Obama didn't sack-up and raise taxes for health care because, after extensive discussions with the Republicans, he concluded that the Republicans would never agree to it. He therefore had to lie and call it something else.
Wrong, because in 2009 (when this monstrosity was introduced) his party had majority control over both houses of Congress - or did you happen to forget that?
So either Obama's administration and supporters either acted out of incompetence, or out of sheer political cowardice... you pick.
Adam Smith said that those who have received a greater benefit from society have an obligation to contribute a proportionally greater part of their income to the costs of running that society -- in other words, progressive taxation.
1) A fixed percentage of income across the board *is* progressive taxation. 10% of one million dollars' income is a hell of a lot larger in absolute dollars than 10% of ten dollars' income. Instead, we end up with regressive taxation, which punishes success and actually rewards failure.
2) Charity and moral obligation are acts of grace, not of enforcement. This is only part of Smith's flaw here.
3) Benefits I've received from society were/are already paid-for, multiple times over - not only in monetary terms, but by a demonstrated oath and life-endangering risks taken to help directly defend the US Constitution from threats both foreign and domestic. Now where are the societal contributions from the largely able-bodied who have done no such thing, continue to milk the system, and yet demand more? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Lookit - I have zero problems with helping the truly helpless. I have even less problem with pitching in to give a hand up instead of a handout.
However, I am very willing to wager that the definition of 'helpless' has expanded so damned much, that the majority of those on public assistance today are perfectly capable of working for their physical needs if they had no other option. Instead, they found a way to avoid it entirely, and to do so at my (and others') expense.
Exactly. For the win? If he had a few solar panels parked on his roof (even if they were never hooked up), it would easily explain why his usage patterns were screwy at times, explain a battery bank, and even (in states with solar tariff credits) allow him to sell the power company their own juice back.
Nope, it didn't, since induction was the key, not resonance.;)
IIRC, the rig involved the peculiar way the tension lines ran in parallel to his roof peak-line. This allowed him to wrap a shitload of long, large wooden dowels with copper wire, then hang them in his attic, orienting them all parallel to the overhead lines. The results would be captured, cleaned-up, and then presented to his home circuitry as household power (120VAC, 60Hz, etc).
Pretty simple, really - but yeah, I remember his being charged with theft as well (though technically, I think nowadays that wouldn't fly as easily, since there have since been plenty of legal precedents made that allow you to make free use of any and all magnetic and radio energy that falls on your property, even if you get it through induction.)
...we end up with operating system variants that are worth a damn (mainly because it'd be too effing expensive and time-consuming to start from scratch, so most would simply adapt Linux. Well, except one case where they'll just keep selling theirs with OSX...)
Think your tablet that requires signed binaries and is drmed to the roof will boot linux?
Tablet? I thought you were talking about the PC. Hell, in the tablet world, Windows is already a non-player at best.
If you want to force me to pay for someone else, then sack-up and raise my taxes for that purpose - Medicare/Medicaid already exist for this exact function. Don't hide it behind "healthcare" and then systematically damage everyone's quality of healthcare in the process (which this little law will indeed do...)
Otherwise, your first sentence shows an idiotic, greedy, and rapacious attitude towards things that are quite simply not yours.
How about this, a minimal floor of insurance quality is set that requires all insurance policies to cover birth control supplies, pre-natal care and other maternity care so that when it is need by the policy holder, they have access to it.
The second two are, believe it or not, already within the grasp of Medicaid, or can be with a simple modification of that statute. Given this, why do you feel the need to screw over everyone with a massive IRS-enforced boondoggle just to accomplish what could have been done for far easier. It's like requiring everyone to buy a full-blown Oracle RAC cluster and banning MySQL entirely, even when a MySQL install could do everything that most folks actually need.
The birth control thing? Why in the ever-living *fuck* should I be required to pay for something others allegedly need, but can be equally attained at no cost by simply keeping one's legs together?
(notice that I wasn't replacing anything, but pointing out differing competitors).
But more importantly, this has been Microsoft's business strategy since not long after it encorporated: "Extend, Embrace, Extinguish." It isn't killing them in the long term, and analysts only ever look at the short term. I shouldn't have to explain the problem of short term thinking.
The problem isn't that Microsoft is moving to a new market, but that they keep jumping out into a plethora of different markets with little rhyme or reason - oftentimes it appears that they're just doing it in case something takes off. Call it shotgun-strategy.
Look at it this way: Buying into the games console market, shovelling zillions of bucks into it, and almost 12 years later not seeing anything close to an ROI? I can understand the charge of "short-term thinking" if the time frame were less than two years, but a decade + is a friggin' eternity in the tech world.
Meanwhile, we have Microsoft casting expensive nets into the worlds of mobile (both tablets and phones), games, television, music, enterprise servers, cloud services, web search, and a whole pile of other directions that make no damned sense. Their overall strategy is moving in as many directions as they can perceive - often to the detriment of their core businesses (see also Metro/Modern, the gawdawful ribbon interface, etc.)
Long story short, there is a big difference in moving into new markets to strengthen (or even transform) your core businesses, and simply throwing everything you can at the wall to find out what sticks - even when it makes no fiscal or branding sense.
There were cheaper policies that didn't cover as much
Because, you know, enforced coverage of birth control supplies, pre-natal care and other maternity care will really come in handy for me and my wife (whose hysterectomy occurred in 2010...) But you know - no worries in being forced by IRS edict to pay for a massive increase in insurance premiums for coverage I literally do not need - all because some policy wonk thinks he knows better than I do about what I do and do not need for healthcare coverage.
Yes! Let's watch him do to Microsoft what he did to Nokia!
But, that said, maybe a breakup and spin-off of non-core divisions is exactly what Microsoft needs. This whole 'chasing Apple/Sony/{$newTechMarket}' thing is slowly killing them.
There is one small silver lining to this otherwise ugly cloud... if of course there's a way to hide any trace of TrueCrypt on a machine that's using it?
No need to charge them with anything... publicizing their real names and locations would do as much damage as charging them with anything would. Of course, there lies the lynch mob....
...unless they 'borrowed' their neighbor's wifi and used their neighbor's name.
TL;DR: One would hope there was at least some due process involved.
there shouldnt be "popular" food. they should all be served the same glop day by day with no variety so they learn to not misbehave.
Problem is, humans require at least some variety of foods in order to achieve basic nutrition. Prisons did try serving something all-inclusive, but apparently it's only used as punishment nowadays, and IIRC some states have banned its use.
What is needed is something with intrinsic value but which is also universally valued by most (if not all) of a population. Food is perfect for this: let's say you want something from another inmate.
Nota Bene: Food in prison can also be considered a raw material - bread for instance can be turned into alcohol with the right know-how, or fruits fermented for the same purpose.
Awesome idea, with but one flaw......who is going to hire a ex-convict, especially in a role that most corporations consider to be sensitive? It could certainly spur entrepreneurial ideas, yes, but the vast majority likely won't be able to use the skills.
Kinda sucks IMHO, because many prisoners are in there because they had no real opportunity before they got arrested... but it is what it is, and no one is going to hire an ex-con to write code. Hell, they rarely get hired to do skilled blue-collar labor as it is.
Originally, framerates were king not because of eyeballs (your eyes stop noticing the difference at around 24-30 fps, or what an ancient Rage Pro 128 can push out with Quake 2).
Framerates were king because of in-game physics. At higher framerates, non-scanhit (or rather, 'ballistic') shots were smoother and more accurate (e.g. the rocket travelled smoother), as was player (and NPC) movement, collision detection, along with quite a few other concepts that make a good 3D game great (not just first-person shooters, but *any* 3D game).
I can see why you wouldn't see much of a boost in gaming these days - moving from Mega-GPU v.1 to Mega-GPU v.2 just moves the bottleneck off your video card and onto the mobo bus, the disk, the RAM speed, or what-have-you (depending on what your rig was built with). Hell, it may even push the bottleneck onto the code, depending on how that was written (for instance, say there were intentional delay/sleep timers put into the game physics to control/prevent cheats - that would be a good example).
Now scientific pursuits that take advantage of a GPU's throughput goodness? Sure - but I suspect that at some point, you'd still run up against the same problem, in that you eventually reach a limit where the limitation is no longer the GPU, but some other bit of crucial hardware or code.
At that point, you either have to wait until the other part(s) catch up (faster bus, faster CPU, etc), or you're going to be stuck waiting for more efficient code with less of an overall hindrance in it (be it intentional or not).
Dunno, but in order for it to work, you'd need to park the infection on the airgapped machine in the first place.
To top that off, good luck making such an arrangement work in a server room, where ambient noise would pretty much destroy any hope of receiving an audible signal...
TBH, a public GMail account is not exactly what you'd want for a professional outfit anyway. Nor would you want a public Outlook.com, Yahoo, or any such other account. I can see (and do see) it being used by individual contractors or freelancers, but otherwise it wasn't really built for the full-blown no-shit enterprise world in the first place.
Yeah I'm with you. People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate.
Unfortunately, it's still the # thing at work... but then, if your company is using only public GMail accounts for work, there's something distinctly wrong with your company.
Can't say I trust the security of most of these non-email methods, but that's a different subject.
Heh - SMTP ain't so secure either.
(...yes, I know about TLS and various 3rd-party SecureMail methods, but they're either unused or hellishly clumsy when communicating with external entities - you pick.)
It is not as if they are forbidding Americans take those jobs.
Given the lower salaries paid to the H1-B's and that fact that Infosys, an *Indian* company, is procuring those visas to then turn around and low-ball bids on IT positions in the US?
They may as well be forbidding Americans from taking those jobs.
It's Ed Bott - what else did you expect? I don't even have to RTFA, and I can tell you that he's likely pimping Outlook.com in that same article as hard as he friggin' can. It's not so much a critical review of GMail, as it is a webvertisement for Outlook.com disguised as a critical review.
GMail isn't exactly sliced bread (I use it POP3-style mostly), but it isn't as horrid as he makes it out to be, either. Think about this for a moment: MSFT's lead professional knob-slobberer badmouths a MSFT product's biggest competitor - so why is this even news?
they are "fixed" at the rom level, change the chip to do anything else
Even in the good old days, if the chip was a UVPROM, you could re-program/re-flash it easily enough. All you needed was a flashing socket, some software, and a blacklight.
* Tire size changes your speedo accuracy. When I went from stock to 32" all-terrain tires on my old Jeep, my speedo under-reported - the speedometer (at least in older cars) gets its input from the transmission output gearing, not the wheels. This means a larger tire diameter gives you faster speed than a smaller one at the same driveshaft RPM. Conversely, a smaller overall tire diameter will over-report your speed for the same reasons (for those who get into the whole low-profile thing). I think the rough estimate was something like a 3-5 mph boost for every additional inch in tire diameter.
* Most states have a bit of 'slop' factor in their official statutes due to a recognition of speedometer accuracy; I recall that Utah's state troopers don't bother with you unless you're going at least 7 mph over. This doesn't mean that doing 5 mph over is smart though, because unless your speedo is perfectly tuned, you could already be going 5-7 mph faster than you think you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama didn't sack-up and raise taxes for health care because, after extensive discussions with the Republicans, he concluded that the Republicans would never agree to it. He therefore had to lie and call it something else.
Wrong, because in 2009 (when this monstrosity was introduced) his party had majority control over both houses of Congress - or did you happen to forget that?
So either Obama's administration and supporters either acted out of incompetence, or out of sheer political cowardice... you pick.
Adam Smith said that those who have received a greater benefit from society have an obligation to contribute a proportionally greater part of their income to the costs of running that society -- in other words, progressive taxation.
1) A fixed percentage of income across the board *is* progressive taxation. 10% of one million dollars' income is a hell of a lot larger in absolute dollars than 10% of ten dollars' income. Instead, we end up with regressive taxation, which punishes success and actually rewards failure.
2) Charity and moral obligation are acts of grace, not of enforcement. This is only part of Smith's flaw here.
3) Benefits I've received from society were/are already paid-for, multiple times over - not only in monetary terms, but by a demonstrated oath and life-endangering risks taken to help directly defend the US Constitution from threats both foreign and domestic. Now where are the societal contributions from the largely able-bodied who have done no such thing, continue to milk the system, and yet demand more? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Lookit - I have zero problems with helping the truly helpless. I have even less problem with pitching in to give a hand up instead of a handout.
However, I am very willing to wager that the definition of 'helpless' has expanded so damned much, that the majority of those on public assistance today are perfectly capable of working for their physical needs if they had no other option. Instead, they found a way to avoid it entirely, and to do so at my (and others') expense.
I'm so sorry that, at some point (Reagan,) we made the decision that humans should be taken care of, no matter what.
...that would probably explain why I mentioned Medicaid/Medicare... a lot.
Exactly. For the win? If he had a few solar panels parked on his roof (even if they were never hooked up), it would easily explain why his usage patterns were screwy at times, explain a battery bank, and even (in states with solar tariff credits) allow him to sell the power company their own juice back.
Nope, it didn't, since induction was the key, not resonance. ;)
IIRC, the rig involved the peculiar way the tension lines ran in parallel to his roof peak-line. This allowed him to wrap a shitload of long, large wooden dowels with copper wire, then hang them in his attic, orienting them all parallel to the overhead lines. The results would be captured, cleaned-up, and then presented to his home circuitry as household power (120VAC, 60Hz, etc).
Pretty simple, really - but yeah, I remember his being charged with theft as well (though technically, I think nowadays that wouldn't fly as easily, since there have since been plenty of legal precedents made that allow you to make free use of any and all magnetic and radio energy that falls on your property, even if you get it through induction.)
If Windows dies off then what happens to the pc?
...we end up with operating system variants that are worth a damn (mainly because it'd be too effing expensive and time-consuming to start from scratch, so most would simply adapt Linux. Well, except one case where they'll just keep selling theirs with OSX...)
Think your tablet that requires signed binaries and is drmed to the roof will boot linux?
Tablet? I thought you were talking about the PC. Hell, in the tablet world, Windows is already a non-player at best.
Me Me Me Me!!!!!
If you want to force me to pay for someone else, then sack-up and raise my taxes for that purpose - Medicare/Medicaid already exist for this exact function. Don't hide it behind "healthcare" and then systematically damage everyone's quality of healthcare in the process (which this little law will indeed do...)
Otherwise, your first sentence shows an idiotic, greedy, and rapacious attitude towards things that are quite simply not yours.
How about this, a minimal floor of insurance quality is set that requires all insurance policies to cover birth control supplies, pre-natal care and other maternity care so that when it is need by the policy holder, they have access to it.
The second two are, believe it or not, already within the grasp of Medicaid, or can be with a simple modification of that statute. Given this, why do you feel the need to screw over everyone with a massive IRS-enforced boondoggle just to accomplish what could have been done for far easier. It's like requiring everyone to buy a full-blown Oracle RAC cluster and banning MySQL entirely, even when a MySQL install could do everything that most folks actually need.
The birth control thing? Why in the ever-living *fuck* should I be required to pay for something others allegedly need, but can be equally attained at no cost by simply keeping one's legs together?
Speaking of which, I wonder if Darl McBride's resume is sitting on a desk at Microsoft?
It would be funny, sad, and scary-as-frig all wrapped up into one.
First, your sed input string syntax is bogus.
Thank God I wasn't referencing sed then, huh? ;)
(notice that I wasn't replacing anything, but pointing out differing competitors).
But more importantly, this has been Microsoft's business strategy since not long after it encorporated: "Extend, Embrace, Extinguish." It isn't killing them in the long term, and analysts only ever look at the short term. I shouldn't have to explain the problem of short term thinking.
The problem isn't that Microsoft is moving to a new market, but that they keep jumping out into a plethora of different markets with little rhyme or reason - oftentimes it appears that they're just doing it in case something takes off. Call it shotgun-strategy.
Look at it this way: Buying into the games console market, shovelling zillions of bucks into it, and almost 12 years later not seeing anything close to an ROI? I can understand the charge of "short-term thinking" if the time frame were less than two years, but a decade + is a friggin' eternity in the tech world.
Meanwhile, we have Microsoft casting expensive nets into the worlds of mobile (both tablets and phones), games, television, music, enterprise servers, cloud services, web search, and a whole pile of other directions that make no damned sense. Their overall strategy is moving in as many directions as they can perceive - often to the detriment of their core businesses (see also Metro/Modern, the gawdawful ribbon interface, etc.)
Long story short, there is a big difference in moving into new markets to strengthen (or even transform) your core businesses, and simply throwing everything you can at the wall to find out what sticks - even when it makes no fiscal or branding sense.
There were cheaper policies that didn't cover as much
Because, you know, enforced coverage of birth control supplies, pre-natal care and other maternity care will really come in handy for me and my wife (whose hysterectomy occurred in 2010...) But you know - no worries in being forced by IRS edict to pay for a massive increase in insurance premiums for coverage I literally do not need - all because some policy wonk thinks he knows better than I do about what I do and do not need for healthcare coverage.
Yes! Let's watch him do to Microsoft what he did to Nokia!
But, that said, maybe a breakup and spin-off of non-core divisions is exactly what Microsoft needs. This whole 'chasing Apple/Sony/{$newTechMarket}' thing is slowly killing them.
There is one small silver lining to this otherwise ugly cloud... if of course there's a way to hide any trace of TrueCrypt on a machine that's using it?
No need to charge them with anything... publicizing their real names and locations would do as much damage as charging them with anything would. Of course, there lies the lynch mob....
...unless they 'borrowed' their neighbor's wifi and used their neighbor's name.
TL;DR: One would hope there was at least some due process involved.
If we get enough know-how, we can just build our own habitable spaces in space itself...
there shouldnt be "popular" food. they should all be served the same glop day by day with no variety so they learn to not misbehave.
Problem is, humans require at least some variety of foods in order to achieve basic nutrition. Prisons did try serving something all-inclusive, but apparently it's only used as punishment nowadays, and IIRC some states have banned its use.
What is needed is something with intrinsic value but which is also universally valued by most (if not all) of a population. Food is perfect for this: let's say you want something from another inmate.
Nota Bene: Food in prison can also be considered a raw material - bread for instance can be turned into alcohol with the right know-how, or fruits fermented for the same purpose.
Awesome idea, with but one flaw... ...who is going to hire a ex-convict, especially in a role that most corporations consider to be sensitive? It could certainly spur entrepreneurial ideas, yes, but the vast majority likely won't be able to use the skills.
Kinda sucks IMHO, because many prisoners are in there because they had no real opportunity before they got arrested... but it is what it is, and no one is going to hire an ex-con to write code. Hell, they rarely get hired to do skilled blue-collar labor as it is.
Don't see why not, but...
Originally, framerates were king not because of eyeballs (your eyes stop noticing the difference at around 24-30 fps, or what an ancient Rage Pro 128 can push out with Quake 2).
Framerates were king because of in-game physics. At higher framerates, non-scanhit (or rather, 'ballistic') shots were smoother and more accurate (e.g. the rocket travelled smoother), as was player (and NPC) movement, collision detection, along with quite a few other concepts that make a good 3D game great (not just first-person shooters, but *any* 3D game).
I can see why you wouldn't see much of a boost in gaming these days - moving from Mega-GPU v.1 to Mega-GPU v.2 just moves the bottleneck off your video card and onto the mobo bus, the disk, the RAM speed, or what-have-you (depending on what your rig was built with). Hell, it may even push the bottleneck onto the code, depending on how that was written (for instance, say there were intentional delay/sleep timers put into the game physics to control/prevent cheats - that would be a good example).
Now scientific pursuits that take advantage of a GPU's throughput goodness? Sure - but I suspect that at some point, you'd still run up against the same problem, in that you eventually reach a limit where the limitation is no longer the GPU, but some other bit of crucial hardware or code.
At that point, you either have to wait until the other part(s) catch up (faster bus, faster CPU, etc), or you're going to be stuck waiting for more efficient code with less of an overall hindrance in it (be it intentional or not).
" Dragos Ruiu (@dragosr), the creator of the pwn2own contest"
It would be odd for him to screw up his rep with a hoax like this.
http://www.securityartwork.es/2013/10/30/badbios-2/?lang=en
Dunno, but in order for it to work, you'd need to park the infection on the airgapped machine in the first place.
To top that off, good luck making such an arrangement work in a server room, where ambient noise would pretty much destroy any hope of receiving an audible signal...
TBH, a public GMail account is not exactly what you'd want for a professional outfit anyway. Nor would you want a public Outlook.com, Yahoo, or any such other account. I can see (and do see) it being used by individual contractors or freelancers, but otherwise it wasn't really built for the full-blown no-shit enterprise world in the first place.
Yeah I'm with you. People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate.
Unfortunately, it's still the # thing at work... but then, if your company is using only public GMail accounts for work, there's something distinctly wrong with your company.
Can't say I trust the security of most of these non-email methods, but that's a different subject.
Heh - SMTP ain't so secure either.
(...yes, I know about TLS and various 3rd-party SecureMail methods, but they're either unused or hellishly clumsy when communicating with external entities - you pick.)
no more activesync support on ios
Wait, wait, wait... let me see if I understand you here:
Are you saying that you cannot get your inbound (or outbound) GMail pushed through an exchange server to/from GMail and your iPhone?
May want to be a bit more specific, boyo. :)
It is not as if they are forbidding Americans take those jobs.
Given the lower salaries paid to the H1-B's and that fact that Infosys, an *Indian* company, is procuring those visas to then turn around and low-ball bids on IT positions in the US?
They may as well be forbidding Americans from taking those jobs.
The iGoogleocolypse?
It's Ed Bott - what else did you expect? I don't even have to RTFA, and I can tell you that he's likely pimping Outlook.com in that same article as hard as he friggin' can. It's not so much a critical review of GMail, as it is a webvertisement for Outlook.com disguised as a critical review.
GMail isn't exactly sliced bread (I use it POP3-style mostly), but it isn't as horrid as he makes it out to be, either. Think about this for a moment: MSFT's lead professional knob-slobberer badmouths a MSFT product's biggest competitor - so why is this even news?
they are "fixed" at the rom level, change the chip to do anything else
Even in the good old days, if the chip was a UVPROM, you could re-program/re-flash it easily enough. All you needed was a flashing socket, some software, and a blacklight.
A couple of things to note...
* Tire size changes your speedo accuracy. When I went from stock to 32" all-terrain tires on my old Jeep, my speedo under-reported - the speedometer (at least in older cars) gets its input from the transmission output gearing, not the wheels. This means a larger tire diameter gives you faster speed than a smaller one at the same driveshaft RPM. Conversely, a smaller overall tire diameter will over-report your speed for the same reasons (for those who get into the whole low-profile thing). I think the rough estimate was something like a 3-5 mph boost for every additional inch in tire diameter.
* Most states have a bit of 'slop' factor in their official statutes due to a recognition of speedometer accuracy; I recall that Utah's state troopers don't bother with you unless you're going at least 7 mph over. This doesn't mean that doing 5 mph over is smart though, because unless your speedo is perfectly tuned, you could already be going 5-7 mph faster than you think you are.