This also does absolutely nothing to fix the other failing government health care programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration.
I generally vote Republican. Philosophically, I think government-run medicine is a bad idea. But the system that's in place now is fundamentally broken, and all this does is feed more taxpayer money into it.
Great job, Democrats.
I'd much prefer an Australian-style system, with caps. If you want better coverage, pay for supplimental insurance. Then cap coverages and expenses. There isn't a realistic way, otherwise. But they'd never never get re-elected telling people that everyone is going to get some coverage, but if you're in really bad shape, or not expected to live very long, you get to die or live out the rest of your days in pain.
Even more despicable is Mark Warner's recently-passed Senate bill authorizing more medicare funds for end-of-life/hospice care. Supposedly, the elderly can still get all the care they want towards the end of their lives, but the doctors have to push hospice care, and don't get paid for services rendered if they don't push hard enough for the people to go die without costing more money.
Yeah, so have I, both of them. Got three different calls telling me I needed to go vote for Barack Obama in November. The third one I slipped through my asterisk-fu.
"We hope you'll go out and vote today!" "I already did this morning. For Senator McCain." "Oh." (long pause) "Have a nice day, then, I guess."
There's only so much you can do, and reporting the non-profits and/or pols doesn't do much good.
Ditto. I went Saturday. Virginia's new licensing process has been well-publicized, and it's a PITA. I probably won't actually get my real license for a few weeks. Until then, I have my old one (doesn't expire until August), and a piece of paper that has the new one's expiration date.
All that said, the Virginia DMV has gotten a lot better. I got there about 20 minutes after opening, and was out in about 1:15. I can remember getting it renewed ten years ago, and having it take almost four hours.
And when I first got my license in Mississippi, it was an all-day affair -- about six hours, total. (mid-90s)
Misleading, because Verizon != VerizonWireless. US Verizon is a minority holder (Vodafone is the majority owner), and so the profit margin for Verizon as a whole isn't reflective of the profit margin of the Wireless division.
Same deal with Sprint; the wireless division uses the same brand name, but is actually a separate company.
As for TFA, What's next? My best guess is that we'll see horrendous pricing surcharges for tethering and MMS, on top of the already expensive data and voice charges iPhone users pay.
In other words, he's pulling right out of his ass, and doesn't have any direct evidence that AT&T intends to actually setup and maintain a separate billing structure for iPhone data and MMS.
I think probably the bigger issue for AT&T is that their proprietary client software doesn't support OS X. The Steve would not be happy if his baby can only support tethered Windows notebooks.
What the other replier said, though, he was much more polite than I would expect. (you didn't get a "ZOMG!!!1! It's a regressive tax!!!1!")
To address that, there are remedies built into the "fair tax" bill that Rep. John Linder introduces every session of Congress. It involves sending a tax rebate to every single person every single month (ick.). It's a big part of why I don't support a sales tax-based system. Would much prefer large deduction flat tax.
Yes, and Obama's little buddy Rahm Emmanuel was talking about implementing a VAT here, too, which is why I mentioned it. The perfect place to start it would be the internet; I'm sure there are a lot of local retailers who'd wholeheartedly support it.
Been to a shopping mall, lately? The minimum wage increases, combined with the internet, and the slumping economy have been extraordinarily bad for malls.
But if a tax would make them price-competitive again..../Not that I support it, but I do understand it//And I remember the German VAT, too. As part of the Status of Forces Agreement, we got like 4 tickets a year to get VAT refunds on things purchased "on the economy"
Look at all the surcharges you pay on your telephone bill. I think the federal rural phone tax lasted until something like 1999?
This is a non-story. The big story where states are going to soak people for taxes is when Congress allows them to do sales tax on every single purchase. It's coming.
And Android should fill all those roles adequately.
Where it will fall down is when people realize that there isn't much room for growth beyond those things. Even those people who use web/IM/mp3 primarily want to write a letter from time to time.
Or play a graphics-intensive game. Or use photoshop.
The kludge that is a Java-based Android doesn't allow for much beyond the basics. And, moreso than any other platform, the reliance upon Java prevents migration of other applications. And, really, who wants an office suite written in pure Java? Didn't Corel try that once upon a time?
...as my old boss, a radio engineer, termed it: "backhoe fade."
Happened to one of our transmitter sites. We switched to a microwave STL, which just had to be retired (only about 4 years later), because of a new skyscraper going in.:-/
So, back to the telco lines.....
As for the CLAN cut, I'm guessing this is probably a protocol violation somewhere. In many installations I've seen, even in secured areas, this stuff is encased in concrete.
And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved
If any other industry was doing this, the newspapers would be killing tens of thousands of trees, and spending a ton of ink talking about another evil capitalist industry's greed.
Imagine, for a second, if your local birdcage liner found out about local gas stations getting together to coordinate prices.....
No, they shouldn't get an exemption. But considering the sweet deal that other ancient organizations are getting (hello, UAW!), they probably will.
Yeah, my upstairs neighbor dives, which is why I said the number might be limited. I'd go, but, as you mentioned...not in the best of shape, and already have ear/sinus problems, so I'm nervous about it.
And it's not really a cheap hobby.:-/
But, yeah, I'd like to see the Vandenberg up close. Looks like it'd be a neat dive. While I'd much prefer to live on one of the newer ships, there is something special and different about being on the vintage vessels.
It's being paid for by people who want to use it. Most of the preparations required for turning it into a diving target/reef are also required to drag it somewhere to be scrapped.
It was a reserve fleet ship; there's been a big push to dispose of most of them in the past five years or so. Remember those ships floating about through New Orleans during Hurricane Gustav? Yep, at a shipyard being prepped for scrapping.
Yeah, MS hasn't gotten enough criticism over Office 2007. Vista doesn't bother me. Once I learned where everything is, I've gotten used to it. Only bluescreen in about 3 years of use was due to bad RAM.
I have Office 2K7 at work, and hate it with a passion. The new document formats were needed, and I've seen several cases where I've saved a couple of megabytes on files (XP/2K/2K3 format versus ODF).
But yesterday, with two documents open, Work 2K7 was eating over 500M on my machine.
If I'm lucky, I can get about six hours of use out of Outlook before it becomes unusable due to memory leaks.
And I hate the ribbon with an unending passion
And they made it very difficult to assign keystrokes...I used to easily map a shortcut for "Paste Unformatted." Had to record a VB macro to do it in 2K7.
On mission-critical systems, they do. But Windows is good enough for probably 95% of what people in the Army do with computers -- spreadsheets, e-mail, presentations, documents.
Just like any other organization. Do you really care that the billing department in your doctor's office is using Word and Excel?
Also, the Army is paying attention; both XP and Office 2K3 are in extended support. Microsoft's policy is that they will provide security updates.....unless the problem is going to cost them too much to fix.
For the most part, Microsoft has been pretty good about it, but they didn't fix the RPC vulnerability while NT4 was in extended support -- too hard.
Furthermore, if MS is serious about upgrading every Vista license to Windows 7, the Army really doesn't really lose anything. In fact, they probably save money because Windows 7 is supposed to be more expensive.
Some of the products, like FireWire, are in widespread use, although maybe not for consumers. I used to work in broadcast; we had a ton of FireWire equipment where I worked.
Itanium, similarly, has a place in certain markets. If you have an HPUX or VMS shop (like lots of government agencies), you're buying Itaniums. I know that Navy and Coast Guard have quite a few Itanium systems in production.
As for Vista, after three years of use, I am very impressed. The only major issue I've had was with the audio/network performance present in the RTM build. Only bluescreen I've had during that time was due to a stick of RAM that'd gone bad. I can't say the same about 95, 98, NT4, 2K, or XP. And it's poor short-term memory on most people's part; XP was a steaming pile when it was released. The shop where I was working didn't start adopting XP over 2k until SP2 came out. People just have forgotten how bad it was, because after several years, it became a stable product. Vista was far better at release.
Similarly, I've been very impressed with 2008 Server. Am in the process of implementing it throughout an enterprise, and haven't encountered any major difficulties./UAC is annoying, though
"Of course GM and Chrysler are going to make good on these bonds. The fact that Vinnie the loanshark thinks the rates are exorbitant means nothing. These are solid American institutions!"
But we at the pension company still are wary, so we're going to make these loans as a secured creditor. If either one goes bankrupt, we get first dibs in court.
Oh.
Wait a minute. Obama's not standing with the "speculators." We're not getting crap, despite giving a very good interest rate.
Crap. Nevermind.
A stock buyback is probably very sound right now, assuming MS can get the credit to do it. But it puts them one step closer to becoming one of the "speculators," and, thus, and enemy of the state.
I live just a few blocks away from a medical school that does quite a bit of reproductive medicine (they did the first IVF in the US), but nothing about this in their upcoming clinicals. I'd be on the top of the list to try it, because my partner has medical concerns that keep her from using the pill.
We're not 100% sure we don't want kids, otherwise, I'd just get a vasectomy, so I'm always interested in stories like this.
As for the 33% drop-out rate in the study, I don't really worry about it. People change contraception methods pretty frequently.
The package management is just as good if not better than what's available in Linuxland,
When's the last time you used Linux? Keeping systems up-to-date, both base system and userspace stuff, is much easier on Debian-based systems, IMO. It's straightforward on the BSDs, yes. But I wouldn't call it better. In fact, when I do setup an OpenBSD systems, I normally end up using pkgsrc over OpenBSD ports.
so there's no great difficulty in setting it up as a good desktop system.
No, there's not. But even a Windows-only imbecile can get Ubuntu with GNOME running in less than an hour, and I don't think you can say that about any of the BSD systems.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer NetBSD and OpenBSD to pretty much everything else out there, but it's still not for beginners.
I manage two/48 IPv6 netblocks. I can remember them just as easily as I do v4 addresses. While autoconfiguration is the preferred method for v6 devices, you can assign addresses manually. So, the host that I have on (my.ip.prefix).20, is also (my.ipv6.prefix)::20.
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This also does absolutely nothing to fix the other failing government health care programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration.
I generally vote Republican. Philosophically, I think government-run medicine is a bad idea. But the system that's in place now is fundamentally broken, and all this does is feed more taxpayer money into it.
Great job, Democrats.
I'd much prefer an Australian-style system, with caps. If you want better coverage, pay for supplimental insurance. Then cap coverages and expenses. There isn't a realistic way, otherwise. But they'd never never get re-elected telling people that everyone is going to get some coverage, but if you're in really bad shape, or not expected to live very long, you get to die or live out the rest of your days in pain.
Even more despicable is Mark Warner's recently-passed Senate bill authorizing more medicare funds for end-of-life/hospice care. Supposedly, the elderly can still get all the care they want towards the end of their lives, but the doctors have to push hospice care, and don't get paid for services rendered if they don't push hard enough for the people to go die without costing more money.
Love it.
I've already registered mine on the DNC list
Yeah, so have I, both of them. Got three different calls telling me I needed to go vote for Barack Obama in November. The third one I slipped through my asterisk-fu.
"We hope you'll go out and vote today!"
"I already did this morning. For Senator McCain."
"Oh." (long pause) "Have a nice day, then, I guess."
There's only so much you can do, and reporting the non-profits and/or pols doesn't do much good.
Ditto. I went Saturday. Virginia's new licensing process has been well-publicized, and it's a PITA. I probably won't actually get my real license for a few weeks. Until then, I have my old one (doesn't expire until August), and a piece of paper that has the new one's expiration date.
All that said, the Virginia DMV has gotten a lot better. I got there about 20 minutes after opening, and was out in about 1:15. I can remember getting it renewed ten years ago, and having it take almost four hours.
And when I first got my license in Mississippi, it was an all-day affair -- about six hours, total. (mid-90s)
Misleading, because Verizon != VerizonWireless. US Verizon is a minority holder (Vodafone is the majority owner), and so the profit margin for Verizon as a whole isn't reflective of the profit margin of the Wireless division.
Same deal with Sprint; the wireless division uses the same brand name, but is actually a separate company.
As for TFA, What's next? My best guess is that we'll see horrendous pricing surcharges for tethering and MMS, on top of the already expensive data and voice charges iPhone users pay.
In other words, he's pulling right out of his ass, and doesn't have any direct evidence that AT&T intends to actually setup and maintain a separate billing structure for iPhone data and MMS.
I think probably the bigger issue for AT&T is that their proprietary client software doesn't support OS X. The Steve would not be happy if his baby can only support tethered Windows notebooks.
What the other replier said, though, he was much more polite than I would expect. (you didn't get a "ZOMG!!!1! It's a regressive tax!!!1!")
To address that, there are remedies built into the "fair tax" bill that Rep. John Linder introduces every session of Congress. It involves sending a tax rebate to every single person every single month (ick.). It's a big part of why I don't support a sales tax-based system. Would much prefer large deduction flat tax.
Yes, and Obama's little buddy Rahm Emmanuel was talking about implementing a VAT here, too, which is why I mentioned it. The perfect place to start it would be the internet; I'm sure there are a lot of local retailers who'd wholeheartedly support it.
Been to a shopping mall, lately? The minimum wage increases, combined with the internet, and the slumping economy have been extraordinarily bad for malls.
But if a tax would make them price-competitive again.... /Not that I support it, but I do understand it //And I remember the German VAT, too. As part of the Status of Forces Agreement, we got like 4 tickets a year to get VAT refunds on things purchased "on the economy"
Look at all the surcharges you pay on your telephone bill. I think the federal rural phone tax lasted until something like 1999?
This is a non-story. The big story where states are going to soak people for taxes is when Congress allows them to do sales tax on every single purchase. It's coming.
(and maybe a federal one, too)
And Android should fill all those roles adequately.
Where it will fall down is when people realize that there isn't much room for growth beyond those things. Even those people who use web/IM/mp3 primarily want to write a letter from time to time.
Or play a graphics-intensive game. Or use photoshop.
The kludge that is a Java-based Android doesn't allow for much beyond the basics. And, moreso than any other platform, the reliance upon Java prevents migration of other applications. And, really, who wants an office suite written in pure Java? Didn't Corel try that once upon a time?
...as my old boss, a radio engineer, termed it: "backhoe fade."
Happened to one of our transmitter sites. We switched to a microwave STL, which just had to be retired (only about 4 years later), because of a new skyscraper going in. :-/
So, back to the telco lines.....
As for the CLAN cut, I'm guessing this is probably a protocol violation somewhere. In many installations I've seen, even in secured areas, this stuff is encased in concrete.
And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved
If any other industry was doing this, the newspapers would be killing tens of thousands of trees, and spending a ton of ink talking about another evil capitalist industry's greed.
Imagine, for a second, if your local birdcage liner found out about local gas stations getting together to coordinate prices.....
No, they shouldn't get an exemption. But considering the sweet deal that other ancient organizations are getting (hello, UAW!), they probably will.
Yeah, my upstairs neighbor dives, which is why I said the number might be limited. I'd go, but, as you mentioned...not in the best of shape, and already have ear/sinus problems, so I'm nervous about it.
And it's not really a cheap hobby. :-/
But, yeah, I'd like to see the Vandenberg up close. Looks like it'd be a neat dive. While I'd much prefer to live on one of the newer ships, there is something special and different about being on the vintage vessels.
It's being paid for by people who want to use it. Most of the preparations required for turning it into a diving target/reef are also required to drag it somewhere to be scrapped.
It was a reserve fleet ship; there's been a big push to dispose of most of them in the past five years or so. Remember those ships floating about through New Orleans during Hurricane Gustav? Yep, at a shipyard being prepped for scrapping.
...because it's information on a very historic ship. Sure, I'd imagine the number of geek divers might is pretty limited, but I do know a few.
The wreck will likely be stable for 50+ years, despite the recent photographs.
(It's also of interest to me, because I work on USNS vessels, and live near the reserve fleet where it spent the past few years)
Yeah, MS hasn't gotten enough criticism over Office 2007. Vista doesn't bother me. Once I learned where everything is, I've gotten used to it. Only bluescreen in about 3 years of use was due to bad RAM.
I have Office 2K7 at work, and hate it with a passion. The new document formats were needed, and I've seen several cases where I've saved a couple of megabytes on files (XP/2K/2K3 format versus ODF).
But yesterday, with two documents open, Work 2K7 was eating over 500M on my machine.
If I'm lucky, I can get about six hours of use out of Outlook before it becomes unusable due to memory leaks.
And I hate the ribbon with an unending passion
And they made it very difficult to assign keystrokes...I used to easily map a shortcut for "Paste Unformatted." Had to record a VB macro to do it in 2K7.
On mission-critical systems, they do. But Windows is good enough for probably 95% of what people in the Army do with computers -- spreadsheets, e-mail, presentations, documents.
Just like any other organization. Do you really care that the billing department in your doctor's office is using Word and Excel?
Mod parent up.
Also, the Army is paying attention; both XP and Office 2K3 are in extended support. Microsoft's policy is that they will provide security updates.....unless the problem is going to cost them too much to fix.
For the most part, Microsoft has been pretty good about it, but they didn't fix the RPC vulnerability while NT4 was in extended support -- too hard.
Furthermore, if MS is serious about upgrading every Vista license to Windows 7, the Army really doesn't really lose anything. In fact, they probably save money because Windows 7 is supposed to be more expensive.
Some of the products, like FireWire, are in widespread use, although maybe not for consumers. I used to work in broadcast; we had a ton of FireWire equipment where I worked.
Itanium, similarly, has a place in certain markets. If you have an HPUX or VMS shop (like lots of government agencies), you're buying Itaniums. I know that Navy and Coast Guard have quite a few Itanium systems in production.
As for Vista, after three years of use, I am very impressed. The only major issue I've had was with the audio/network performance present in the RTM build. Only bluescreen I've had during that time was due to a stick of RAM that'd gone bad. I can't say the same about 95, 98, NT4, 2K, or XP. And it's poor short-term memory on most people's part; XP was a steaming pile when it was released. The shop where I was working didn't start adopting XP over 2k until SP2 came out. People just have forgotten how bad it was, because after several years, it became a stable product. Vista was far better at release.
Similarly, I've been very impressed with 2008 Server. Am in the process of implementing it throughout an enterprise, and haven't encountered any major difficulties. /UAC is annoying, though
"ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake."
Who cares if it's consistent; it still seriously overshadows all the other good things Microsoft has done to Office.
TFA should have read, "the ribbon still sucks, and now it's on every application."
FTFY.
"Of course GM and Chrysler are going to make good on these bonds. The fact that Vinnie the loanshark thinks the rates are exorbitant means nothing. These are solid American institutions!"
But we at the pension company still are wary, so we're going to make these loans as a secured creditor. If either one goes bankrupt, we get first dibs in court.
Oh.
Wait a minute. Obama's not standing with the "speculators." We're not getting crap, despite giving a very good interest rate.
Crap. Nevermind.
A stock buyback is probably very sound right now, assuming MS can get the credit to do it. But it puts them one step closer to becoming one of the "speculators," and, thus, and enemy of the state.
Rahm Emmanuel says, "watch your back, Ballmer."
You mean, like, such as, "The Iraq."
ObOldSkoolAOL: Me, too!
I live just a few blocks away from a medical school that does quite a bit of reproductive medicine (they did the first IVF in the US), but nothing about this in their upcoming clinicals. I'd be on the top of the list to try it, because my partner has medical concerns that keep her from using the pill.
We're not 100% sure we don't want kids, otherwise, I'd just get a vasectomy, so I'm always interested in stories like this.
As for the 33% drop-out rate in the study, I don't really worry about it. People change contraception methods pretty frequently.
The package management is just as good if not better than what's available in Linuxland,
When's the last time you used Linux? Keeping systems up-to-date, both base system and userspace stuff, is much easier on Debian-based systems, IMO. It's straightforward on the BSDs, yes. But I wouldn't call it better. In fact, when I do setup an OpenBSD systems, I normally end up using pkgsrc over OpenBSD ports.
so there's no great difficulty in setting it up as a good desktop system.
No, there's not. But even a Windows-only imbecile can get Ubuntu with GNOME running in less than an hour, and I don't think you can say that about any of the BSD systems.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer NetBSD and OpenBSD to pretty much everything else out there, but it's still not for beginners.
I manage two /48 IPv6 netblocks. I can remember them just as easily as I do v4 addresses. While autoconfiguration is the preferred method for v6 devices, you can assign addresses manually. So, the host that I have on (my.ip.prefix).20, is also (my.ipv6.prefix)::20.
THIS. Mod A/C parent up.
Reclaiming class As only delays things slightly, and doesn't fix the inescapable math.
But it's much easier to bitch and point fingers at evil corporations like Ford, than it is to pick up a damn book and learn how IPv6 works.
I wasn't as read up on the "business world" when this happened, but why did a company like Time Warner merge AOL into it?
The same thing Microsoft and GE were aiming at with MSN BC: "convergence." Yes, I think that was the correct buzzword at the time.
Is MSN even still around as a dialup service? AFAIK, MS has no ownership of MSNBC anymore.