> Typical English conversation is roughly 200 words per minute.
Boring, vapid, content-free conversation is sometimes that fast, but it is also quite worthless. Conversations worth taking part in generally have more pauses, as people *think* before flapping their jaws like sails in a gale.
> One problem is that ASL isn't signed english but very much a separate language.
True, but...
> To deaf-born ASL users English is their second language.
Often (perhaps usually) not so. Even when it is, they are generally fluent in the predominant written language in their area. Because most of society doesn't know sign language, and as far as I'm aware most books are not available in it, and so on and so forth.
> So it's not about picking the "hard" or "easy" problem but picking the one that > is most important to the users...
It's often best to solve the easy problems first, and _then_ move on to the hard ones. You tend to get useful results sooner that way.
> You mean race has nothing to do with the fact Africans haven't invented the wheel yet?
We have no idea who invented the wheel, but the reason the industrial revolution took place in Europe, inasmuch as there can ever be a single reason for anything so complex, is probably due to climate as much as anything: temperate zones are more likely to produce conditions such as year-round grain surplus. Obviously there were many other factors as well; history is complicated. It is entirely possible that genetic tendencies in different people groups might be one of those factors, and cultural factors certainly are, but the causative relationship there is not as simple as you imply.
> Or that blacks commit half the violent crimes in America, while being ONLY 12% of > the population?
There are historical reasons for that statistic (which, incidentally, you exaggerate somewhat, although it is a very real and measurable phenomenon), having to do mostly with concentration in urban areas. Not that that's any excuse for crime: criminals are criminals and must take responsibility for their personal actions. Nonetheless, there is a VERY strong correlation in the US between population density and criminal activity, and a somewhat weaker but still quite significant correlation between population density and racial diversity, and the correlation between race and crime is (at least mostly) a result of the interaction of those. Why racial diversity is so much higher in the urban areas is an interesting study. (Why crime is so much higher in the urban areas is, in my opinion, obvious: you crowd people together, they're going to step on one another's toes, and also the apparent anonymity of the individual is MUCH stronger in more densely populated areas.)
Put another way, a white person living in the inner city is statistically *WAY* more likely to be a criminal than a black person living in a small town in a rural county. If you correlate against where the person's parents and grandparents lived (urban versus rural), it's even more obvious.
There's also a strong correlation between population density and liberal politics. All kinds of fun can be had with that fact:-)
> Aren't "dwarves" and "elves" technically different species?
In Tolkein, they are called races, and elves, humans, and hobbits can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring, so the term "race" makes a certain sense for them (if not really for dwarves and ents). (Yes, elves and men are of distinct origin in Tolkein, but both are Children of Illuvatar, and hobbits, as near as anyone can determine, are just a particular breed of men.) Most role-playing games are based indirectly on Tolkein via other influences (notably D&D), so the term "race" probably got passed down.
> If your phone is far enough away that it can capture your whole body, > how are you going to see the screen?
It doesn't need to capture the whole body. Waist-up is adequate for ASL and probably most other sign languages. Deaf people want to communicate while seated, as well as while standing, so gestures involving the lower body are not used much.
Of course, people with impaired vision might have trouble seeing it even at a distance that captures from the waist up only, but the goal here isn't to solve the Helen Keller problem. That's a more difficult one to tackle for remote communication.
> Although text messaging is a viable alternative for everyone, signing -- > like speech -- is a much faster and more convenient form of communication."
Umm. I type as fast as I generally speak. I *can* speak faster, but then, I *can* type faster too, if I don't have to stop and think what I'm going to say. I imagine signing would be similar. So I would think text messaging would be just as fast.
Unless the problem is that it's hard to type on the available input device. In which case, fix the input device.
I don't guess there's anything _wrong_ with developing technology to allow sign language to be transmitted over the cell phone network, but it seems like a harder problem is being worked on to avoid having to solve an easier one.
> If there is a new low, lower than forcing kid at school looking at ads, which is > an obvious example of brainwashing, it is currently unimaginable to me.
How about parents deliberately lying to their own children? I'd consider that worse, since it's the kids' own parents doing it, rather than a third party such as the school.
> But I honestly can't see the difference between society providing for > a standing army, police protection, food inspection, mail delivery and > a host of other things that we expect, and society providing for basic > health care
I will tell you what the difference is.
First, let's set mail delivery aside, because, at least in the US, it is not subsidized (on average). The USPS has to charge enough to break even (and to cover the small amount of franked mail). (I wish they were required by law to charge the same amount for bulk mail as for first class mail, but that's a separate issue entirely. So although the USPS is a government agency, mail delivery isn't really provided by the government, in the sense of being paid for out of public funds like the other things you list.
With the standing army, police protection, and food inspection, there is a limit to how much people want to have provided. Well, in peace time there is, at any rate. Wartime is... more complicated. Note however that despite the current action in Iraq we really are at peace, in terms of how people look at the military, and have been at least since the eighties. The Vietnam conflict was also a peacetime war, in terms of how it was perceived at home. Nobody felt directly threatened by the enemy. The cold war is arguable, and even there there were (admittedly high) limits on how much military we really wanted. The last time we really had an unbounded demand for military was WWII. Note too that I don't mean to imply the military doesn't want more funding. Every government program always want more funding. The USDA wants more funding. However, there is a limit to the military services that the public are generally interested in having available. Similarly, there is a limit to how much police protection we require. (In the city I live in, two patrol cars at night and three in the daytime, plus the dispatcher, is enough. If we have that much police protection all the time, nobody argues for more. We can easily afford that amount. Heck, we didn't even *notice* the city taxes, which are negligable in comparison to the federal and state ones, until the city started requiring everyone to *file* them, which is an annoying waste of time since most people end up owing exactly $0 anyway, due to employers withholding the correct amount. If the city just kept what our employers withheld, they'd be welcome to it.)
When it comes to medical care, there is no limit to how much people will consume if they don't have to personally pay for it. In fairness, you did say "basic health care", so perhaps you were thinking in terms of there being limits on what the government plan will pay for. That would potentially be workable, but it won't satisfy anyone: whatever limits are set will be a major source of contention. People will want more medical care than can be provided.
The only government-provides service I can think of off the top of my head (in the US, currently) that is in that same "unlimited needs" category with health care, is education. And if you think about the kind of job that the government is doing with education, you may ask yourself if you really want those people running your health care. As bad as health care seems now, it could easily be worse. Indeed, all you have to do is look at the Canadian system, to see how it could be worse. At any rate, if you want to argue for socialized medicine, it's not fair to compare to police protection and food inspection. It would be a lot more like the education system.
> You suggest that the providers (hospitals, etc.) are losing money on the insured > patients because the negotiated rates are so low.
I didn't mean to imply that. They avoid this situation by artificially inflating the official list price that self-insured people must pay.
> You suggest that hospitals make up the money they're losing to insured patients > by over-charging the uninsured (or under-insured).
I didn't mean to imply that either. They over-charge the uninsured (and the self-insured) in order to inflate the *perceived* cost of the procedure, to place them in a better bargaining position with the insurance companies, so they can say, "Look, you're already paying less than 25% of our usual rate, we really can't afford to discount you any further!" or something along those lines.
> providers actually make less money, on average, per patient on uninsured cases.
If that's true, it's because a lot of uninsured people end up being indigent or charity cases, and the hospital ends up writing those off as a loss. Those of us who actually set aside 10% of our income for medical care, but don't go through an insurance company, get the nasty end of the stick. I am certain I pay more for dental procedures, for instance, than the insurance companies pay on behalf of the people they insure.
If somebody is living in a magical make-believe fairy-tale land, it's the person who believes that the health care providers can charge uninsured people a fair amount, charge the insurance companies a lot less for insured people, and still make money hand over fist.
> I suggest you go to college.
If you argue ad hominem, I get to argue ad quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur. (I'd use Greek, but slashdot's code filters it out.)
The test is simple: all applicants must first winter over at either Amundsen-Scott or Vostok, not physically attack anyone, and come back sane with mostly good things to say about the other people they had to work with.
The duration of this test wouldn't be as long as the actual mission, but the antarctic winter is long enough to weed out anyone very edgy, I think.
Note that stations with the ability to get people in and out during the winter, such as McMurdo, should not qualify.
> over 10% of the population has been sent to prison at least once in their lives
Where on earth do you live? Los Angeles?
In any case, that is certainly not true around here. In small-town Ohio, I doubt if 1% of the population, nevermind 10%, has ever done time in prison. I believe 10% is higher than the proportion who have been inside a prison even to visit. I do know a guy who *works* at a prison, and I know several men who have been into prisons at one time or another as part of a ministry... but we're talking way less than 10% of the population here, and these are people who go into the prison voluntarily and come back out the same day.
I can't prove these numbers, but I'm confident they're much closer than yours, at least around here.
> No, there's also the benefit of not cutting down trees.
That's a red herring, at least in North America in the twenty-first century. The paper industry plants every tree it cuts down -- and they're "junk" trees, fast-growth wood with a natural lifespan shorter than a human anyhow, grown on plantations dedicated to the purpose.
Slow-growth trees, especially hardwood, aren't used for paper, because they're too valuable as expensive specialty lumber. Even cheap forms of lumber (e.g., 2x4s) aren't made out of slow-growth or hardwood trees, but out of fast-growth pine. Making them out of oak and maple would be a waste of money. Paper even moreso.
> I would question this statement. WHY should every American get the same price?
Because the current system is essentially a price-fixing conspiracy and is only even legal due to weird technical loopholes.
When the insurance company forces health care providers to provide discounts for its customers that are not provided to anyone else, the end result is that the health care providers, in order to cover their real costs (including their own not insignificant insurance against litigation) and make a profit, raise their rates for everyone, so that the price for the insurance company's customers is enough to cover expenses.
So the rest of us are actually paying *more* than we otherwise would be, because of the demands of an insurance company we *don't* do business with.
Imagine if one of the banks in town negotiates a deal with all the grocery stores, wherein customers of that bank get a 50% discount on all groceries, versus the marked price that everyone else pays. The grocery stores then raises their prices, so now anyone who doesn't use Eighteenth Street Bank is now paying significantly more for groceries than they're really worth.
There are basically five ways to respond. You can pay the higher prices, switch your banking to Eighteenth Street Bank, ship groceries in from out of town where the deal is not in effect, stop buying groceries altogether and grow your own food, or resort to criminal actions of one sort or another to address the situation. None of these are very good options, but the *worst* one, as far as I'm concerned, is to switch your banking to Eighteenth Street Bank, because that makes you an assessory to what they're doing. (Yes, the fifth option, resorting to crime, is potentially worse, depending on the exact nature of the crime you resort to.) When the class action suit is finally filed, I would hope that anyone who chose the switch-banks option would be named as a defendant.
The big problem with the health insurance price fixing scam is that it's absurd to name that many defendants. We're going to have to let the insurance customers totally off the hook on the assessory charge, simply because there are so many of them.
> > Yeah, good luck generating all the world's electricity from solar and wind. > > Let me know when you've finished that up... > I didn't say all of it. But it would be possible if humans actually cared enough > to put any effort into sustainable energy. Why do you think it's not possible?
The way I read his post, he's not saying that it's impossible, only that it will take quite a long time to accomplish. The efficiency of currently available solar cells leaves something to be desired, and they are *expensive*. The technology will improve with time, of course, but it's going to be a few decades (possibly centuries, but certainly decades) before solar becomes one of the world's major energy sources. Wind probably never will.
Currently, although a lot of environmentalists don't like to hear it, the most sustainable power source we've got that's at all practical is nuclear fission. That's not sustainable in the extreme long term, but it should be good to get us through for a while until solar technology can be developed into what it needs to be.
Actually, there's a net loss of energy when recycling paper, if you consider the whole processing (including ink/dye removal) plus collecting all the paper and trucking it to the recycling plant. Why do you think recycled paper, in the absense of government subsidies, costs so much more than regular paper?
There are only two arguably positive things that come from paper recycling. One is reduced landfill space consumption (the importance of which, except in areas of very high population density, is... arguable), and the other is the public relations benefit of being perceived as "green".
Other kinds of recycling (glass especially, almost any metal, and even some plastics) are a much more worthwhile prospect. If you really want to do something good for the environment, get a home close to your workplace, or a job close to your home, and walk (or bicycle) to work. Recycling paper is a token gesture, a nice visible thing corporations can do for their public image, but in terms of actual impact on the environment it's pretty much worthless.
> What about the time you spend cleaning up or reinstalling?
You're going to do that anyway. Your system has been compromised, remember? You're going to salvage what data you can (inert data only, _not_ applications, much less the OS) and then repartition and do a fresh install. Even if you believe the attacker probably didn't gain root access, it's not worth the risk.
Besides, the major reason I don't do new installations very often is because of the time I would have to spend copying my data to the new installation. If you've got to do that anyway, the extra time to install is small in comparison, so you might as well grab a newer version of your favorite OS, or try a different one, or whatever, while you're at it.
If my home directory were wiped out by an attack, even if it were only *seconds* after a backup, I'd go ahead and do a clean install anyway.
> in their black hearts, they all want the same thing. They all want to RULE the earth!
Well, sure, doesn't everyone? Thing is, most people don't have a workable plan to achieve it. I, on the other hand, have a plan that I'm quite sure I can implement. Phase one of my plan is to go to work today and do my job. I'm pretty sure I can manage that. Phase two is to do the same thing tomorrow. I'm still working on phase three.
I don't salivate when bells ring. I only salivate when I hear the word "Pavlov". (This is the result of an experiment we did in Intro to Psych (in the fall of 1993, IIRC) and it still works without fail every time.)
> However, we are talking about trashing everything, against trashing just ~. > Obviously just ~ is better.
Only because I keep a lot (err, most, actually) of my data on other partitions, mounted outside of my home directory. If all my data were in ~, then I would consider trashing it to be just as bad as trashing everything.
> In the case of a multi-user system
Outside of server space, when was the last time you saw a multi-user system with separate logins? Every desktop system I've ever seen, all the users who use it do so from the same account. It's nice that operating systems have multi-user capability, but it is typically not used in the intended way on desktop systems. (It *is*, of course, used in server space, extensively.)
> Although I agree with you in essence, I find it odd to call someone > "lazy" for doing more work...
That's false laziness. True virtuous laziness drives a programmer to create tools that make his work easier over the long term, and a collection of personally evaluated known good sources of quality code is as good an example as any. When a programmer doesn't *bother* to do something that would make his work easier over the long term, that's the vice of false laziness.
A programmer must be careful to avoid false laziness. Also false impatience and false hubris.
> I think a system like this might work if it has a user feedback system, > where particular authors get a good reputation by positive feedback.
Unfortunately not -- or, at least, not unless something non-trivial is done to make it work that way.
Most of the feedback is generated by brand new programmers fresh out of their first semester of high school web design class looking to get up to the next level. Those are the people who are looking for sources they don't know about, so they're exploring, using the search engines, finding what they can, and giving feedback. Established programmers *know* where to find good code, but new programmers are still looking around, and consequently still finding what's out there. They don't yet have the ability to tell good code from bad, so sites like Matt's Script Archive get plenty of good feedback. (Don't believe me? Today, a Google search for perl scripts turns up that site *first*. Before search.cpan.org, before perlmonks, before everything.)
Sure, if you ask anybody who knows the language in question pretty well, he'll steer you in a better direction. But the problem is that Google, at least with its current technology (which, as search engines go, is state of the art at this point in time), can't tell the difference between informed feedback and uninformed feedback.
Remember, nothing naturally falls into a well-organized state. Serious effort has to be put into *getting* it into a well-organized state, or it'll be chaos. This law of entropy was first stated in the realm of thermodynamics, but it is true generally: in the absense of a deliberate directed effort to the contrary, everything in the universe tends toward worthlessness. Wherever you see order, it's the result of hard work on someone's part.
Some kind of feedback on the feedback is needed -- but it needs to work a good deal better than slashdot's meta-moderation. I'm not sure exactly how it needs to work, but it needs to be able to assign value to different sources of feedback, and possibly to sources of the feedback on the feedback as well. And some reliable seeding method is needed, a bootstrap if you will, to anchor the thing so that certain reliable sources of good feedback can be established.
Well, this is off-topic for the current thread, but since you bring it up...
> even if Vista wasn't around, I'd still want to go back to XP. OSX just isn't for me
I find it isn't for me, either. It's impressive in some ways, but certain critical things aren't there that I require. The most important of these is that it's just not configurable enough, and the most critical aspect of that configurability, for me, is the ability to centrally specify a set of preferred colors and have virtually all applications respect them. Windows, Gnome, and KDE have all had that since their inception.
I find too that the Dock on OS X, although it has a trainload of cool eye candy, is in practical terms about a decade behind the docks, taskbars, panels, or whatever else they're called on other systems. In terms of layout it's about as flexible as cement, and it doesn't feature drawers, action buttons (except for application launchers), or discoverable configurability. It seems to be designed to make a first impression, rather than to be convenient over years of use. Also, the distinction between what apps are currently running versus which ones have windows open complicates the task list, both visually and conceptually. You can't just glance; you have to glance and *think*, and for something you do as often as looking to see what's open, that's very unfortunate. This isn't really a dock problem per se, more a consequence of a paradigm that lies deep in the Apple way of thinking about application management, but there has got to be a better way for the dock to deal with it.
This is not to say that OS X doesn't have its strong points. There are some very tempting things about it. But ultimately I found that I care more about these shortcomings than about the shortcomings of the desktop environment I've been using.
> I'd say it's good for any company to have an engineer like this on staff, > who has guts to face management and speak his or her mind.
I didn't mean to imply that cutting WinFS out of Vista was the wrong decision. I saw a database-ish filesystem before, when I played around with BeOS for a while, and although several things about BeOS impressed me and in my view would be well worth copying in other OSes (this is still true IMO), the filesystem was never one of them. It enabled a variety of cutesy tricks (e.g., address-book files that couldn't be copied to another filesystem or archived (e.g. via tar) because they'd come out as zero bytes and worthless), but its practical usefulness was, in my estimation, virtually nil. (I don't mean that the filesystem was unuseful as a whole -- it was still a filesystem, after all, and the ability to store files on disk is terribly useful -- but only that this feature of it was in practice not useful.)
And the Be filesystem was well-implemented (for what it was) and performed well, which by all accounts cannot be said for WinFS. So I didn't mean to imply that Allchin was wrong to get WinFS axed. I'd have axed it before it was ever called WinFS, if the decision had been mine. I was only saying that this email gives us a look inside MS at what happened behind the scenes to result in the outcome that we saw on the surface, wherein WinFS went from being one of the three big selling points of Vista to having the useful portions of its codebased cherry-picked for inclusion in other projects like SQL Server and other than that being scrapped. That's quite an about-face, and publically we didn't previously know how it came about. Now we have a clue.
The filesystem feature I want is one that VMS has: automatic file versioning.
> Now that Vista is out, you can see he was talking about much more than that.
Perhaps so, but it seems clear that that remark was talking about WinFS specifically. Which implies Allchin was instrumental in killing it. Whatever else he may have been talking about, he may or may not have gotten through to anyone about it, but it seems like on this point he did.
I always wondered what happened to WinFS, because it had been a major sacred cow at MS for quite a while, and although it kept getting pushed back, re-envisioned, and renamed, I was surprised to see them give up on it entirely. Now we know (at least part of) why.
Slashdot Mirror
> Typical English conversation is roughly 200 words per minute.
Boring, vapid, content-free conversation is sometimes that fast, but it is also quite worthless. Conversations worth taking part in generally have more pauses, as people *think* before flapping their jaws like sails in a gale.
> One problem is that ASL isn't signed english but very much a separate language.
True, but...
> To deaf-born ASL users English is their second language.
Often (perhaps usually) not so. Even when it is, they are generally fluent in the predominant written language in their area. Because most of society doesn't know sign language, and as far as I'm aware most books are not available in it, and so on and so forth.
> So it's not about picking the "hard" or "easy" problem but picking the one that
> is most important to the users...
It's often best to solve the easy problems first, and _then_ move on to the hard ones. You tend to get useful results sooner that way.
> You mean race has nothing to do with the fact Africans haven't invented the wheel yet?
:-)
We have no idea who invented the wheel, but the reason the industrial revolution took place in Europe, inasmuch as there can ever be a single reason for anything so complex, is probably due to climate as much as anything: temperate zones are more likely to produce conditions such as year-round grain surplus. Obviously there were many other factors as well; history is complicated. It is entirely possible that genetic tendencies in different people groups might be one of those factors, and cultural factors certainly are, but the causative relationship there is not as simple as you imply.
> Or that blacks commit half the violent crimes in America, while being ONLY 12% of
> the population?
There are historical reasons for that statistic (which, incidentally, you exaggerate somewhat, although it is a very real and measurable phenomenon), having to do mostly with concentration in urban areas. Not that that's any excuse for crime: criminals are criminals and must take responsibility for their personal actions. Nonetheless, there is a VERY strong correlation in the US between population density and criminal activity, and a somewhat weaker but still quite significant correlation between population density and racial diversity, and the correlation between race and crime is (at least mostly) a result of the interaction of those. Why racial diversity is so much higher in the urban areas is an interesting study. (Why crime is so much higher in the urban areas is, in my opinion, obvious: you crowd people together, they're going to step on one another's toes, and also the apparent anonymity of the individual is MUCH stronger in more densely populated areas.)
Put another way, a white person living in the inner city is statistically *WAY* more likely to be a criminal than a black person living in a small town in a rural county. If you correlate against where the person's parents and grandparents lived (urban versus rural), it's even more obvious.
There's also a strong correlation between population density and liberal politics. All kinds of fun can be had with that fact
> Aren't "dwarves" and "elves" technically different species?
In Tolkein, they are called races, and elves, humans, and hobbits can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring, so the term "race" makes a certain sense for them (if not really for dwarves and ents). (Yes, elves and men are of distinct origin in Tolkein, but both are Children of Illuvatar, and hobbits, as near as anyone can determine, are just a particular breed of men.) Most role-playing games are based indirectly on Tolkein via other influences (notably D&D), so the term "race" probably got passed down.
> I still think deaf people should communicate by getting to kick non-deaf people
Somehow, I don't think that would improve their relations with the rest of society.
> If your phone is far enough away that it can capture your whole body,
> how are you going to see the screen?
It doesn't need to capture the whole body. Waist-up is adequate for ASL and probably most other sign languages. Deaf people want to communicate while seated, as well as while standing, so gestures involving the lower body are not used much.
Of course, people with impaired vision might have trouble seeing it even at a distance that captures from the waist up only, but the goal here isn't to solve the Helen Keller problem. That's a more difficult one to tackle for remote communication.
> Although text messaging is a viable alternative for everyone, signing --
> like speech -- is a much faster and more convenient form of communication."
Umm. I type as fast as I generally speak. I *can* speak faster, but then, I *can* type faster too, if I don't have to stop and think what I'm going to say. I imagine signing would be similar. So I would think text messaging would be just as fast.
Unless the problem is that it's hard to type on the available input device. In which case, fix the input device.
I don't guess there's anything _wrong_ with developing technology to allow sign language to be transmitted over the cell phone network, but it seems like a harder problem is being worked on to avoid having to solve an easier one.
> If there is a new low, lower than forcing kid at school looking at ads, which is
> an obvious example of brainwashing, it is currently unimaginable to me.
How about parents deliberately lying to their own children? I'd consider that worse, since it's the kids' own parents doing it, rather than a third party such as the school.
> But I honestly can't see the difference between society providing for
> a standing army, police protection, food inspection, mail delivery and
> a host of other things that we expect, and society providing for basic
> health care
I will tell you what the difference is.
First, let's set mail delivery aside, because, at least in the US, it is not subsidized (on average). The USPS has to charge enough to break even (and to cover the small amount of franked mail). (I wish they were required by law to charge the same amount for bulk mail as for first class mail, but that's a separate issue entirely. So although the USPS is a government agency, mail delivery isn't really provided by the government, in the sense of being paid for out of public funds like the other things you list.
With the standing army, police protection, and food inspection, there is a limit to how much people want to have provided. Well, in peace time there is, at any rate. Wartime is... more complicated. Note however that despite the current action in Iraq we really are at peace, in terms of how people look at the military, and have been at least since the eighties. The Vietnam conflict was also a peacetime war, in terms of how it was perceived at home. Nobody felt directly threatened by the enemy. The cold war is arguable, and even there there were (admittedly high) limits on how much military we really wanted. The last time we really had an unbounded demand for military was WWII. Note too that I don't mean to imply the military doesn't want more funding. Every government program always want more funding. The USDA wants more funding. However, there is a limit to the military services that the public are generally interested in having available. Similarly, there is a limit to how much police protection we require. (In the city I live in, two patrol cars at night and three in the daytime, plus the dispatcher, is enough. If we have that much police protection all the time, nobody argues for more. We can easily afford that amount. Heck, we didn't even *notice* the city taxes, which are negligable in comparison to the federal and state ones, until the city started requiring everyone to *file* them, which is an annoying waste of time since most people end up owing exactly $0 anyway, due to employers withholding the correct amount. If the city just kept what our employers withheld, they'd be welcome to it.)
When it comes to medical care, there is no limit to how much people will consume if they don't have to personally pay for it. In fairness, you did say "basic health care", so perhaps you were thinking in terms of there being limits on what the government plan will pay for. That would potentially be workable, but it won't satisfy anyone: whatever limits are set will be a major source of contention. People will want more medical care than can be provided.
The only government-provides service I can think of off the top of my head (in the US, currently) that is in that same "unlimited needs" category with health care, is education. And if you think about the kind of job that the government is doing with education, you may ask yourself if you really want those people running your health care. As bad as health care seems now, it could easily be worse. Indeed, all you have to do is look at the Canadian system, to see how it could be worse. At any rate, if you want to argue for socialized medicine, it's not fair to compare to police protection and food inspection. It would be a lot more like the education system.
> You suggest that the providers (hospitals, etc.) are losing money on the insured
> patients because the negotiated rates are so low.
I didn't mean to imply that. They avoid this situation by artificially inflating the official list price that self-insured people must pay.
> You suggest that hospitals make up the money they're losing to insured patients
> by over-charging the uninsured (or under-insured).
I didn't mean to imply that either. They over-charge the uninsured (and the self-insured) in order to inflate the *perceived* cost of the procedure, to place them in a better bargaining position with the insurance companies, so they can say, "Look, you're already paying less than 25% of our usual rate, we really can't afford to discount you any further!" or something along those lines.
> providers actually make less money, on average, per patient on uninsured cases.
If that's true, it's because a lot of uninsured people end up being indigent or charity cases, and the hospital ends up writing those off as a loss. Those of us who actually set aside 10% of our income for medical care, but don't go through an insurance company, get the nasty end of the stick. I am certain I pay more for dental procedures, for instance, than the insurance companies pay on behalf of the people they insure.
If somebody is living in a magical make-believe fairy-tale land, it's the person who believes that the health care providers can charge uninsured people a fair amount, charge the insurance companies a lot less for insured people, and still make money hand over fist.
> I suggest you go to college.
If you argue ad hominem, I get to argue ad quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur. (I'd use Greek, but slashdot's code filters it out.)
The test is simple: all applicants must first winter over at either Amundsen-Scott or Vostok, not physically attack anyone, and come back sane with mostly good things to say about the other people they had to work with.
The duration of this test wouldn't be as long as the actual mission, but the antarctic winter is long enough to weed out anyone very edgy, I think.
Note that stations with the ability to get people in and out during the winter, such as McMurdo, should not qualify.
> over 10% of the population has been sent to prison at least once in their lives
Where on earth do you live? Los Angeles?
In any case, that is certainly not true around here. In small-town Ohio, I doubt if 1% of the population, nevermind 10%, has ever done time in prison. I believe 10% is higher than the proportion who have been inside a prison even to visit. I do know a guy who *works* at a prison, and I know several men who have been into prisons at one time or another as part of a ministry... but we're talking way less than 10% of the population here, and these are people who go into the prison voluntarily and come back out the same day.
I can't prove these numbers, but I'm confident they're much closer than yours, at least around here.
> No, there's also the benefit of not cutting down trees.
That's a red herring, at least in North America in the twenty-first century. The paper industry plants every tree it cuts down -- and they're "junk" trees, fast-growth wood with a natural lifespan shorter than a human anyhow, grown on plantations dedicated to the purpose.
Slow-growth trees, especially hardwood, aren't used for paper, because they're too valuable as expensive specialty lumber. Even cheap forms of lumber (e.g., 2x4s) aren't made out of slow-growth or hardwood trees, but out of fast-growth pine. Making them out of oak and maple would be a waste of money. Paper even moreso.
> I would question this statement. WHY should every American get the same price?
Because the current system is essentially a price-fixing conspiracy and is only even legal due to weird technical loopholes.
When the insurance company forces health care providers to provide discounts for its customers that are not provided to anyone else, the end result is that the health care providers, in order to cover their real costs (including their own not insignificant insurance against litigation) and make a profit, raise their rates for everyone, so that the price for the insurance company's customers is enough to cover expenses.
So the rest of us are actually paying *more* than we otherwise would be, because of the demands of an insurance company we *don't* do business with.
Imagine if one of the banks in town negotiates a deal with all the grocery stores, wherein customers of that bank get a 50% discount on all groceries, versus the marked price that everyone else pays. The grocery stores then raises their prices, so now anyone who doesn't use Eighteenth Street Bank is now paying significantly more for groceries than they're really worth.
There are basically five ways to respond. You can pay the higher prices, switch your banking to Eighteenth Street Bank, ship groceries in from out of town where the deal is not in effect, stop buying groceries altogether and grow your own food, or resort to criminal actions of one sort or another to address the situation. None of these are very good options, but the *worst* one, as far as I'm concerned, is to switch your banking to Eighteenth Street Bank, because that makes you an assessory to what they're doing. (Yes, the fifth option, resorting to crime, is potentially worse, depending on the exact nature of the crime you resort to.) When the class action suit is finally filed, I would hope that anyone who chose the switch-banks option would be named as a defendant.
The big problem with the health insurance price fixing scam is that it's absurd to name that many defendants. We're going to have to let the insurance customers totally off the hook on the assessory charge, simply because there are so many of them.
> > Yeah, good luck generating all the world's electricity from solar and wind.
> > Let me know when you've finished that up...
> I didn't say all of it. But it would be possible if humans actually cared enough
> to put any effort into sustainable energy. Why do you think it's not possible?
The way I read his post, he's not saying that it's impossible, only that it will take quite a long time to accomplish. The efficiency of currently available solar cells leaves something to be desired, and they are *expensive*. The technology will improve with time, of course, but it's going to be a few decades (possibly centuries, but certainly decades) before solar becomes one of the world's major energy sources. Wind probably never will.
Currently, although a lot of environmentalists don't like to hear it, the most sustainable power source we've got that's at all practical is nuclear fission. That's not sustainable in the extreme long term, but it should be good to get us through for a while until solar technology can be developed into what it needs to be.
> so while there are likely some gains in energy
Actually, there's a net loss of energy when recycling paper, if you consider the whole processing (including ink/dye removal) plus collecting all the paper and trucking it to the recycling plant. Why do you think recycled paper, in the absense of government subsidies, costs so much more than regular paper?
There are only two arguably positive things that come from paper recycling. One is reduced landfill space consumption (the importance of which, except in areas of very high population density, is... arguable), and the other is the public relations benefit of being perceived as "green".
Other kinds of recycling (glass especially, almost any metal, and even some plastics) are a much more worthwhile prospect. If you really want to do something good for the environment, get a home close to your workplace, or a job close to your home, and walk (or bicycle) to work. Recycling paper is a token gesture, a nice visible thing corporations can do for their public image, but in terms of actual impact on the environment it's pretty much worthless.
> What about the time you spend cleaning up or reinstalling?
You're going to do that anyway. Your system has been compromised, remember? You're going to salvage what data you can (inert data only, _not_ applications, much less the OS) and then repartition and do a fresh install. Even if you believe the attacker probably didn't gain root access, it's not worth the risk.
Besides, the major reason I don't do new installations very often is because of the time I would have to spend copying my data to the new installation. If you've got to do that anyway, the extra time to install is small in comparison, so you might as well grab a newer version of your favorite OS, or try a different one, or whatever, while you're at it.
If my home directory were wiped out by an attack, even if it were only *seconds* after a backup, I'd go ahead and do a clean install anyway.
> in their black hearts, they all want the same thing. They all want to RULE the earth!
Well, sure, doesn't everyone? Thing is, most people don't have a workable plan to achieve it. I, on the other hand, have a plan that I'm quite sure I can implement. Phase one of my plan is to go to work today and do my job. I'm pretty sure I can manage that. Phase two is to do the same thing tomorrow. I'm still working on phase three.
I don't salivate when bells ring. I only salivate when I hear the word "Pavlov". (This is the result of an experiment we did in Intro to Psych (in the fall of 1993, IIRC) and it still works without fail every time.)
> However, we are talking about trashing everything, against trashing just ~.
> Obviously just ~ is better.
Only because I keep a lot (err, most, actually) of my data on other partitions, mounted outside of my home directory. If all my data were in ~, then I would consider trashing it to be just as bad as trashing everything.
> In the case of a multi-user system
Outside of server space, when was the last time you saw a multi-user system with separate logins? Every desktop system I've ever seen, all the users who use it do so from the same account. It's nice that operating systems have multi-user capability, but it is typically not used in the intended way on desktop systems. (It *is*, of course, used in server space, extensively.)
> Although I agree with you in essence, I find it odd to call someone
> "lazy" for doing more work...
That's false laziness. True virtuous laziness drives a programmer to create tools that make his work easier over the long term, and a collection of personally evaluated known good sources of quality code is as good an example as any. When a programmer doesn't *bother* to do something that would make his work easier over the long term, that's the vice of false laziness.
A programmer must be careful to avoid false laziness. Also false impatience and false hubris.
> I think a system like this might work if it has a user feedback system,
> where particular authors get a good reputation by positive feedback.
Unfortunately not -- or, at least, not unless something non-trivial is done to make it work that way.
Most of the feedback is generated by brand new programmers fresh out of their first semester of high school web design class looking to get up to the next level. Those are the people who are looking for sources they don't know about, so they're exploring, using the search engines, finding what they can, and giving feedback. Established programmers *know* where to find good code, but new programmers are still looking around, and consequently still finding what's out there. They don't yet have the ability to tell good code from bad, so sites like Matt's Script Archive get plenty of good feedback. (Don't believe me? Today, a Google search for perl scripts turns up that site *first*. Before search.cpan.org, before perlmonks, before everything.)
Sure, if you ask anybody who knows the language in question pretty well, he'll steer you in a better direction. But the problem is that Google, at least with its current technology (which, as search engines go, is state of the art at this point in time), can't tell the difference between informed feedback and uninformed feedback.
Remember, nothing naturally falls into a well-organized state. Serious effort has to be put into *getting* it into a well-organized state, or it'll be chaos. This law of entropy was first stated in the realm of thermodynamics, but it is true generally: in the absense of a deliberate directed effort to the contrary, everything in the universe tends toward worthlessness. Wherever you see order, it's the result of hard work on someone's part.
Some kind of feedback on the feedback is needed -- but it needs to work a good deal better than slashdot's meta-moderation. I'm not sure exactly how it needs to work, but it needs to be able to assign value to different sources of feedback, and possibly to sources of the feedback on the feedback as well. And some reliable seeding method is needed, a bootstrap if you will, to anchor the thing so that certain reliable sources of good feedback can be established.
Well, this is off-topic for the current thread, but since you bring it up...
> even if Vista wasn't around, I'd still want to go back to XP. OSX just isn't for me
I find it isn't for me, either. It's impressive in some ways, but certain critical things aren't there that I require. The most important of these is that it's just not configurable enough, and the most critical aspect of that configurability, for me, is the ability to centrally specify a set of preferred colors and have virtually all applications respect them. Windows, Gnome, and KDE have all had that since their inception.
I find too that the Dock on OS X, although it has a trainload of cool eye candy, is in practical terms about a decade behind the docks, taskbars, panels, or whatever else they're called on other systems. In terms of layout it's about as flexible as cement, and it doesn't feature drawers, action buttons (except for application launchers), or discoverable configurability. It seems to be designed to make a first impression, rather than to be convenient over years of use. Also, the distinction between what apps are currently running versus which ones have windows open complicates the task list, both visually and conceptually. You can't just glance; you have to glance and *think*, and for something you do as often as looking to see what's open, that's very unfortunate. This isn't really a dock problem per se, more a consequence of a paradigm that lies deep in the Apple way of thinking about application management, but there has got to be a better way for the dock to deal with it.
This is not to say that OS X doesn't have its strong points. There are some very tempting things about it. But ultimately I found that I care more about these shortcomings than about the shortcomings of the desktop environment I've been using.
> I'd say it's good for any company to have an engineer like this on staff,
> who has guts to face management and speak his or her mind.
I didn't mean to imply that cutting WinFS out of Vista was the wrong decision. I saw a database-ish filesystem before, when I played around with BeOS for a while, and although several things about BeOS impressed me and in my view would be well worth copying in other OSes (this is still true IMO), the filesystem was never one of them. It enabled a variety of cutesy tricks (e.g., address-book files that couldn't be copied to another filesystem or archived (e.g. via tar) because they'd come out as zero bytes and worthless), but its practical usefulness was, in my estimation, virtually nil. (I don't mean that the filesystem was unuseful as a whole -- it was still a filesystem, after all, and the ability to store files on disk is terribly useful -- but only that this feature of it was in practice not useful.)
And the Be filesystem was well-implemented (for what it was) and performed well, which by all accounts cannot be said for WinFS. So I didn't mean to imply that Allchin was wrong to get WinFS axed. I'd have axed it before it was ever called WinFS, if the decision had been mine. I was only saying that this email gives us a look inside MS at what happened behind the scenes to result in the outcome that we saw on the surface, wherein WinFS went from being one of the three big selling points of Vista to having the useful portions of its codebased cherry-picked for inclusion in other projects like SQL Server and other than that being scrapped. That's quite an about-face, and publically we didn't previously know how it came about. Now we have a clue.
The filesystem feature I want is one that VMS has: automatic file versioning.
> Now that Vista is out, you can see he was talking about much more than that.
Perhaps so, but it seems clear that that remark was talking about WinFS specifically. Which implies Allchin was instrumental in killing it. Whatever else he may have been talking about, he may or may not have gotten through to anyone about it, but it seems like on this point he did.
I always wondered what happened to WinFS, because it had been a major sacred cow at MS for quite a while, and although it kept getting pushed back, re-envisioned, and renamed, I was surprised to see them give up on it entirely. Now we know (at least part of) why.