that's totally off base. Many states have passed parity laws making mental care equal to other types of specialist care like cardiologists or podiatrists. Most insurance plans cover medications for "mental illness" the same as any other chronic illness.
The thing is that with proper therapy and medication the vast majority of depression/anxiety/etc cases even if it involves hospitalization, are treated and maintained, and the patients go back to normal, productive working and family life.. it still take hard work, but not social welfare.
"expectation of privacy" is not the same as having your actions in public places recorded.. far from it. Somebody watching you in public is subject to questioning their motives for doing so and whether they were paying proper attention to all the details. Recordings are nearly always taken completely by faith no matter how out-of-context they might be. A stong component of common law is based on intent, and recordings generally don't properly show that.
essentially they're sending some body to watch you in public places and they happen to be recording it. Although one would think that too much watching (once you spot the PIs) would trigger separate anti-stalking laws.
I think people claiming total disability for crippling depression are a very small portion of depression claims. If those people aren't spending time under hospital care, but aren't functioning at basic jobs they are probably scamming the system.
Lots of people are treated for depression and with medication and therapy continue performing at work and home. Being totally crippled by it is pretty rare...if that's the case it's also dangerous and those people are only rarely functional... think "cat lady" type people that really should be under constant supervision.
but if you have a hospital that has that many people coming to it, then it has highly paid employees and families traveling to your city for medical care and professionals for conferences. If you're not making money with tens of thousands of people coming per day from outside your city to spend money there, then you're doing something wrong.
by this line of thinking why not raise taxes on poor people to get them to move out. Then most of the city will be university... or shops and businesses that support university, problem solved with the pesky citizens.
Living in Michigan, I see this difference very clearly between Ann Arbor and East Lansing. In Ann Arbor, the University and Hospital is in the very core of the city. Things going on at UofM are going on in Ann Arbor..students go everywhere in the city for shopping and work, it's well mixed and well connected. In East Lansing the situation is very different, being a land grant school MSU was put on a big empty square miles "in the country" specifically to develop the idea it was "separate" and the city of East Lansing is a little sliver between expensive Lansing suburbs...MSU is probably bigger than the city in raw area from the start. Now they have 30K students living in the middle of nowhere and your closest malls, restaurants are miles away and all the travel goes thru one little "suburb". It's a very "us versus them" attitude I don't see when I talk to people that live/work in Ann Arbor.
Students buy stuff for their dorms from local shops (that all pay business and property tax) and probably pay far more than $400 per year in sales tax alone. Not to mention many are employed at local businesses providing cheaper labor costs. Many rent apartments off campus making a profit for landlords that pay "business" tax on those rental properties. Those students pay tuition that goes to pay professor salaries (which are better than steel factory salaries) not to mention the troops of service workers, administrators, and staff to manage a school.
In short these people are coming to your down and dropping $40K per year plus living expenses (not to mention state and federal matching money!) in your city that almost all goes to construction, worker wages, local stores, property owners, etc, etc. Nearly every dollar they spend is passed right along to somebody that is going to pay taxes on it and use it to live on. Mayor really isn't that smart!
Why would you buy a cluster not the same architecture? You don't know what you're talking about. VMs generally aren't used to change architecture like that. In a Virtualized Cluster the "OS" is just another data file too! Just point an available CPU to your file server image on the SAN and start it back up... that's smart, not lazy!
Most people need virtualization because managing crappy old apps on old server OSes is a bitch. The old busted apps are doing mission critical work, customized to the point the manufacture won't support them and management doesn't want to pay out for the new version... or the new version doesn't support the old equipment. The leading purpose for VMs is to get new shiny hardware with a modern OS and backup methods to segregate your old hard to maintain configurations to instances. Then the old and busted doesn't crash the core services anymore. Instances that used to be on dedicated, busted hardware that used to require a call-out can be rebooted from your couch in your jammies! (I vote VNC on iPhone as thee killer admin app!) VMs include backup at the VM level, so those old machines that refused to support backup can be backed up "in spite of" the software trying to prevent it.
not really, you can split your VMs between 2-3 servers and do the migrations manually in the beginning. Once you make the virtual images the hard work is done, even if you just run 2 images per server, you've saved money or increased reliability. Now that you have VMs you can reinstall from backup tapes to another configured server so you have a start at disaster recovery. Once that part is done it's a function of how much money you are allowed to throw at the solution (blades, clusters, sans, etc)
Except of course that management ALREADY HAS that because they've been very lucky for 7 years. Why spend money for what works (never mind we can't upgrade or replace any of it because it's so old)
I think what the article is really asking is what's a good model to start all this stuff. Your looking at one or two servers per location (or maybe even network appliances at remote sites) We read all this stuff on Slashdot and in the deluges of magazines and marketing material...where do we start to make it GO?
Being as Windows 7 just had its first "drive by" zero-day security bug last week, I'd say the "No Such Agency" spooks have nothing to fear from Windows Security as it stands now. Now everybody can have their own "backdoor" installed for free.
It looks like Win 7 continues the root of Microsoft's problem... even with XP compatibility VM now, they still won't bring themselves to break binary compatibility for years of code hacked to operate outside its bounds.... by all rights they didn't do their security job if ANY existing XP/Vista viruses would run at all on Win 7. That's one thing Both Apple and LInux do better even if it causes some pain every few years.
looking at it from a strictly IP standpoint teachers are the truest form of salary employee as they're always "on the clock" for teaching, events, and lesson planning. Traditionally, teachers are expected to make their class plans outside of "working hours" typically at home, with their own resources. The copyright for the material would clearly belong to them using similar standards we expect in our IT jobs.
A secondary issue is that any teacher using these is plagiarizing (i.e. not doing their own original lesson planning) and while plagiarism is not necessarily legally copyright infringement it's still academically "illegal".. as educators are paid to do their own work of teaching, not to mooch.
or at least that's how my school's rules work, for instance if you took a class two times, you would have to do original assignments for the second class, even if you got a good mark first time or it would be "plagiarism". I don't see why the same rules wouldn't apply to teachers generating THEIR teaching materials as we pay them to teach US uniquely for each class, not regurgitate material they've been reusing, or was "canned" for them.
The complaint is that even though the "mobile web" service is blocked, there's still a hard-wired button, that YOU can't turn off that tries to connect to the site.... therefore you get a tiny little $2 charge every time the button is hit for "data" usage.
no, lots of non-smart phones like Moto Razor and even all the nokias I have had have a type of "data" on them, if only to browse THEIR OWN site and get games. Like other posters have said, once you hit the button, you get the "online data" charge... even if the page it downloads is just the "blocked" page. It's a scam, because YOU can't re-map those buttons or menu options to prevent the charge... THAT is the problem with phone companies in general...
except you missed the part where the broadcast flag was going to make it through the FCC so to speed it along MPAA companies directly licensed TV makers to include the flag with proper functions Stations have nothing to do with it and you can't undo what's already inside your TV.
Hence, if the content provider (networks) include the flag in a broadcast or digital file, the TV station can't remove it (what you call degrading the signal).
complaining about OSX on Atom is like complaining that you can't run Microsoft's Xbox OS on your computer. As Microsoft previously sold Unbundled OSes an OS tied to THEIR hardware was a change in business... but I don't really see any "Xbox on PC" projects out there, nor people crying there wasn't one.
personally, I think Apple just decided to optimize for higher level processors. Atom is basically a Pentium 3 shrunk small. Apple really wants to build for only Core 2 Duo and higher as all but the first round of Core Duo/Solo Macs are fully 64-bit and VT aware CPU models (hence the premium) For the longest time the Java 6 updates specifically excluded the Core Duo/Solo chips and several of the new features of Snow Leopard are "diminshed" on the oldest Intel Macs. When the oldest Intel Processor they have to support is a higher bin Core 2 Duo, Apple has a lot of room to optimize code that would make even Gentoo Linux users envious. It also has the neat side effect of cutting out the cheapest bottom-barrel processors from running their OS, but I doubt that was even a thought in design meetings.
all electronic data is stored in a "database"... even a file system is a type of database you just can't query it with SQL... it's just that database programs that use SQL as the front end have more tools built for them.
You have a point that the implementation has to be thought about. If you RTFA you'll see the issue is more that RDMS implementations like Oracle rely on breaking up clusters so you can cram as much of the data into RAM as possible on to fast CPUs... in the case of something like Facebook that's just not possible, it's not reasonable to build that type of system, so they have to optimize their systems in new ways. This is also why mainframes and midrange systems still rule the enterprise arena because they have massive amounts of ram, cache, and disk directly connected . They don't architecturally fix the problem, just throw more resources at it. Google and Facebook are built on small, cheap machines in massive arrays...but RDMS doesn't really fit that storage model. Also internet clusters don't get "batch downtime" like mainframes do... time to cleanup tables and reset indexes. The big joke I thought of in my Oracle class was how much manually "tending" the package took....where Oracle systems try to have PERFECT data, Facebook or Google simply "evolves" the data as they build new banks of servers and throws out the unoptimized nodes, they know they'll never have perfect data... stop employing armies of DBAs to rearrange the house of cards. (in their defense Oracle is building "perfect" systems because that's how accounting, inventory, shipping, etc NEED to be... if you lose a Facebook post or Google loses a months worth of Bot data it's not the end of the world... lose a month of TPS reports and there's hell to pay!)
In a parallel problem it's the same on your home computer. Why do I care about my OS having a "file system" and why can't my data, contacts, pictures, music, document, etc be in some kind of database that is self contained, properly metatagged, and enables a simple method of backup. In many ways the first 30 years of home computing was about making things generalized and marketable... the next will be building systems that ignore "files" and manage the raw data and metatags directly.
but as Tycho pointed out over at PA, he ran out and bought the BOXED collector's edition and they didn't include the extra content... why would you spend money on a "premium" product with no extra content or pay extra only to get the "download only" version?
The idea is that they're assuming you'll buy the extra content to the point NPCs are asking you right in the game to get it. I don't think DLC is a bad idea... the other option is to make subscription games like WoW but people can't afford more than one or two of those. Packs don't always work because due to the internet it's hard to keep the surprise factor going... everybody finds a walk thru spoiling the "fun" factor like 5 minutes before buying it. I think the "magazine" model might work, having small, interconnected pieces but you don't have to buy all of them... about the only game to really pull this off was the Sims though.
I think it's the presumptuous part that they're not even bothering to add DLC as a pack or download later... it's just in-your-face to pay them more money and they're going to do it in the game, not at a news or logon screen.
it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem... the idea of fining "people" that don't get insurance is just a slap in the face. The real problem are all those wonderful "service industry" jobs that still won't include options and will just leave the employee to pay the $2500, mooching off spouses and parents with insurance from the "unmodern" manufacturing industries. Companies like large chain department stores and food service don't pay nearly their fair share and changed their industries to eliminate insurance from the "wasteful, local" businesses that could afford to pay insurance... and Wall Street ate those choice up and made their stocks fly high.
At my company (manufacturing with pretty good insurance), we're doing open enrollment and putting up the numbers, insurance costs about $8k -$10k per employee. Of that I'm paying about $2k in premiums (family) and have to set aside another $3k in FSA for "my share" of copays and deductibles. So the wonderful, free, employer-provided insurance is nearly $5k out of MY pocket and $8K+ out of the companies... and going up $500 - $1000 per year (my end) just to keep things the same. i don't see anything in ANY of the discussion that fixes THAT problem for the company, nor anything that makes things better for employees.
What upsets me more is that insurance companies claim "rising costs" but keep taking a larger and larger share of my Doctor's bill. From the various bills, they routinely take 1/3 off the top as "in network" discount, combine with my ever-increasing copay of about 1/3 - 1/4 the bill they're only cashing out a small portion of the "cash price" bill. Even for a hospitalization they took almost half off the top from the hospital's portion. The whole thing is based on the idea that for-profit insurance companies can squeeze "wasteful" non-profit providers to "improve service" without dealing with pharma companies, medical device makers, and most importantly Lawyers to reduce costs... it's the "walmart" strategy.
What upsets me most about this whole debate is that it's been a war on EMPLOYEES of GOOD companies that provide insurance. Rather than working with the PAYING employers they're only asking the insurance companies what will keep THEM profitable.. while basically telling health providers they're "giving away" free care now. I haven't seen anything that addresses the real issue with the system now, and it's not even making a GOOD new system.
The key to breaking up Microsoft is to wipe out the cash reserves.. force them to pay out dividends of 150% their cash on hand at their peak. The shareholders (rightful owners of the money) can then be told by the government to put their windfalls someplace other than Microsoft... what an extra 70 Billion wouldn't do in Wall Street right now!
Once you wipe out the cash hoard the other problems will fix themselves. Microsoft would have to sell off quite a bit at a steep discount to competition, that's why I picked 150% of their PEAK CASH. That will divest many of the non-profitable ventures that are burning profits to crush other growing, individual businesses. Taking the cash also forces them to make every business division cut excess products and focus on being profit driven like a real business. Again, the idea is to cut them to the bone, so they have to have massive layoffs (employees who will start new companies) and have to borrow money from the bank for large capital intensive ventures (no more losing $5 Billion on video games over 5 years). It will stop the buying sprees of small companies just so they can't "grow to be threat" and it will put the screws on the legal team when they can't make those big cash payouts "out-of-court" to make things go away.
Sun was harmed by Microsoft's actions against Java on the Desktop. Microsoft used it's position to implement Java to keep the version on Microsoft's OS from working correctly with Sun's other licensees. Microsoft voluntarily signed a contract with a competitor to get Sun Java on it's desktop OS, then made the licensed product perform poorly when Microsoft's created it's own product. Nobody MADE Microsoft sign that contract (but because Microsoft had a near monopoly on desktop OS it was good to have), but once they did they were bound to "do their best"... and they didn't.
Anti-trust law is not about being an absolute 100% monopoly, it's about making and performing service on fair contracts between two parties. In the case of Java Sun needed to get Microsoft on board for their market share in desktop office computers in order for their server products and other licensees to be valuable. Microsoft COULD have walked away and told SUN they had to work alone, that would have been perfectly legal.. but they didn't... Later Microsoft promoted it's OWN product over the contractual agreement they had with SUN. If Microsoft did not have monopolistic advantage then people would stop asking them to partner.. but they have so much power they can sign contracts they never intend to service properly... and middle managers effectively can play "kingmaker" in their industries because of the desktop marketshare.
Gun sellers also have extremely specific laws they have to follow or the face jail time for not filling out paperwork.... but following that paperwork limits their liability for the gun owner's actions AFTER the sale.
Slashdot Mirror
that's totally off base. Many states have passed parity laws making mental care equal to other types of specialist care like cardiologists or podiatrists. Most insurance plans cover medications for "mental illness" the same as any other chronic illness.
The thing is that with proper therapy and medication the vast majority of depression/anxiety/etc cases even if it involves hospitalization, are treated and maintained, and the patients go back to normal, productive working and family life.. it still take hard work, but not social welfare.
"expectation of privacy" is not the same as having your actions in public places recorded.. far from it. Somebody watching you in public is subject to questioning their motives for doing so and whether they were paying proper attention to all the details. Recordings are nearly always taken completely by faith no matter how out-of-context they might be. A stong component of common law is based on intent, and recordings generally don't properly show that.
essentially they're sending some body to watch you in public places and they happen to be recording it. Although one would think that too much watching (once you spot the PIs) would trigger separate anti-stalking laws.
I think people claiming total disability for crippling depression are a very small portion of depression claims. If those people aren't spending time under hospital care, but aren't functioning at basic jobs they are probably scamming the system.
Lots of people are treated for depression and with medication and therapy continue performing at work and home. Being totally crippled by it is pretty rare...if that's the case it's also dangerous and those people are only rarely functional ... think "cat lady" type people that really should be under constant supervision.
but if you have a hospital that has that many people coming to it, then it has highly paid employees and families traveling to your city for medical care and professionals for conferences. If you're not making money with tens of thousands of people coming per day from outside your city to spend money there, then you're doing something wrong.
by this line of thinking why not raise taxes on poor people to get them to move out. Then most of the city will be university... or shops and businesses that support university, problem solved with the pesky citizens.
Living in Michigan, I see this difference very clearly between Ann Arbor and East Lansing. In Ann Arbor, the University and Hospital is in the very core of the city. Things going on at UofM are going on in Ann Arbor..students go everywhere in the city for shopping and work, it's well mixed and well connected. In East Lansing the situation is very different, being a land grant school MSU was put on a big empty square miles "in the country" specifically to develop the idea it was "separate" and the city of East Lansing is a little sliver between expensive Lansing suburbs...MSU is probably bigger than the city in raw area from the start. Now they have 30K students living in the middle of nowhere and your closest malls, restaurants are miles away and all the travel goes thru one little "suburb". It's a very "us versus them" attitude I don't see when I talk to people that live/work in Ann Arbor.
Students buy stuff for their dorms from local shops (that all pay business and property tax) and probably pay far more than $400 per year in sales tax alone. Not to mention many are employed at local businesses providing cheaper labor costs. Many rent apartments off campus making a profit for landlords that pay "business" tax on those rental properties. Those students pay tuition that goes to pay professor salaries (which are better than steel factory salaries) not to mention the troops of service workers, administrators, and staff to manage a school.
In short these people are coming to your down and dropping $40K per year plus living expenses (not to mention state and federal matching money!) in your city that almost all goes to construction, worker wages, local stores, property owners, etc, etc. Nearly every dollar they spend is passed right along to somebody that is going to pay taxes on it and use it to live on. Mayor really isn't that smart!
fix it till it's broke!
Why would you buy a cluster not the same architecture? You don't know what you're talking about. VMs generally aren't used to change architecture like that. In a Virtualized Cluster the "OS" is just another data file too! Just point an available CPU to your file server image on the SAN and start it back up... that's smart, not lazy!
Most people need virtualization because managing crappy old apps on old server OSes is a bitch. The old busted apps are doing mission critical work, customized to the point the manufacture won't support them and management doesn't want to pay out for the new version... or the new version doesn't support the old equipment. The leading purpose for VMs is to get new shiny hardware with a modern OS and backup methods to segregate your old hard to maintain configurations to instances. Then the old and busted doesn't crash the core services anymore. Instances that used to be on dedicated, busted hardware that used to require a call-out can be rebooted from your couch in your jammies! (I vote VNC on iPhone as thee killer admin app!) VMs include backup at the VM level, so those old machines that refused to support backup can be backed up "in spite of" the software trying to prevent it.
not really, you can split your VMs between 2-3 servers and do the migrations manually in the beginning. Once you make the virtual images the hard work is done, even if you just run 2 images per server, you've saved money or increased reliability. Now that you have VMs you can reinstall from backup tapes to another configured server so you have a start at disaster recovery. Once that part is done it's a function of how much money you are allowed to throw at the solution (blades, clusters, sans, etc)
Except of course that management ALREADY HAS that because they've been very lucky for 7 years. Why spend money for what works (never mind we can't upgrade or replace any of it because it's so old)
I think what the article is really asking is what's a good model to start all this stuff. Your looking at one or two servers per location (or maybe even network appliances at remote sites) We read all this stuff on Slashdot and in the deluges of magazines and marketing material...where do we start to make it GO?
Being as Windows 7 just had its first "drive by" zero-day security bug last week, I'd say the "No Such Agency" spooks have nothing to fear from Windows Security as it stands now. Now everybody can have their own "backdoor" installed for free.
It looks like Win 7 continues the root of Microsoft's problem... even with XP compatibility VM now, they still won't bring themselves to break binary compatibility for years of code hacked to operate outside its bounds.... by all rights they didn't do their security job if ANY existing XP/Vista viruses would run at all on Win 7. That's one thing Both Apple and LInux do better even if it causes some pain every few years.
They're already published and in use, therefore not patentable.... if only the patent office would follow their own damn rules about such things!
looking at it from a strictly IP standpoint teachers are the truest form of salary employee as they're always "on the clock" for teaching, events, and lesson planning. Traditionally, teachers are expected to make their class plans outside of "working hours" typically at home, with their own resources. The copyright for the material would clearly belong to them using similar standards we expect in our IT jobs.
A secondary issue is that any teacher using these is plagiarizing (i.e. not doing their own original lesson planning) and while plagiarism is not necessarily legally copyright infringement it's still academically "illegal".. as educators are paid to do their own work of teaching, not to mooch.
or at least that's how my school's rules work, for instance if you took a class two times, you would have to do original assignments for the second class, even if you got a good mark first time or it would be "plagiarism". I don't see why the same rules wouldn't apply to teachers generating THEIR teaching materials as we pay them to teach US uniquely for each class, not regurgitate material they've been reusing, or was "canned" for them.
Except they ALL do it so after a year you won't have a phone company you haven't exercised your right to cancel at!
The complaint is that even though the "mobile web" service is blocked, there's still a hard-wired button, that YOU can't turn off that tries to connect to the site.... therefore you get a tiny little $2 charge every time the button is hit for "data" usage.
no, lots of non-smart phones like Moto Razor and even all the nokias I have had have a type of "data" on them, if only to browse THEIR OWN site and get games. Like other posters have said, once you hit the button, you get the "online data" charge... even if the page it downloads is just the "blocked" page. It's a scam, because YOU can't re-map those buttons or menu options to prevent the charge... THAT is the problem with phone companies in general...
except you missed the part where the broadcast flag was going to make it through the FCC so to speed it along MPAA companies directly licensed TV makers to include the flag with proper functions Stations have nothing to do with it and you can't undo what's already inside your TV.
Hence, if the content provider (networks) include the flag in a broadcast or digital file, the TV station can't remove it (what you call degrading the signal).
complaining about OSX on Atom is like complaining that you can't run Microsoft's Xbox OS on your computer. As Microsoft previously sold Unbundled OSes an OS tied to THEIR hardware was a change in business... but I don't really see any "Xbox on PC" projects out there, nor people crying there wasn't one.
personally, I think Apple just decided to optimize for higher level processors. Atom is basically a Pentium 3 shrunk small. Apple really wants to build for only Core 2 Duo and higher as all but the first round of Core Duo/Solo Macs are fully 64-bit and VT aware CPU models (hence the premium) For the longest time the Java 6 updates specifically excluded the Core Duo/Solo chips and several of the new features of Snow Leopard are "diminshed" on the oldest Intel Macs. When the oldest Intel Processor they have to support is a higher bin Core 2 Duo, Apple has a lot of room to optimize code that would make even Gentoo Linux users envious. It also has the neat side effect of cutting out the cheapest bottom-barrel processors from running their OS, but I doubt that was even a thought in design meetings.
all electronic data is stored in a "database"... even a file system is a type of database you just can't query it with SQL... it's just that database programs that use SQL as the front end have more tools built for them.
You have a point that the implementation has to be thought about. If you RTFA you'll see the issue is more that RDMS implementations like Oracle rely on breaking up clusters so you can cram as much of the data into RAM as possible on to fast CPUs... in the case of something like Facebook that's just not possible, it's not reasonable to build that type of system, so they have to optimize their systems in new ways. This is also why mainframes and midrange systems still rule the enterprise arena because they have massive amounts of ram, cache, and disk directly connected . They don't architecturally fix the problem, just throw more resources at it. Google and Facebook are built on small, cheap machines in massive arrays...but RDMS doesn't really fit that storage model. Also internet clusters don't get "batch downtime" like mainframes do... time to cleanup tables and reset indexes. The big joke I thought of in my Oracle class was how much manually "tending" the package took....where Oracle systems try to have PERFECT data, Facebook or Google simply "evolves" the data as they build new banks of servers and throws out the unoptimized nodes, they know they'll never have perfect data... stop employing armies of DBAs to rearrange the house of cards. (in their defense Oracle is building "perfect" systems because that's how accounting, inventory, shipping, etc NEED to be... if you lose a Facebook post or Google loses a months worth of Bot data it's not the end of the world... lose a month of TPS reports and there's hell to pay!)
In a parallel problem it's the same on your home computer. Why do I care about my OS having a "file system" and why can't my data, contacts, pictures, music, document, etc be in some kind of database that is self contained, properly metatagged, and enables a simple method of backup. In many ways the first 30 years of home computing was about making things generalized and marketable... the next will be building systems that ignore "files" and manage the raw data and metatags directly.
but as Tycho pointed out over at PA, he ran out and bought the BOXED collector's edition and they didn't include the extra content... why would you spend money on a "premium" product with no extra content or pay extra only to get the "download only" version?
The idea is that they're assuming you'll buy the extra content to the point NPCs are asking you right in the game to get it. I don't think DLC is a bad idea... the other option is to make subscription games like WoW but people can't afford more than one or two of those. Packs don't always work because due to the internet it's hard to keep the surprise factor going... everybody finds a walk thru spoiling the "fun" factor like 5 minutes before buying it. I think the "magazine" model might work, having small, interconnected pieces but you don't have to buy all of them... about the only game to really pull this off was the Sims though.
I think it's the presumptuous part that they're not even bothering to add DLC as a pack or download later... it's just in-your-face to pay them more money and they're going to do it in the game, not at a news or logon screen.
it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem ... the idea of fining "people" that don't get insurance is just a slap in the face. The real problem are all those wonderful "service industry" jobs that still won't include options and will just leave the employee to pay the $2500, mooching off spouses and parents with insurance from the "unmodern" manufacturing industries. Companies like large chain department stores and food service don't pay nearly their fair share and changed their industries to eliminate insurance from the "wasteful, local" businesses that could afford to pay insurance... and Wall Street ate those choice up and made their stocks fly high.
At my company (manufacturing with pretty good insurance), we're doing open enrollment and putting up the numbers, insurance costs about $8k -$10k per employee. Of that I'm paying about $2k in premiums (family) and have to set aside another $3k in FSA for "my share" of copays and deductibles. So the wonderful, free, employer-provided insurance is nearly $5k out of MY pocket and $8K+ out of the companies... and going up $500 - $1000 per year (my end) just to keep things the same. i don't see anything in ANY of the discussion that fixes THAT problem for the company, nor anything that makes things better for employees.
What upsets me more is that insurance companies claim "rising costs" but keep taking a larger and larger share of my Doctor's bill. From the various bills, they routinely take 1/3 off the top as "in network" discount, combine with my ever-increasing copay of about 1/3 - 1/4 the bill they're only cashing out a small portion of the "cash price" bill. Even for a hospitalization they took almost half off the top from the hospital's portion. The whole thing is based on the idea that for-profit insurance companies can squeeze "wasteful" non-profit providers to "improve service" without dealing with pharma companies, medical device makers, and most importantly Lawyers to reduce costs... it's the "walmart" strategy.
What upsets me most about this whole debate is that it's been a war on EMPLOYEES of GOOD companies that provide insurance. Rather than working with the PAYING employers they're only asking the insurance companies what will keep THEM profitable.. while basically telling health providers they're "giving away" free care now. I haven't seen anything that addresses the real issue with the system now, and it's not even making a GOOD new system.
The key to breaking up Microsoft is to wipe out the cash reserves.. force them to pay out dividends of 150% their cash on hand at their peak. The shareholders (rightful owners of the money) can then be told by the government to put their windfalls someplace other than Microsoft... what an extra 70 Billion wouldn't do in Wall Street right now!
Once you wipe out the cash hoard the other problems will fix themselves. Microsoft would have to sell off quite a bit at a steep discount to competition, that's why I picked 150% of their PEAK CASH. That will divest many of the non-profitable ventures that are burning profits to crush other growing, individual businesses. Taking the cash also forces them to make every business division cut excess products and focus on being profit driven like a real business. Again, the idea is to cut them to the bone, so they have to have massive layoffs (employees who will start new companies) and have to borrow money from the bank for large capital intensive ventures (no more losing $5 Billion on video games over 5 years). It will stop the buying sprees of small companies just so they can't "grow to be threat" and it will put the screws on the legal team when they can't make those big cash payouts "out-of-court" to make things go away.
Sun was harmed by Microsoft's actions against Java on the Desktop. Microsoft used it's position to implement Java to keep the version on Microsoft's OS from working correctly with Sun's other licensees. Microsoft voluntarily signed a contract with a competitor to get Sun Java on it's desktop OS, then made the licensed product perform poorly when Microsoft's created it's own product. Nobody MADE Microsoft sign that contract (but because Microsoft had a near monopoly on desktop OS it was good to have), but once they did they were bound to "do their best"... and they didn't.
Anti-trust law is not about being an absolute 100% monopoly, it's about making and performing service on fair contracts between two parties. In the case of Java Sun needed to get Microsoft on board for their market share in desktop office computers in order for their server products and other licensees to be valuable. Microsoft COULD have walked away and told SUN they had to work alone, that would have been perfectly legal.. but they didn't... Later Microsoft promoted it's OWN product over the contractual agreement they had with SUN. If Microsoft did not have monopolistic advantage then people would stop asking them to partner.. but they have so much power they can sign contracts they never intend to service properly... and middle managers effectively can play "kingmaker" in their industries because of the desktop marketshare.
None of the 10 they picked!
Gun sellers also have extremely specific laws they have to follow or the face jail time for not filling out paperwork.... but following that paperwork limits their liability for the gun owner's actions AFTER the sale.