That is a good point. Plus, we have actually been using a lot of our own supply. Despite major investment in exploration there is simply not a lot of oil in the US left (except for the tar sand which will be impossible to be used practically, which is why no one has wanted to use it, its just to hard to extract and costly to produce). Actual liquid oil supplies are simply not there and fully exploiting these would probably lower gas prices a few cents and do nothing to make the US energy independant. The idea that there are vast pools of oil is a republican fantasy made up by its oil company puppetmasters. its not there.
You are probably wrong and it shows your lack of education to think that. You somehow think that no one has been looking for oil. The fact is, geologists have pretty much been looking evrywhere for it and the possibility that there could be another very large discovery that could push back peak oil significantly is not that great. Despite increased investment on oil discovery, we are seeing a downward trend on discovery, not because we are not looking, because its not there. The US saw increases in oil exploration in the 80s, oil production which hit peak 1970 continued to decline like nothing happened. Of course there will be more discoveries, the point of peak oil is decreased volume, discoveries wont be able to maintain the supply.
Except its all tar sand of which there is really no economically viable way to mine (in a significant and quick way). Most experts have dismissed the idea that this will circumvent peak oil as the production would not be enough and the environmental effects are too great. The tar sands also produce twice as much CO2. Its an environmental nightmare and to promote this as a solution when there is concern of global mass extinction due to CO2 is absurd!.
I certainly agree. Every time we hear this NoSQL arguments and all of the disinformation from people who don't know what they are talking about, apparently dont know anything about SQL or relational databases, or dont use them properly. There is nothing in particular about SQL that is inefficient. In fact, it offers lots of opportunity to really speed things up. The multicolumn lookup on SQL does not slow down the speed of a single column lookup, so you get added benefit over a single column "nonsql" db without a downside. NonSQL brings back problems that were solved by SQL, its a regression, and without any valid reason.
It is nearly impossible in many areas of the country to avoid owning a car, due to the car centered culture and the lack of alternatives. If we had public transportation systems that worked well and more bike and pedestrian oriented cities, you could get by without it. Democrats have always pushed for more development of public transportation which would also help reduce energy consumption but as usual it is opposed to republicans who recieve donations from the oil companies.
As I said before, if you feel that saving lives of the poor is less important than introducing a reasonable, ability to pay tax rate on the rich which they can comfortably afford, your priorities are mixed up and you seem to have little regard for human life. Some of us actually have some compassion and believe in helping those who are less fortunate, and that those who have taken so much from society, the super rich who have massively exploited the working class, can afford to pay for it. As for the difference between robbing people, with taxes this is done under the law and with democratic representation, and the ethics and legality of ability to pay income adjusted taxes on those who can afford it to promote the common good are well established. In most cases, those who we are taxing have already stolen their money from the working people through their capitalist exploitation of workers in their corporations. Not one billionaire has earned a majority of their money from the work of their own hands, but through the labour of other persons who they have enslaved.
As far as socialised health care, these systems have been proven with multiple studies by the WHO and the Commonwealth Fund to improve outcomes, increase life expectancy and preserve human health, and that the US system consistently delivers less than those systems, despite costing twice as much as any other health care system in the world. I know some studies put out by conservative organisations have tried to distort the facts, most of the studies which try to portray the private US health care system in a positive light have been proven inaccurate and discredited. A majority of the reliable independant studies show a health care system that is vastly wasteful and inefficient under the free market capitalist system (massive exploitation by wealthy elites of the working poor, geared towards consolidating wealth and power) as it is in the US and socialised systems in other countries are far more effective. By all measures we have seen validation after validation that the conservative ideology is wrong, that in fact small government leads to chronic instability and a collapsing society due to the selfishness and greed that it unleashes that rapes and pillages to enrich a few. We have tried providing health care with corporations and we have seen over 40 million without health care and one of the most wasteful and ineffective health care systems in the world with great inequalities in coverage. We have seen this with the collapse of the financial system with deregulation, brought on by banks greed and foolishness with the lack of government oversight.
Conservatives like to blame everything on government, but to say government cannot do anything right is an ideology, not bnased on any facts, in fact the era of deregulation under bush and the disintegration of the economy, the failures of our capitalist, elite centered private health care system, is an example of that. Conservative policies over the last decade have wrecked our economy and left millions unemployed.
To answer another part of your question. The health care for the poor will be paid for by taxes on the super wealthy. I consider it far more important to save lives of the poor and treat their condition rather than to make sure a wealthy elite can afford another mansion. The taxes on the wealthy are going to leave more than enough to enjoy a very high standard of living, more than which is known to 99% of the population of this planet. If you think that people should eb allowed to die because they are poor so some rich elite can purchase another yacht, while i think your priorities are mixed up, you dont place much of a value on human life.
I forgot. The US, which is very prudish, where the population would hyperventilate and go on the attack if they saw a human body on TV, where there are few nude beaches, etc, has twice as much violent crime was western europe. In belgium you can walk down the street in brussels as see the Mannekin pis, a statue of a nude boy pissing on a fuse to defeat invaders, a key part of Belgian culture, right out there in the open. As far as I can tell, the belgians are pretty non violent compared to americans. If you tried to erect such a thing in the USA, they would have your head.
I would also like to add that there are many different kinds of socialism. Socialism can be companies not associated with companies in a market economy, which are run and owned by their employees for instance. One of the defining characteristics of socialism is control by the people and ownership of their economy by the people, through democracy. This is a contrast to capitalism where unelected wealthy elites control and own resources, and there is little voice for the people who work beneath them, capitalism is found in state capitalist systems where government per se owns resources and the government is unelected and unowned by the people (meaningfully), and corporate capitalism where resources are owned by corporations whicha re unelected by people. The line between state and corporate capitalism can become blurred as it has become in the US with the close collusion of corporations and their purchase and subversion of democracy in that country. Corporations in the US, with the control they have over their workers and their elimination of the possibility of survival ourside the corporate system, through monopolisation which effectively makes it impossible for anyone except large corporations to be able to compete and survive, due to economies of scale and the fact they can undercut and outdo smaller independants with fewer resources, is making corporations the only option for employment. Thus, to have a chance of survival you have to do what they want. The corporations also manage to buy Republicans and elect them to office, so they basically make the alws, the representatives they own, and they represent them, not you. The wealthy elite so control the law that they have in many places made it illegal to even try to start your own business on the street!. if you live in the US and think you live in a democracy when you elect your Republicans backed by powerful wealthy corporations, elected by a brainwashed population by a corporate controlled media, I have a deal on the Brooklyn Bridge that may interest you.
As i said, if you want to regain your freedom, you must support unions, democratisation and employee ownership of all corporations, and banning of all giving of money by corporations to the politicians. Otherwise i assure you they will enslave you, or kill you.
As I said it is an imperfect bill. It basically does subsidise the massively wasteful insurance system, which i was hoping could be kept in check with regulations and the public option, yet both of these are lacking. I do not know if there will be anything to limit cost overhead on the private companies, like salaries, dividends,etc. I would like to have seen a public option targeted at medicare's overhead levels for pricing, instead of the private insurance industry, and adjust the subsidy according to making insurance affordable for low income persons for purchasing from the public option, not for the more expensive and wasteful private insurance. Public money should not be used to subsidise fat cat CEOs.
A lot of the money to fund the subsidies will come from taxes on the wealthy, they are able to pay for it entirely with that. Which is good. I place the importance of saving the life of a poor person than that of assuring the wealthy can afford another mansion. Well, if you don't believe that, you are a very cold and cruel person. This idea that the capitalist system will cause the best outcome, that people would find ways to make enough money to pay for private insurance, has been proven wrong, by the simple fact europe pays half as much we do and has universal coverage . The US pure capitalist insurance system is a total failure at addressing human needs, it basically addresses the needs of the wealthy and kills poor people. The arrogant assumption of many capitalists is that wealth is always proportional to work and the people who have less money should die off. I do not think it is ethical in any case to let people die off, plus the idea that the wealthy worked harder is usually wrong. Its an insult to every factory worker who works for $5 an hour or the people who pick the food on your table who dont make enough to feed their own families. The most people are actually paid the least. Then we have billionaires, who do very little work at all, who own the factories and basically take the money made by their workers. Who has the most wealth is based on who can exploit other people the most.
The health care reform neglects education, which should be subsidised by grants to get more people into medical school to increase doctor supply, and the costs associated with private hospitals. We need to subsidise education to produce more doctors. The private hospitals should have their profits and salaries regulated as well, turned into non profits. This is especially true of HCA which is just full of corruption. I do not know what kind of collective negotiating power with pharmaceuticals and suppliers is present which have been valuable tools in Canada for reducing costs.
I have also think there should be malpractice reform as well as a lot of irrational behaviours and costs are generated from the frivulous litigation and the lawyers who make a living off of filing frivolous lawsuits.
there was an independent study that proved that 4% overhead on medicare. its not too difficult when you dont have to line the pockets of shareholders, CEOs, advertising, and all this other crap that private insurance spends money on that could otherwise spent on providing health care. WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies constitently show that the US has the worst health care outcomes despite having the most expensive health care, because our system is loaded with fat that has nothing to do with health care. Cut out the capitalist fat and we can have a more lean, far more effective health care system.
All we hear from capitalists and conservatives is lies. Everything I mentioned was based on study data. The 40,000 who die each year due to lack of health care because of capitalism, the poor outcomes, the 4% overhead vs 30% overhead on private insurance, the fact that the socialised system actually prevents death panels by making sure that everone has health care, not rationing because someone's work is more important (food, stockers, truckers that get food onto the plate of you greedy capitalists), and at the same time enriching fat lazy CEOs and elites who havent touched a plow in their lives.
The fact that you oppose socialism exposes your true agendas. You either knowingly or unknowingly support capitalist agendas which will lead to our total enslavement, death to the poor, the utter impoverishment and enslavement of workers under horrid conditions, and so on, through the consolidation and control over resources by the capitalist elite, including the enslavement and exploitation of the workers to benefit the wealthy elite, and elite control over the entire economy, completely undemocratic economic dictatorship. All you need to implement a totalitarian state is control resources and then you can completely control every aspect of peoples lives if you are to allow them access to those resources. Getting rid of the government, the only democratic voice the people have to stop this from happening, would lead to the implementation of corporate totalitatianism. The problems we have with government now are due to the fact that government has been so undermined by the corporate corruption it represents what corporations want, not the common good, and them the corporates and the capitalists then use this problem THEY CREATED to justify abolishing government. This is what republicans do, they so corrupt government, they actually create the problems themselves which they then use to attack government. What we need to do is get corporations out of government to uncorrupt government, and reform the corporations into democratic, employee owned entities which serve the common interest.
Socialism is an economic system owned and democratically controlled by the people, and which benefits the common people, the workers who actually make the economy work and do all of the real innovation and from whom most technologies come. The people who developed the transistor for instance were not wealthy but were middle class engineers who were not even in a market environment. To have innovation there has to be a enabling environment that provides a protected place to do so, for innovations that take longer to monetise, and which also gives freedom. State capitalism and corporate capitalism can both be stifle innovation by giving too little freedom to the individual where innovation occurs. Socialism could be used for instance to fund independant engineers to develop technologies free of either market forces or free of beauracracies.
Most people due to the orwellian propoganda put out by capitalists do not even know what socialism is. When Marx developed the Communist Manifesto, the elites realised the threat and instead of just attacking communism, they infiltrated and totally corrupted its organising structures. This happened long after Marx was dead. Marx dead decades before the disasterous revolutions in Russia which didn't lead to anything that looked remotely like communism. Marx was rolling in his grave. Com
I am sure this bill will certainly help many of those who cannot afford insurance and will now recieve it. However that does not mean i think it is the perfect bill, however we will be better off with it. It does not regulate insurance companies enough, included in the bill should have been a CEO pay cap, to open p the finances of private companies to be audited and requiring them to reduce their overhead, eliminate advertising budgets, and use all of the money for providing health insurance coverage and capped salaries to their employees. Only then can we be certain that money being paid into these companies is not going to some fat cat CEO while the companies deny claims for life saving treatments as they do now. Private insurance today is pretty scammy and worthless, you often have to fight with the companies to get things covered. Hopefully the bill does set a basic coverage standard which covers everything essential. I have also always been a little skeptical of ideas of linking insurance to employment unless the insurance can continue seemlessly after employment or persons are transferred instantly to a government plan. The Public Option even in this bill is too weak and should have been set according to medicare's cost alignment rather than an average of private insurance. It is unclear whether it will survive the senate. Without the public option I would be concerned that the private companies will ruthlessly jack up rates and massively exploit the people, which could be controlled by the pay caps i mentioned above however and perhaps setting some price control or requiring that as i said the money be spent on actually providing health care. Better yet still would have been single payer, which ironically would be the most efficient, would have saved enough money considering that private insurance is 30% inefficient while medicare is 4% to provide insurance to everyone without spending any more money than we do now. That would save the lives of 40,000 children who die annually so some capitalist pig CEO can get rich. The single payer in progressive plans would be the least beauracratic, you would not have insurance company beauracrats deciding what health care you can get or deciding to deny stuff to help improve the profit margin. The single payer would gaurantee coverage of essential care, and not deny things to improve profit margins.
As far as rationing, the single payer and this bill both fight rationing. To be honest, any system contains rationing. However, it is important to make sure that highest urgency treatment is giving first priority, regardless of the patients income. Our current system rations in the worst possible way, according to ability to pay. It is genocidal to the poor since it guarantees health care to the rich and denies it to the poor. I don't want to hear this idea that people who make money contribute more. that is a lie. Try telling that to the overworked factory slave laborer or field worker who harvests the food you eat who works out in the hot sun all day making $5 an hour. It is usually the case that the hardest working people who do the most essential thing, bringing food to your table, make the least.
I think that the human body is beautiful, it is my opinion that looking at it, and nudism even, are actually very healthy things emotionally and psychologically and lead to less violent societies. Nudists in my experience are more confident, peaceful, compassionate, less violent, and less judgemental, more likely to help others, and more likely to vote democratic . Maybe because it is closer to nature as humans were this way for thousands of years. Consider, that the most peaceful societies in the world, and the most free, have the most nudity, europe, where there are nude beaches and nudity on TV, while the most violent countries are consistently the most prudish, Arabia, Afghanistan, Muslim countries, are basically filled with crime and war.
The ideas sound great. 3 years is pretty incredible and if so, makes one wonder why they are messing around with Ares when they can get something just as good in a shorter period. Unless, the Ares has a better safety rating. I have thought, unless the rockets can replace the in orbit satellite repair capability of the shuttle, if they should keep the shuttle going, unless that can be duplicated with the new system. Could the new system, for instance repair hubble in orbit?
Are you kidding me? The Democrats first got control in 2006 (first time since 1994). By that time the problem was already well underway. The loan policies have questionable influence on what happened. It is the fact that we had rampant real estate speculation (drove up prices and led to bad mortgages due to too high prices) and there were no regulation on derivatives that caused the systemic collapse. Unless we regulate the banks, it will happen all over again. THe republican control house gutted out the Glass Steagall act which allowed alot of this to happen, and as well, continued to preside over a period of deregulation where the banks ran wild.
We do want to control malpractice insurance costs. I agree with you there! The system is just far too litigation happy and we have lawyers who make a living off frivoulous lawsuits. But Part of the problem though is insurance companies with have 30% overhead compared to 4% for medicare. If we got rid of the insurance companies and replace it with medicare for all, we would save enough money to cover everyone in the country. Just by getting rid of private insurance and their $120 million dollar salary executives! The insurance companies have so corrupted government, especially repubs. but also the democrats, like Max "Insurance company lapdog" Baucus, that we will never see a real universal single payer system that works best for americans rather than insurance companies. The public option was the middle ground between the conservatives want, the current corrupt, fatten up the wealthy on the pain and suffering from out of control costs on average americans, private health care systems, and the ideal and best option single payer. Single payer would actually give you the most choice, under progressive proposals, to choose any doctor, adn there would be no bureaucracy, doctors and patients would make the decisions about what treatment is best. it would be the opposite of death panels because you would not have private insurance denying life saving treatments so the CEO can get another yacht, and millions of uninsured and dying off. The Republicans are such an immoral and scandalous, outright liars to propogate this totally false lie that there would be death panels in the bill, when the private insurance system they protect IS a death panel and the Republicans are responsible for 40,000 children dying every year due to lack of healthcare so some sleazy CEO can get rich!
Pretty much the only thing a trip to mars is that space travel is totally impractical and extremely expensive. it is also likely that anyone who does go to mars will die of cancer prematurely due to the exposure to cosmic rays. The think would basically be a pointless stunt that would waste billions on something that will be pretty useless and pointless as far as human welfare.
As a moral issue, and as an issue of saving the only planet we have, we need to make sure our planet is a healthy place to live into the future. Growing up means leaving a good, healthy, unpolluted world for our children, not wasting billions on some stupid space journey stunt to stoke your ego. Trying to waste precious resources on pointless space programs that could otherwise be spent to save this planet are greatly irresponsible.
I would place the energy problem far ahead of the one regarding space travel. Lets face it, this idea that we can totally %$%$ up this planet and then just fly off to another one is absurd. Lets focus on fixing things here. Too often here on slashdot, I see people both promoting insane things like space travel, which will never be feasible for more than a few people adn who wouldnt survive well on these other planets, and destructive technologies like GMOs which are literally causing a global ecological collapse. Its our moral obligation to take care of this planet. Many of these same people are all gung ho for every dangerous technology which could totally ruin this planet including the vast array of chemicals which are causing cancer, various diseases, even causing a collapse of maleness and various male birth defects and reduced sperm counts, just to name a few. GMOs have been proved to cause cancer, damage the liver and kidney. This technology is truly dangerous, and could totally destroy this planet and ruin our food supply. The fact is it cannot be done safety and is just not worth the risk. The risk is much higher than weith selective breeding because we are circumventing the safeguards in natural conception, and will never fully understand the complex multiple functions of genes. There is an ethical issue here. Science has helped us understand nature, but a part of the deal was that we were not going to redesign and restructure nature. The GMO technology allows a few elites to impose their agendas on everyone. Nature does not have an agenda but scientists certainly do. GMOs are just too risky and really need to be banned. Many of the chemicals, such as those used in plastics and in farming have been proven to cause an array of physical degenerations. it is quite possible that we will, with our technology, end up causing a deevolutionary collapse, into a deformed, mentally retarded, physically impaired species, due to the cumulative GMO damage of the tons of chemicals, GMOs, radioactive waste that we are poisoning ourselves with.
It does sound a lot like JIT compilation. An important part is storing the native code for later use. This would as well be for C code. Indeed, Java, is often thought to be a good application development platform along with perl, python, ruby, etc, because the apps are portable and you dont have to mess around with as much dependancies, especially with Java where so much of the environment such as GUI is included. One of the ideas of Parrot was that it would have an interpreter for C and many languages so that you could do a universal binary with it, in effect.
I should add that so many other Linux developers misdiagnose the problem and actually end up making Linux WORSE rather than better, in particular Gnome. The way to make things useable is to understand a few concepts, useability is in layout, not in sparseness of features. A system needs to have a lot of customisability and allow the user to grow into it, but they should be able to jump in quickly and start using without having to learn much, and then gradually learn more as time goes on. This does not mean options need to be removed, no the opposite, the software can be highly configurable and easy to use at the same time, for instance, by placing more advanced features deeper into the UI. Thats what i mean by layout. Secondly, the system needs a backwards compatable driver ABI. Now, the fact that Linux developers cant figure out how to do this shows how incompetent they are. Each driver would have slots for pointers to kernel functions that can be filled at runtime, they can be filled with pointers to wrapper functions to provide support for older versions of the ABI. Whenever the kernel ABI is updated, a wrapper would be produced for the older version. This way, the right interface for the driver can be provided without requiring it to be run in userspace.
Linux can be both an expert friendly and user friendly system. There can be a higher level user interface but everthing done at that level can also be done at the command line level, configuration files could still be directly edited, adn so on. Software should be built in layers, with a core layer which the experts can directly access, and then user friendly front ends on top of those.
Another issue is the need to understand that binary drivers adn apps are just evils we will have to live with but as a result the total amount of open source software in use will increase thousands of times. Making binary drivers useable on Linux through a stable driver ABI would also help the hardware interfaces to be easily backengineered so an open source driver would apper more quickly. The fact is most people dont want to wait 5 months for an open source driver, if they are lucky, they want the hardware to work and if Windows makes it just work they are not going to screw around with Linux. Period. Vendor supplied drivers, unlike the open source ones are extensively tested with the hardware, vendors do go through extensive QA with the drivers, while many open source drivers are written by people who dont even have the hardware! Applications which are binary also need to be run and especially there needs to be the ability for the app to be easily installed from one distribution no matter what linux distribution it is installed on. The binary has to count on a certain number of core libraries being avialable, has to find those libraries, adn furthermore, the application needs to install without messing up the system. One thing that will help is a filesystem overlay environment. When an apps installer is run, it can write out files to the hard drive, if the files it writes out happen to collide with an existing library file, only the application being installed will be able to see its own version while other apps will continue to use the original version. The fact is there will often be small in house apps and specialised programs that are not worth putting into a package manager that are used in a internal corporate environment. The OS needs to assume that not all programs will be installed via the package manager. Dependance on the package manager also leads to out of date software since it always lags by often months the release of new versions from the author. Compiling software is just too messy and so often fails too much for average users. Having a single linux binary that can install on all distributions would make it easy for users to keep software up to date.
Agreed. That and as well backwards compatability in Linux's ABIs would make the system far more user friendly and make it a desktop OS. I often have the feeling that Linux developers are a bunch of elitists, who feel superior that they can manage to spend 40 hours just getting everything to work in Linux, and thus oppose making Linux easy to use for the grannies and so on, with everyone using Linux, they would no longer feel "special". I am convinced with people like Linus and that group running things Linux will never make it to the desktop. The learning curve is just too high and the system is so clunky and hard to set up only nerds love it. So instead of promoting open source and software freedom by getting open source software into as many hands as possible, they tend to be a bunch of elitest nerds who want Linux to be a domain offlimits to normal users. Their goals are mainly selfish.
Only the last phase of compilation, code generation, would occur on the users computer. One of the problems with source code is that it can take hours for it to compile, and getting it to compile right is never easy enough for granny. The purpose of a universal executable is that it should be easy enough for granny to use, which means download, double click, and it runs. None of this fiddling with a million dependancies and so on. Granted, the problem is parly due to the fact that each Linux distribution does something differently and puts things in a different place.
Cancelling Ares I in my opinion would be pretty foolish, especially after so many resources have been invested into it. Its like, they barely funded the project, so that it struggled to produce, and then after they produced a working system, they decide to kill it off. I know conservatives babble on about private space and so on but I am doubtful that those would be as capable as Ares or that they would be any cheaper. More likely, the American tax payer would likely end up spending millions on some wealthy CEOs salary just like what happens with health care now. The problem with NASA not having enough funding can be solved by making sure it is properly funded rather than spending it on these stupid wars.
It has been said that Obama is not a liberal as a liberal would usually support the national space program instead of wars, along with a single payer health care, and I agree. We will be paying for Bushs mistakes for a while, and now (conservative) Obamas, and the rotten corruption of the conservatives lack of regulation on the banks and the financials, which are throughly republican and conservative, but after years of trying to kill of social welfare programs and the space program, are the first to line up for a huge government handout for their OWN mistakes. The irony, is, the people who have been denied social welfare because they lost their jobs, lost their jobs because of the mistakes of the wealthy elites, including those who totally screwed up GM and so many other American companies and have massively offshored the US jobs offseas, and are taking billion dollar bonuses while they continue to drive the US econom into the ground and screw US workers. Then we reward them with huge bailouts and welfare for the rich!
Fatelf was never really a great idea in my opinion. Putting two binaries in a file is not a really good way to solve the problem as there are many more variations of CpU type including all of the x86 variation than one or two. it would be a better idea to do something similar to the AS/400, include, an intermediate form in the file, such as a syntax tree, convert it to native at runtime on the users system, and then store the native code inside the file next to the intermediate code. if the binary is moved to a new system, the native code can be regenerated again from the intermediate code. This does not even requite kernel support, the front of the file put shell code to call the code generator installed on the system, and generate the native code, and then run it. This way, things like various x86 extensions can also be supported and so on.
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That is a good point. Plus, we have actually been using a lot of our own supply. Despite major investment in exploration there is simply not a lot of oil in the US left (except for the tar sand which will be impossible to be used practically, which is why no one has wanted to use it, its just to hard to extract and costly to produce). Actual liquid oil supplies are simply not there and fully exploiting these would probably lower gas prices a few cents and do nothing to make the US energy independant. The idea that there are vast pools of oil is a republican fantasy made up by its oil company puppetmasters. its not there.
You are probably wrong and it shows your lack of education to think that. You somehow think that no one has been looking for oil. The fact is, geologists have pretty much been looking evrywhere for it and the possibility that there could be another very large discovery that could push back peak oil significantly is not that great. Despite increased investment on oil discovery, we are seeing a downward trend on discovery, not because we are not looking, because its not there. The US saw increases in oil exploration in the 80s, oil production which hit peak 1970 continued to decline like nothing happened. Of course there will be more discoveries, the point of peak oil is decreased volume, discoveries wont be able to maintain the supply.
Except its all tar sand of which there is really no economically viable way to mine (in a significant and quick way). Most experts have dismissed the idea that this will circumvent peak oil as the production would not be enough and the environmental effects are too great. The tar sands also produce twice as much CO2. Its an environmental nightmare and to promote this as a solution when there is concern of global mass extinction due to CO2 is absurd!.
I certainly agree. Every time we hear this NoSQL arguments and all of the disinformation from people who don't know what they are talking about, apparently dont know anything about SQL or relational databases, or dont use them properly. There is nothing in particular about SQL that is inefficient. In fact, it offers lots of opportunity to really speed things up. The multicolumn lookup on SQL does not slow down the speed of a single column lookup, so you get added benefit over a single column "nonsql" db without a downside. NonSQL brings back problems that were solved by SQL, its a regression, and without any valid reason.
It is nearly impossible in many areas of the country to avoid owning a car, due to the car centered culture and the lack of alternatives. If we had public transportation systems that worked well and more bike and pedestrian oriented cities, you could get by without it. Democrats have always pushed for more development of public transportation which would also help reduce energy consumption but as usual it is opposed to republicans who recieve donations from the oil companies.
As I said before, if you feel that saving lives of the poor is less important than introducing a reasonable, ability to pay tax rate on the rich which they can comfortably afford, your priorities are mixed up and you seem to have little regard for human life. Some of us actually have some compassion and believe in helping those who are less fortunate, and that those who have taken so much from society, the super rich who have massively exploited the working class, can afford to pay for it. As for the difference between robbing people, with taxes this is done under the law and with democratic representation, and the ethics and legality of ability to pay income adjusted taxes on those who can afford it to promote the common good are well established. In most cases, those who we are taxing have already stolen their money from the working people through their capitalist exploitation of workers in their corporations. Not one billionaire has earned a majority of their money from the work of their own hands, but through the labour of other persons who they have enslaved.
As far as socialised health care, these systems have been proven with multiple studies by the WHO and the Commonwealth Fund to improve outcomes, increase life expectancy and preserve human health, and that the US system consistently delivers less than those systems, despite costing twice as much as any other health care system in the world. I know some studies put out by conservative organisations have tried to distort the facts, most of the studies which try to portray the private US health care system in a positive light have been proven inaccurate and discredited. A majority of the reliable independant studies show a health care system that is vastly wasteful and inefficient under the free market capitalist system (massive exploitation by wealthy elites of the working poor, geared towards consolidating wealth and power) as it is in the US and socialised systems in other countries are far more effective. By all measures we have seen validation after validation that the conservative ideology is wrong, that in fact small government leads to chronic instability and a collapsing society due to the selfishness and greed that it unleashes that rapes and pillages to enrich a few. We have tried providing health care with corporations and we have seen over 40 million without health care and one of the most wasteful and ineffective health care systems in the world with great inequalities in coverage. We have seen this with the collapse of the financial system with deregulation, brought on by banks greed and foolishness with the lack of government oversight.
Conservatives like to blame everything on government, but to say government cannot do anything right is an ideology, not bnased on any facts, in fact the era of deregulation under bush and the disintegration of the economy, the failures of our capitalist, elite centered private health care system, is an example of that. Conservative policies over the last decade have wrecked our economy and left millions unemployed.
To answer another part of your question. The health care for the poor will be paid for by taxes on the super wealthy. I consider it far more important to save lives of the poor and treat their condition rather than to make sure a wealthy elite can afford another mansion. The taxes on the wealthy are going to leave more than enough to enjoy a very high standard of living, more than which is known to 99% of the population of this planet. If you think that people should eb allowed to die because they are poor so some rich elite can purchase another yacht, while i think your priorities are mixed up, you dont place much of a value on human life.
I forgot. The US, which is very prudish, where the population would hyperventilate and go on the attack if they saw a human body on TV, where there are few nude beaches, etc, has twice as much violent crime was western europe. In belgium you can walk down the street in brussels as see the Mannekin pis, a statue of a nude boy pissing on a fuse to defeat invaders, a key part of Belgian culture, right out there in the open. As far as I can tell, the belgians are pretty non violent compared to americans. If you tried to erect such a thing in the USA, they would have your head.
I would also like to add that there are many different kinds of socialism. Socialism can be companies not associated with companies in a market economy, which are run and owned by their employees for instance. One of the defining characteristics of socialism is control by the people and ownership of their economy by the people, through democracy. This is a contrast to capitalism where unelected wealthy elites control and own resources, and there is little voice for the people who work beneath them, capitalism is found in state capitalist systems where government per se owns resources and the government is unelected and unowned by the people (meaningfully), and corporate capitalism where resources are owned by corporations whicha re unelected by people. The line between state and corporate capitalism can become blurred as it has become in the US with the close collusion of corporations and their purchase and subversion of democracy in that country. Corporations in the US, with the control they have over their workers and their elimination of the possibility of survival ourside the corporate system, through monopolisation which effectively makes it impossible for anyone except large corporations to be able to compete and survive, due to economies of scale and the fact they can undercut and outdo smaller independants with fewer resources, is making corporations the only option for employment. Thus, to have a chance of survival you have to do what they want. The corporations also manage to buy Republicans and elect them to office, so they basically make the alws, the representatives they own, and they represent them, not you. The wealthy elite so control the law that they have in many places made it illegal to even try to start your own business on the street!. if you live in the US and think you live in a democracy when you elect your Republicans backed by powerful wealthy corporations, elected by a brainwashed population by a corporate controlled media, I have a deal on the Brooklyn Bridge that may interest you.
As i said, if you want to regain your freedom, you must support unions, democratisation and employee ownership of all corporations, and banning of all giving of money by corporations to the politicians. Otherwise i assure you they will enslave you, or kill you.
As I said it is an imperfect bill. It basically does subsidise the massively wasteful insurance system, which i was hoping could be kept in check with regulations and the public option, yet both of these are lacking. I do not know if there will be anything to limit cost overhead on the private companies, like salaries, dividends,etc. I would like to have seen a public option targeted at medicare's overhead levels for pricing, instead of the private insurance industry, and adjust the subsidy according to making insurance affordable for low income persons for purchasing from the public option, not for the more expensive and wasteful private insurance. Public money should not be used to subsidise fat cat CEOs.
A lot of the money to fund the subsidies will come from taxes on the wealthy, they are able to pay for it entirely with that. Which is good. I place the importance of saving the life of a poor person than that of assuring the wealthy can afford another mansion. Well, if you don't believe that, you are a very cold and cruel person. This idea that the capitalist system will cause the best outcome, that people would find ways to make enough money to pay for private insurance, has been proven wrong, by the simple fact europe pays half as much we do and has universal coverage . The US pure capitalist insurance system is a total failure at addressing human needs, it basically addresses the needs of the wealthy and kills poor people. The arrogant assumption of many capitalists is that wealth is always proportional to work and the people who have less money should die off. I do not think it is ethical in any case to let people die off, plus the idea that the wealthy worked harder is usually wrong. Its an insult to every factory worker who works for $5 an hour or the people who pick the food on your table who dont make enough to feed their own families. The most people are actually paid the least. Then we have billionaires, who do very little work at all, who own the factories and basically take the money made by their workers. Who has the most wealth is based on who can exploit other people the most.
The health care reform neglects education, which should be subsidised by grants to get more people into medical school to increase doctor supply, and the costs associated with private hospitals. We need to subsidise education to produce more doctors. The private hospitals should have their profits and salaries regulated as well, turned into non profits. This is especially true of HCA which is just full of corruption. I do not know what kind of collective negotiating power with pharmaceuticals and suppliers is present which have been valuable tools in Canada for reducing costs.
I have also think there should be malpractice reform as well as a lot of irrational behaviours and costs are generated from the frivulous litigation and the lawyers who make a living off of filing frivolous lawsuits.
there was an independent study that proved that 4% overhead on medicare. its not too difficult when you dont have to line the pockets of shareholders, CEOs, advertising, and all this other crap that private insurance spends money on that could otherwise spent on providing health care. WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies constitently show that the US has the worst health care outcomes despite having the most expensive health care, because our system is loaded with fat that has nothing to do with health care. Cut out the capitalist fat and we can have a more lean, far more effective health care system.
All we hear from capitalists and conservatives is lies. Everything I mentioned was based on study data. The 40,000 who die each year due to lack of health care because of capitalism, the poor outcomes, the 4% overhead vs 30% overhead on private insurance, the fact that the socialised system actually prevents death panels by making sure that everone has health care, not rationing because someone's work is more important (food, stockers, truckers that get food onto the plate of you greedy capitalists), and at the same time enriching fat lazy CEOs and elites who havent touched a plow in their lives.
The fact that you oppose socialism exposes your true agendas. You either knowingly or unknowingly support capitalist agendas which will lead to our total enslavement, death to the poor, the utter impoverishment and enslavement of workers under horrid conditions, and so on, through the consolidation and control over resources by the capitalist elite, including the enslavement and exploitation of the workers to benefit the wealthy elite, and elite control over the entire economy, completely undemocratic economic dictatorship. All you need to implement a totalitarian state is control resources and then you can completely control every aspect of peoples lives if you are to allow them access to those resources. Getting rid of the government, the only democratic voice the people have to stop this from happening, would lead to the implementation of corporate totalitatianism. The problems we have with government now are due to the fact that government has been so undermined by the corporate corruption it represents what corporations want, not the common good, and them the corporates and the capitalists then use this problem THEY CREATED to justify abolishing government. This is what republicans do, they so corrupt government, they actually create the problems themselves which they then use to attack government. What we need to do is get corporations out of government to uncorrupt government, and reform the corporations into democratic, employee owned entities which serve the common interest.
Socialism is an economic system owned and democratically controlled by the people, and which benefits the common people, the workers who actually make the economy work and do all of the real innovation and from whom most technologies come. The people who developed the transistor for instance were not wealthy but were middle class engineers who were not even in a market environment. To have innovation there has to be a enabling environment that provides a protected place to do so, for innovations that take longer to monetise, and which also gives freedom. State capitalism and corporate capitalism can both be stifle innovation by giving too little freedom to the individual where innovation occurs. Socialism could be used for instance to fund independant engineers to develop technologies free of either market forces or free of beauracracies.
Most people due to the orwellian propoganda put out by capitalists do not even know what socialism is. When Marx developed the Communist Manifesto, the elites realised the threat and instead of just attacking communism, they infiltrated and totally corrupted its organising structures. This happened long after Marx was dead. Marx dead decades before the disasterous revolutions in Russia which didn't lead to anything that looked remotely like communism. Marx was rolling in his grave. Com
I am sure this bill will certainly help many of those who cannot afford insurance and will now recieve it. However that does not mean i think it is the perfect bill, however we will be better off with it. It does not regulate insurance companies enough, included in the bill should have been a CEO pay cap, to open p the finances of private companies to be audited and requiring them to reduce their overhead, eliminate advertising budgets, and use all of the money for providing health insurance coverage and capped salaries to their employees. Only then can we be certain that money being paid into these companies is not going to some fat cat CEO while the companies deny claims for life saving treatments as they do now. Private insurance today is pretty scammy and worthless, you often have to fight with the companies to get things covered. Hopefully the bill does set a basic coverage standard which covers everything essential. I have also always been a little skeptical of ideas of linking insurance to employment unless the insurance can continue seemlessly after employment or persons are transferred instantly to a government plan. The Public Option even in this bill is too weak and should have been set according to medicare's cost alignment rather than an average of private insurance. It is unclear whether it will survive the senate. Without the public option I would be concerned that the private companies will ruthlessly jack up rates and massively exploit the people, which could be controlled by the pay caps i mentioned above however and perhaps setting some price control or requiring that as i said the money be spent on actually providing health care. Better yet still would have been single payer, which ironically would be the most efficient, would have saved enough money considering that private insurance is 30% inefficient while medicare is 4% to provide insurance to everyone without spending any more money than we do now. That would save the lives of 40,000 children who die annually so some capitalist pig CEO can get rich. The single payer in progressive plans would be the least beauracratic, you would not have insurance company beauracrats deciding what health care you can get or deciding to deny stuff to help improve the profit margin. The single payer would gaurantee coverage of essential care, and not deny things to improve profit margins.
As far as rationing, the single payer and this bill both fight rationing. To be honest, any system contains rationing. However, it is important to make sure that highest urgency treatment is giving first priority, regardless of the patients income. Our current system rations in the worst possible way, according to ability to pay. It is genocidal to the poor since it guarantees health care to the rich and denies it to the poor. I don't want to hear this idea that people who make money contribute more. that is a lie. Try telling that to the overworked factory slave laborer or field worker who harvests the food you eat who works out in the hot sun all day making $5 an hour. It is usually the case that the hardest working people who do the most essential thing, bringing food to your table, make the least.
I think that the human body is beautiful, it is my opinion that looking at it, and nudism even, are actually very healthy things emotionally and psychologically and lead to less violent societies. Nudists in my experience are more confident, peaceful, compassionate, less violent, and less judgemental, more likely to help others, and more likely to vote democratic . Maybe because it is closer to nature as humans were this way for thousands of years. Consider, that the most peaceful societies in the world, and the most free, have the most nudity, europe, where there are nude beaches and nudity on TV, while the most violent countries are consistently the most prudish, Arabia, Afghanistan, Muslim countries, are basically filled with crime and war.
Oh ok, that sounds good. I do agree it sounds like a good system to me
The ideas sound great. 3 years is pretty incredible and if so, makes one wonder why they are messing around with Ares when they can get something just as good in a shorter period. Unless, the Ares has a better safety rating. I have thought, unless the rockets can replace the in orbit satellite repair capability of the shuttle, if they should keep the shuttle going, unless that can be duplicated with the new system. Could the new system, for instance repair hubble in orbit?
Are you kidding me? The Democrats first got control in 2006 (first time since 1994). By that time the problem was already well underway. The loan policies have questionable influence on what happened. It is the fact that we had rampant real estate speculation (drove up prices and led to bad mortgages due to too high prices) and there were no regulation on derivatives that caused the systemic collapse. Unless we regulate the banks, it will happen all over again. THe republican control house gutted out the Glass Steagall act which allowed alot of this to happen, and as well, continued to preside over a period of deregulation where the banks ran wild.
We do want to control malpractice insurance costs. I agree with you there! The system is just far too litigation happy and we have lawyers who make a living off frivoulous lawsuits. But Part of the problem though is insurance companies with have 30% overhead compared to 4% for medicare. If we got rid of the insurance companies and replace it with medicare for all, we would save enough money to cover everyone in the country. Just by getting rid of private insurance and their $120 million dollar salary executives! The insurance companies have so corrupted government, especially repubs. but also the democrats, like Max "Insurance company lapdog" Baucus, that we will never see a real universal single payer system that works best for americans rather than insurance companies. The public option was the middle ground between the conservatives want, the current corrupt, fatten up the wealthy on the pain and suffering from out of control costs on average americans, private health care systems, and the ideal and best option single payer. Single payer would actually give you the most choice, under progressive proposals, to choose any doctor, adn there would be no bureaucracy, doctors and patients would make the decisions about what treatment is best. it would be the opposite of death panels because you would not have private insurance denying life saving treatments so the CEO can get another yacht, and millions of uninsured and dying off. The Republicans are such an immoral and scandalous, outright liars to propogate this totally false lie that there would be death panels in the bill, when the private insurance system they protect IS a death panel and the Republicans are responsible for 40,000 children dying every year due to lack of healthcare so some sleazy CEO can get rich!
Pretty much the only thing a trip to mars is that space travel is totally impractical and extremely expensive. it is also likely that anyone who does go to mars will die of cancer prematurely due to the exposure to cosmic rays. The think would basically be a pointless stunt that would waste billions on something that will be pretty useless and pointless as far as human welfare.
As a moral issue, and as an issue of saving the only planet we have, we need to make sure our planet is a healthy place to live into the future. Growing up means leaving a good, healthy, unpolluted world for our children, not wasting billions on some stupid space journey stunt to stoke your ego. Trying to waste precious resources on pointless space programs that could otherwise be spent to save this planet are greatly irresponsible.
I would place the energy problem far ahead of the one regarding space travel. Lets face it, this idea that we can totally %$%$ up this planet and then just fly off to another one is absurd. Lets focus on fixing things here. Too often here on slashdot, I see people both promoting insane things like space travel, which will never be feasible for more than a few people adn who wouldnt survive well on these other planets, and destructive technologies like GMOs which are literally causing a global ecological collapse. Its our moral obligation to take care of this planet. Many of these same people are all gung ho for every dangerous technology which could totally ruin this planet including the vast array of chemicals which are causing cancer, various diseases, even causing a collapse of maleness and various male birth defects and reduced sperm counts, just to name a few. GMOs have been proved to cause cancer, damage the liver and kidney. This technology is truly dangerous, and could totally destroy this planet and ruin our food supply. The fact is it cannot be done safety and is just not worth the risk. The risk is much higher than weith selective breeding because we are circumventing the safeguards in natural conception, and will never fully understand the complex multiple functions of genes. There is an ethical issue here. Science has helped us understand nature, but a part of the deal was that we were not going to redesign and restructure nature. The GMO technology allows a few elites to impose their agendas on everyone. Nature does not have an agenda but scientists certainly do. GMOs are just too risky and really need to be banned. Many of the chemicals, such as those used in plastics and in farming have been proven to cause an array of physical degenerations. it is quite possible that we will, with our technology, end up causing a deevolutionary collapse, into a deformed, mentally retarded, physically impaired species, due to the cumulative GMO damage of the tons of chemicals, GMOs, radioactive waste that we are poisoning ourselves with.
It does sound a lot like JIT compilation. An important part is storing the native code for later use. This would as well be for C code. Indeed, Java, is often thought to be a good application development platform along with perl, python, ruby, etc, because the apps are portable and you dont have to mess around with as much dependancies, especially with Java where so much of the environment such as GUI is included. One of the ideas of Parrot was that it would have an interpreter for C and many languages so that you could do a universal binary with it, in effect.
I should add that so many other Linux developers misdiagnose the problem and actually end up making Linux WORSE rather than better, in particular Gnome. The way to make things useable is to understand a few concepts, useability is in layout, not in sparseness of features. A system needs to have a lot of customisability and allow the user to grow into it, but they should be able to jump in quickly and start using without having to learn much, and then gradually learn more as time goes on. This does not mean options need to be removed, no the opposite, the software can be highly configurable and easy to use at the same time, for instance, by placing more advanced features deeper into the UI. Thats what i mean by layout. Secondly, the system needs a backwards compatable driver ABI. Now, the fact that Linux developers cant figure out how to do this shows how incompetent they are. Each driver would have slots for pointers to kernel functions that can be filled at runtime, they can be filled with pointers to wrapper functions to provide support for older versions of the ABI. Whenever the kernel ABI is updated, a wrapper would be produced for the older version. This way, the right interface for the driver can be provided without requiring it to be run in userspace.
Linux can be both an expert friendly and user friendly system. There can be a higher level user interface but everthing done at that level can also be done at the command line level, configuration files could still be directly edited, adn so on. Software should be built in layers, with a core layer which the experts can directly access, and then user friendly front ends on top of those.
Another issue is the need to understand that binary drivers adn apps are just evils we will have to live with but as a result the total amount of open source software in use will increase thousands of times. Making binary drivers useable on Linux through a stable driver ABI would also help the hardware interfaces to be easily backengineered so an open source driver would apper more quickly. The fact is most people dont want to wait 5 months for an open source driver, if they are lucky, they want the hardware to work and if Windows makes it just work they are not going to screw around with Linux. Period. Vendor supplied drivers, unlike the open source ones are extensively tested with the hardware, vendors do go through extensive QA with the drivers, while many open source drivers are written by people who dont even have the hardware! Applications which are binary also need to be run and especially there needs to be the ability for the app to be easily installed from one distribution no matter what linux distribution it is installed on. The binary has to count on a certain number of core libraries being avialable, has to find those libraries, adn furthermore, the application needs to install without messing up the system. One thing that will help is a filesystem overlay environment. When an apps installer is run, it can write out files to the hard drive, if the files it writes out happen to collide with an existing library file, only the application being installed will be able to see its own version while other apps will continue to use the original version. The fact is there will often be small in house apps and specialised programs that are not worth putting into a package manager that are used in a internal corporate environment. The OS needs to assume that not all programs will be installed via the package manager. Dependance on the package manager also leads to out of date software since it always lags by often months the release of new versions from the author. Compiling software is just too messy and so often fails too much for average users. Having a single linux binary that can install on all distributions would make it easy for users to keep software up to date.
Agreed. That and as well backwards compatability in Linux's ABIs would make the system far more user friendly and make it a desktop OS. I often have the feeling that Linux developers are a bunch of elitists, who feel superior that they can manage to spend 40 hours just getting everything to work in Linux, and thus oppose making Linux easy to use for the grannies and so on, with everyone using Linux, they would no longer feel "special". I am convinced with people like Linus and that group running things Linux will never make it to the desktop. The learning curve is just too high and the system is so clunky and hard to set up only nerds love it. So instead of promoting open source and software freedom by getting open source software into as many hands as possible, they tend to be a bunch of elitest nerds who want Linux to be a domain offlimits to normal users. Their goals are mainly selfish.
Only the last phase of compilation, code generation, would occur on the users computer. One of the problems with source code is that it can take hours for it to compile, and getting it to compile right is never easy enough for granny. The purpose of a universal executable is that it should be easy enough for granny to use, which means download, double click, and it runs. None of this fiddling with a million dependancies and so on. Granted, the problem is parly due to the fact that each Linux distribution does something differently and puts things in a different place.
Cancelling Ares I in my opinion would be pretty foolish, especially after so many resources have been invested into it. Its like, they barely funded the project, so that it struggled to produce, and then after they produced a working system, they decide to kill it off. I know conservatives babble on about private space and so on but I am doubtful that those would be as capable as Ares or that they would be any cheaper. More likely, the American tax payer would likely end up spending millions on some wealthy CEOs salary just like what happens with health care now. The problem with NASA not having enough funding can be solved by making sure it is properly funded rather than spending it on these stupid wars.
It has been said that Obama is not a liberal as a liberal would usually support the national space program instead of wars, along with a single payer health care, and I agree. We will be paying for Bushs mistakes for a while, and now (conservative) Obamas, and the rotten corruption of the conservatives lack of regulation on the banks and the financials, which are throughly republican and conservative, but after years of trying to kill of social welfare programs and the space program, are the first to line up for a huge government handout for their OWN mistakes. The irony, is, the people who have been denied social welfare because they lost their jobs, lost their jobs because of the mistakes of the wealthy elites, including those who totally screwed up GM and so many other American companies and have massively offshored the US jobs offseas, and are taking billion dollar bonuses while they continue to drive the US econom into the ground and screw US workers. Then we reward them with huge bailouts and welfare for the rich!
Fatelf was never really a great idea in my opinion. Putting two binaries in a file is not a really good way to solve the problem as there are many more variations of CpU type including all of the x86 variation than one or two. it would be a better idea to do something similar to the AS/400, include, an intermediate form in the file, such as a syntax tree, convert it to native at runtime on the users system, and then store the native code inside the file next to the intermediate code. if the binary is moved to a new system, the native code can be regenerated again from the intermediate code. This does not even requite kernel support, the front of the file put shell code to call the code generator installed on the system, and generate the native code, and then run it. This way, things like various x86 extensions can also be supported and so on.