As I said in another post, somebody has to make a decision somewhere along the line, and somebody will make some money out of the deal. The person who makes the money will try to influence the person that makes the decision. A law doesn't magically change that. And as long as the federal government is providing funding, it will encourage the breaking of that law even if it did exist.
I think it's unlikely that people are being grown entirely for their organs. I think it's much more likely that embryos will be produced for the purpose of stem cell research, law or not.
In fact, by banning federal funding, you've pushed research out to labs that are less worried about pissing the government
Are you suggesting that there is greater demand for embryos when the government is not funding research upon them? That doesn't make any sense. The demand for embryos will be much higher if federal money is subsidizing the research.
Actually, I'm not strictly opposed to embryonic stem cell research. However, I acknowledge the moral issues in balance on both sides.
Think about it this way: we don't allow cosmetic testing on animals (or it's at least shunned), but we do allow medical testing on animals (often resulting in death). It's a balance.
I can see how that balance could weigh in favor of IVF and against embryonic stem cell research for a given person, without contradiction.
You could probably convince me one way or the other on the embryonic stem cell research if you come out with a lot of convincing facts or arguments. However, you can't make me totally disregard the idea that an embryo is some degree of life.
But yeah, there's a lot of misinformation in politics. It's good to clear up the misinformation, and it's also good to use comparisons so people realize if they are in contradiction with themselves.
I don't know what Bush's motives are or not; it seems pointless to speculate. If you think that Bush in particular is deceiving us, that's another topic that warrants further evidence.
Lots of death happens all the time. A lot of medical research has gone into preventing miscarriage, as a matter of fact.
The point is that some people do not want to federally subsidize more death.
I have no idea what is "morally significant" vs. "morally insignificant". Either something is right, or it's wrong. Many factors are in play, such as the possibility of medical advances with embryonic stem cells. However, each person makes a decision for themselves: right or wrong.
And if a significant number of people in this country find it to be wrong, why do we confiscate their money for research they don't believe in?
It creates conflicts of interest that could result in the additional production of embryos for harvest.
If someone embezzles $10M and gets caught, we can: (a) Throw them in prison. (b) Not.
In case (b), is there really a chance he will commit another crime? It's not like anybody will let him near that kind of money again. So, should we let him loose? No. It's about incentives. We incarcerate him so that other people avoid embezzling for fear of prison time.
If you can pick whatever point in time you want -- disregarding all that previously occurred -- of course you can avoid the whole moral dillema.
It'd be overtly clear that they're trying to turn their religious beliefs into legislation that affects us all.
Actually, the people that want to affect us all are the people that want to tax all Americans to support their morally questionable research. You can do as much private research as you want.
Not all pro-lifers are religious. Everyone draws the line at a different place. If you spend taxpayer money supporting research in conflict with many people's moral values, you are not respecting their values.
I think most reasonable people agree that all stem cell research shows some promise. The real question is whether that hope outweighs the questionable moral grounds of embryonic stem cell research.
And yes, they are questionable, or else this would be a very boring/. discussion.
Well, somebody makes a decision at some point, and somebody makes money at some point. The person who makes the money will try to influence the person who makes the decision. There is an obvious conflict of interest there. You can't just magically seperate the two with a law.
Bush and his support base are being hypocritical in finding fault with stem cell reseach while ignoring IVF; either they should oppose both on equally strong ground, or they should stand in the way of neither.
An interesting point, and some anti-stem cell people are surely confused about the topic.
However, IVF is not taxpayer funded. Period. You can do IVF, and you can do stem cell research, but not with my money. If you think it's so promising, start up a private stem cell research fund and I'm sure the legions of stem cell research supporters will donate left and right.
Many people in this country feel that stem cell research is on questionable moral grounds. The argument that "it was dead already" doesn't hold water. Encouraging more research creates demand for stem cells, and many Americans don't want to create such a conflict of interest.
IVF is less questionable for many Americans because the purpose of a fertility clinic is to create human life, not destroy it. There do not appear to be any conflicts of interest which would encourage the destruction of life.
And yes, I realize that some people expect lives to be saved by stem cell research. Then those people must weigh the issues morally for themselves whether it's a good idea or not. Many people have weighed against it, and so I don't think we should be spending their money to do it.
Your sarcastic comment doesn't really make sense. Of course managers don't do stuff. They want YOU to do it. If you go in and prove you can do stuff, that's less stuff for them to do and more money for them to make. If you go in and tell them how great you are at bean counting and holding meetings, that's more of their time wasted and less money for them. Not to mention you'll be competition for their job.
They should. If the government would just stop buying MS products, MS would no longer have a monopoly.
However, the government really wanted to use the law to intervene in private contracts it had with MS, to make them more friendly to the government. That's fascism: the government buys almost exclusively MS products, and then uses the law (not just it's market power) to control the terms of those contracts.
There is no GUI standard. You either pick one and code to it and blow off all the potential customers who want to use another
I'm running evolution, some GUI terminal emulators, firefox, xpdf, and abiword. All of these are running in Gnome. If I quit gnome, I could start KDE and run all these same applications.
What is the big deal about some different environments? If you link to Qt, it will look like Qt, and if you link to gtk+, it will look like gtk+. The user at most has to install some libraries.
Just because a developer finds Qt more useful for his application, and I use Gnome, doesn't mean that he has excluded me. I can still run his app just fine.
Sure, it's frustrating to new users to understand a few different desktop layouts. But why does everyone act like it holds up the whole development process? It's not like evolution and openoffice and firefox don't exist.
I agree completely. I would generalize your answer to be that interoperability is a feature in and of itself.
I don't just mean cross-platform, although that is of course an important advantage in OOo. I mean that the formats and processes are standardized, so that you can access and manipulate your data in ways you could not before.
Examples: (1) In a word document, it saves deleted data so that you can undo. Lets say that you wanted to make a filter that removes all deleted data in any email attachments going outside the company. You can't do that to word docs very easily or reliably. If OOo saves any unwanted data in a document (author, whatever), that could easily be filtered out reliably. (2) You can make a sophisticated search engine or archiving tool for your data. (3) Your data will always be accessible, not just as long as MS decides to make readers for your data. (4) You can data mine your, well, your data. In MS word, it's not your data until you open it in word, copy the text somewhere else, and resave it in a non-proprietary format. Then you can mine it. Try doing that to 100K documents in a week. (5) ?? There's always that unaccounted-for need you have. MS could come up with "solutions" to the above problems because I listed them. But what about when the atypical situation comes up and you need to do something about it?
In short, MS has a "tool" or application for all the needs of its target market customers. If that leaves 1% fo their customers out in the cold without a solution, they don't care. In the world of open formats and simple access, if you know what you want to do, you can do it. In the MS world, if you know what you want to do you have to do some reverse engineering and programming, or hope someone else had the exact same problem.
And really, RMS is right: why "save" your data in a secret format that only MS can read? The fact that they usually let you read most of the data you have recently produced means nothing, since at any time they could decide that you may be a software pirate and deny access to your own data. Or they could just decide that you are now a negligible portion of the market, and no longer provide access to your old data.
Huh? I'd agree with you if we were talking about an RDBMS or something, but we're talking about a GUI app.
I don't really use GUI apps for the most part ('cept for a few of course). But sometimes I need to evaluate a few alternatives and make a basic recommendation to someone looking to fill a certain need. It might not be all things to all people, but if it sets them in the right direction it's obviously helpful.
Can you provide some examples of it's drawbacks? I'm not the type of person to use this software myself, but I want to know who to recommend it to and who not.
Huh? The FCC is now a fraud-detection agency? What does that have to do with the original idea of the FCC at all? The original idea of the FCC was to regulate a limited resource (airwaves). The airwaves seem less and less limited as we progress. I would be perfectly content if the FCC vanished tomorrow. It's not as though we're afraid to walk the streets at night because somebody might broadcast something that could be interpreted as an encoded image of a bare breast.
Why doesn't a consumer just sue them for breach of contract?
PS: We are afraid, of course, now that Martha Stuart is free again. </sarcasm>. I just can't believe you can be put in jail for lying to federal agents (and if you can, why doesn't Clinton live under the same laws? Oh, I guess he's above the law.).
You're absolutely right. My first boss lost that focus (got 90's dot com fever I guess), and he lost the business.
A good boss tells you when to do something quick, and tells you when to do something right, and understands the consequences of both (quick = cheap, fast, but problems if you need it later; right = slow, expensive, but grows with the business). In fact, a good boss understands the entire spectrum, and communicates his needs to you.
A bad boss tries to get something cheap and fast, but wants to present it to customers as a polished product and sell it at a premium price. They create all kinds of illusions: fancier graphics work, parties for the VCs, wild promises, etc. But the customers will see through it and not look back.
Re:The Problem With XML
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Effective XML
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Huh? I don't think the SQL spec has anything to do with record sizes in the on-disk representation.
Many RDBMSs use variable length records.
I think you're talking about fixed-length record databases, like might be found in some embedded databases (like Berkeley DB, which also offers variable-length records).
Most companies see it as their function to make money. That's a neanderthal way of looking at things now days
Money is a pretty good way of keeping track of what someone has accomplished for someone else. It might not be perfect, but it's the best tool we've got. If you know something that correlates more closely to productivity than money, let me know.
I made the remark about the QA dept. as a joke, mostly. In case you don't know, Macguyver was a T.V. character that escaped from bad guys by building weird contraptions with what he had available, and he'd always escape in the nick of time.
So, there was no QA dept overseeing Macguyver's contraptions. The whole point of my post is that sometimes you just need something to fill a specific need, and you need it cheap, and you need it fast.
A good boss will tell you what to do quickly, and what to do right. He will understand that if he tells you to do it quickly, he expects problems if he's still trying to use/sell/extend it 6 months later. He understands if he tells you to do it right, the cost will be high and deadlines may slip.
I brought the Macguyver analogy into my post to show that it's not all about dollars and profits and market pressure and marketroids. There are real, efficient reasons to do some jobs quickly rather than The Right Way (tm). This is one of those complexities that they can't teach you in a computer science class in college; you must use your judgement or have a boss that uses his judgement.
And yes, the QA dept should be using their judgement as well.
doing things the Right Way has long-term benefits that overshadow the "quick fix."
That's an oversimplification. Sometimes the right way is the quick fix and not the Right Way. If having something fast is more important than having something correct, the right way is the quick fix.
Sometimes a product can be developed perfectly, and totally miss its opportunity to be useful. This is a crucial aspect of communication between management and labor.
If it needs to be done next tuesday and won't be worth a penny on wednesday, you'll do lots of things that aren't "The Right Way". You'll use MS Access, Visual Basic, bailing wire, and duct tape if you have to. And if you've got a good boss you'll know the situation and understand how "Right" you should do it, because he'll tell you.
MacGuyver (sp?) has built many useful things escaping from drug dealers, and none of them would pass the scrutiny of a good QA dept.
Interesting health info. I'm still checking that out.
What we have now is a bad health care system. Costs are not controlled because the people making the buying decisions are not the ones paying the costs. To balance it out, the insurance companies must require patients to go to low-cost providers who underprescribe and generally provide poor service. And, because the costs are only loosely controlled, the premiums are still very high. So, we have high premiums and low quality medical care. The allocation of medical resources is very inefficient.
Health care in the U.S. is very important to me since I have high health care costs and I will my entire life. I need quality health care and prescriptions, and I am willing to pay the cost.
When a politician speaks to me of "health care as a right" or reducing the price to me, I don't like it at all, because I want quality health care. It's no secret that if you reduce the consumer's price, via insurance or social programs, one or more of the following things will happen: (1) reduced quality (2) shortage (3) lines/queues/rationing
Which all result in doom for me personally.
I think it would be much better if the government got out of health care and employers got out of health care, and the government just issued a voucher to everyone below a certain income level. They could spend it on whatever health care they want.
Regarding gay marriage, I'm a little unclear whether that should be allowed or not. It is clear to me that government is involved in marriage, otherwise this wouldn't be an issue in the first place. It probably shouldn't be a Federal issue though. The only reason to make it Federal is because couples move around, and generally we expect to be able to maintain the same family structure when moving within the U.S. This whole issue is one of those unfortunate murky situations, because it's much easier to treat everyone as an individual.
But everyone is not an individual. A married person is no longer an individual in many practical ways. They share children with another person, who are also not really individuals. Marriage is a practical recognition of human nature. In many ways, marriage is designed to protect the woman from various outcomes. One common situation is that the woman might support a man for 20 years as he builds his career, and then if the man were to leave the woman would have nothing and the man would have everything. Marriage protects the woman in that case. And I don't consider marriage religious since it is pervasive throughout the human population of all different religions. It's more of an acknowledgement of human nature. I'm not saying that we should force people to bahave naturally, but in some cases it might be good to acknowledge a common human behavior.
Some of these assumptions do not really translate to same sex marriages.
I think if you allow other forms of marriage you might as well just get rid of the entire thing from government involvement. Everyone can just go to whatever church they want, or no church, and make whatever agreement they want. They can sign a contract or not make any legal committment at all. I'm not really against the idea of getting the government out of marriage (however, I think if you do that a lot of women will get really really screwed by their husbands if they break up). I just don't see the point in extending the definition of marriage so far that the laws regarding marriage don't even make sense any more.
Either way, it is an issue. I think people had an idea who Bush is. Let me put it this way: I don't think that Kerry alienated ONE PERSON in the entire country with a one-liner. You know someone doesn't have any stance when they don't alienate someone. Bush would take a stance, and if someone didn't agree with him, he would let the vote disappear, not pander. I'm not saying a candidate needs to be overly devisive (and I would respect the argument that Bush is overly divisive), but you can't please everyone.
I'm a big fan of more nuclear power for power generation. However, nuclear isn't "better" since it still can't power a car.
We need fuel cells or something similar. I know that the U.S. government funds some development in that area, and also there is private research being done in the U.S.
It would be nice if some other countries would step up and help, since it's clear to me that electric cars recharged by nuclear power are the only viable option as oil prices increase.
I don't think government funding is required to advance this technology, but I would consider it one of the more prudent uses of government.
The problem is that there are positive feedback situations
Any time I read "positive feedback" the first thing that comes to mind is instability. I don't think we're so precarious that we will destroy the planet by some warming over the next few decades. Anyway, the science is a lot less clear when we get into this type of discussion. We're now pretty far away from "Global waming is happening, humans caused it" and into speculation.
I don't think that there is any viable option other than electric cars. I think that's the only thing that can significantly reduce CO2 output within reason.
Rather than signing the Kyoto protocol, if all of those nations took the money that it will cost them and invested in electric car technology (like fuel cells) I bet we'd have a real solution, rather than a minor reduction in CO2 output at huge expense.
Slashdot Mirror
...solution would be to ban the sell of them
As I said in another post, somebody has to make a decision somewhere along the line, and somebody will make some money out of the deal. The person who makes the money will try to influence the person that makes the decision. A law doesn't magically change that. And as long as the federal government is providing funding, it will encourage the breaking of that law even if it did exist.
I think it's unlikely that people are being grown entirely for their organs. I think it's much more likely that embryos will be produced for the purpose of stem cell research, law or not.
In fact, by banning federal funding, you've pushed research out to labs that are less worried about pissing the government
Are you suggesting that there is greater demand for embryos when the government is not funding research upon them? That doesn't make any sense. The demand for embryos will be much higher if federal money is subsidizing the research.
The embryos which produce the stem cell lines are not morally significant.
Many people disagree with that statement. Perhaps we should not confiscate their money to subsidize this research?
Actually, I'm not strictly opposed to embryonic stem cell research. However, I acknowledge the moral issues in balance on both sides.
Think about it this way: we don't allow cosmetic testing on animals (or it's at least shunned), but we do allow medical testing on animals (often resulting in death). It's a balance.
I can see how that balance could weigh in favor of IVF and against embryonic stem cell research for a given person, without contradiction.
You could probably convince me one way or the other on the embryonic stem cell research if you come out with a lot of convincing facts or arguments. However, you can't make me totally disregard the idea that an embryo is some degree of life.
But yeah, there's a lot of misinformation in politics. It's good to clear up the misinformation, and it's also good to use comparisons so people realize if they are in contradiction with themselves.
I don't know what Bush's motives are or not; it seems pointless to speculate. If you think that Bush in particular is deceiving us, that's another topic that warrants further evidence.
Lots of death happens all the time. A lot of medical research has gone into preventing miscarriage, as a matter of fact.
The point is that some people do not want to federally subsidize more death.
I have no idea what is "morally significant" vs. "morally insignificant". Either something is right, or it's wrong. Many factors are in play, such as the possibility of medical advances with embryonic stem cells. However, each person makes a decision for themselves: right or wrong.
And if a significant number of people in this country find it to be wrong, why do we confiscate their money for research they don't believe in?
educational institutions are free to do their own research
As long as it's not a federal grant.
I'm not disagreeing, but since you mentioned school, I wanted to clear that up.
It creates conflicts of interest that could result in the additional production of embryos for harvest.
If someone embezzles $10M and gets caught, we can:
(a) Throw them in prison.
(b) Not.
In case (b), is there really a chance he will commit another crime? It's not like anybody will let him near that kind of money again. So, should we let him loose? No. It's about incentives. We incarcerate him so that other people avoid embezzling for fear of prison time.
If you can pick whatever point in time you want -- disregarding all that previously occurred -- of course you can avoid the whole moral dillema.
A restriction on murder is also unnecessary, but that doesn't mean it's not morally desirable.
It'd be overtly clear that they're trying to turn their religious beliefs into legislation that affects us all.
Actually, the people that want to affect us all are the people that want to tax all Americans to support their morally questionable research. You can do as much private research as you want.
Not all pro-lifers are religious. Everyone draws the line at a different place. If you spend taxpayer money supporting research in conflict with many people's moral values, you are not respecting their values.
None of those are embryonic stem cells.
/. discussion.
I think most reasonable people agree that all stem cell research shows some promise. The real question is whether that hope outweighs the questionable moral grounds of embryonic stem cell research.
And yes, they are questionable, or else this would be a very boring
Well, somebody makes a decision at some point, and somebody makes money at some point. The person who makes the money will try to influence the person who makes the decision. There is an obvious conflict of interest there. You can't just magically seperate the two with a law.
Bush and his support base are being hypocritical in finding fault with stem cell reseach while ignoring IVF; either they should oppose both on equally strong ground, or they should stand in the way of neither.
An interesting point, and some anti-stem cell people are surely confused about the topic.
However, IVF is not taxpayer funded. Period. You can do IVF, and you can do stem cell research, but not with my money. If you think it's so promising, start up a private stem cell research fund and I'm sure the legions of stem cell research supporters will donate left and right.
Many people in this country feel that stem cell research is on questionable moral grounds. The argument that "it was dead already" doesn't hold water. Encouraging more research creates demand for stem cells, and many Americans don't want to create such a conflict of interest.
IVF is less questionable for many Americans because the purpose of a fertility clinic is to create human life, not destroy it. There do not appear to be any conflicts of interest which would encourage the destruction of life.
And yes, I realize that some people expect lives to be saved by stem cell research. Then those people must weigh the issues morally for themselves whether it's a good idea or not. Many people have weighed against it, and so I don't think we should be spending their money to do it.
Your sarcastic comment doesn't really make sense. Of course managers don't do stuff. They want YOU to do it. If you go in and prove you can do stuff, that's less stuff for them to do and more money for them to make. If you go in and tell them how great you are at bean counting and holding meetings, that's more of their time wasted and less money for them. Not to mention you'll be competition for their job.
They should. If the government would just stop buying MS products, MS would no longer have a monopoly.
However, the government really wanted to use the law to intervene in private contracts it had with MS, to make them more friendly to the government. That's fascism: the government buys almost exclusively MS products, and then uses the law (not just it's market power) to control the terms of those contracts.
There is no GUI standard. You either pick one and code to it and blow off all the potential customers who want to use another
I'm running evolution, some GUI terminal emulators, firefox, xpdf, and abiword. All of these are running in Gnome. If I quit gnome, I could start KDE and run all these same applications.
What is the big deal about some different environments? If you link to Qt, it will look like Qt, and if you link to gtk+, it will look like gtk+. The user at most has to install some libraries.
Just because a developer finds Qt more useful for his application, and I use Gnome, doesn't mean that he has excluded me. I can still run his app just fine.
Sure, it's frustrating to new users to understand a few different desktop layouts. But why does everyone act like it holds up the whole development process? It's not like evolution and openoffice and firefox don't exist.
I agree completely. I would generalize your answer to be that interoperability is a feature in and of itself.
I don't just mean cross-platform, although that is of course an important advantage in OOo. I mean that the formats and processes are standardized, so that you can access and manipulate your data in ways you could not before.
Examples:
(1) In a word document, it saves deleted data so that you can undo. Lets say that you wanted to make a filter that removes all deleted data in any email attachments going outside the company. You can't do that to word docs very easily or reliably. If OOo saves any unwanted data in a document (author, whatever), that could easily be filtered out reliably.
(2) You can make a sophisticated search engine or archiving tool for your data.
(3) Your data will always be accessible, not just as long as MS decides to make readers for your data.
(4) You can data mine your, well, your data. In MS word, it's not your data until you open it in word, copy the text somewhere else, and resave it in a non-proprietary format. Then you can mine it. Try doing that to 100K documents in a week.
(5) ?? There's always that unaccounted-for need you have. MS could come up with "solutions" to the above problems because I listed them. But what about when the atypical situation comes up and you need to do something about it?
In short, MS has a "tool" or application for all the needs of its target market customers. If that leaves 1% fo their customers out in the cold without a solution, they don't care. In the world of open formats and simple access, if you know what you want to do, you can do it. In the MS world, if you know what you want to do you have to do some reverse engineering and programming, or hope someone else had the exact same problem.
And really, RMS is right: why "save" your data in a secret format that only MS can read? The fact that they usually let you read most of the data you have recently produced means nothing, since at any time they could decide that you may be a software pirate and deny access to your own data. Or they could just decide that you are now a negligible portion of the market, and no longer provide access to your old data.
Huh? I'd agree with you if we were talking about an RDBMS or something, but we're talking about a GUI app.
I don't really use GUI apps for the most part ('cept for a few of course). But sometimes I need to evaluate a few alternatives and make a basic recommendation to someone looking to fill a certain need. It might not be all things to all people, but if it sets them in the right direction it's obviously helpful.
Can you provide some examples of it's drawbacks? I'm not the type of person to use this software myself, but I want to know who to recommend it to and who not.
Huh? The FCC is now a fraud-detection agency? What does that have to do with the original idea of the FCC at all? The original idea of the FCC was to regulate a limited resource (airwaves). The airwaves seem less and less limited as we progress. I would be perfectly content if the FCC vanished tomorrow. It's not as though we're afraid to walk the streets at night because somebody might broadcast something that could be interpreted as an encoded image of a bare breast.
Why doesn't a consumer just sue them for breach of contract?
PS: We are afraid, of course, now that Martha Stuart is free again. </sarcasm>. I just can't believe you can be put in jail for lying to federal agents (and if you can, why doesn't Clinton live under the same laws? Oh, I guess he's above the law.).
You're absolutely right. My first boss lost that focus (got 90's dot com fever I guess), and he lost the business.
A good boss tells you when to do something quick, and tells you when to do something right, and understands the consequences of both (quick = cheap, fast, but problems if you need it later; right = slow, expensive, but grows with the business). In fact, a good boss understands the entire spectrum, and communicates his needs to you.
A bad boss tries to get something cheap and fast, but wants to present it to customers as a polished product and sell it at a premium price. They create all kinds of illusions: fancier graphics work, parties for the VCs, wild promises, etc. But the customers will see through it and not look back.
Huh? I don't think the SQL spec has anything to do with record sizes in the on-disk representation.
Many RDBMSs use variable length records.
I think you're talking about fixed-length record databases, like might be found in some embedded databases (like Berkeley DB, which also offers variable-length records).
An RDBMS is very different from XML data.
Most companies see it as their function to make money. That's a neanderthal way of looking at things now days
Money is a pretty good way of keeping track of what someone has accomplished for someone else. It might not be perfect, but it's the best tool we've got. If you know something that correlates more closely to productivity than money, let me know.
I made the remark about the QA dept. as a joke, mostly. In case you don't know, Macguyver was a T.V. character that escaped from bad guys by building weird contraptions with what he had available, and he'd always escape in the nick of time.
So, there was no QA dept overseeing Macguyver's contraptions. The whole point of my post is that sometimes you just need something to fill a specific need, and you need it cheap, and you need it fast.
A good boss will tell you what to do quickly, and what to do right. He will understand that if he tells you to do it quickly, he expects problems if he's still trying to use/sell/extend it 6 months later. He understands if he tells you to do it right, the cost will be high and deadlines may slip.
I brought the Macguyver analogy into my post to show that it's not all about dollars and profits and market pressure and marketroids. There are real, efficient reasons to do some jobs quickly rather than The Right Way (tm). This is one of those complexities that they can't teach you in a computer science class in college; you must use your judgement or have a boss that uses his judgement.
And yes, the QA dept should be using their judgement as well.
doing things the Right Way has long-term benefits that overshadow the "quick fix."
That's an oversimplification. Sometimes the right way is the quick fix and not the Right Way. If having something fast is more important than having something correct, the right way is the quick fix.
Sometimes a product can be developed perfectly, and totally miss its opportunity to be useful. This is a crucial aspect of communication between management and labor.
If it needs to be done next tuesday and won't be worth a penny on wednesday, you'll do lots of things that aren't "The Right Way". You'll use MS Access, Visual Basic, bailing wire, and duct tape if you have to. And if you've got a good boss you'll know the situation and understand how "Right" you should do it, because he'll tell you.
MacGuyver (sp?) has built many useful things escaping from drug dealers, and none of them would pass the scrutiny of a good QA dept.
Interesting health info. I'm still checking that out.
What we have now is a bad health care system. Costs are not controlled because the people making the buying decisions are not the ones paying the costs. To balance it out, the insurance companies must require patients to go to low-cost providers who underprescribe and generally provide poor service. And, because the costs are only loosely controlled, the premiums are still very high. So, we have high premiums and low quality medical care. The allocation of medical resources is very inefficient.
Health care in the U.S. is very important to me since I have high health care costs and I will my entire life. I need quality health care and prescriptions, and I am willing to pay the cost.
When a politician speaks to me of "health care as a right" or reducing the price to me, I don't like it at all, because I want quality health care. It's no secret that if you reduce the consumer's price, via insurance or social programs, one or more of the following things will happen:
(1) reduced quality
(2) shortage
(3) lines/queues/rationing
Which all result in doom for me personally.
I think it would be much better if the government got out of health care and employers got out of health care, and the government just issued a voucher to everyone below a certain income level. They could spend it on whatever health care they want.
Regarding gay marriage, I'm a little unclear whether that should be allowed or not. It is clear to me that government is involved in marriage, otherwise this wouldn't be an issue in the first place. It probably shouldn't be a Federal issue though. The only reason to make it Federal is because couples move around, and generally we expect to be able to maintain the same family structure when moving within the U.S. This whole issue is one of those unfortunate murky situations, because it's much easier to treat everyone as an individual.
But everyone is not an individual. A married person is no longer an individual in many practical ways. They share children with another person, who are also not really individuals. Marriage is a practical recognition of human nature. In many ways, marriage is designed to protect the woman from various outcomes. One common situation is that the woman might support a man for 20 years as he builds his career, and then if the man were to leave the woman would have nothing and the man would have everything. Marriage protects the woman in that case. And I don't consider marriage religious since it is pervasive throughout the human population of all different religions. It's more of an acknowledgement of human nature. I'm not saying that we should force people to bahave naturally, but in some cases it might be good to acknowledge a common human behavior.
Some of these assumptions do not really translate to same sex marriages.
I think if you allow other forms of marriage you might as well just get rid of the entire thing from government involvement. Everyone can just go to whatever church they want, or no church, and make whatever agreement they want. They can sign a contract or not make any legal committment at all. I'm not really against the idea of getting the government out of marriage (however, I think if you do that a lot of women will get really really screwed by their husbands if they break up). I just don't see the point in extending the definition of marriage so far that the laws regarding marriage don't even make sense any more.
Either way, it is an issue. I think people had an idea who Bush is. Let me put it this way: I don't think that Kerry alienated ONE PERSON in the entire country with a one-liner. You know someone doesn't have any stance when they don't alienate someone. Bush would take a stance, and if someone didn't agree with him, he would let the vote disappear, not pander. I'm not saying a candidate needs to be overly devisive (and I would respect the argument that Bush is overly divisive), but you can't please everyone.
Ker
We already have - nuclear.
I'm a big fan of more nuclear power for power generation. However, nuclear isn't "better" since it still can't power a car.
We need fuel cells or something similar. I know that the U.S. government funds some development in that area, and also there is private research being done in the U.S.
It would be nice if some other countries would step up and help, since it's clear to me that electric cars recharged by nuclear power are the only viable option as oil prices increase.
I don't think government funding is required to advance this technology, but I would consider it one of the more prudent uses of government.
The problem is that there are positive feedback situations
Any time I read "positive feedback" the first thing that comes to mind is instability. I don't think we're so precarious that we will destroy the planet by some warming over the next few decades. Anyway, the science is a lot less clear when we get into this type of discussion. We're now pretty far away from "Global waming is happening, humans caused it" and into speculation.
I don't think that there is any viable option other than electric cars. I think that's the only thing that can significantly reduce CO2 output within reason.
Rather than signing the Kyoto protocol, if all of those nations took the money that it will cost them and invested in electric car technology (like fuel cells) I bet we'd have a real solution, rather than a minor reduction in CO2 output at huge expense.