Calls to Belgian ground lines are $0.02/min for VOIP retail users.. but calls to cell phones are about $0.20/min... unless the cell providers in Belgium are also giving users a discount. Given the number of Americans likely in Belgium right now, this is probably not going to cost these cell providers more than a couple of thousand dollars a day, for a log of good publicity.
Not that I think it's a bad idea, or anything -- It's just not as big a deal as it might seem, unless you compare this to their normal prices to call Belgium.
It really does have to do with being foreign. If those workers had landed immigrant status, were expecting to raise a family in the US, and had the freedom to quit and go work for another employer at fair market value, they wouldn't accept the pay (or working conditions) that they get with an H1B visa that locks them into a single employer while they're in the US.
H1Bs for third-world workers are sometimes just a step above indentured servitude.
Even if there were a 9/11 class attack in the US every year, it wouldn't hold a candle to drunk driving deaths. -- but drunk driving deaths don't make the news because they're so common. It's the fallacy of the news cycle -- to be national news it has to be rare. More common threats of tragic death don't make the news because they've become so blase.
If we're going to have our civil rights watered down, it should, at the very least, be because of a real threat. The courts should be asked to set aside the news reports and demand that the FBI quantify the reality of the threat compared to normal everyday issues. If apple is forced to create this app, the app and it's ilk are going to creep into everyday use by law enforcement and other entities -- here, Russia, China, Iran, Syria and pretty much every dictatorship you can think of.
Would you consider it justified to force Apple to create this app and set this precedent to investigate a drunk driver?? Even though a drunk driver is far more of a threat to you and your family? It's time to put this whole terrorism hysteria into proper perspective. We shouldn't continue to allow it to be used to nibble away at our freedoms until there is nothing left -- especially for a 'threat' that is more of a PR issue than a statistical reality.
Lets face it- Terrorists don't kill Americans. Americans kill Americans. In the last ten years Terrorists have killed on American Soil... what? 20 Americans a year? If that? (actually, it turns out to be 11/year, worldwide from 2005-2014 )
Drunk drivers kill about 10,000/year (200/year of that kids).
The Tobacco industry kills almost half a million people a year -- and that's for profit. Eve second hand smoke kills about 40,000 people per year.... That's more per month than died in 9/11 -- and you can argue that those 40,000 are innocent lives. They never made a choice to smoke. Many of them made a conscious decision to avoid smoking.
about 50,000/year die from concussion related injuries.
Even if you include 9/11, over the 20 years from 1995 to 2014 terrorism only accounts for 175 deaths per year. That's not even a BLIP compared to gun deaths. I'll bet you can find more Americans killed per year by NRA members involved in mass shootings (too esoteric to be able to find stats on that one) than you have terror deaths including 9/11.
My point is that the courts should be asked to ignore the media hype, and decide this issue based on the REAL, factual threat that terrorism poses to the average American (roughly none) when deciding how important it is for Apple to break protection of every I-Phone in America.
The FBI accuses Apple of playing the PR game. Apple should turn that gun on the FBI and ask them to prove the actual threat that they claim to be mitigating. -- ignoring the Media hype over 'Terrorism'.
Native communities in Northern Saskatchewan are dealing with the problem of caribou herds moving north. Their ranges are no longer within range of hunters from the communities. I theory, the climate change would have probably cause buffalo to move north to replace them, but the buffalo are mostly extinct, now.
Cinepaint forked a number of years ago -- it's main purpose was to support 32bit per channel color (needed by the film industry). I don't use it now because it doesn't compile on Ubuntu based distributions -- which I now use for my desktops.
Krita is what I use now -- even though it's explicit orientation is to digital painting than image editing, it still works quite well for image editing, and supports HDR images. HDR imaging has been important for me since I moved to digital photography. Modern DSLR's produce HDR raw images, so downgrading to 8 bit before manipulating an image can be rather counter-productive, and requires annoying work-arounds to take advantage of the available dynamic range in GIMP.
But why? It's like replacing the Brooklyn Bridge. The thing is big, and kinda clunky and nobody would ever make something that looks like that today.... but it's just way more expensive to replace it than it is to keep it working. That's why it's still here.
I personally swore that I'd quite before I took on any significant programming in COBOL -- but that doesn't mean that I'd turn my nose up at someone who was willing to take on the task. As a general case, I'd apply this rule about current COBOL code:
It's not good because it's old -- It's old because it's good.
I was working for an ISP in 1998 and needed a stable system for my (work) laptop to access the systems and the internet.
The problem with windows was that the driver for my PCMCIA ethernet card made the system unstable. Most notably it was unable to reliably wake up from sleep. Solaris on i386 was available, but I considered it a weak beta. A few people at work were big fans of Linux, so I tried loading Redhat on my system. It only took me an hour or two to find the driver I needed (our windows guru had spent days trying to solve the driver problem with Windows).
Once I got the driver installed, the system was gloriously stable and fast compared to Windows. I was hooked! Now, all of my machines run either Linux (desktop) or OpenBSD (routers, etc.). One laptop can dual-boot to Windows for a single piece of software that I occasionally use that depends on MS Office.
More specifically, Health care inflation has dropped significantly since the ACA went into effect
Obamacare has brought down health care costs in the US. It's also brought down the number of uninsured, and seems to be part of the economic recovery. (when small business owners can get health coverage, it removes a dis-incentive to start a business, and thus create new jobs).
some stats, and some more stats. or you can just peruse through a tags search on dailyKOS
Strange thing is that the left is all over stats about stuff -- but if you only go to Fox for your news, you won't hear much about hard numbers.
The right was forecasting massive price increases, but California only saw a 4% increase in premiums, compared to a historical (pre-ACA) trend of about 10% per year.
The upper class and the upper-middle class in the US probably do OK under republicare because they can afford it. (in some cases -- barely). Once you gt to the lower middle class, though, I'm betting that the US does worse than Canada (which is where I'm from)
I remember a incident, some years ago, when an American friend fell and hit his head. He was a small business owner, which means that health care was beyond his reach. The conversation went pretty much as follows:
Canadians: That's not good. You might have a concussion. We should take you to the hospital.
Paul: Hospital? No way man! How much is it gonna cost me? A hospital visit could bankrupt me!
Canadians: Huh?
Paul: The last time I went to the hospital with a headache, I ended up with a $20K second mortgage -- and they didn't even solve the problem!
Canadians: Seriously?
After a good deal of cajoling we managed to get him to the hospital, where things turned out fine. As a foreigner, the visit was a flat-rate $600 (a good hard hit, but it could have been a lot worse in the US.)
The fact that a simple visit to the hospital could bankrupt an average middle-class american is what makes the US system so dangerous. I have little respect for it. Many Canadian doctors have moved to the US for the money, and then moved back to Canada, where they could actually spend their time taking care of people, rather than worrying about whether or not they could afford to pay for that care.
You can pay a couple hundred bucks for a pre-built solution, or you can build a pair of OpenBSD routers to do the job. You can either use a pair of old machines that you've been too lazy to send for recycling, or you can buy a pair of Raspberry PIs with a second (USB) ethernet connector, for a low power solution. VPN them together, and set the default route for the router at network 'A" to be through network 'B'. Problem solved. People have suggested both IPsec and OpenVPN to build the tunnel. . Just make sure that both networks don't use the ubiquitous 192.168.1.0/24 network, or you'll be in routing hell trying to talk back and forth.
My question is: If you know what you're doing, why wasn't this the obvious solution for you before you posted?
As for needing enough CPU power, don't worry.. Back in the '90s, UBC Comp Sci was using a bunch of 30MZ pentiums to route between 10Megabit networks (mostly thicknet, with some thinnet). The reason why they used 30Mz machines??? The supplier ran out of 25Mz machines... So I figure that just about anything that runs over 300Mz would be overkill for your particular problem -- and anything less is probably no longer supported in many of the current distros.
They put a trojan horse into pirated copies of code for a bulk mailer -- then used those servers to send spam. Who's gonna notice? Who's gonna be surprised that their machine gets 'accidentally' flagged as a spam box? Who do you complain to when you figure out that your 'cracked' spam software turned out to contain a trojan?
Apple definitely succeeded. By 1990, Mac was the de-facto standard for desktop publishing. Even many of the the biggest Window/DOS newsletters were being created on the Mac. When Windows95 came out, the mantra was "Almost as good as a Mac". Microsoft won the desktop war with anticompetitive practices, not quality.
I remember around 1989, a print shop in Edmonton was broken into one night. The thieves stole all of the shop's Macintosh computers -- even the ones in the back room, but didn't touch the many PCs.
If it wasn't for stiff competition from Apple, it's probable that Microsoft wouldn't have introduced a Graphical desktop until well into the '90s. Apple, The Amiga, Sun, SGI and many other companies led Microsoft in the graphical desktop field. Microsoft was very much a follower, not a leader.
The warning about self-signed certs is just that. If you know that you're talking to the right site, you can add the cert to your trusted list.
"trusted" root certs are organizations that you are supposed to be able to trust to be proper with the certs that they give out. CNNIC is (properly) being removed from that list. The point isn't to 'punish' their customers. It's to protect the rest of us.IfCNNIC manages to convince Google (and others) that they've fixed the problem anf won't let it happen again, they'll be admitted to the trusted group, again.
It took NASA about 20 years to find 90% of NEO asteroids bigger than 1KM in diameter. and most of those more than 100M... so if The Aliens have been stalking earth for the last decade trying to match orbit, and have a ship more than 1KM in diameter, then there's a 50% chance that we've mistaken them for an asteroid.
They're taking those rights away from all of us. Islamists are the excuse for that. If the general public realized that these restrictions are ultimately gonna bite all of us on the ass, they'd never be allowed to pass these laws.
You always need an identifiable "other" to justify laws that remove rights from all of us.
In th McCarthy era it was 'the communist threat'. In Nazi Germany it was "The jewish threat". (then communists, gays, Gypsies, dissidents, and by the end of the war tanks were roaming the streets shooting at any window that was flying a flag of surrender).
The Patriot Act was supposedly to catch "Those damned (Muslim) terrorists", but then the NSA and the FBI used those laws to justify listening in on everybody. Do you really think that it's going to be any different with this new law? Do you really think that wasn't the intent of the old one? I'm almost disgusted enough to say "Yeah, go ahead -- give up your freedoms, and see what happens!" -- but the problem is that when you give up your freedoms, you give up mine too.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I think it's a bad idea, or anything -- It's just not as big a deal as it might seem, unless you compare this to their normal prices to call Belgium.
H1Bs for third-world workers are sometimes just a step above indentured servitude.
I bet that there are a lot of programmers who would be more than happy to be trained to replace him at half of his salary.
Since 9/11, American deaths by terror have averaged about 12 per year worldwide. That puts terrorism right up there with lightning strikes.
Even if there were a 9/11 class attack in the US every year, it wouldn't hold a candle to drunk driving deaths. -- but drunk driving deaths don't make the news because they're so common. It's the fallacy of the news cycle -- to be national news it has to be rare. More common threats of tragic death don't make the news because they've become so blase.
If we're going to have our civil rights watered down, it should, at the very least, be because of a real threat. The courts should be asked to set aside the news reports and demand that the FBI quantify the reality of the threat compared to normal everyday issues. If apple is forced to create this app, the app and it's ilk are going to creep into everyday use by law enforcement and other entities -- here, Russia, China, Iran, Syria and pretty much every dictatorship you can think of.
Would you consider it justified to force Apple to create this app and set this precedent to investigate a drunk driver?? Even though a drunk driver is far more of a threat to you and your family? It's time to put this whole terrorism hysteria into proper perspective. We shouldn't continue to allow it to be used to nibble away at our freedoms until there is nothing left -- especially for a 'threat' that is more of a PR issue than a statistical reality.
Drunk drivers kill about 10,000/year (200/year of that kids). ... That's more per month than died in 9/11 -- and you can argue that those 40,000 are innocent lives. They never made a choice to smoke. Many of them made a conscious decision to avoid smoking.
The Tobacco industry kills almost half a million people a year -- and that's for profit. Eve second hand smoke kills about 40,000 people per year.
about 50,000/year die from concussion related injuries.
Even if you include 9/11, over the 20 years from 1995 to 2014 terrorism only accounts for 175 deaths per year. That's not even a BLIP compared to gun deaths. I'll bet you can find more Americans killed per year by NRA members involved in mass shootings (too esoteric to be able to find stats on that one) than you have terror deaths including 9/11.
My point is that the courts should be asked to ignore the media hype, and decide this issue based on the REAL, factual threat that terrorism poses to the average American (roughly none ) when deciding how important it is for Apple to break protection of every I-Phone in America.
The FBI accuses Apple of playing the PR game. Apple should turn that gun on the FBI and ask them to prove the actual threat that they claim to be mitigating. -- ignoring the Media hype over 'Terrorism'.
Native communities in Northern Saskatchewan are dealing with the problem of caribou herds moving north. Their ranges are no longer within range of hunters from the communities. I theory, the climate change would have probably cause buffalo to move north to replace them, but the buffalo are mostly extinct, now.
For anybody with older ("3rd party") bulbs, Phillips has, essentially bricked their controllers.
On the 8th day, God, once again said "Let there be light", and Phillips said "F*ck you .. We didn't make those lights!".
Thus it was that Phillips joined the Dark Side.
Krita is what I use now -- even though it's explicit orientation is to digital painting than image editing, it still works quite well for image editing, and supports HDR images. HDR imaging has been important for me since I moved to digital photography. Modern DSLR's produce HDR raw images, so downgrading to 8 bit before manipulating an image can be rather counter-productive, and requires annoying work-arounds to take advantage of the available dynamic range in GIMP.
I personally swore that I'd quite before I took on any significant programming in COBOL -- but that doesn't mean that I'd turn my nose up at someone who was willing to take on the task. As a general case, I'd apply this rule about current COBOL code:
Yes, but -- like a well paying job, there are some Herpes carriers that your occasional programmer would be more than happy to embrace.
The problem with windows was that the driver for my PCMCIA ethernet card made the system unstable. Most notably it was unable to reliably wake up from sleep. Solaris on i386 was available, but I considered it a weak beta. A few people at work were big fans of Linux, so I tried loading Redhat on my system. It only took me an hour or two to find the driver I needed (our windows guru had spent days trying to solve the driver problem with Windows).
Once I got the driver installed, the system was gloriously stable and fast compared to Windows. I was hooked! Now, all of my machines run either Linux (desktop) or OpenBSD (routers, etc.). One laptop can dual-boot to Windows for a single piece of software that I occasionally use that depends on MS Office.
The final altitude was -45 feet. I can expect some error, but I don't think that the drone made that deep of a crater.
I grabbed the stats from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics... The end result is that Obamacare didn't really affect jobs at all -- either negative or positive. I even made an article about it. Read it via the link.
Obamacare has brought down health care costs in the US. It's also brought down the number of uninsured, and seems to be part of the economic recovery. (when small business owners can get health coverage, it removes a dis-incentive to start a business, and thus create new jobs). some stats, and some more stats. or you can just peruse through a tags search on dailyKOS
Strange thing is that the left is all over stats about stuff -- but if you only go to Fox for your news, you won't hear much about hard numbers.
The right was forecasting massive price increases, but California only saw a 4% increase in premiums, compared to a historical (pre-ACA) trend of about 10% per year.
I remember a incident, some years ago, when an American friend fell and hit his head. He was a small business owner, which means that health care was beyond his reach. The conversation went pretty much as follows:
After a good deal of cajoling we managed to get him to the hospital, where things turned out fine. As a foreigner, the visit was a flat-rate $600 (a good hard hit, but it could have been a lot worse in the US.)
The fact that a simple visit to the hospital could bankrupt an average middle-class american is what makes the US system so dangerous. I have little respect for it. Many Canadian doctors have moved to the US for the money, and then moved back to Canada, where they could actually spend their time taking care of people, rather than worrying about whether or not they could afford to pay for that care.
My question is: If you know what you're doing, why wasn't this the obvious solution for you before you posted?
As for needing enough CPU power, don't worry.. Back in the '90s, UBC Comp Sci was using a bunch of 30MZ pentiums to route between 10Megabit networks (mostly thicknet, with some thinnet). The reason why they used 30Mz machines??? The supplier ran out of 25Mz machines. .. So I figure that just about anything that runs over 300Mz would be overkill for your particular problem -- and anything less is probably no longer supported in many of the current distros.
How can you run a 'free speech event' where you headline someone who advocates banning a book?
For comparison, you can still legally marry a 12 year old girl in the US.
They put a trojan horse into pirated copies of code for a bulk mailer -- then used those servers to send spam. Who's gonna notice? Who's gonna be surprised that their machine gets 'accidentally' flagged as a spam box? Who do you complain to when you figure out that your 'cracked' spam software turned out to contain a trojan?
I remember around 1989, a print shop in Edmonton was broken into one night. The thieves stole all of the shop's Macintosh computers -- even the ones in the back room, but didn't touch the many PCs.
If it wasn't for stiff competition from Apple, it's probable that Microsoft wouldn't have introduced a Graphical desktop until well into the '90s. Apple, The Amiga, Sun, SGI and many other companies led Microsoft in the graphical desktop field. Microsoft was very much a follower, not a leader.
"trusted" root certs are organizations that you are supposed to be able to trust to be proper with the certs that they give out. CNNIC is (properly) being removed from that list. The point isn't to 'punish' their customers. It's to protect the rest of us. If CNNIC manages to convince Google (and others) that they've fixed the problem anf won't let it happen again, they'll be admitted to the trusted group, again.
"No gay service". That way people would know to avoid the business if they are either gay, or support gays.
It took NASA about 20 years to find 90% of NEO asteroids bigger than 1KM in diameter. and most of those more than 100M... so if The Aliens have been stalking earth for the last decade trying to match orbit, and have a ship more than 1KM in diameter, then there's a 50% chance that we've mistaken them for an asteroid.
You always need an identifiable "other" to justify laws that remove rights from all of us. In th McCarthy era it was 'the communist threat'. In Nazi Germany it was "The jewish threat". (then communists, gays, Gypsies, dissidents, and by the end of the war tanks were roaming the streets shooting at any window that was flying a flag of surrender).
The Patriot Act was supposedly to catch "Those damned (Muslim) terrorists", but then the NSA and the FBI used those laws to justify listening in on everybody . Do you really think that it's going to be any different with this new law? Do you really think that wasn't the intent of the old one? I'm almost disgusted enough to say "Yeah, go ahead -- give up your freedoms, and see what happens!" -- but the problem is that when you give up your freedoms, you give up mine too.