Windows 8 is a platform. How can it be "cross platform"? And how is iOS supposed to be "cross-platform"?
Are they saying that it supports multiple CPU types? Or are they saying that it supports multiple device types? Operating systems have done both for a long time.
That's because the engine is unsuited for use as the baseload prime mover. It is only suitable for a full electric transmission with battery storage. Full electric transmissions are expensive and inefficient and, as I note in another post, probably can't compete with plain old Diesel.
They can and they do. Instead of inventing your own big words and guessing about what does and doesn't work, why not do your homework?
You can't have a car that accelerates so poorly that it gets rear-ended by road-raged drivers. You can't have one that only gets good MPG at some particular speed range. You can't have one that stalls about a car length after a stop sign. You can't have one that doesn't run when the temperature is below 10 degrees farenheit. you can't have one that needs an engine replacement every 20,000 miles. And I could go on for pages.
Fortunately, with hybrid designs, all of those constraints disappear: you just hook up the motor to a generator, and all it has to do is run under steady, constant conditions.
The whole outside world -- and I've been there mind you -- the whole outside world looks at us like we're savages for leaving the sick and injured to fend for themselves.
I have lived in half a dozen countries around the world. You're right that other nations are less savage than the US when it comes to health care: they are less savage because they put limits on how selfish pricks like you can waste medical resources on unneeded procedures, ineffective end-of-life care, and the latest gimmicky drugs.
Sick people get doctors. Period. Whatever it takes, I don't care. I don't care if my taxes go up.
Taxes don't need to go up; the US already spends far more per capita on medicine than other nations. What "it takes" is putting people like you in their place and stop them from causing our medical expenses to spiral out of control through their ignorance and unreasonable expectations. That's how other nations achieve full coverage with less money than the US.
When "personal" medical problems get treated, "public" medical problems find fewer opportunities to breed in your community
Even Cuban-style health care would be sufficient for that, at a small fraction of what the US pays per capita. We can actually do better in the US, but not as long as people like you "don't care".
Them and the grandkids will have to live in this world after my wife and I are gone. What terrifies me is that half this country's population, a country I gave years to, half this country's population thinks Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh aren't loud-mouthed idiots
Then be terrified of yourself, because you're just as ignorant and destructive as the people who worship Beck and Limbaugh.
If you've got some gray in your hair, and your heart and spirit are still this stunted, small and shriveled, then you have my pity. You're going to go to your grave feeling even more miserable, alone and afraid than you do right now.
You said: Public health is simply the sum total of private health.... Like it or not, your health is inextricably tied into the health of everyone else. Unlike money and cookies, this isn't a situation where you can say 'Screw you I got mine.'
That statement is objectively false: my health does, for the most part, not depend on your health. My health does not depend on whether you have ALS or Huntingtons or cancer. If we only needed to address private health concerns that affect other people, we'd get by with very little money per American per year.
But nowhere did I say that because of that we should not help other people who have fallen sick. I was simply pointing out that your argument was false. There are many reasons to provide free health care to people, including the fact that it considered is a basic human right, but public health is not one of them.
You apparently think that defending your political and social views entitles you to insult and attack other people in whatever underhanded way you can come up with. I don't know what made you so bitter and arrogant, but whatever it was, it has turned you into a reprehensible human being.
I've never understood how replacing a very efficient broadcast mechanism with a unicast mechanism is "better". It's better for the user, but really, it's not scalable.
Oh, please, the average home plumbing is more complex than what it takes to deliver a few Mbps to every household; technically, of course it scales. And with caching and intelligent networks, you don't even need a lot more backbone bandwidth than with broadcasting.
Mr. Wozniak: people often "have the same answer" because in math, science, and engineering, there are a lot of answers that are objectively true and unique. And I don't know what kind of rotten high school you went to, but many high schools do reward creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Mr. Rothschild: haven't you heard? The current for-profit invasion of people's privacy is through social networks and ad networks; you're in the wrong business.
Multicore doesn't necessarily mean that you want more speed. A quad core processor may be no faster than a single core processor with the same number of transistors, but you can turn off three of the four cores when you don't need them to save power. Multicore processors are also potentially easier to manufacture because you just manufacture an extra core and then keep the four cores that work best out of the five.
No, it isn't. In the US, copyright is something utilitarian.
It is disingenuous to characterize this as solely an American problem, that we're somehow the cause of all of this.... You bear some responsibility for this
You're barking up the wrong tree, buddy. If you're going to do something is stupid as dividing the world into "us" vs "them", at least get your sides straight, OK?
I do not want most of the expensive treatments that my health plan currently provides: in case of heart attack, coma, stroke, broken spinal column, severe burns, or most diseases requiring a transplant, I would prefer death to treatment because I know that the quality of life after treatment would not be satisfactory for me.
Given that a huge chunk of US health care costs is due to frequently preventable medical conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer) or involves personal treatment choices (e.g., aggressive end-of-life care), those aren't "corner cases".
For the motorcycle, you already pay different costs because you pick different coverage. That's also how it would work for healthcare: beyond some basic coverage, you pick what you want to get covered for and that's what you pay for. Your insurer will make you an offer based on your risk factors, with provisions against genetic discrimination. Courts usually wouldn't have to get involved to determine who's at fault.
It has nothing to do with capitalism, it has to do with scarcity. Each person chooses one profession, each gallon of oil is turned into one kind of product, etc. You want more of one, you get less of the other. Capitalism is one way of allocating those resources, central planning is another. Dollars are a convenient way of keeping track of the tradeoffs in a free market, but you are free to do the bookkeeping differently if you like; it doesn't alter the tradeoffs involved.
You mean like how we spend over $200 billion more on our military than the entire rest of the planet combined? I fail to see how those dollars are making me any happier.
What kind of stupid argument is that? "Because we are wasting money here, let's waste more money there?" Of course, our defense budget should get cut back strongly now that the Cold War is over.
Our American medical dollars might be stretching further if we did more *preventative* care.
Absolutely.
Some level of socialized medicine would do a lot to make our economy more efficient. (I would prefer a public single-payer system to an individual mandate, though.)
As long as you lump together preventive care with insurable diseases, costs are going to spiral out of control.
The solution is to offer preventive care, care related to communicable diseases, and some simple common medical problems (appendicitis etc.) for free to anyone, without insurance, since everybody needs that anyway.
Anything else, people should have the option (but not obligation) to buy as much or as little insurance as they like, with steep discounts for those people taking advantage of preventive care offers.
*Sigh* OK, once again for the slow learners. Public health is simply the sum total of private health. Like it or not, your health is inextricably tied into the health of everyone else. Unlike money and cookies, this isn't a situation where you can say "Screw you I got mine."
Nonsense. Public health is concerned with a small number of communicable diseases, plus some infrastructure, sanitation, cost containment, and quarantine procedures.
There is only a small overlap with private health. It makes no difference to my health whether you suffer or die from cancer, obesity, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, or heart disease, and those are the major sources of private health expenditures.
I take it those who claim that also don't watch american movies, read american books, or listen to any american music? (I don't mean just new or popular stuff...)
I didn't say it was rational.
BTW, what caused the US to cave in eventually? Couldn't and shouldn't the US have upheld their version of copyright indefinitely?
The US needed some kind of international agreement, and the only choice was Berne, since that's what everybody else had agreed on. And the only way these agreements ever can go is that they become more restrictive and more punitive. It's the same with international agreements on drugs.
International treaties undermining liberties in individual nations is a big problem. More and more it's being used by special interests to undermine democratic decision making ("policy laundering").
Probably the most powerful counterargument is that exclusive rights in sound recordings are granted for a reason. The prospect of a temporary legal monopoly acts as an incentive for the industry to invest in recording and distributing sound recordings. Logically, the term of protection should therefore be just long enough for record companies to recoup these investments.
That's the US reasoning. In Europe, control of their creations is viewed as an intrinsic right of artists and creators. Furthermore, any argument you make from the American point of view is going to be met by the deep-seated European conviction that there is no art or culture in the US that's worth protecting anyway so Americans should just keep out of these discussions. If you want to convince Europeans, you need to come up with a different argument. But, frankly, between European attitudes, corporate lobbying, and policy laundering, you might as well talk to a wall.
(Remember that the current copyright insanity originated in Europe with the Berne convention; the US refused to comply for a long time, but finally gave in in the 1970's.)
These people believe in a book demonstrably full of forgeries, a religion that is full of contradictions and errors, and have chosen to work in an organization that has lied, defrauded, and murdered people for two millennia.
Their opinions and analyses of Catholic officials have neither moral nor intellectual value.
Because we're human beings and not vile repugnant inhuman anti-social Libertarian monsters.
I don't endorse the libertarian position, but frankly, people like you often just turn out to be a different kind of monster--the theocratic kind, the socialist kind, the totalitarian kind, etc. You're all out to help me live better, but historically, your track record is lousy.
What seems to work fairly well is a democracy with a loosely regulated free market and a limited set of public services. The government should build roads, prevent monopolies, and make sure everybody is vaccinated and gets treated for communicable diseases.
Whether it should make sure you have insurance coverage for diabetes, cancer, and bypass operations is open to debate. Often, those diseases are preventable and do fall under personal responsibility. And the amount of treatment people want may also differ.
In different words, I am happy to pay for the consequences of your bad luck, but I'm not happy to pay for the consequences of bad choices you have made when you should have known better, and I'm not happy to waste money because you have an irrational fear of death.
The US has all the same pooling of resources. For education, infrastructure, etc. they make sense. Furthermore, all of those have significant per-use costs built in: if you have many kids, if you have multiple cars or use roads for trucking, you pay extra.
It's not clear that that makes sense for health care, and for health care, you pay the same whether the costs arise as a consequence of your choice or by accident.
Yes, like it or not, you are your brother's keeper. You can bellyache all you want but in healthcare alone there are myriad things we do, as a civilization, that benefits the whole far more than an individual (vaccination is a great example of this).
Vaccinations are public health, not health care. Public health is clearly underfunded in the US: we should be spending more on vaccinations, health education, statistics and monitoring, and public health research.
Public health may also include some treatments for infectious diseases. All of those should be free and provided by the government. Effectively they are. But even this overlap between public health and health care is negligible.
Almost all US health care spending is on diseases which pose no threat to others: heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer. Most of that spending is wasted: either the disease is preventable, or it is treatable with lifestyle changes, or treatment is nearly ineffective.
For every time you've "worked hard" to earn what you have you've probably benefitted 10 times simply from good fortune
That kind of reasoning is pointless; markets aren't socially fair, but they are still better than the alternatives. Government should do a little bit of work to smooth the excesses that markets sometimes produce, but anything more doesn't really work.
The real question is: what is going to get people off their butts so that they make the changes in their lives that keep our health care spending in check.
If we have the technology and resources (and in a first world country, we DO have the resources) in our society to cure the sick, aren't we morally obligated to do so?
You have an inflated sense of what medicine can do right now; medicine doesn't reliably "cure the sick". Medicine can cure some simple diseases, improve quality of life for some others, give you a slightly better chance for yet more, and even make you sick or kill you. Medicine is not a very effective way of saving lives.
The problem is really one of resource allocation: every dollar you spend on medical treatments is a dollar you don't spend on education, research, public health, etc. That only makes sense if that dollar spent on medical treatments saves more lives and produces more happiness than if you spent it somewhere else. We're already far beyond that point in our medical treatments in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 8 is a platform. How can it be "cross platform"? And how is iOS supposed to be "cross-platform"?
Are they saying that it supports multiple CPU types? Or are they saying that it supports multiple device types? Operating systems have done both for a long time.
It's quite suitable for a series hybrid. There are several of those in production; they work. You can even get a series hybrid bicycle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vehicle#Series
They can and they do. Instead of inventing your own big words and guessing about what does and doesn't work, why not do your homework?
Fortunately, with hybrid designs, all of those constraints disappear: you just hook up the motor to a generator, and all it has to do is run under steady, constant conditions.
I have lived in half a dozen countries around the world. You're right that other nations are less savage than the US when it comes to health care: they are less savage because they put limits on how selfish pricks like you can waste medical resources on unneeded procedures, ineffective end-of-life care, and the latest gimmicky drugs.
Taxes don't need to go up; the US already spends far more per capita on medicine than other nations. What "it takes" is putting people like you in their place and stop them from causing our medical expenses to spiral out of control through their ignorance and unreasonable expectations. That's how other nations achieve full coverage with less money than the US.
Even Cuban-style health care would be sufficient for that, at a small fraction of what the US pays per capita. We can actually do better in the US, but not as long as people like you "don't care".
Then be terrified of yourself, because you're just as ignorant and destructive as the people who worship Beck and Limbaugh.
You said: Public health is simply the sum total of private health. ... Like it or not, your health is inextricably tied into the health of everyone else. Unlike money and cookies, this isn't a situation where you can say 'Screw you I got mine.'
That statement is objectively false: my health does, for the most part, not depend on your health. My health does not depend on whether you have ALS or Huntingtons or cancer. If we only needed to address private health concerns that affect other people, we'd get by with very little money per American per year.
But nowhere did I say that because of that we should not help other people who have fallen sick. I was simply pointing out that your argument was false. There are many reasons to provide free health care to people, including the fact that it considered is a basic human right, but public health is not one of them.
You apparently think that defending your political and social views entitles you to insult and attack other people in whatever underhanded way you can come up with. I don't know what made you so bitter and arrogant, but whatever it was, it has turned you into a reprehensible human being.
Oh, please, the average home plumbing is more complex than what it takes to deliver a few Mbps to every household; technically, of course it scales. And with caching and intelligent networks, you don't even need a lot more backbone bandwidth than with broadcasting.
Mr. Wozniak: people often "have the same answer" because in math, science, and engineering, there are a lot of answers that are objectively true and unique. And I don't know what kind of rotten high school you went to, but many high schools do reward creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Mr. Rothschild: haven't you heard? The current for-profit invasion of people's privacy is through social networks and ad networks; you're in the wrong business.
Multicore doesn't necessarily mean that you want more speed. A quad core processor may be no faster than a single core processor with the same number of transistors, but you can turn off three of the four cores when you don't need them to save power. Multicore processors are also potentially easier to manufacture because you just manufacture an extra core and then keep the four cores that work best out of the five.
An excellent characterization of your argument style.
No, it isn't. In the US, copyright is something utilitarian.
You're barking up the wrong tree, buddy. If you're going to do something is stupid as dividing the world into "us" vs "them", at least get your sides straight, OK?
I do not want most of the expensive treatments that my health plan currently provides: in case of heart attack, coma, stroke, broken spinal column, severe burns, or most diseases requiring a transplant, I would prefer death to treatment because I know that the quality of life after treatment would not be satisfactory for me.
Given that a huge chunk of US health care costs is due to frequently preventable medical conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer) or involves personal treatment choices (e.g., aggressive end-of-life care), those aren't "corner cases".
For the motorcycle, you already pay different costs because you pick different coverage. That's also how it would work for healthcare: beyond some basic coverage, you pick what you want to get covered for and that's what you pay for. Your insurer will make you an offer based on your risk factors, with provisions against genetic discrimination. Courts usually wouldn't have to get involved to determine who's at fault.
Except that your "facts" are a figment of your imagination.
It has nothing to do with capitalism, it has to do with scarcity. Each person chooses one profession, each gallon of oil is turned into one kind of product, etc. You want more of one, you get less of the other. Capitalism is one way of allocating those resources, central planning is another. Dollars are a convenient way of keeping track of the tradeoffs in a free market, but you are free to do the bookkeeping differently if you like; it doesn't alter the tradeoffs involved.
What kind of stupid argument is that? "Because we are wasting money here, let's waste more money there?" Of course, our defense budget should get cut back strongly now that the Cold War is over.
Absolutely.
As long as you lump together preventive care with insurable diseases, costs are going to spiral out of control.
The solution is to offer preventive care, care related to communicable diseases, and some simple common medical problems (appendicitis etc.) for free to anyone, without insurance, since everybody needs that anyway.
Anything else, people should have the option (but not obligation) to buy as much or as little insurance as they like, with steep discounts for those people taking advantage of preventive care offers.
Nonsense. Public health is concerned with a small number of communicable diseases, plus some infrastructure, sanitation, cost containment, and quarantine procedures.
There is only a small overlap with private health. It makes no difference to my health whether you suffer or die from cancer, obesity, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, or heart disease, and those are the major sources of private health expenditures.
I didn't say it was rational.
You can read the history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works
The US needed some kind of international agreement, and the only choice was Berne, since that's what everybody else had agreed on. And the only way these agreements ever can go is that they become more restrictive and more punitive. It's the same with international agreements on drugs.
International treaties undermining liberties in individual nations is a big problem. More and more it's being used by special interests to undermine democratic decision making ("policy laundering").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering
That's the US reasoning. In Europe, control of their creations is viewed as an intrinsic right of artists and creators. Furthermore, any argument you make from the American point of view is going to be met by the deep-seated European conviction that there is no art or culture in the US that's worth protecting anyway so Americans should just keep out of these discussions. If you want to convince Europeans, you need to come up with a different argument. But, frankly, between European attitudes, corporate lobbying, and policy laundering, you might as well talk to a wall.
(Remember that the current copyright insanity originated in Europe with the Berne convention; the US refused to comply for a long time, but finally gave in in the 1970's.)
Maybe, maybe not. That gets complicated.
These people believe in a book demonstrably full of forgeries, a religion that is full of contradictions and errors, and have chosen to work in an organization that has lied, defrauded, and murdered people for two millennia.
Their opinions and analyses of Catholic officials have neither moral nor intellectual value.
I don't endorse the libertarian position, but frankly, people like you often just turn out to be a different kind of monster--the theocratic kind, the socialist kind, the totalitarian kind, etc. You're all out to help me live better, but historically, your track record is lousy.
What seems to work fairly well is a democracy with a loosely regulated free market and a limited set of public services. The government should build roads, prevent monopolies, and make sure everybody is vaccinated and gets treated for communicable diseases.
Whether it should make sure you have insurance coverage for diabetes, cancer, and bypass operations is open to debate. Often, those diseases are preventable and do fall under personal responsibility. And the amount of treatment people want may also differ.
In different words, I am happy to pay for the consequences of your bad luck, but I'm not happy to pay for the consequences of bad choices you have made when you should have known better, and I'm not happy to waste money because you have an irrational fear of death.
The US has all the same pooling of resources. For education, infrastructure, etc. they make sense. Furthermore, all of those have significant per-use costs built in: if you have many kids, if you have multiple cars or use roads for trucking, you pay extra.
It's not clear that that makes sense for health care, and for health care, you pay the same whether the costs arise as a consequence of your choice or by accident.
Vaccinations are public health, not health care. Public health is clearly underfunded in the US: we should be spending more on vaccinations, health education, statistics and monitoring, and public health research.
Public health may also include some treatments for infectious diseases. All of those should be free and provided by the government. Effectively they are. But even this overlap between public health and health care is negligible.
Almost all US health care spending is on diseases which pose no threat to others: heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer. Most of that spending is wasted: either the disease is preventable, or it is treatable with lifestyle changes, or treatment is nearly ineffective.
That kind of reasoning is pointless; markets aren't socially fair, but they are still better than the alternatives. Government should do a little bit of work to smooth the excesses that markets sometimes produce, but anything more doesn't really work.
The real question is: what is going to get people off their butts so that they make the changes in their lives that keep our health care spending in check.
You have an inflated sense of what medicine can do right now; medicine doesn't reliably "cure the sick". Medicine can cure some simple diseases, improve quality of life for some others, give you a slightly better chance for yet more, and even make you sick or kill you. Medicine is not a very effective way of saving lives.
The problem is really one of resource allocation: every dollar you spend on medical treatments is a dollar you don't spend on education, research, public health, etc. That only makes sense if that dollar spent on medical treatments saves more lives and produces more happiness than if you spent it somewhere else. We're already far beyond that point in our medical treatments in the US.