If you really are that scared, I would recommend doing one eye at a time - but still do it. If you see someone reputable, you will be fine. Being able to see clearly without glasses will seriously change your life!
It is icky (a technical term), but I had it done and I have to say that I would really recommend it to anyone! It really does change your life - even simple things, like being able to just look at the clock at night and know what time it is!
Treat it like a very important server upgrade - research vendors (well, doctors); don't go for the cheap one; and ask how other clients faired. But I strongly recommend the procedure - I think it is the best money you can spend on yourself!
The problem occurs when you need to get a signal from the divider circuit back to the register circuit - which is on the opposite side of the chip - in one clock cycle. How it is solved is that you place buffers to delay the signal an integer number of cycles, but that of course slows the computation down somewhat.
Well, my point was that it can make sense to start your own company (you know, a company with no product... no costs... only one employee) just to get coverage. Weird but true...
As with most things in the US, any problem can be solved. Seriously, if you still know this lady (and she hasn't figured this out already): In the US, anyone can start a company. In most states, any two people that form a company together can apply for group health care coverage. In at least IL (state laws vary), the group health care provider cannot refuse you coverage - they do a medical check and then they can adjust your rates up to 150%, but that is it.
To be honest, though, she really should have had insurance - at least for the catostrophic stuff. The easiest way to get insurance if you are young is to apply to your local college - by law they will require/supply medical insurance.
Your analysis is correct, but misses some important points that make capacitors promising "futuretech". First, capacitors can store energy in empty space (the fields), not in a substance. That means that with unobtanium, capacitors can have essentially zero mass. For example, a not quite so future tech (but very expensive) way of doing this would be to have nanotube sized wires held a short distance away from each other in free space. Electrons would not flow out of the wires as long as the wires were so close together that the charge voltage was below their metal work function. (Someone else can fill in the detailed physics.)
The second thing that may eventually make capacitors replace other energy sources is that they can have essentially infinite capacitance in a given space. Capacitance is an edge effect, not a volume effect. That means that you can always add more edges to a design in a given space. Current on-chip capacitors use fractal designs to add as many edges as the processing technology can put in - the key here is to use fringe field capacitance, not the normal "plate" capacitance.
So in other words, as we get better at manipulating nature, capacitors show real promise - while competing technologies are approaching real limits.
Building an electrical system that can move megawatts of power is not something that will ever happen on the consumer level.No one will ever need more than 64KB...
You realize that you have now committed the classic blunder (second only to getting involved in a land war in Asia). Millions of engineers are now scrambling to prove you wrong, at any cost!
Here is how I would do it: Battery in car is a one meter square, 2 cm thick. Charging station brings over their one meter square battery, places it on top of yours. Power is transfered at 50 volts x 100,000 amps - but that 100,000 amps is flowing through a "wire" half a square meter in area, which is the equivalent of 0.1 amps through a somewhat standard 1mm wire. In other words: the efficiency is basically 100% (it would be hard to estimate before doing it, but very high); the grid can see a long slow charge (as the Charging station can slow charge their transfer battery); the energy transfer is done at 5MW, so it takes only a few seconds to fill your car.
While it might limit improvements, gas stations currently carry 4 types of gas. It is not too much of a stretch to say they would carry 4 types of batteries.
The real problem I see is wear and tear - there is no incentive on anyone in the system to be nice to the batteries, or to get rid of them when they wear out.
OK, so you disagree with ESRB? They saw Oblivion as another GTA, and changed the rating from T to M because of a mod that really had little to do with Oblivion as it shipped.
I agree that GTA should have been smacked down, from a moral point of view. My problem is that unless the line is drawn at "shipped with active stuff inapropriate to the rating", the line becomes impossible to draw consistently - as happened with Oblivion. Mods can do anything - so I think it is better to admit defeat and say "if you mod it, you are on your own and the providing company is not liable."
I mean come on! There are easier ways to get porn, people!
Or how about this as a vector - put an executable file on the disk, labeled "Sexy Pics" and with a folder icon. Windows by default does not show extensions... and it is safe to click on folders, right?
While I think that works for GTA, it doesn't really work for Oblivion. In Oblivion, the models used were hierarcial models, and one of the objects was a "bra". There were no nipples, but obviously a breast shape needed to be included. So someone deletes the "bra" from the model hierarcy, and puts in the male nipple, and viola.
Which is that closer to - my taking random data and putting it into a new form, or GTA unlocking a bad porno? No matter which way you decide, at the very least you have to see that a reasonable person might disagree - and that there is a continuum.
And BTW, this oblivious guess is what makes binary division hardware so fricken complicated. Seriously - look at a modern CPU, and the divider is one of the largest features. (Ignoring memory, of course)
OK - go one further. Every byte of the.gif image files used to create this awful solitaire game will be copied from somewhere else in the solitaire executable. So in other words, the "patch" just takes data already in solitaire and moves it around - and naked pictures appear.
The fact is, all of the "data" is already there (it's only numbers!). Really, we need to judge games on how they run during normal, unmodded play. Mods can do anything, and you can use data in any program for any purpose.
Of course, if I was making games I would just include in the license that you agree that you will not make mods that will adversely effect the games rating - problem solved. (Then when someone does it, they are not your responsiblity.)
Um, you're saying that you expect some people to have HP/UX boxes lying around not as production servers?
I believe the point is still valid: HP/UX boxes are never used for anything other than production servers - they cost too much to think otherwise. Windows boxes have at least some cost to them, so they similarly tend to be professionally administered. Linux boxes are free - so you can through them anywhere, even if you don't know what you are doing.
Personally, I think the study is flawed somewhere else, but the complaint is valid.
Well, I guess we just differ in what we see as possible governments. As you said, I was in need, so I try to give to others. I just do not believe it is possible to design a government where politics doesn't carry more weight than correctness - such a government would be quickly converted to a political one because those that worked the political angle instead of the correct angle would by definition end up with more power. That is the central problem with government - darwinism, the unseen hand, whatever leads to politics deciding issues - not what is most correct.
So given that a government cannot do the job, I would propose that corporations stand in. My favorite idea is to make donations to acreditted charities come off the top of your taxes, up to half your tax bill. For example, if your taxes are $50,000 you can pay $25,000 to the government and $25,000 to the charity. Yes, it would probably be abused somewhat - but so is the government system now!
Making government larger is not the answer, because a government will always have political darwinism at work. You say it is silly that the Commander in Chief and the Schools are run by the same guy. I agree, but that is not really how it works. The President's job is not to actually do any one thing. His job is to force his underlings to do a good job. Although he anounces foriegn policy, he doesn't really make it. Although he anounces school policy, he doesn't really make it. What he does is to say, "Here is what I think is important" and then to make sure that the things he really considers important are done. As to why that is necessary: who decides which is more important, schools or the armed forces? In the end, a decision must be made by a single person when timing is short. Most decisions are made by Congress - or rather aren't made, because they fight too much. This is good - laws should be few. But enforcing those laws needs to be timely, and that is supposedly what the president does. A decision to send the military to aid in a natural disaster should never be made in committee.
Your ideas are interesting. I can't remember anyone recommending a larger, more beaurocratic government before as a solution to pretty much anything. It might even work if there was some external agency that existed to dilute power to counteract the natural tendancy of power to accumulate. Maybe another branch of government? Of course, you'd have to do a cost/benefit analysis to be sure.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with anything that you said - and if that was what the government did, I would have no problem with it. (As it stands, I am obviously not revolting against the government anyway, even though they take about 58% of my salary. On top of that, I donate another 10% to charity, and donate as much of my time as possible.)
My real beef is that most of the money spent by the government is spent on welfare - but that the several trillion spent so far has not really helped people. If the government controls the redistribution of wealth, only people that a politically important get anything. If they let individuals make welfare decisions instead we might actually see some progress on poverty.
I have seen both sides of this - I currently make enough that the government takes 58%, but I also lived by myself a few years on a 4 figure anual salary because I couldn't walk (my family was overseas, and didn't exactly have any money they could send me anyway) AND WAS DENIED GOVERNMENT AID! I could not afford a doctor, I was legally disabled, I had no way to earn money except for ad hoc programming jobs (which I did from my bed). I talked to a social worker to see if they could help me, and was turned down...
Of course, knowing what I know now I should have talked to his supervisor and made a big stink. But that is a little hard to do from a bed, and besides, I think the real source of poverty is situations like that where if you only had a little bit more information you could get yourself out. I'm not bitter, I've done well - but it really annoys me when people ask me to give more money to a government that kicked me when I was down. Really, government help is not the answer to poverty.
WHOOSH!!! That sound you may or may not have heard was the sound of a joke flying by over your head...
But if you want it to be serious: 1) They are alway resentfull, unless they have received something from that person in the past (such as life, education, etc.) When the government comes in and informs you that you will provide 2/3 of your work for the sole benefit of people you have never met, it just doesn't go over well! 2) Put to death? You mean they would have to work like the rest of us? That would put them to death? Weird! 3) This is called a pyramid scheme. Please research what happens to pyramid schemes when they run out of suckers, er, workers. The last guy that buys in is left holding the bag - and they are never happy about that. 4) The only reasonable explanation I've seen is the statement "we are not running out of suckers, because the suckers are able to work so much harder than previous suckers". I am unconvinced that this is a winning argument.
Interestingly enough, I did not grow up in the US...
But besides that, are you saying that if I go to France and figure out a way to make a million Euros, that the government is fine with me keeping it?
Or are you just saying that 1) noone has revolted yet, so the government has not found it neccessary to point guns (just reminds everyone that only the police have them) or 2) all the welfare recipients seem to like the system.
I'm talking about a stable system where the people that want to work in exchange for (things or experiences) of value can, and where other people that don't want to work can just sit there and get (things or experiences) of value (and healthcare).
The problem with healthcare systems outside the US is that it does not atract the capital necessary to create new treatments. Essentially all of the new treatments developed in the last few decades were paid for by the US market. I know of no treatments that were developed and paid for by the systems you seem to think are better. (Of course, if you can have someone else take most of the burden of your healthcare you would be foolish not to do so - but that does not make it a viable system for everyone).
Healthcare is especially tricky, really. Everyone agrees (even in the US) that poor people should not die from lack of treatment. The real problem that arises is how do you allocate resources (brain cancer verses bone cancer, for example). The most efficient allocator of resources we know of is the free market - but that would mess up the first assumption, that poor people should not die from lack of treatment. So in the US we have this system that says that if you can't pay for treatment (and you need it) you still get it, but if you can pay for it (and even if you don't really need it) you get it. Of course, who is paying (typically insurance companies) and who is receiving the benefit are different, so the free market screws up and overpays.
Social-democratic governments are interested in providing public healthcare and social welfare.
I've always thought that these two aims (free healthcare and welfare) required an authoritarian government. Why would Doctors and everyone work for the benefit of those that do not benefit themselves? Even if some do, some will choose not to - so in order to achieve free health care and welfare, it is necessary to point guns at people and say "work for them" (or us). That is what tax is, of course - no one is paying taxes because they like it!
Do you really see a method of providing healthcare and welfare that does not involve guns? The only efficient methods I have seen for welfare rely on trust, which does not work for a government (and I imagine you would not like such a system, anyway).
What about it? She was brain dead -- she didn't care about anything.
Only true if there is no afterlife.
Don't kid yourself -- there is no dignity to death.
Same as above, except that I believe strongly in dignity in death - it effects how your loved ones remember you. Though by all means, write your wishes down (and tell everyone that you have done so!)
To get the same effect in a perfectly legal and unstoppable way, alter Mozilla and other email clients so that when you click on the junk button it automatically goes and fills out form, etc - without accessing a separate server. That way, they get a response from each person solicited or spammed (prefectly reasonable) and they have to sort through the responses to find the ones that fell for the scam.
Many people will say that if you do this the spammers will know your address. My response: 1) they obviously already know your address, and 2) if everyone does it, it won't help that they know your address. The point is not to make you personally get less spam, the point is to eliminate spam as an easy option for criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really are that scared, I would recommend doing one eye at a time - but still do it. If you see someone reputable, you will be fine. Being able to see clearly without glasses will seriously change your life!
It is icky (a technical term), but I had it done and I have to say that I would really recommend it to anyone! It really does change your life - even simple things, like being able to just look at the clock at night and know what time it is!
Treat it like a very important server upgrade - research vendors (well, doctors); don't go for the cheap one; and ask how other clients faired. But I strongly recommend the procedure - I think it is the best money you can spend on yourself!
The problem occurs when you need to get a signal from the divider circuit back to the register circuit - which is on the opposite side of the chip - in one clock cycle. How it is solved is that you place buffers to delay the signal an integer number of cycles, but that of course slows the computation down somewhat.
Well, my point was that it can make sense to start your own company (you know, a company with no product... no costs... only one employee) just to get coverage. Weird but true...
As with most things in the US, any problem can be solved. Seriously, if you still know this lady (and she hasn't figured this out already): In the US, anyone can start a company. In most states, any two people that form a company together can apply for group health care coverage. In at least IL (state laws vary), the group health care provider cannot refuse you coverage - they do a medical check and then they can adjust your rates up to 150%, but that is it.
To be honest, though, she really should have had insurance - at least for the catostrophic stuff. The easiest way to get insurance if you are young is to apply to your local college - by law they will require/supply medical insurance.
Your analysis is correct, but misses some important points that make capacitors promising "futuretech". First, capacitors can store energy in empty space (the fields), not in a substance. That means that with unobtanium, capacitors can have essentially zero mass. For example, a not quite so future tech (but very expensive) way of doing this would be to have nanotube sized wires held a short distance away from each other in free space. Electrons would not flow out of the wires as long as the wires were so close together that the charge voltage was below their metal work function. (Someone else can fill in the detailed physics.)
The second thing that may eventually make capacitors replace other energy sources is that they can have essentially infinite capacitance in a given space. Capacitance is an edge effect, not a volume effect. That means that you can always add more edges to a design in a given space. Current on-chip capacitors use fractal designs to add as many edges as the processing technology can put in - the key here is to use fringe field capacitance, not the normal "plate" capacitance.
So in other words, as we get better at manipulating nature, capacitors show real promise - while competing technologies are approaching real limits.
Building an electrical system that can move megawatts of power is not something that will ever happen on the consumer level. No one will ever need more than 64KB...
You realize that you have now committed the classic blunder (second only to getting involved in a land war in Asia). Millions of engineers are now scrambling to prove you wrong, at any cost!
Here is how I would do it: Battery in car is a one meter square, 2 cm thick. Charging station brings over their one meter square battery, places it on top of yours. Power is transfered at 50 volts x 100,000 amps - but that 100,000 amps is flowing through a "wire" half a square meter in area, which is the equivalent of 0.1 amps through a somewhat standard 1mm wire. In other words: the efficiency is basically 100% (it would be hard to estimate before doing it, but very high); the grid can see a long slow charge (as the Charging station can slow charge their transfer battery); the energy transfer is done at 5MW, so it takes only a few seconds to fill your car.
OK, I think you owe me lunch now!
While it might limit improvements, gas stations currently carry 4 types of gas. It is not too much of a stretch to say they would carry 4 types of batteries.
The real problem I see is wear and tear - there is no incentive on anyone in the system to be nice to the batteries, or to get rid of them when they wear out.
OK, so you disagree with ESRB? They saw Oblivion as another GTA, and changed the rating from T to M because of a mod that really had little to do with Oblivion as it shipped.
I agree that GTA should have been smacked down, from a moral point of view. My problem is that unless the line is drawn at "shipped with active stuff inapropriate to the rating", the line becomes impossible to draw consistently - as happened with Oblivion. Mods can do anything - so I think it is better to admit defeat and say "if you mod it, you are on your own and the providing company is not liable."
I mean come on! There are easier ways to get porn, people!
Or how about this as a vector - put an executable file on the disk, labeled "Sexy Pics" and with a folder icon. Windows by default does not show extensions... and it is safe to click on folders, right?
While I think that works for GTA, it doesn't really work for Oblivion. In Oblivion, the models used were hierarcial models, and one of the objects was a "bra". There were no nipples, but obviously a breast shape needed to be included. So someone deletes the "bra" from the model hierarcy, and puts in the male nipple, and viola.
Which is that closer to - my taking random data and putting it into a new form, or GTA unlocking a bad porno? No matter which way you decide, at the very least you have to see that a reasonable person might disagree - and that there is a continuum.
And BTW, this oblivious guess is what makes binary division hardware so fricken complicated. Seriously - look at a modern CPU, and the divider is one of the largest features. (Ignoring memory, of course)
OK - go one further. Every byte of the .gif image files used to create this awful solitaire game will be copied from somewhere else in the solitaire executable. So in other words, the "patch" just takes data already in solitaire and moves it around - and naked pictures appear.
The fact is, all of the "data" is already there (it's only numbers!). Really, we need to judge games on how they run during normal, unmodded play. Mods can do anything, and you can use data in any program for any purpose.
Of course, if I was making games I would just include in the license that you agree that you will not make mods that will adversely effect the games rating - problem solved. (Then when someone does it, they are not your responsiblity.)
Um, isn't the whole point of Java/C# (which this error looks like) that you don't have to worry about memory leaks? Especially on a web server!
Um, you're saying that you expect some people to have HP/UX boxes lying around not as production servers?
I believe the point is still valid: HP/UX boxes are never used for anything other than production servers - they cost too much to think otherwise. Windows boxes have at least some cost to them, so they similarly tend to be professionally administered. Linux boxes are free - so you can through them anywhere, even if you don't know what you are doing.
Personally, I think the study is flawed somewhere else, but the complaint is valid.
Well, I guess we just differ in what we see as possible governments. As you said, I was in need, so I try to give to others. I just do not believe it is possible to design a government where politics doesn't carry more weight than correctness - such a government would be quickly converted to a political one because those that worked the political angle instead of the correct angle would by definition end up with more power. That is the central problem with government - darwinism, the unseen hand, whatever leads to politics deciding issues - not what is most correct.
So given that a government cannot do the job, I would propose that corporations stand in. My favorite idea is to make donations to acreditted charities come off the top of your taxes, up to half your tax bill. For example, if your taxes are $50,000 you can pay $25,000 to the government and $25,000 to the charity. Yes, it would probably be abused somewhat - but so is the government system now!
Making government larger is not the answer, because a government will always have political darwinism at work. You say it is silly that the Commander in Chief and the Schools are run by the same guy. I agree, but that is not really how it works. The President's job is not to actually do any one thing. His job is to force his underlings to do a good job. Although he anounces foriegn policy, he doesn't really make it. Although he anounces school policy, he doesn't really make it. What he does is to say, "Here is what I think is important" and then to make sure that the things he really considers important are done. As to why that is necessary: who decides which is more important, schools or the armed forces? In the end, a decision must be made by a single person when timing is short. Most decisions are made by Congress - or rather aren't made, because they fight too much. This is good - laws should be few. But enforcing those laws needs to be timely, and that is supposedly what the president does. A decision to send the military to aid in a natural disaster should never be made in committee.
Your ideas are interesting. I can't remember anyone recommending a larger, more beaurocratic government before as a solution to pretty much anything. It might even work if there was some external agency that existed to dilute power to counteract the natural tendancy of power to accumulate. Maybe another branch of government? Of course, you'd have to do a cost/benefit analysis to be sure.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with anything that you said - and if that was what the government did, I would have no problem with it. (As it stands, I am obviously not revolting against the government anyway, even though they take about 58% of my salary. On top of that, I donate another 10% to charity, and donate as much of my time as possible.)
My real beef is that most of the money spent by the government is spent on welfare - but that the several trillion spent so far has not really helped people. If the government controls the redistribution of wealth, only people that a politically important get anything. If they let individuals make welfare decisions instead we might actually see some progress on poverty.
I have seen both sides of this - I currently make enough that the government takes 58%, but I also lived by myself a few years on a 4 figure anual salary because I couldn't walk (my family was overseas, and didn't exactly have any money they could send me anyway) AND WAS DENIED GOVERNMENT AID! I could not afford a doctor, I was legally disabled, I had no way to earn money except for ad hoc programming jobs (which I did from my bed). I talked to a social worker to see if they could help me, and was turned down...
Of course, knowing what I know now I should have talked to his supervisor and made a big stink. But that is a little hard to do from a bed, and besides, I think the real source of poverty is situations like that where if you only had a little bit more information you could get yourself out. I'm not bitter, I've done well - but it really annoys me when people ask me to give more money to a government that kicked me when I was down. Really, government help is not the answer to poverty.
know who your friends are
Haha! They can't touch me - I have no friends!
WHOOSH!!! That sound you may or may not have heard was the sound of a joke flying by over your head...
But if you want it to be serious:
1) They are alway resentfull, unless they have received something from that person in the past (such as life, education, etc.) When the government comes in and informs you that you will provide 2/3 of your work for the sole benefit of people you have never met, it just doesn't go over well!
2) Put to death? You mean they would have to work like the rest of us? That would put them to death? Weird!
3) This is called a pyramid scheme. Please research what happens to pyramid schemes when they run out of suckers, er, workers. The last guy that buys in is left holding the bag - and they are never happy about that.
4) The only reasonable explanation I've seen is the statement "we are not running out of suckers, because the suckers are able to work so much harder than previous suckers". I am unconvinced that this is a winning argument.
Interestingly enough, I did not grow up in the US...
But besides that, are you saying that if I go to France and figure out a way to make a million Euros, that the government is fine with me keeping it?
Or are you just saying that 1) noone has revolted yet, so the government has not found it neccessary to point guns (just reminds everyone that only the police have them) or 2) all the welfare recipients seem to like the system.
I'm talking about a stable system where the people that want to work in exchange for (things or experiences) of value can, and where other people that don't want to work can just sit there and get (things or experiences) of value (and healthcare).
The problem with healthcare systems outside the US is that it does not atract the capital necessary to create new treatments. Essentially all of the new treatments developed in the last few decades were paid for by the US market. I know of no treatments that were developed and paid for by the systems you seem to think are better. (Of course, if you can have someone else take most of the burden of your healthcare you would be foolish not to do so - but that does not make it a viable system for everyone).
Healthcare is especially tricky, really. Everyone agrees (even in the US) that poor people should not die from lack of treatment. The real problem that arises is how do you allocate resources (brain cancer verses bone cancer, for example). The most efficient allocator of resources we know of is the free market - but that would mess up the first assumption, that poor people should not die from lack of treatment. So in the US we have this system that says that if you can't pay for treatment (and you need it) you still get it, but if you can pay for it (and even if you don't really need it) you get it. Of course, who is paying (typically insurance companies) and who is receiving the benefit are different, so the free market screws up and overpays.
Social-democratic governments are interested in providing public healthcare and social welfare.
I've always thought that these two aims (free healthcare and welfare) required an authoritarian government. Why would Doctors and everyone work for the benefit of those that do not benefit themselves? Even if some do, some will choose not to - so in order to achieve free health care and welfare, it is necessary to point guns at people and say "work for them" (or us). That is what tax is, of course - no one is paying taxes because they like it!
Do you really see a method of providing healthcare and welfare that does not involve guns? The only efficient methods I have seen for welfare rely on trust, which does not work for a government (and I imagine you would not like such a system, anyway).
There is no universal law of nature which says 1 person can't produce enough for 3.
There is, however, a universal law of nature that says that the one person will not be happy about this arrangement.
What about it? She was brain dead -- she didn't care about anything.
Only true if there is no afterlife.
Don't kid yourself -- there is no dignity to death.
Same as above, except that I believe strongly in dignity in death - it effects how your loved ones remember you. Though by all means, write your wishes down (and tell everyone that you have done so!)
To get the same effect in a perfectly legal and unstoppable way, alter Mozilla and other email clients so that when you click on the junk button it automatically goes and fills out form, etc - without accessing a separate server. That way, they get a response from each person solicited or spammed (prefectly reasonable) and they have to sort through the responses to find the ones that fell for the scam.
Many people will say that if you do this the spammers will know your address. My response: 1) they obviously already know your address, and 2) if everyone does it, it won't help that they know your address. The point is not to make you personally get less spam, the point is to eliminate spam as an easy option for criminals.
Um, a single data point does not invalidate a generalization. Statistics can invalidate a generalization.
Or are you saying that you are a statistic? Didn't you pay attention to all those comercials, "don't become a statistic!"?