You can demand whatever you want, and the company will hire you if they think you are worth it.
It's the same way you hire a plumber, a nanny, or a hairdresser. And if you think you can fix that leak yourself or that the plumber is going to screw you, you don't hire a plumber at all, you head down to the Home Depot yourself, and you don't give a damn whether he makes a "living wage" or not.
Lanai is just an island; there are lots of them for sale in the world, in all price ranges. If you really wanted to, you could probably buy one yourself somewhere, in your price range. If want to deprive Ellison of his island, compete with him. Given how shitty and copycat his company's software is, it shouldn't be too hard.
It is doubtful that either food or foreign aid helps these people. What they need is a functioning economy and a functioning society, and handouts create neither of them.
The way we could help them is remove subsidies from our agricultural products and remove trade barriers. But hell will freeze over before US and European farmers let that happen. It is politically much easier to first waste many billions on farm subsidies, then waste many more billions on "foreign aid".
Rising because of increasing and aging population, not because insurance companies are mandated to increase their profits by their shareholders every year. That's why health care in Canada is cheaper.
National health care expenditures are $2.2 trillion, health insurance profits are $13 billion; that is 0.6%. Even if you took all the profits of insurers away, it wouldn't make a noticeable dent in US health care costs.
Socializing the costs for the uninsured also doesn't account for the increases, and neither does the aging population. The reason health care costs are rising much faster than inflation in every developed nation is because people receive more and more expensive medical services. And the reason they do that is because they don't have to pay for it.
Most developed countries, with the exception of the United States, have partially or fully publicly funded health systems
The US spent $769 billion on public funding for health insurance. That's about a third of total health care expenditures. I'd call that "partially publicly funded" through "taxation during their working life".
actually yes i do which is why any professional gets waivers/arranges payment in these types of cases.
Professionals get waivers in order to be able to use the pictures commercially. You do not need a waiver or permission to take anybody's picture anywhere, except truly private locations (changing rooms, bathrooms).
and again your "rights" to watch anything in my backyard end where my ability to defend my backyard ends.
You indeed have a "right to defend your backyard": with hedges, trees, and fences. Beyond that, you do not have a right to keep others from looking or taking photographs.
Ive already stated the Canadian costs are about half of that in the US.
Canadian health care costs are also rising unsustainably, just like the US ones.
It seems the US is the ones with the unnecessary medical procedures.
Yes, and for the same reason: in the US, like Canada, the vast majority of people are part of insurance pools that they don't have much influence over and that socialize the costs.
The question is how to fix it. Going to a Canadian-style system is not a solution. Even if it could achieve cost containment, it wouldn't be acceptable for the US.
In reality most western civilized countries have fully or partially funded health care. It is the US that is the exception.
Ah, I see, your mind is unmoved by facts. Learn something about the world beyond your borders for a change.
There is apparently a flaw in your reasoning somewhere. Bin Laden declared war on the US [pbs.org] on behalf of Al Qaeda in 1996,
So if I declare war on the US on behalf of my chess club, the president of the US is justified in bombing my chess club into oblivion? I don't thikn so.
Exploding a car bomb in a busy market or shopping area is pretty clear. Membership in a particular terrorist organization is even clearer.
Attributing terrorist acts to particular organizations is extremely difficult. And determining membership in terrorist organizations is just as hard.
Somehow, what you declared impossible has happened. How do you think that is? Hint - a flaw in your thinking.
Or, alternatively, Congress and the president exceeded their powers, and we should make sure that that doesn't happen again.
The Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Al Qaeda, so one other branch of government was involved. After that is became a military matter, and the President is Commander in Chief. Quite straight forward.
The military has license to kill on battlefields in wars, not to shoot down arbitrary people it deems to be a threat. And Congress can't authorize the military to do the latter either.
If an American member of Al Qaeda wants a trial, they can surrender.
How can they "surrender" if they haven't even been charged with anything? How would they know? How would they even know that the US considers them a member of a terrorist organization?
Otherwise they are a legitimate target of war. It isn't a question of criminal law, but the law of war.
With that view, there are no limits on executive power. A president could unilaterally and secretly declare you (or his political opponent or his ex-wife) to be a member of Al Qaeda and kill you without you ever knowing what hit you. Right now, all we can rely on is that the president won't abuse that power, but that's not a workable long-term solution.
In the past, the US couldn't just draw up kill lists and implement them because killing people overseas was a major effort, and terrorists that were overseas were not much concern anyway back then. But technology has changed that. That's why there is a legally grey area right now that we need to address. But the way to resolve that grey area is not to hand the executive branch unlimited power by default, it is to work out what is a reasonable thing to do given these new realities.
The ones that opposed are those who will never get elected to the White House (i.e. Ron Paul and those from third parties).
People had choices and they chose Obama and Romney. That's why people like Ron Paul don't get elected.
But regarding presidental election, people will argue their candidate whether it be Obama (some claim he is a secret communist) or Romney ("only free markets work"). Well that can simply lead into the tagline, "Capitalism is where man exploits man. In Communism it is the other way around."
So, again, you get a meaningful choice (democratic socialism or free markets), and it is merely your cynicism and political malaise that makes you dismiss that choice.
Under the US Constitution you have a right to face your accusers, so no trial in absentia.
Arguing against judicial review of targeted killings because of a right to face one's accusers is ridiculous. Furthermore, who said that the accused was deprived of a right to face his accusers? In most cases, he (or more likely his lawyers) could be invited to attend.
Further more, this is a question of war, not a judicial matter, not a criminal matter. It is a matter for the Commander in Chief - the President. Anyone who takes up arms against the United States is at risk of being killed.
War is supposed to be authorized by Congress and not something the president can decide unilaterally and use as justification to kill anyone anywhere. The Constitution clearly did not intend for the executive branch to be able to plan and execute killings without at least one other branch of government being involved.
Yes, it's nice that things are getting better, but they are getting better because people are paying more attention to just these kinds of questions. And the fact that people in the Congo are killing each other really has little bearing on what policies are proper for us to adopt. And, frankly, that the president is not as bad as Stalin is not exactly a reassuring comparison.
There is no reason why the president needs to decide these cases by himself. The US could hold a trial in absentia where the executive branch presents evidence to judges; that would allow two of the branches of government to have input into the cases, and it would provide much better documentation for why they were killed and what the evidence was.
Let's keep this in mind for the upcoming election, and let's see what the two major candidates have to say about it. And don't complain that you didn't have a choice... there were primary candidates who strongly opposed these kinds of foreign adventures by the US government.
If the US really had better treatments and outcomes, then you would think their life expectancy would be higher than Canada,
You might think that but you would be wrong. The US causes of lower US life expectancy are not related to quality of medical care but other factors (immigration and higher obesity, for example). When you compare comparable populations in the two countries, US life expectancy is actually a bit higher than Canadian.
So, for comparable or less outcome, for this the US spends twice the amount per capita and per GDP than we do in Canada.
Yes, but much of that extra spending is by choice: it's employers and individuals choosing expensive health plans because they like the extra benefits, service, and peace of mind they get.
My father also went to the hospital complaining of weakness. They checked him out and immediately prepped him for surgery for a pacemaker. He received what they said was a $50k pacemaker, top of the line. No wait, no bills.
So, in different words, your father didn't have to think about whether he actually needed the pacemaker or whether a cheaper treatment would have also worked. Maybe he actually needed it, but that kind of approach is the reason costs are rising much faster than inflation. And behind the scenes, there are cost controls and rules that may well end up denying you care you actually need.
No, I do not want a health care system in which there is "no wait, no bills" regardless of your choices. You should have to think about what level of service and coverage you want, choose your insurance plan accordingly, and then live with the consequences. That's the only way to rein in insurance costs long term without completely giving up control over your future to faceless bureaucrats.
But given my experiences with the Canadian and American systems (my sister is American - when she went into labour they would not send an ambulance until she gave them a visa number), makes me firmly believe our system is the correct way to go and I would never trade it for a private system like the US. Obama is on the right track - he just has to ignore the uninformed idiots and keep pushing.
The US doesn't have a "private system". The elderly and the poor are already covered by government insurance programs, which make up a large part of total health care expenditures. Most of the rest are covered by tax-exempt employer provided coverage that also really doesn't give people much choice.
Obama isn't trying to move the US to a single payer system and that wouldn't fix anything. Portable private insurance with an individual insurance mandate would be a reasonable system for the US, and most civilized countries have that, not the bizarre system that exists in Canada and the UK. Unfortunately, Obama didn't tackle the biggest problem, namely the link between health care and employment.
Except for that pesky "Now I'm 7,000 miles away from my OS, apps and data" thing...
I'm usually less than a foot away from my OS, apps, and data; they are backed up automatically on USB flash drive. It takes only a few minutes to start working on a new laptop. If you don't know how to do that, well, you probably shouldn't travel 7000 miles with your laptop.
(If you want to be even more versatile, use a bootable flash drive or portable apps.)
Just get an Air, and forget about the "fixing it" part;... And as I said, both are unlikely to be fixed by YOU on the road; but at least with the Air, there is the possibility of having an Apple Store in the area, where it CAN be fixed.
Or even better, get an Ultralight laptop for about half the price (or a netbook for even less). If it breaks, you can buy another one pretty much anywhere in the world and still have not spent more than for a MacBook Air.
A Acer Aspire S3 costs about $620, the cheapest 13" MacBook Air costs about $1200 (an 11" costs $1000, but that's really too small for real work and still a lot more money).
Other than screen size, the specs are irrelevant since the S3 is more than sufficient for everything most people want to do (it has an i5 at 1.6GHz, 4G of memory, and 320G disk +20G SSD). It's Apple's fault that they don't offer the MacBook Air in lower-spec'ed configurations.
For practical purposes, you have to pay about twice as much for a MacBook Air compared to an Acer to get a usable ultralight laptop for traveling.
The most compact and versatile travel combo I found is a 7" Android tablet with HDMI output and a folding Bluetooth keyboard.
I'm not sure a pico projector adds much to that: it's not that useful for presentations, and it doesn't really give you a better picture for working than the tablet.
$6000/year over 30 years at 5% (investment return minus inflation) is $417000. Yup, that's worth it. You can buy a lot of education, retirement, and insurance for that kind of money.
And do the Fins get anything for the extra taxes they pay? That's doubtful. Even in 2011, Ireland is at place 7 on the UN's HDI index, while Finland is at position 22, just below Slovenia and above Spain. Finland's murder rate is higher than Ireland's, its Internet speeds are lower (Akamai), and factors like rent are comparable.
Finland nominally ranks a bit higher on education, but Ireland is comparable to Germany and Spain, and any differences are likely due to the smaller and more homogeneous population of Finland, not an inability to get a good education. Besides, providing good public education isn't expensive and doesn't require high taxes.
And, frankly, unless you're ethnically Finnish, Finland isn't such a good place to live.
Yes because it's not as if various US policy figures have suggested this is what should happen, or the US has a history of extraordinary rendition or anything is it?
Politicians say outrageous things all the time. Just listing to the right wing and left wing crap coming from European politicians (nobody bothers to listen to them, of course).
Has Assange been abducted? Indicted? No. So, stop accusing the US government as if he had been.
but every UI study I've seen shows [single menu] faster to operate than one-per-window.
Give a reference to a study that shows (rather than merely infers from Fitts law) that "single menus are faster to operate than one-per-window". I don't know of any study that has been done to actually show it. None of the papers you cited do. If you do know of such a study, show it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can demand whatever you want, and the company will hire you if they think you are worth it.
It's the same way you hire a plumber, a nanny, or a hairdresser. And if you think you can fix that leak yourself or that the plumber is going to screw you, you don't hire a plumber at all, you head down to the Home Depot yourself, and you don't give a damn whether he makes a "living wage" or not.
Lanai is just an island; there are lots of them for sale in the world, in all price ranges. If you really wanted to, you could probably buy one yourself somewhere, in your price range. If want to deprive Ellison of his island, compete with him. Given how shitty and copycat his company's software is, it shouldn't be too hard.
It's a standard idiom:
"Do you want a ride to the prom?" "No, I have my own car."
"Does John still have problems have time on the family PC?" "No, he bought his own PC."
"Is Larry Ellison the incarnation of Dr. Evil?" "Sure is! He bought his own volcanic island."
It is doubtful that either food or foreign aid helps these people. What they need is a functioning economy and a functioning society, and handouts create neither of them.
The way we could help them is remove subsidies from our agricultural products and remove trade barriers. But hell will freeze over before US and European farmers let that happen. It is politically much easier to first waste many billions on farm subsidies, then waste many more billions on "foreign aid".
National health care expenditures are $2.2 trillion, health insurance profits are $13 billion; that is 0.6%. Even if you took all the profits of insurers away, it wouldn't make a noticeable dent in US health care costs.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/06/pushing-for-a-public-plan/
Socializing the costs for the uninsured also doesn't account for the increases, and neither does the aging population. The reason health care costs are rising much faster than inflation in every developed nation is because people receive more and more expensive medical services. And the reason they do that is because they don't have to pay for it.
The US spent $769 billion on public funding for health insurance. That's about a third of total health care expenditures. I'd call that "partially publicly funded" through "taxation during their working life".
Professionals get waivers in order to be able to use the pictures commercially. You do not need a waiver or permission to take anybody's picture anywhere, except truly private locations (changing rooms, bathrooms).
You indeed have a "right to defend your backyard": with hedges, trees, and fences. Beyond that, you do not have a right to keep others from looking or taking photographs.
Give corporations the same rights as any other group of people, no more and no less.
Canadian health care costs are also rising unsustainably, just like the US ones.
Yes, and for the same reason: in the US, like Canada, the vast majority of people are part of insurance pools that they don't have much influence over and that socialize the costs.
The question is how to fix it. Going to a Canadian-style system is not a solution. Even if it could achieve cost containment, it wouldn't be acceptable for the US.
Ah, I see, your mind is unmoved by facts. Learn something about the world beyond your borders for a change.
You still have failed to explain why that is a bad thing.
Is this really a good thing? How many art history and psychology majors do we need?
So if I declare war on the US on behalf of my chess club, the president of the US is justified in bombing my chess club into oblivion? I don't thikn so.
Attributing terrorist acts to particular organizations is extremely difficult. And determining membership in terrorist organizations is just as hard.
Or, alternatively, Congress and the president exceeded their powers, and we should make sure that that doesn't happen again.
The military has license to kill on battlefields in wars, not to shoot down arbitrary people it deems to be a threat. And Congress can't authorize the military to do the latter either.
How can they "surrender" if they haven't even been charged with anything? How would they know? How would they even know that the US considers them a member of a terrorist organization?
With that view, there are no limits on executive power. A president could unilaterally and secretly declare you (or his political opponent or his ex-wife) to be a member of Al Qaeda and kill you without you ever knowing what hit you. Right now, all we can rely on is that the president won't abuse that power, but that's not a workable long-term solution.
In the past, the US couldn't just draw up kill lists and implement them because killing people overseas was a major effort, and terrorists that were overseas were not much concern anyway back then. But technology has changed that. That's why there is a legally grey area right now that we need to address. But the way to resolve that grey area is not to hand the executive branch unlimited power by default, it is to work out what is a reasonable thing to do given these new realities.
People had choices and they chose Obama and Romney. That's why people like Ron Paul don't get elected.
So, again, you get a meaningful choice (democratic socialism or free markets), and it is merely your cynicism and political malaise that makes you dismiss that choice.
Arguing against judicial review of targeted killings because of a right to face one's accusers is ridiculous. Furthermore, who said that the accused was deprived of a right to face his accusers? In most cases, he (or more likely his lawyers) could be invited to attend.
War is supposed to be authorized by Congress and not something the president can decide unilaterally and use as justification to kill anyone anywhere. The Constitution clearly did not intend for the executive branch to be able to plan and execute killings without at least one other branch of government being involved.
Yes, it's nice that things are getting better, but they are getting better because people are paying more attention to just these kinds of questions. And the fact that people in the Congo are killing each other really has little bearing on what policies are proper for us to adopt. And, frankly, that the president is not as bad as Stalin is not exactly a reassuring comparison.
There is no reason why the president needs to decide these cases by himself. The US could hold a trial in absentia where the executive branch presents evidence to judges; that would allow two of the branches of government to have input into the cases, and it would provide much better documentation for why they were killed and what the evidence was.
Let's keep this in mind for the upcoming election, and let's see what the two major candidates have to say about it. And don't complain that you didn't have a choice... there were primary candidates who strongly opposed these kinds of foreign adventures by the US government.
You might think that but you would be wrong. The US causes of lower US life expectancy are not related to quality of medical care but other factors (immigration and higher obesity, for example). When you compare comparable populations in the two countries, US life expectancy is actually a bit higher than Canadian.
Yes, but much of that extra spending is by choice: it's employers and individuals choosing expensive health plans because they like the extra benefits, service, and peace of mind they get.
So, in different words, your father didn't have to think about whether he actually needed the pacemaker or whether a cheaper treatment would have also worked. Maybe he actually needed it, but that kind of approach is the reason costs are rising much faster than inflation. And behind the scenes, there are cost controls and rules that may well end up denying you care you actually need.
No, I do not want a health care system in which there is "no wait, no bills" regardless of your choices. You should have to think about what level of service and coverage you want, choose your insurance plan accordingly, and then live with the consequences. That's the only way to rein in insurance costs long term without completely giving up control over your future to faceless bureaucrats.
The US doesn't have a "private system". The elderly and the poor are already covered by government insurance programs, which make up a large part of total health care expenditures. Most of the rest are covered by tax-exempt employer provided coverage that also really doesn't give people much choice.
Obama isn't trying to move the US to a single payer system and that wouldn't fix anything. Portable private insurance with an individual insurance mandate would be a reasonable system for the US, and most civilized countries have that, not the bizarre system that exists in Canada and the UK. Unfortunately, Obama didn't tackle the biggest problem, namely the link between health care and employment.
I'm usually less than a foot away from my OS, apps, and data; they are backed up automatically on USB flash drive. It takes only a few minutes to start working on a new laptop. If you don't know how to do that, well, you probably shouldn't travel 7000 miles with your laptop.
(If you want to be even more versatile, use a bootable flash drive or portable apps.)
Or even better, get an Ultralight laptop for about half the price (or a netbook for even less). If it breaks, you can buy another one pretty much anywhere in the world and still have not spent more than for a MacBook Air.
A Acer Aspire S3 costs about $620, the cheapest 13" MacBook Air costs about $1200 (an 11" costs $1000, but that's really too small for real work and still a lot more money).
Other than screen size, the specs are irrelevant since the S3 is more than sufficient for everything most people want to do (it has an i5 at 1.6GHz, 4G of memory, and 320G disk +20G SSD). It's Apple's fault that they don't offer the MacBook Air in lower-spec'ed configurations.
For practical purposes, you have to pay about twice as much for a MacBook Air compared to an Acer to get a usable ultralight laptop for traveling.
The most compact and versatile travel combo I found is a 7" Android tablet with HDMI output and a folding Bluetooth keyboard.
I'm not sure a pico projector adds much to that: it's not that useful for presentations, and it doesn't really give you a better picture for working than the tablet.
Or get one of the Intel-based Ultrabooks and pay half as much.
$6000/year over 30 years at 5% (investment return minus inflation) is $417000. Yup, that's worth it. You can buy a lot of education, retirement, and insurance for that kind of money.
And do the Fins get anything for the extra taxes they pay? That's doubtful. Even in 2011, Ireland is at place 7 on the UN's HDI index, while Finland is at position 22, just below Slovenia and above Spain. Finland's murder rate is higher than Ireland's, its Internet speeds are lower (Akamai), and factors like rent are comparable.
Finland nominally ranks a bit higher on education, but Ireland is comparable to Germany and Spain, and any differences are likely due to the smaller and more homogeneous population of Finland, not an inability to get a good education. Besides, providing good public education isn't expensive and doesn't require high taxes.
And, frankly, unless you're ethnically Finnish, Finland isn't such a good place to live.
Politicians say outrageous things all the time. Just listing to the right wing and left wing crap coming from European politicians (nobody bothers to listen to them, of course).
Has Assange been abducted? Indicted? No. So, stop accusing the US government as if he had been.
Stop mincing words and put up. You wrote:
Give a reference to a study that shows (rather than merely infers from Fitts law) that "single menus are faster to operate than one-per-window". I don't know of any study that has been done to actually show it. None of the papers you cited do. If you do know of such a study, show it.