Modern sci-fi viewers who watch the original Star Trek series often wonder why it was so popular, when it's so bad. The answer, of course, is that sci-fi was different back then. It wasn't up to modern standards, not even close. Back then, sci-fi was an ultra-low-budget fringe genre, producing lame B-movies. It frequently got mixed up with horror, too, e.g., in movies like The Crawling Hand.
If you really want to understand why Star Trek became the popular phenomenon that it did, you have to realize that, up until that time, prior to the introduction of Star Trek, the best science-fiction television series had been Doctor Who -- a show about a middle-aged man and two teenagers who travel back through time in a phone booth to visit cavemen and try unsuccessfully to enlighten them to be less violent; I only ever saw one or two episodes, so I may be missing some of the finer points, but trust me the show was at least twice as bad as I've made it sound. Nonetheless, before Star Trek, there was nothing better. When you understand that, then you'll know why Star Trek became so popular, even though TOS was so bad. It was nowhere near as bad as the hopeless drivel that passed for sci-fi television until then.
> Isn't that the greatest headline ever to create a nerd flame war?
If you ran it the other way around (claiming Star Trek is better than Star Wars), you'd get the Star Wars fans riled. But the rivalry is very one-sided.
If you want to get Star Trek fans riled up, you have to talk about Star Trek. For instance, you could argue that STV:TVH should be considered non-canon because of the ridiculous inconsistencies it introduces, both regarding Vulcans and also how long it takes to get to the center of the galaxy at warp six. Or you could talk about the horrible acting non-skills certain well-known Star Trek actors have exhibited. I refer, of course, to Nana Visitor. You thought I meant William Shattner, didn't you? Yeah, he's even worse, but that was TOS anyway, so who cares. I mean, the doors went whoosh...
You get the idea. If you want to get Star Trek fans riled up. You have to talk about Star Trek. Making vague references to the ostensible superiority of another franchise (particularly one that isn't even really sci-fi) barely elicits a yawn.
Besides, the best way to stir up a nerd flame war is to claim that object-oriented programming is a way of "dumbing down" programming and that object-oriented languages actively make programmers stupider and more mistake-prone. That's why Emacs is so much better, because it uses a functional language. It's also why VMS is better than Unix and BeOS. HTH.HAND.
Glenn Beck is not an actual conservative. He's a standard-issue frothing-at-the-mouth "let's get all riled up and behave like lunatics just because we've got nothing better to do" entertainer who happens to use the _word_ "conservative". Most of the people who listen to him don't even know what the word means. You can safely ignore the lot of them.
Some of those ideas are headed in the right direction.
Decoupling medical coverage from employment is an important step that needs to be taken. People need to be able to change jobs without worrying about how it's going to impact their ability to receive medical care. If people are going to have medical plans, then they need to be independent of the employer. Medical coverage only got mixed up with employment in the US in the first place because of ill-advised government meddling (in the form of unwarranted wage and price controls, in a poorly conceived attempt to control inflation by making it illegal). So yeah, we need to fix that. (This does NOT mean everyone should be on the same government-controlled plan. Heck no. It does mean that some legislation will be required, however, to untangle the mess we've gotten ourselves into.)
Even more important, IMO, (and kind of along the same lines) is to outlaw the practice medical "insurance" companies currently have of having contracts with certain health care providers ("in-network") and getting a discount in exchange for steering people their way -- contracts that effectively say, "if you want the business of everyone who does business with us, you have to charge everyone else extra". There's no way this ever should have been legal in the first place. It's reasonable and fair for the insurance company to have policies about what procedures they will cover and for how much, but NOT for which health care providers can provide the services. That decision should always rest with the individual.
The problem with a mandatory HSA is deciding what the mandatory percentage should be. No matter where you set it, it won't be high enough, because fiscally irresponsible idiots who don't have any other savings and are up to their eyeballs in credit-card debt will always find ways to "need" more medical care than they can pay for.
If you think about it, you know this is true. The people who call an ambulance to take them to the emergency room for a routine chest cold, instead of just popping over to Rite-Aid and picking up an over-the-counter expectorant for ten bucks, are not going to suddenly become rational and intelligent just because they're spending money they were personally forced to save. If it's money they can't spend on anything but medical care anyway, they're going to blow it on unnecessary medical care, just like they currently blow all of their money on unnecessary things. The only way to fix this would be to stop people from being stupid and impulsive and irresponsible. Good luck with that.
I don't guess I'm opposed to the mandatory HSA in principle, though (or it could be an option for people who don't want to pay for a medical "insurance" plan), as long as the percentage is sane. Even though no percentage would be high enough for the idiots, a reasonable minimum figure (say, 5% of your gross income) might be better than nothing, and people with larger medical "needs" could be encourage to increase their withholding rate. I suppose there could also be a somewhat higher minimum mandatory percentage for people who've had trouble paying their medical bills in the last N months.
On the other side of the coin, people who have other investments and generally know how to handle money will be complaining about having too much of their money tied up with unnecessary restrictions, which makes it harder to manage. I suppose you could just allow anyone who has at least $N in savings and other liquid investments to "opt-out" of the HSA restrictions, in the same way that people with enough money to be effectively self-insured can currently opt-out of liability insurance for motor vehicle accidents, because if anything happens they can just pay for it. Finding the right value for $N could be a contentious issue, but in principle it should work.
Another thing you don't address that's driving up medical costs is unnecessary stupid litigation. Malpractice lawyers can afford to try dozens and dozens of half-baked cases, be
> On the top there's a quarter who could afford it, but genuinely do not see any value in it
If you have enough money and can handle it well enough to pay your medical bills out of pocket, it's actually a good deal cheaper than medical "insurance". Many Americans can't do this, or think they can't, because medical bills come suddenly and unexpectedly, so you have to actually keep some money set aside in case of sudden and unexpected events.
If you've let the advertisers train you to spend all your money the instant you get it in your hot little hand, then you can't handle money well enough to pay medical bills out of pocket. If you've let the credit card companies train you to spend your money *before* you have it in your hot little hand, then fiscally speaking you're in over your head. How would you pay a multi-thousand-dollar bill that springs up overnight? You can't.
So most Americans are stuck paying for a medical plan (usually marketed as "insurance", although it's not very much like insurance really; insurance is predicated on the premise that most people who pay for the insurance won't need to file any claims, so the premiums can be affordable; with medical "insurance" this is obviously not the case). The medical plan costs you more in the long run -- it has to, because in addition to the medical bills you've also got to pay the salaries of everyone who works for the medical "insurance" company, from the guy who handles your claims right on down to the janitor, not to mention the cost of dealing with people who try to abuse the system, any profit the "insurance" company wants to turn, legal costs that all medical insurance companies incur, and various other incidentals. The cost is going to be higher, for most people, than just paying the medical bills out of pocket.
But your premiums are predictable, and you can have them taken out of your paycheck up front every month, and you don't have a big wad of money sitting in the bank drawing interest and burning a hole in your mind causing you to think of all the things you could be spending it on. "Maybe I *won't* need any medical care! I could just *spend* that money!" Most Americans don't have the fiscal responsibility to handle that, so the medical plan, even though it costs them more money, is a better option.
But, as shocking as it may seem, there are people out there who can actually handle a budget. (There, I did it. I said the B word.) For them, it's cheaper and more fiscally responsible to skip the medical "insurance" and just pay the medical bills as they arise. It costs less.
I'm not talking here about people who are born into an uber-rich family and have infinite resources. I'm just talking about people who know how to handle money. My grandfather didn't inherit his small farm. He spent the first ten years of his career as a farmer paying for it. Then he bought a cattle truck and started a small business on the side, driving other farmers' cattle to market. Later he sold the farm, bought two houses in town, invested what was left over, and got a job in town. When he bought cars, he paid cash for them, because it's cheaper in the long run than loans. When he retired, he sold both of those old two-story homes, bought a small ranch house in a newer neighborhood, and invested what was left over. The whole time they were married (more than 65 years), Grandma never worked outside the home, but they consistently paid all their bills, raised four kids, had enough left to retire, still had enough left a couple of decades later when Gradma had a stroke that they could pay for her to be in the hospital and then in a nursing home for the rest of her life, still had enough left for Grandpa to move into a retirement community after that, and at the end left a small inheritance to their children.
Heck, most colleges and even a lot of state university websites don't show up on that image, only the really big ones. For kicks I looked up the only accreditation agency I could think of off the top of my head, and it was sized at 8x8 pixels. Nevermind about local K-12 school districts and private schools and regional little league organizations and such. No way they'd show up.
> It gives you a visual feel for how vast the net is, > with all the favicons stretching back into space > until they're just indistinguishable dots.
Actually, this image doesn't even scratch the surface on that, because they cut it off at a mere million sites. The top million sites may account for most of the traffic, but it's a tiny fraction of the total number of actual sites (and I mean *actual* sites, not parked domains). There are fairly popular sites (as in, thousands of *regular* readers) that don't show at all, nevermind about sites that are actually obscure. I looked up a couple dozen sites that I visit periodically, and about half of them weren't represented. *Most* websites, of course, have fewer than a hundred regular readers. Many have *no* regular readers, but many more have a small handful. Small businesses, local government agencies, local churches and not-for-profits, family sites, personal/vanity sites,... Search for anything and go to about the fiftieth page of Google results. Searching for most things, there are *thousands* of pages of results -- but after about thirty pages (forty or fifty for competitive terms) you're unlikely to find much that shows up on this nmap image.
The net is much bigger than you realize. In fact, just the part of the net hosted in Mexico is probably larger than your conception of the whole worldwide internet.
A lot of rules are different in Vegas. Gambling, for instance, is legal there even if the games are run by private enterprise (whereas, gambling is almost universally illegal in the United States except when run by a government or non-profit organization). Basically, the local law enforcement is effectively at least half way under the thumb of the casinos.
However, "they'll throw you in prison IF you can't pay your debts" does not really describe debtor's prison. Debtor's prison is when they'll throw you in prison *until* you pay your debts, just because you can't pay, irrespective of how the debt was incurred. If you do something illegal (bounce a check, for instance -- yeah, it's a minor crime, but it IS illegal) and they throw you in jail for some fixed term determined at sentencing, or until your (speedy and public) trial comes up, that's fundamentally different from "Oh, man, a storm wiped out half my crop this year and I can't make my crop-share. I'd better skip town before the land owner has me tossed in the clink, or I won't get out until my family coughs up the whole amount!"
> turning on package-survey would be rather useless for their purposes
Right, I didn't mean that this is the _same_ as package-survey in terms of what it accomplishes, or that Canonical should just use package-survey instead of this. I mentioned it only as a precedent in the Linux community for opt-in phone-home stuff.
Debtor's prison does not exist in the US, for historical reasons. (Basically, at the time our constitution was written debtor's prison was being, or had recently been, significantly abused in Europe as a political tool to squelch opposition. Our founding fathers did Not Want That Happening Here, so they proscribed debtor's prison entirely.)
The provision that prevents our congressmen from being stopped and prosecuted if they are on their way to a session of congress exists for similar reasons. Also the third amendment in the Bill of Rights.
However, we *can* throw somebody in prison for a crime, and I'm pretty sure fraud on this kind of scope qualifies. Unfortunately, our courts are generally pretty soft on white-collar crime. But that's not a constitutional issue, just a practical and social and judicial one. Come to that, our entire judicial system is pretty severely broken at this point.
> FORCE the company to sell their products at government-determined fair prices
Anything but that. That would be *significantly* worse than the existing problem.
> Fine them? This is the problem. There is no punishment.
Depends on the amount of the fine. If, for instance, you fine them the full retail price of all the price-fixed merchandise they have sold since they started doing it, that would be a major deterrent. (The company might or might not survive that. Whether it does or doesn't isn't really important.)
That's not, of course, what will actually happen. They will be fined some ridiculously tiny amount, which sounds large to most people in a lump sum but is nothing compared to the amount they have made on the price-fixed merchandise. You know, three million dollars or something like that, which is, as you say, no punishment. But it's not no punishment because it's a fine; it's no punishment because it's far too *small* a fine.
> FORBID them from doing business in the US.
That sounds like it would work, but in practice it would have very little impact. (All you do is spin off a legally separate distribution company, sell to them at a price that gives the parent company almost all of the profit, and let the distribution company handle business within the country in question.)
There is strong evidence that it can, under the right circumstances, take considerably less time than that. For example, a small amount of (what basically amounts to) crude oil has formed in the Spirit Lake area (in Washington state) within my lifetime.
How often this occurs, and how much crude oil is produced this way, remains very much an open question. It seems likely we may be using oil significantly faster than such events can supply it.
> I'm curious what technical challenges would have to be > overcome to actually recover this frozen water.
Why bother?
Northwestern Greenland has plenty of water to meet the needs of the rather limited population.
Surely you weren't thinking of trying to transport it...
> Off the top of my head, I was musing about getting it into
Oh. You were.
> the Great Lakes
Sure, because the Great Lakes area doesn't have enough water. We barely spend even a third of the year complaining about the excessive amounts of water falling from the sky all the blessed time. I mean, it only goes crazy and rains thirty or forty hours a week for three or four months (late March through the middle of July) most years, and the rest of the year it only precipitates two or three times as much as would be necessary to keep us in fresh drinking water. Enough? Never! Let's get us a glacier and see if we can *increase* the amount of extra water! Yay!
I'll tell you what. You dream up a magically affordable way to transport an object more than three times the size of Manhattan all the way from Greenland to someplace like northern Nigeria, where they actually *want* more water, before it melts or absorbs too much seawater to be potable. Meanwhile, I'll be over here in the real world, not holding my breath.
Sure it has. For instance, if you were away from your computer for a while (farfetched, I know, but bear with me here) and a whole bunch of new stories were posted and some of them lost their place on the front page, it used to be possible to torture yourself by clicking an "older stories" link , which would take you to a new page that would *start* with the story just previous to the bottom (chronologically first) one on the page you were just looking at. If you (heaven forfend) went on vacation for a whole week, you could come back and incrementally read through the headlines on every single story you had missed, in order, page by page. But they fixed that now. HTH.HAND.
> its just sad Ubuntu gets all the publicity when > they just reap the benefits of Debian's hard work.
Whose fault is that?
Ubuntu arguably exists, or certainly became as popular as it is, because the Debian people went into some kind of coma or something and completely stopped producing stable releases for several years.
At a time when cutting-edge distros were all moving to Linux 2.6 and conservative distributions and ones that hadn't been updated lately were still using 2.4.x, the Debian installer was asking users if they wanted to try the "new" 2.2 kernel, which might not be totally ready for prime time yet, or stick with the tried and true 2.0 kernel.
Other packages were similarly ancient. If you wanted to install an application that wasn't included in the distribution, or a newer version of some key application, well that was just too bad, because there was no way anything would compile against libraries that old. Reasonable people had pretty much given up on Debian. The word "stable" became a joke. Debian wasn't just stable -- it was of purely historical interest.
Ubuntu came out with an actual release, and people flocked to it, for obvious reasons. Then *another* Ubuntu release came out, and *more* people moved to it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Some of us moved back to Debian when sarge finally came out, but we half expected to end up moving back to Ubuntu, because we didn't really expect the next release to come out in a reasonable timeframe. After the experience we'd just had, we were pretty jaded. The next release (etch) was a little slow in coming too, so some of us were pretty nervous for a while about whether we'd be able to stay with Debian. It wasn't until Lenny came out that I was able to really settle down as a Debian user.
So you might say this news that Squeeze has frozen is "welcome news".
You're making my point for me. Chant doesn't have counterpoint. Neither does the drivel they play on the radio, by the way. With a few exceptions, the principle of contrario motu was pretty much abandoned in the eighteenth century and replaced with mere harmony (dependent backup parts, written around the lead, with no life of their own, no contrary motion, no real interaction, no auditory moire effect -- in short, no real musical quality).
> You can only view a small number of pages of each book, which is > pretty useless from the point of view of public uses that come to mind.
It's useful to the public for the purpose of search -- being able to *find* what you're looking for, even if it's not in the bibliographic data and only appears embedded in the text someplace. I wish the catalog computers at the public library could do that. It brings us one step closer to LCARS.
I haven't browsed with page-specified colors turned on ever since I realized, back in the nineties, that most web content creators have extremely terrible taste in colors. Web pages appear in the system colors (#FFE6BC on #294D4A), same as everything else. That way I can actually stand to look at them.
Kids don't need computer classes. They *grew up* with computers. Computers are no more mystifying to them than telephones, stereos, toasters, microwave ovens, or refrigerators. Do they teach classes in how to use those things?
It's middle-aged people who need computer classes. Ten or fifteen years ago it was the elderly, but most of them have now taken the computer classes they needed. They were retired and had time, so hey, why not? The middle-aged people, who were busy working at the time, never bothered, so now they are unemployed and don't know how to fill out an online job application. They're the ones who need the computer classes.
The kids could *teach* the adults how to use computers, if they had the patience for it, but most kids are a little short on patience when it comes to such things. Anything they've known for more than a year is "kids stuff" and anybody who doesn't know it is "dumb" and they don't want to take the time to slow down and explain everything.
I'm assuming here that by "computer classes" we're talking about basic everyday stuff schools always want to teach, like how to create documents and surf the web. Kids (especially ones who might some day want to go into an IT-related profession) could benefit from courses in more advanced topics, of course.
Egad. Is there any way that could be construed as a good thing? Call me a curmudgeon, but, seriously, bluegrass? Next you'll be talking about how polka is gaining popularity and disco is coming back. There are some musical forms we're better off without.
> Libraries bypass this system by actually purchasing works and then making > them available free, entirely bypassing the intent of Copyright to our benefit.
You could say the same thing about used book stores.
Libraries do not make copies. They lend them, but each copy still only goes to one person (err, one household, really, but the same caveat applies to a book or movie you buy at the store) at a time. If a book (say, the latest Grisham lawyer novel) is popular, libraries have to buy numerous copies in order to keep up with demand, or else the waiting list gets too long (and people end up just going out and buying their own copies, which after being read once usually end up donated for the Friends of the Library used book sale...)
Libraries do not prevent authors from making a profit on their books. In fact, aspiring authors are generally extremely eager for their books to get into libraries. It's not as good as being featured on Oprah, but it's a big step in the same direction.
Libraries are older than copyright law. I don't think it's reasonable to say that libraries "bypass the intent" of copyright. Copyright law was written with the understanding that libraries would exist. It would have been easy enough for the people who wrote copyright law to write in "exclusive lending rights" for the copyright holder, but they did not choose to do so, because libraries are entirely consistent with the original intent of copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh.
Modern sci-fi viewers who watch the original Star Trek series often wonder why it was so popular, when it's so bad. The answer, of course, is that sci-fi was different back then. It wasn't up to modern standards, not even close. Back then, sci-fi was an ultra-low-budget fringe genre, producing lame B-movies. It frequently got mixed up with horror, too, e.g., in movies like The Crawling Hand.
If you really want to understand why Star Trek became the popular phenomenon that it did, you have to realize that, up until that time, prior to the introduction of Star Trek, the best science-fiction television series had been Doctor Who -- a show about a middle-aged man and two teenagers who travel back through time in a phone booth to visit cavemen and try unsuccessfully to enlighten them to be less violent; I only ever saw one or two episodes, so I may be missing some of the finer points, but trust me the show was at least twice as bad as I've made it sound. Nonetheless, before Star Trek, there was nothing better. When you understand that, then you'll know why Star Trek became so popular, even though TOS was so bad. It was nowhere near as bad as the hopeless drivel that passed for sci-fi television until then.
> Isn't that the greatest headline ever to create a nerd flame war?
If you ran it the other way around (claiming Star Trek is better than Star Wars), you'd get the Star Wars fans riled. But the rivalry is very one-sided.
If you want to get Star Trek fans riled up, you have to talk about Star Trek. For instance, you could argue that STV:TVH should be considered non-canon because of the ridiculous inconsistencies it introduces, both regarding Vulcans and also how long it takes to get to the center of the galaxy at warp six. Or you could talk about the horrible acting non-skills certain well-known Star Trek actors have exhibited. I refer, of course, to Nana Visitor. You thought I meant William Shattner, didn't you? Yeah, he's even worse, but that was TOS anyway, so who cares. I mean, the doors went whoosh...
You get the idea. If you want to get Star Trek fans riled up. You have to talk about Star Trek. Making vague references to the ostensible superiority of another franchise (particularly one that isn't even really sci-fi) barely elicits a yawn.
Besides, the best way to stir up a nerd flame war is to claim that object-oriented programming is a way of "dumbing down" programming and that object-oriented languages actively make programmers stupider and more mistake-prone. That's why Emacs is so much better, because it uses a functional language. It's also why VMS is better than Unix and BeOS. HTH.HAND.
Glenn Beck is not an actual conservative. He's a standard-issue frothing-at-the-mouth "let's get all riled up and behave like lunatics just because we've got nothing better to do" entertainer who happens to use the _word_ "conservative". Most of the people who listen to him don't even know what the word means. You can safely ignore the lot of them.
I've actually seen PowerPoint used effectively, in a way that enhanced the presentation rather than actively detracting.
Once.
Some of those ideas are headed in the right direction.
Decoupling medical coverage from employment is an important step that needs to be taken. People need to be able to change jobs without worrying about how it's going to impact their ability to receive medical care. If people are going to have medical plans, then they need to be independent of the employer. Medical coverage only got mixed up with employment in the US in the first place because of ill-advised government meddling (in the form of unwarranted wage and price controls, in a poorly conceived attempt to control inflation by making it illegal). So yeah, we need to fix that. (This does NOT mean everyone should be on the same government-controlled plan. Heck no. It does mean that some legislation will be required, however, to untangle the mess we've gotten ourselves into.)
Even more important, IMO, (and kind of along the same lines) is to outlaw the practice medical "insurance" companies currently have of having contracts with certain health care providers ("in-network") and getting a discount in exchange for steering people their way -- contracts that effectively say, "if you want the business of everyone who does business with us, you have to charge everyone else extra". There's no way this ever should have been legal in the first place. It's reasonable and fair for the insurance company to have policies about what procedures they will cover and for how much, but NOT for which health care providers can provide the services. That decision should always rest with the individual.
The problem with a mandatory HSA is deciding what the mandatory percentage should be. No matter where you set it, it won't be high enough, because fiscally irresponsible idiots who don't have any other savings and are up to their eyeballs in credit-card debt will always find ways to "need" more medical care than they can pay for.
If you think about it, you know this is true. The people who call an ambulance to take them to the emergency room for a routine chest cold, instead of just popping over to Rite-Aid and picking up an over-the-counter expectorant for ten bucks, are not going to suddenly become rational and intelligent just because they're spending money they were personally forced to save. If it's money they can't spend on anything but medical care anyway, they're going to blow it on unnecessary medical care, just like they currently blow all of their money on unnecessary things. The only way to fix this would be to stop people from being stupid and impulsive and irresponsible. Good luck with that.
I don't guess I'm opposed to the mandatory HSA in principle, though (or it could be an option for people who don't want to pay for a medical "insurance" plan), as long as the percentage is sane. Even though no percentage would be high enough for the idiots, a reasonable minimum figure (say, 5% of your gross income) might be better than nothing, and people with larger medical "needs" could be encourage to increase their withholding rate. I suppose there could also be a somewhat higher minimum mandatory percentage for people who've had trouble paying their medical bills in the last N months.
On the other side of the coin, people who have other investments and generally know how to handle money will be complaining about having too much of their money tied up with unnecessary restrictions, which makes it harder to manage. I suppose you could just allow anyone who has at least $N in savings and other liquid investments to "opt-out" of the HSA restrictions, in the same way that people with enough money to be effectively self-insured can currently opt-out of liability insurance for motor vehicle accidents, because if anything happens they can just pay for it. Finding the right value for $N could be a contentious issue, but in principle it should work.
Another thing you don't address that's driving up medical costs is unnecessary stupid litigation. Malpractice lawyers can afford to try dozens and dozens of half-baked cases, be
> On the top there's a quarter who could afford it, but genuinely do not see any value in it
If you have enough money and can handle it well enough to pay your medical bills out of pocket, it's actually a good deal cheaper than medical "insurance". Many Americans can't do this, or think they can't, because medical bills come suddenly and unexpectedly, so you have to actually keep some money set aside in case of sudden and unexpected events.
If you've let the advertisers train you to spend all your money the instant you get it in your hot little hand, then you can't handle money well enough to pay medical bills out of pocket. If you've let the credit card companies train you to spend your money *before* you have it in your hot little hand, then fiscally speaking you're in over your head. How would you pay a multi-thousand-dollar bill that springs up overnight? You can't.
So most Americans are stuck paying for a medical plan (usually marketed as "insurance", although it's not very much like insurance really; insurance is predicated on the premise that most people who pay for the insurance won't need to file any claims, so the premiums can be affordable; with medical "insurance" this is obviously not the case). The medical plan costs you more in the long run -- it has to, because in addition to the medical bills you've also got to pay the salaries of everyone who works for the medical "insurance" company, from the guy who handles your claims right on down to the janitor, not to mention the cost of dealing with people who try to abuse the system, any profit the "insurance" company wants to turn, legal costs that all medical insurance companies incur, and various other incidentals. The cost is going to be higher, for most people, than just paying the medical bills out of pocket.
But your premiums are predictable, and you can have them taken out of your paycheck up front every month, and you don't have a big wad of money sitting in the bank drawing interest and burning a hole in your mind causing you to think of all the things you could be spending it on. "Maybe I *won't* need any medical care! I could just *spend* that money!" Most Americans don't have the fiscal responsibility to handle that, so the medical plan, even though it costs them more money, is a better option.
But, as shocking as it may seem, there are people out there who can actually handle a budget. (There, I did it. I said the B word.) For them, it's cheaper and more fiscally responsible to skip the medical "insurance" and just pay the medical bills as they arise. It costs less.
I'm not talking here about people who are born into an uber-rich family and have infinite resources. I'm just talking about people who know how to handle money. My grandfather didn't inherit his small farm. He spent the first ten years of his career as a farmer paying for it. Then he bought a cattle truck and started a small business on the side, driving other farmers' cattle to market. Later he sold the farm, bought two houses in town, invested what was left over, and got a job in town. When he bought cars, he paid cash for them, because it's cheaper in the long run than loans. When he retired, he sold both of those old two-story homes, bought a small ranch house in a newer neighborhood, and invested what was left over. The whole time they were married (more than 65 years), Grandma never worked outside the home, but they consistently paid all their bills, raised four kids, had enough left to retire, still had enough left a couple of decades later when Gradma had a stroke that they could pay for her to be in the hospital and then in a nursing home for the rest of her life, still had enough left for Grandpa to move into a retirement community after that, and at the end left a small inheritance to their children.
Heck, most colleges and even a lot of state university websites don't show up on that image, only the really big ones. For kicks I looked up the only accreditation agency I could think of off the top of my head, and it was sized at 8x8 pixels. Nevermind about local K-12 school districts and private schools and regional little league organizations and such. No way they'd show up.
> It gives you a visual feel for how vast the net is,
... Search for anything and go to about the fiftieth page of Google results. Searching for most things, there are *thousands* of pages of results -- but after about thirty pages (forty or fifty for competitive terms) you're unlikely to find much that shows up on this nmap image.
> with all the favicons stretching back into space
> until they're just indistinguishable dots.
Actually, this image doesn't even scratch the surface on that, because they cut it off at a mere million sites. The top million sites may account for most of the traffic, but it's a tiny fraction of the total number of actual sites (and I mean *actual* sites, not parked domains). There are fairly popular sites (as in, thousands of *regular* readers) that don't show at all, nevermind about sites that are actually obscure. I looked up a couple dozen sites that I visit periodically, and about half of them weren't represented. *Most* websites, of course, have fewer than a hundred regular readers. Many have *no* regular readers, but many more have a small handful. Small businesses, local government agencies, local churches and not-for-profits, family sites, personal/vanity sites,
The net is much bigger than you realize. In fact, just the part of the net hosted in Mexico is probably larger than your conception of the whole worldwide internet.
A lot of rules are different in Vegas. Gambling, for instance, is legal there even if the games are run by private enterprise (whereas, gambling is almost universally illegal in the United States except when run by a government or non-profit organization). Basically, the local law enforcement is effectively at least half way under the thumb of the casinos.
However, "they'll throw you in prison IF you can't pay your debts" does not really describe debtor's prison. Debtor's prison is when they'll throw you in prison *until* you pay your debts, just because you can't pay, irrespective of how the debt was incurred. If you do something illegal (bounce a check, for instance -- yeah, it's a minor crime, but it IS illegal) and they throw you in jail for some fixed term determined at sentencing, or until your (speedy and public) trial comes up, that's fundamentally different from "Oh, man, a storm wiped out half my crop this year and I can't make my crop-share. I'd better skip town before the land owner has me tossed in the clink, or I won't get out until my family coughs up the whole amount!"
> turning on package-survey would be rather useless for their purposes
Right, I didn't mean that this is the _same_ as package-survey in terms of what it accomplishes, or that Canonical should just use package-survey instead of this. I mentioned it only as a precedent in the Linux community for opt-in phone-home stuff.
> Maybe it'll be an option on the installer or a first-run question on OEM installs.
You mean like the package-survey in Debian? Wow, what a novel concept!
Debtor's prison does not exist in the US, for historical reasons. (Basically, at the time our constitution was written debtor's prison was being, or had recently been, significantly abused in Europe as a political tool to squelch opposition. Our founding fathers did Not Want That Happening Here, so they proscribed debtor's prison entirely.)
The provision that prevents our congressmen from being stopped and prosecuted if they are on their way to a session of congress exists for similar reasons. Also the third amendment in the Bill of Rights.
However, we *can* throw somebody in prison for a crime, and I'm pretty sure fraud on this kind of scope qualifies. Unfortunately, our courts are generally pretty soft on white-collar crime. But that's not a constitutional issue, just a practical and social and judicial one. Come to that, our entire judicial system is pretty severely broken at this point.
> There is no 'value' outside of the human mind.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there's no value *in* the human mind. But that's another topic.
> FORCE the company to sell their products at government-determined fair prices
Anything but that. That would be *significantly* worse than the existing problem.
> Fine them? This is the problem. There is no punishment.
Depends on the amount of the fine. If, for instance, you fine them the full retail price of all the price-fixed merchandise they have sold since they started doing it, that would be a major deterrent. (The company might or might not survive that. Whether it does or doesn't isn't really important.)
That's not, of course, what will actually happen. They will be fined some ridiculously tiny amount, which sounds large to most people in a lump sum but is nothing compared to the amount they have made on the price-fixed merchandise. You know, three million dollars or something like that, which is, as you say, no punishment. But it's not no punishment because it's a fine; it's no punishment because it's far too *small* a fine.
> FORBID them from doing business in the US.
That sounds like it would work, but in practice it would have very little impact. (All you do is spin off a legally separate distribution company, sell to them at a price that gives the parent company almost all of the profit, and let the distribution company handle business within the country in question.)
> Only takes a few million years
There is strong evidence that it can, under the right circumstances, take considerably less time than that. For example, a small amount of (what basically amounts to) crude oil has formed in the Spirit Lake area (in Washington state) within my lifetime.
How often this occurs, and how much crude oil is produced this way, remains very much an open question. It seems likely we may be using oil significantly faster than such events can supply it.
But "a few million of years" is an overstatement.
> I'm curious what technical challenges would have to be
> overcome to actually recover this frozen water.
Why bother?
Northwestern Greenland has plenty of water to meet the needs of the rather limited population.
Surely you weren't thinking of trying to transport it...
> Off the top of my head, I was musing about getting it into
Oh. You were.
> the Great Lakes
Sure, because the Great Lakes area doesn't have enough water. We barely spend even a third of the year complaining about the excessive amounts of water falling from the sky all the blessed time. I mean, it only goes crazy and rains thirty or forty hours a week for three or four months (late March through the middle of July) most years, and the rest of the year it only precipitates two or three times as much as would be necessary to keep us in fresh drinking water. Enough? Never! Let's get us a glacier and see if we can *increase* the amount of extra water! Yay!
I'll tell you what. You dream up a magically affordable way to transport an object more than three times the size of Manhattan all the way from Greenland to someplace like northern Nigeria, where they actually *want* more water, before it melts or absorbs too much seawater to be potable. Meanwhile, I'll be over here in the real world, not holding my breath.
> Nothing here has been fixed in years.
Sure it has. For instance, if you were away from your computer for a while (farfetched, I know, but bear with me here) and a whole bunch of new stories were posted and some of them lost their place on the front page, it used to be possible to torture yourself by clicking an "older stories" link , which would take you to a new page that would *start* with the story just previous to the bottom (chronologically first) one on the page you were just looking at. If you (heaven forfend) went on vacation for a whole week, you could come back and incrementally read through the headlines on every single story you had missed, in order, page by page. But they fixed that now. HTH.HAND.
> I know that living organisms don't just "absorb" DNA.
He meant that the (genome of the) _population_ would absorb the additional genetic possibilities, not that individual organisms would do so.
> its just sad Ubuntu gets all the publicity when
> they just reap the benefits of Debian's hard work.
Whose fault is that?
Ubuntu arguably exists, or certainly became as popular as it is, because the Debian people went into some kind of coma or something and completely stopped producing stable releases for several years.
At a time when cutting-edge distros were all moving to Linux 2.6 and conservative distributions and ones that hadn't been updated lately were still using 2.4.x, the Debian installer was asking users if they wanted to try the "new" 2.2 kernel, which might not be totally ready for prime time yet, or stick with the tried and true 2.0 kernel.
Other packages were similarly ancient. If you wanted to install an application that wasn't included in the distribution, or a newer version of some key application, well that was just too bad, because there was no way anything would compile against libraries that old. Reasonable people had pretty much given up on Debian. The word "stable" became a joke. Debian wasn't just stable -- it was of purely historical interest.
Ubuntu came out with an actual release, and people flocked to it, for obvious reasons. Then *another* Ubuntu release came out, and *more* people moved to it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Some of us moved back to Debian when sarge finally came out, but we half expected to end up moving back to Ubuntu, because we didn't really expect the next release to come out in a reasonable timeframe. After the experience we'd just had, we were pretty jaded. The next release (etch) was a little slow in coming too, so some of us were pretty nervous for a while about whether we'd be able to stay with Debian. It wasn't until Lenny came out that I was able to really settle down as a Debian user.
So you might say this news that Squeeze has frozen is "welcome news".
You're making my point for me. Chant doesn't have counterpoint. Neither does the drivel they play on the radio, by the way. With a few exceptions, the principle of contrario motu was pretty much abandoned in the eighteenth century and replaced with mere harmony (dependent backup parts, written around the lead, with no life of their own, no contrary motion, no real interaction, no auditory moire effect -- in short, no real musical quality).
> You can only view a small number of pages of each book, which is
> pretty useless from the point of view of public uses that come to mind.
It's useful to the public for the purpose of search -- being able to *find* what you're looking for, even if it's not in the bibliographic data and only appears embedded in the text someplace. I wish the catalog computers at the public library could do that. It brings us one step closer to LCARS.
I haven't browsed with page-specified colors turned on ever since I realized, back in the nineties, that most web content creators have extremely terrible taste in colors. Web pages appear in the system colors (#FFE6BC on #294D4A), same as everything else. That way I can actually stand to look at them.
Kids don't need computer classes. They *grew up* with computers. Computers are no more mystifying to them than telephones, stereos, toasters, microwave ovens, or refrigerators. Do they teach classes in how to use those things?
It's middle-aged people who need computer classes. Ten or fifteen years ago it was the elderly, but most of them have now taken the computer classes they needed. They were retired and had time, so hey, why not? The middle-aged people, who were busy working at the time, never bothered, so now they are unemployed and don't know how to fill out an online job application. They're the ones who need the computer classes.
The kids could *teach* the adults how to use computers, if they had the patience for it, but most kids are a little short on patience when it comes to such things. Anything they've known for more than a year is "kids stuff" and anybody who doesn't know it is "dumb" and they don't want to take the time to slow down and explain everything.
I'm assuming here that by "computer classes" we're talking about basic everyday stuff schools always want to teach, like how to create documents and surf the web. Kids (especially ones who might some day want to go into an IT-related profession) could benefit from courses in more advanced topics, of course.
> bluegrass of all things is getting a resurgence
Egad. Is there any way that could be construed as a good thing? Call me a curmudgeon, but, seriously, bluegrass? Next you'll be talking about how polka is gaining popularity and disco is coming back. There are some musical forms we're better off without.
> Libraries bypass this system by actually purchasing works and then making
> them available free, entirely bypassing the intent of Copyright to our benefit.
You could say the same thing about used book stores.
Libraries do not make copies. They lend them, but each copy still only goes to one person (err, one household, really, but the same caveat applies to a book or movie you buy at the store) at a time. If a book (say, the latest Grisham lawyer novel) is popular, libraries have to buy numerous copies in order to keep up with demand, or else the waiting list gets too long (and people end up just going out and buying their own copies, which after being read once usually end up donated for the Friends of the Library used book sale...)
Libraries do not prevent authors from making a profit on their books. In fact, aspiring authors are generally extremely eager for their books to get into libraries. It's not as good as being featured on Oprah, but it's a big step in the same direction.
Libraries are older than copyright law. I don't think it's reasonable to say that libraries "bypass the intent" of copyright. Copyright law was written with the understanding that libraries would exist. It would have been easy enough for the people who wrote copyright law to write in "exclusive lending rights" for the copyright holder, but they did not choose to do so, because libraries are entirely consistent with the original intent of copyright.