In Europe, though, it's practically forbidden to acknowledge that Hitler ever existed.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
What a nonsense. Where in Europe? Have you ever been to Europe? Which country you are talking about? Half of European movies were about the world war II in various shapes or forms. The generation that went through that devastation is still (though barely) alive. You can't erase people's memory. Contrary to the U.S. that did not experience a war on its territory for well over a century, this is still not an abstract issue in Europe.
I have no clue what in the French history have you seen that makes you think that they are such a tolerant nation. The revolution that possibly invented a totalitarian state? Vichy collaboration with Nazis? A strong record of voting for either communist, trotskist or else fascist parties?
What works against US in these kinds of statistics are immigrants - lower life expectancy of a group constituting much more significant proportion of population than anywhere in Europe. More severe climate also does not help. Traffic fatalities and crime are not directly related to health care but affect life expectancy as well. Many other lifestyle choices do. I don't know the contribution of each of these things to the difference in life expectancy, but before you pin down something about health care to be the culprit think about it for a second at least.
Most of the really poor in the US have health care - if they are old (over 65) they are on Medicare, otherwise they are likely to be on Medicaid. These are not "universal" programs (though Medicare comes close as it's not means tested) but are public. They are also very expensive for the taxpayer. People who don't have health care are "working poor" - they make a choice not buy a private coverage. Yes, private coverage is expensive. But so are taxes that you have to pay for your helth care anywhere in Europe, the only difference being that there you don't have a choice.
The rest of the world is also free-riding on U.S. medical research. With U.S. companies not able to charge enough abroad, they just pursue their research with mostly U.S. profits in mind. It means that there is less research than you would otherwise have. It also means that health-care in your favorite socialized system would be even crappier if not for the U.S.
Finally, just to tease you: "People in industrialized nations with socialized healthcare live longer (often a lot longer), and pay far less." How do you know in which direction causality goes? Maybe nations that (for other reasons) live longer demand socialized healthcare?
Of course, the Open Source model really points to a future where corporations are largely irrelevant, and everybody participates in an extremely organic, dynamic model where we all act as free agents, working on the projects which most interest us. But, don't even get me started on that topic.
...and (other than anti-corporate religious belief) how is it different from a free market economy where people choose to work on whatever most interests them provided that someone else is willing to pay for it?
It is not clear it needs to be taxed: the idea is to tax consumption. Your whole argument applied to durable goods. The first time your computer was sold, its full value (meaning: its full consumption value) was taxed. The first owner did not exhaust full consumption possibilities (because there is still something you are willing to pay for), he passed them to you in exchange for your payment - in essence, he paid the tax for you upfront and you reimbursed him when buying stuff used.
The U.S. style sales tax is one of the more screwed up
taxes there are because it taxes the same things many times. In a nutshell - there is a sales tax to be
paid on inputs and a sales tax to be paid on output.
As the result, before the product reaches its final
consumer, inputs are taxed multiple times. A bit of economics is required to show that this is usually not efficient.
The way
the tax is implemented by the U.S. states makes it virtually impossible to deal with this problem in a sensible way without creating opportunities for tax avoidance.
The sensible alternatives are a European style value added tax or the so called Hall-Rabushka tax (also known as the flat tax; the variant of it was popularized by Forbes some years ago)
I have been happily using win4lin for two years now. It is just windows (98 or me but not XP; you need a license) in
a window running under linux. My favorite part is
that I can do 'kill -9' when it annoys me.
(I've been told that the Japanese (or is it Chinese) game of Go is one such game)
If you ask a Korean, you'll be told that it's Korean (he might call it "baduk" though). Anyway, the point is that we are still years from seeing a machine that can beat a human with a few years of experience (not to mention a professional). The game has much more combinations than chess. The numbers I remember is something of the order of 10^720 distinct games that you can play in go vs. 10^120 in chess - they may be off by a bit but that's roughly the order of magnitude. On top of it, it is not that easy to prune unreasonable moves - in chess you can in most cases easily go down to a few moves to consider while in go it is easily 20 or more in the opening game. You cannot just rely on the brute force but rather on hard to formalize concepts of "shape" and "influence". That's what also makes the game fun.
Whatever - don't make a dumb impression that knowing what o(N), O(N), omega(N) or theta(N) mean is a rocket science. You just happened to be a pain in the neck just because I mistyped "O(N)" as "o(N)" - it's your call that you want to troll, now go search for typos elsewhere.
That being said, I have one complaint. FIVE fscking-disks?!
The more discs there are, the less likely people are to download it and the more likely they are to buy the box. RedHat can make some money this way. You see, they are a corporation and they are supposed to make profit.
You could do the very same by simply running VNC Server in each VM (of course, that's only really feasable if you give each one a different IP address...). =)
People would be willing to pay for air yet it usually does not cost that much. Basic economics is that if you buy something, you are willing to pay at least as much as you paid for it or maybe more. It does not follow though that the producers can grab the whole surplus. That depends on whether there is competition and on how flexible are pricing strategies. If you have competition, people are actually willing to pay much more than they are really paying.
The problem is that only the most intelligent and wealthy of people (the two are directly related. cf The Bell Curve) will be able to afford genetic screening and so will inevitably become genetically perfect, like a master race, while the poor remain like old fashioned Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
There will be folks who will test others for a fraction of the insurance payout. Pretty much like with the lawyers who offer to work for a fraction of the potential settlement. So, the poor will also benefit.
A lot of money was invested in developing the medicines. If the pharmaceutical companies did not believe that they would make profit on it, they would not have done it. Now it is so easy to simply confiscate the existing discoveries, but AIDS is not the last disease that the world will see. If you don't let them make their profit, next time nobody will want to invest in researching new treatments.
Basically, somebody has to pay. The simplistic view in the article is that you can make drug companies pay and everybody (but them) will be happy. What it ignores is that in the longer term we will all have to pay for it by not having access to better treatments.
No it can't work, unless you believe that others are irrational. If you believe that it is going to stop at some point, you will never buy the asset just before that so it must stop before whenever you believed it is going to stop. By backward induction, it will never start to rise like that.
...and then after a few years the capitalization of the stock market exceeds the total wealth of the world. So, a large enough number of people would have to believe that it is possible. You must believe that (in the future) even though by selling your shares you could buy everything in the world, there will still be suckers who are going to pay you that much. It does not work like that my fried.
Slashdot Mirror
What about using it as cheap remote backup?
another good reason to wait a few more weeks before applying sp2
Read the parent:
Where the hell did you get the info that there is anti-jewish sentiment in France?
I just pointed out where the hell is.
You have no idea what you are talking about. What a nonsense. Where in Europe? Have you ever been to Europe? Which country you are talking about? Half of European movies were about the world war II in various shapes or forms. The generation that went through that devastation is still (though barely) alive. You can't erase people's memory. Contrary to the U.S. that did not experience a war on its territory for well over a century, this is still not an abstract issue in Europe.
and clearly I did not preview... Here is the link: http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=U TF-8&tab=nn&q=france+anti-semitic&btnG=Search+News
I have no clue what in the French history have you seen that makes you think that they are such a tolerant nation. The revolution that possibly invented a totalitarian state? Vichy collaboration with Nazis? A strong record of voting for either communist, trotskist or else fascist parties?
What works against US in these kinds of statistics are immigrants - lower life expectancy of a group constituting much more significant proportion of population than anywhere in Europe. More severe climate also does not help. Traffic fatalities and crime are not directly related to health care but affect life expectancy as well. Many other lifestyle choices do. I don't know the contribution of each of these things to the difference in life expectancy, but before you pin down something about health care to be the culprit think about it for a second at least.
Most of the really poor in the US have health care - if they are old (over 65) they are on Medicare, otherwise they are likely to be on Medicaid. These are not "universal" programs (though Medicare comes close as it's not means tested) but are public. They are also very expensive for the taxpayer. People who don't have health care are "working poor" - they make a choice not buy a private coverage. Yes, private coverage is expensive. But so are taxes that you have to pay for your helth care anywhere in Europe, the only difference being that there you don't have a choice.
The rest of the world is also free-riding on U.S. medical research. With U.S. companies not able to charge enough abroad, they just pursue their research with mostly U.S. profits in mind. It means that there is less research than you would otherwise have. It also means that health-care in your favorite socialized system would be even crappier if not for the U.S.
Finally, just to tease you: "People in industrialized nations with socialized healthcare live longer (often a lot longer), and pay far less." How do you know in which direction causality goes? Maybe nations that (for other reasons) live longer demand socialized healthcare?
you probably thought of world wide web not the internet
It is not clear it needs to be taxed: the idea is to tax consumption. Your whole argument applied to durable goods. The first time your computer was sold, its full value (meaning: its full consumption value) was taxed. The first owner did not exhaust full consumption possibilities (because there is still something you are willing to pay for), he passed them to you in exchange for your payment - in essence, he paid the tax for you upfront and you reimbursed him when buying stuff used.
The sensible alternatives are a European style value added tax or the so called Hall-Rabushka tax (also known as the flat tax; the variant of it was popularized by Forbes some years ago)
I have been happily using win4lin for two years now. It is just windows (98 or me but not XP; you need a license) in a window running under linux. My favorite part is that I can do 'kill -9' when it annoys me.
This is illegal under any set of go rules
If you ask a Korean, you'll be told that it's Korean (he might call it "baduk" though). Anyway, the point is that we are still years from seeing a machine that can beat a human with a few years of experience (not to mention a professional). The game has much more combinations than chess. The numbers I remember is something of the order of 10^720 distinct games that you can play in go vs. 10^120 in chess - they may be off by a bit but that's roughly the order of magnitude. On top of it, it is not that easy to prune unreasonable moves - in chess you can in most cases easily go down to a few moves to consider while in go it is easily 20 or more in the opening game. You cannot just rely on the brute force but rather on hard to formalize concepts of "shape" and "influence". That's what also makes the game fun.
Whatever - don't make a dumb impression that knowing what o(N), O(N), omega(N) or theta(N) mean is a rocket science. You just happened to be a pain in the neck just because I mistyped "O(N)" as "o(N)" - it's your call that you want to troll, now go search for typos elsewhere.
(...) a "speed" of O(N)
The rest I agree with. Including that we both should learn to master a shift key.
That's o(N) - the asymptotic speed of N.
The more discs there are, the less likely people are to download it and the more likely they are to buy the box. RedHat can make some money this way. You see, they are a corporation and they are supposed to make profit.
You could do the very same by simply running VNC Server in each VM (of course, that's only really feasable if you give each one a different IP address...). =)
Can't you make them listen on different ports?
People would be willing to pay for air yet it usually does not cost that much. Basic economics is that if you buy something, you are willing to pay at least as much as you paid for it or maybe more. It does not follow though that the producers can grab the whole surplus. That depends on whether there is competition and on how flexible are pricing strategies.
If you have competition, people are actually willing to pay much more than they are really paying.
There will be folks who will test others for a fraction of the insurance payout. Pretty much like with the lawyers who offer to work for a fraction of the potential settlement. So, the poor will also benefit.
Basically, somebody has to pay. The simplistic view in the article is that you can make drug companies pay and everybody (but them) will be happy. What it ignores is that in the longer term we will all have to pay for it by not having access to better treatments.
it is really spooky! In Polish, okulary means "glasses" and that is just one step from an eye...
No it can't work, unless you believe that others are irrational. If you believe that it is going to stop at some point, you will never buy the asset just before that so it must stop before whenever you believed it is going to stop. By backward induction, it will never start to rise like that.
...and then after a few years the capitalization of the stock market exceeds the total wealth of the world. So, a large enough number of people would have to believe that it is possible. You must believe that (in the future) even though by selling your shares you could buy everything in the world, there will still be suckers who are going to pay you that much. It does not work like that my fried.