And now the costs will be driven up even more since sick people will be able to get insurance after the fact.
This is only an issue because tantrums thrown by Republicans and Teabaggers made a simple single-payer system politically impossible. This despite the fact that it is successfully used in many countries, including retirees and veterans in the USA. (Blah blah, "Medicare is broke!" That's because people live longer. Just raise the retirement age and the problem is solved.)
In fact, just about everything wrong with the healthcare reform bill is the ironic result of political pressure from its opponents.
I wasn't bothered. I thought it was worth it just to see the picture of the system in the link. I can't decide if it looks more like a prop from the set of Space:1999, or the hood scoop from some 1970s AMC muscle car.
Any time you hear music at a club, bar, or formal function these days, chances are you're listening to an MP3.
I'm no audiophile, but even I can tell that the PA speakers used in those situations sound like total crap. Of course nobody would notice if the earsplitting output of those ugly black crates originally came from a less than perfect source.
Sure, but the real problem with wikipedia is with editor bias, not factual accuracy.
Every information source created by human beings is subject to the exact same problem, so I don't see how that in itself would make Wikipedea worse than other resources.
The reader is always responsible for estimating the bias of any document's author(s) and interpreting the information in that light.
If you don't agree with the groupthink, then your voice is excluded.
This is true for everything in life. In an old-style paper encyclopedia, it just happened that the groupthink was hidden from public view and confined to a small group of the publisher's employees.
What does your screen look like while a program like this is running?
Well I haven't kept up with the latest developments, but if it's anything like the Sinclair ZX80 I'm posting from, the screen goes blank gray when you start actively computing. Then it returns to normal when the answer is ready.
How many other people have already pointed out that Germany declared war on the USA? Not the other way around. And you still can't figure out why we fought them? Are you some kind of idiot?
Tourism is not the only possible venture. Mining and extraction of elements will be the driving force.
If we do not take space mining and extraction seriously now, we will end up like Spain or France. Dead empires that ran out of resources and money, and had to reinvent themselves.
We live in a universe with about 100 natural elements. Fortunately for us, the earth has a good selection of almost all of these. Our moon, OTOH, doesn't; its crust is mostly a boring mixture of what we consider junk rocks down here on this planet.
There are only a couple of chemical elements that that are both highly valuable and in very short supply on earth. (For example platinum, which is mainly used as a catalyst to manipulate more intrinsically useful elements.) I would place my bets on replacing those rare elements with advancements in materials science and nanotechnology using more common elements rather than hugely expensive and risky space adventures.
It was possible to fully understand all of the old 8 and 16 but machines.
Well, a lot of the segment-based memory management features introduced in the 80286 seemed to be so complex and hard to understand that nobody really used them to the extent Intel envisioned. Once the much simpler page-based virtual memory was added to the 32-bit 80386, people tried to forget that those 286 features ever existed.
In 2001 you got hit by a multinational group of thugs and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
We got attacked by Saudis based in Afghanistan, so we invaded Iraq.
We could have simplified logistics and saved a bunch of money by invading a much closer country like Jamaica. It would have made the same amount of sense under your logical analysis.
You people who try to portray it as nothing more than "sending tourists to a dry barren rock" are idiots. The space program gave us so much of the technology we take for granted today, including the microprocessor you used to type your ignorant posts.
You're the "ignorant idiot" here. The microprocessor was developed for a Japanese desk calculator; it had nothing to do with any space program. You might be thinking of the integrated circuit. However, in that case you'd have what seems to be a common misconception. The IC was developed for ICBM guidance, not for any manned space program.
If you want to develop a bunch of technology, go ahead and fund it directly. There's no reason to put on an expensive dog-and-pony show to get technology as a side effect. That's just inefficient.
You've got to cut something if the country is too politically polarized to raise enough revenue to cover expenditures. Sending tourists to a dry barren rock seems pretty low on the priority list, especially when robots can achieve the same science goals at a small fraction of the cost.
It is a medical device which means that it is subject to insane levels of litigation. Mostly you are probably paying for insurance.
I highly doubt that they pay $1000 of insurance premium on each hearing aid.
What's really happening is the context that the product is marketed in. It's a "medical device", so the buyer expects it will be outrageously expensive, just like every other healthcare-related product or service in the USA. The producer charges what the market will bear, and that depends on the psychological state of the buyers.
Context is important. If you went into a grocery store and saw a six-pack of mass produced beer on sale for $25.00, you'd be incredulous. But you'd most likely pay that same price without thinking twice at a baseball game.
Christ, what the hell happened to personal responsibility?
It never existed. There has never been any such thing as personal responsibility.
People have always made bad decisions, and society at large pays the price for the consequences. What libertarians call "personal responsibility" is actually socialized risk.
The fact that 0% of restaurants offer a healthy level of sodium on their menu is a huge failure of the free market system. This is because it's a situation that matches the "prisoner's dilemma", which free markets are horrible at addressing.
Trying to legislate a solution to the problem isn't the right approach though, because there's no reasonable way to achieve the goal.
So we have to live with the consequences. Just don't go around saying that it's some feel-good thing like "responsibility" or "freedom". The situation just plain sucks, and you're paying a high price for it every day in your health insurance premiums.
Nothing is worse than the feeling you get when you find out that you got duped. What you thought was the fake lead CPU that you ordered, turns out instead to be an imitation made of cadmium.
Another thing to consider is that if you're a software developer, the mapping of the alphabet keys is almost irrelevant. I hardly ever type whole words; I type a couple of characters then the autocomplete key. Other than that, it's mostly punctuation.
Since almost all the symbol keys are awkward to reach, I've done lots of modifications to my vim profile to accelerate the coding symbols and sequences I use most, and I've mapped them to the most easily typed key sequences. That's far more significant to me than the letter layout.
I know I'm just dreaming up science fiction here, but if only there were some way that ABC could send their signal directly through space to our TVs and bypass the cable companies completely, we could avoid this horrible situation. Maybe one day it will be possible...
As long as the USPTO is out there rubber stamping claims, then it's best that their rubber stamp is as inefficient as possible.
The number of patents issued is already far too large and needs to be reduced by an order of magnitude from today's levels. In the absence of truly reforming the patent-industrial-complex to protect only truly exceptional innovations, government waste is better than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're claiming that private health insurance only excludes those with pre-existing conditions because of government interference?
It looks like you've fallen for someone's line of BS hook, line and sinker.
And now the costs will be driven up even more since sick people will be able to get insurance after the fact.
This is only an issue because tantrums thrown by Republicans and Teabaggers made a simple single-payer system politically impossible. This despite the fact that it is successfully used in many countries, including retirees and veterans in the USA. (Blah blah, "Medicare is broke!" That's because people live longer. Just raise the retirement age and the problem is solved.)
In fact, just about everything wrong with the healthcare reform bill is the ironic result of political pressure from its opponents.
Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?'
For a lot of problems, for the same reason that some guy who just married 8 brides will still have to wait for his baby.
Possibly first to deploy, but not the first to build, by a good 50 years.
No need to bother a million Slashdot readers.
I wasn't bothered. I thought it was worth it just to see the picture of the system in the link. I can't decide if it looks more like a prop from the set of Space:1999, or the hood scoop from some 1970s AMC muscle car.
louder != better
As for the rest of your comment - you seem like a real class act.
Any time you hear music at a club, bar, or formal function these days, chances are you're listening to an MP3.
I'm no audiophile, but even I can tell that the PA speakers used in those situations sound like total crap. Of course nobody would notice if the earsplitting output of those ugly black crates originally came from a less than perfect source.
Sure, but the real problem with wikipedia is with editor bias, not factual accuracy.
Every information source created by human beings is subject to the exact same problem, so I don't see how that in itself would make Wikipedea worse than other resources.
The reader is always responsible for estimating the bias of any document's author(s) and interpreting the information in that light.
If you don't agree with the groupthink, then your voice is excluded.
This is true for everything in life. In an old-style paper encyclopedia, it just happened that the groupthink was hidden from public view and confined to a small group of the publisher's employees.
What does your screen look like while a program like this is running?
Well I haven't kept up with the latest developments, but if it's anything like the Sinclair ZX80 I'm posting from, the screen goes blank gray when you start actively computing. Then it returns to normal when the answer is ready.
Still harping on your strawman?
How many other people have already pointed out that Germany declared war on the USA? Not the other way around. And you still can't figure out why we fought them? Are you some kind of idiot?
No wonder you support the war in Iraq.
Tourism is not the only possible venture. Mining and extraction of elements will be the driving force.
If we do not take space mining and extraction seriously now, we will end up like Spain or France. Dead empires that ran out of resources and money, and had to reinvent themselves.
We live in a universe with about 100 natural elements. Fortunately for us, the earth has a good selection of almost all of these. Our moon, OTOH, doesn't; its crust is mostly a boring mixture of what we consider junk rocks down here on this planet.
There are only a couple of chemical elements that that are both highly valuable and in very short supply on earth. (For example platinum, which is mainly used as a catalyst to manipulate more intrinsically useful elements.) I would place my bets on replacing those rare elements with advancements in materials science and nanotechnology using more common elements rather than hugely expensive and risky space adventures.
Saudi, UAE, and Lebanese. The nationality was irrelevant, though - it was the ideology that was an issue.
And how many Iraqis? 0
And what did the Stalinist ideology of the Iraqi regime have to do with Islamist attackers?
You're still talking about WW2 there, right?
No, that was purely your strawman.
It was possible to fully understand all of the old 8 and 16 but machines.
Well, a lot of the segment-based memory management features introduced in the 80286 seemed to be so complex and hard to understand that nobody really used them to the extent Intel envisioned. Once the much simpler page-based virtual memory was added to the 32-bit 80386, people tried to forget that those 286 features ever existed.
In 2001 you got hit by a multinational group of thugs and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
We got attacked by Saudis based in Afghanistan, so we invaded Iraq.
We could have simplified logistics and saved a bunch of money by invading a much closer country like Jamaica. It would have made the same amount of sense under your logical analysis.
You people who try to portray it as nothing more than "sending tourists to a dry barren rock" are idiots. The space program gave us so much of the technology we take for granted today, including the microprocessor you used to type your ignorant posts.
You're the "ignorant idiot" here. The microprocessor was developed for a Japanese desk calculator; it had nothing to do with any space program. You might be thinking of the integrated circuit. However, in that case you'd have what seems to be a common misconception. The IC was developed for ICBM guidance, not for any manned space program.
If you want to develop a bunch of technology, go ahead and fund it directly. There's no reason to put on an expensive dog-and-pony show to get technology as a side effect. That's just inefficient.
You've got to cut something if the country is too politically polarized to raise enough revenue to cover expenditures. Sending tourists to a dry barren rock seems pretty low on the priority list, especially when robots can achieve the same science goals at a small fraction of the cost.
It is a medical device which means that it is subject to insane levels of litigation. Mostly you are probably paying for insurance.
I highly doubt that they pay $1000 of insurance premium on each hearing aid.
What's really happening is the context that the product is marketed in. It's a "medical device", so the buyer expects it will be outrageously expensive, just like every other healthcare-related product or service in the USA. The producer charges what the market will bear, and that depends on the psychological state of the buyers.
Context is important. If you went into a grocery store and saw a six-pack of mass produced beer on sale for $25.00, you'd be incredulous. But you'd most likely pay that same price without thinking twice at a baseball game.
Christ, what the hell happened to personal responsibility?
It never existed. There has never been any such thing as personal responsibility.
People have always made bad decisions, and society at large pays the price for the consequences. What libertarians call "personal responsibility" is actually socialized risk.
The fact that 0% of restaurants offer a healthy level of sodium on their menu is a huge failure of the free market system. This is because it's a situation that matches the "prisoner's dilemma", which free markets are horrible at addressing.
Trying to legislate a solution to the problem isn't the right approach though, because there's no reasonable way to achieve the goal.
So we have to live with the consequences. Just don't go around saying that it's some feel-good thing like "responsibility" or "freedom". The situation just plain sucks, and you're paying a high price for it every day in your health insurance premiums.
Since about 1945. It's short for kilotons of TNT, and used mainly for big instantaneous energy releases.
One kiloton = 4.2e12 joules.
At least until somebody starts faking the fakes.
Nothing is worse than the feeling you get when you find out that you got duped. What you thought was the fake lead CPU that you ordered, turns out instead to be an imitation made of cadmium.
Another thing to consider is that if you're a software developer, the mapping of the alphabet keys is almost irrelevant. I hardly ever type whole words; I type a couple of characters then the autocomplete key. Other than that, it's mostly punctuation.
Since almost all the symbol keys are awkward to reach, I've done lots of modifications to my vim profile to accelerate the coding symbols and sequences I use most, and I've mapped them to the most easily typed key sequences. That's far more significant to me than the letter layout.
I know I'm just dreaming up science fiction here, but if only there were some way that ABC could send their signal directly through space to our TVs and bypass the cable companies completely, we could avoid this horrible situation. Maybe one day it will be possible...
there exist DSLRs that use plain AA batteries, and surely somebody already tried to bring into space something that uses those.
Since it costs NASA about $1000 to lift a single AA battery into orbit, rechargeables seem like a better bet.
As long as the USPTO is out there rubber stamping claims, then it's best that their rubber stamp is as inefficient as possible.
The number of patents issued is already far too large and needs to be reduced by an order of magnitude from today's levels. In the absence of truly reforming the patent-industrial-complex to protect only truly exceptional innovations, government waste is better than nothing.
But in all seriousness, if you dropped a 600 million metric ton ice cub into the ocean, what would happen?
If dropped from the altitude of the moon? Let's see:
I'd guess the result would be catastrophic tsunamis and a few years of disruptive climate effects.