Hmmm well these programs do exist, at least for companies (which any individual could start for themselves). Problem is that the amount required is much higher than most can do. You'd need at least 100k in an account to handle the typical 'emergency'.
If they were required and taken out of your paycheck every month by the gov and put into a fund for you... well supposedly that's what we do already.
The hardest part would be covering the interim. We are set up now so that there is no time to develop this emergency fund. We don't start getting our own insurance until our first job or at university as a student... and at that point our parents coverage lapses on us so we immediately need to have full coverage without any deposits. We'd have to have a scenario where it was offered to parents to set up a fund for their children as well so that they have the basic coverage for a young adult (with low risk of age related illness like most cancers) but even then, one childhood disaster could wipe it out.
There would still need to be accident insurance and sports injury insurance, etc. as group policies... independent health funds would need to only provide basic healthcare coverage.
Maybe a better way would be to set up co-ops where you hire a 3rd party to manage it but they are accountable to you and your fellow members rather than to their shareholders.
This way you get the advantage of pooled resources and the direct ownership of the funds. Problem with a co-op is what happens when a member has a hugely expensive scenario that could drain all the funds from everyone? DO you kick them out or does everyone foot the bill, knowing that if it were them they'd want others to be there for them? What about the poor who can't afford to contribute? Do we still pay into a national healthcare program for the poor? This adds a lot of redundancies and inefficiencies (as we are all very aware of).
You could go further and start your own HMO so that you could control costs of physicians, drugs, etc. but then your co-op needs to maintain a certain number of members with most in good health and paying while the few in poor health receive the main benefits AND you have the overhead of managing an organization with payroll, procurement, distribution, etc.
No the only good method is a universal health care program for all where economies of scale can drop expenses via bulk purchasing, bulk land management, bulk staffing, distribution of high-end research+technology costs, etc.
BUT we need to have private vendors that can cut costs through competitive improvement and incentive based work programs (which the gov can not offer as they simply have a budget with no room for profit to be disbursed in an incentive program).
So we need universal health care provided by private practices paid through a government budget... but there must be strict control over the budget where the contracts awarded are very profitable but are still divided up amongst enough vendors so that they stay competitive, trying to outbid one another. To do this we'd have to have the gov own the infrastructure so they wouldn't be locked in to one companies location or systems.
Anyways, it can get pretty damn complicated. There is a plan in there somewhere though. Gov owned medical facilities leased out to private practices who have to maintain a standard of care in line with public needs. Gov financed research and development contracted out to private firms with additional allotments from investors who would profit share in the operations. Gov sponsored general staffing (nurses, orderlies, office workers) with independent specialists and private assistants (this maintains operations in the facility regardless of a specialist/MD coming or going). Pharma orders purchased in bulk with special allotments according to a facilities prior usage...
The only way you are going to get affordable healthcare for everyone( which means those who can't afford it) to have everyone(meaning those who already can afford it) front a larger percentage of the bill. I'll pass(needless to say I'm in the latter category).
There is of course an argument that goes a little like this:
If all the people in a society are relatively healthy, they are better consumers and better workers, meaning that the rich will get even richer off of the average citizens life activities. Only the somehow stupid or lazy upper middleclass, whom for whatever reason forgot to invest their extra capital into companies that profited from the new health, would suffer having to pay extra for healthcare subsidies without realizing any return on this prior investment.
Maybe there should be a healthcare fund that you can invest into that would realize a return over time AND provide universal healthcare. Those who could afford to invest would get the return and become more wealthy while those who could not afford the investment would simply get healthcare.
Uhmmm it's black and white ink in capsules... you 'front-light' it the same way you would a book. What you are looking for is a common desk lamp. Unfortunately most of them need to be plugged in to a power source.
Uh sure.... yeah, let's all just go into comas but plug in to 2nd life and a full life support system ala the matrix and it'll be all good!????
I say go for it. Tell me how it all is via email and I'll tell you how it is have a perfect world out here with hopefully 33% less people wandering around. You and your friends can sit in your bio-bubbles hooked up to virtual reality and the rest of us will enjoy our new-found over abundance of natural resources and traffic free highways. As long as you keep doing work mind you and contributing to the economy.. in fact now that you are virtual do you think you could just work an extra 4 hours each day... maybe change your VR to be a 32 hour day where you work for 12 hours. This way the rest of us can just hold part time jobs doing fun things. You can design robots to take care of your bodies so we don't have to... we'll just make sure they get enough power to do their job, 'k
sounds good, when do you think you can get started? I'd like to take a vacation here pretty soon.
Hasn't it always been the position that if you have a patent you feel is infringed upon you should just say so and FOSS will clean room re-engineer their implementation so it no longer infringes?
This is barely a threat at all when the people you threaten have unlimited resources to simply work around your claims by throwing skilled bodies at the problem, who work as volunteers.
Anyone who really understands a concept can put it in to terms that a high school graduate can understand. My example was proof that this takes less than 5 minutes todo and can be put at the top of any entry in a box labeled "a quick definition for the average person" as a sidebar, easily without dumbing down the rest of the entry.
A metric space is just a definition of how geometry works within a given set of rules... in fact the set of rules IS the metric space. So a metric space is a set of rules for how different types of geometry work. One metric space is the type you learned about in high school geometry. That is Euclidean 'metric space'. There are many other types that allow for 3/4/5 and more dimensions. As we can't see in more than 3 dimensions you will probably never come across any of these additional metric spaces outside of a scientific journal or fictional novel. Theoretical mathematicians are the primary user of this concept as they need additional dimensions to solve some specific mathematical equations.
A small unit that places directional charges to explosively blast out portions of regolith and then gather the resulting dust/rock might be the way to go. maybe put in place a shield of some sort to further contain/direct the displacement?
would certainly cut down on the power requirements and weight of the unit itself and explosives are not very heavy but contain enormous power output.
Those things (trenchers) are fairly lightweight in the consumer version... have to be able to be pushed by lowest common denominator of people... move a lot of dirt quickly and could easily be adapted to a mulching lawnmower type design where the dirt is shoveled into an enclosed container rather than simply spewed out the sides.
IMHO we already have equipment designs that meet this spec, minus the autonomous part. Add in an expert system and an ECU and you're done (yeah I know that's the hard part). What I'm trying to say is that TFA makes it sound like a build a better mousetrap contest when really it should be more of a vendor sourcing expedition to find a company that already makes the equipment and is willing to work closely with NASA to modify their existing tool in return for major publicity in lieu of cash.
I'm still scared of it, and wouldn't let my clients near it even if they begged me. It might be more useful when you have hundreds of technical users working on a single project with needs like reporting and time tracking, but for anything less a more flexible alternative is preferable, IMHO.
This is so interesting.... something must have changed at say 2.2 or 2.3 cause back at 2.16 of Bugzilla I as a designer with about 6 months or perl exposure (but plenty of html + css + javascript) went in to the Bugzilla UI pages (search, reports, etc.) and completely customized them for a company with about 35 devs at the time. I was 'the web guy' at the time. They all coded in C++ primarily.
I created a bunch of canned queries in a select menu, plus a quick search that had better defaults. A better default search page with info and a layout that actually meant something for the devs rather than being generic but consistent with other Bugzilla installs. Added color coding and collapsible lists to the results pages, and more..... it really wasn't that complicated to make changes... the html in perl is still html so creating a better UI was a matter of looking at source for Bugzilla output in the browser and then doing a global find on the Bugzilla web dir with an html snippet or css class or something as my search.
Those weren't vampires, they were illegal immigrants and they just wanted a fake id.... well they could have been identity thieves on hard times... reduced to begging for your credit cards instead of stealing them like any self-respecting ID thief.
Personally I read it 'out loud' in my head, even when I'm writing, as in a narrative from a 3rd person. I find that I'm more capable of comprehending the full extent of the content and actually carry on a two sided or many sided conversation about the content (with myself), relating it to other prior content or external sourced content and creating new contexts for what I am reading. Same thing for writing. I edit while I write unless I'm simply creating an outline of tasks or some such.
Even when reading fiction for enjoyment I find it much more interesting to read slowly in a narrative form rathe than simply scanning for a timeline or highlights (Harry Potter) and simply choose not to continue reading something that doesn't provide enough enjoyment with this method. This means I'm picky about the authors I read. They too must have a good narrative form, even when writing a technical document.
Faster is not always better IMHO. Quality over quantity. i also don't memorize. Internalize, then the specific wording and syntax isn't relevant.. only the meme. This does give me problems with coding though. I always need a handy reference nearby. Luckily I only do proof of concept RAD stuff so it's not that big a deal.
Sorry this is the wrong forum for this post... most/.ers are much more intimately familiar with their joysticks than with nipples. Apple should just introduce a joystick based interface for men and reintroduce the trackball for women... much more intuitive interfaces for manipulating their respective PCs
hmmm you have hit upon a fascinating loophole. I wonder if this would apply to more traditional patents as well? Could I get your expert opinion on possibly reinventing an apparatus like a wheel and yet it would be in an octagonal formulation rather than a circumferal... it would in fact serve the same purpose and in some specific scenarios (such as in a roadway with an aligned 'teeth' configuration) it may in fact be more efficient than said 'wheel'.
Hmmm it occurs to me that there may be more than one way to skin a cat as well.... possibly could you aid me in determining a non-obvious method that could be patented?
ewwww I'm never eating toffee again... they just use their hands to move it around? that's like saying the wine makers crush the grapes with their feet....;-p
If I make a suggestion to MS and they implement my great idea, what do I get out of it? They get a better product to sell to people and I still have to pay them for it. Where's the ROI? With an open OS I get the benefit of lots of peoples suggestions and contributions and can make some money off it myself... but why would I ever contribute to a proprietary OS? It's their product, let them figure it out for themselves....
almost... you forgot to mention that Web 2.0 means that the users contribute the content, thereby relieving the website owner from having to pay to have content created for them. Now all they have to do is provide the venue and let the users make the money for them.
Let's extend this a little and see what you think:
ME: "Birth control mitigates the risk of unintentional babies which follows that the vast majority of babies conceived in a society where birth control is available are intentional, therefore there is no longer any basis for allowing abortion of intentionally conceived babies through any other means than pre-conception birth control. We should ban abortion and instead promote full pre-conception birth control for all.
You: "But but but that was a freedom to have accidents and not be held accountable when we messed up"
Me: "Sorry you had the opporunity to prevent unintentional pregnancy but chose to be both lazy and irresponsible... request denied. You can give the baby to a family that wants to raise it if you're not ready."
Like how quantum theory is so very stable? or how the Earth is the center of the universe and also flat? Science fads seem to last longer but is that really better? I'd rather that science advanced as quickly as web technology.... would be nice to see this new science Cold Fusion come out of Alpha by next year so I could deploy my beta home CF Reactor and get off the grid.... like how I can now use an off the shelf OS CMS to run my own website without paying a million bucks for a dev company to build one from scratch (they did that for those prices less than 5 years ago).
Seems like there's more productivity gains in Web tech than science to me. I'll bet my ready money on web tech for the near term and put steady but small incremental investments in science for the long hold to offset my riskier web tech losses and squirrel some away for retirement.
Uhmmm it's a cell phone. You pay the service bill regardless of how you use it. I'm certain though that there won't be an all data plan so unless you frequently call long distance or overrun your normal minutes allotment you wouldn't see any benefit to VOIP on your cell anyways.
OTOH there probably will be an iChat interface with audio... so when you do have a good solid connection you could probably use that with others who also have iChat and audio in play. With iChat there is no legal requirements that it be available or that it support e911, etc. that a full phone line service needs to comply with though, so they're 'off-the-hook' on that.
Darwin Streaming Server can be run on Darwin on any intel PC.... Darwin is Apple's OS BSD-like kernel. Maybe an option? It's a Quicktime Streaming server without OS X or the need to by a Mac or Xserve.
There are very few "Programming Jobs" out there... there are lots of Programming Jobs for Industry X which requires some knowledge of Industry X for you to understand the problems that need to be solved with programming.
You should be double majoring in CompSci and some other field of study that you have an interest in, maybe not biology but something.
OTOH understanding basic biology will also make you a better person.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I said in the last article.... hmmm kinda dupish but it's better than copy/paste (did I just infringe?).
Hmmm well these programs do exist, at least for companies (which any individual could start for themselves). Problem is that the amount required is much higher than most can do. You'd need at least 100k in an account to handle the typical 'emergency'.
;-p
If they were required and taken out of your paycheck every month by the gov and put into a fund for you... well supposedly that's what we do already.
The hardest part would be covering the interim. We are set up now so that there is no time to develop this emergency fund. We don't start getting our own insurance until our first job or at university as a student... and at that point our parents coverage lapses on us so we immediately need to have full coverage without any deposits. We'd have to have a scenario where it was offered to parents to set up a fund for their children as well so that they have the basic coverage for a young adult (with low risk of age related illness like most cancers) but even then, one childhood disaster could wipe it out.
There would still need to be accident insurance and sports injury insurance, etc. as group policies... independent health funds would need to only provide basic healthcare coverage.
Maybe a better way would be to set up co-ops where you hire a 3rd party to manage it but they are accountable to you and your fellow members rather than to their shareholders.
This way you get the advantage of pooled resources and the direct ownership of the funds. Problem with a co-op is what happens when a member has a hugely expensive scenario that could drain all the funds from everyone? DO you kick them out or does everyone foot the bill, knowing that if it were them they'd want others to be there for them? What about the poor who can't afford to contribute? Do we still pay into a national healthcare program for the poor? This adds a lot of redundancies and inefficiencies (as we are all very aware of).
You could go further and start your own HMO so that you could control costs of physicians, drugs, etc. but then your co-op needs to maintain a certain number of members with most in good health and paying while the few in poor health receive the main benefits AND you have the overhead of managing an organization with payroll, procurement, distribution, etc.
No the only good method is a universal health care program for all where economies of scale can drop expenses via bulk purchasing, bulk land management, bulk staffing, distribution of high-end research+technology costs, etc.
BUT we need to have private vendors that can cut costs through competitive improvement and incentive based work programs (which the gov can not offer as they simply have a budget with no room for profit to be disbursed in an incentive program).
So we need universal health care provided by private practices paid through a government budget... but there must be strict control over the budget where the contracts awarded are very profitable but are still divided up amongst enough vendors so that they stay competitive, trying to outbid one another. To do this we'd have to have the gov own the infrastructure so they wouldn't be locked in to one companies location or systems.
Anyways, it can get pretty damn complicated. There is a plan in there somewhere though. Gov owned medical facilities leased out to private practices who have to maintain a standard of care in line with public needs. Gov financed research and development contracted out to private firms with additional allotments from investors who would profit share in the operations. Gov sponsored general staffing (nurses, orderlies, office workers) with independent specialists and private assistants (this maintains operations in the facility regardless of a specialist/MD coming or going). Pharma orders purchased in bulk with special allotments according to a facilities prior usage...
got other things to do this morning
There is of course an argument that goes a little like this:
If all the people in a society are relatively healthy, they are better consumers and better workers, meaning that the rich will get even richer off of the average citizens life activities. Only the somehow stupid or lazy upper middleclass, whom for whatever reason forgot to invest their extra capital into companies that profited from the new health, would suffer having to pay extra for healthcare subsidies without realizing any return on this prior investment.
Maybe there should be a healthcare fund that you can invest into that would realize a return over time AND provide universal healthcare. Those who could afford to invest would get the return and become more wealthy while those who could not afford the investment would simply get healthcare.
Uhmmm it's black and white ink in capsules... you 'front-light' it the same way you would a book. What you are looking for is a common desk lamp. Unfortunately most of them need to be plugged in to a power source.
Uh sure.... yeah, let's all just go into comas but plug in to 2nd life and a full life support system ala the matrix and it'll be all good!????
I say go for it. Tell me how it all is via email and I'll tell you how it is have a perfect world out here with hopefully 33% less people wandering around. You and your friends can sit in your bio-bubbles hooked up to virtual reality and the rest of us will enjoy our new-found over abundance of natural resources and traffic free highways. As long as you keep doing work mind you and contributing to the economy.. in fact now that you are virtual do you think you could just work an extra 4 hours each day... maybe change your VR to be a 32 hour day where you work for 12 hours. This way the rest of us can just hold part time jobs doing fun things. You can design robots to take care of your bodies so we don't have to... we'll just make sure they get enough power to do their job, 'k
sounds good, when do you think you can get started? I'd like to take a vacation here pretty soon.
Hasn't it always been the position that if you have a patent you feel is infringed upon you should just say so and FOSS will clean room re-engineer their implementation so it no longer infringes?
This is barely a threat at all when the people you threaten have unlimited resources to simply work around your claims by throwing skilled bodies at the problem, who work as volunteers.
Anyone who really understands a concept can put it in to terms that a high school graduate can understand. My example was proof that this takes less than 5 minutes todo and can be put at the top of any entry in a box labeled "a quick definition for the average person" as a sidebar, easily without dumbing down the rest of the entry.
A metric space is just a definition of how geometry works within a given set of rules... in fact the set of rules IS the metric space. So a metric space is a set of rules for how different types of geometry work. One metric space is the type you learned about in high school geometry. That is Euclidean 'metric space'. There are many other types that allow for 3/4/5 and more dimensions. As we can't see in more than 3 dimensions you will probably never come across any of these additional metric spaces outside of a scientific journal or fictional novel. Theoretical mathematicians are the primary user of this concept as they need additional dimensions to solve some specific mathematical equations.
done.
A small unit that places directional charges to explosively blast out portions of regolith and then gather the resulting dust/rock might be the way to go. maybe put in place a shield of some sort to further contain/direct the displacement?
would certainly cut down on the power requirements and weight of the unit itself and explosives are not very heavy but contain enormous power output.
Those things (trenchers) are fairly lightweight in the consumer version... have to be able to be pushed by lowest common denominator of people... move a lot of dirt quickly and could easily be adapted to a mulching lawnmower type design where the dirt is shoveled into an enclosed container rather than simply spewed out the sides.
IMHO we already have equipment designs that meet this spec, minus the autonomous part. Add in an expert system and an ECU and you're done (yeah I know that's the hard part). What I'm trying to say is that TFA makes it sound like a build a better mousetrap contest when really it should be more of a vendor sourcing expedition to find a company that already makes the equipment and is willing to work closely with NASA to modify their existing tool in return for major publicity in lieu of cash.
This is so interesting.... something must have changed at say 2.2 or 2.3 cause back at 2.16 of Bugzilla I as a designer with about 6 months or perl exposure (but plenty of html + css + javascript) went in to the Bugzilla UI pages (search, reports, etc.) and completely customized them for a company with about 35 devs at the time. I was 'the web guy' at the time. They all coded in C++ primarily.
I created a bunch of canned queries in a select menu, plus a quick search that had better defaults. A better default search page with info and a layout that actually meant something for the devs rather than being generic but consistent with other Bugzilla installs. Added color coding and collapsible lists to the results pages, and more..... it really wasn't that complicated to make changes... the html in perl is still html so creating a better UI was a matter of looking at source for Bugzilla output in the browser and then doing a global find on the Bugzilla web dir with an html snippet or css class or something as my search.
he/she mispoke.. meant to say 'increased population'...'of scantily-clad women running around in bikini tops and shorts, due to the heat.'
Those weren't vampires, they were illegal immigrants and they just wanted a fake id.... well they could have been identity thieves on hard times... reduced to begging for your credit cards instead of stealing them like any self-respecting ID thief.
We already do this... it's called scar tissue. Great for short term survival... bad for future quality of life.
Personally I read it 'out loud' in my head, even when I'm writing, as in a narrative from a 3rd person. I find that I'm more capable of comprehending the full extent of the content and actually carry on a two sided or many sided conversation about the content (with myself), relating it to other prior content or external sourced content and creating new contexts for what I am reading. Same thing for writing. I edit while I write unless I'm simply creating an outline of tasks or some such.
Even when reading fiction for enjoyment I find it much more interesting to read slowly in a narrative form rathe than simply scanning for a timeline or highlights (Harry Potter) and simply choose not to continue reading something that doesn't provide enough enjoyment with this method. This means I'm picky about the authors I read. They too must have a good narrative form, even when writing a technical document.
Faster is not always better IMHO. Quality over quantity. i also don't memorize. Internalize, then the specific wording and syntax isn't relevant.. only the meme. This does give me problems with coding though. I always need a handy reference nearby. Luckily I only do proof of concept RAD stuff so it's not that big a deal.
Sorry this is the wrong forum for this post... most /.ers are much more intimately familiar with their joysticks than with nipples. Apple should just introduce a joystick based interface for men and reintroduce the trackball for women... much more intuitive interfaces for manipulating their respective PCs
hmmm you have hit upon a fascinating loophole. I wonder if this would apply to more traditional patents as well? Could I get your expert opinion on possibly reinventing an apparatus like a wheel and yet it would be in an octagonal formulation rather than a circumferal... it would in fact serve the same purpose and in some specific scenarios (such as in a roadway with an aligned 'teeth' configuration) it may in fact be more efficient than said 'wheel'.
Hmmm it occurs to me that there may be more than one way to skin a cat as well.... possibly could you aid me in determining a non-obvious method that could be patented?
ewwww I'm never eating toffee again... they just use their hands to move it around? that's like saying the wine makers crush the grapes with their feet.... ;-p
If I make a suggestion to MS and they implement my great idea, what do I get out of it? They get a better product to sell to people and I still have to pay them for it. Where's the ROI? With an open OS I get the benefit of lots of peoples suggestions and contributions and can make some money off it myself... but why would I ever contribute to a proprietary OS? It's their product, let them figure it out for themselves....
almost... you forgot to mention that Web 2.0 means that the users contribute the content, thereby relieving the website owner from having to pay to have content created for them. Now all they have to do is provide the venue and let the users make the money for them.
Let's extend this a little and see what you think:
ME: "Birth control mitigates the risk of unintentional babies which follows that the vast majority of babies conceived in a society where birth control is available are intentional, therefore there is no longer any basis for allowing abortion of intentionally conceived babies through any other means than pre-conception birth control. We should ban abortion and instead promote full pre-conception birth control for all.
You: "But but but that was a freedom to have accidents and not be held accountable when we messed up"
Me: "Sorry you had the opporunity to prevent unintentional pregnancy but chose to be both lazy and irresponsible... request denied. You can give the baby to a family that wants to raise it if you're not ready."
Like how quantum theory is so very stable? or how the Earth is the center of the universe and also flat? Science fads seem to last longer but is that really better? I'd rather that science advanced as quickly as web technology.... would be nice to see this new science Cold Fusion come out of Alpha by next year so I could deploy my beta home CF Reactor and get off the grid.... like how I can now use an off the shelf OS CMS to run my own website without paying a million bucks for a dev company to build one from scratch (they did that for those prices less than 5 years ago).
Seems like there's more productivity gains in Web tech than science to me. I'll bet my ready money on web tech for the near term and put steady but small incremental investments in science for the long hold to offset my riskier web tech losses and squirrel some away for retirement.
Uhmmm it's a cell phone. You pay the service bill regardless of how you use it. I'm certain though that there won't be an all data plan so unless you frequently call long distance or overrun your normal minutes allotment you wouldn't see any benefit to VOIP on your cell anyways.
OTOH there probably will be an iChat interface with audio... so when you do have a good solid connection you could probably use that with others who also have iChat and audio in play. With iChat there is no legal requirements that it be available or that it support e911, etc. that a full phone line service needs to comply with though, so they're 'off-the-hook' on that.
Darwin Streaming Server can be run on Darwin on any intel PC.... Darwin is Apple's OS BSD-like kernel. Maybe an option? It's a Quicktime Streaming server without OS X or the need to by a Mac or Xserve.
Just one comment on this one:
There are many programming positions in the BioTech Industry and if you think having a basic understanding of Biology is not going to help them decide between you and someone else... you're poorly misguided.
There are very few "Programming Jobs" out there... there are lots of Programming Jobs for Industry X which requires some knowledge of Industry X for you to understand the problems that need to be solved with programming.
You should be double majoring in CompSci and some other field of study that you have an interest in, maybe not biology but something.
OTOH understanding basic biology will also make you a better person.