The healthcare reform has given the health care industry a great excuse for screwing people. I got one of those "rate increases". It was a full page of "we're screwing you over because the gov't made us do it" crap. All emphasis on what you've lost and how much extra it's going to cost, without a single mention of all of the extra benefits you get.
Face it, the health care industry hates this reform, and they will screw you over for a dime.
New laws? Ahhh - I see. You're part of the problem.
Huh?! Crime will always seek new avenues of least resistance. New technology creates new opportunities, and not just for consumers but for those with base motives. Once we figure out what we don't want to happen, we have to create laws against it.
If you don't have a law against it, it's not a crime. Spam didn't used to be a crime. At one time, hacking into a system connected to a public carrier (eg internet or modem) was not a crime since you didn't physically enter the premises; thus no B&E and no crime.
We have to create new, effective laws against new exploits against the public good. That's the way civilization responds to change.
Hmmm... I spend time in Japan - I was there last summer - and I've yet to see an iPhone in someone's hand. Who's buying all of these phones? None of the students or their moms, that's for sure. I don't recall seeing any in the businessmen's hands either.
I've never seen one for sale in Tokyo or Yokohama, but then again, I was not looking for one either.
I wonder if there's a market segment that's not visible? Or if there's some different way of counting? Say, a Docomo handset is counted in a different way from a iPhone handset?
BTW, I know obese people, blind people, and have met a man with one leg all who have ran a marathon. I suspect the on'y reason you think you can not is because you don't want to do it
I'm a personal trainer and a group fitness instructor, as well as an endurance cyclist. Nope, my body will not stand up to the pounding of a marathon. No way, no how. After 13 miles, my knees and hips are done.
And contrary to what TV may tell us, pretty much ayone who properly applies themselves can be a great chef. The work isn't really that hard.*
*I was trained as a chef, but I found it a horrible job, surrounded by uneducated people. I was trained in 1983-4; did the gob in 85. I consider it 'Shit I did while waiting for the computer stuff to take off'~.
You might have been a good cook, but to be a great chef you need to have a love and a deep understanding of food. If you consider the job shit, your food will taste likewise. I am a fair cook; I've run kitchens before and still do on occasion. A friend of mine is a great chef, and nothing I can do will allow my meager talents to match his.
Anyone with that aspiration can teach themselves what they need to, go to school or get training, and do it. Especially for that type of discipline(physics/math) where prerequisite knowledge is more important than original thinking.
You're not serious, are you?
You mean I can train myself to have perfect pitch, like some musicians? Or to have perfect color sense, like artists? Or a deep understanding of multiple dimensions?
That's like saying that we can all play basketball like Wilt Chamberlain, or ride a bike like Lance Armstrong.
Each brain is drastically different, each is capable of different things. No amount of training will make my daughter an engineer like her brother in spite of her nearly perfect math skills. No amount of training will give my son the empathy to deal with animals like his sister has.
Brains are as different as our bodies, and no amount of training will let me run a marathon; my body won't allow it. For some, no amount of training will let them keep up with me on a bicycle.
No amount of training will let most people keep up with me in my field of intellectual expertise; I have great vision in that one area, and I'm a total doofus in others.
Yeah, I can learn to flip burgers. But that won't let me compete with an accomplished chef, who has talent and vision.
No they don't. We use a proprietary, closed source "ticket management system" for lack of a better word. This thing is horrid; it has no recordkeeping, no search to speak of, no customization.... I could go on. We also have no direct access to the database; all we can get is a CD of what are essentially static pages of a particular issue.
It's also pretty close to being abandoned. No new licenses are sold and no new features are being added; the whole thing is in maintenance mode.
They jumped the subcription about 6 fold last year. I argued strenuously for something like RT, even worked out the cost of adding our needed features - 1/10 of the cost of the annual subscription of the proprietary product.
No dice. Not windows based, not supported by a major vendor, not approved by MS.
They're back to evaluating other, closed source, proprietary, locked in systems. So basically some people never learn.
I washed my hands of the whole deal when I was told "That's not how we do enterprise" as a response to my suggestion to use FOSS.
At some point, though, you have to let her jump off the couch and whack her head. And stand by and let it happen.
Because if you always catch her, she never learns that there are things in this world that will hurt, will main, will destroy her life.
My kids have gone through their share of bruises, head whacks, and such. If they make a bad decision, and it won't hurt them permanently, I let it ride.
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
Absolutely. We have some friends who micro-managed their daughter. Now she's 13, has already been thrown out of 2 schools, and on and on. Kids need room to be kids.
Teach your kids to do the right thing. To do that you have to actually live that way too - it does no good to preach the evils of drunk driving, then have 4 beers with dinner and drive home.
Set the example, trust your kids to do the right thing, and talk to them.
Bringing your kids up right is all about respect. I encourage my kids to keep their passwords private, I don't snoop on them, and I encourage them to talk to me.
That's much harder and much more effective than some stupid filter.
I've got a small home network. It has a handful of IP cameras, a few access points, some wifi gadgets, a couple of laptops, and 3 "regular" computers.
As everything works, it's not unusual for me to lose track of some gadget after a year or two, or to notice a "new" gadget that's actually been there.
Now imagine that you have a 10,000 of these sorts of setups, but each has 1,000 nodes. And each has an admin or a group of admins that do what they need to to make their management happy. And now move the admins around every 2-4 years like the military does.
Just because you have a lot of them, doesn't mean they're redundant or in any way coordinated.
Most are probably just a local chief/commander/boss saying "we need XYZ, get us some computers".
I can see some serious redundancy in DOD computers; basically you want each field unit to have some data center capability in case the grid goes down. They need to be able to run their own affairs at the very least.
But entities like the VA and the Education folks? They don't really need redundancy to any great extent; a few mirrored datacenters around the country should work fine.
You are suffering from the failed logic that government actually acts rational.
In fact, the revenue streams won't decrease your tax burden, instead they just give raises to employees, elected officials, find a way to work bonuses or more/better benefits into the public sector, and end up spending more.
You need to take off your teabagger hat. I work in the public sector, and I tell you that the last thing an elected official will do is give public employees a raise. We advertised for a traffic engineer; even in this horrendous job market it took 3 months to get 4 qualified applicants. Public sector pay is, for the most part, crap. I get about 75 cents on the dollar compared to private sector work. Most public service employees I know have some sort of side income - rentals, side business, etc - that increase their take home pay.
Government is funny that way, they think once the money is in their hands, they have to spend it.
You're right there, but the money is spent on pet projects, pie in the sky dreams, and stuff like that. They spend the money on what gets them re-elected, what YOU demand they provide YOU. They don't spend a dime on their own employees unless they have to. Any politician that would champion raises to staff, either as pay increases or better benefits, would not be re-elected next time around.
Once the economy improves, there will be a huge exodus of qualified public sector employees into the private sector, to the detriment of public service. Heck, I'm on my way out.
What happens is that once all the good people leave for better paying jobs, leaving mostly the lazy, indolent, and stupid, and a handful of people truly dedicated to service to the public. Then the politicians notice, run around in a panic, give everyone raises, thus rewarding the unqualified for their inability to find a better job.
But... A lot psy-ops goes into these decoys. They're meant to confuse, delay, etc.
OK, you know that 10 planes on the airstrip are real, and 30 are fake. But the pilot who's trying to take them out will have flak, AAA, all sorts of things getting thrown at him. The decoys will be positioned to look like the more promising targets of opportunity. With the same infrared and radar signature, it's hard to pick out the ones you want.
Better yet, move 10 real units into place. Camouflage them. Now blow up 10 decoys next to them. What will the pilot/gunner hit?
The decoys are just one small part of the overall picture. Google for CCD - Camouflage, Concealement, and Deception.
I actually tried to get permission from ASCAP et al to play music in a particular setting. Turns out that there is no way to get permission to play music publicly unless you do so professionally (as in, a DJ or a band).
There's also no way to get permission to mix your own CDs and compilations unless you do so professionally and sell at least 200 of the compilations.
Along the way, no one at ASCAP could actually explain the process for getting legal access, or provide any sort of information other than referring me to other people in the organization and in outside organizations, none of whom were able to help or would return phone calls or emails.
So this is sort of a chicken and egg problem; the music industry *could* solve a lot of piracy by offering a simple, legal access to their catalog by those who want to, but for whatever reasons they choose not to do so.
So clearly the music industry itself does not assign a significant value to entities who are not large profit centers. In light of this, I really don't understand why they are suing those very people.
I for one would pay a fee to have full, unfettered, legal access to their catalog as long as the fee was proportional to my income from that catalog, and took into account that what I do has resulted in sales of CDs and individual tracks.
That's ARRA money; those were required to be "shovel ready" projects - in other words, projects that local gov'ts had in the can waiting on funds.
Very few professional level jobs were created by these and most of the blue collar jobs are on the order of 6 months duration. Although they are Davis-Bacon wages, which means they are well paid short term jobs.
Actually, I'm a "Professional Engineer" and yes, I have to stay on top of a lot of stuff. Like Federal and state regulations, laws, current lawsuits, environmental laws, OSHA regulations. And I have to know the intricacies of BOLI v. Davis-Bacon wages, record keeping, etc. And I have to walk a fine line because of the crazy tort system we have in the US. The license fee I pay is a drop in the bucket.
Pretty much like any professional in any other field. And the guy who goes around wiping viruses off desktops should, by all rights, be making more too, and should have a job more in line with his training and education and certifications.
It sucks for everyone right now, but all you hear is that benefits should be cut, wages should be cut, retirements should be wiped clean, "the other guy" should be screwed to the wall. And there's precious little work out there that is rewarding, well paid, and doesn't require you to sell your soul.
If you haven't noticed, there's a recession on. Construction has taken a huge hit and probably borne the brunt of the recession in terms of wages, jobs, and careers. It's taken me the better part of 2 years to get a call back on a resume. For now my shitty wage feeds my family.
My point is that I think a lot of IT people are living in the 90s, when wages were ridiculously high and just knowing how to spell IT was a guarantee of a good job.
Not so much anymore. The job market sucks for everyone right now.
If you haven't noticed, there's a recession on. Construction has taken the brunt of lost jobs, stagnant wages, and wrecked careers.
It's taken me 2 years to get a call back on a resume. In the meantime my shitty wage feeds my family.
My point is that many IT people still expect the salaries from the 90s, when simply knowing how to spell IT was a guarantee of a high paying job. It's changing, and not for the better.
Oh hell... C*O salaries are set by boards, which are populated by other C*Os. No bargaining involved; "you give me $100M today and I'll give you $100M tomorrow." No bargaining involved.
Unfortunately for most of us we have other people who are all too willing to take the job at a lower pay scale. No bargaining involved; "you take what we offer or we go to teh next guy in line."
Hehe.... I manage $10M in construction. I deal with contract disputes, State and Federal funding and regulatory agencies, local politics, you name it. Oh, and I'm a licensed engineer.
My pay is less than the guy who goes around wiping viruses off people's computers.
Go ahead and jump, IT. There's nothing on the other side.
His insurance company may dispute the claim, especially if he got lower rates because he had fire coverage. Insurance in no-coverage districts is expensive; how much you want to bet this cheepskate lied and told them he had coverage?
You don't know the sticks, do you? How do you collect the bill?
These are the same people who chase government bill collectors off their property with shotguns. The "starve government until you can drown it in a bathtub" crowd. The Tea Partiers. Those people who believe that all government is evil, and they believe that paying taxes, any sort of taxes, is an imposition, and illegal to boot, and they have the right to shoot the damn tax collector.
So suck it up, you didn't pay, you don't get the service.
The only fair way to bill him would be to assess him at a rate that equals the entire cost of running the fire service, divided by the number of fires they respond to. How much you want to bet that's more than his house is worth?
Few people realize what a good deal government really is. We get a huge amount of services for a few pennies. If you refuse to pay the pennies, suck it up, shut up, and go to your militia meeting and bitch about how evil government is.
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The healthcare reform has given the health care industry a great excuse for screwing people. I got one of those "rate increases". It was a full page of "we're screwing you over because the gov't made us do it" crap. All emphasis on what you've lost and how much extra it's going to cost, without a single mention of all of the extra benefits you get.
Face it, the health care industry hates this reform, and they will screw you over for a dime.
New laws? Ahhh - I see. You're part of the problem.
Huh?! Crime will always seek new avenues of least resistance. New technology creates new opportunities, and not just for consumers but for those with base motives. Once we figure out what we don't want to happen, we have to create laws against it.
If you don't have a law against it, it's not a crime. Spam didn't used to be a crime. At one time, hacking into a system connected to a public carrier (eg internet or modem) was not a crime since you didn't physically enter the premises; thus no B&E and no crime.
We have to create new, effective laws against new exploits against the public good. That's the way civilization responds to change.
In the US, political donors define the problems, define what tools can be used to solve the problems
there, fixed that for ya
Hmmm... I spend time in Japan - I was there last summer - and I've yet to see an iPhone in someone's hand. Who's buying all of these phones? None of the students or their moms, that's for sure. I don't recall seeing any in the businessmen's hands either.
I've never seen one for sale in Tokyo or Yokohama, but then again, I was not looking for one either.
I wonder if there's a market segment that's not visible? Or if there's some different way of counting? Say, a Docomo handset is counted in a different way from a iPhone handset?
Sure, it's about interest, not a magical 'IQ'.
BTW, I know obese people, blind people, and have met a man with one leg all who have ran a marathon. I suspect the on'y reason you think you can not is because you don't want to do it
I'm a personal trainer and a group fitness instructor, as well as an endurance cyclist. Nope, my body will not stand up to the pounding of a marathon. No way, no how. After 13 miles, my knees and hips are done.
And contrary to what TV may tell us, pretty much ayone who properly applies themselves can be a great chef. The work isn't really that hard.*
*I was trained as a chef, but I found it a horrible job, surrounded by uneducated people. I was trained in 1983-4; did the gob in 85. I consider it 'Shit I did while waiting for the computer stuff to take off'~.
You might have been a good cook, but to be a great chef you need to have a love and a deep understanding of food. If you consider the job shit, your food will taste likewise. I am a fair cook; I've run kitchens before and still do on occasion. A friend of mine is a great chef, and nothing I can do will allow my meager talents to match his.
Anyone with that aspiration can teach themselves what they need to, go to school or get training, and do it. Especially for that type of discipline(physics/math) where prerequisite knowledge is more important than original thinking.
You're not serious, are you?
You mean I can train myself to have perfect pitch, like some musicians? Or to have perfect color sense, like artists? Or a deep understanding of multiple dimensions?
That's like saying that we can all play basketball like Wilt Chamberlain, or ride a bike like Lance Armstrong.
Each brain is drastically different, each is capable of different things. No amount of training will make my daughter an engineer like her brother in spite of her nearly perfect math skills. No amount of training will give my son the empathy to deal with animals like his sister has.
Brains are as different as our bodies, and no amount of training will let me run a marathon; my body won't allow it. For some, no amount of training will let them keep up with me on a bicycle.
No amount of training will let most people keep up with me in my field of intellectual expertise; I have great vision in that one area, and I'm a total doofus in others.
Yeah, I can learn to flip burgers. But that won't let me compete with an accomplished chef, who has talent and vision.
No they don't. We use a proprietary, closed source "ticket management system" for lack of a better word. This thing is horrid; it has no recordkeeping, no search to speak of, no customization.... I could go on. We also have no direct access to the database; all we can get is a CD of what are essentially static pages of a particular issue.
It's also pretty close to being abandoned. No new licenses are sold and no new features are being added; the whole thing is in maintenance mode.
They jumped the subcription about 6 fold last year. I argued strenuously for something like RT, even worked out the cost of adding our needed features - 1/10 of the cost of the annual subscription of the proprietary product.
No dice. Not windows based, not supported by a major vendor, not approved by MS.
They're back to evaluating other, closed source, proprietary, locked in systems. So basically some people never learn.
I washed my hands of the whole deal when I was told "That's not how we do enterprise" as a response to my suggestion to use FOSS.
Hehe. My standard rant to overprotective parents:
"Kids are the progeny of the most successful predator to ever walk the face of the Earth. They're pretty tough; they don't break easily."
I like your perspective; I'm not sure that I wouldn't lower that age to 16, though. Kids are pretty much grown up by 16, or at least think they are.
JUdging from the legal drinking age of 18, I'd guess this was written by a non-native english speaker, possibly with the help of a translator.
At some point, though, you have to let her jump off the couch and whack her head. And stand by and let it happen.
Because if you always catch her, she never learns that there are things in this world that will hurt, will main, will destroy her life.
My kids have gone through their share of bruises, head whacks, and such. If they make a bad decision, and it won't hurt them permanently, I let it ride.
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
Absolutely. We have some friends who micro-managed their daughter. Now she's 13, has already been thrown out of 2 schools, and on and on. Kids need room to be kids.
Teach your kids to do the right thing. To do that you have to actually live that way too - it does no good to preach the evils of drunk driving, then have 4 beers with dinner and drive home.
Set the example, trust your kids to do the right thing, and talk to them.
Bringing your kids up right is all about respect. I encourage my kids to keep their passwords private, I don't snoop on them, and I encourage them to talk to me.
That's much harder and much more effective than some stupid filter.
I've got a small home network. It has a handful of IP cameras, a few access points, some wifi gadgets, a couple of laptops, and 3 "regular" computers.
As everything works, it's not unusual for me to lose track of some gadget after a year or two, or to notice a "new" gadget that's actually been there.
Now imagine that you have a 10,000 of these sorts of setups, but each has 1,000 nodes. And each has an admin or a group of admins that do what they need to to make their management happy. And now move the admins around every 2-4 years like the military does.
Get the idea?
Just because you have a lot of them, doesn't mean they're redundant or in any way coordinated.
Most are probably just a local chief/commander/boss saying "we need XYZ, get us some computers".
I can see some serious redundancy in DOD computers; basically you want each field unit to have some data center capability in case the grid goes down. They need to be able to run their own affairs at the very least.
But entities like the VA and the Education folks? They don't really need redundancy to any great extent; a few mirrored datacenters around the country should work fine.
You are suffering from the failed logic that government actually acts rational.
In fact, the revenue streams won't decrease your tax burden, instead they just give raises to employees, elected officials, find a way to work bonuses or more/better benefits into the public sector, and end up spending more.
You need to take off your teabagger hat. I work in the public sector, and I tell you that the last thing an elected official will do is give public employees a raise. We advertised for a traffic engineer; even in this horrendous job market it took 3 months to get 4 qualified applicants. Public sector pay is, for the most part, crap. I get about 75 cents on the dollar compared to private sector work. Most public service employees I know have some sort of side income - rentals, side business, etc - that increase their take home pay.
Government is funny that way, they think once the money is in their hands, they have to spend it.
You're right there, but the money is spent on pet projects, pie in the sky dreams, and stuff like that. They spend the money on what gets them re-elected, what YOU demand they provide YOU. They don't spend a dime on their own employees unless they have to. Any politician that would champion raises to staff, either as pay increases or better benefits, would not be re-elected next time around.
Once the economy improves, there will be a huge exodus of qualified public sector employees into the private sector, to the detriment of public service. Heck, I'm on my way out.
What happens is that once all the good people leave for better paying jobs, leaving mostly the lazy, indolent, and stupid, and a handful of people truly dedicated to service to the public. Then the politicians notice, run around in a panic, give everyone raises, thus rewarding the unqualified for their inability to find a better job.
But... A lot psy-ops goes into these decoys. They're meant to confuse, delay, etc.
OK, you know that 10 planes on the airstrip are real, and 30 are fake. But the pilot who's trying to take them out will have flak, AAA, all sorts of things getting thrown at him. The decoys will be positioned to look like the more promising targets of opportunity. With the same infrared and radar signature, it's hard to pick out the ones you want.
Better yet, move 10 real units into place. Camouflage them. Now blow up 10 decoys next to them. What will the pilot/gunner hit?
The decoys are just one small part of the overall picture. Google for CCD - Camouflage, Concealement, and Deception.
I'm with you on this.
I actually tried to get permission from ASCAP et al to play music in a particular setting. Turns out that there is no way to get permission to play music publicly unless you do so professionally (as in, a DJ or a band).
There's also no way to get permission to mix your own CDs and compilations unless you do so professionally and sell at least 200 of the compilations.
Along the way, no one at ASCAP could actually explain the process for getting legal access, or provide any sort of information other than referring me to other people in the organization and in outside organizations, none of whom were able to help or would return phone calls or emails.
So this is sort of a chicken and egg problem; the music industry *could* solve a lot of piracy by offering a simple, legal access to their catalog by those who want to, but for whatever reasons they choose not to do so.
So clearly the music industry itself does not assign a significant value to entities who are not large profit centers. In light of this, I really don't understand why they are suing those very people.
I for one would pay a fee to have full, unfettered, legal access to their catalog as long as the fee was proportional to my income from that catalog, and took into account that what I do has resulted in sales of CDs and individual tracks.
That's ARRA money; those were required to be "shovel ready" projects - in other words, projects that local gov'ts had in the can waiting on funds.
Very few professional level jobs were created by these and most of the blue collar jobs are on the order of 6 months duration. Although they are Davis-Bacon wages, which means they are well paid short term jobs.
Actually, I'm a "Professional Engineer" and yes, I have to stay on top of a lot of stuff. Like Federal and state regulations, laws, current lawsuits, environmental laws, OSHA regulations. And I have to know the intricacies of BOLI v. Davis-Bacon wages, record keeping, etc. And I have to walk a fine line because of the crazy tort system we have in the US. The license fee I pay is a drop in the bucket.
Pretty much like any professional in any other field. And the guy who goes around wiping viruses off desktops should, by all rights, be making more too, and should have a job more in line with his training and education and certifications.
It sucks for everyone right now, but all you hear is that benefits should be cut, wages should be cut, retirements should be wiped clean, "the other guy" should be screwed to the wall. And there's precious little work out there that is rewarding, well paid, and doesn't require you to sell your soul.
If you haven't noticed, there's a recession on. Construction has taken a huge hit and probably borne the brunt of the recession in terms of wages, jobs, and careers. It's taken me the better part of 2 years to get a call back on a resume. For now my shitty wage feeds my family.
My point is that I think a lot of IT people are living in the 90s, when wages were ridiculously high and just knowing how to spell IT was a guarantee of a good job.
Not so much anymore. The job market sucks for everyone right now.
If you haven't noticed, there's a recession on. Construction has taken the brunt of lost jobs, stagnant wages, and wrecked careers.
It's taken me 2 years to get a call back on a resume. In the meantime my shitty wage feeds my family.
My point is that many IT people still expect the salaries from the 90s, when simply knowing how to spell IT was a guarantee of a high paying job. It's changing, and not for the better.
Oh hell... C*O salaries are set by boards, which are populated by other C*Os. No bargaining involved; "you give me $100M today and I'll give you $100M tomorrow." No bargaining involved.
Unfortunately for most of us we have other people who are all too willing to take the job at a lower pay scale. No bargaining involved; "you take what we offer or we go to teh next guy in line."
Hehe.... I manage $10M in construction. I deal with contract disputes, State and Federal funding and regulatory agencies, local politics, you name it. Oh, and I'm a licensed engineer.
My pay is less than the guy who goes around wiping viruses off people's computers.
Go ahead and jump, IT. There's nothing on the other side.
His insurance company may dispute the claim, especially if he got lower rates because he had fire coverage. Insurance in no-coverage districts is expensive; how much you want to bet this cheepskate lied and told them he had coverage?
You don't know the sticks, do you? How do you collect the bill?
These are the same people who chase government bill collectors off their property with shotguns. The "starve government until you can drown it in a bathtub" crowd. The Tea Partiers. Those people who believe that all government is evil, and they believe that paying taxes, any sort of taxes, is an imposition, and illegal to boot, and they have the right to shoot the damn tax collector.
So suck it up, you didn't pay, you don't get the service.
The only fair way to bill him would be to assess him at a rate that equals the entire cost of running the fire service, divided by the number of fires they respond to. How much you want to bet that's more than his house is worth?
Few people realize what a good deal government really is. We get a huge amount of services for a few pennies. If you refuse to pay the pennies, suck it up, shut up, and go to your militia meeting and bitch about how evil government is.
I'd rather be a live fucking pansy than a tough grizzled dead Alaskan, I guess....
Something like 5 cougars have been shot in the last 5 years, just around where I live. Take your choice.