There's a pawn shop in my town that resurfaces DVDs for $5. It works on game disks -- my 5-year-old daughter wore out LEGO Star Wars.
For home viewing, it's usually just my good ol' upconverting DVR with a USB front port. (and HDMI out) It plays AVIs without issue and can copy videos directly onto the hard drive. For the high-res stuff, my wife's laptop has an HDMI port and the/video directory is shared on the network.
I wondered about that as I was posting. Where would we get all this water and CO2 from? We can't really export it from Earth because that'll fuck up our ecology here.
We'd have to make it on site once we get to Mars, and that means industry, like you say. I've never had a problem with industry -- I like the fact that I don't have to spend all day every day growing / chasing food and finding water. You're conflating environmentalism with Ludditism. Technology and industry are fantastic. However, we can be more responsible with wastes this time around. We know we can't dump industrial waste into the ocean and have it magically disappear. (Fire it into space!;) )
Red Mars is on my list, but I can only read so many books at a time. (It's bought, on my shelf, and ready to go.)
That was my point. In Canada, you buy whatever coverage you want. If you can't afford any, you get a base coverage of medically required procedures.
To summarize Canuck Health Care:
1. The basics are paid for.
2. You can buy more insurance.
That's all there is to it. If you don't make enough money, you get taken care of. If you make enough, you get the same care for the same price*, but you can buy more. I can get coverage that'll cover a massage every day and chocolate mints on the pillows in a private suite in the Mayo Clinic.
*Some provinces, like BC, have extra MSP premiums. I pay ~$100 a month for a family of four.** If the household income was less than about $35k, then the premiums would be waived. Where this differs from regular (i.e. American) insurance is that I cannot be retroactively denied coverage. (Post-claim underwriting, I think you call it.) Also, if I don't pay, my coverage doesn't lapse.
**This is actually paid via my wife's supplementary coverage from work.
As a Canadian, I have to quirk my eyebrow at that.
You realize that we have supplementary coverage up here, right? Hear me out.
The government provides basic health coverage. They cover almost everything, from emergency treatment to birth and annual physicals.
We don't get coverage for private rooms, eyeglasses, Rx medication (unless you spend $3k a year or more, long story), massage, physio, etc. There's a long laundry list of things that aren't covered. Ambulance rides aren't covered, but that's because too many people were using it as a taxi service. It's $65, but when you need one, it's money well spent.
I can go out and buy more coverage. My wife gets Green Shield from work, and that covers $250 in eyeglasses every 2 years, massage and physio, 80% reimbursment on medication, private rooms, dental care, etc. I have an HSA at work, but I use my wife's plan instead because it's a better plan.
When my kids were born, it cost me $12 for parking each time. When they got hit by a car and rushed to the hospital, it cost me $10 for dinner and $65 for the ambulance. (For each of the above, there were multiple ultrasounds, xrays, blood tests, beds, bandages, etc.) That's all I had to pay.
When it's critical, there aren't wait times, despite what you may have heard. My friend had a sharp pain in his head when he coughed -- he was ushered in right away, had an ultrasound, a CT scan, and a spinal tap within 30 minutes of arriving at the hospital. (The wait was because someone was in the machine.)
I was having chest pains about six months ago, so I went to a drop-in clinic (not my regular GP) and had an ECG within about 15 minutes.
This is all stuff that's just covered up here, and always has been. True, the system has faults, but that's because our politicians up here get really good secondary coverage so they don't feel any pain from cutting back on health care spending. (These are the same breed of jokers that brought Canada from the 3rd largest Navy in the world at the end of WW2 to the 3rd-div team it is today.) If they increased health-care funding, we'd be in much better shape and the Americans would have nothing to point their fingers at.
By the way, my tax rate was ~15% in 2008. I haven't done my 2009 taxes yet. (It's not a directly fair comparison because we also have subsidized education up here -- my engineering degree cost me ~$0 net.)
I am an environmentalist, but I don't think that we have to live in caves and grow our own food to keep Mother Gaia and all Her Creatures in something something, I kind of lose interest at that point too.
If you consider terraforming pollution, then you and I have different views. Adding carbon dioxide and water to Mars to make it habitable for humans is perfectly acceptable. We require more earths to sustain our lifestyle, and we've only got the one tiny little blue marble.
Adding CFCs, tetraflourohexine, formaldehide, PCBs, and any other alphabet-soup materials to a new planet is something completely different. Now that we know better, we can be responsible with our materials handling and stop shitting where we eat.
If you adequately explain what you are doing and then you charge a fair price for fair work, then you have no problems with that idea. I've made a fair bit of money doing exactly that, and it makes for a very good client relationship.
The problem here is that they aren't actually doing any work, they've lost cables, and then they're forcing you to buy the service. That's not acceptable from either a moral or legal standpoint.
My brother bought an old Dreamcast game from EB for $2. The clerk said, "I have to ask in case you're a mystery shopper: Do you want scratch protection for $5?" So there's a good chance that they'll get dragged to the carpet / fired for not asking the right questions.
I actually got mystery shopped on my very first day at Pearle Vision. I got good marks on everything except product knowledge.
I once got a shock during enclosure maintenance when I touched a secondary supply that wasn't powered off. It was a minor shock, but that's partly because I was wearing insulated boots and had the other hand in my pocket. (i.e. there was no path to ground.)
The kicker is that I had a voltage tester in my pocket but I didn't bother to pull it out that one time.
As a Canadian I can confirm that they are in fact called "The Conservative Party of Canada" or more colloquially "the fuckers."
FTFY. (I am also Canadian.) They got in riding the anti-gay-marriage ticket. The next two elections were done when the other parties were hurting, hoping that they'd win a majority. (Turnabout is fair play -- Cretin did this years ago.) No issues have been brought forward in any way that makes the citizens of this country go out and vote.
It pisses me off when they (and I mean any party) call us "voters", "constituents", or "taxpayers". We aren't any of those things. We're citizens, and they exist at our whim.
The problem we have is that not one party up here is worth voting for. Our choices are: 1. Sweatervest, 2. Clueless, 3. Dr. Moustachio, 4. La Wall Briq, and 5. Outcast.
None of these people deserve to run the country, and none of them have done a thing to impress the Canadian public.
We're Goldilocks; we're looking at the porridges and beds... er, planets, and finding ones that are too cold, too hot, too hard, too soft...
and then we find one that's juuuust right.
A planet that's (relatively) close that wouldn't require terraforming? There are no languages that have the words to describe how incredibly valuable such a find would be if we could get there. Humans forever -- even destroying Earth wouldn't stop us.
I've always called Frankenstein's monster a Flesh Golem, but that's just me.
It means they can't make a statement just for the sake of inflaming public opinion. Is it "interesting" or "factual"?
For example, the public eats up any celebrity gossip, no matter how trivial. This means that the balance skew towards making the statement rather than the facts behind it. "Did Steven Harper visit a strip club in Copenhagen? Details at 11!"
That statement is more interesting than it is factual.
Face it - if you (or some female relative) is a known prostitute, especially with a long list of convictions related to prostitution, and I should tell people that you are a whore, there should be NO PENALTY for doing so. Stating a fact should NEVER be a crime, nor should it be a civil matter.
And in Canada, it is not. Libel in Canada requires: 1. It must be false. 2. It must be believable. 3. It must do harm to the person.
For example, let's assume that I print "Runaway1956 bench-pressed 200 pounds, even though he could barely do it."
This is probably more than you can bench. Thus it's false, and it's potentially believable. However, it's not doing you any harm since it's most likely inflating your abilities in a nice way.
Now, let's say that you're a professional bodybuilder and you're going for a record next month. That would be harmful to you, so it could be libel.
The new twist is that if I talk to a lot of people who saw you struggling with the weight, then tried to contact you about it to get your side. Then it's no longer libel because I attempted to fulfil the standard obligations of the trade. (This isn't much different than Engineering -- it's okay to be wrong as long as you're not deviating from the standards of the time.) Even if the witnesses were wrong and you were having trouble lifting 200kg after doing 100 reps, I would still not be liable for libel since I talked to witnesses and didn't just make stuff up for the sake of harming your rep.
Yep, I had a small unincorporated business a few years ago. They make a tax software package just for that.
It was $80. It found $2000 worth of things that I didn't know I could write off (% of mortgage, equipment, parts, taxes I paid, &etc), then checked for updates and found a $500 tax grant when there wasn't even a line for it on the paper forms. Those aren't tax-credit values rated at 17% counting leastwise -- that was $80 turned into $3500 in actual cash. (I thought I was going to have to pay $1000.)
It also let me file my wife's personal taxes for no extra fee.
>...but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time.
Your wish is our Slashdotting! That's a name-brand CPU cooling solution you're running, right? Gooood.
I don't think that COTS is going to work. He'll have to have some kind of custom liquid cooling package. Maybe they could have a mic hooked up to the CPU and the sound they're actually trying to get is what happens acoustically when a CPU dies.
Drew Curtis (of Fark) has the same kind of sentiment. "You want traffic? Be careful what you wish for."
Slashdot Mirror
Walkman is now used for Sony's MP3 line, like the NWZ-E436 I'm listening to right now.
There's a pawn shop in my town that resurfaces DVDs for $5. It works on game disks -- my 5-year-old daughter wore out LEGO Star Wars.
For home viewing, it's usually just my good ol' upconverting DVR with a USB front port. (and HDMI out) It plays AVIs without issue and can copy videos directly onto the hard drive. For the high-res stuff, my wife's laptop has an HDMI port and the /video directory is shared on the network.
I still say "HK47 error" to refer to "meatbag incompetence".
Watch carefully -- they don't actually call it illegal.
"Copyright infringment is stealing." (Their opinion)
"Stealing is against the law." (Fact)
They're purposely framing the two sentences to make them seem related. It would be roughly equivalent to:
"This MPAA exec says that these are pictures of his kids in the bath."
"Child pornographers lie."
The two sentences aren't related in any way, but the framing makes it seem like they are.
I wondered about that as I was posting. Where would we get all this water and CO2 from? We can't really export it from Earth because that'll fuck up our ecology here.
We'd have to make it on site once we get to Mars, and that means industry, like you say. I've never had a problem with industry -- I like the fact that I don't have to spend all day every day growing / chasing food and finding water. You're conflating environmentalism with Ludditism. Technology and industry are fantastic. However, we can be more responsible with wastes this time around. We know we can't dump industrial waste into the ocean and have it magically disappear. (Fire it into space! ;) )
Red Mars is on my list, but I can only read so many books at a time. (It's bought, on my shelf, and ready to go.)
That was my point. In Canada, you buy whatever coverage you want. If you can't afford any, you get a base coverage of medically required procedures.
To summarize Canuck Health Care:
1. The basics are paid for.
2. You can buy more insurance.
That's all there is to it. If you don't make enough money, you get taken care of. If you make enough, you get the same care for the same price*, but you can buy more. I can get coverage that'll cover a massage every day and chocolate mints on the pillows in a private suite in the Mayo Clinic.
*Some provinces, like BC, have extra MSP premiums. I pay ~$100 a month for a family of four.** If the household income was less than about $35k, then the premiums would be waived. Where this differs from regular (i.e. American) insurance is that I cannot be retroactively denied coverage. (Post-claim underwriting, I think you call it.) Also, if I don't pay, my coverage doesn't lapse.
**This is actually paid via my wife's supplementary coverage from work.
As a Canadian, I have to quirk my eyebrow at that.
You realize that we have supplementary coverage up here, right? Hear me out.
The government provides basic health coverage. They cover almost everything, from emergency treatment to birth and annual physicals.
We don't get coverage for private rooms, eyeglasses, Rx medication (unless you spend $3k a year or more, long story), massage, physio, etc. There's a long laundry list of things that aren't covered. Ambulance rides aren't covered, but that's because too many people were using it as a taxi service. It's $65, but when you need one, it's money well spent.
I can go out and buy more coverage. My wife gets Green Shield from work, and that covers $250 in eyeglasses every 2 years, massage and physio, 80% reimbursment on medication, private rooms, dental care, etc. I have an HSA at work, but I use my wife's plan instead because it's a better plan.
When my kids were born, it cost me $12 for parking each time. When they got hit by a car and rushed to the hospital, it cost me $10 for dinner and $65 for the ambulance. (For each of the above, there were multiple ultrasounds, xrays, blood tests, beds, bandages, etc.) That's all I had to pay.
When it's critical, there aren't wait times, despite what you may have heard. My friend had a sharp pain in his head when he coughed -- he was ushered in right away, had an ultrasound, a CT scan, and a spinal tap within 30 minutes of arriving at the hospital. (The wait was because someone was in the machine.)
I was having chest pains about six months ago, so I went to a drop-in clinic (not my regular GP) and had an ECG within about 15 minutes.
This is all stuff that's just covered up here, and always has been. True, the system has faults, but that's because our politicians up here get really good secondary coverage so they don't feel any pain from cutting back on health care spending. (These are the same breed of jokers that brought Canada from the 3rd largest Navy in the world at the end of WW2 to the 3rd-div team it is today.) If they increased health-care funding, we'd be in much better shape and the Americans would have nothing to point their fingers at.
By the way, my tax rate was ~15% in 2008. I haven't done my 2009 taxes yet. (It's not a directly fair comparison because we also have subsidized education up here -- my engineering degree cost me ~$0 net.)
I'd prefer a non-polluted life-sustaining planet.
I am an environmentalist, but I don't think that we have to live in caves and grow our own food to keep Mother Gaia and all Her Creatures in something something, I kind of lose interest at that point too.
If you consider terraforming pollution, then you and I have different views. Adding carbon dioxide and water to Mars to make it habitable for humans is perfectly acceptable. We require more earths to sustain our lifestyle, and we've only got the one tiny little blue marble.
Adding CFCs, tetraflourohexine, formaldehide, PCBs, and any other alphabet-soup materials to a new planet is something completely different. Now that we know better, we can be responsible with our materials handling and stop shitting where we eat.
If you adequately explain what you are doing and then you charge a fair price for fair work, then you have no problems with that idea. I've made a fair bit of money doing exactly that, and it makes for a very good client relationship.
The problem here is that they aren't actually doing any work, they've lost cables, and then they're forcing you to buy the service. That's not acceptable from either a moral or legal standpoint.
My brother bought an old Dreamcast game from EB for $2. The clerk said, "I have to ask in case you're a mystery shopper: Do you want scratch protection for $5?" So there's a good chance that they'll get dragged to the carpet / fired for not asking the right questions.
I actually got mystery shopped on my very first day at Pearle Vision. I got good marks on everything except product knowledge.
I once got a shock during enclosure maintenance when I touched a secondary supply that wasn't powered off. It was a minor shock, but that's partly because I was wearing insulated boots and had the other hand in my pocket. (i.e. there was no path to ground.)
The kicker is that I had a voltage tester in my pocket but I didn't bother to pull it out that one time.
Coraline on DVD is 3D and it comes with glasses. Admittedly, it's the older red/green 3D, but it does work.
Chaps are, by definition, assless. It's like saying "a vest without arms" or "mittens without individual fingers"
Yes we do:
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
As a Canadian I can confirm that they are in fact called "The Conservative Party of Canada" or more colloquially "the fuckers."
FTFY. (I am also Canadian.) They got in riding the anti-gay-marriage ticket. The next two elections were done when the other parties were hurting, hoping that they'd win a majority. (Turnabout is fair play -- Cretin did this years ago.) No issues have been brought forward in any way that makes the citizens of this country go out and vote.
It pisses me off when they (and I mean any party) call us "voters", "constituents", or "taxpayers". We aren't any of those things. We're citizens, and they exist at our whim.
The problem we have is that not one party up here is worth voting for. Our choices are:
1. Sweatervest,
2. Clueless,
3. Dr. Moustachio,
4. La Wall Briq, and
5. Outcast.
None of these people deserve to run the country, and none of them have done a thing to impress the Canadian public.
Wait for the Gillette Fusion Power Stealth Extreme Plus 3000.
We're Goldilocks; we're looking at the porridges and beds... er, planets, and finding ones that are too cold, too hot, too hard, too soft...
and then we find one that's juuuust right.
A planet that's (relatively) close that wouldn't require terraforming? There are no languages that have the words to describe how incredibly valuable such a find would be if we could get there. Humans forever -- even destroying Earth wouldn't stop us.
I've always called Frankenstein's monster a Flesh Golem, but that's just me.
I pulled a codebase down from 10,000 versions to 2.
That's right, the previous system had one different file for each of 10 pulse rates, 255 ID numbers, and a mortality switch.
I got it down to one version for each of the two chips.
I lost that job.
Nope, just standard /. goatse references.
It means they can't make a statement just for the sake of inflaming public opinion. Is it "interesting" or "factual"?
For example, the public eats up any celebrity gossip, no matter how trivial. This means that the balance skew towards making the statement rather than the facts behind it. "Did Steven Harper visit a strip club in Copenhagen? Details at 11!"
That statement is more interesting than it is factual.
Face it - if you (or some female relative) is a known prostitute, especially with a long list of convictions related to prostitution, and I should tell people that you are a whore, there should be NO PENALTY for doing so. Stating a fact should NEVER be a crime, nor should it be a civil matter.
And in Canada, it is not. Libel in Canada requires:
1. It must be false.
2. It must be believable.
3. It must do harm to the person.
For example, let's assume that I print "Runaway1956 bench-pressed 200 pounds, even though he could barely do it."
This is probably more than you can bench. Thus it's false, and it's potentially believable. However, it's not doing you any harm since it's most likely inflating your abilities in a nice way.
Now, let's say that you're a professional bodybuilder and you're going for a record next month. That would be harmful to you, so it could be libel.
The new twist is that if I talk to a lot of people who saw you struggling with the weight, then tried to contact you about it to get your side. Then it's no longer libel because I attempted to fulfil the standard obligations of the trade. (This isn't much different than Engineering -- it's okay to be wrong as long as you're not deviating from the standards of the time.) Even if the witnesses were wrong and you were having trouble lifting 200kg after doing 100 reps, I would still not be liable for libel since I talked to witnesses and didn't just make stuff up for the sake of harming your rep.
Indeed; I've been able to use an old P2 366 laptop with Puppy, and it's even got wireless networking up and running.
It's not a great laptop, but it just works.
Oh no, this is actually about pornography. The government of China already openly and unabashedly censors political content it doesn't approve of.
Yeah, with a lead-based filtering system.
Yep, I had a small unincorporated business a few years ago. They make a tax software package just for that.
It was $80. It found $2000 worth of things that I didn't know I could write off (% of mortgage, equipment, parts, taxes I paid, &etc), then checked for updates and found a $500 tax grant when there wasn't even a line for it on the paper forms. Those aren't tax-credit values rated at 17% counting leastwise -- that was $80 turned into $3500 in actual cash. (I thought I was going to have to pay $1000.)
It also let me file my wife's personal taxes for no extra fee.
>...but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time.
Your wish is our Slashdotting! That's a name-brand CPU cooling solution you're running, right? Gooood.
I don't think that COTS is going to work. He'll have to have some kind of custom liquid cooling package. Maybe they could have a mic hooked up to the CPU and the sound they're actually trying to get is what happens acoustically when a CPU dies.
Drew Curtis (of Fark) has the same kind of sentiment. "You want traffic? Be careful what you wish for."