In places where it has gone 100 percent digital, the cable companies are required to carry any channels that are available over-the-air unencrypted. So all of the main broadcast channels plus a few others are available to anyone who has a digital tuner (you don't need a box or card from the cable company). The selection is better, too, because the digital channels make more efficient use of bandwidth. So the local PBS affiliate, for example, actually broadcasts about five digital channels instead of just one analog one.
What people of both parties are pushing is a strange bastardization of privatized socialized healthcare where we pay one rate and virtually everything is covered.
Actually, I don't know what newspapers you've been reading, but unless I'm misunderstanding you I'm pretty certain nobody in either party is pushing that.
Checkups aren't a risk: I have no desire to insure myself against checkups.
I don't even do annual checkups. I don't think they've been shown to have any significant preventative effects for young men. On the other hand, most things you go to a doctor for at a young age are just simple doctor visits, for things like a sinus infection. Those aren't generally billed any differently than a checkup is; they're just "doctor visits." If the doctor discovers something unusual, however, you may be sent somewhere for further tests. Thus, the whole process should be insured. It's unforeseen medical treatment and that's precisely what you get insurance for.
Replying to my own post: I should add, I'm talking about insurance rates because you asked what insurance costs. I am self employed and therefore buy insurance as an individual. Most people in America get their insurance through their employer. That means they usually get a better level of coverage than individuals who buy insurance on their own, but their out of pocket expense is less. Their employer pays for the majority of their insurance premiums (in addition to their salary). They must pay the rest out of their salary, but it's usually no more than 20 percent of the total cost of the plan, and the money is taken out of their salary before taxes are assessed (so the money they spend on health insurance is tax-free). Like I said before -- it's all very complicated.
What are the American insurance rates for a single male who won't see 40 again and doesn't like taking to much risk? Both under the new system and the old system?
This is a difficult question to answer, because the plans are fairly complex.
I'm a male who is not quite 40. I pay about USD $250 per month for health insurance. I'm willing to bet, however, that the level of coverage my insurance gives me is different than what you get in Holland.
For one thing, my insurance only covers 60 percent of most health care costs. I'm personally responsible for the other 40 percent. This also assumes that I'm using doctors and other health care providers who have agreed to my insurer's terms (they are "preferred providers"). My plan allows me to use any doctor I want, even if they are not "preferred"; some plans don't. If I use non-preferred services, however, the rate my insurance pays goes down (I think it still pays half).
There is a hidden savings here also. Doctors tend to bill as much as they can for their services, but the insurance companies dictate how much they will pay for each class of service. It's illegal for doctors to bill insurance companies a different rate from individuals. But in practice, if an insurance company will only pay a certain amount, doctors will usually write off the difference between what they billed and what the insurance company actually allows. They would not do that if they were billing you as an individual. Therefore, if you don't have insurance, the actual amount you'll end up having to pay will be significantly higher. You can often negotiate such bills if you can make the case for financial hardship (which is easy to do -- medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the U.S.) but that's obviously not as easy as to sit back and let your insurer do the negotiating for you.
The insurance also has a "deductible," which means your bill must reach a certain amount before insurance will pay anything. I believe my deductible is $1,700 -- so I must pay $1,700 out of my own pocket in any one calendar year before insurance will pay anything. Really basic services, such as doctor visits, X-rays for broken bones, and things of this nature tend to be exempt from the deductible, though. These things aren't free, but you get them for a flat rate. So a doctor visit with insurance might cost $35; the same visit, without insurance, might cost $170.
Maybe the most important thing with my plan is that it sets a maximum amount that the patient must pay in any calendar year; in my case, I think it's something like $6,500. That might sound like a lot of money, but a friend of mine twisted her ankle on the street, broke it in several places, and by that afternoon she had a hospital bill for $30,000. To me that's completely unmanageable, but $6,500 per calendar year is not.
There are many other factors, such as whether your plan will pay for non-generic drug prescriptions, whether it covers eye care and other types of care, and so on. One of the biggest factors for women is whether their plan covers pregnancy. If a woman got a similar plan to mine at a similar rate, it would not cover pregnancy. If she got pregnant, pretty much every insurer would offer her a plan that does cover it at a significantly higher rate, and she would be able to switch. (In San Francisco, however, the city offers prenatal care and similar services essentially for free.)
Anyway, like I said, the whole thing is very complicated, and there are further options I have not discussed, such as insurance combined with a health savings account. It's too much to go into everything, and even what I have written here is simplified.
I spent a long time weighing different plans and imagining different scenarios in which I might need to file claims against them. The bottom line I came to was: Different plans pay for things in different ways, but unless you can predict exactly what injury or illness you'll get in the future, there's no way to know which one
I know that for instance mortgage is a different thing in the US, in Holland the debt stays with you and if selling the house doesn't cover the debt you get to keep paying, whereas Americans can apparently just abandon the house and walk away, the debt is with the house. That changes things a lot, in Holland loosing your house often results in personal bankruptcy.
You can't legally walk away. The situation in the U.S. is pretty much the same as you describe in Holland, with maybe two differences:
1.) What should happen and what does happen may be different things. In some cases, American mortgages have changed hands so many times that quite literally nobody knows who owns the paper on your house. In the wake of the mortgage crisis of a couple years ago, if you walk away, it might take more than a year for someone to come knock on your front door to find out why you haven't been paying your mortgage. That doesn't absolve you of the debt, but who cares about debt when you don't have to pay the money every month?
2.) Bankruptcy in America is really not so catastrophic a scenario. It can create hardships, making it more difficult for you to obtain credit, but the bankruptcy laws are designed so that bankruptcy doesn't really destroy you financially (what would be the economic purpose of that)? I know several people who filed for bankruptcy at a fairly young age and have since paid their way out of it. In the meantime, life goes on. Donald Trump -- a famous, rich real estate developer -- has filed for bankruptcy several times. So while walking away from a mortgage will probably end with you filing for bankruptcy, so what? Especially if you're in the last 1/3 of your life, maybe in retirement and on fixed income, default and bankruptcy can be strategic decisions.
Suppose you got in two car accidents in two weeks? Is your savings account big enough? If your kid gets sick the following week and has to go to the hospital, now you're a burden on society.
The thing is, we already have universal health care, as many people have pointed out, because if you took your kid to the hospital, the kid would get treated, irrespective of your ability to pay. So we already have a universal health insurance system; it's just the least efficient it can possibly be, because it's completely unregulated, unsupervised, and managed by no one except at the municipality level. All this health bill really does is establish a formal public health insurance system, make the costs explicit, and balance them across every American, instead of the few who choose to participate now.
In my case, they really don't. My down-the-street neighbor and I both subscribe to an Internet-only plan and we both get basic cable on top of it. And $5 is $5.
I'm not sure the "RF filters" even really exist anymore now that cable has gone 100 percent digital. Or if they do, it's not worth it for Comcast to roll a truck out to remove the filters once a customer like me decides that I might as well get basic cable after all. How long will it take for that extra $5 a month I'll be sending Comcast to pay for the cost of sending out the truck a second time -- 18 months?
The "social" aspect is that a certain number of people have to sign up for a deal before the deal becomes active. If a preset limit isn't met, nobody gets the deal. People tend to use social networks such as Facebook to spread the deals and encourage other people to sign up. So Groupon is kind of an adjunct to social networking sites like Facebook in the same sense as Zynga is (Zynga only exists because of Facebook).
There are only 200 people staying within the park, as in camping with sleeping bags and plastic bags for shelter. There are thousands who are participating that are staying elsewhere in the city.
I was being a little snarky, but I'd love to get some kind of real confirmation of that. You said you saw 200 people. You seemed to be saying those people told you there were thousands more. Where are they? None of the videos I've seen seem to indicate thousands of people. We have protests here in the Bay Area, too, so I have a pretty decent idea of what a crowd of thousands of people would look like. What I'm seeing in these videos looks like a few hundred loosely-organized people, most of whom are just sitting around (as opposed to, say, choking the streets in their teeming thousands). Meanwhile, folks are posting photos to Facebook showing the streets filled with people -- which turn out to be Photoshopped. It seems to me that all the hyperbole and rhetoric coming out of the protesters is doing them more harm than good, because it all seems so phony and disingenuous. Since you live in New York, give us your real impression: How does this protest really compare to, say, the St. Patrick's Day Parade?
Excuse the police? Where? O'Donnell calls it "unprovoked police brutality." He calls out the NYPD for "protecting its troublemakers." He says there is "absolutely nothing" in any of the videos that could constitute grounds for arrest. What video were you watching? Or did you even bother?
I'm sorry vocab aside the OP is a troll & is just making more excuses for this kind of behavior
No, I'm sorry... you're acting like a real moron. Is that "vocab" you can understand?
Hi, did you even bother to watch the link? The word is "excoriates." Apparently you don't know what it means. The second sentence in O'Donnell's report was "the troublemakers were carrying pepper spray and guns and were wearing badges."
Before you go calling someone a troll, try to at least understand what they're talking about, especially when they're talking about the same thing as you.
This type of ambiguity could be eliminated if Slashdot would join the rest of the civilized world and use standard case instead of title case for their article names.
What would be another word for "article names"? "Article titles," maybe?
I think religious people can be scientific, but scientific people cannot be religious.
I don't see why not:
A: Here is a black box. When you drop a marble into this hole in the top of the box, some powder comes out of this hole at the bottom, and some water comes out of this hole, and this part of the box over here will light up for a little while. B: What a miracle! A: Yes, quite nice. B: How did the box get here? Who put it here? Who made it? A: The Creator. B: The Creator! A: Yes. B: How does the box work? A: That's for you to find out.
Or: make sure I have all the ingrediants needed for a meal, prepare it, wait for it to finish, eat it, then have to do a bunch of dishes, and then have to deal with leftovers of the same food for the next 3-4 days because its downright hard to cook for one person. Total time expense: a lot.
I hear ya on a lot of this. I still cook because I just like to do it; it makes me feel like a human being compared to what seems like 80 percent of the rest of what I do, which involves staring at a computer screen.
One thing that Changed My Life: I got an apartment with a dishwasher. Seriously, those things are little miracles these days, quiet and highly water/energy efficient. You waste more water doing dishes by hand, almost certainly, and it definitely takes more effort. Imagine being able to cook Thanksgiving dinner for a few friends, clear everything off the counter and tables into the dishwasher and be done with 90 percent of your clean-up in two loads, over a few bottles of wine, and your friends don't have to do anything. Everything really does come out of the dishwasher looking squeaky clean, too, way better than if you washed and dried by hand. I breathe a sigh of thanks every time I run it.
Another thing I acquired more recently is a food processor. These aren't really the God's gift to cooks they pretend to be, but they really can be handy for stuff like chopping up onions, slicing vegetables, making hash browns, grating cheese, etc. It's not that you couldn't do all that by hand, but once you get the hang of the food processor each step is done in like 20 seconds. (It's especially good for the onions, too -- no more tears.) They're also handy for making any kind of sauces or purees, including stuff like salsa and guacamole. And a food processor is also --- and I'm being serious now -- a gadget, which if you're anything like a lot of guys I know, will encourage you to cook more often, just to play with it.
The real hard one to overcome, though, is the waste. Many recipes can be cut in half, but even then you tend to end up with 3-4 servings. Few people I know really enjoy eating the same meal every day, and not everything freezes or even keeps well, so you end up throwing away food. And buying ingredients at the grocery store really isn't all that cheap when you're not thinking in terms of volume. Which is really more cost effective -- a $9 enchilada dinner you get at a restaurant, or the enchiladas you make at home that cost $18 and you end up throwing away a third of it? You might save a few bucks but you might not, especially if you like side dishes. I haven't really found a satisfactory way to solve this problem, unfortunately, other than to find someone to come over for dinner (which, conveniently, can have other benefits -- efficiency!).
Power plants and other such critical installations simply need to start hiring BOFHs.
I think most do. I once met a guy who worked on software for nuclear power plants. He didn't give me many details (probably couldn't and I probably wouldn't have really understood him if he did) but he said the work was important enough that he could potentially screw something up, bad. I think he may have been attached to the Navy or maybe that was just his background; I forget, as it was many years ago now. Anyway, the point is that he made a lot of money and he only really "worked" a few weeks out of the year. No moonlighting; he did one thing and that one thing was all he ever did. Not to mention, I highly doubt anyone would be able to pass all the background checks and psychological exams and gain the security clearances necessary for such a job and not take the work pretty deadly seriously. I suspect, however, that turnover is a problem; the guy I spoke to had an exit plan in mind and I highly doubt most people who gain the necessary experience really plan to make a career in such a stressful field.
So Dreamworks has produced a little over 100 titles, so that would be a 3 billion dollar deal
Netflix has struck a deal strictly with DreamWorks Animation, not DreamWorks as a whole. DreamWorks Animation has produced a total of 22 films. Furthermore, the deal only starts with the films DreamWorks Animation plans to release in 2013. Netflix will not automatically gain access to the studio's back catalog; rather, "certain titles" will be made available "over time" (and then only if Netflix chooses to pay for them). More info here.
I think you mean billion, and I for one think Palm could have been worth it... to somebody. I just don't understand why HP believed itself to be that somebody. Anyone could have predicted how that would turn out. Even if you believed you had a suspicion of what HP's strategy might possibly be, that piece didn't fit into it. Baffling.
I want a titanium or some other metal case on that laptop. I have a plastic one right now, and I melted part of it with pieces falling off.
I have an HP laptop with a metal case (I think it's aluminum). On mine, the two USB ports on the right-hand side are too close together, so you can't use both of them at once. They also seem shoddily made, so they don't fit easily with most cables I've tried -- you feel like you really have to shove them to get them in, and sliding them in and out produces a scraping sound. The touchpad absolutely sucks and has shitty drivers that weren't even available on HP's support site until recently (so if you reformatted the drive to get rid of HP's piles of bloatware without checking first, no touchpad for you). But other than that, hey... I guess it does the job. The problem with consumer laptops is that there are no margins in that market anymore, thanks to netbooks. This one's a 14-incher with a Sandy Bridge Core i3, 4GB RAM, and a 640GB hard drive, and I think it cost around $550 out the door, tax included.
There was a time in which HP had a corporate identity that would have fit well with open source. They made great hardware, mostly for professionals. Now they're just another mish-mash jack of all trades tech company that needs to sell consumer products to a disappearing middle class in order to thrive. It doesn't really stand a chance. The only tech company dependent on selling to consumers that's doing well in the last several years is Apple, because they're selling luxury goods.
I don't think that's true. Maybe that's only the part of HP that you see. HP still has twice Dell's share of the server market, and quarter over quarter it's been pretty much neck-and-neck with IBM. And when HP talks about ditching its PC business, it's not talking about x86 servers; it's just talking about jettisoning the consumer-facing business that you claim it depends on. HP's printer division also sells a lot into businesses (is there even such a thing as a business-class Lexmark?), and believe it or not HP does sell a decent amount of systems/IT management software. What it really wants to do is become a company more like IBM, which reorganized itself around services and consulting in the mid-90s.
So what's your point? No one (with a brain) ever said you could make money working on OSS, giving it away for free, and doing nothing else. If you want to make money directly on software, you have to be proprietary, like MS or Intuit.
Or a hybrid model: Make a server software package, give it away for free under an OSS license, but if you want to use it with an Oracle or DB2 database (for example), you need to buy a proprietary plugin.
Or do what EnterpriseDB does -- it takes PostgreSQL and adds a bunch of features to it, perhaps the most significant being Oracle PL/SQL compatibility (so you can take applications written for Oracle and port them easily to PostgreSQL). EnterpriseDB is proprietary, but obviously it relies 100 percent on PostgreSQL for its underlying database. Recognizing this, EnterpriseDB contributes a ton back to the PostgreSQL project (it "invests in open source"). But from a certain point of view, it's still "just" a proprietary software company, making money from software.
Or create a product where the real benefit to many commercial customers will be to embed it in their own proprietary software, then offer it under a dual license for a fee. (MySQL always made a lot of its revenue from this.)
(BTW, I'm not saying the parent wasn't aware of these examples; I'm just pointing them out.)
Slashdot Mirror
In places where it has gone 100 percent digital, the cable companies are required to carry any channels that are available over-the-air unencrypted. So all of the main broadcast channels plus a few others are available to anyone who has a digital tuner (you don't need a box or card from the cable company). The selection is better, too, because the digital channels make more efficient use of bandwidth. So the local PBS affiliate, for example, actually broadcasts about five digital channels instead of just one analog one.
What people of both parties are pushing is a strange bastardization of privatized socialized healthcare where we pay one rate and virtually everything is covered.
Actually, I don't know what newspapers you've been reading, but unless I'm misunderstanding you I'm pretty certain nobody in either party is pushing that.
Checkups aren't a risk: I have no desire to insure myself against checkups.
I don't even do annual checkups. I don't think they've been shown to have any significant preventative effects for young men. On the other hand, most things you go to a doctor for at a young age are just simple doctor visits, for things like a sinus infection. Those aren't generally billed any differently than a checkup is; they're just "doctor visits." If the doctor discovers something unusual, however, you may be sent somewhere for further tests. Thus, the whole process should be insured. It's unforeseen medical treatment and that's precisely what you get insurance for.
Replying to my own post: I should add, I'm talking about insurance rates because you asked what insurance costs. I am self employed and therefore buy insurance as an individual. Most people in America get their insurance through their employer. That means they usually get a better level of coverage than individuals who buy insurance on their own, but their out of pocket expense is less. Their employer pays for the majority of their insurance premiums (in addition to their salary). They must pay the rest out of their salary, but it's usually no more than 20 percent of the total cost of the plan, and the money is taken out of their salary before taxes are assessed (so the money they spend on health insurance is tax-free). Like I said before -- it's all very complicated.
What are the American insurance rates for a single male who won't see 40 again and doesn't like taking to much risk? Both under the new system and the old system?
This is a difficult question to answer, because the plans are fairly complex.
I'm a male who is not quite 40. I pay about USD $250 per month for health insurance. I'm willing to bet, however, that the level of coverage my insurance gives me is different than what you get in Holland.
For one thing, my insurance only covers 60 percent of most health care costs. I'm personally responsible for the other 40 percent. This also assumes that I'm using doctors and other health care providers who have agreed to my insurer's terms (they are "preferred providers"). My plan allows me to use any doctor I want, even if they are not "preferred"; some plans don't. If I use non-preferred services, however, the rate my insurance pays goes down (I think it still pays half).
There is a hidden savings here also. Doctors tend to bill as much as they can for their services, but the insurance companies dictate how much they will pay for each class of service. It's illegal for doctors to bill insurance companies a different rate from individuals. But in practice, if an insurance company will only pay a certain amount, doctors will usually write off the difference between what they billed and what the insurance company actually allows. They would not do that if they were billing you as an individual. Therefore, if you don't have insurance, the actual amount you'll end up having to pay will be significantly higher. You can often negotiate such bills if you can make the case for financial hardship (which is easy to do -- medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the U.S.) but that's obviously not as easy as to sit back and let your insurer do the negotiating for you.
The insurance also has a "deductible," which means your bill must reach a certain amount before insurance will pay anything. I believe my deductible is $1,700 -- so I must pay $1,700 out of my own pocket in any one calendar year before insurance will pay anything. Really basic services, such as doctor visits, X-rays for broken bones, and things of this nature tend to be exempt from the deductible, though. These things aren't free, but you get them for a flat rate. So a doctor visit with insurance might cost $35; the same visit, without insurance, might cost $170.
Maybe the most important thing with my plan is that it sets a maximum amount that the patient must pay in any calendar year; in my case, I think it's something like $6,500. That might sound like a lot of money, but a friend of mine twisted her ankle on the street, broke it in several places, and by that afternoon she had a hospital bill for $30,000. To me that's completely unmanageable, but $6,500 per calendar year is not.
There are many other factors, such as whether your plan will pay for non-generic drug prescriptions, whether it covers eye care and other types of care, and so on. One of the biggest factors for women is whether their plan covers pregnancy. If a woman got a similar plan to mine at a similar rate, it would not cover pregnancy. If she got pregnant, pretty much every insurer would offer her a plan that does cover it at a significantly higher rate, and she would be able to switch. (In San Francisco, however, the city offers prenatal care and similar services essentially for free.)
Anyway, like I said, the whole thing is very complicated, and there are further options I have not discussed, such as insurance combined with a health savings account. It's too much to go into everything, and even what I have written here is simplified.
I spent a long time weighing different plans and imagining different scenarios in which I might need to file claims against them. The bottom line I came to was: Different plans pay for things in different ways, but unless you can predict exactly what injury or illness you'll get in the future, there's no way to know which one
I know that for instance mortgage is a different thing in the US, in Holland the debt stays with you and if selling the house doesn't cover the debt you get to keep paying, whereas Americans can apparently just abandon the house and walk away, the debt is with the house. That changes things a lot, in Holland loosing your house often results in personal bankruptcy.
You can't legally walk away. The situation in the U.S. is pretty much the same as you describe in Holland, with maybe two differences:
1.) What should happen and what does happen may be different things. In some cases, American mortgages have changed hands so many times that quite literally nobody knows who owns the paper on your house. In the wake of the mortgage crisis of a couple years ago, if you walk away, it might take more than a year for someone to come knock on your front door to find out why you haven't been paying your mortgage. That doesn't absolve you of the debt, but who cares about debt when you don't have to pay the money every month?
2.) Bankruptcy in America is really not so catastrophic a scenario. It can create hardships, making it more difficult for you to obtain credit, but the bankruptcy laws are designed so that bankruptcy doesn't really destroy you financially (what would be the economic purpose of that)? I know several people who filed for bankruptcy at a fairly young age and have since paid their way out of it. In the meantime, life goes on. Donald Trump -- a famous, rich real estate developer -- has filed for bankruptcy several times. So while walking away from a mortgage will probably end with you filing for bankruptcy, so what? Especially if you're in the last 1/3 of your life, maybe in retirement and on fixed income, default and bankruptcy can be strategic decisions.
Suppose you got in two car accidents in two weeks? Is your savings account big enough? If your kid gets sick the following week and has to go to the hospital, now you're a burden on society.
The thing is, we already have universal health care, as many people have pointed out, because if you took your kid to the hospital, the kid would get treated, irrespective of your ability to pay. So we already have a universal health insurance system; it's just the least efficient it can possibly be, because it's completely unregulated, unsupervised, and managed by no one except at the municipality level. All this health bill really does is establish a formal public health insurance system, make the costs explicit, and balance them across every American, instead of the few who choose to participate now.
In my case, they really don't. My down-the-street neighbor and I both subscribe to an Internet-only plan and we both get basic cable on top of it. And $5 is $5.
I'm not sure the "RF filters" even really exist anymore now that cable has gone 100 percent digital. Or if they do, it's not worth it for Comcast to roll a truck out to remove the filters once a customer like me decides that I might as well get basic cable after all. How long will it take for that extra $5 a month I'll be sending Comcast to pay for the cost of sending out the truck a second time -- 18 months?
I wasn't going to say it. ;-)
It's really tough to make a case when you don't have a set of three.
OK, then: The ongoing meltdown of MySpace, which was bought by News Corp in 2005 for $580 million, and was sold in 2011 for $35 million.
The "social" aspect is that a certain number of people have to sign up for a deal before the deal becomes active. If a preset limit isn't met, nobody gets the deal. People tend to use social networks such as Facebook to spread the deals and encourage other people to sign up. So Groupon is kind of an adjunct to social networking sites like Facebook in the same sense as Zynga is (Zynga only exists because of Facebook).
So far, Acrobat Create PDF 1.1 is incompatible.
There are only 200 people staying within the park, as in camping with sleeping bags and plastic bags for shelter. There are thousands who are participating that are staying elsewhere in the city.
I was being a little snarky, but I'd love to get some kind of real confirmation of that. You said you saw 200 people. You seemed to be saying those people told you there were thousands more. Where are they? None of the videos I've seen seem to indicate thousands of people. We have protests here in the Bay Area, too, so I have a pretty decent idea of what a crowd of thousands of people would look like. What I'm seeing in these videos looks like a few hundred loosely-organized people, most of whom are just sitting around (as opposed to, say, choking the streets in their teeming thousands). Meanwhile, folks are posting photos to Facebook showing the streets filled with people -- which turn out to be Photoshopped. It seems to me that all the hyperbole and rhetoric coming out of the protesters is doing them more harm than good, because it all seems so phony and disingenuous. Since you live in New York, give us your real impression: How does this protest really compare to, say, the St. Patrick's Day Parade?
The video berates the protesters & excused the police saying the individuals were dangerous and carrying weapons.
No. It doesn't. You're not just a moron, you're a troll.
Excuse the police? Where? O'Donnell calls it "unprovoked police brutality." He calls out the NYPD for "protecting its troublemakers." He says there is "absolutely nothing" in any of the videos that could constitute grounds for arrest. What video were you watching? Or did you even bother?
I'm sorry vocab aside the OP is a troll & is just making more excuses for this kind of behavior
No, I'm sorry... you're acting like a real moron. Is that "vocab" you can understand?
The estimates of about 200 people staying in the park are likely accurate.
Wait, I thought the /. summary said "the tenth consecutive day that thousands of protesters..."?
Hi, did you even bother to watch the link? The word is "excoriates." Apparently you don't know what it means. The second sentence in O'Donnell's report was "the troublemakers were carrying pepper spray and guns and were wearing badges."
Before you go calling someone a troll, try to at least understand what they're talking about, especially when they're talking about the same thing as you.
This type of ambiguity could be eliminated if Slashdot would join the rest of the civilized world and use standard case instead of title case for their article names.
What would be another word for "article names"? "Article titles," maybe?
I think religious people can be scientific, but scientific people cannot be religious.
I don't see why not:
A: Here is a black box. When you drop a marble into this hole in the top of the box, some powder comes out of this hole at the bottom, and some water comes out of this hole, and this part of the box over here will light up for a little while.
B: What a miracle!
A: Yes, quite nice.
B: How did the box get here? Who put it here? Who made it?
A: The Creator.
B: The Creator!
A: Yes.
B: How does the box work?
A: That's for you to find out.
Or: make sure I have all the ingrediants needed for a meal, prepare it, wait for it to finish, eat it, then have to do a bunch of dishes, and then have to deal with leftovers of the same food for the next 3-4 days because its downright hard to cook for one person. Total time expense: a lot.
I hear ya on a lot of this. I still cook because I just like to do it; it makes me feel like a human being compared to what seems like 80 percent of the rest of what I do, which involves staring at a computer screen.
One thing that Changed My Life: I got an apartment with a dishwasher. Seriously, those things are little miracles these days, quiet and highly water/energy efficient. You waste more water doing dishes by hand, almost certainly, and it definitely takes more effort. Imagine being able to cook Thanksgiving dinner for a few friends, clear everything off the counter and tables into the dishwasher and be done with 90 percent of your clean-up in two loads, over a few bottles of wine, and your friends don't have to do anything. Everything really does come out of the dishwasher looking squeaky clean, too, way better than if you washed and dried by hand. I breathe a sigh of thanks every time I run it.
Another thing I acquired more recently is a food processor. These aren't really the God's gift to cooks they pretend to be, but they really can be handy for stuff like chopping up onions, slicing vegetables, making hash browns, grating cheese, etc. It's not that you couldn't do all that by hand, but once you get the hang of the food processor each step is done in like 20 seconds. (It's especially good for the onions, too -- no more tears.) They're also handy for making any kind of sauces or purees, including stuff like salsa and guacamole. And a food processor is also --- and I'm being serious now -- a gadget, which if you're anything like a lot of guys I know, will encourage you to cook more often, just to play with it.
The real hard one to overcome, though, is the waste. Many recipes can be cut in half, but even then you tend to end up with 3-4 servings. Few people I know really enjoy eating the same meal every day, and not everything freezes or even keeps well, so you end up throwing away food. And buying ingredients at the grocery store really isn't all that cheap when you're not thinking in terms of volume. Which is really more cost effective -- a $9 enchilada dinner you get at a restaurant, or the enchiladas you make at home that cost $18 and you end up throwing away a third of it? You might save a few bucks but you might not, especially if you like side dishes. I haven't really found a satisfactory way to solve this problem, unfortunately, other than to find someone to come over for dinner (which, conveniently, can have other benefits -- efficiency!).
Power plants and other such critical installations simply need to start hiring BOFHs.
I think most do. I once met a guy who worked on software for nuclear power plants. He didn't give me many details (probably couldn't and I probably wouldn't have really understood him if he did) but he said the work was important enough that he could potentially screw something up, bad. I think he may have been attached to the Navy or maybe that was just his background; I forget, as it was many years ago now. Anyway, the point is that he made a lot of money and he only really "worked" a few weeks out of the year. No moonlighting; he did one thing and that one thing was all he ever did. Not to mention, I highly doubt anyone would be able to pass all the background checks and psychological exams and gain the security clearances necessary for such a job and not take the work pretty deadly seriously. I suspect, however, that turnover is a problem; the guy I spoke to had an exit plan in mind and I highly doubt most people who gain the necessary experience really plan to make a career in such a stressful field.
So Dreamworks has produced a little over 100 titles, so that would be a 3 billion dollar deal
Netflix has struck a deal strictly with DreamWorks Animation, not DreamWorks as a whole. DreamWorks Animation has produced a total of 22 films. Furthermore, the deal only starts with the films DreamWorks Animation plans to release in 2013. Netflix will not automatically gain access to the studio's back catalog; rather, "certain titles" will be made available "over time" (and then only if Netflix chooses to pay for them). More info here.
But seriously, 1.2 million for Palm?
I think you mean billion, and I for one think Palm could have been worth it ... to somebody. I just don't understand why HP believed itself to be that somebody. Anyone could have predicted how that would turn out. Even if you believed you had a suspicion of what HP's strategy might possibly be, that piece didn't fit into it. Baffling.
I want a titanium or some other metal case on that laptop. I have a plastic one right now, and I melted part of it with pieces falling off.
I have an HP laptop with a metal case (I think it's aluminum). On mine, the two USB ports on the right-hand side are too close together, so you can't use both of them at once. They also seem shoddily made, so they don't fit easily with most cables I've tried -- you feel like you really have to shove them to get them in, and sliding them in and out produces a scraping sound. The touchpad absolutely sucks and has shitty drivers that weren't even available on HP's support site until recently (so if you reformatted the drive to get rid of HP's piles of bloatware without checking first, no touchpad for you). But other than that, hey... I guess it does the job. The problem with consumer laptops is that there are no margins in that market anymore, thanks to netbooks. This one's a 14-incher with a Sandy Bridge Core i3, 4GB RAM, and a 640GB hard drive, and I think it cost around $550 out the door, tax included.
There was a time in which HP had a corporate identity that would have fit well with open source. They made great hardware, mostly for professionals. Now they're just another mish-mash jack of all trades tech company that needs to sell consumer products to a disappearing middle class in order to thrive. It doesn't really stand a chance. The only tech company dependent on selling to consumers that's doing well in the last several years is Apple, because they're selling luxury goods.
I don't think that's true. Maybe that's only the part of HP that you see. HP still has twice Dell's share of the server market, and quarter over quarter it's been pretty much neck-and-neck with IBM. And when HP talks about ditching its PC business, it's not talking about x86 servers; it's just talking about jettisoning the consumer-facing business that you claim it depends on. HP's printer division also sells a lot into businesses (is there even such a thing as a business-class Lexmark?), and believe it or not HP does sell a decent amount of systems/IT management software. What it really wants to do is become a company more like IBM, which reorganized itself around services and consulting in the mid-90s.
So what's your point? No one (with a brain) ever said you could make money working on OSS, giving it away for free, and doing nothing else. If you want to make money directly on software, you have to be proprietary, like MS or Intuit.
Or a hybrid model: Make a server software package, give it away for free under an OSS license, but if you want to use it with an Oracle or DB2 database (for example), you need to buy a proprietary plugin.
Or do what EnterpriseDB does -- it takes PostgreSQL and adds a bunch of features to it, perhaps the most significant being Oracle PL/SQL compatibility (so you can take applications written for Oracle and port them easily to PostgreSQL). EnterpriseDB is proprietary, but obviously it relies 100 percent on PostgreSQL for its underlying database. Recognizing this, EnterpriseDB contributes a ton back to the PostgreSQL project (it "invests in open source"). But from a certain point of view, it's still "just" a proprietary software company, making money from software.
Or create a product where the real benefit to many commercial customers will be to embed it in their own proprietary software, then offer it under a dual license for a fee. (MySQL always made a lot of its revenue from this.)
(BTW, I'm not saying the parent wasn't aware of these examples; I'm just pointing them out.)