I never said that insurance for catasrophic events was a bad thing, I said insurance that covers routine checkups and stuff like that is driving up the prices of stuff.
Why shouldn't it cost $100 per visit? Are you an MD? Are you a DO? Did you spend 200k going to school? Didn't think so.
I don't care how much they spent going to school, it should not cost me $100 to walk into an office wait for an hour, and then have someone come in, look at me for 10 minutes and say "yep, you're sick". It sure as hell wouldn't cost $100 per vist without insurance that covered it because you hear all the time about how unaffordable healthcare is without insurance. Well if it's unaffordable with out insurance, and most people didn't have insurance to cover routine checkups then the doctors will lower their prices or they won't be able to pay their 200k student loans.
Why should it cost $100? Even assuming the doctor only sees two people per hour (which you know they don't) that's still $200 / hour.
The question we should be asking ourselves is why we are paying into a system that makes it so that the only way to afford BASIC health care is to pay a thousand dollars a year? Why do I need to insure against routine checkups? Your car insurance doesn't pay for tune ups, why the hell should your health insurance pay for routine physicals?
To be fair, aprature was not sopposed to compete directly with photoshop. But on the other hand, Apple has been (IMO) feeling the lack of serious support from major devs for a while. That I think is part of the reason for not only their pro apps but all the iLife stuff too. Basicaly, if no one else will do it right, then Apple will. (If you want something done right.....). Examples of this can be seen not only with the old switch from classic to OS X (see quark) but also the current transition to intel chips (see adobe "yeah, sometime in about a year and a half" ). In part I think Apple may be trying to raise the bar for software development. If joe user can get everything he needs done with what comes with the computer, then Adobe et al need to make their products seriously compelling to get joe user to upgrade.
So why are we treating the symptom and not the problem? If the systems are useful but prone to abuse, then we should be eliminating the abuse NOT the system. The argument that a national ID is a bad thing or will lead to a police state is about as founded as saying video games cause kids to be violent. The ID isn't the problem, it's the people on the other end.
How much would that cost me compared to the total ammount I pay into insurance? Insurance is a gamble and these days it's a bad one. At $1000 / year plus 20% I think I'm better off having the hospital bill me in payment plans. In 2002 the average bill for a hospitalization was $17,300. So lets do some calculating:
Basic health care: $82 / month
Deductable: $3,500
Drugs (pain killers): $500 deductable (so I pay my drugs out of pocket)
Hospital care: 50% AFTER deductable
So if I have isurance for a year and then got hospitalized, I spend $984 in premiums + $3500 in deductable + 6,900 costs.
In all, in one year I will spend $11,384. Which means that if I can keep my hospital stays down to one every 7 years I will have beat the house.
But of course, my main point was the insurance for basic health care. Simple doctors visits should NOT cost $100 per vist, but because of insurance being the way it is, doctors can get away with that.
My question is, why do people continue to pay for health insurance? All it does is drive costs through the roof without making any serious dent in medical expenses (not counting for emergencies, but hey, that's what catasrophic insurance is for). Seriously in the last year, I went to the doctor twice, once for a routine check up, once to see a specialist and I have no health insurance (partialy by choice). The routine checkup cost me $85 because I paid upfront (as opposed to $125 if I went on a payment plan with them, the specialist cost me $300 on a payment plan. In all that means my yearly medical costs were $85 + $300 + $20 (prescription) + $120 (glasses) = $525. Absolute bare minimum health insurance (private) for me would have been about $80 / month or $960 for the year, and that doesn't include co-pay (20% up to $500). The annoying thing is, if most people didn't get insurance to cover basic checkups, I could have gotten mine for closer to $50 or so becuase people wouldn't actualy stand for paying $100 per doctor visit.
... or buying something with a credit card, or trying to get a library card, or trying to rent anything, or performing any transaction at a bank or similar institution.
The problem is inherrently the methods used to teach. Theory is all well and good but it's worthless without practical application. In the 3 years of college that I attended, I took 3 courses that had any impact on my ability to be better at what I was doing. One course involved a semester long coding project from beginning to end with instruction on what we were doing and why and how it improved what we were doing. In otherwords, theory with practical application. One course taught low level code, getting really nitty gritty showing how simple taks we take for granted were not all so simple, and showing how a quick adjustment can make a small simple code more efficient and thus improve a larger code. Again, theory with practical application. The last was a course I almost failed, but because the professor was actually willing and able to teach and take some time to help me I learned how to take what was a mess of a pile of code that I had written and turn it into a workable and well written piece of code without scrapping the whole project. Again, theory with practical application.
Unfortunately the rest of the courses were continuous theory with abstract single moment examples from a text book.
Ok, so what are the things you're not telling us about this laptop of yours?
How many pounds is it? Personaly I don't call it a laptop unless I can carry it all day without throwing my back out.
How big is this thing that you can fit two HDDs in it and a surround sound speaker system.
How many minutes of battery life do you get driving two HDs, two 64 bit AMD hot plates (and for the record, my desktop is an AMD but you can't tell me those things aren't hot) and this 3x faster video card?
And how many banks did you have to rob to afford it?
Don't get me wrong, there's room for apple to improve on their laptops, but aside from IBM, Apple is the only company I know of that makes a laptop that's balanced rather than awsome in one area and a POS in the others.
I assure you that such a warning would be ignored and unseen by the vast majority of the customers, even if it appeared in flashing siezure inducing patterns every time you loaded a program. People are blind to such things.
It may be fiction on any large scale public attempt to get government interaction, but I can certainly attest from personal experience (given that I was the one doing the speaking, and I have it on video) that it's not too difficult to get people interested in banning and eliminating DHMO from the world. People are more than willing to jump on a bandwagon for "public good" without knowing what they're talking about.
I have talked publicly about doing unususal things. My friends and I used to talk about the best way to dispose of a body while looking around the sporting goods section of Wally World. Does that mean a cop can begin an investigation?
If he has reason to think you are actualy looking to dispose of a body, yes.
What if he finds a body nearby that was disposed of in a creative manner with no other evidence? What would the trial be like? Just because they heard me talking about body disposal and they found a body, does that mean I'm guilty?
That's what investigations and trials are all about. Why is it that any time there is discussion about anything law enforcement does people assume they're going to be convicted and sentenced to life on one piece of circumstancial evidence.
BTW, if you do ever get convicted on one piece of circumstancial evidence, sue your lawyer.
Here's another example: Lets say I'm unpopular in school. To boost my reputation, I decide to blog about how I burned down a house. I got most of the details from $local_news and just made the rest up.
Now, they always leave out details. Let'say I fill in $accelerant from last month's CSI. Just so happens that the real criminal got the idea from the same place.
They have your claim, they have you knowing an unpublished detail. Will I be convicted?
Again, please see investigation and trial by jury for more information as to how the criminal justice system works.
What if I have a pic of me testing a gravity bong with tobacco. Should my school (assuming I'm at least 18) be able to suspend me?
Again see investigation and trial by jury.
What about if I post a chat log of me talking about BSDM with a 14yo girl? Just because there is text containing the claim that she is 14 does not, in fact, mean that she is 14...or even a girl. Should that open the door for a child-sex investigation?
Um yes.
Who is to say that my blog is not a work of fiction?
If it is, that would be revealed in the investigation.
Do cops troll Hollywood movies looking for people discharging firearms within city limits?
Then why should they troll MySpace looking for, and opening investigations on, stuff that may or may not be true?
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here but if you're saying what I think you're saying, you realize that movies have to get permits for that right? As for the investiations thing, it's because it may be true. Isn't that the job of cops, to investigate?
I fully agree that software that gets released to anyone outside of the in house developers should fail gracefully when it fails and that standards have certainly fallen over the years for what people consider acceptable in software but I also think that sometimes you can't "fail gracefully" because the failure is in the destructive nature of the program.
To use this public beta for an example, the program partitions your HDD on the fly, updates the system firmware and then allows you to run a destructive application (an installer) on your system. There are lots of places where the software itself can fail gracefully but still leave you in a bad situation just due to the nature of the software.
In this case it appears that everything goes according to plan (or at least as the software expects it to) but something in the end is messed up, and it only happens on a few end user systems. In this case the software is failing gacefully in that it's not leaving anything unrecoverable but you still need to do some work to actualy do that recovery. This is truely where I would expect public betas to be. Given the infrequency of this problem (what did the summary say about a dozen or so?) I would assume that this met the qualifications for the beta and was working on in house machines. In this case a public beta is just what would be needed for a program of this type, though in my opinion it should have been more limited to say registered Apple developers or something like that.
The reason I think a public beta is appropriate here is that because of the destructive nature of the program, it needs to be seriously field tested by all sorts of odd combinations of hardware and software that the developers may not have on hand before something like this gets rolled into a final release. In fact, in an odd sort of contradiction, I think that the more destructive potential a program has (and let's face it messing with the partition tables, firmware and OS installs is about as destructive as you can get to a computer) the more it should have a public beta before any official release. Of course that assumes that people understand what a beta is and what that entials for them.
I think in this case the product is ready to be seen and used by the public but that the public at large needs to understand that it isn't finalized yet and they could concieveably have to do some recovery work.
Whether the problem is in the software itself or a step in the directions that is either unclear or missed by some people it is, in the grand scope of things, a minor bug. A bug that needs to be corrected before the final release to be sure, but a minor bug that may have only been possible to find by releasing it to the public at large.
If you are writing an article on software dev and alpha v beta v final release I'd love to see it.
Beta's are expected to have bugs too. At least that's how I always learned it. Alpha software was in-house, app developer only, still undergoing major changes and fixes.
Alpha software should be expected to fail and fail often, and is more likely to have an entire section of it's code rewritten rather than patched or fixed.
Beta software works most of the time on in-house, app developer machines. At this point the developers are looking to move the software away from testing to see what works to testing to see what isn't working like it should when applied to "real world" tasks. At this point bugs should be expected but those bugs should involved patching and fixing code rather than scratching things and rewriting.
Publc-Beta software should be esentialy the same as beta, the main difference being the developers believe it's stable enough in house to give it to untrained people to try. In this case you're looking to make the program as idiot proof as possible so you're actualy counting on your users to not read the directions, not follow the directions and attempt things you wouldn't dream of attempting because "it's not supposed to do that".
Final Release software should be stable on most machines most of the time for the public at large.
Integration on a mac != integration in windows. I think the best way to describe the difference (and it's a poor description at that) is that under windows, applications (like IE) integrate by putting their tenticles into every other part of the system, where as on a mac, applications integrate by having the OS put it's tenticles into the application.
Boy that sounds like a really bad porn flick doesn't it?
For the same reason that despite the fact that OS X can and does run X11 apps easily, people still spend time porting them to aqua and the mac environment. Because mac users HATE applications that don't look and play the same way that the rest of the applications do. And rebooting in to windows every time you want to play your game is not going to win many customers.
Odd, we are now more than 6 months since the intel announcement and I just recently sold my mac mini for $450 on ebay. I paid ~$600 for the machine all told including having upgraded the memory and bought some add ons when I bought it. The price I sold it as was about the price I would have expected to sell it for, both before and after the intel announcement. In fact if we peruse ebay a bit, there's lots of PPC machines selling for just as much as they used to. In fact, go into any Apple store and you'll see PPC machines selling for full price.
BTW, why the fuck would anyone sell a brand new PPC machine on ebay just after the intel switch announcement?
Slashdot Mirror
I never said that insurance for catasrophic events was a bad thing, I said insurance that covers routine checkups and stuff like that is driving up the prices of stuff.
Why shouldn't it cost $100 per visit? Are you an MD? Are you a DO? Did you spend 200k going to school? Didn't think so.
I don't care how much they spent going to school, it should not cost me $100 to walk into an office wait for an hour, and then have someone come in, look at me for 10 minutes and say "yep, you're sick". It sure as hell wouldn't cost $100 per vist without insurance that covered it because you hear all the time about how unaffordable healthcare is without insurance. Well if it's unaffordable with out insurance, and most people didn't have insurance to cover routine checkups then the doctors will lower their prices or they won't be able to pay their 200k student loans.
Why should it cost $100? Even assuming the doctor only sees two people per hour (which you know they don't) that's still $200 / hour.
The question we should be asking ourselves is why we are paying into a system that makes it so that the only way to afford BASIC health care is to pay a thousand dollars a year? Why do I need to insure against routine checkups? Your car insurance doesn't pay for tune ups, why the hell should your health insurance pay for routine physicals?
The same one that Adobe's Lightbooth or whatever the hell it's called is gunning for.
Does asking to be modded down and then not being modded down mean your point is invalid then? (score as of this reply: 2)
To be fair, aprature was not sopposed to compete directly with photoshop. But on the other hand, Apple has been (IMO) feeling the lack of serious support from major devs for a while. That I think is part of the reason for not only their pro apps but all the iLife stuff too. Basicaly, if no one else will do it right, then Apple will. (If you want something done right.....). Examples of this can be seen not only with the old switch from classic to OS X (see quark) but also the current transition to intel chips (see adobe "yeah, sometime in about a year and a half" ). In part I think Apple may be trying to raise the bar for software development. If joe user can get everything he needs done with what comes with the computer, then Adobe et al need to make their products seriously compelling to get joe user to upgrade.
So why are we treating the symptom and not the problem? If the systems are useful but prone to abuse, then we should be eliminating the abuse NOT the system. The argument that a national ID is a bad thing or will lead to a police state is about as founded as saying video games cause kids to be violent. The ID isn't the problem, it's the people on the other end.
How much would that cost me compared to the total ammount I pay into insurance? Insurance is a gamble and these days it's a bad one. At $1000 / year plus 20% I think I'm better off having the hospital bill me in payment plans. In 2002 the average bill for a hospitalization was $17,300. So lets do some calculating:
m #hospital
Basic health care: $82 / month
Deductable: $3,500
Drugs (pain killers): $500 deductable (so I pay my drugs out of pocket)
Hospital care: 50% AFTER deductable
So if I have isurance for a year and then got hospitalized, I spend $984 in premiums + $3500 in deductable + 6,900 costs.
In all, in one year I will spend $11,384. Which means that if I can keep my hospital stays down to one every 7 years I will have beat the house.
Source for hospital info:
http://www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/factbk6/factbk6b.ht
Source for insurance: BCBS
But of course, my main point was the insurance for basic health care. Simple doctors visits should NOT cost $100 per vist, but because of insurance being the way it is, doctors can get away with that.
What is an image other that a series of colors at given points? Whether each point contains one or multiple colors is irrellevant.
But good luck getting through a week without need for your ID.
As opposed to me sitting in the grocery store and writing down what everyone buys or some jackass on the internet taping and distributing a suicide?
I hope to god you don't carry a credit card. You would be horrified at what's stored on those.
My question is, why do people continue to pay for health insurance? All it does is drive costs through the roof without making any serious dent in medical expenses (not counting for emergencies, but hey, that's what catasrophic insurance is for). Seriously in the last year, I went to the doctor twice, once for a routine check up, once to see a specialist and I have no health insurance (partialy by choice). The routine checkup cost me $85 because I paid upfront (as opposed to $125 if I went on a payment plan with them, the specialist cost me $300 on a payment plan. In all that means my yearly medical costs were $85 + $300 + $20 (prescription) + $120 (glasses) = $525. Absolute bare minimum health insurance (private) for me would have been about $80 / month or $960 for the year, and that doesn't include co-pay (20% up to $500). The annoying thing is, if most people didn't get insurance to cover basic checkups, I could have gotten mine for closer to $50 or so becuase people wouldn't actualy stand for paying $100 per doctor visit.
... or buying something with a credit card, or trying to get a library card, or trying to rent anything, or performing any transaction at a bank or similar institution.
Kind of like how an image stiched together from thousands of tiny (but physically spread out) dots looks like it's on drugs, huh?
The problem is inherrently the methods used to teach. Theory is all well and good but it's worthless without practical application. In the 3 years of college that I attended, I took 3 courses that had any impact on my ability to be better at what I was doing. One course involved a semester long coding project from beginning to end with instruction on what we were doing and why and how it improved what we were doing. In otherwords, theory with practical application. One course taught low level code, getting really nitty gritty showing how simple taks we take for granted were not all so simple, and showing how a quick adjustment can make a small simple code more efficient and thus improve a larger code. Again, theory with practical application. The last was a course I almost failed, but because the professor was actually willing and able to teach and take some time to help me I learned how to take what was a mess of a pile of code that I had written and turn it into a workable and well written piece of code without scrapping the whole project. Again, theory with practical application.
Unfortunately the rest of the courses were continuous theory with abstract single moment examples from a text book.
Ok, so what are the things you're not telling us about this laptop of yours?
How many pounds is it? Personaly I don't call it a laptop unless I can carry it all day without throwing my back out.
How big is this thing that you can fit two HDDs in it and a surround sound speaker system.
How many minutes of battery life do you get driving two HDs, two 64 bit AMD hot plates (and for the record, my desktop is an AMD but you can't tell me those things aren't hot) and this 3x faster video card?
And how many banks did you have to rob to afford it?
Don't get me wrong, there's room for apple to improve on their laptops, but aside from IBM, Apple is the only company I know of that makes a laptop that's balanced rather than awsome in one area and a POS in the others.
I assure you that such a warning would be ignored and unseen by the vast majority of the customers, even if it appeared in flashing siezure inducing patterns every time you loaded a program. People are blind to such things.
BTW, that H2O story you're repeating is fiction.
It may be fiction on any large scale public attempt to get government interaction, but I can certainly attest from personal experience (given that I was the one doing the speaking, and I have it on video) that it's not too difficult to get people interested in banning and eliminating DHMO from the world. People are more than willing to jump on a bandwagon for "public good" without knowing what they're talking about.
I have talked publicly about doing unususal things. My friends and I used to talk about the best way to dispose of a body while looking around the sporting goods section of Wally World. Does that mean a cop can begin an investigation?
If he has reason to think you are actualy looking to dispose of a body, yes.
What if he finds a body nearby that was disposed of in a creative manner with no other evidence? What would the trial be like? Just because they heard me talking about body disposal and they found a body, does that mean I'm guilty?
That's what investigations and trials are all about. Why is it that any time there is discussion about anything law enforcement does people assume they're going to be convicted and sentenced to life on one piece of circumstancial evidence.
BTW, if you do ever get convicted on one piece of circumstancial evidence, sue your lawyer.
Here's another example: Lets say I'm unpopular in school. To boost my reputation, I decide to blog about how I burned down a house. I got most of the details from $local_news and just made the rest up.
Now, they always leave out details. Let'say I fill in $accelerant from last month's CSI. Just so happens that the real criminal got the idea from the same place.
They have your claim, they have you knowing an unpublished detail. Will I be convicted?
Again, please see investigation and trial by jury for more information as to how the criminal justice system works.
What if I have a pic of me testing a gravity bong with tobacco. Should my school (assuming I'm at least 18) be able to suspend me?
Again see investigation and trial by jury.
What about if I post a chat log of me talking about BSDM with a 14yo girl? Just because there is text containing the claim that she is 14 does not, in fact, mean that she is 14...or even a girl. Should that open the door for a child-sex investigation?
Um yes.
Who is to say that my blog is not a work of fiction?
If it is, that would be revealed in the investigation.
Do cops troll Hollywood movies looking for people discharging firearms within city limits?
Then why should they troll MySpace looking for, and opening investigations on, stuff that may or may not be true?
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here but if you're saying what I think you're saying, you realize that movies have to get permits for that right? As for the investiations thing, it's because it may be true. Isn't that the job of cops, to investigate?
I fully agree that software that gets released to anyone outside of the in house developers should fail gracefully when it fails and that standards have certainly fallen over the years for what people consider acceptable in software but I also think that sometimes you can't "fail gracefully" because the failure is in the destructive nature of the program.
To use this public beta for an example, the program partitions your HDD on the fly, updates the system firmware and then allows you to run a destructive application (an installer) on your system. There are lots of places where the software itself can fail gracefully but still leave you in a bad situation just due to the nature of the software.
In this case it appears that everything goes according to plan (or at least as the software expects it to) but something in the end is messed up, and it only happens on a few end user systems. In this case the software is failing gacefully in that it's not leaving anything unrecoverable but you still need to do some work to actualy do that recovery. This is truely where I would expect public betas to be. Given the infrequency of this problem (what did the summary say about a dozen or so?) I would assume that this met the qualifications for the beta and was working on in house machines. In this case a public beta is just what would be needed for a program of this type, though in my opinion it should have been more limited to say registered Apple developers or something like that.
The reason I think a public beta is appropriate here is that because of the destructive nature of the program, it needs to be seriously field tested by all sorts of odd combinations of hardware and software that the developers may not have on hand before something like this gets rolled into a final release. In fact, in an odd sort of contradiction, I think that the more destructive potential a program has (and let's face it messing with the partition tables, firmware and OS installs is about as destructive as you can get to a computer) the more it should have a public beta before any official release. Of course that assumes that people understand what a beta is and what that entials for them.
I think in this case the product is ready to be seen and used by the public but that the public at large needs to understand that it isn't finalized yet and they could concieveably have to do some recovery work.
Whether the problem is in the software itself or a step in the directions that is either unclear or missed by some people it is, in the grand scope of things, a minor bug. A bug that needs to be corrected before the final release to be sure, but a minor bug that may have only been possible to find by releasing it to the public at large.
If you are writing an article on software dev and alpha v beta v final release I'd love to see it.
Beta's are expected to have bugs too. At least that's how I always learned it. Alpha software was in-house, app developer only, still undergoing major changes and fixes.
Alpha software should be expected to fail and fail often, and is more likely to have an entire section of it's code rewritten rather than patched or fixed.
Beta software works most of the time on in-house, app developer machines. At this point the developers are looking to move the software away from testing to see what works to testing to see what isn't working like it should when applied to "real world" tasks. At this point bugs should be expected but those bugs should involved patching and fixing code rather than scratching things and rewriting.
Publc-Beta software should be esentialy the same as beta, the main difference being the developers believe it's stable enough in house to give it to untrained people to try. In this case you're looking to make the program as idiot proof as possible so you're actualy counting on your users to not read the directions, not follow the directions and attempt things you wouldn't dream of attempting because "it's not supposed to do that".
Final Release software should be stable on most machines most of the time for the public at large.
If you think that 2+2=7 I am not being an asshole by telling you that you're misinformed. Also, life isn't fair. Welcome to reality.
Well not to be a complete ass but um 2+2 is actualy 11.
Then again I am speaking from a base 3 system rather than base 10, but the point is truths are relative to a given starting point.
Integration on a mac != integration in windows. I think the best way to describe the difference (and it's a poor description at that) is that under windows, applications (like IE) integrate by putting their tenticles into every other part of the system, where as on a mac, applications integrate by having the OS put it's tenticles into the application.
Boy that sounds like a really bad porn flick doesn't it?
Why bother?
For the same reason that despite the fact that OS X can and does run X11 apps easily, people still spend time porting them to aqua and the mac environment. Because mac users HATE applications that don't look and play the same way that the rest of the applications do. And rebooting in to windows every time you want to play your game is not going to win many customers.
Odd, we are now more than 6 months since the intel announcement and I just recently sold my mac mini for $450 on ebay. I paid ~$600 for the machine all told including having upgraded the memory and bought some add ons when I bought it. The price I sold it as was about the price I would have expected to sell it for, both before and after the intel announcement. In fact if we peruse ebay a bit, there's lots of PPC machines selling for just as much as they used to. In fact, go into any Apple store and you'll see PPC machines selling for full price.
BTW, why the fuck would anyone sell a brand new PPC machine on ebay just after the intel switch announcement?
15" notice the PCMCIA slot.