Extending Medicare for everyone is the public option.
...because that would never be abused... just like college tuition never shot into the stratosphere after Uncle Sugar began guaranteeing student loans to world+dog... right? Oh, wait... it did. (yes, I know facilities currently refuse Medicare, but only because there's less paperwork and hassle per dollar to be gained by dealing only with private insurers.)
Incidentally, if you actually know someone on Medicare (not Medicaid mind, but Medicare), you'd know that it doesn't cover a whole lot, necessitating a lovely little thing called Part D Coverage... which is exclusively handled by private insurers. Are we ditching that as well? If so, healthcare is about to get real ugly... and far more expensive than anyone could ever have planned for in their finances.
The problem with the VA system is that the country went to war without allocating resources for all the damaged bodies that got chewed up and spit out on the battlefield.
Indeed - and it's that horrifying lack of even the most basic foresight that makes me doubly worried about having the government run everyone's healthcare.
Seriously - the ACA was supposed to cut costs, make things less expensive (it didn't), allow you to keep your current insurance (it didn't), and provide a more diverse insurance market (again, it didn't.) So, what makes you think the government won't bung-up single-payer as well?
Certainly! Because everyone wants the government to swallow 1/8th of the economy, and then make all of our healthcare become just as efficient and safe as the VA Medical system!
On the plus side, at least there won't be nearly as many Canadians coming down to this side of the border for complex treatments...
Likely, but complaints dropped even when the officer wasn't wearing a camera: "But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not... Officers were randomly assigned to wear or not wear cameras week by week (about half would be wearing them any given week), and had to keep them on during all encounters."
So... how exactly does the average perp (who isn't exactly a cyberpunk hacker-type dude) actually know if there was or wasn't a camera present? Probably wouldn't.
It's also highly likely that once reaching jail, said perp would likely try to lodge a complaint, whereupon the jailer would simply say "you know they're wearing body cameras nowadays, right?" This would cause said perp to drop the complaint, knowing that if it were all recorded, his story would most likely carry little-to-no water.
...something I could do at home with a low-end shoebox computer (or better yet, an old cast-off box with a little SSD and a big platter drive stuffed into it) that would be incredibly cheaper over time, electricity included.
And wait - who said I had to have the damned thing on 24/7 at home? I boot it when I turn the TV on - takes less time to start up than the TV does these days thanks to SSD *shrug*.
Seriously - if I subscribed to this service, I'd be damned embarrassed to say that I did and claim that I'm a geek at the same time...
At the rate things are going, W10 will become the most successful and rapid malware spread since the old "I love you" email virus of 1999...
(no really, I'm fully willing to wager that, say, at least 50% of the installs were pushed onto an ignorant public who would not have otherwise bothered, 10-20% more were shoved onto machines whose owner consciously wanted no such thing, maybe 10-20% from people who actually wanted the thing, and the rest just showed up on new computers.)
I have to give a big so what. I know we suppose to hate Microsoft and I have no love for Azure. But so what, it is Adobe who will need to deal with the consequences more than the users of the services.
Exactly.
Besides, maybe with a little luck, MSFT will nickel-and-dime Adobe hard-core along the way, and they become victims of the same rental scheme they've inflicted on their own customer base. Couldn't happen to a more deserving company, really.
I toy around with CG and artistic software, but aside from a (now-ancient) copy of Photoshop, I usually do not bother with Adobe's products anymore precisely because of The Cloud (cue angelic chorals and a deep majestic voice enunciating every syllable...)
Not that I hate the whole cloudy thing per se - it has its use cases... but digital artwork ain't one of them, especially for the hobbyist.
Renting render farm time? Okay, that's a good thing to have. OTOH, Fiddling with pics and CG stills that only your family or some small business will see? Not so much. I already have hella powerful machinery and oceans of storage space at home... the hell do I need to clog up my bandwidth (and in my case, bandwidth allocation thanks to Sat. Internet) just so that Adobe can rent their software instead of buying it?
Just a rant, I guess... but it's astounding how many shops just sucked down the party line and continued shoveling money towards the whole enterprise.
I mean, seriously - the cloud is nothing more than someone else's computer - yet it became one of the biggest buzzwords of the past 10 years... feck.
Yup - but they're not the only player to do it. Most of the big registrars will snarf up names (especially expired ones) register them, and park them on an empty generic server full of marketing blurbs to their site... only to resell them to you for an additional price.
That's because it's nothing more than a clearinghouse for corporate PR flacks.
Anyone (and I mean that in an almost literal sense) can put a press release out on that site without editing if they become a member of the site. No, I'm honestly not kidding about that: http://www.prnewswire.com/solu...
The early LG G-series phones (G1, G2) had this problem as well... after about a year or two of use, it would start becoming unresponsive on one side of the screen, and eventually the whole thing soon became unusable.
Of course, the LG phones are far less expensive (especially when you buy them a generation or two back from bleeding-edge), so it was no big deal to toss the thing and get a new one.
I can care even less. For approximately the past two years, I've been using OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. almost exclusively. At home, I haven't had to even look at a Windows UI in about a year now (I keep an old Windows 7 VM hanging around with no network access), and I have never seen a Windows 10 install - either at work or at home.
Seriously - ~2 million people fled the country by any means possible (a staggering percentage of whom died in the effort, and the majority of the survivors telling tales of being shot at and losing family to the NVA on their way out).
Pretty sure they weren't leaving a peaceful utopia, sport.
So, do you have better documentation for your assertions than 'my math prof told me'?
If you start asking people, "which businessperson do you think would make a good president?" they will start listing celebrity CEOs (woohoo! Steve Jobs for president! Nevermind that his temperment is totally unsuited for it).
Pretty sure he's calmed down a little since he died... and maybe a corpse would be an improvement over the current top two candidates?
I already mentioned the remote location as a primary reason (though it doesn't seem to slow down the tourist traffic much...) But then, it works both ways - that remote location also means you (As a criminal) have *more time* to take what you want, and you can be sloppy about it, because really - who is gonna hear you do it - the guy living 1/2 mile away?
So no, your argument falls flat... there is obviously something else keeping the criminals from being stupid.
It's all about risk and reward, and even the most common criminal is usually smart enough to make that calculation. The motivation and higher firearm possession/skill count out in the sticks will almost always push the calculus in favor of staying in town.
GP is actually correct... Police are reactive, and unless you live next door to a busy police station, you can count on the lag time being greater than the time spent committing (individually) vast majority of crimes. In the vast majority of cases, it's about retribution (albeit justified retribution). At most, the protection is abstract (as in protection of society as a whole).
The one and only person you can count on to protect you is... you.
Now if you're a child or an invalid, your parents/family are supposed to fulfill that role as needed, but that's the only real exception.
As for your challenge? I live in the middle of nowhere. We only have the county sheriff, and they cover a *lot* of ground given their small manpower complement. Therefore, we take it on ourselves to protect ourselves. The reason we're not inundated with criminals is because a) we live remotely, but most importantly b) all of us out here are armed, and have no compunction against bearing deadly force on anyone dumb enough to commit a crime against persons or property.
Is it a perfect system? Of course not... but it's all we have, and IMHO, is still much preferable to living in a near- police/big-brother state that most densely-populated cities endure. In exchange for the freedom, we bear our own risks to an extent. *shrug*
VB, PHP(spit!), JavaScript... the commonality is the ease with which a neophyte can 'code' something, and in the process open some real nasty and easily-exploitable security holes with 'em (which reminds me... how does the TFA product avoid a lot of this?)
Probably includes almost nothing but those type of apps, with maybe a few 'plugins' (read, pluggable functions that are narrowly defined and compiled-in w/ no 'developer' intervention) tossed-in for good measure.
What I'm curious about is how much bloat a typical app generated this way carries, versus a decent/competently-coded bespoke application on the same platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Extending Medicare for everyone is the public option.
...because that would never be abused... just like college tuition never shot into the stratosphere after Uncle Sugar began guaranteeing student loans to world+dog... right? Oh, wait... it did. (yes, I know facilities currently refuse Medicare, but only because there's less paperwork and hassle per dollar to be gained by dealing only with private insurers.)
Incidentally, if you actually know someone on Medicare (not Medicaid mind, but Medicare), you'd know that it doesn't cover a whole lot, necessitating a lovely little thing called Part D Coverage... which is exclusively handled by private insurers. Are we ditching that as well? If so, healthcare is about to get real ugly... and far more expensive than anyone could ever have planned for in their finances.
The problem with the VA system is that the country went to war without allocating resources for all the damaged bodies that got chewed up and spit out on the battlefield.
Indeed - and it's that horrifying lack of even the most basic foresight that makes me doubly worried about having the government run everyone's healthcare.
Seriously - the ACA was supposed to cut costs, make things less expensive (it didn't), allow you to keep your current insurance (it didn't), and provide a more diverse insurance market (again, it didn't.) So, what makes you think the government won't bung-up single-payer as well?
Certainly! Because everyone wants the government to swallow 1/8th of the economy, and then make all of our healthcare become just as efficient and safe as the VA Medical system!
On the plus side, at least there won't be nearly as many Canadians coming down to this side of the border for complex treatments...
Likely, but complaints dropped even when the officer wasn't wearing a camera: "But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not... Officers were randomly assigned to wear or not wear cameras week by week (about half would be wearing them any given week), and had to keep them on during all encounters."
So... how exactly does the average perp (who isn't exactly a cyberpunk hacker-type dude) actually know if there was or wasn't a camera present? Probably wouldn't.
It's also highly likely that once reaching jail, said perp would likely try to lodge a complaint, whereupon the jailer would simply say "you know they're wearing body cameras nowadays, right?" This would cause said perp to drop the complaint, knowing that if it were all recorded, his story would most likely carry little-to-no water.
...the only department of the US Government that actually listens to you.
Oh, wait...
Some men also prefer to die in a nursing home - old, decrepit, and can't even retain his bowels, let alone remember his name.
Not sure what kind of a life goal that would be...
...something I could do at home with a low-end shoebox computer (or better yet, an old cast-off box with a little SSD and a big platter drive stuffed into it) that would be incredibly cheaper over time, electricity included.
And wait - who said I had to have the damned thing on 24/7 at home? I boot it when I turn the TV on - takes less time to start up than the TV does these days thanks to SSD *shrug*.
Seriously - if I subscribed to this service, I'd be damned embarrassed to say that I did and claim that I'm a geek at the same time...
willingly?
Precisely.
At the rate things are going, W10 will become the most successful and rapid malware spread since the old "I love you" email virus of 1999...
(no really, I'm fully willing to wager that, say, at least 50% of the installs were pushed onto an ignorant public who would not have otherwise bothered, 10-20% more were shoved onto machines whose owner consciously wanted no such thing, maybe 10-20% from people who actually wanted the thing, and the rest just showed up on new computers.)
I have to give a big so what. I know we suppose to hate Microsoft and I have no love for Azure. But so what, it is Adobe who will need to deal with the consequences more than the users of the services.
Exactly.
Besides, maybe with a little luck, MSFT will nickel-and-dime Adobe hard-core along the way, and they become victims of the same rental scheme they've inflicted on their own customer base. Couldn't happen to a more deserving company, really.
I was just thinking about this a bit...
I toy around with CG and artistic software, but aside from a (now-ancient) copy of Photoshop, I usually do not bother with Adobe's products anymore precisely because of The Cloud (cue angelic chorals and a deep majestic voice enunciating every syllable...)
Not that I hate the whole cloudy thing per se - it has its use cases... but digital artwork ain't one of them, especially for the hobbyist.
Renting render farm time? Okay, that's a good thing to have. OTOH, Fiddling with pics and CG stills that only your family or some small business will see? Not so much. I already have hella powerful machinery and oceans of storage space at home... the hell do I need to clog up my bandwidth (and in my case, bandwidth allocation thanks to Sat. Internet) just so that Adobe can rent their software instead of buying it?
Just a rant, I guess... but it's astounding how many shops just sucked down the party line and continued shoveling money towards the whole enterprise.
I mean, seriously - the cloud is nothing more than someone else's computer - yet it became one of the biggest buzzwords of the past 10 years... feck.
Yup - but they're not the only player to do it. Most of the big registrars will snarf up names (especially expired ones) register them, and park them on an empty generic server full of marketing blurbs to their site... only to resell them to you for an additional price.
That's because it's nothing more than a clearinghouse for corporate PR flacks.
Anyone (and I mean that in an almost literal sense) can put a press release out on that site without editing if they become a member of the site. No, I'm honestly not kidding about that: http://www.prnewswire.com/solu...
We've been talking about a 'second net' for many years now, one with no lusers. Perhaps Tor is it?
FreeNet and Internet2 (for starters) were both supposed to be 'it'...
(hell, FreeNet still exists. Who'da thunk it? Pity that my corporate firewall denies access outright, no?)
Same here with my old LG G2. The right-hand side became unresponsive, soon followed by the whole thing becoming useless.
There's a Gentoo joke in here somewhere, I just know it...
The early LG G-series phones (G1, G2) had this problem as well... after about a year or two of use, it would start becoming unresponsive on one side of the screen, and eventually the whole thing soon became unusable.
Of course, the LG phones are far less expensive (especially when you buy them a generation or two back from bleeding-edge), so it was no big deal to toss the thing and get a new one.
I can care even less. For approximately the past two years, I've been using OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. almost exclusively. At home, I haven't had to even look at a Windows UI in about a year now (I keep an old Windows 7 VM hanging around with no network access), and I have never seen a Windows 10 install - either at work or at home.
Feels pretty nice that I can say that, really.
I'm also kind of curious as to how much 'US imperialism' figured into Lenin and Stalin's little string of atrocities...
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. .
Seriously - ~2 million people fled the country by any means possible (a staggering percentage of whom died in the effort, and the majority of the survivors telling tales of being shot at and losing family to the NVA on their way out).
Pretty sure they weren't leaving a peaceful utopia, sport.
So, do you have better documentation for your assertions than 'my math prof told me'?
If you start asking people, "which businessperson do you think would make a good president?" they will start listing celebrity CEOs (woohoo! Steve Jobs for president! Nevermind that his temperment is totally unsuited for it).
Pretty sure he's calmed down a little since he died... and maybe a corpse would be an improvement over the current top two candidates?
Actually, they mis-named the project:
They should have named it Galaxia.
(...bonus points if you thought of Trevize, Bliss, and Pelorat when you read the above sentence.)
Surprise! I've submitted this news and slashdot refuses to run it. Just one more example of blatant pro-Trump bias on slashdot.
Because your submission didn't involve, you know, hackers... because this happens to be a, you know, tech site.
Dunno who modded your post up, but they're apparently just as unable to grasp that concept as you are.
I already mentioned the remote location as a primary reason (though it doesn't seem to slow down the tourist traffic much...) But then, it works both ways - that remote location also means you (As a criminal) have *more time* to take what you want, and you can be sloppy about it, because really - who is gonna hear you do it - the guy living 1/2 mile away?
So no, your argument falls flat... there is obviously something else keeping the criminals from being stupid.
It's all about risk and reward, and even the most common criminal is usually smart enough to make that calculation. The motivation and higher firearm possession/skill count out in the sticks will almost always push the calculus in favor of staying in town.
GP is actually correct... Police are reactive, and unless you live next door to a busy police station, you can count on the lag time being greater than the time spent committing (individually) vast majority of crimes. In the vast majority of cases, it's about retribution (albeit justified retribution). At most, the protection is abstract (as in protection of society as a whole).
The one and only person you can count on to protect you is... you.
Now if you're a child or an invalid, your parents/family are supposed to fulfill that role as needed, but that's the only real exception.
As for your challenge? I live in the middle of nowhere. We only have the county sheriff, and they cover a *lot* of ground given their small manpower complement. Therefore, we take it on ourselves to protect ourselves. The reason we're not inundated with criminals is because a) we live remotely, but most importantly b) all of us out here are armed, and have no compunction against bearing deadly force on anyone dumb enough to commit a crime against persons or property.
Is it a perfect system? Of course not... but it's all we have, and IMHO, is still much preferable to living in a near- police/big-brother state that most densely-populated cities endure. In exchange for the freedom, we bear our own risks to an extent. *shrug*
VB, PHP(spit!), JavaScript... the commonality is the ease with which a neophyte can 'code' something, and in the process open some real nasty and easily-exploitable security holes with 'em (which reminds me... how does the TFA product avoid a lot of this?)
Probably includes almost nothing but those type of apps, with maybe a few 'plugins' (read, pluggable functions that are narrowly defined and compiled-in w/ no 'developer' intervention) tossed-in for good measure.
What I'm curious about is how much bloat a typical app generated this way carries, versus a decent/competently-coded bespoke application on the same platform.