That's right, taxes...money that would otherwise go to your salary.
Yes. But I pay *far less* for my healthcare than you do. As in, like, half, compared to the US, thanks to reduced overhead, among other things. That's an *enormous* difference. And that's ignoring all the other issues introduced by the US's insurance model (fighting to get coverage, inability to select doctors, etc).
I'm doing all right in the salary department and don't miss the extra money I'd be making had my company's health-care costs been lower.
You might not, but trust me, your company does. The amount of money budgeted toward health insurance in your average US corporation is a *staggering*. The sheer drag it creates, economically, is really incredible... but, something tells me you're too steeped in the Kool-aid to understand that.
Probably a silly worry. Every SSD out there provides it's own wear-leveling hardware, so the FS you use is fairly immaterial. Heck, most (all?) gear out there doesn't even provide a mechanism for direct access to the underlying storage, so you *can't* do the leveling in software (ie, with something like JFFS, etc) even if you wanted to.
That's a crock. My wife is having a baby next month and the whole thing will be about $4000.
And in my country it costs... nothing.
Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the secondary costs. How much of the money your company currently throws away on health insurance would've gone to you in the form of salary if your employer wasn't so heavily burdened with said costs? Particularly given that in the US, healthcare costs *far* more than in nations with a public system? And how many people are simply never employed because businesses can't afford to take on another employee, with all the health-related costs associated with it?
Healthcare in the US is a truly *massive* burden, doubly so because of all the insane overhead and additional cost the system introduces. The only reason you don't realize this is because your employer hides the true costs from you (which is really part of the problem... if you actually want free-market healthcare, then the money should come straight out of your pocket... the way it is right now, you have *no idea* how much it's actually costing you).
If your goal is to improve energy efficiency, economists have figured out a remarkably simple and efficient method: tax electricity use.
The problem with this is, unless you institute some kind of rebate system, a tax like this is highly regressive (which is why, in Canada, certain staple items are exempt from our Goods and Services Tax... to try and counteract the regressive nature of a consumption tax).
That's not to say it's fundamentally a bad idea (I tend to favour taxation in order to compensate for negative externalities). But such a tax would have to be very carefully structured so as not to strongly adversely affect the poor.
Commies (and yes, I use that term intentionally) were just less creative about how they committed mass murder... the skipped the whole elaborate Xyklon-off-the-trains scenario, and went straight to firing squads and starvation.
You *are* aware that Communism, the political idealogy, != Stalinism/totalitarianism, right? I mean, I get that you Americans have been brainwashed over the last 50 years to believe that communism precisely equates to the Russian purges, but... have you not yet learned that that's not *actually* true?
I mean, I fully concede that Communism, as it's been implemented on a large scale in recent human history, has devolved to totalitarianism, but that doesn't mean the two are equal. Or are you telling me that your average hutterite colony is a hotbed of genocidal killings that we're just not aware of?
I hate to bring up one little, carefully glossed-over fact, Pollyanna, but some of Gitmo's inmates are hardcore mass-murderers.
They are? Huh... so I take it you have some sort of information source that no one, including the military legal system that was put in place, doesn't? Lucky! You should share, I'm sure they'd love to see the info you apparently have.
Then what can a state, or even a country, do to enforce the law on an entity outside its jurisdiction?
That has *always* been a problem. Take poppy production in Afghanistan. I'm sure, if the US had it's druthers, it'd carpet bomb any such operations, but it can't. So it has to live with their existence. The same goes with gambling, kiddie porn distribution, etc, in foreign countries.
The only way this is handled today is through international law, in the form of treaties. At least then, the US could put pressure on foreign governments to enact or enforce laws banning the things they don't like (obviously they'd need those treaties in place, first). But, alas, if they can't get nations on board, guess what? The only answer is economic or military intervention.
Barring that, the best KY can do is firewall the internets and hope they can block things they don't like. But given how successful China has been in this regard, I'm not sure it's really worth it...
KY doesn't have jurisdiction over the organizations behind the gambling sites (or the domain registrars, another problem with this case) - so they couldn't force location aware IP blocks (which don't work anyway), they couldn't fine the organizations, or impose any normal civil/criminal penalties. In addition, ISP level blocks don't work & are costly, and the servers were also outside KY and couldn't be seized.
I know, it sucks, doesn't it? But if someone created, I dunno... say, a Bingo system that used conference calling to connect players to a site in some other country, they'd have the *exact same problem*. And the answer? Simple: tough shit. You can't control what entities outside your jurisdiction do.
The best you can try to do is stop people from accessing those sites in the first place. And if they want to attempt a Great Firewall of Kentucky, they're free to. It's their state. But it'll be hard, and wickedly expensive, so they better be sure their "values" are worth it before trying to embark on something like that.
Sorry, bub. As a software developer with a bachelors degree in the field (I can't decide if I can tolerate school sufficiently to get that masters that my honours program was grooming me for:), let me tell you... you're not an engineer, even if your little piece of paper from Harvard tells you so. The fact that our industry has chosen to co-opt the term speaks to me of envy more than anything else.
You may be a software developer. Architect. Designer. Any number of other things. But you're not an engineer, any more than you're a doctor, or a master tradesman.
I am a software engineer; I find inefficiency annoying. Vista does all sorts of anonymous crap in the background. I don't know what it's doing, and there's no easy way to find out. I don't see any concrete benefit to whatever it's doing, and it seems to do it all the time.
*shrug* Then turn it off. On a laptop with a low-ish amount of RAM (which, these days, is 1-2GB), the first thing I do is disable: scheduled disk defrag, SuperFetch, and the indexer. I'll also disable any virus scanner that's onboard (yeah, it's a bit of a risk, but dear god... realtime virus protection is seriously expensive, in terms of CPU usage, etc), and personally, I also disable Aero (mostly because I think it's fugly). I'll then actively disable the services that make all those things go.
With those changes, Vista is actually a very comfortable OS to work with, IMHO. It's biggest problem, though, is that it requires all this tweaking to actually get decent performance out of it.
I'm not saying MS is worse, or that Linux or OSX are better. I'm saying that all three can get away with being craptacular (to varying degrees) simply because of the Microsoft legacy: that software, including OSes, is a cheap commodity that we shouldn't expect to be bulletproof. It's bullshit (Sun and IBM have been putting out truly rock solid OSes for many years), but the consumer has been trained to believe otherwise.
I would contend the answer to that is probably "no". OSes today are *better* than they used to be (XP is pretty solid compared to the early days of Windows, and Linux and OSX aren't too bad), but they sure aren't great. But my point is, because of the legacy of Microsoft, no one *expects* them to be.
Oh bullshit. There are large corporations out there, right now, that have, in their charter, the obligation to take on a certain level of social responsibility. And there are those who believe there should be far more of this.
Honestly, the idea that a corporation exists purely to generate profit is consumate American-style thinking, and is something that, with the crash of the banking system, I hope disappears... the last thing we need is more people believing that profits must be generated at all costs, so long as the actions stay within the bounds of the law (hint: very little the banking system did was actually illegal... just deeply, deeply immoral).
they are not firing people because the company cannot pay them, but because the owners of the companies don't want to earn less money this year.
No, it's because the owners of the companies don't want the companies to have lower profits, because the stock market, in it's infinite wisdom, rewards short-term, profit-oriented thinking over longer-term strategy.
The only reason why there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for their incompetence is that many misguided people STILL think that every 20 minutes of MS Word is worth 1 week of their time spent Patching and Praying and trying to recover data.
Actually, I think it's more fundamental than that. I think the last 20 years of Microsoft dominance have convinced people that this is the *only way computers can work*. That it's impossible to do any better. So they've learned to live with the instability, the insecurity, the constant fear of losing work due to mysterious crashes and instabilities.
Heck, just look at the praise lavished on XP. Compared to 95, XP is a quantum leap in terms of stability. And yet, in my experience, it's only just adequate. But compared to what people were used to, it's amazing!
How the hell is Google an SPF? OHNOES Google shuts down! So I switch to Yahoo. Or Microsoft's engine. And I'm sure there are others (I haven't surveyed the space in a while). Would it be annoying? Certainly. But the Internet would pick up and move on, just as it always has.
Not to mention the guarantee of at least SSE2, among other things.
Of course, that does require apps actually compiled for 64-bit. But for the right applications, the performance improvements can be impressive (eg, audio/video encoding, that sort of thing).
I highly doubt that. Calculate the amount of money you would've paid out in rent during that time. Do you honestly believe that wouldn't amount to as much, or less, than you paid out in interest? If the answer is yes, you either bought at far too high a rate, or neglected to take the opportunity to increase payments, pay lump sums, and so forth, which can have a truly massive effect on total amortization.
It's obvious--if you enjoy what you study, your colleagues, and your professors, then your work as a student is (and should be) enjoyable.
Oh, I never said it wasn't enjoyable. I said it was tiring and stressful, and as enjoyable as it may have been, I'd never want to repeat the experience, as I can enjoy myself doing many other things that don't *also* involve a massive workload.:)
Good teachers DO make a huge difference, and I virtually never had to interact with TAs at either of my schools. So yeah, I can see how if you were miserable in that regard, you wouldn't be happy. Goes right back to what I said about college fit.
No, *that* has to do with the program you're in. I, for example, have a BSc in Computing Science. And there are few students who can make it through the labs and projects without assistance from a TA (I was actually one of the lucky ones in this regard, having a fair bit of programming experience before I ever attended a University class). So bad TAs (which is most of them... the average TA is just a grad student who has better things to do) can be a serious issue.
So, you are correct, there may be other programs that aren't nearly so intense. Say, a nice English degree.:) But IMHO, if you come out of a science, math, or engineering degree without having experienced a fair bit of stress due to the workload, then I question the quality of the degree program.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right, taxes...money that would otherwise go to your salary.
Yes. But I pay *far less* for my healthcare than you do. As in, like, half, compared to the US, thanks to reduced overhead, among other things. That's an *enormous* difference. And that's ignoring all the other issues introduced by the US's insurance model (fighting to get coverage, inability to select doctors, etc).
I'm doing all right in the salary department and don't miss the extra money I'd be making had my company's health-care costs been lower.
You might not, but trust me, your company does. The amount of money budgeted toward health insurance in your average US corporation is a *staggering*. The sheer drag it creates, economically, is really incredible... but, something tells me you're too steeped in the Kool-aid to understand that.
Probably a silly worry. Every SSD out there provides it's own wear-leveling hardware, so the FS you use is fairly immaterial. Heck, most (all?) gear out there doesn't even provide a mechanism for direct access to the underlying storage, so you *can't* do the leveling in software (ie, with something like JFFS, etc) even if you wanted to.
That's a crock. My wife is having a baby next month and the whole thing will be about $4000.
And in my country it costs... nothing.
Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the secondary costs. How much of the money your company currently throws away on health insurance would've gone to you in the form of salary if your employer wasn't so heavily burdened with said costs? Particularly given that in the US, healthcare costs *far* more than in nations with a public system? And how many people are simply never employed because businesses can't afford to take on another employee, with all the health-related costs associated with it?
Healthcare in the US is a truly *massive* burden, doubly so because of all the insane overhead and additional cost the system introduces. The only reason you don't realize this is because your employer hides the true costs from you (which is really part of the problem... if you actually want free-market healthcare, then the money should come straight out of your pocket... the way it is right now, you have *no idea* how much it's actually costing you).
If your goal is to improve energy efficiency, economists have figured out a remarkably simple and efficient method: tax electricity use.
The problem with this is, unless you institute some kind of rebate system, a tax like this is highly regressive (which is why, in Canada, certain staple items are exempt from our Goods and Services Tax... to try and counteract the regressive nature of a consumption tax).
That's not to say it's fundamentally a bad idea (I tend to favour taxation in order to compensate for negative externalities). But such a tax would have to be very carefully structured so as not to strongly adversely affect the poor.
Commies (and yes, I use that term intentionally) were just less creative about how they committed mass murder... the skipped the whole elaborate Xyklon-off-the-trains scenario, and went straight to firing squads and starvation.
You *are* aware that Communism, the political idealogy, != Stalinism/totalitarianism, right? I mean, I get that you Americans have been brainwashed over the last 50 years to believe that communism precisely equates to the Russian purges, but... have you not yet learned that that's not *actually* true?
I mean, I fully concede that Communism, as it's been implemented on a large scale in recent human history, has devolved to totalitarianism, but that doesn't mean the two are equal. Or are you telling me that your average hutterite colony is a hotbed of genocidal killings that we're just not aware of?
I hate to bring up one little, carefully glossed-over fact, Pollyanna, but some of Gitmo's inmates are hardcore mass-murderers.
They are? Huh... so I take it you have some sort of information source that no one, including the military legal system that was put in place, doesn't? Lucky! You should share, I'm sure they'd love to see the info you apparently have.
No. I really can't.
Yours truly,
pedantic ass.
"I could care less"
No, you *couldn't* care less. Jesus Christ, it's basic english, people!
Then what can a state, or even a country, do to enforce the law on an entity outside its jurisdiction?
That has *always* been a problem. Take poppy production in Afghanistan. I'm sure, if the US had it's druthers, it'd carpet bomb any such operations, but it can't. So it has to live with their existence. The same goes with gambling, kiddie porn distribution, etc, in foreign countries.
The only way this is handled today is through international law, in the form of treaties. At least then, the US could put pressure on foreign governments to enact or enforce laws banning the things they don't like (obviously they'd need those treaties in place, first). But, alas, if they can't get nations on board, guess what? The only answer is economic or military intervention.
Barring that, the best KY can do is firewall the internets and hope they can block things they don't like. But given how successful China has been in this regard, I'm not sure it's really worth it...
KY doesn't have jurisdiction over the organizations behind the gambling sites (or the domain registrars, another problem with this case) - so they couldn't force location aware IP blocks (which don't work anyway), they couldn't fine the organizations, or impose any normal civil/criminal penalties. In addition, ISP level blocks don't work & are costly, and the servers were also outside KY and couldn't be seized.
I know, it sucks, doesn't it? But if someone created, I dunno... say, a Bingo system that used conference calling to connect players to a site in some other country, they'd have the *exact same problem*. And the answer? Simple: tough shit. You can't control what entities outside your jurisdiction do.
The best you can try to do is stop people from accessing those sites in the first place. And if they want to attempt a Great Firewall of Kentucky, they're free to. It's their state. But it'll be hard, and wickedly expensive, so they better be sure their "values" are worth it before trying to embark on something like that.
Sorry, bub. As a software developer with a bachelors degree in the field (I can't decide if I can tolerate school sufficiently to get that masters that my honours program was grooming me for :), let me tell you... you're not an engineer, even if your little piece of paper from Harvard tells you so. The fact that our industry has chosen to co-opt the term speaks to me of envy more than anything else.
You may be a software developer. Architect. Designer. Any number of other things. But you're not an engineer, any more than you're a doctor, or a master tradesman.
I am a software engineer; I find inefficiency annoying. Vista does all sorts of anonymous crap in the background. I don't know what it's doing, and there's no easy way to find out. I don't see any concrete benefit to whatever it's doing, and it seems to do it all the time.
*shrug* Then turn it off. On a laptop with a low-ish amount of RAM (which, these days, is 1-2GB), the first thing I do is disable: scheduled disk defrag, SuperFetch, and the indexer. I'll also disable any virus scanner that's onboard (yeah, it's a bit of a risk, but dear god... realtime virus protection is seriously expensive, in terms of CPU usage, etc), and personally, I also disable Aero (mostly because I think it's fugly). I'll then actively disable the services that make all those things go.
With those changes, Vista is actually a very comfortable OS to work with, IMHO. It's biggest problem, though, is that it requires all this tweaking to actually get decent performance out of it.
Indeed. I *thought* there was an explanation, until the revelation about Ty's wife at the end of the ep...
MythTV needs constant maintenance
No. It doesn't.
and it's much less user-friendly than other TV products out there.
s/much/somewhat/ and I'll agree.
Ahh, I see you've missed my point.
I'm not saying MS is worse, or that Linux or OSX are better. I'm saying that all three can get away with being craptacular (to varying degrees) simply because of the Microsoft legacy: that software, including OSes, is a cheap commodity that we shouldn't expect to be bulletproof. It's bullshit (Sun and IBM have been putting out truly rock solid OSes for many years), but the consumer has been trained to believe otherwise.
I would contend the answer to that is probably "no". OSes today are *better* than they used to be (XP is pretty solid compared to the early days of Windows, and Linux and OSX aren't too bad), but they sure aren't great. But my point is, because of the legacy of Microsoft, no one *expects* them to be.
Oh bullshit. There are large corporations out there, right now, that have, in their charter, the obligation to take on a certain level of social responsibility. And there are those who believe there should be far more of this.
Honestly, the idea that a corporation exists purely to generate profit is consumate American-style thinking, and is something that, with the crash of the banking system, I hope disappears... the last thing we need is more people believing that profits must be generated at all costs, so long as the actions stay within the bounds of the law (hint: very little the banking system did was actually illegal... just deeply, deeply immoral).
they are not firing people because the company cannot pay them, but because the owners of the companies don't want to earn less money this year.
No, it's because the owners of the companies don't want the companies to have lower profits, because the stock market, in it's infinite wisdom, rewards short-term, profit-oriented thinking over longer-term strategy.
The only reason why there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for their incompetence is that many misguided people STILL think that every 20 minutes of MS Word is worth 1 week of their time spent Patching and Praying and trying to recover data.
Actually, I think it's more fundamental than that. I think the last 20 years of Microsoft dominance have convinced people that this is the *only way computers can work*. That it's impossible to do any better. So they've learned to live with the instability, the insecurity, the constant fear of losing work due to mysterious crashes and instabilities.
Heck, just look at the praise lavished on XP. Compared to 95, XP is a quantum leap in terms of stability. And yet, in my experience, it's only just adequate. But compared to what people were used to, it's amazing!
How the hell is Google an SPF? OHNOES Google shuts down! So I switch to Yahoo. Or Microsoft's engine. And I'm sure there are others (I haven't surveyed the space in a while). Would it be annoying? Certainly. But the Internet would pick up and move on, just as it always has.
Says the guy who apparently doesn't participate in email conversations between small groups of people.
Not to mention the guarantee of at least SSE2, among other things.
Of course, that does require apps actually compiled for 64-bit. But for the right applications, the performance improvements can be impressive (eg, audio/video encoding, that sort of thing).
Err, that is, "...as much, or more, than you paid out in interest? If the answer is no...". :)
I highly doubt that. Calculate the amount of money you would've paid out in rent during that time. Do you honestly believe that wouldn't amount to as much, or less, than you paid out in interest? If the answer is yes, you either bought at far too high a rate, or neglected to take the opportunity to increase payments, pay lump sums, and so forth, which can have a truly massive effect on total amortization.
It's obvious--if you enjoy what you study, your colleagues, and your professors, then your work as a student is (and should be) enjoyable.
Oh, I never said it wasn't enjoyable. I said it was tiring and stressful, and as enjoyable as it may have been, I'd never want to repeat the experience, as I can enjoy myself doing many other things that don't *also* involve a massive workload. :)
Good teachers DO make a huge difference, and I virtually never had to interact with TAs at either of my schools. So yeah, I can see how if you were miserable in that regard, you wouldn't be happy. Goes right back to what I said about college fit.
No, *that* has to do with the program you're in. I, for example, have a BSc in Computing Science. And there are few students who can make it through the labs and projects without assistance from a TA (I was actually one of the lucky ones in this regard, having a fair bit of programming experience before I ever attended a University class). So bad TAs (which is most of them... the average TA is just a grad student who has better things to do) can be a serious issue.
So, you are correct, there may be other programs that aren't nearly so intense. Say, a nice English degree. :) But IMHO, if you come out of a science, math, or engineering degree without having experienced a fair bit of stress due to the workload, then I question the quality of the degree program.