Maybe, just maybe, because it's not the *job* of the government (well, the US government, anyway) to provide/administer/control health care to the masses?
That's nice in theory. In practice, health insurance
doesn't make a very good market for individual
buyers, because most families have somebody
with at least one health problem.
Therefore, most people "buy" health insurance
in aggregate groups. Right now, that usually means
through arrangements made by the corporations
that employ them.
Now, why is it the *job* of your employer to buy
your health insurance for you? I don't know.
They don't usually buy cars or houses for people.
In an ideal world, people would buy insurance
for themselves. But, as I pointed out, you
often can't because health problems aren't totally random
events to be insured against.
The corporations who wield so much control
over this system are probably pleased, however.
The current system keeps the employees shepherded
into corporate benefits plans, unable to easily
strike out on their own. Knowing that the
employees need to keep in a group plan, the
employers can offer wages that are lower than
they otherwise would be.
The net result is, most people don't really enjoy
very much "freedom" under this system.
Changing jobs or starting a business are made
much more stressful than they need to be because
of this unrelated health insurance issue. Most
people are insured, so you're already paying the
medical costs one way or another; moreover, the most
expensive retired patients are already being paid
for by tax money through medicare.
The overblown worries of a few
tightwads over the few percent of the population
who currently have no coverage and are
therefore potential "freeloaders"
prevents us from ever improving our current system
to make it more rational.
I find that plastic models are easier, quicker
and look more realistic,
but wood and paper models are more satisfying
to work on and give you a better sense of
accomplishment.
McDonald's doesn't actually flip burgers anymore! they cook both sides at once. I almost cried when i heard my fallback profession of flipping burgers and mickey D's ceased to exist.
Are you serious? As a former McDonald's burger
flipper, I am appalled. We used to pride ourselves
on flipping 8 or more burgers in one deft motion.
Actually, burger flipping wasn't so bad in my day
(before fast food restauants had computers, microwaves or
value meals; inexplicably, our location didn't even have proper
cash registers, the counter people added up the
totals by hand on slips of paper). We also wore
pointy paper hats, the only headware that truly
distinguishes the burger flipping profession; none
of these stupid baseball hats that any truck driver
could wear.
You actually had to use a little bit of your mind to do the job.
The market wasn't so oversaturated, so each
restaurant had quite a bit more business. During busy hours,
we would crank out massive quantities of
Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, etc. according to
intricate patterns specified in
verbal commands from the head counter.
Keeping up with the demand could be like playing
a video game.
Now days, most McDonalds seem to only have one or
two active cash registers. You almost never need
to wait in line because there's a Taco Bell
and 5 other restaurants next door. The people in
back always have a bored, glazed look, staring up at a
computer monitor that tells them the next thing
they should do.
This is one case where I'm glad that computers
weren't part of my life.
. When he messed with the stuff on Star Trek, he was PRETENDING. Yep, that's right, it was all an act. He really didn't know how to calibrate a plasma relay, etc.
He may only be an actor, but he knows
the only technical principle you need to know
on a starship: if something doesn't work right,
reverse the polarity.
My experience is that if you let these things sit without making a print for a month or two, the cartridge is screwed up from dried out ink.
On my Epson printer, if I let it sit for two weeks,
half of the nozzles get clogged on the test
pattern. To fix it, I have to run multiple
passes of the head cleaning procdure, using
up even more "precious" ink. (Not to mention
the ink and paper wasted on a ruined photo
to find out that
the heads are clogged in the first place.)
Surely, this must be a further conspiracy on
their part; it sets a lower limit on ink usage that
you're guaranteed to exceed.
I've wondered how just how much ink is
in those cartridges, and how it compares in price
per milliliter of expensive fluids such as
a $1000 bottle of rare cognac.
It looks like Hollywood has got it wrong again.
In every movie I've seen, a murder attempt like this
would surely fail:
Evil Villain:
Haha! Now you're trapped in the airlock with
no way to escape!
Microbiologist:
What do you want from me?
Evil Villain:
Silence! Do you hear that sound? That is the sound
of nitrogen gas slowly filling the airlock.
You will suffocate in a short while.
Microbiologist:
You bastard! You're never going to get away with this!
Evil Villain:
We'll see about that. Now; I'd love nothing
more than to stay here and witness your
demise, but I have an "appointment" with
another prominent microbiologist, and I
can't be late. Sadly, I must bid you farewell.
I'm sorry to have leave your party so soon, I'm sure
it will be a "gas"! BWAHAHA!! BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
At this point, Hollywood would have you
believe that the unsupervised microbiologist will
narrowly escape from the airlock. Well,
in the real world, it just didn't happen. It's no
wonder that the kids growing up today
watching movies and TV have no grip
on reality.
I don't know why they need to use RTF for a legal
document anyway, because they're always done
in plain courier font. Might as well use an ASCII
text file.
BTW, what's up with lawyers and ugly courier
documents? They use high-powered computers
to draw vertical lines in the document
header with ')' characters, as if all they
had was an old Smith Corona manual typewriter. They always make documents on
unwieldy legal size paper that won't fit in
your filing cabinet. They use huge fonts that
take up lots of paper. They print single-sided
on heavy, thick stock. No wonder they're always
running around with special 14-inch thick
briefcases.
I've gone through a few patent applications
(luckily at my employer's expense), where a lot
of the process was paying some attorney $200/hr
to: Take my carefully formatted documents
(which had nice fonts, tables and clear diagrams),
and transform them almost verbatim into an
uninterrupted stream of monospaced courier text.
They also took my nice
diagrams and redrew them in a clunky style
with little number tags stuck to every line on
the drawings. Oh, and every plural noun had
the phrase "a plurality of" inserted in front of it.
I could almost write a Perl script to do this job.
No wonder the patent office has a hard time
retaining patent examiners. Anybody would go mad
reading documents all day that have all formatting
and context removed.
Why can't the legal profession just come up with
a nice standardized documet template?
Many years ago, I took a hovercraft across the
English channel in very choppy conditions.
IIRC, it was so bad that day that normal
ferries had to stay in port.
I wouldn't want to repeat that experience. The
trip was like a bad 90-minute carnival ride.
This huge machine was plowing straight into
towering waves at something like 50mph. My
girlfriend had to work very hard to retain the contents
of her stomach.
As bad as that was, the hovercraft had the
advantage of a huge rubber skirt to absorb the
impacts. I'm sure there's no way an aircraft
could handle the same conditions.
This is what I always find stupid about the "Oh no! If you read MS code they will come and sue you!" arguments, or same about GPL. It's not true.
Actually, Microsoft would come an sue you. That's
because there's no way that you're going to
see their code unless you first enter into an iron-clad
NDA with them, in which you sign away a big swath of your
potential future career opportunities.
The point is once you've copyed software into RAM without following Section 117, you are forced to accept the GPL. That means you lose your right to first sale. It means you lose your right to make a backup copy of just the binary. It means you cannot install the binary on multiple systems.
The more interesting question is:
How many angels
can dance on the head of a pin?
Answer that one for me. After you've tackled
that, maybe you can analyze some common
software vendor EULAs with equal zeal. That should
keep you busy for a while. Maybe you can
find some self-inconsistent terms in one of
them and go into an endless loop.
but in the past ten years every application has been converted to requiring a relational database.
Actually, that in itself is probably not a bad thing.
A database can make the app extremely
scalable and robust by removing memory
size limitations and introducing transactions.
If you can keep all of your runtime program
state in a database, you can do a lot of
cool things with your architecure.
IMHO, however, the database should be
embedded, zero maintenence, cheap or free, and
largely hidden from the end user. If you have to
shell out dozens of kilobucks just for the database
and hire a specialist, it's hard to cost-justify
the features the database provides.
Luckily, there are a lot of cheap or free small
database engines out there now that can
be used as a building block to create
applications.
This media blown hype that everyone seems to have boughten into that somewhere out there is some "l33t Haxors" that are just sitting around waiting to "steal your files"
I hate to break it to you, but there are in fact 133t Haxors
who would love to steal your files, (or at least troll
everyone's traffic for valuable info).
Yes there is security measures in place but unless you have a large sat.dish. located roughly 1000 meters from the main NOC pointed and peaked correctly you will pick up nothin, exactly nothing.
I wasn't talking about packets going to the
NOC. I was talking about packets from
the NOC bounced off the satellite and broadcast
over a big chunk of the country.
My concerns were based on the famous inability
for satellite TV systems to control piracy, as well
as the sieve-like effectiveness often seen with
"secure" communications protocols such as 802.11.
He also insisted that we not call them bugs. "They are ERRORS, calling them bugs makes it sound like they are cute little accidental things that pop up when actually they are programming mistakes."
When my boss comes around and pesters
me about problems with the code, I
tell him: "They are FEATURES, calling them
bugs makes it sound like they are accidental
things that pop up when actually I never
make programming mistakes."
With all of the satellite TV hax0rs out there,
I worry if beaming your packets to the
entire continent is a security problem. Do they
encrypt the data at all? If so, do they use a
secure protocol?
I know the wired internet isn't exactly secure,
either, but this kind of thing seems like it would
be an especially inviting target for snoopers.
In a subscription based model, IT managers pay a yearly fee and never ever have to worry about upgrades, patches or licensing issues.
Users on a subscription model don't have
to worry about licensing issues in the same
way that a dog chained to a post doesn't have
to worry about trampeling its neighbors' lawns.
I understand the space savings advantages of kerosene, but how does the thrust produced per unit weight compare to that of the current SRB/LRB compare? Having to (hypothetically) double the fuel weight to double the thrust seems like a waste of money to me.
On another article a few weeks back, someone
posted an answer that cleared this up for me.
(I'm too lazy to track down the posting now.)
Bottom line is: hydrogen is like a high-horsepower,
high-RPM turbo racing engine; it's best for driving
light vehicles at high speeds (upper stages).
Kerosene is like a high-torque diesel truck engine,
good for getting a lot of weight moving from
a dead stop.
The difference has to do with the physics of
exhaust density, speed, momentum, etc.
Shuttle technology is like 30 years old now, and it's seriously *embarassing* because of that.
What seems more embarassing to me is that the
Russians have a much more appropriate and cost effective
system to launch humans into space -- and it uses 45 year
old technology.
Software that companies write belongs to them so they should be free to do whatever they choose with it
The copies of the software that were sold to you
are your property, not the vendor's. What the
vendor does own is a government-sanctioned
"lien" on your copy that prevents you from
making addtional copies. Nothing more.
They do
not have the right to force you into an
additional restrictive contract after the sale.
They are free to attempt to get
you to agree to such a contract, but you don't
have to agree to it.
Not by much, I buy wholesale and a hardware 56Kbs modem is only $10 more expensive then the equivalant software modem.
But the way computer manufacturer's
accounting works, you multiply the
hardware cost by a factor of 3 or 4 to get the
suggested retail price (at least last time I was
involved with it, way back when hardware
had a profit margin). This works out to
a $30 or more difference to the end user.
I know that the fixed factor is bogus, but that's
the way accountants think. Even if you convince
someone that you don't need to assign the same
overhead and profit numbers to the extra $10,
somebody later on is going to come back and
ask why this product's base materials cost is out of line
with the rest of your products.
I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.
That reminds me of the storage display teminals I would
sometimes use in the early 80's. Some of these
were huge, like a 25-inch TV. The CRT had
a special layer that would permanently turn on
any time the electron beam hit it. You could
only add to the "on" pixels; the only way to
turn off pixels was to clear the whole screen.
The TTY output would add to the screen
until you filled it up, but you couldn't scroll.
I remember being able to view 400 lines of
code at once on one of these. At the time, it blew away
any other display technology at viewing
code. The downside was, it really blew
chunks at motion, since it was static. You
could actually get some work done with a real line-based
editor like TECO, though.
In summary, then, your argument is well supported by your beliefs. However, because my religion teaches common respect (Christianity), I cannot subscribe to your argument.
In your post, you don't seem to be showing much respect
for self-assertive atheists. If your idea of
"common respect" does not extend to those
who don't respect you, you are in the exact
same boat as they are, and all of your bullet
points apply to your belief system just as much as theirs.
My favorite is Ruby, which has a very
clean OO design. Newer versions
of Python (2.1, 2.2) are almost as good and
more widely used; lately I've been developing mostly
with Python 2.2.
Some people swear by Objective Caml, which
is a fast compiled functional/OO language, but my mind
is a little to imperative to really get into it.
I like OO fine. I guess I'm getting biased these
days because now I tend to use very high-level
languages and then add C or C++ extensions
where needed. I use the OO features in
the high level language, but extensions are
usually simple enough so that they don't need it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nice in theory. In practice, health insurance doesn't make a very good market for individual buyers, because most families have somebody with at least one health problem.
Therefore, most people "buy" health insurance in aggregate groups. Right now, that usually means through arrangements made by the corporations that employ them.
Now, why is it the *job* of your employer to buy your health insurance for you? I don't know. They don't usually buy cars or houses for people. In an ideal world, people would buy insurance for themselves. But, as I pointed out, you often can't because health problems aren't totally random events to be insured against.
The corporations who wield so much control over this system are probably pleased, however. The current system keeps the employees shepherded into corporate benefits plans, unable to easily strike out on their own. Knowing that the employees need to keep in a group plan, the employers can offer wages that are lower than they otherwise would be.
The net result is, most people don't really enjoy very much "freedom" under this system. Changing jobs or starting a business are made much more stressful than they need to be because of this unrelated health insurance issue. Most people are insured, so you're already paying the medical costs one way or another; moreover, the most expensive retired patients are already being paid for by tax money through medicare.
The overblown worries of a few tightwads over the few percent of the population who currently have no coverage and are therefore potential "freeloaders" prevents us from ever improving our current system to make it more rational.
I find that plastic models are easier, quicker and look more realistic, but wood and paper models are more satisfying to work on and give you a better sense of accomplishment.
Are you serious? As a former McDonald's burger flipper, I am appalled. We used to pride ourselves on flipping 8 or more burgers in one deft motion.
Actually, burger flipping wasn't so bad in my day (before fast food restauants had computers, microwaves or value meals; inexplicably, our location didn't even have proper cash registers, the counter people added up the totals by hand on slips of paper). We also wore pointy paper hats, the only headware that truly distinguishes the burger flipping profession; none of these stupid baseball hats that any truck driver could wear.
You actually had to use a little bit of your mind to do the job. The market wasn't so oversaturated, so each restaurant had quite a bit more business. During busy hours, we would crank out massive quantities of Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, etc. according to intricate patterns specified in verbal commands from the head counter. Keeping up with the demand could be like playing a video game.
Now days, most McDonalds seem to only have one or two active cash registers. You almost never need to wait in line because there's a Taco Bell and 5 other restaurants next door. The people in back always have a bored, glazed look, staring up at a computer monitor that tells them the next thing they should do.
This is one case where I'm glad that computers weren't part of my life.
He may only be an actor, but he knows the only technical principle you need to know on a starship: if something doesn't work right, reverse the polarity.
Maybe you've identified use for those stupid decorative candles that accumulate at the back of everybody's linen closet: Free color printing.
On my Epson printer, if I let it sit for two weeks, half of the nozzles get clogged on the test pattern. To fix it, I have to run multiple passes of the head cleaning procdure, using up even more "precious" ink. (Not to mention the ink and paper wasted on a ruined photo to find out that the heads are clogged in the first place.)
Surely, this must be a further conspiracy on their part; it sets a lower limit on ink usage that you're guaranteed to exceed.
I've wondered how just how much ink is in those cartridges, and how it compares in price per milliliter of expensive fluids such as a $1000 bottle of rare cognac.
Evil Villain: Haha! Now you're trapped in the airlock with no way to escape!
Microbiologist: What do you want from me?
Evil Villain: Silence! Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of nitrogen gas slowly filling the airlock. You will suffocate in a short while.
Microbiologist: You bastard! You're never going to get away with this!
Evil Villain: We'll see about that. Now; I'd love nothing more than to stay here and witness your demise, but I have an "appointment" with another prominent microbiologist, and I can't be late. Sadly, I must bid you farewell. I'm sorry to have leave your party so soon, I'm sure it will be a "gas"! BWAHAHA!! BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
At this point, Hollywood would have you believe that the unsupervised microbiologist will narrowly escape from the airlock. Well, in the real world, it just didn't happen. It's no wonder that the kids growing up today watching movies and TV have no grip on reality.
BTW, what's up with lawyers and ugly courier documents? They use high-powered computers to draw vertical lines in the document header with ')' characters, as if all they had was an old Smith Corona manual typewriter. They always make documents on unwieldy legal size paper that won't fit in your filing cabinet. They use huge fonts that take up lots of paper. They print single-sided on heavy, thick stock. No wonder they're always running around with special 14-inch thick briefcases.
I've gone through a few patent applications (luckily at my employer's expense), where a lot of the process was paying some attorney $200/hr to: Take my carefully formatted documents (which had nice fonts, tables and clear diagrams), and transform them almost verbatim into an uninterrupted stream of monospaced courier text. They also took my nice diagrams and redrew them in a clunky style with little number tags stuck to every line on the drawings. Oh, and every plural noun had the phrase "a plurality of" inserted in front of it. I could almost write a Perl script to do this job.
No wonder the patent office has a hard time retaining patent examiners. Anybody would go mad reading documents all day that have all formatting and context removed.
Why can't the legal profession just come up with a nice standardized documet template?
I wouldn't want to repeat that experience. The trip was like a bad 90-minute carnival ride. This huge machine was plowing straight into towering waves at something like 50mph. My girlfriend had to work very hard to retain the contents of her stomach.
As bad as that was, the hovercraft had the advantage of a huge rubber skirt to absorb the impacts. I'm sure there's no way an aircraft could handle the same conditions.
Actually, Microsoft would come an sue you. That's because there's no way that you're going to see their code unless you first enter into an iron-clad NDA with them, in which you sign away a big swath of your potential future career opportunities.
The more interesting question is:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Answer that one for me. After you've tackled that, maybe you can analyze some common software vendor EULAs with equal zeal. That should keep you busy for a while. Maybe you can find some self-inconsistent terms in one of them and go into an endless loop.
Actually, that in itself is probably not a bad thing. A database can make the app extremely scalable and robust by removing memory size limitations and introducing transactions. If you can keep all of your runtime program state in a database, you can do a lot of cool things with your architecure.
IMHO, however, the database should be embedded, zero maintenence, cheap or free, and largely hidden from the end user. If you have to shell out dozens of kilobucks just for the database and hire a specialist, it's hard to cost-justify the features the database provides.
Luckily, there are a lot of cheap or free small database engines out there now that can be used as a building block to create applications.
I hate to break it to you, but there are in fact 133t Haxors who would love to steal your files, (or at least troll everyone's traffic for valuable info).
Yes there is security measures in place but unless you have a large sat.dish. located roughly 1000 meters from the main NOC pointed and peaked correctly you will pick up nothin, exactly nothing.
I wasn't talking about packets going to the NOC. I was talking about packets from the NOC bounced off the satellite and broadcast over a big chunk of the country.
My concerns were based on the famous inability for satellite TV systems to control piracy, as well as the sieve-like effectiveness often seen with "secure" communications protocols such as 802.11.
When my boss comes around and pesters me about problems with the code, I tell him: "They are FEATURES, calling them bugs makes it sound like they are accidental things that pop up when actually I never make programming mistakes."
I know the wired internet isn't exactly secure, either, but this kind of thing seems like it would be an especially inviting target for snoopers.
Users on a subscription model don't have to worry about licensing issues in the same way that a dog chained to a post doesn't have to worry about trampeling its neighbors' lawns.
On another article a few weeks back, someone posted an answer that cleared this up for me. (I'm too lazy to track down the posting now.)
Bottom line is: hydrogen is like a high-horsepower, high-RPM turbo racing engine; it's best for driving light vehicles at high speeds (upper stages). Kerosene is like a high-torque diesel truck engine, good for getting a lot of weight moving from a dead stop.
The difference has to do with the physics of exhaust density, speed, momentum, etc.
What seems more embarassing to me is that the Russians have a much more appropriate and cost effective system to launch humans into space -- and it uses 45 year old technology.
The copies of the software that were sold to you are your property, not the vendor's. What the vendor does own is a government-sanctioned "lien" on your copy that prevents you from making addtional copies. Nothing more.
They do not have the right to force you into an additional restrictive contract after the sale. They are free to attempt to get you to agree to such a contract, but you don't have to agree to it.
But the way computer manufacturer's accounting works, you multiply the hardware cost by a factor of 3 or 4 to get the suggested retail price (at least last time I was involved with it, way back when hardware had a profit margin). This works out to a $30 or more difference to the end user.
I know that the fixed factor is bogus, but that's the way accountants think. Even if you convince someone that you don't need to assign the same overhead and profit numbers to the extra $10, somebody later on is going to come back and ask why this product's base materials cost is out of line with the rest of your products.
That reminds me of the storage display teminals I would sometimes use in the early 80's. Some of these were huge, like a 25-inch TV. The CRT had a special layer that would permanently turn on any time the electron beam hit it. You could only add to the "on" pixels; the only way to turn off pixels was to clear the whole screen. The TTY output would add to the screen until you filled it up, but you couldn't scroll.
I remember being able to view 400 lines of code at once on one of these. At the time, it blew away any other display technology at viewing code. The downside was, it really blew chunks at motion, since it was static. You could actually get some work done with a real line-based editor like TECO, though.
In your post, you don't seem to be showing much respect for self-assertive atheists. If your idea of "common respect" does not extend to those who don't respect you, you are in the exact same boat as they are, and all of your bullet points apply to your belief system just as much as theirs.
Some people swear by Objective Caml, which is a fast compiled functional/OO language, but my mind is a little to imperative to really get into it.
I like OO fine. I guess I'm getting biased these days because now I tend to use very high-level languages and then add C or C++ extensions where needed. I use the OO features in the high level language, but extensions are usually simple enough so that they don't need it.
I found the other news link for today on the Samba home page even more interesting. Could this be the motivation behind the strange licensing hijinx?