Not all Republicans. Granted, I'm a nominal Republican but really more of a Libertarian, but still, not all Republicans.
There are some who trot out an argument reminiscent of "Think of the children!" (I have three, thanks, and I should imagine that by the time they're old enough to set foot in a casino they'll already be decent poker players, if they're interested) that is basically that "Since some people will gamble uncontrollably, we have to make online gambling illegal for everyone." Never mind that most people in the U.S live not far from a legal bricks-n-mortar casino, and bookies aren't exactly hard to find, either. Or that it's quite easy to ruin your life through excessive use of alcohol or tobacco, yet those remain legal.
Just because some small percentage of the population cannot restrain itself for whatever reason(s), I just can't see that as a reason to ban it for the rest. Heck, some people drive their cars in extremely irresponsible ways and cause others to be killed or maimed for life, but we don't see any (rational) people calling for cars to be made illegal because of that.
The problem with firing everyone involved with the mistake is that if you do, you're getting rid of the people most able and most motivated to be sure this never happens again. Firing someone for a single incident is almost always the wrong thing to do. It certainly would be here.
Things may be different now from when I lived in Japan (1994 - 2002) but there were definitely cars older than seven years around at that time. Keeping them on the road becomes a lot more expensive, of course, do to the Auto Mechanics and Car Dealers Welfare Act - uh, I mean, the strict but fair vehicle inspection fees and regulations, but they were around. I even saw quite a few American muscle cars from the 1960s and early seventies, including a 1970 Challenger R/T in a parking lot near Mizonokuchi (where the Nambu-sen and the Denentoshi-sen intersect). I used to have a '70 Challenger myself, so that was a pretty cool thing to see there.
The thing is, even if he's not nuttier than a fruitcake (unlikely as that may be), if he doesn't like it, the moral and (I suspect; IANAL) legal responsibility to prevent it is his. As others have noted, if you have a pollen allergy it doesn't mean you can required your neighbor to uproot all the plants in her yard.
You can seal your house up nice and tight, you can have HEPA-filtered everything, you can wear the appropriate mask when your outside if necessary. You can put a big fan in your yard and blow air away from your house:p
But you can't expect that your neighbor will not use her property as she sees fitSo , within the bounds of the law.
So, he should paint his house with anti-RF paint, build himself a Faraday cage, line his walls with metal, whatever. Maybe move out to the countryside. I'm not unsympathetic to anyone whose really sick - I have an epileptic daughter and I understand about managing chronic illness - but if my something at my neighbor's house tended to trigger her seizures and my neighbor couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it, mitigating the problem would be up to me.
So even on the off chance that this guy isn't a kook, that's not her problem.
Paper cost factors in, but paper is far cheaper than printer ink. For the cost of an ink cartridge (more or less) I can buy a whole case of paper, and it takes multiple cartridges to print a case of paper. Even if the font doubled the amount of paper they use (it won't), they'd still be money ahead.
I can only comment on ones in California, granted, but the 3 Walmarts here that I have been too are all better than any of the Kmarts here that I'd been too (have never been to one since they became Sears, so can't comment on that) and are in the same category as Target WRT nastiness or lack of same. What, specifically, do you think is nastier about Walmart other than the astonishing fatness of many of the customers. WRT pricing, I can always get a better deal at Walmart than Target on most stuff. Surprisingly, though, JC Penney often beats Walmart on children's clothing and the quality is way better.
Other quality tip: look for clothing made in Vietnam. Walmart sometimes has some, and the quality is generally much better than Chinese-made.
I don't often shop at Walmart, at least in part because the nearest one to my house is about 25 miles away. However, it's surprising just how much US-made stuff I notice on the shelves when I do go there.
More, at least in my experience, than I see at the Target which I shop at more often because it's quite near my house.
Basically, other low-end chains like Target (and even higher-end chains, even) have very little that's made in the US. Based on what I see on the shelves on my rare visits, I doubt Walmart even has the highest percentage of Chinese-made stuff. Even if they do, it's a matter of a very small degree. Yet, somehow, Walmart seems to be the one that gets all the flack for a practice they all engage in.
It's damned hard to find stuff made in the USA anymore. It's damned hard to find stuff that isn't made in China. So if you're going to be shopping at a store that sells mostly Chinese-made stuff (and you are, because that's the only kind there is), it might as well be Walmart. They have lower prices and a better selection than the others. Just watch out for the Walmart whales pushing shopping carts; you wouldn't want to be hit by one of those.
If this poorly crafted bill - which is going to cost far more than they say and is making its numbers with guesses and sleight of hand - passes, we are going to be fixing it - that is, reforming the reform - for decades to come. This was rushed through far to quickly and is too poorly considered for something this important. What both the House and Senate need to do is scrap the current versions, go back to the drawing board, get input from their constituents on what *they* think needs to be reformed, rather than a bill done primarily in response to what the White House asked for, and then pass *that* bill and send it to the President.
Sure, there are some things in the current bill that are good: the first thing that comes to my mind is doing away with pre-existing conditions. That's unconscionable. So is charging people more if they actually use their insurance. I don't like lifetime maximums, either. Some treatments are very expensive.
There are countries that have reasonably well-run national health insurance systems (Japan, for one, which is a single-payer country) and countries that have terrible ones. One thing they have in common is that the standard of care covered by insurance tends to be non-great. I've been hospitalized in Japan and can speak from experience about that. Doctor care can also be hit or miss, although that seems to have more to do with general culture and standards and little or nothing to do with insurance.
Some other countries have really poorly run national health care systems that result in serious rationing of medical procedures. I have a friend in Winnipeg who is on a waiting list right now, whereas if she were a US resident, she would have had it done long ago. Lest someone start up some BS about "What if she needed surgery but didn't have insurance?" every hospital I have ever been to, or that any member of my family has been to, has had an explicit written statement that inability to pay will not keep you from treatment. They have programs and foundations in place for that. Yes, those programs make my own bill higher - I'm sure the two weeks one of my kids spent in the pediatric ICU last year would have been cheaper otherwise, but I'm also certain of two things:
1) The cost increase to me would be even worse with the government involved.
2) I'd much rather have that between me and the hospital and the poor who are receiving help from the hospital than between me and the government and those parties. Anything that puts more layers between patient and caregiver is bad. It's kind of like the reasons that start-ups are more nimble than large, established companies: at every start-up I've worked for, the CEO not only knew me by name and face, I had no more than two levels of management between myself and the CEO. At the company I currently work for - which is pretty nimble as big companies go, but it's still more oil tanker than speed boat - I can't even tell you how many managers are between me and the CEO, or who they are. I know who the managers are three levels up from me and who the last one before the CEO is, but there are some more in between.
Look at point 2, above, and remember that to err is human; to really screw things up requires a bureaucracy. To screw things up so badly that there is no reasonable hope of ever fixing them properly requires a government bureaucracy.
The only thing surprising to me about this is that he doesn't live in San Francisco. It sounds like something one could expect of Chris Daly (member of the SF board of supervisors).
Granted, Daly is probably a bigger idiot than Ortiz, but his proposing this sort of law makes me think they may be birds of a feather.
Definitely not so. I don't know if you have any kids or firearms. I have young children and no longer own any firearms (partly for that reason, partly for others) and I can tell you:
-My 16-month old is strong enough to lift, carry, and control things larger and heavier than the.40 S&W Glock I used to have. She'll grab a 3 pound plastic jar of animal crackers off the shelf, carry it across the room to where I am, and ask for one. Then, whether she gets one or not, she'll take the jar back and put it away. Round trip is about 40 feet, carrying a 3 pound object. Small children are far stronger than you think. -It doesn't take much strength to pull the trigger on a Glock. I'm not familiar with the weapon that was involved in this horrible accident, but in general, the pressure required to pull the trigger on a semi-auto isn't all that much. Heck, even the trigger on my friend's.44 mag revolver could be pulled be a 3 year old, at least if the kid wasn't trying to hold the gun off the floor at the same time, and maybe even then.
My 16-month old could probably even pull the trigger on a large revolver with some effort. If you have kids, you know just how strong their grip is when they don't want to let go of something they aren't supposed to have. That's more than strong enough to pull the trigger on pretty much any small arms; all that is necessary is enough desire to overcome the resistance.
I'm sure this accident occurred exactly as described. If it didn't, the police investigation and the autopsy will reveal that. Self-inflicted gunshot wounds are quite different than ones inflicted by someone else, and it's pretty rare for anyone who would do something like this on purpose to be able to keep the story straight.
I'm sure this was just a horrible accident, and it illustrates again why, if there are kids in your house, a firearm that isn't under lock and key must never, ever, leave your immediate possession. Lapses can happen. Kids are an incredibly distracting force. I have three, and they can make you just about leave the house with your brain left behind on the kitchen counter. That certainly influenced my decision to not have any firearms in the house until they are much older. The price of a lapse like that is just too high.
Of course, I live in a very safe area with an infinitesimal crime rate. My city of 50,000 or so only has something like nine police officers.
They must not be on that site, then, because I checked it with Firefox on both Mac and Linux and got no pop-ups. I'm also running Noscript and Adblock-Plus; anyone who isn't, should be.
Everything important in routing and switching in the last 20 years has really just been about a bigger pipe. What did ASICs do? Let people build faster routers and switches, so you can run bigger pipes.
I work in security myself, and that makes more real "change" in the Internet, since without some kind of security solutions in place (whether ours or someone else's), a lot of important things that go over the Internet (especially email) would be practically unusable. However, security solutions work further out toward the network edge. Having enough routing and switching capacity at the network core is the most fundamental thing to make the Internet work.
I never said it was a revolutionary technology, you're putting words in my mouth. I never claimed anything even remotely like that. I said it will change the Internet, and it will. Changes in the Internet itself is always evolutionary these days, not revolutionary. Social networking was revolutionary, sure, but that's not the Internet; it's just something that the Internet is used for. The Internet is routing and switching. Greater capacity at the network core, and the bigger pipes that follow after it, enable better applications to run over the Internet. Remember how much fun it wasn't to try and stream video 10 or 12 years ago? Neither most network cores nor most last miles were fast enough to make that a pleasant experience for most people. Now we take it for granted. Why? Streaming hasn't changed that much, but the internetwork pipes, intranetwork pipes, and the last miles are all a lot bigger now than they were then. As are the routers and switches that support that stuff. It's all about routing and switching.
Sure,this thing seems like an impossibly powerful beast to many people right now, but so did every new and powerful technology that we now take as a given, and many that we already regard as obsolete. Look at the CPUs a lot of us have on our home and work computers. My desktop at work has 2 cores, my laptop has 2 cores, my desktop at home has four. 10 years ago I was messing around with dual P-III motherboards that had far less processing power and memory capacity than even one of the cores on anything I'm using now. A four-core, or even dual-core, chip would have been just a fantasy back then. Now we take them for granted. Ditto for fast DSL or cable, or even FTTH, at least in urban areas. And compare the graphics card you had 10 years ago to what you have now. The one you have now is more powerful than the computer you had in 2000. Probably has more memory, too.
Bottom line? This "big wow" router you don't seem very impressed by, or ones like it (I don't expect our competitors to sit still) will be a necessity in a lot o networks five years from now, not a luxury. And we were the first to build one this big, just like we were with so many other routing and switching products over the years. That doesn't mean we're the only good vendor; we have worthy competitors, to be sure. But we're number one for a good reason, and the routing and switching market isn't like the desktop OS market: if your gear is less than capable or has insurmountable security problems, it _will_ be ripped out and replaced with something else, if you can even sell it in the first place.
Full disclosure: I work at Cisco Further disclosure: but not on routing and switching, but yes, in engineering.
Opinion: That Cisco has changed the Internet is a pretty good argument. If you look back to 1984 when Cisco was founded and how the Internet has grown over the years and what our products have done and the fact that we are by far the world's largest networking company, I think it's pretty clear that Cisco's influence on the Internet has been pivotal. Changed the Internet. Built the hardware that built the Internet. Walk through any data center and you'll probably see more Cisco gear than gear from all our competitors put together. Does that mean I think we're perfect? No. But we're very good. I've worked at other large IT-industry companies and none of them hold a candle to Cisco, IMO. I can't imagine what it would take to get me to go anywhere else. Well, I can, but no one in her/his right mind would actually give it to me:-)
Granted, the Internet is a lot bigger and harder to change now than it was back then. Still, a product like this can produce change in the Internet, or at least increase its rate of change by enabling much faster core speeds, which allows more high-bandwidth content to go around. Imagine if everybody had FIOS or Uverse at home and many of them were getting all their TV programming via that connection, plus Internet. I'd like something like a home-user version of Cisco Telepresence to talk with far-away friends and family instead of a laptop webcam. Maybe FTTH would be fast enough for something like that. Is the core infrastructure in place today fast enough for that? Probably not. This provides a nice segue for my rant about the last mile.
At home, my only option is cable. Too far from the CO for any DSL provider, even AT&T. No FIOS or Uverse, either. Granted, my cable is pretty good at 12 megabits down, but still, I'm not going to be overloading my ISP's current core infrastructure anytime soon. No home-version of Telepresence - should we develop such a thing - at 12 megabits down/256 kbits up. Ditto for my iPhone. The numbers of iPhone users seem to be able to strain AT&Ts ability to deliver fast 3G services, but I doubt they have a lot of core bottleneck. Somebody just give me a fast last mile.
Then I'll work at straining your network core enough to need one of those routers:-)
TFA doesn't mention how long it takes this bag to bio-degrade; when crops need fertilizer, they need it _right now_, not in a year or two after some biodegradable plastic falls apart. TFA also mostly talks about using this bag in urban areas with no sanitation facilities; it doesn't really seem to be about farming.
Anyway, people have been using human waste as fertilizer for literally thousands of years. Ever heard of a honey wagon?
It's not that they don't have access to birth control (well, some don't, but...), it's that many/most people in those places don't necessarily want it. Change attitudes about that and they'll do a lot to get their own birth control. Otherwise, giving away a bunch of free rubbers just translates into amusing balloon tricks for the impoverished world.
With respect to CC&Rs, I'm inclined to say "No, they probably shouldn't have that right."
Why?
Try buying a new (or newish) house in any development tract in the US that doesn't have CC&Rs. Just try. Granted, I can't speak for other parts of the country, but in California, that would be impossible. The only way to get a new home with no CC&Rs is to either own some empty land somewhere and have a custom home built, or buy an old house, tear it down, and have a custom home built.
The fact that you can't buy anything even remotely new that doesn't have CC&Rs attached is, IMO, basically a form of discrimination (or extortion, if you will) that says "We will not allow you buy a new home, anywhere, unless you allow other people to decide how you decorate your home/yard, park your car, etc." I'm not talking about municipal law here, which is what the couple in question are charged with violating, but rules made up by an unelected body of unaccountable individuals (the CC&Rs are typically written by the builder before the homes even go and sale). Eventually, they pass into the hands of the HOA, which is kinda sort elected, but good luck getting anybody who isn't a busybody onto the board of the HOA.
So, what are groups of people who really want to live the CC&R/HOA lifestyle to do? Well, if they can get everyone on their street (and I mean everyone) to agree to pass a set of CC&Rs, with the stipulation that if any of them sell, it is not binding on the new owner, they could do that.
Or buy some land in the countryside and build a bunch of (identical) custom homes and live in a sort of groupthink CC&R commune.
My former neighbor had the ugliest house on the street. Didn't maintain it. Front yard looked like crap. Entire backyard was a farm (really). Everyone thought it was an eyesore. He was probably even violating some city laws. But would I turn him in, or enact any CC&Rs to stop him from doing that? No. It is (or was; he fixed it up a bit, then sold it). his house. Not mine.
I'm from their area, and believe me, that house/yard/fence stands out, and not in a good way. I sure wouldn't want to live next to it. That doesn't mean that whatever neighbor ratted them out to the city isn't a jerk (or that they aren't, and maybe just pissed off too many people; probably no one here knows any of the protagonists; I don't, anyway), but really, what they did probably lowered the valued of _my_ property, even though it's a few miles from theirs:p
There are reasonable arguments in favor of both your position and the GP's position. I tend to be more on your side of the fence - that what I do with my yard and my house is not really any of anyone else's business, so long as I'm not breaking a "real" law such running a drug business out of my house (I'm defining "real" here as doing actual felonies, and making a wood-chip front yard a felony wouldn't cut it in my book).
However, the reasonable counter-argument is that what I do is my own business until it harms my neighbors' interests. For example, if I have loud parties all the the time and have 3 or 4 derelict vehicles up on blocks in my front yard and that makes it difficult for my neighbors to rent out or sell their homes, thus lowering the prices at which they might do so, then it becomes their business. Stated another way, my freedoms end where theirs begin.
That doesn't mean I'm in favor of CC&Rs - those are way beyond the pale and I would not buy a house that had them - but there's a line there somewhere. Do I think the Ha family has crossed that line? No, probably not. OTOH, I looked at the picture of their yard in TFA and I must say that it looks like crap. My brother who lives in SoCal (not in Orange, fortunately, or the city would be after him, too) also has a low water usage yard. He has no lawn at all. His front yard is filled with decorative gravel with larger stones placed throughout it. Some of them form a dry creekbed. All the plants are native and drought-tolerant. In the back, the yard is partly a sculpted concrete deck with a redwood gazebo, and partly the decomposed granite (looks like big, course sand) that is natural to that area. In the back, too, native drought-tolerant plants are planted throughout, plus a few small fruit trees and herbs in tubs. It all looks like it was done by a professional landscaper, but he designed and built all of the landscaping in his spare time. Only the concrete and gazebo were hired out (the concrete to his design; the gazebo designed and built by a master carpenter).
I know I'd *much* rather live next to my brother's house than to the Has' house. I suspect that a lot of their problem with the City of Orange comes more from how ugly their yard looks (and that fence is fugly, too) than the fact that they went for a low water-usage solution, especially in these days when everyone in California is being told to conserve water, especially water used on landscaping. If they'd done a nice, professional looking job, maybe created an actual landscape instead of just dumping a bunch of wood chips, I think chances are pretty good they wouldn't be having this problem.
OTOH, it's always possible that the local government is just a bunch of mindless bureaucrats; governments tend to attract that type. However, it remains very likely that the only reason the city government even knows about their yard is because one or more of their neighbors ratted them out. If you build an attractive low-water landscape that makes people look and say "Wow, that's cool!" no one is going to turn you in. If you build one that looks like theirs, someone probably will. Whether it actually hurts their property values or not could be difficult to ascertain, but I'll tell you one thing: I used to live next to the crappiest looking house on my block, and when they sold it and the new owners cleaned up the landscaping, painted the house, and put in new windows, I was a happy camper. I'm sure that if I had had to sell my own house at that time, it would have made it harder to sell, being next door to that eyesore. The fact that my own house was one of the best on the block probably helped the eyesore to sell (that and it's really low price).
Heck, even the admin mentioned in TFA is said to have suspected the scam immediately, and got confirmation 10 minutes later when he received another identical mail. Wow if 10 minutes went by and he still hadn't confirmed that it was a scam, he was either really busy, didn't care, or CISSP doesn't mean a whole lot. You get a mail like that, you look at the headers right away. In almost all cases that will give you the confirmation you need.
Problem number one is that the criminals you are talking about are most commonly not in US jurisdiction. A lot of them are not even in countries with which the US has extradition treaties. Good luck seizing stuff from all those Russians, Nigerians, and other Eastern Europeans.
As far as specifics go, if all of the criminals' assets are going to be seized, the pecking order for receipt of those assets should be:
1) Restitution to the victims. If there is anything left after that:
2) Goes toward the cost of the investigation and prosecution. If anything is left after that:
3) Reduction of the national debt. Since you live in the PRK like me, you might have noticed that public schools today get the largest slice of the state budget they've ever had, yet seem to do less than ever with it. Certainly, the schools here were better when I was a kid than they are now.
I really like the hard labor thing. I've been a proponent of chain gangs for years.
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Not all Republicans. Granted, I'm a nominal Republican but really more of a Libertarian, but still, not all Republicans.
There are some who trot out an argument reminiscent of "Think of the children!" (I have three, thanks, and I should imagine that by the time they're old enough to set foot in a casino they'll already be decent poker players, if they're interested) that is basically that "Since some people will gamble uncontrollably, we have to make online gambling illegal for everyone." Never mind that most people in the U.S live not far from a legal bricks-n-mortar casino, and bookies aren't exactly hard to find, either. Or that it's quite easy to ruin your life through excessive use of alcohol or tobacco, yet those remain legal.
Just because some small percentage of the population cannot restrain itself for whatever reason(s), I just can't see that as a reason to ban it for the rest. Heck, some people drive their cars in extremely irresponsible ways and cause others to be killed or maimed for life, but we don't see any (rational) people calling for cars to be made illegal because of that.
The problem with firing everyone involved with the mistake is that if you do, you're getting rid of the people most able and most motivated to be sure this never happens again. Firing someone for a single incident is almost always the wrong thing to do. It certainly would be here.
Things may be different now from when I lived in Japan (1994 - 2002) but there were definitely cars older than seven years around at that time. Keeping them on the road becomes a lot more expensive, of course, do to the Auto Mechanics and Car Dealers Welfare Act - uh, I mean, the strict but fair vehicle inspection fees and regulations, but they were around. I even saw quite a few American muscle cars from the 1960s and early seventies, including a 1970 Challenger R/T in a parking lot near Mizonokuchi (where the Nambu-sen and the Denentoshi-sen intersect). I used to have a '70 Challenger myself, so that was a pretty cool thing to see there.
The thing is, even if he's not nuttier than a fruitcake (unlikely as that may be), if he doesn't like it, the moral and (I suspect; IANAL) legal responsibility to prevent it is his. As others have noted, if you have a pollen allergy it doesn't mean you can required your neighbor to uproot all the plants in her yard.
You can seal your house up nice and tight, you can have HEPA-filtered everything, you can wear the appropriate mask when your outside if necessary. You can put a big fan in your yard and blow air away from your house :p
But you can't expect that your neighbor will not use her property as she sees fitSo , within the bounds of the law.
So, he should paint his house with anti-RF paint, build himself a Faraday cage, line his walls with metal, whatever. Maybe move out to the countryside. I'm not unsympathetic to anyone whose really sick - I have an epileptic daughter and I understand about managing chronic illness - but if my something at my neighbor's house tended to trigger her seizures and my neighbor couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it, mitigating the problem would be up to me.
So even on the off chance that this guy isn't a kook, that's not her problem.
Uh, I think you have that backwards. "Binary megabytes" are the real ones. You might have heard that computers use binary...
The "Base 10" megabytes were invented by disk vendors to make disks seem larger than they are, as your C64 example shows.
To tell the truth, I hadn't even noticed the change in OS X. My disk so large that it hardly matters, there's no danger of it getting full, FWIW.
I make bubbles from stored methane all the time. I'll go swimming in the ocean and solve the problem.
Yup! :-)
I'd never heard of fbpurify before, but I have now. Not only did I go right out and install it, I updated my FB status to tell others :-)
Way to go, Facebook! I think you just hit at least a 7.0 on the Stupidity Richter Scale!
Paper cost factors in, but paper is far cheaper than printer ink. For the cost of an ink cartridge (more or less) I can buy a whole case of paper, and it takes multiple cartridges to print a case of paper. Even if the font doubled the amount of paper they use (it won't), they'd still be money ahead.
All that will accomplish is to fill the world with beautiful, bisexual nympho women who still aren't interested in you...
I can only comment on ones in California, granted, but the 3 Walmarts here that I have been too are all better than any of the Kmarts here that I'd been too (have never been to one since they became Sears, so can't comment on that) and are in the same category as Target WRT nastiness or lack of same. What, specifically, do you think is nastier about Walmart other than the astonishing fatness of many of the customers. WRT pricing, I can always get a better deal at Walmart than Target on most stuff. Surprisingly, though, JC Penney often beats Walmart on children's clothing and the quality is way better.
Other quality tip: look for clothing made in Vietnam. Walmart sometimes has some, and the quality is generally much better than Chinese-made.
I don't often shop at Walmart, at least in part because the nearest one to my house is about 25 miles away. However, it's surprising just how much US-made stuff I notice on the shelves when I do go there.
More, at least in my experience, than I see at the Target which I shop at more often because it's quite near my house.
Basically, other low-end chains like Target (and even higher-end chains, even) have very little that's made in the US. Based on what I see on the shelves on my rare visits, I doubt Walmart even has the highest percentage of Chinese-made stuff. Even if they do, it's a matter of a very small degree. Yet, somehow, Walmart seems to be the one that gets all the flack for a practice they all engage in.
It's damned hard to find stuff made in the USA anymore. It's damned hard to find stuff that isn't made in China. So if you're going to be shopping at a store that sells mostly Chinese-made stuff (and you are, because that's the only kind there is), it might as well be Walmart. They have lower prices and a better selection than the others. Just watch out for the Walmart whales pushing shopping carts; you wouldn't want to be hit by one of those.
If this poorly crafted bill - which is going to cost far more than they say and is making its numbers with guesses and sleight of hand - passes, we are going to be fixing it - that is, reforming the reform - for decades to come.
This was rushed through far to quickly and is too poorly considered for something this important. What both the House and Senate need to do is scrap the current versions, go back to the drawing board, get input from their constituents on what *they* think needs to be reformed, rather than a bill done primarily in response to what the White House asked for, and then pass *that* bill and send it to the President.
Sure, there are some things in the current bill that are good: the first thing that comes to my mind is doing away with pre-existing conditions. That's unconscionable. So is charging people more if they actually use their insurance. I don't like lifetime maximums, either. Some treatments are very expensive.
There are countries that have reasonably well-run national health insurance systems (Japan, for one, which is a single-payer country) and countries that have terrible ones. One thing they have in common is that the standard of care covered by insurance tends to be non-great. I've been hospitalized in Japan and can speak from experience about that. Doctor care can also be hit or miss, although that seems to have more to do with general culture and standards and little or nothing to do with insurance.
Some other countries have really poorly run national health care systems that result in serious rationing of medical procedures. I have a friend in Winnipeg who is on a waiting list right now, whereas if she were a US resident, she would have had it done long ago. Lest someone start up some BS about "What if she needed surgery but didn't have insurance?" every hospital I have ever been to, or that any member of my family has been to, has had an explicit written statement that inability to pay will not keep you from treatment. They have programs and foundations in place for that. Yes, those programs make my own bill higher - I'm sure the two weeks one of my kids spent in the pediatric ICU last year would have been cheaper otherwise, but I'm also certain of two things:
1) The cost increase to me would be even worse with the government involved.
2) I'd much rather have that between me and the hospital and the poor who are receiving help from the hospital than between me and the government and those parties. Anything that puts more layers between patient and caregiver is bad. It's kind of like the reasons that start-ups are more nimble than large, established companies: at every start-up I've worked for, the CEO not only knew me by name and face, I had no more than two levels of management between myself and the CEO. At the company I currently work for - which is pretty nimble as big companies go, but it's still more oil tanker than speed boat - I can't even tell you how many managers are between me and the CEO, or who they are. I know who the managers are three levels up from me and who the last one before the CEO is, but there are some more in between.
Look at point 2, above, and remember that to err is human; to really screw things up requires a bureaucracy. To screw things up so badly that there is no reasonable hope of ever fixing them properly requires a government bureaucracy.
What do you mean, deer? I want to select missiles and target the SOB that cut me off...
The only thing surprising to me about this is that he doesn't live in San Francisco. It sounds like something one could expect of Chris Daly (member of the SF board of supervisors).
Granted, Daly is probably a bigger idiot than Ortiz, but his proposing this sort of law makes me think they may be birds of a feather.
Definitely not so. I don't know if you have any kids or firearms. I have young children and no longer own any firearms (partly for that reason, partly for others) and I can tell you:
-My 16-month old is strong enough to lift, carry, and control things larger and heavier than the .40 S&W Glock I used to have. She'll grab a 3 pound plastic jar of animal crackers off the shelf, carry it across the room to where I am, and ask for one. Then, whether she gets one or not, she'll take the jar back and put it away. Round trip is about 40 feet, carrying a 3 pound object. Small children are far stronger than you think. .44 mag revolver could be pulled be a 3 year old, at least if the kid wasn't trying to hold the gun off the floor at the same time, and maybe even then.
-It doesn't take much strength to pull the trigger on a Glock. I'm not familiar with the weapon that was involved in this horrible accident, but in general, the pressure required to pull the trigger on a semi-auto isn't all that much. Heck, even the trigger on my friend's
My 16-month old could probably even pull the trigger on a large revolver with some effort. If you have kids, you know just how strong their grip is when they don't want to let go of something they aren't supposed to have. That's more than strong enough to pull the trigger on pretty much any small arms; all that is necessary is enough desire to overcome the resistance.
I'm sure this accident occurred exactly as described. If it didn't, the police investigation and the autopsy will reveal that. Self-inflicted gunshot wounds are quite different than ones inflicted by someone else, and it's pretty rare for anyone who would do something like this on purpose to be able to keep the story straight.
I'm sure this was just a horrible accident, and it illustrates again why, if there are kids in your house, a firearm that isn't under lock and key must never, ever, leave your immediate possession. Lapses can happen. Kids are an incredibly distracting force. I have three, and they can make you just about leave the house with your brain left behind on the kitchen counter. That certainly influenced my decision to not have any firearms in the house until they are much older. The price of a lapse like that is just too high.
Of course, I live in a very safe area with an infinitesimal crime rate. My city of 50,000 or so only has something like nine police officers.
They must not be on that site, then, because I checked it with Firefox on both Mac and Linux and got no pop-ups. I'm also running Noscript and Adblock-Plus; anyone who isn't, should be.
Everything important in routing and switching in the last 20 years has really just been about a bigger pipe. What did ASICs do? Let people build faster routers and switches, so you can run bigger pipes.
I work in security myself, and that makes more real "change" in the Internet, since without some kind of security solutions in place (whether ours or someone else's), a lot of important things that go over the Internet (especially email) would be practically unusable. However, security solutions work further out toward the network edge. Having enough routing and switching capacity at the network core is the most fundamental thing to make the Internet work.
I never said it was a revolutionary technology, you're putting words in my mouth. I never claimed anything even remotely like that. I said it will change the Internet, and it will. Changes in the Internet itself is always evolutionary these days, not revolutionary. Social networking was revolutionary, sure, but that's not the Internet; it's just something that the Internet is used for. The Internet is routing and switching. Greater capacity at the network core, and the bigger pipes that follow after it, enable better applications to run over the Internet. Remember how much fun it wasn't to try and stream video 10 or 12 years ago? Neither most network cores nor most last miles were fast enough to make that a pleasant experience for most people. Now we take it for granted. Why? Streaming hasn't changed that much, but the internetwork pipes, intranetwork pipes, and the last miles are all a lot bigger now than they were then. As are the routers and switches that support that stuff. It's all about routing and switching.
Sure,this thing seems like an impossibly powerful beast to many people right now, but so did every new and powerful technology that we now take as a given, and many that we already regard as obsolete. Look at the CPUs a lot of us have on our home and work computers. My desktop at work has 2 cores, my laptop has 2 cores, my desktop at home has four. 10 years ago I was messing around with dual P-III motherboards that had far less processing power and memory capacity than even one of the cores on anything I'm using now. A four-core, or even dual-core, chip would have been just a fantasy back then. Now we take them for granted. Ditto for fast DSL or cable, or even FTTH, at least in urban areas. And compare the graphics card you had 10 years ago to what you have now. The one you have now is more powerful than the computer you had in 2000. Probably has more memory, too.
Bottom line? This "big wow" router you don't seem very impressed by, or ones like it (I don't expect our competitors to sit still) will be a necessity in a lot o networks five years from now, not a luxury. And we were the first to build one this big, just like we were with so many other routing and switching products over the years. That doesn't mean we're the only good vendor; we have worthy competitors, to be sure. But we're number one for a good reason, and the routing and switching market isn't like the desktop OS market: if your gear is less than capable or has insurmountable security problems, it _will_ be ripped out and replaced with something else, if you can even sell it in the first place.
Full disclosure: I work at Cisco
Further disclosure: but not on routing and switching, but yes, in engineering.
Opinion: That Cisco has changed the Internet is a pretty good argument. If you look back to 1984 when Cisco was founded and how the Internet has grown over the years and what our products have done and the fact that we are by far the world's largest networking company, I think it's pretty clear that Cisco's influence on the Internet has been pivotal. Changed the Internet. Built the hardware that built the Internet. Walk through any data center and you'll probably see more Cisco gear than gear from all our competitors put together. Does that mean I think we're perfect? No. But we're very good. I've worked at other large IT-industry companies and none of them hold a candle to Cisco, IMO. I can't imagine what it would take to get me to go anywhere else. Well, I can, but no one in her/his right mind would actually give it to me :-)
Granted, the Internet is a lot bigger and harder to change now than it was back then. Still, a product like this can produce change in the Internet, or at least increase its rate of change by enabling much faster core speeds, which allows more high-bandwidth content to go around. Imagine if everybody had FIOS or Uverse at home and many of them were getting all their TV programming via that connection, plus Internet. I'd like something like a home-user version of Cisco Telepresence to talk with far-away friends and family instead of a laptop webcam. Maybe FTTH would be fast enough for something like that. Is the core infrastructure in place today fast enough for that? Probably not. This provides a nice segue for my rant about the last mile.
At home, my only option is cable. Too far from the CO for any DSL provider, even AT&T. No FIOS or Uverse, either. Granted, my cable is pretty good at 12 megabits down, but still, I'm not going to be overloading my ISP's current core infrastructure anytime soon. No home-version of Telepresence - should we develop such a thing - at 12 megabits down/256 kbits up. Ditto for my iPhone. The numbers of iPhone users seem to be able to strain AT&Ts ability to deliver fast 3G services, but I doubt they have a lot of core bottleneck. Somebody just give me a fast last mile.
Then I'll work at straining your network core enough to need one of those routers :-)
TFA doesn't mention how long it takes this bag to bio-degrade; when crops need fertilizer, they need it _right now_, not in a year or two after some biodegradable plastic falls apart. TFA also mostly talks about using this bag in urban areas with no sanitation facilities; it doesn't really seem to be about farming.
Anyway, people have been using human waste as fertilizer for literally thousands of years. Ever heard of a honey wagon?
It's not that they don't have access to birth control (well, some don't, but...), it's that many/most people in those places don't necessarily want it. Change attitudes about that and they'll do a lot to get their own birth control. Otherwise, giving away a bunch of free rubbers just translates into amusing balloon tricks for the impoverished world.
With respect to CC&Rs, I'm inclined to say "No, they probably shouldn't have that right."
Why?
Try buying a new (or newish) house in any development tract in the US that doesn't have CC&Rs. Just try. Granted, I can't speak for other parts of the country, but in California, that would be impossible. The only way to get a new home with no CC&Rs is to either own some empty land somewhere and have a custom home built, or buy an old house, tear it down, and have a custom home built.
The fact that you can't buy anything even remotely new that doesn't have CC&Rs attached is, IMO, basically a form of discrimination (or extortion, if you will) that says "We will not allow you buy a new home, anywhere, unless you allow other people to decide how you decorate your home/yard, park your car, etc." I'm not talking about municipal law here, which is what the couple in question are charged with violating, but rules made up by an unelected body of unaccountable individuals (the CC&Rs are typically written by the builder before the homes even go and sale). Eventually, they pass into the hands of the HOA, which is kinda sort elected, but good luck getting anybody who isn't a busybody onto the board of the HOA.
So, what are groups of people who really want to live the CC&R/HOA lifestyle to do? Well, if they can get everyone on their street (and I mean everyone) to agree to pass a set of CC&Rs, with the stipulation that if any of them sell, it is not binding on the new owner, they could do that.
Or buy some land in the countryside and build a bunch of (identical) custom homes and live in a sort of groupthink CC&R commune.
My former neighbor had the ugliest house on the street. Didn't maintain it. Front yard looked like crap. Entire backyard was a farm (really). Everyone thought it was an eyesore. He was probably even violating some city laws. But would I turn him in, or enact any CC&Rs to stop him from doing that? No. It is (or was; he fixed it up a bit, then sold it). his house. Not mine.
I'm from their area, and believe me, that house/yard/fence stands out, and not in a good way. I sure wouldn't want to live next to it. That doesn't mean that whatever neighbor ratted them out to the city isn't a jerk (or that they aren't, and maybe just pissed off too many people; probably no one here knows any of the protagonists; I don't, anyway), but really, what they did probably lowered the valued of _my_ property, even though it's a few miles from theirs :p
There are reasonable arguments in favor of both your position and the GP's position. I tend to be more on your side of the fence - that what I do with my yard and my house is not really any of anyone else's business, so long as I'm not breaking a "real" law such running a drug business out of my house (I'm defining "real" here as doing actual felonies, and making a wood-chip front yard a felony wouldn't cut it in my book).
However, the reasonable counter-argument is that what I do is my own business until it harms my neighbors' interests. For example, if I have loud parties all the the time and have 3 or 4 derelict vehicles up on blocks in my front yard and that makes it difficult for my neighbors to rent out or sell their homes, thus lowering the prices at which they might do so, then it becomes their business. Stated another way, my freedoms end where theirs begin.
That doesn't mean I'm in favor of CC&Rs - those are way beyond the pale and I would not buy a house that had them - but there's a line there somewhere. Do I think the Ha family has crossed that line? No, probably not. OTOH, I looked at the picture of their yard in TFA and I must say that it looks like crap. My brother who lives in SoCal (not in Orange, fortunately, or the city would be after him, too) also has a low water usage yard. He has no lawn at all. His front yard is filled with decorative gravel with larger stones placed throughout it. Some of them form a dry creekbed. All the plants are native and drought-tolerant. In the back, the yard is partly a sculpted concrete deck with a redwood gazebo, and partly the decomposed granite (looks like big, course sand) that is natural to that area. In the back, too, native drought-tolerant plants are planted throughout, plus a few small fruit trees and herbs in tubs. It all looks like it was done by a professional landscaper, but he designed and built all of the landscaping in his spare time. Only the concrete and gazebo were hired out (the concrete to his design; the gazebo designed and built by a master carpenter).
I know I'd *much* rather live next to my brother's house than to the Has' house. I suspect that a lot of their problem with the City of Orange comes more from how ugly their yard looks (and that fence is fugly, too) than the fact that they went for a low water-usage solution, especially in these days when everyone in California is being told to conserve water, especially water used on landscaping. If they'd done a nice, professional looking job, maybe created an actual landscape instead of just dumping a bunch of wood chips, I think chances are pretty good they wouldn't be having this problem.
OTOH, it's always possible that the local government is just a bunch of mindless bureaucrats; governments tend to attract that type. However, it remains very likely that the only reason the city government even knows about their yard is because one or more of their neighbors ratted them out. If you build an attractive low-water landscape that makes people look and say "Wow, that's cool!" no one is going to turn you in. If you build one that looks like theirs, someone probably will. Whether it actually hurts their property values or not could be difficult to ascertain, but I'll tell you one thing: I used to live next to the crappiest looking house on my block, and when they sold it and the new owners cleaned up the landscaping, painted the house, and put in new windows, I was a happy camper. I'm sure that if I had had to sell my own house at that time, it would have made it harder to sell, being next door to that eyesore. The fact that my own house was one of the best on the block probably helped the eyesore to sell (that and it's really low price).
Heck, even the admin mentioned in TFA is said to have suspected the scam immediately, and got confirmation 10 minutes later when he received another identical mail. Wow if 10 minutes went by and he still hadn't confirmed that it was a scam, he was either really busy, didn't care, or CISSP doesn't mean a whole lot. You get a mail like that, you look at the headers right away. In almost all cases that will give you the confirmation you need.
Problem number one is that the criminals you are talking about are most commonly not in US jurisdiction. A lot of them are not even in countries with which the US has extradition treaties. Good luck seizing stuff from all those Russians, Nigerians, and other Eastern Europeans.
As far as specifics go, if all of the criminals' assets are going to be seized, the pecking order for receipt of those assets should be:
1) Restitution to the victims. If there is anything left after that:
2) Goes toward the cost of the investigation and prosecution. If anything is left after that:
3) Reduction of the national debt. Since you live in the PRK like me, you might have noticed that public schools today get the largest slice of the state budget they've ever had, yet seem to do less than ever with it. Certainly, the schools here were better when I was a kid than they are now.
I really like the hard labor thing. I've been a proponent of chain gangs for years.