I doubt I'll ever be rich but should I happen to make the right choices in life and wind up rich and/or powerful I won't be leaving millions of dollars to my kids. They should find success on their own.
I respect you and anyone else who has that opinion - right up to the point where it crosses over from your opinion of how to live your live to how you think everyone should live. I'm also quite certain I'll never be rich, but the single biggest motivation for me to make money is to provide for my kids. When I'm gone, they get what I earned because it was mostly for them in the first place. The sense of entitlement & other traits the we so dislike in the rich comes not from getting their inheritance when their parents die but from what they were given & how they were raised while they were alive.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, though not sure of the source:
We live in remarkable times where the person saying something is impossible is often interrupted by another saying he did it.
For me the killer feature in Mail.app that I miss the most on Windows/Thunderbird is the search and having my email included in system searches (spotlight). I can't always remember whether what I'm looking for was in an email, text document or whatever.
If Jatol.com dependent on a single guy, then most likely it didn't have plenty of customers, and most of those were quite cheap customers. They got what they paid for.
I don't disagree entirely. But in many cases, how exactly is a customer to know whether a company is one guy or 100? To some extent, that's the blessing and the curse of the internet. And in this case, Jatol had a solid history of I think about 7 years and wasn't a one man shop. But one of the co-owners left in some sort of disagreement and at least one (probably more) quality tech support guy was sent packing. It wasn't a fly by night place - at least not until the very end. But there's no transparency - no way for people to see inside & behind the scenes of the company. Also what sets this one apart a little is just how quickly it happened. Typically there is a gradual degradation of service which serves as an indicator. In this case everything was fine - I think I noticed maybe 2 or 3 outages in the last 6-8 months, a total downtime of maybe a couple of hours. And then it was gone completely.
Buyer beware indeed. It's fair to say that this is just the way things are in the budget, shared hosting market - competition is such that the risk of flameout is significant. I'm finally to the point where I'm able to step up to a higher end service (I had been using a $25/month plan with one company and a $15 with another as a form of redundancy. But what about all the hobbyists and people just starting out who can't afford more expensive plans? How are they to know the difference between a good host and a bad one? Or even between a one man show & a big company?
Digg for news, Slashdot for discussion & more insight into the stories. Partly just thing inherent with their different approaches. Slashdot editors filter (though definitely not always to our liking) and there's less postings & they're often a little slower - though really I think/. has improved on this quite a bit in the last 6-12 months. Digg has a ton more postings flow through - and they're usually faster. Obviously there's an impact on signal to noise but it's also easy to scan through a page of postings & skip over the garbage.
But ultimately the strength of Slashdot are three things. The threading for the discussions is better than any other site I've seen at fostering discussions. You can reply to a specific comment and your comment gets attached the way it should, on and on with the parent/child postings. Moderation works pretty well - making it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff and viewing only the higher/highest quality comments. And yet it's easy and to work into & through a whole thread above or below a highly moderated comment. Finally there's the people. There are a lot of experts and generally intelligent people here who have interesting things to say. I'm quite certain the average age of/. poster is considerably higher. I'll refrain from commenting on the maturity except to say I stopped reading comments on Digg some time ago out of frustration. If you like to hang out with the kids who are still living with their parents, Digg is a better place for you. If you like hang out with the people who used to live with their parents and are now in many cases married & having kids - still hackers & techies, but now living in the real world as well - then/. is a better fit.
Wow, I guess I've been suppressing a meta rant on/. vs. Digg & it finally got loose.
I'll never again let my web host get involved with my Domain Name reg.
But going with a big-time domain name only company isn't any kind of guarantee either. I and other former RegisterFly customers can attest to that. I'm starting to think it's me though - every hosting company & domain registrar I've used (except for my current ones) has gone out of business or had some other sort of blowup.
It's very important to research who you're hosting with. Not just who their providers are but what the company history is, who owns it and most importantly do they have a good reputation that goes back at least 3 - 5 years + ?
That's one thing that made this worse - I was with Jatol. I chose them when my previous hosting company, which was a one man show, who busted his but providing fantastic service for years, just needed move to something with more regular hours & sold out to guys who seemed to be up to something illegal. They seemed to not actually be trying to make a profit. Anyway, I actually chose Jatol because they had a longer history (I think 7 years or so) and had provided very solid service during that time. Problem is, I had no way to know - until this blowup - that one of the owners left in a dispute of some sort, and at least one excellent tech support guy was sent packing. Had I known these things I would have been gone.
But having been through this before, I've learned that this is just the nature of this level of hosting - if you want fairly cheap web hosting, this is something you have to prepare for & deal with. I had my backups & was restored & back up & running on a new host in not a lot more time than it took for name server propagation. But I really feel bad for people who had to learn their lesson the hard way.
Except with Katz, they countered this by having other editors post his crap. If memory serves there was some rationalization about him being on the road and couldn't submit himself or some such thing but it certainly seemed like an end around the author check box.
I'm guessing I'm probably in a very similar situation to you and for the most part, share your sentiments. I do find two problems though. The first is that if you're really talking about really costing people real money, BMI is not accurate enough. Sure it's not a bad general rule, but there are too many cases where it breaks down and isn't a fair assessment of health or body fat. Replacing BMI with an accurate body fat measure - at least at the option of the insured should address that. The other issue, as plenty of others are pointing out, is whether genetic & other pre-existing conditions is included. It's problematic at best, and well, it just feels unfair. If they stick to behavioral issues it's much more palatable.
Before indicting capitalism because of the problems with the healthcare system, why don't you stop and consider whether it actually is a capitalist system. There isn't real competition in as far as consumers being able to easily shop around between different providers. No price transparency means people can't be good consumers and make decisions based in part on cost. There's a hodge-podge of government funding - to the effect that private providers get under-paid for services provided for some individuals so they compensate by charging others more.
I would much rather see the government tweak the current system to actually put market forces to work than overhaul completely into a more socialist approach. Private life and auto insurance work just fine and are very competitive, why can't health insurance work the same way?
Which makes me think about the idea of parachutes for the aircraft itself. Ballistic parachutes have been used successfully with small planes for awhile & one manufacturer claims theirs have saved over 200 lives.
Obviously the physics involved in doing this for large commercial aircraft is just slightly more difficult. But by the same means, car air bags were first envisioned decades before they became possible - and really only in recent years with smart airbags that sense & adjust based on the occupants weight, seat position & whether he's wearing a seatbelt have they really become most beneficial. Commercial aircraft parachute/drag systems just seems like a no-brainer that at some point would be a solvable problem if not today.
Ironically enough, the little buggers have done a pretty good job at cleaning up the lakes. The result has been a rise in the northern pike, and best of all yellow perch as they happen to be one of my favorite meals.
Of course I can't swim in a lot places I used to without some sort of foot protection as the little buggers are sharp and can cut the hell out of your feet. That and for the few species that have benefited, there's plenty that have not and a result of the cleaner water means the growth of weeds has exploded.
It would be cool if they could safely genetically engineer these things to be sterile & seed the waters with them from time to time to clean it up some without having to worry about them actually taking root. Of course I've seen the Simpsons episode, I know what happens when you mess with an ecosystem.
I've always liked the idea of an increasing fee - one that doubles every year. You get X years for free, then a small fee that doubles each year thereafter. The numbers can be tweaked, but the idea is that the loss to the public domain is not only of the work itself, but the derivative works that could have been created.
That approach feels most fair, but I (and I think most reasonable people who care about the issue) don't have any disillusions about reforming the system to be the most fair. I'd settle for simply less destructive. Right now the system is tweaked to benefit the marginal cases where a work generates a lot of money. Reform proponents really don't give a damn about Mickey Mouse entering the public domain - Disney can have him. Make copyright a reasonable length by default and for Disney and others, even if they pay a pittance for renewal every year or couple of years. As long as a positive action needs to take place to get extended, and the fee is enough to cover the administration, things would be so much improved it would be hard to complain.
Now that seems like a rather questionable comment for a judge to make. INAL, but I'd bet if I try and sue the IRS because of how they treat an organization that I have nothing to do with, my suit will be dismissed because I don't have standing. I can sue because they're not fair to me, but as a third party not directly affected, there's not much I can do.
First time I've had to do this - just posting a reply to remove my moderation - I intended to mod this comment up but slipped. Is there any other way to undo a mod - the UI makes it too easy to accidentally mod something wrong?
Otherwise, there's absolutely no alternative to Adobe products. (Yes, technically GIMP etc exists, but they aren't industry standard so professionals have no chance of using them.)
We'll let see...for Illustrator, there's Freehand. Oh wait...For Image Ready (& kind of Photoshop) there's Fireworks. Guess not. We'll at least there's Dreamweaver to compete with GoLive (ok that's kind of backwards but still).
My point is that for many areas, there were two relatively decent commercial products that competed against each other - and the Adobe - Macromedia merger effectively killed that. Why that merger was approved - especially without any strings - I just don't get. At the very least, they should have required them to pick one product and either sell or open source the other. This is something with precedent - years back, when Adobe bought out Aldus, because they wanted Pagemaker, they had to sell Freehand to Macromedia and that worked well.
But there's still a difference between a clear threat/absolute declaration of intent as in the case you mentioned, especially what struck me as prejudice against the appellant by the judge and an off the cuff hyperbole in this case.
Personally I dislike the Supreme Court's taking into consideration any international law in their decisions, but that's just me. It strikes me as problematic to say the least, allowing people from other countries to determine the fairness of our legal proceedings - and vice versa. Follow the laws of the land where you are or don't go there/do business with people there.
Though I guess I shouldn't inflect my opinion of justice because common sense, fairness, and really even the laws on the books don't have a prominent place - it's politics. Extradition laws aren't based on the evidence in a given case they're based on what one country thinks of another, what the trade & other economic ties are like, etc.
I haven't seen anyone condoning the prosecutor for making an idiotic statement. Just that it's quite obvious that the statement shouldn't be taking at face value as it is it's quite clear he was speaking idiomatically. Give him some unpaid leave or something or hell, fire him even for saying something stupid - but that's a separate issue and the deportation and case as a whole, the "he'll fry" bit should not really factor into it in the least.
Actually I'm absolutely certain I would get much more work done with the boss in jail. And I'm betting there are millions like me - Office Space, like Dilbert is funny (when it's not downright depressing) because it's so true.
Not to mention whoever got hacked - be it the merchant, MC/Visa or the issuing bank - usually manages to keep the whole thing secret. Even when it's your account info that has been stolen, they won't even admit to you that it has. Of course they justify this because you don't have to pay for fraudulent charges that result. If you catch them in time. And of course it assumes that they can't do anything else with the info. I can accept the fact that they won't ever really pay the cost when they can pass them along to us as an expense of doing business - same for fines. But there needs to be a law requiring disclosure and criminal charges for failure to disclose breaches. The bad PR and loss of public trust is the only way to punish bad security and allow consumers to be informed, not to mention actually providing them real encouragement to work harder at protecting private information.
When I see the comment about liposuction, I start to wonder...It just feels like a smear campaign. That said, if all or some of that stuff is true, it's still no excuse for the crap they've pulled. I don't care what backend damage he did, I waited for 2 hours to talk to a tech support person. When I did, the connection was so awful, static was fading in and out and oh by the way, I could hear parts of other people's conversations! And after all of this, of course anyone who's called them will know the answer - try again later. This former CEO may have done whatever sabotage/fraud whatever. But whoever else was running things chose to treat the customers like garbage too.
I wouldn't count on that. I've heard that LCDs are cheaper to manufacture than CRTs and they're certainly not cheaper for consumers. Of course I have absolutely no source and a bit of googling didn't result in any info on it.
I was thinking the same thing. It's amusing how similar they situations are on some levels. When reading the article, it jumped out at me that they mentioned building off earlier research. And I thought, yeah they go and take knowledge gained by those before them, add something and then wrap it up in patents so others can't do the same. Of course just like the debates around open source licenses, one persuasive argument is that if you've gained some knowledge and decide to make it available to the world, then what someone else does with it is out of your hands. The "infectious" part of GPL should be an option for researchers too. They could publish research as GPL and so anyone who builds off their work must also release it, or BSD where people can use it and still patent/not publish.
Defensive patents are yet another example of the sad state of our IP laws. It shouldn't be necessary and some sort of model similar to open sourcing would seem to be a better option.
For Natalie Portman, she at least has an undergraduate degree, even though it is in psychology, it still kind of counts.
You're trading one demagogue for another. We're probably all going to agree that celebrities shouldn't have any great say in science (or much of anything else) just because they're celebrities. But assuming a person is intelligent, educated or whatever based solely on the fact that they have a degree isn't really any better.
Slashdot Mirror
I respect you and anyone else who has that opinion - right up to the point where it crosses over from your opinion of how to live your live to how you think everyone should live. I'm also quite certain I'll never be rich, but the single biggest motivation for me to make money is to provide for my kids. When I'm gone, they get what I earned because it was mostly for them in the first place. The sense of entitlement & other traits the we so dislike in the rich comes not from getting their inheritance when their parents die but from what they were given & how they were raised while they were alive.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, though not sure of the source: We live in remarkable times where the person saying something is impossible is often interrupted by another saying he did it.
For me the killer feature in Mail.app that I miss the most on Windows/Thunderbird is the search and having my email included in system searches (spotlight). I can't always remember whether what I'm looking for was in an email, text document or whatever.
I don't disagree entirely. But in many cases, how exactly is a customer to know whether a company is one guy or 100? To some extent, that's the blessing and the curse of the internet. And in this case, Jatol had a solid history of I think about 7 years and wasn't a one man shop. But one of the co-owners left in some sort of disagreement and at least one (probably more) quality tech support guy was sent packing. It wasn't a fly by night place - at least not until the very end. But there's no transparency - no way for people to see inside & behind the scenes of the company. Also what sets this one apart a little is just how quickly it happened. Typically there is a gradual degradation of service which serves as an indicator. In this case everything was fine - I think I noticed maybe 2 or 3 outages in the last 6-8 months, a total downtime of maybe a couple of hours. And then it was gone completely.
Buyer beware indeed. It's fair to say that this is just the way things are in the budget, shared hosting market - competition is such that the risk of flameout is significant. I'm finally to the point where I'm able to step up to a higher end service (I had been using a $25/month plan with one company and a $15 with another as a form of redundancy. But what about all the hobbyists and people just starting out who can't afford more expensive plans? How are they to know the difference between a good host and a bad one? Or even between a one man show & a big company?
Digg for news, Slashdot for discussion & more insight into the stories. Partly just thing inherent with their different approaches. Slashdot editors filter (though definitely not always to our liking) and there's less postings & they're often a little slower - though really I think /. has improved on this quite a bit in the last 6-12 months. Digg has a ton more postings flow through - and they're usually faster. Obviously there's an impact on signal to noise but it's also easy to scan through a page of postings & skip over the garbage.
But ultimately the strength of Slashdot are three things. The threading for the discussions is better than any other site I've seen at fostering discussions. You can reply to a specific comment and your comment gets attached the way it should, on and on with the parent/child postings. Moderation works pretty well - making it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff and viewing only the higher/highest quality comments. And yet it's easy and to work into & through a whole thread above or below a highly moderated comment. Finally there's the people. There are a lot of experts and generally intelligent people here who have interesting things to say. I'm quite certain the average age of /. poster is considerably higher. I'll refrain from commenting on the maturity except to say I stopped reading comments on Digg some time ago out of frustration. If you like to hang out with the kids who are still living with their parents, Digg is a better place for you. If you like hang out with the people who used to live with their parents and are now in many cases married & having kids - still hackers & techies, but now living in the real world as well - then /. is a better fit.
Wow, I guess I've been suppressing a meta rant on /. vs. Digg & it finally got loose.
But going with a big-time domain name only company isn't any kind of guarantee either. I and other former RegisterFly customers can attest to that. I'm starting to think it's me though - every hosting company & domain registrar I've used (except for my current ones) has gone out of business or had some other sort of blowup.
That's one thing that made this worse - I was with Jatol. I chose them when my previous hosting company, which was a one man show, who busted his but providing fantastic service for years, just needed move to something with more regular hours & sold out to guys who seemed to be up to something illegal. They seemed to not actually be trying to make a profit. Anyway, I actually chose Jatol because they had a longer history (I think 7 years or so) and had provided very solid service during that time. Problem is, I had no way to know - until this blowup - that one of the owners left in a dispute of some sort, and at least one excellent tech support guy was sent packing. Had I known these things I would have been gone.
But having been through this before, I've learned that this is just the nature of this level of hosting - if you want fairly cheap web hosting, this is something you have to prepare for & deal with. I had my backups & was restored & back up & running on a new host in not a lot more time than it took for name server propagation. But I really feel bad for people who had to learn their lesson the hard way.
Except with Katz, they countered this by having other editors post his crap. If memory serves there was some rationalization about him being on the road and couldn't submit himself or some such thing but it certainly seemed like an end around the author check box.
I'm guessing I'm probably in a very similar situation to you and for the most part, share your sentiments. I do find two problems though. The first is that if you're really talking about really costing people real money, BMI is not accurate enough. Sure it's not a bad general rule, but there are too many cases where it breaks down and isn't a fair assessment of health or body fat. Replacing BMI with an accurate body fat measure - at least at the option of the insured should address that. The other issue, as plenty of others are pointing out, is whether genetic & other pre-existing conditions is included. It's problematic at best, and well, it just feels unfair. If they stick to behavioral issues it's much more palatable.
I would much rather see the government tweak the current system to actually put market forces to work than overhaul completely into a more socialist approach. Private life and auto insurance work just fine and are very competitive, why can't health insurance work the same way?
Obviously the physics involved in doing this for large commercial aircraft is just slightly more difficult. But by the same means, car air bags were first envisioned decades before they became possible - and really only in recent years with smart airbags that sense & adjust based on the occupants weight, seat position & whether he's wearing a seatbelt have they really become most beneficial. Commercial aircraft parachute/drag systems just seems like a no-brainer that at some point would be a solvable problem if not today.
Of course I can't swim in a lot places I used to without some sort of foot protection as the little buggers are sharp and can cut the hell out of your feet. That and for the few species that have benefited, there's plenty that have not and a result of the cleaner water means the growth of weeds has exploded.
It would be cool if they could safely genetically engineer these things to be sterile & seed the waters with them from time to time to clean it up some without having to worry about them actually taking root. Of course I've seen the Simpsons episode, I know what happens when you mess with an ecosystem.
That approach feels most fair, but I (and I think most reasonable people who care about the issue) don't have any disillusions about reforming the system to be the most fair. I'd settle for simply less destructive. Right now the system is tweaked to benefit the marginal cases where a work generates a lot of money. Reform proponents really don't give a damn about Mickey Mouse entering the public domain - Disney can have him. Make copyright a reasonable length by default and for Disney and others, even if they pay a pittance for renewal every year or couple of years. As long as a positive action needs to take place to get extended, and the fee is enough to cover the administration, things would be so much improved it would be hard to complain.
Now that seems like a rather questionable comment for a judge to make. INAL, but I'd bet if I try and sue the IRS because of how they treat an organization that I have nothing to do with, my suit will be dismissed because I don't have standing. I can sue because they're not fair to me, but as a third party not directly affected, there's not much I can do.
First time I've had to do this - just posting a reply to remove my moderation - I intended to mod this comment up but slipped. Is there any other way to undo a mod - the UI makes it too easy to accidentally mod something wrong?
We'll let see...for Illustrator, there's Freehand. Oh wait...For Image Ready (& kind of Photoshop) there's Fireworks. Guess not. We'll at least there's Dreamweaver to compete with GoLive (ok that's kind of backwards but still).
My point is that for many areas, there were two relatively decent commercial products that competed against each other - and the Adobe - Macromedia merger effectively killed that. Why that merger was approved - especially without any strings - I just don't get. At the very least, they should have required them to pick one product and either sell or open source the other. This is something with precedent - years back, when Adobe bought out Aldus, because they wanted Pagemaker, they had to sell Freehand to Macromedia and that worked well.
But there's still a difference between a clear threat/absolute declaration of intent as in the case you mentioned, especially what struck me as prejudice against the appellant by the judge and an off the cuff hyperbole in this case. Personally I dislike the Supreme Court's taking into consideration any international law in their decisions, but that's just me. It strikes me as problematic to say the least, allowing people from other countries to determine the fairness of our legal proceedings - and vice versa. Follow the laws of the land where you are or don't go there/do business with people there. Though I guess I shouldn't inflect my opinion of justice because common sense, fairness, and really even the laws on the books don't have a prominent place - it's politics. Extradition laws aren't based on the evidence in a given case they're based on what one country thinks of another, what the trade & other economic ties are like, etc.
I haven't seen anyone condoning the prosecutor for making an idiotic statement. Just that it's quite obvious that the statement shouldn't be taking at face value as it is it's quite clear he was speaking idiomatically. Give him some unpaid leave or something or hell, fire him even for saying something stupid - but that's a separate issue and the deportation and case as a whole, the "he'll fry" bit should not really factor into it in the least.
Actually I'm absolutely certain I would get much more work done with the boss in jail. And I'm betting there are millions like me - Office Space, like Dilbert is funny (when it's not downright depressing) because it's so true.
Not to mention whoever got hacked - be it the merchant, MC/Visa or the issuing bank - usually manages to keep the whole thing secret. Even when it's your account info that has been stolen, they won't even admit to you that it has. Of course they justify this because you don't have to pay for fraudulent charges that result. If you catch them in time. And of course it assumes that they can't do anything else with the info. I can accept the fact that they won't ever really pay the cost when they can pass them along to us as an expense of doing business - same for fines. But there needs to be a law requiring disclosure and criminal charges for failure to disclose breaches. The bad PR and loss of public trust is the only way to punish bad security and allow consumers to be informed, not to mention actually providing them real encouragement to work harder at protecting private information.
When I see the comment about liposuction, I start to wonder...It just feels like a smear campaign. That said, if all or some of that stuff is true, it's still no excuse for the crap they've pulled. I don't care what backend damage he did, I waited for 2 hours to talk to a tech support person. When I did, the connection was so awful, static was fading in and out and oh by the way, I could hear parts of other people's conversations! And after all of this, of course anyone who's called them will know the answer - try again later. This former CEO may have done whatever sabotage/fraud whatever. But whoever else was running things chose to treat the customers like garbage too.
I wouldn't count on that. I've heard that LCDs are cheaper to manufacture than CRTs and they're certainly not cheaper for consumers. Of course I have absolutely no source and a bit of googling didn't result in any info on it.
Insert joke making fun of Canada (possibly tying in a South Park quote) here
Defensive patents are yet another example of the sad state of our IP laws. It shouldn't be necessary and some sort of model similar to open sourcing would seem to be a better option.
You're trading one demagogue for another. We're probably all going to agree that celebrities shouldn't have any great say in science (or much of anything else) just because they're celebrities. But assuming a person is intelligent, educated or whatever based solely on the fact that they have a degree isn't really any better.