"Congratulations Mr and Mrs Jones, your 6-month foetal scans have been analysed. Your daughter is doing just fine, good health, no abnormalities. Her brain scans indicate she would be well suited for a career in law, so you might want to get your application in to the Legal Eagles Day Care Center. They have good play programs there, and their reference will help your daughter get the best chance for acceptance at Juris Elementary School. Don't delay, competition is fierce!"
...was the discovery, 5 metres away from the mammoth, of an inscribed granite slate. Archaeologists were set to work on translating the inscriptions, and came up with a bulletin with the headline:
Climate Change A "Myth" Coming Ice Age a "Fabrication" -- Energy Company CEO
In my day, I saved up for a year, delivering papers in the rain, to buy a board for a video display that gave me 40 columns x 16 rows. And that felt like sheer luxury!
Before that, I just had a 2 x 7-segment display, showing the hex codes of the characters as they came out of the UART at 110bits/s, and I used to translate them from the ASCII in my head in real time. As for input, I used to write it down on a piece of paper, then toggle it in with binary switches.
The kids these days have lines of 160 chars or longer. And they're still not happy, they're begging their parents for wider and wider displays. Soon you'll need a 30-inch wide display with a maximised editor window just to see the source lines without wrapping. But at least the kids will be able to say "7 lines? You think that's cool? I did it in 1!"
Also, I don't think insurance companies are inherently evil. In the confines of the system we currently have, they are quite a good thing. They allow many people to pool their resources together to protect individuals from loss. However, I'm biased in my opinion because I plan to work for one.
Which makes it crucial for you to see Michael Moore's 'SiCKO'. It's a huge eye-opener. He says very early on that 'In America, there are 50 million people with no health insurance, but this film is not about them... this film is about the 250 million who are insured...
The film has numerous case histories of people who have died waiting for treatment, because they were delayed by insurance red tape. It also shows how many loopholes are built into the insurance contracts, so that payouts can be (and so often are) denied for even the most trivial and unrelated reasons. One highlight is a doctor testifying at a trial about how she was rewarded lucratively for finding ways to deny treatment for any reason.
If you're training as an actuary, you have my admiration. That's a field that calls for some hard-core mathematical talent, and you can look forward to a job with lots of big computers and lots of interesting scenarios to explore. But you definitely need to see this film, so you can make a better informed choice about which particular field of insurance you go in to. If you've got a heart, I can't see you wanting to get in to health insurance after seeing 'SiCKO' - why not look for a field where you're not at risk of cutting off life-saving help to innocent people. Best yet, pick a field with relatively low fraud rates - the lower the fraud rates, the lower the risk of shafting innocent folks.
I concur with that. I saw it last night. SiCKO is a powerful documentary, in a style much matured from his earlier works. If it isn't nominated for an Oscar, I'd be surprised - even given his rant^H^H^H^Hacceptance speech for his Bowling For Columbine oscar.
What's especially powerful is how the film touches on the psychological effects of health insecurity - a much more docile and unprovokable population, easier to keep in their place.
It was especially sickening to see how the health insurance companies regard any payout as a 'loss', even if the customer is a net cash cow, and how the companies keep M.D.s on 6-figure retainers purely for the purpose of denying people care, based on the most trivial contractual technicalities. Any system where people's incomes and careers benefit from effectively sentencing honest citizens to an early grave can only be labelled as impossibly corrupt.
Newspapers will soon be reporting a strange phenomenon - parolees from a certain prison having unexplainably large penises and unexplainably firm erections, unexplainable bank accounts with millions of dollars, and unexplainably high-income jobs working from home for offshore employers.
If we look into the recent history of Latin America, we would see that major conflicts tend to concentrate people in urban areas rather than disperse them to rural areas. Whether this would still be true for diseases or nuclear warfare is unknown.
I can't speak for everyone here, but if there was a bird flu epidemic going down in the city, I'd certainly be looking to get out to the country for a while.
Oh my... this statement is killing me:
For the first time in human history, the earth's population is more urban than rural. I really do not see that there'll be a second time when the earth's population will be come more urban than rural
Could happen. For instance, bird-flu or limited nuclear warfare, which decimates urban populations with much less impact on rural populations. This would leave the earth with more rural than urban people. Then, when the urban population bounces back, the 'earth's population will become more urban than rural' for the *second* time.
Some weeks/months later, wake up at 3:45am to a crowd of heavily armed people in dark clothes and ski masks, with 'SEC' in big white letters on their backs, walking out with your computer, bank statements etc and leaving a warrant on the kitchen table.
Depends, of course, on the ethical position of the employer. 'World's largest financial company' brings up images of shareholders creaming off the sweat of the employees, and creaming off some morally dodgy investments as well.
If they're a completely ethical company, confining themselves to ethical investments, with top-level consideration for their staff's welfare, completely honest and up-front in their marketing and treatment of clients/customers, then I'd be less inclined to screw them. But if they're the average fscktard employer and corporation run by a pack of MBAs with broomsticks up their back passages, constantly getting more value from their staff than they pay for, and screwing their client base as far as they can get away with, then IMHO they're Fair Game (TM)
Not necessarily. I made a complete switch away from IT 12 years ago (this month), and haven't looked back. Here are some keys to success:
Re-organise your lifestyle drastically (and preferably quickly) to slash your financial outgoings - the lower your financial needs, the greater your freedom!
Pay off any non-mortgage debt ASAP, preferably yesterday - keep only one Visa/Mastercard, with a low credit limit
In your remaining days in the IT trade, save as much money as you can
Only work as you feel able, feel free to slack off here and there without guilt, stall your bosses for time if/when they start questioning your performance
If you have a sickness plan in your job, consider feigning some symptoms to prolong the paycheque
When you get totally fed up with going into the office, tender your resignation on health grounds, and seek the best severance package you can get
Sit at home for 2 weeks, take some long baths, keep intoxicants (booze, pot etc) and 'comfort foods' to an absolute minimum - feel your feelings - maybe take some long walks or hikes as well
Write a list of things you really enjoy doing - no matter how weird or wild
Choose about 3 items from that list, and for each item, ask yourself:
How can I mak an income from doing this?
What (affordable) training could I get to improve my earning potential doing this?
Is there a market for this? If not, could I create a market?
Could I sustain my interest in this area long enough to pay my training/startup costs, have some fun and save money?
When you feel ready and inspired, get off your butt and persue one or more of these options
I am an Australian expat, resident for some years in New Zealand, and have broken no laws of this land.
But New Zealand has an extradition treaty with China.
I've done some work - totally within New Zealand - on anonymous publishing and encryption software, and shared it freely with the world. What I've done is totally legal here, but it's likely I've infringed on numerous sections of the Chinese criminal code.
So theoretically, the Chinese Govt could file a request to the New Zealand government for my extradition. The only thing that stops them is that my part in developing this software has been pretty small, and likely hasn't presented a huge obstacle to domestic Chinese law enforcement. I'm pretty small fry. But if any of my code, for instance, gave Falun Gong or pro-democracy protestors a huge advantage in concealing their activities from the Chinese authorities, I could be looking at a long holiday at the Beijing Hilton:(
Here in the west, studies have suggested that people who don't watch/read news regularly tend to be happier and healthier. Here in the west, most of the news is negative. Major newspapers I've read tend to average up to 1 death story per news page, and most TV news programmes have at least one death/violence story per bulletin.
This might be an popular position, but I feel that there could be some good in the '50% good news' requirement. It could have an uplifting effect on a population. If a newspaper really wants to cover a given amount of negative material, they can do so, just print more pages, and find enough good news to balance it out and meet quota.
But as for rules requiring no mention of opposition politicians, or perception of the US as an enemy state, that is something I do find completely unacceptable.
So many website devs are pwn3d by Microsoft, by virtue of habit and the platforms they've trained on.
What more can you expect when the majority of website development courses (and tertiary courses in general) run Windows workstations, and teach students with Windows applications. Get 'em young, get 'em into the groove. We all tend to be creatures of habit.
I did a tertiary certificate course last year and was told that using OpenOffice.org for in-class assessments was strictly forbidden - it was MSOffice or an F grade.
As the Jesuits used to say: Give me your child till he is 6, then you can have him after that
If only people and their elected respresentatives in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, as well as other US states were as feisty about their privacy, then the real thrust of the 9/11 attacks would be rendered null and void. As it is, bin Laden (if alive) and his crew must be guffawing about how they've destroyed so much of that 'decadent infidel regime' in the west that also goes by the name of 'freedom'.
I see from TFA that they're shitting themselves at the prospect of widespread drive-level encryption. They console themselves with the fact that only the high-end Vista versions support BitLocker.
But in the end, encryption offers only limited protection. If some well-resourced hostile authority wants to take you down, there's endless options for framing you up. For instance, they could mess with your ISP's logs to fabricate http hits to k1dd13 pr0n sites, or infect your box with a bot that hits such sites on your behalf, which will cause the hits without messing with the ISP's logs...
Any banning of the Sheik Feiz DVDs will only boost their popularity amongst disgruntled western suburbs muslim youth. Illegality increases desirability. And the 'cheap dvd burner' genie has already escaped from the bottle.
What's needed to counter this is not repression - "repress a religion, and it will flourish" (Frank Herbert), but a social outreach campaign to seek to discover why these pissed-off young westies are so easy to reach, and how to entice them into other less destructive outlets for their energies.
Slashdot Mirror
"Congratulations Mr and Mrs Jones, your 6-month foetal scans have been analysed. Your daughter is doing just fine, good health, no abnormalities. Her brain scans indicate she would be well suited for a career in law, so you might want to get your application in to the Legal Eagles Day Care Center. They have good play programs there, and their reference will help your daughter get the best chance for acceptance at Juris Elementary School. Don't delay, competition is fierce!"
...Darl McBride's arraignment on numerous charges.
Agreed - on TFA I was hoping to see the 'PHP4 to Python' migration guide
...for these disks. Will need 10GB for the movie itself, and 490GB for the DRM software.
80 columns? That's all anyone needs.
In my day, I saved up for a year, delivering papers in the rain, to buy a board for a video display that gave me 40 columns x 16 rows. And that felt like sheer luxury!
Before that, I just had a 2 x 7-segment display, showing the hex codes of the characters as they came out of the UART at 110bits/s, and I used to translate them from the ASCII in my head in real time. As for input, I used to write it down on a piece of paper, then toggle it in with binary switches.
The kids these days have lines of 160 chars or longer. And they're still not happy, they're begging their parents for wider and wider displays. Soon you'll need a 30-inch wide display with a maximised editor window just to see the source lines without wrapping. But at least the kids will be able to say "7 lines? You think that's cool? I did it in 1!"
Also, I don't think insurance companies are inherently evil. In the confines of the system we currently have, they are quite a good thing. They allow many people to pool their resources together to protect individuals from loss. However, I'm biased in my opinion because I plan to work for one.
Which makes it crucial for you to see Michael Moore's 'SiCKO'. It's a huge eye-opener. He says very early on that 'In America, there are 50 million people with no health insurance, but this film is not about them... this film is about the 250 million who are insured...
The film has numerous case histories of people who have died waiting for treatment, because they were delayed by insurance red tape. It also shows how many loopholes are built into the insurance contracts, so that payouts can be (and so often are) denied for even the most trivial and unrelated reasons. One highlight is a doctor testifying at a trial about how she was rewarded lucratively for finding ways to deny treatment for any reason.
If you're training as an actuary, you have my admiration. That's a field that calls for some hard-core mathematical talent, and you can look forward to a job with lots of big computers and lots of interesting scenarios to explore. But you definitely need to see this film, so you can make a better informed choice about which particular field of insurance you go in to. If you've got a heart, I can't see you wanting to get in to health insurance after seeing 'SiCKO' - why not look for a field where you're not at risk of cutting off life-saving help to innocent people. Best yet, pick a field with relatively low fraud rates - the lower the fraud rates, the lower the risk of shafting innocent folks.
I concur with that. I saw it last night. SiCKO is a powerful documentary, in a style much matured from his earlier works.
If it isn't nominated for an Oscar, I'd be surprised - even given his rant^H^H^H^Hacceptance speech for his Bowling For Columbine oscar.
What's especially powerful is how the film touches on the psychological effects of health insecurity - a much more docile and unprovokable population, easier to keep in their place.
It was especially sickening to see how the health insurance companies regard any payout as a 'loss', even if the customer is a net cash cow, and how the companies keep M.D.s on 6-figure retainers purely for the purpose of denying people care, based on the most trivial contractual technicalities. Any system where people's incomes and careers benefit from effectively sentencing honest citizens to an early grave can only be labelled as impossibly corrupt.
Newspapers will soon be reporting a strange phenomenon - parolees from a certain prison having unexplainably large penises and unexplainably firm erections, unexplainable bank accounts with millions of dollars, and unexplainably high-income jobs working from home for offshore employers.
Could happen. For instance, bird-flu or limited nuclear warfare, which decimates urban populations with much less impact on rural populations. This would leave the earth with more rural than urban people. Then, when the urban population bounces back, the 'earth's population will become more urban than rural' for the *second* time.
> I think you're getting your law enforcement agencies confused with ninjas or terrorists.
These days, what's the real difference?
Live in peace with your new-found profits.
Some weeks/months later, wake up at 3:45am to a crowd of heavily armed people in dark clothes and ski masks, with 'SEC' in big white letters on their backs, walking out with your computer, bank statements etc and leaving a warrant on the kitchen table.
If they're a completely ethical company, confining themselves to ethical investments, with top-level consideration for their staff's welfare, completely honest and up-front in their marketing and treatment of clients/customers, then I'd be less inclined to screw them. But if they're the average fscktard employer and corporation run by a pack of MBAs with broomsticks up their back passages, constantly getting more value from their staff than they pay for, and screwing their client base as far as they can get away with, then IMHO they're Fair Game (TM)
I am an Australian expat, resident for some years in New Zealand, and have broken no laws of this land.
:(
But New Zealand has an extradition treaty with China.
I've done some work - totally within New Zealand - on anonymous publishing and encryption software, and shared it freely with the world. What I've done is totally legal here, but it's likely I've infringed on numerous sections of the Chinese criminal code.
So theoretically, the Chinese Govt could file a request to the New Zealand government for my extradition. The only thing that stops them is that my part in developing this software has been pretty small, and likely hasn't presented a huge obstacle to domestic Chinese law enforcement. I'm pretty small fry. But if any of my code, for instance, gave Falun Gong or pro-democracy protestors a huge advantage in concealing their activities from the Chinese authorities, I could be looking at a long holiday at the Beijing Hilton
Yep, looks like I have freedom of speech. For now, anyway.
Here in the west, studies have suggested that people who don't watch/read news regularly tend to be happier and healthier. Here in the west, most of the news is negative. Major newspapers I've read tend to average up to 1 death story per news page, and most TV news programmes have at least one death/violence story per bulletin.
This might be an popular position, but I feel that there could be some good in the '50% good news' requirement. It could have an uplifting effect on a population. If a newspaper really wants to cover a given amount of negative material, they can do so, just print more pages, and find enough good news to balance it out and meet quota.
But as for rules requiring no mention of opposition politicians, or perception of the US as an enemy state, that is something I do find completely unacceptable.
Yeah right
That'll work
So many website devs are pwn3d by Microsoft, by virtue of habit and the platforms they've trained on.
What more can you expect when the majority of website development courses (and tertiary courses in general) run Windows workstations, and teach students with Windows applications. Get 'em young, get 'em into the groove. We all tend to be creatures of habit.
I did a tertiary certificate course last year and was told that using OpenOffice.org for in-class assessments was strictly forbidden - it was MSOffice or an F grade.
As the Jesuits used to say: Give me your child till he is 6, then you can have him after that
If only people and their elected respresentatives in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, as well as other US states were as feisty about their privacy, then the real thrust of the 9/11 attacks would be rendered null and void. As it is, bin Laden (if alive) and his crew must be guffawing about how they've destroyed so much of that 'decadent infidel regime' in the west that also goes by the name of 'freedom'.
I see from TFA that they're shitting themselves at the prospect of widespread drive-level encryption. They console themselves with the fact that only the high-end Vista versions support BitLocker.
But in the end, encryption offers only limited protection. If some well-resourced hostile authority wants to take you down, there's endless options for framing you up. For instance, they could mess with your ISP's logs to fabricate http hits to k1dd13 pr0n sites, or infect your box with a bot that hits such sites on your behalf, which will cause the hits without messing with the ISP's logs...
Any banning of the Sheik Feiz DVDs will only boost their popularity amongst disgruntled western suburbs muslim youth. Illegality increases desirability. And the 'cheap dvd burner' genie has already escaped from the bottle.
What's needed to counter this is not repression - "repress a religion, and it will flourish" (Frank Herbert), but a social outreach campaign to seek to discover why these pissed-off young westies are so easy to reach, and how to entice them into other less destructive outlets for their energies.