I think he misquoted it, which caused the confusion.
"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination." -Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At the End of the Universe
So it is a finite number divided by infinity == as near to nothing as makes no odds
What we have is a phenomenon that is not explained by the calculated mass of the universe. As a filler we have titled it "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" and given it a mathematical correction to the calculations.
The mass issue is fixed if we realize that the size of the universe is larger than the visible horizon. Meaning it is bigger than we can see. With that we can assume that we can only see 13% of the whole universe and that the reset of it is too far away to see. Now, run those numbers through the formula to calculate the expansion rate of the universe and you get some great results!
The energy issue disappears when you realize that the closer an object is to a gravity well the slower time moves. Thus there is a large time differential between the edge of a given galaxy and intergalactic space. This time differential accounts for the perceived added gravity.
Better yet, paint it hot pink and put an SEP field around it. It is a better solution.
This is just another reason to ban the reporting agencies. There would be little to no Identity theft once they are gone. Your credit would depend on you and your relationship with the lender. no anonymous mailings of Credit cards, no SS=good credit.
You would have to have a relationship with a bank or credit company, get to know them. Work up your credit with them, etc. Back to the way it used to work!
Did you know that Credit reporting agencies have caused some laws and restrictions because of there actions. They used to report everything about you. Age, marital status, sexual preference, etc, etc. They used to have no time limits so things on the report would be listed for ever, they used to even ban you from seeing the report. They are all scum bags and the whole lot of them shuld be banned
I have paid all my medical out of pocket until recently so your primes is moot.
How about we allow hospitable and doctors to turn away those that can not pay. Then "Charity cases" can go to real charities like the Shriners. Hell, I donate money to the Shriners now to help support the Scotish rite hospital.
Put charity where charity belongs, in the hand of the people. It is not up to the government to take my money by force of arms and give it to any one else.
Then why should I have to pay for my neighbor's cancer?
I understand the spreading of risk across a larger group. The issue is the amount. are you telling me we are one of the few healthy families? Does 60% of the population of the US have terminal illnesses?
The problem I have is that if you run the numbers, it is very high for insurance. Higher than anything else I pay and frankly, I can do without it. Accept they are now going to fine me for choosing to not have insurance. Well, to not have conventional insurance.
Your #1 is flawed. If you are in an auto accident, medical is covered by the auto insurance. Depending on how your state manages it, it would be covered by the Liability overage of the other person or by the uninsured/under-insured rider on your own policy.
If you are at home, working on your house and fall through the ceiling. Your homeowners insurance will cover the medical if you call them.
If you are injured at work, you have workman's comp and/or your companies property insurance to cover the costs of the medical.
The company I used to work for had health insurance. It cost $1295.00 per month to cover the family and had a $9,000 deductible.
So, I would pay $15,540 per year and still had to pay the first $9,000 of care, then they would cover %80 of approved care.
Think about it, I had to spend 9k on doctor visits/tests/etc meaning that I would have spent $24,540 for that year before they would even start to cover %80.
I worked for that company for 3 years, I paid $46,620 in insurance payments and we went to the doctor once. Only once and it was %100 out of pocket.
Can some one explain how this is supposed to work? It is a lot of money to be paying out for nothing.
Better than the Indian firm that the code development was outsourced to? Yes, even "government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss" would do a better job.
So Gartner keeps increasing the number of servers per admin that they say is "normal" and now they realize it is taking fewer people to do the job???
I can not count the number of companies where I have heard "Gartner says we should only have 1 admin for every XXX servers" Normally they are running old equipment with no underlying infrastructure and in a way where every system is a one off requiring all administration to be a manual process. The last company I worked at was touting 1 admin for every 160 servers with 90% outsourced to India.
Personally I think Gartner needs to hire more intelligent people if they are only now realizing this.
I would expect this to get worse. As Obama care kicks in and the government demands more and more of our medical records they will begin to dig deeper and deeper. I am not looking forward to government bureaucrats deciding what is and is not needed for my medical conditions. That is for me and the doctor to decided, not the government.
Wouldn't it be great if we had something like a help desk position, low entry requirements and easy to do. We could then use those jobs to find the people who love computers and as they excel and learn they could move into Jr Admin or L1 positions. The ones that excel at the Jr. Admin/L1 positions could learn and move into L2 positions. Those that excel at L2 could learn and move into an L3/Engineer Those exceptional Engineer's could move into Architect positions
That would never happen, that would have to stop outsourcing Help Desk/L1/L2/L3 and bring them back to groom good high level Engineers and Architects.
Oh well, until then, I am going to rake in the cash.
I have interviewed those Tata MCSE/CCIE/RHEL "certified" people. You have got to be kidding, they are useless.
RHCE who can not tell you how to change the default runlevel in linux CCIE who does not know how to save a config in Cisco IOS MCSE who's answer to every problem is reboot the system. (ok, that may be right, it is windows)
They dont do far more work, they work twice as hard to get 1/8th the amount done. They also have no clue on time requirements to do a job. I have a seasoned Linux person say it would take 200 hours to develop a script to do a given job. Upper management asked the Indian guy how long it would take and he said two weeks. They told him to do it, and he pumped out spaghetti code to do the job in two weeks. When I asked him how he did 200 hours of work in 80 hours he responded "I worked all night and day to get it done"
He put in over 200 hours in two weeks to get it done and management believes he put in 80 hours, because that is all he reported.
2. Is my health insurance premium going to go through the roof.
My company just announced a 20% increase in health insurance premiums. Seems Obama care is kicking in and it is going to cost us more (Managements explanation)
Unless you are yelling FIRE because you see someone light a bic lighter.
Based on your projection that it could start a fire and burn the building down.
If you would like we could build a computer simulation as to what would happen if the building was to burn from the bic lighter along with projected death rates and evaluations of proper suppression systems as a feedback.
"I am fully qualified for this position and willing to work it. I have attached my resume for you to review Please be aware that I expect the following #1) Relocation costs #2) 4 weeks vacation #3) (what ever the going pay rate is x4) #4) Profit sharing/Stock options/Bonus #5) Full benefits Health, dental, vision, life insurance fully paid for by the company. #6) a paid 3 month sabbatical every 4 years. "
At least they have a qualified candidate who replied and outlined the expected package. I never expect to get an offer or even a reply, truth is it is mostly a form letter I reply with.
Ill agree with that, my daughters science teachers (HS) went one of two ways. It was ether cool experiments with no research or it was the teacher doing the experiment and then having the students do the math.
I started teaching her after school. We would do the cool experiment then formulate questions from it. Why did it do that? what did it change to? etc. Then research and math to answer the questions. It was a blase.
A great example is as simple as baking soda and vinegar. Mix them to a neutral PH, heat and boil off the excess water (1/2), set in the fridge tell cool, then reach in and touch the liquid with a pin. From that we had over a month of learning, Starting with why it bubbled, why the PH was changing, what are the chemical formulas for both, what was the reaction doing, why did it solidify when touched, etc, etc, etc. Math and science can be hard, the trick is to let the kids explore and learn. Let them see how and why it matters and teach them analytical thought.
You are just a bit early for the PC enthusiasts to be equal to the car enthusiasts. Cars are over 100 years old now and PC's are just over 30.
PC's of today are where cars were back in the 1980's They have started to move away from things that we build and tinker with and into the buy what you need and take it to a specialist to fix. The real enthusiasts will still be building systems just as the real car enthusiasts are still building and working on cars. The next step is the true customization phase. Custom built cars today are a real work of art, not just an old car that has been hopped up and modified a bit. They are far more custom and far more complex than off the line cars. Computers over the next few years will begin to go that direction. Where we start to see more and more truly custom systems that wow us with both the amount of customization as well as the art involved.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he misquoted it, which caused the confusion.
"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At the End of the Universe
So it is a finite number divided by infinity == as near to nothing as makes no odds
What we have is a phenomenon that is not explained by the calculated mass of the universe. As a filler we have titled it "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" and given it a mathematical correction to the calculations.
The mass issue is fixed if we realize that the size of the universe is larger than the visible horizon. Meaning it is bigger than we can see. With that we can assume that we can only see 13% of the whole universe and that the reset of it is too far away to see. Now, run those numbers through the formula to calculate the expansion rate of the universe and you get some great results!
The energy issue disappears when you realize that the closer an object is to a gravity well the slower time moves. Thus there is a large time differential between the edge of a given galaxy and intergalactic space. This time differential accounts for the perceived added gravity.
Better yet, paint it hot pink and put an SEP field around it. It is a better solution.
This is just another reason to ban the reporting agencies. There would be little to no Identity theft once they are gone. Your credit would depend on you and your relationship with the lender. no anonymous mailings of Credit cards, no SS=good credit.
You would have to have a relationship with a bank or credit company, get to know them. Work up your credit with them, etc. Back to the way it used to work!
Did you know that Credit reporting agencies have caused some laws and restrictions because of there actions. They used to report everything about you. Age, marital status, sexual preference, etc, etc. They used to have no time limits so things on the report would be listed for ever, they used to even ban you from seeing the report. They are all scum bags and the whole lot of them shuld be banned
I have paid all my medical out of pocket until recently so your primes is moot.
How about we allow hospitable and doctors to turn away those that can not pay. Then "Charity cases" can go to real charities like the Shriners. Hell, I donate money to the Shriners now to help support the Scotish rite hospital.
Put charity where charity belongs, in the hand of the people. It is not up to the government to take my money by force of arms and give it to any one else.
Then why should I have to pay for my neighbor's cancer?
I understand the spreading of risk across a larger group. The issue is the amount. are you telling me we are one of the few healthy families? Does 60% of the population of the US have terminal illnesses?
The problem I have is that if you run the numbers, it is very high for insurance. Higher than anything else I pay and frankly, I can do without it. Accept they are now going to fine me for choosing to not have insurance. Well, to not have conventional insurance.
Your #1 is flawed. If you are in an auto accident, medical is covered by the auto insurance. Depending on how your state manages it, it would be covered by the Liability overage of the other person or by the uninsured/under-insured rider on your own policy.
If you are at home, working on your house and fall through the ceiling. Your homeowners insurance will cover the medical if you call them.
If you are injured at work, you have workman's comp and/or your companies property insurance to cover the costs of the medical.
Right, the rich. That is EVERYONE reading this.
The poorest 1 billion people on this planet do not have computers to read slash dot. As such they will not be taking part in the following discussion.
The company I used to work for had health insurance. It cost $1295.00 per month to cover the family and had a $9,000 deductible.
So, I would pay $15,540 per year and still had to pay the first $9,000 of care, then they would cover %80 of approved care.
Think about it, I had to spend 9k on doctor visits/tests/etc meaning that I would have spent $24,540 for that year before they would even start to cover %80.
I worked for that company for 3 years, I paid $46,620 in insurance payments and we went to the doctor once. Only once and it was %100 out of pocket.
Can some one explain how this is supposed to work? It is a lot of money to be paying out for nothing.
Better than the Indian firm that the code development was outsourced to? Yes, even "government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss" would do a better job.
So Gartner keeps increasing the number of servers per admin that they say is "normal" and now they realize it is taking fewer people to do the job???
I can not count the number of companies where I have heard "Gartner says we should only have 1 admin for every XXX servers" Normally they are running old equipment with no underlying infrastructure and in a way where every system is a one off requiring all administration to be a manual process. The last company I worked at was touting 1 admin for every 160 servers with 90% outsourced to India.
Personally I think Gartner needs to hire more intelligent people if they are only now realizing this.
I would expect this to get worse. As Obama care kicks in and the government demands more and more of our medical records they will begin to dig deeper and deeper. I am not looking forward to government bureaucrats deciding what is and is not needed for my medical conditions. That is for me and the doctor to decided, not the government.
But we live in a 4D universe, or I do. I dont know about you.
Wouldn't it be great if we had something like a help desk position, low entry requirements and easy to do.
We could then use those jobs to find the people who love computers and as they excel and learn they could move into Jr Admin or L1 positions.
The ones that excel at the Jr. Admin/L1 positions could learn and move into L2 positions.
Those that excel at L2 could learn and move into an L3/Engineer
Those exceptional Engineer's could move into Architect positions
That would never happen, that would have to stop outsourcing Help Desk/L1/L2/L3 and bring them back to groom good high level Engineers and Architects.
Oh well, until then, I am going to rake in the cash.
I have interviewed those Tata MCSE/CCIE/RHEL "certified" people. You have got to be kidding, they are useless.
RHCE who can not tell you how to change the default runlevel in linux
CCIE who does not know how to save a config in Cisco IOS
MCSE who's answer to every problem is reboot the system. (ok, that may be right, it is windows)
They dont do far more work, they work twice as hard to get 1/8th the amount done. They also have no clue on time requirements to do a job. I have a seasoned Linux person say it would take 200 hours to develop a script to do a given job. Upper management asked the Indian guy how long it would take and he said two weeks. They told him to do it, and he pumped out spaghetti code to do the job in two weeks. When I asked him how he did 200 hours of work in 80 hours he responded "I worked all night and day to get it done"
He put in over 200 hours in two weeks to get it done and management believes he put in 80 hours, because that is all he reported.
Then I am a french model.
Now it must be true.
2. Is my health insurance premium going to go through the roof.
My company just announced a 20% increase in health insurance premiums. Seems Obama care is kicking in and it is going to cost us more (Managements explanation)
So, yes it is going through the roof.
Unless you are yelling FIRE because you see someone light a bic lighter.
Based on your projection that it could start a fire and burn the building down.
If you would like we could build a computer simulation as to what would happen if the building was to burn from the bic lighter along with projected death rates and evaluations of proper suppression systems as a feedback.
Nasa http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
(And just so you dont have to read that long complicated article here is a link to a nice picture)
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
But don't let real science get in the way of your research via Wikipedia.
I reply to every one of these with
"I am fully qualified for this position and willing to work it. I have attached my resume for you to review
Please be aware that I expect the following
#1) Relocation costs
#2) 4 weeks vacation
#3) (what ever the going pay rate is x4)
#4) Profit sharing/Stock options/Bonus
#5) Full benefits Health, dental, vision, life insurance fully paid for by the company.
#6) a paid 3 month sabbatical every 4 years.
"
At least they have a qualified candidate who replied and outlined the expected package. I never expect to get an offer or even a reply, truth is it is mostly a form letter I reply with.
HR is also always immune since they have the power to give anyone a bad performance review.
BZZZ wrong answer.
American Airlines outsourced their HR to IBM, who outsourced it to India.
So, it does happen, and if you think Indian help desk is bad, wait tell you talk to an Indian HR person.
Ok, I looked it over and am not impressed.
A hammock and a plastic tarp stuffed into a jacket pocket is not a bad solution.
No, the second amendment does not secure your right to hunt ducks or deer.
It does secure your right to hunt congressmen should there be an open season for them.
Ok 2 injured, but were they children? If they were then just thing of the children, if not they are of no interest to the politics of the situation.
They are taught without any relation to reality.
Ill agree with that, my daughters science teachers (HS) went one of two ways. It was ether cool experiments with no research or it was the teacher doing the experiment and then having the students do the math.
I started teaching her after school. We would do the cool experiment then formulate questions from it. Why did it do that? what did it change to? etc. Then research and math to answer the questions. It was a blase.
A great example is as simple as baking soda and vinegar. Mix them to a neutral PH, heat and boil off the excess water (1/2), set in the fridge tell cool, then reach in and touch the liquid with a pin. From that we had over a month of learning, Starting with why it bubbled, why the PH was changing, what are the chemical formulas for both, what was the reaction doing, why did it solidify when touched, etc, etc, etc. Math and science can be hard, the trick is to let the kids explore and learn. Let them see how and why it matters and teach them analytical thought.
You are just a bit early for the PC enthusiasts to be equal to the car enthusiasts. Cars are over 100 years old now and PC's are just over 30.
PC's of today are where cars were back in the 1980's They have started to move away from things that we build and tinker with and into the buy what you need and take it to a specialist to fix. The real enthusiasts will still be building systems just as the real car enthusiasts are still building and working on cars. The next step is the true customization phase. Custom built cars today are a real work of art, not just an old car that has been hopped up and modified a bit. They are far more custom and far more complex than off the line cars. Computers over the next few years will begin to go that direction. Where we start to see more and more truly custom systems that wow us with both the amount of customization as well as the art involved.