I want my children to get a good science education.
Then you will most probably have to see to it personally because the system will almost certainly fail you if you do not. After completing my own engineering degree I was able to look back on my education from grade school on and be genuinely disgusted by the relatively poor science and math education that I received at public school from an early age. In fact, where it not for my wonderful parents, who recognized my apptitude and could afford private schooling for grades 7-12 and contribute to my college education, I would probably not be an engineer today and my relatively modest engineering talent would be wasted doing something else and benefiting the American economy much less (i.e. more productive and educated workers produce more and better things more efficiently that we all benefit from). The Soviet system had its own problems of course (what system doesn't?), but here in the United States the squeaky wheel gets the grease and if your children attend public school then you may have to do a lot of squeaking to make sure that you children get their share of the grease or else send them to private school, where if you have a problem then it WILL be fixed because you are paying thousands of dollars per year in tuition, or teach them extra things yourself from your own science and math background.
This appears to be related, at least in concept, to problem which sometimes comes up in network protocol design, Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome, which results in a cascade of copies that eventually overwhelms the ability of the connection to transmit and route the duplicates. The term originates from the Walt Disney animated feature Fantasia where the Sorcerer's Apprentice (Mickey Mouse in the red robes and wizard hat) accidentally causes the mops washing the floor to increase via geometric doubling. One wonders if other MMORPGs are vulnerable to similar attacks.
The road rage and anger (and occasional killings) not only point to a deep-seated inner hatred of everyone but oneself, but also show the ubiquitous "me-first" attitude manifesting itself.
Hmmm...It was my understanding that road rage is less the result of a particular personality, everyone gets angry from time to time after all, than it is a feeling of violation of privacy, which would make just about anyone angry IF they believe that they have an expectation of the same in a given situation. If one considers this for a bit then it actually makes sense. When we get into our own private cars for a trip we close the doors to our own highly personalized space where, unlike public transport, we do not have to interact with unexpected passengers and can go just about anywhere we wish at any time (this is the whole point of the private automobile after all). If we are interupted while traveling along in our own semi-private air conditioned vehicular enclosure and someone cuts us off, which we subconsciencely perceive as a violation of our private space, then we are likely to become annoyed, its just human nature. There are probably more sinister motivations for the road rage cases that result in physical violence, but the vast majority of us simply curse or use the horn and five minutes later we have forgotten the incident entirely. That is how it was explained to me anyway by a friend who has some knowledge of these types of things.
I seem to recall that a Russian researcher, Yury Israel, has done research to indicate that the addition of sulpher compounds to the jet fuel used by international airline flights, which fly at 60,000+ feet to take advantage of the jet streams, would result in particulate dispertion into the stratosphere and global temperature reduction due to reflection of sunlight. Perhaps not the best solution to the problem, but an intriguing proposal none the less...
Like working on a strategy to make peace with the palestinians.
Israel has already done that and has been more than reasonable in implementing the international agreements. It has been the Palestinians who have, in recent years and especially since the election of the Hamas government, acted in bad faith. Israel honors its peace agreement obligations and Hamas responds with rockets. The people of Israel have already made all of the concessions that they can be reasonably expected to make and Hamas will not renounce their stated goal of the complete destruction of Israel. Thirty years of negotiations have reached an intractable impasse and will not produce any further results. At this point it is probably best to simply let them fight the matter out to a more decisive conclusion or perhaps a long term stalemate.
I dunno, they're just wild guesses at finding more positive ways to use that kind of technology.
You are right, you don't know. There is evil in this world and it must be confronted or else you be forced into trade after trade until finally the aggressor demands something that you will not trade and your worst fears will be made real. Peace through strength and loyalty with honor...that is what it is all about.
It would not make any difference. The puppet masters pulling the strings of Hezbollah from Iran are not interested in anything except the complete destruction of Israel and they carefully shelter their foot soldiers in the Madrassas and Mosques, channeling their angers, desires, and fears into an unquenchable hatred of Israel, and all the while carefully controlling information about the outside world so that anything which does not fit into their brainwashing program is NOT seen by their pool of suicide bombers and fighters or if it is seen they are conditioned to dismiss it as "enemy propaganda" and part of world-wide "Zionist conspiracy". You cannot reason with these people and the people that you can reason with are too terrified by the terrorists, who would kill the moderate Muslims and their families without a second thought, to do anything about it.
It seems reasonable to suppose that there are conventional programs that would result in more reliable and shorter term payoffs for Israel than nanotechnology and bionics. First off, why not divert extra funding into their intelligence services to increase the number of case officers, enhance their ability to run foreign agents in hostile neighboring states, and improve the analysis of the intelligence gathered by these additional agents with data mining and decision assisting software. Second, improve the existing remote piloted drone technology to include longer endurance, higher altitude, and stealthier surveillance platforms to more quickly identify targets of opportunity and expedite strikes. This could be coordinated with longer range rocket propelled artillery or faster and shorter endurance attack drones to service the targets identified by the surveillance drones. It should be cheaper and more efficient to operate drones than $100 million dollar piloted fighters, especially when one considers that terrorists generally do not have their own air forces to field against the drones. Finally, if Israel must work on some miniaturized bugging devices then why not concentrate on devices which could be used in a catch and release scenario whereby low level terrorists could be tagged (unknowingly of course) and released to make their way back to their base of operations or more important leadership targets which could then be targeted for elimination by the aforementioned drone network. These scenarios are certainly doable today with available technology and existing funds as opposed to a longer term and more uncertain payoff with nanotechnology and bionics.
Typically you won't find any way to win more than one million at a time in a casino
For the average player this is probably true, with the possible exception of regional progressive slots, Megabucks for example, which are networked together and increase the payout every time someone plays anywhere in the network but does not hit the jackpot. The Megabucks Nevada starts at $10,000,000 after a jackpot (Prior to September 2005, Megabucks Nevada reset to $7,000,000), but then again three and four reel machines with hundreds of stops have odds that are approaching the lottery anyway. The other way to see this kind of money is to become a high roller, but the casino will probably not risk these amounts unless the player in question regularly bets and loses at least $10,000 per hand. In the past there were casinos in Las Vegas, notably Binion's Horseshoe, which had a policy of, "if you can bring it then you can bet it." There are stories of people betting $1 million on a coin toss at Binion's among other more unusual wagers, but the policy was for real.
If the comments in this forum about nothing worthwhile being on the radio dial, with the possible exception of political talk, since the mid 1980s and my own experience with newspapers thus far (I have never been a subscriber) are any thing to go by then these private equity firms are going to loose their collective shirts in this business. When was the last time you saw any of your friends younger than thirty (30) regularly listening to music radio stations or reading a paper newspaper? Clearly there is value in online news, but with Google news bringing even the most obscure sources to the top of the stack where is the equity in an ink and dead wood newspaper brand? Readership and subscriber numbers for newspapers and radio listeners are either stagnated or declining in most of the major markets and have been going in that direction for many years. This article by Jim Cramer really hits the nail on the head. These guys are ultimately going to lose and lose big with this investment.
Great Scott! If they calibrate the time circuits wrong and do not apply the necessary 1.21 Jigowatts of electrical power, then the temporal causality loop could result in a paradox which completely destroys the Universe! This is heavy...
but don't you think a little blame should go to the people who lent him amounts of money they should have known he could never repay?
The issue of blame is irrelevant since we are talking about a country here where the lender was a private foreign bank. If the people do manage to overthrow their dictator they can simply default (i.e. refuse to pay) on the previous debts (countries with armies can do that you know). The foreign banks simply lose their money for lending it to bad borrowers...it happens all the time.
They did not 'discontinue' classic VB in the sense that they will not fix library bugs as and when they come up, but rather they declined to continue developing new features for classic VB. If you want these features then you can code them yourself (your VB compiler still works right?), buy them ready made from a third party, or maintain your old applications as is and write your newer stuff in a language which meets your current needs. I did not start off as a C# developer, I switched from C++ because I liked the language features in C# better and I have no doubt that I will probably switch several more times in the decades to come because languages change and needs change. The Algol, LISP, and Fortran programmers either stuck with their language of choice and still use it to this day or they switched to something else when their needs changed. If you are going to make a switch from VB and you have an axe to grind with Microsoft then Java may be a good choice, but remember that a lot of the OSS development out there is actually done in C with GCC and if you thought VB was convoluted then just wait until you pick up C...it will malloc you a new world of pain.
Though bleeding third world countries dry via interest repayments and taking their natural resources certainly helps.
If governments choose to borrow from private foreign banks then that is their problem. If they don't want to pay back the loan then either don't borrow in the first place or tell the private foreign bank to shove it...even the poorest third world country has a military and most private banks do not. As for "stealing" the natural resources that is a can't win if you try argument. If we buy the oil or whatever else these countries will sell to us, even at a premium price, then we are "stealing" from them and if we use force to compel them to put their financial house in order and share the benefits of selling these resources with the people of that country then we are meddling in the internal affairs of a poor foreign country. So what are we to do? Not buy anything from these countries and let the corrupt regimes that rule them continue while hampering our own growth and doing nothing for the people of these countries anyway (oil, natural gas, gold, etc is worthless if it just sits in the ground doing nothing)? Everyone, but the dictator loses with that strategy.
So what you are saying is that poverty must exist in order for you to maintain your high standard of living.
No, that is not what he is saying. This is a default position of many people that oppose private markets and it sounds attractive, but it is in fact a fallacy. The poor people are not poor because they are rich people living in this world, they are poor in SPITE of the fact that there are rich people living in this world. The economy is not a zero sum game where every gain MUST be balanced by someone else's corresponding loss. It really is possible for everyone to win, but there are billions of people on this planet who are not winning primarily because their governments have failed to provide the necessary economic, legal, and educational institutions to generate sustained economic growth. It is sustained economic growth that makes the first world countries rich. Remember that it was not so long ago, perhaps 250 years, when just about everyone on the face of the planet, with the exception of the nobility, had about the same standards of living and life expectancy. The rising tide really does lift all of the boats, but the liberals just do not want to hear any of it, they just shake their heads and go, "La, la, la...I'm not listening", whenever an economist, even a liberal one, points out the flaws in their reasoning.
Re:Keywords: Government. Health Care. Disaster
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Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The law provides write-offs for businesses that offer health insurance, but individuals don't get that write-off, so health insurance is pushed onto the company which incurs additional overhead. We also see people using insurance for basic healthcare costs, which means that insurance companies spend money on non-emergency situations, so the cost goes up.
They are trying to change this here in the United States by introducing the tax deductible health savings account, which is a step in the right direction but not completely effective until the government ABOLISHES the tax deductible benefit of employer provided health care. You see right now there is little incentive for the consumer to seek his own health care coverage in the open marketplace because the employer provided plan is a tax deduction already, meaning that the employee does not pay tax on his employer plan premiums, albeit with lower quality HMO care (but most people don't understand the difference until their life saving cancer treatment is denied as 'too expensive' by the insurance company at which point they raise holy hell, but hey you get what you pay for right?). The health savings accounts will not be effective in reducing costs, through market forces, until consumers are fully incentivized to take advantage of them.
We also see people using insurance for basic healthcare costs, which means that insurance companies spend money on non-emergency situations, so the cost goes up.
This is exactly right. The health care insurance industry is peculiar in that they pay SOMETHING on just about EVERYTHING and this serves to promote over consumption and drive up costs. One does not insure their home against the cost of mowing the lawn or their car against the cost of replacing worn parts, but rather against accidental serious, catastrophic, or total loss. The health care insurance industry should not be any different. If people used the health savings account and then paid out of pocket from their savings in the account then the prices would be well controlled by the market forces of people seeking out the best deal on perscription drugs, routine office visits, and other forms of routine non-emergency care.
Combine that with the AMA's fraudulent restrictions on the number of graduating doctoral students and you see a limited supply of available doctors (cost goes up when supply goes down), and then throw in the bureacracy of Medicare and the price skyrockets.
This is one problem that we don't have here in the United States because there are no government regulations controlling the number of people who chose to go to medical or nursing school. In the United States, provided that one is wealthy enough to afford the costs education or able to borrow the money, anyone who meets the necessary qualifications can attend medical school and be subsequently licensed as a practitioner in their home state of choice. The British people have some funny ideas about what should and should not be regulated and/or taxed, but that is another discussion entirely.
England is worse, since they are (I believe) a cover-all insurance scheme.
I think that in many ways the United States is actually worse and NOT because I think that the single payer government provided health care system is the way to go because clearly England has had major problems with the system. However, there is one bright spot, from a cost standpoint anyway, in the British system and that is the ability to ration care. If the government controls all health care payments in the public system then they can control costs by rationing care and/or denying treatments at the probable expense of public frustration and anger. In the United States not only can we NOT ration care since the health care system is not directly controlled by the government, but we create incentives for hospitals, lawyers, and insurance companies to escalate costs while removing any individual incentives to seek better priced and better quality ca
Putting aside the fact that running an unsecured network should also be a punishable offence in this day and age, the kid was still in the wrong.
Is it really? Did the neighbor in question specifically ask him nicely to please stop connecting to his network before calling the police? If the neighbor suspected that it was him and yet did not even take to the time to ask him to please stop then it seems to me that the neighbor has no leg to stand on. If the neighbor was to ask nicely then Garyl Tan Jia Luo might have even offered to help the neighbor properly configure his router so that the router would be routing traffic with his (the neighbor and owner's) wishes in mind. If you are unwilling or unable to configure you router or have it configured to enforce your wishes concerning how other people connect to your network then you have no call when other people simply use the network, after all the network was allowing anyone to connect anonymously so that must be what the owner wanted...
BTW: It should not be illegal to run an unsecured wireless network, there are legitimate reasons for wanting to do this after all (coffee shop), but you the owner must be able, within reason, to supply logs of activities OR accept full responsibility for what goes on in your open network. Personally, I think this is crazy from a liability standpoint, hence the reason why I do NOT run an open wireless network...apart from the fact that I like to reserve the bandwidth that I paid for for my own or friends use only, but it should be allowed for those willing to shoulder the potential risks for other (perhaps business) reasons.
just hope the conviction isn't too harsh.
Give the proclivities of the criminal justice system in Singapore the penalty will probably be very harsh indeed, just ask Michael Fay how the courts handle this sort of thing in Singapore (i.e. lashing you in the buttocks with a cane until the flesh is torn from your pelvic bones).
Yet, they still want more. We kept our half of the bargain and they sued XM for selling a recording device which can't even send a signal over the internet.
Tech Companies: But! you said that the lawsuits would stop...this was not part of the agreement.
RIAA: Perhaps you feel that you are being treated unfairly?
Tech Companies: sigh...No
RIAA: Good! it would be unfortunate if we had to leave a garrison of lawyers here.
Tech Companies: sigh...This deal is getting worse all the time.
RIAA: We are altering the deal, pray that we do not alter it any further.
It is perfectly legal to make complete copies of any copyrighted work provided there is no commercial intent and no restraint of commerce
I agree with you that this is the way that it *should* be but is it actually? Has anyone else noticed the new FBI warnings on DVDs that say something to the effect of, "The FBI investigates all cases of infringement including infringement without financial gain". The question of whether or not they would actually win in court becomes somewhat meaningless unless you can get a benefactor, such as Electronic Frontier Foundation, to bankroll your defense while the whole thing winds its way through the courts and that is unlikely to happen unless the case has a good chance of setting a "precedent" whereby the goals of the organization, namely the EFF in this case, would be advanced by a successful defense. Otherwise most people, even though they may have the right to make the copies, throw in the towel and settle the case for a few grand because they don't want to endure bankruptcy just to find out that they were right.
If you're going to spam me at least try to sell me something.
The worthless messages are an attempt to poison your spam filters by using many common business, home, and lifestyle related keywords (whether or not these messages are actually effective at confusing the Bayesian filters is an open question). The pitch for "Vla6|2a" and that can't lose stock market "opportunity" will be in a follow on message. It is sort of like in football where there is a lead blocker and fake handoffs to confuse the defense while the ball carrier follows behind them.
The best is that I'm getting the exact same spams, within seconds, on several mailboxes on different domains at once (work, GMail, and home).I can't ban their IP ranges fast enough and when I do I end up blocking stuff like my wife's work IPs.
Witness the effectiveness of the Bot Net strategy combined with spamming. It is impossible to filter the spam based upon IP addresses if the spam zombies are extremely well distributed among the different networks on the public Internet. One cannot simply block Nextel, Verizon, and the like because some of their customers have been hijacked into the bot network by a spam trojan. This is why this new strategy is of such concern, because it is a major escalation on the part of the spammers. These asshats need to be dragged out of their dens and pistol whipped by the men in the black with the MP5s and the telescoping batons.
It was not a dig at the free software supporters and there is no explicit comparison being made between malware authors and people who chose to make their work available as open source. I was merely commenting that people who have an axe to grind with Microsoft, malware authors for example, would probably appreciate the irony of turning the Windows Genuine Advantage layer against licensed users via an exploit of some kind, hence the use of the phrases "turn the tables" and "the man". However, you have read your own bias into the comment and assumed that I was taking a shot at the free software supporters when in fact I was not.
Yes, but this particular method has added irony of turning the tables on "the man" which fits in rather nicely with whole ethos of the malware authors and their fellow travelers.
The cycle that you describe does indeed exist and has been known to astronomers since the time of the ancient Greeks. This precession of the equinoxes has a cycle of approximately 25,800 years, during which the positions of stars as measured in the equatorial coordinate system will slowly change; the change is actually due to the change of the coordinates.
You don't need to do all that to tamper with it. You just mount your disk under linux or whatever and replace ci.dll with one that always returns "yeah this file hashes OK". Could probably do it with a hex editor.
Perhaps, but you might also have to change a other hashes in obsucre locations to fool the kernel tampering detection algorithm after you hex edit the binary in order to bypass the check.
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I want my children to get a good science education.
Then you will most probably have to see to it personally because the system will almost certainly fail you if you do not. After completing my own engineering degree I was able to look back on my education from grade school on and be genuinely disgusted by the relatively poor science and math education that I received at public school from an early age. In fact, where it not for my wonderful parents, who recognized my apptitude and could afford private schooling for grades 7-12 and contribute to my college education, I would probably not be an engineer today and my relatively modest engineering talent would be wasted doing something else and benefiting the American economy much less (i.e. more productive and educated workers produce more and better things more efficiently that we all benefit from). The Soviet system had its own problems of course (what system doesn't?), but here in the United States the squeaky wheel gets the grease and if your children attend public school then you may have to do a lot of squeaking to make sure that you children get their share of the grease or else send them to private school, where if you have a problem then it WILL be fixed because you are paying thousands of dollars per year in tuition, or teach them extra things yourself from your own science and math background.
This appears to be related, at least in concept, to problem which sometimes comes up in network protocol design, Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome, which results in a cascade of copies that eventually overwhelms the ability of the connection to transmit and route the duplicates. The term originates from the Walt Disney animated feature Fantasia where the Sorcerer's Apprentice (Mickey Mouse in the red robes and wizard hat) accidentally causes the mops washing the floor to increase via geometric doubling. One wonders if other MMORPGs are vulnerable to similar attacks.
The road rage and anger (and occasional killings) not only point to a deep-seated inner hatred of everyone but oneself, but also show the ubiquitous "me-first" attitude manifesting itself.
Hmmm...It was my understanding that road rage is less the result of a particular personality, everyone gets angry from time to time after all, than it is a feeling of violation of privacy, which would make just about anyone angry IF they believe that they have an expectation of the same in a given situation. If one considers this for a bit then it actually makes sense. When we get into our own private cars for a trip we close the doors to our own highly personalized space where, unlike public transport, we do not have to interact with unexpected passengers and can go just about anywhere we wish at any time (this is the whole point of the private automobile after all). If we are interupted while traveling along in our own semi-private air conditioned vehicular enclosure and someone cuts us off, which we subconsciencely perceive as a violation of our private space, then we are likely to become annoyed, its just human nature. There are probably more sinister motivations for the road rage cases that result in physical violence, but the vast majority of us simply curse or use the horn and five minutes later we have forgotten the incident entirely. That is how it was explained to me anyway by a friend who has some knowledge of these types of things.
I seem to recall that a Russian researcher, Yury Israel, has done research to indicate that the addition of sulpher compounds to the jet fuel used by international airline flights, which fly at 60,000+ feet to take advantage of the jet streams, would result in particulate dispertion into the stratosphere and global temperature reduction due to reflection of sunlight. Perhaps not the best solution to the problem, but an intriguing proposal none the less...
Like working on a strategy to make peace with the palestinians.
Israel has already done that and has been more than reasonable in implementing the international agreements. It has been the Palestinians who have, in recent years and especially since the election of the Hamas government, acted in bad faith. Israel honors its peace agreement obligations and Hamas responds with rockets. The people of Israel have already made all of the concessions that they can be reasonably expected to make and Hamas will not renounce their stated goal of the complete destruction of Israel. Thirty years of negotiations have reached an intractable impasse and will not produce any further results. At this point it is probably best to simply let them fight the matter out to a more decisive conclusion or perhaps a long term stalemate.
I dunno, they're just wild guesses at finding more positive ways to use that kind of technology.
You are right, you don't know. There is evil in this world and it must be confronted or else you be forced into trade after trade until finally the aggressor demands something that you will not trade and your worst fears will be made real. Peace through strength and loyalty with honor...that is what it is all about.
It would not make any difference. The puppet masters pulling the strings of Hezbollah from Iran are not interested in anything except the complete destruction of Israel and they carefully shelter their foot soldiers in the Madrassas and Mosques, channeling their angers, desires, and fears into an unquenchable hatred of Israel, and all the while carefully controlling information about the outside world so that anything which does not fit into their brainwashing program is NOT seen by their pool of suicide bombers and fighters or if it is seen they are conditioned to dismiss it as "enemy propaganda" and part of world-wide "Zionist conspiracy". You cannot reason with these people and the people that you can reason with are too terrified by the terrorists, who would kill the moderate Muslims and their families without a second thought, to do anything about it.
It seems reasonable to suppose that there are conventional programs that would result in more reliable and shorter term payoffs for Israel than nanotechnology and bionics. First off, why not divert extra funding into their intelligence services to increase the number of case officers, enhance their ability to run foreign agents in hostile neighboring states, and improve the analysis of the intelligence gathered by these additional agents with data mining and decision assisting software. Second, improve the existing remote piloted drone technology to include longer endurance, higher altitude, and stealthier surveillance platforms to more quickly identify targets of opportunity and expedite strikes. This could be coordinated with longer range rocket propelled artillery or faster and shorter endurance attack drones to service the targets identified by the surveillance drones. It should be cheaper and more efficient to operate drones than $100 million dollar piloted fighters, especially when one considers that terrorists generally do not have their own air forces to field against the drones. Finally, if Israel must work on some miniaturized bugging devices then why not concentrate on devices which could be used in a catch and release scenario whereby low level terrorists could be tagged (unknowingly of course) and released to make their way back to their base of operations or more important leadership targets which could then be targeted for elimination by the aforementioned drone network. These scenarios are certainly doable today with available technology and existing funds as opposed to a longer term and more uncertain payoff with nanotechnology and bionics.
Typically you won't find any way to win more than one million at a time in a casino
For the average player this is probably true, with the possible exception of regional progressive slots, Megabucks for example, which are networked together and increase the payout every time someone plays anywhere in the network but does not hit the jackpot. The Megabucks Nevada starts at $10,000,000 after a jackpot (Prior to September 2005, Megabucks Nevada reset to $7,000,000), but then again three and four reel machines with hundreds of stops have odds that are approaching the lottery anyway. The other way to see this kind of money is to become a high roller, but the casino will probably not risk these amounts unless the player in question regularly bets and loses at least $10,000 per hand. In the past there were casinos in Las Vegas, notably Binion's Horseshoe, which had a policy of, "if you can bring it then you can bet it." There are stories of people betting $1 million on a coin toss at Binion's among other more unusual wagers, but the policy was for real.
If the comments in this forum about nothing worthwhile being on the radio dial, with the possible exception of political talk, since the mid 1980s and my own experience with newspapers thus far (I have never been a subscriber) are any thing to go by then these private equity firms are going to loose their collective shirts in this business. When was the last time you saw any of your friends younger than thirty (30) regularly listening to music radio stations or reading a paper newspaper? Clearly there is value in online news, but with Google news bringing even the most obscure sources to the top of the stack where is the equity in an ink and dead wood newspaper brand? Readership and subscriber numbers for newspapers and radio listeners are either stagnated or declining in most of the major markets and have been going in that direction for many years. This article by Jim Cramer really hits the nail on the head. These guys are ultimately going to lose and lose big with this investment.
Great Scott! If they calibrate the time circuits wrong and do not apply the necessary 1.21 Jigowatts of electrical power, then the temporal causality loop could result in a paradox which completely destroys the Universe! This is heavy...
but don't you think a little blame should go to the people who lent him amounts of money they should have known he could never repay?
The issue of blame is irrelevant since we are talking about a country here where the lender was a private foreign bank. If the people do manage to overthrow their dictator they can simply default (i.e. refuse to pay) on the previous debts (countries with armies can do that you know). The foreign banks simply lose their money for lending it to bad borrowers...it happens all the time.
They discontinued the VB language
Disclaimer: I am a C# developer
They did not 'discontinue' classic VB in the sense that they will not fix library bugs as and when they come up, but rather they declined to continue developing new features for classic VB. If you want these features then you can code them yourself (your VB compiler still works right?), buy them ready made from a third party, or maintain your old applications as is and write your newer stuff in a language which meets your current needs. I did not start off as a C# developer, I switched from C++ because I liked the language features in C# better and I have no doubt that I will probably switch several more times in the decades to come because languages change and needs change. The Algol, LISP, and Fortran programmers either stuck with their language of choice and still use it to this day or they switched to something else when their needs changed. If you are going to make a switch from VB and you have an axe to grind with Microsoft then Java may be a good choice, but remember that a lot of the OSS development out there is actually done in C with GCC and if you thought VB was convoluted then just wait until you pick up C...it will malloc you a new world of pain.
Though bleeding third world countries dry via interest repayments and taking their natural resources certainly helps.
If governments choose to borrow from private foreign banks then that is their problem. If they don't want to pay back the loan then either don't borrow in the first place or tell the private foreign bank to shove it...even the poorest third world country has a military and most private banks do not. As for "stealing" the natural resources that is a can't win if you try argument. If we buy the oil or whatever else these countries will sell to us, even at a premium price, then we are "stealing" from them and if we use force to compel them to put their financial house in order and share the benefits of selling these resources with the people of that country then we are meddling in the internal affairs of a poor foreign country. So what are we to do? Not buy anything from these countries and let the corrupt regimes that rule them continue while hampering our own growth and doing nothing for the people of these countries anyway (oil, natural gas, gold, etc is worthless if it just sits in the ground doing nothing)? Everyone, but the dictator loses with that strategy.
So what you are saying is that poverty must exist in order for you to maintain your high standard of living.
No, that is not what he is saying. This is a default position of many people that oppose private markets and it sounds attractive, but it is in fact a fallacy. The poor people are not poor because they are rich people living in this world, they are poor in SPITE of the fact that there are rich people living in this world. The economy is not a zero sum game where every gain MUST be balanced by someone else's corresponding loss. It really is possible for everyone to win, but there are billions of people on this planet who are not winning primarily because their governments have failed to provide the necessary economic, legal, and educational institutions to generate sustained economic growth. It is sustained economic growth that makes the first world countries rich. Remember that it was not so long ago, perhaps 250 years, when just about everyone on the face of the planet, with the exception of the nobility, had about the same standards of living and life expectancy. The rising tide really does lift all of the boats, but the liberals just do not want to hear any of it, they just shake their heads and go, "La, la, la...I'm not listening", whenever an economist, even a liberal one, points out the flaws in their reasoning.
The law provides write-offs for businesses that offer health insurance, but individuals don't get that write-off, so health insurance is pushed onto the company which incurs additional overhead. We also see people using insurance for basic healthcare costs, which means that insurance companies spend money on non-emergency situations, so the cost goes up.
They are trying to change this here in the United States by introducing the tax deductible health savings account, which is a step in the right direction but not completely effective until the government ABOLISHES the tax deductible benefit of employer provided health care. You see right now there is little incentive for the consumer to seek his own health care coverage in the open marketplace because the employer provided plan is a tax deduction already, meaning that the employee does not pay tax on his employer plan premiums, albeit with lower quality HMO care (but most people don't understand the difference until their life saving cancer treatment is denied as 'too expensive' by the insurance company at which point they raise holy hell, but hey you get what you pay for right?). The health savings accounts will not be effective in reducing costs, through market forces, until consumers are fully incentivized to take advantage of them.
We also see people using insurance for basic healthcare costs, which means that insurance companies spend money on non-emergency situations, so the cost goes up.
This is exactly right. The health care insurance industry is peculiar in that they pay SOMETHING on just about EVERYTHING and this serves to promote over consumption and drive up costs. One does not insure their home against the cost of mowing the lawn or their car against the cost of replacing worn parts, but rather against accidental serious, catastrophic, or total loss. The health care insurance industry should not be any different. If people used the health savings account and then paid out of pocket from their savings in the account then the prices would be well controlled by the market forces of people seeking out the best deal on perscription drugs, routine office visits, and other forms of routine non-emergency care.
Combine that with the AMA's fraudulent restrictions on the number of graduating doctoral students and you see a limited supply of available doctors (cost goes up when supply goes down), and then throw in the bureacracy of Medicare and the price skyrockets.
This is one problem that we don't have here in the United States because there are no government regulations controlling the number of people who chose to go to medical or nursing school. In the United States, provided that one is wealthy enough to afford the costs education or able to borrow the money, anyone who meets the necessary qualifications can attend medical school and be subsequently licensed as a practitioner in their home state of choice. The British people have some funny ideas about what should and should not be regulated and/or taxed, but that is another discussion entirely.
England is worse, since they are (I believe) a cover-all insurance scheme.
I think that in many ways the United States is actually worse and NOT because I think that the single payer government provided health care system is the way to go because clearly England has had major problems with the system. However, there is one bright spot, from a cost standpoint anyway, in the British system and that is the ability to ration care. If the government controls all health care payments in the public system then they can control costs by rationing care and/or denying treatments at the probable expense of public frustration and anger. In the United States not only can we NOT ration care since the health care system is not directly controlled by the government, but we create incentives for hospitals, lawyers, and insurance companies to escalate costs while removing any individual incentives to seek better priced and better quality ca
Putting aside the fact that running an unsecured network should also be a punishable offence in this day and age, the kid was still in the wrong.
Is it really? Did the neighbor in question specifically ask him nicely to please stop connecting to his network before calling the police? If the neighbor suspected that it was him and yet did not even take to the time to ask him to please stop then it seems to me that the neighbor has no leg to stand on. If the neighbor was to ask nicely then Garyl Tan Jia Luo might have even offered to help the neighbor properly configure his router so that the router would be routing traffic with his (the neighbor and owner's) wishes in mind. If you are unwilling or unable to configure you router or have it configured to enforce your wishes concerning how other people connect to your network then you have no call when other people simply use the network, after all the network was allowing anyone to connect anonymously so that must be what the owner wanted...
BTW: It should not be illegal to run an unsecured wireless network, there are legitimate reasons for wanting to do this after all (coffee shop), but you the owner must be able, within reason, to supply logs of activities OR accept full responsibility for what goes on in your open network. Personally, I think this is crazy from a liability standpoint, hence the reason why I do NOT run an open wireless network...apart from the fact that I like to reserve the bandwidth that I paid for for my own or friends use only, but it should be allowed for those willing to shoulder the potential risks for other (perhaps business) reasons.
just hope the conviction isn't too harsh.
Give the proclivities of the criminal justice system in Singapore the penalty will probably be very harsh indeed, just ask Michael Fay how the courts handle this sort of thing in Singapore (i.e. lashing you in the buttocks with a cane until the flesh is torn from your pelvic bones).
Yet, they still want more. We kept our half of the bargain and they sued XM for selling a recording device which can't even send a signal over the internet.
Tech Companies: But! you said that the lawsuits would stop...this was not part of the agreement.
RIAA: Perhaps you feel that you are being treated unfairly?
Tech Companies: sigh...No
RIAA: Good! it would be unfortunate if we had to leave a garrison of lawyers here.
Tech Companies: sigh...This deal is getting worse all the time.
RIAA: We are altering the deal, pray that we do not alter it any further.
It is perfectly legal to make complete copies of any copyrighted work provided there is no commercial intent and no restraint of commerce
I agree with you that this is the way that it *should* be but is it actually? Has anyone else noticed the new FBI warnings on DVDs that say something to the effect of, "The FBI investigates all cases of infringement including infringement without financial gain". The question of whether or not they would actually win in court becomes somewhat meaningless unless you can get a benefactor, such as Electronic Frontier Foundation, to bankroll your defense while the whole thing winds its way through the courts and that is unlikely to happen unless the case has a good chance of setting a "precedent" whereby the goals of the organization, namely the EFF in this case, would be advanced by a successful defense. Otherwise most people, even though they may have the right to make the copies, throw in the towel and settle the case for a few grand because they don't want to endure bankruptcy just to find out that they were right.
If you're going to spam me at least try to sell me something.
The worthless messages are an attempt to poison your spam filters by using many common business, home, and lifestyle related keywords (whether or not these messages are actually effective at confusing the Bayesian filters is an open question). The pitch for "Vla6|2a" and that can't lose stock market "opportunity" will be in a follow on message. It is sort of like in football where there is a lead blocker and fake handoffs to confuse the defense while the ball carrier follows behind them.
The best is that I'm getting the exact same spams, within seconds, on several mailboxes on different domains at once (work, GMail, and home).I can't ban their IP ranges fast enough and when I do I end up blocking stuff like my wife's work IPs.
Witness the effectiveness of the Bot Net strategy combined with spamming. It is impossible to filter the spam based upon IP addresses if the spam zombies are extremely well distributed among the different networks on the public Internet. One cannot simply block Nextel, Verizon, and the like because some of their customers have been hijacked into the bot network by a spam trojan. This is why this new strategy is of such concern, because it is a major escalation on the part of the spammers. These asshats need to be dragged out of their dens and pistol whipped by the men in the black with the MP5s and the telescoping batons.
you mean del.icio.us right?
And think of all the applications that would be made available on Linux.
...in Mandarin Chinese
It was not a dig at the free software supporters and there is no explicit comparison being made between malware authors and people who chose to make their work available as open source. I was merely commenting that people who have an axe to grind with Microsoft, malware authors for example, would probably appreciate the irony of turning the Windows Genuine Advantage layer against licensed users via an exploit of some kind, hence the use of the phrases "turn the tables" and "the man". However, you have read your own bias into the comment and assumed that I was taking a shot at the free software supporters when in fact I was not.
Yes, but this particular method has added irony of turning the tables on "the man" which fits in rather nicely with whole ethos of the malware authors and their fellow travelers.
The cycle that you describe does indeed exist and has been known to astronomers since the time of the ancient Greeks. This precession of the equinoxes has a cycle of approximately 25,800 years, during which the positions of stars as measured in the equatorial coordinate system will slowly change; the change is actually due to the change of the coordinates.
You don't need to do all that to tamper with it. You just mount your disk under linux or whatever and replace ci.dll with one that always returns "yeah this file hashes OK". Could probably do it with a hex editor.
Perhaps, but you might also have to change a other hashes in obsucre locations to fool the kernel tampering detection algorithm after you hex edit the binary in order to bypass the check.