There was a story on NPR about this in the morning and there is an audio link there, plus you can click on the photo of the fossil so that you get an enlarged version than the one available at the Nature link.
I have not read any of the articles on this, but when I heard the NPR story, I wondered what evidence they had against it simply being a scavenger along the lines of a modern hyena?
Think about the size of the box without the keyboard. Now think how many more of these boxes CompUSA or BestBuy will be willing to stock. Think about how much less Apple will pay for inventory and shipping. And think about people have always complained about the one button mouse anyway...
Wow that's neat history to know, thanks! And actually it makes sense now that I think about it. You would like the segments at least for stack, heap, and code. The protections at the segment level are there already, so it would make sense to leave that in.
The 386 went from 16-bit to 32, taking all 16-bit apps with it, but there was also the very little known 80376, all 32-bit none of the 16-bit parts.
Actually the i80376 was not meant for workstations and servers. It was targeted at the embedded market. The reason it would not work as a replacement for the i80386SX was that it lacked the integrated MMU. It is true that it only supported protected mode though, but it would not have been able to do the sort of unique segments with different protections for each app deal that a real 32-bit OS does.
The reason most people never heard of it is because it was not supposed to compete with the i80386SX/DX/SL chips. In its intended market for embedded systems it did, well... well enough for me to have heard about it at least, though for the systems from that vintage here the people before me went mainly went with 68K.
Actually I had a model I and later added a expansion interface and floppy disk. Tandy even had a cartridge addapter for the CoCo, so you could connect floppy drives to pretty much any of the pre 1000 home computers.
Was the sound blaster pro the bastard 12-bit sound card that creative put out?
No, it had two 8 bit DACs and two 8 bit ADCs. That set it apart from the original Sound Blaster which had only one of each. This meant that the pro was stereo while the original was mono. It was also a full ISA (16 pin) card (well maybe some pins were unused) and had a ribbon cable connector at the back for connecting a CDROM drive and a controller chip for Panasonic style drives.
My sense is the poster wants to get a rise seeing his post be moderated informative. The first clues is where it states that SRAM is smaller than DRAM which false.
Fewer polling places would reduce the number of voting machines and would require fewer poll workers, which could cut salary and training costs.
Fewer polling places would also make it harder for the poor to reach 'super' polling places especially if they were located with ill intent. Remember that there were long lines at many of the 'super' polling places open early in Florida this year all through the voting season. Having fewer places open longer is not necessarily a panacea.
The insurance companies do not seem to care about the overcharges and I do not know why. Two situations happened to me like that, though not on the scale of your father's. Once my wife went in to have her birth induced because she should have given birth about two weeks ago. When she went in the nurse first checked to see if she was dilated and since my wife was, they did not do any of the procedure. Later we found that the hospital had charged for the procedure anyway.
Another time when my wife was pregnant and went to the dentist for a regular visit she did not get the x-ray. The dentist still charged the insurance company for it though. In both cases we reported it to the insurance companies, but it was clear that they did not care.
The only time that any insurance company seemed to care was in this case: We called and found an anesthesiologist that was covered under our plan. So when my wife gave birth, this was the fellow that gave my wife an epidural. Well a long time later we get a bill. I call and the lady says that in fact that this doctor was never a member of our insurance so we have to pay. This was a PPO so the insurance had paid a portion and the doctor wanted more. (The PPO paid 80% of what it pays its member doctors which was not even close to what this doctor was charging.) I would have been fine, except for the fact that I had worked so hard getting everything together to find clinics whose doctors worked at a hospital that was in the plan and an anesthesiologist that was also working in that particular hospital. This was no easy feat, really that was the only combination that worked anywhere within an hour of where we lived. Now when I called the insurance they said that this doctor was not working for them and never did! This whole dispute was dragging on and in one of the later times I called the insurance company gathering information for the impending arbitration phase as I was giving the information of my case, the lady on the phone said that this doctor was in their system...
BINGO! This rung some alarm bells for this lady and she connected me with some higher-up. It turned-out that it looked like this particular doctor was playing a sort of game. He was repeatedly asking to become a member of the insurance, would be sent the paperwork, but would never fill it out. So while he was pending he was listed in the system and every 60 days or so would be removed. Then after a while he would start this process again. I was sent some paperwork that we signed that basically amounted to the insurance company would pay the bill but I would not sue the insurance company. The understanding from the conversation was that the lawyers for the insurance company would go after this doctor.
After that I never dealt with the doctor again. The threats about being reported to a collection agency stopped so I assume he got paid. Then later out of the blue I got some letter from the doctor with some lame explanation that a hospital he worked for kept putting him under this insurance as if he was trying to protect his back from a lawsuit.
The thing that always bothered me was that when dealing with the insurance company, if it had not been for the fluke that I had called while his status was pending, we would have never figured-out what was going on. Really the insurance company should have been able to immediately see that he was taking patients for 60 days at a time every few months right away instead of telling me that he is not a member doctor and never was. But I have to wonder how many people did pay the guy.
But back to the over billing, The first kid we had cost almost twice as much as the second. These were under different insurance plans and in different parts of the country so that may have something to do with it. But the second kid had many more problems. For example she was not growing properly and that meant monthly ultrasounds followed by bi-weekly. Also we had numerous cases of preterm labor that required trips to hospitals, once to a hospital that was out of network even. Because of this I expected the bill for the second one to have been much more than the first. It was not, and it just makes me wonder how many things like the inducement procedure we never had were sent to the insurance company to pay.
Serenity's is firmly slated for release in April of 2005, just a few weeks shy of Star Wars: Episode III. Whedon and crew hope that the slot will get a boost from the eager sci-fi crowd. "It's exactly where I want to be," Whedon says. "We call it the Matrix slot, as opposed to the death slot, which is what the show had. It's a spring movie. It was always a spring movie... I can't compete with the $200 million movies... It's a smaller film. It's like the crew itself, its a little run and gun, it's a little bit underdog... It's that time when people are getting ready. They've got that anticipation, they're excited to get into the summer and be disappointed over and over. (Laughs) I mean, and see the big movies, but it's not going to be swamped by them. So I'm just absolutely thrilled. To me, it's another huge vote of confidence from the studio."
Wow Whedon's own words really seem to contradict his recent statement. My guess is that the producers' faith is shaken and that they are better liars than Whedon is used to.
It seems to me that standardized Federal election procedures would help ensure a fair election.
It seems to me that this would make it so much easier for election fraud to take place. Seriously consider if someone wanted to rig the election nationally how much easier it would be to do so if there was a central way to do so. I did not come-up with this idea myself, I read it somewhere, and wish I could remember where right now.
Also the idea of the credit card like device, that is just along the same lines as other technological solutions. This approach is no panacea. There is a long history of adopting newer technologies in the USA to try and 'solve' the perceived problems at the polling place. What I view as the real problem here in the USA is that voters are not informed about the candidates and issues. For example check-out this statistic:
Think about that. Only 4% of the sample claimed to belong to that category so there is the issue of small sample size and in addition to that anyone fibbing would have a greater effect, but at 23% you cannot seriously discount it all. Then there must be some people where certain issues out weighed the Bush administration's take on gay rights. For example very wealthy gays may have had a serious reason to vote for Bush since Kerry was promising to increase their taxes. Now some could have voted because of being fearful of terrorism or something like this, but now you are getting to the issue of the voting public not making well informed rational decisions. (I know that people can reach a 'rational' decision to have voted for Bush based on weighing evidence in a particular way, but I would group that in the previous category anyway, I am talking about an irrational decision based on fear here.) Now what does that leave, that leaves some percentage of gays that voted for Bush out of a Pavlovian response to always vote Republican, I am convinced that there was a non-negligible percentage of gays that just did not know the Bush administration stance on gay rights issues.
I think that is a serious problem about the voting populace here in the USA. I am not being elitist or anything of the sort, I just think that there is a sizable proportion of individuals that just take the word of others as Gospel and do not form informed decisions. What is the percentage of Americans that still believe that Iraq was behind 9/11? Until voters take voting much more seriously, no amount of better voting technology, methodology, or legislation is going to solve the real problem.
But about technology, I personally am a fan of optical scan systems. You fill in the sheet and send it through a reader that immediately deposits it into a locked ballot box. If the counts do not match exit polls or are close, you can manually recount the ballots in the box. Also you can manually spot check a certain percentage of the ballots. Also at each polling place (not each precinct, there can be multiple precincts per polling location) you would have one computer system for those challenged in anyway to vote in the manner that others were. For example the blind. This would produce an optical scan ballot with the proper choices selected, which would be fed through the appropriate reader. This would be low cost and have a verifiable paper trail.
I have to close this off quickly, but as for actual voting method I personally like Condorcet schemes. You can explain what to do to the voter the same way you would what to do with the ballot with instant run-off. You would have a harder time explaining how the winner(s) are chosen if there is not an apparent winner. There are two methods I like for choosing the winner in such a case which I cannot remember the names of. One was written-up in a paper in the 80's and the other in a paper in the 90's. There are two reasons I prefer Condorcet to IRV. First IRV i
IIRC, if you look back at history you will find several ex-state governers were made Supreme Court Justices.
You are probably thinking of Earl Warren. He was appointed as Chief Justice after being the Governor of California. Because of his influence in getting the Californian delegation of the Republican National Convention to nominate Eisenhower, President elect Eisenhower promised Warren that he would be appointed to the Supreme Court with the first vacancy in the Court.
When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died, Warren expected Eisenhower to be true to his pledge. There was considerable out-cry about this because the nation was at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement and Warren was seen as too liberal by many at the time. They brought forward the argument that Warren had never been a judge in his life and that to make him the Chief Justice was clearly political graft. In the end Warren was a recess appointment and later confirmed.
Earl Warren is best remembered for his hard work to make sure Brown v. Board of Education was a unanimous decision and a(n in)famous quote attributed to Eisenhower about Warren is, "The biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made."
Everyone should be asked to read the whole act at least once in their lives.
I did, or rather I tried to. It was one gigantic mess that looked mostly approximately something like this:
Section 6.6.73.8898 replace "warrant" with "court order"
Really, I cannot understand how anyone could understand this. To me it was like trying to understand a huge body of source code solely by looking at diff output.
That's fine for you. Now suppose you are responsible for several small children. What do you do now, genius?
Thankfully a number of other posters have already expressed some valid argument against this. The whole genius bit justs makes me think this is a Troll we are feeding here, but whatever, personal experience makes me a good candidate to respond to this...
My wife had a VERY scary experience, along the lines of to satisfy their sexual urges on you against your will only it was TWO men, in a dark elevator, with our infant son present. Now first, how would have this situation resolved itself in any positive manner had my wife been packing heat? Do you live is some TV fiction-land where you think my wife could have successfully defended herself in such a situation? You ARE a stupid dick, but I will go on anyway.
Now this is what happened. In fact my wife kept a (relatively) cool head, and we believe that this was VERY important so that these piss-for-brains did not get-off on some power trip. In the end the fact that there were two men was what caused the situation to end better than it could have. Simply, one of the perpetrators had a conscience and basically said, "look man, there's a kid, let's leave, we've done enough, look at her."
Now the serious gun angle to this story. This happened in the morning, it was not until the evening that my wife had gathered her senses enough to talk to the police. We were home waiting for hours, but she finally admitted that she had NOT called the police like she had said she had. All I can say is that until you have been through something like this you will never understand the logic, the level of humiliation is indescribable.
When the police officer finally arrived in the evening, the emotions ran high, but in retrospect, with such a long delay and the fact that an actual rape, in a technical sense but the emotional effects on my wife's well being were disastrous, had not taken place led the police nowhere. Now understand how this only made the situation worse. It made it clear that the police, who we thought were there to protect us from 'bad people' were in fact only there as the law enforcement arm of the criminal justice system. They were not there to prevent us from being victims, but rather only there to catch the criminals when a serious enough crime had taken place to warrant their attention - which tearing of clothes, threatening rape, groping, and shoving of an immigrant woman clearly were not - ahem.
I have experience with guns from my youth. (Very positive experiences shooting with my father's family on vacations and the Boy Scouts.) I felt it would be very good if my wife got a handgun and the training to learn how to use it. I saw it as an empowering thing, something that would help her get back a feeling of safety. Heck it would even alter dynamics of our relationship. But she is afraid of guns, largely having never grown-up around them. But she made a very good point. How could we keep a gun in our apartment if we had a child living with us?
Seriously think back to when you were a teenager. Wasn't it difficult with all the changes? The statistics my wife and I have seen are horrendous for kids that kill themselves as part of teenage angst when there is a gun in the house. This cannot be seriously addressed, in the statistics we saw gun locks and lockers had little impact on those suicides. (They were much more effective for preventing accidents.)
Now on the other hand, I plan on exposing my children to guns in the same way that I was when I was younger. I really believe that installing the proper respect is key for preventing kids from being involved in some tragic accident. Even though we will not have guns in our house, little Jimmy probably will figure-out where his dad hides his gun in the house and may want to show it one of our kids. It is very important to teach kids that guns are not toys.
I still remember that evening with my scout troops when one o
According to the exit polling statistics from CNN it would indeed seem to be the case that more women participated in the exit polls:
Male (46%)
Female (54%)
Moreover considering that according to the same exit polls women favored Kerry by 52% while men favored Bush by 54%, that may lend credence to the hypothesis that simply the fact that more women were interviewed at the polling place than men had a non-negligible influence on the exit polling results.
Also, consider the leads of 1-2% in the exit polls, what was the margin of error in the exit polls? It has been a long night, time for me to finally hit the sack...
I think this was designed for me, it is SO VERY peculiar. I was recently trying to get a 3G 40GB iPod at an Apple store. (They still have them, and are trying to move them for $370.) I do not want the 4G 40 GB because the icelink does not fit that model yet. Also the 4G 20GB does not come with a dock. This U2 one comes with two cables and a dock! More than adequate for leaving one at work and one at home. Also the interior of my car is black as well as the icelink connectors and proclip which will match the iPod case. Even better the red click wheel, it matches the majority of the interior lights in the car! And the blue screen, the same color that my dash instruments are. (I drive a VW Golf.)
So if you take into account the extra dock (which I would buy anyway) this makes the U2 iPod only $10 more than the regular iPod. Also when I went to college I gave my tape collection to my little brother. All of my old music collection including everything by U2 I had is gone anyway! More than 400 hundred U2 songs for 100$ is a great deal to me. I was a pretty big U2 fan back in the day, mostly because they were so politically and socially relevant to me at that time. By the time I was in college, well they did not seem to be at the same level in those respects. But they did make some good (ie successful on the charts) songs after I stopped caring so it would be nice to have such a round collection again.
The only bad thing is the signatures on the back. I really wanted to laser engrave some silly 'government warning' on the back of my iPod, oh well.
Now I just need to convince my wife that this is something worthwhile to purchase...
Try as I might, I can only think of one example of such behavior from Democrats
I do not think that you looked hard enough. Voter fraud is worked on both sides of the aisle. Consider mayor Richard Daley's 'vote early and vote often' campaign that many consider gave JFK the presidency over Richard M. Nixon in 1960.
Or how about the 1948 Texas Senate race that gave LBJ the victory by a scant 87, yes only 87, votes. Most people believe that thousands of those votes were bought in south Texas or stuffed at the ballot boxes.
Think how different things could have been if... What if Johnson had never been president to escalate us into Vietnam? How would have Nixon handled the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Maybe Moore is afraid of mentioning anyone other than Kerry and Bush at this point, but I would have expected something about the free speech zone quote, being blocked from FOX news, his arrest, or this Arizona debates to have made his site somewhere.
I had an early HP ink jet, and it was fantastic. How early, well it used a tractor feed so it had to have the kind of paper where you tore off the sides and was connected to Victor (XT class machine). That thing was fantastic, lasted more than a decade, the print head was NEVER changed. I would just squirt more (inexpensive) ink into the reservoir. Many years later I bought an early color bubble jet from Canon, to get color and experienced ALL of the hassles that people now know are common with ink type printers. It was so wasteful and expensive to run that for charts I used my trusty old imagewriter with a color ribbon until last year.
What changed about a year ago? The price of both new and used color laser printers fell into range. I believe that you can get a new duplex capable color laser printer from Xerox for $400 at todays prices. (That is if my memory serves, possibly there was a mail in rebate involved.) Our laserprinter is used for almost everything and it natively supports PS and has an RJ-45 and print server built-in, it is an HP something or other.
That printer is used for almost everything my wife and I print. For photos we have a small dye-sub printer. Sony something or other. We just have it hooked-up to the TV, not even to a computer and we only use it rarely because it is cheaper to just go to pretty-much any photo place. It is nice though for when you care about the color to be exactly predictable. (Each photo place seems to get the colors a bit different in my experience.) And I have had some problems with photo places having bad card readers which will sometimes be unable to read a few of the pictures out of the multitude on the card. So for situations like that or when you want the pictures now (trust me when you have kids and your relatives or friends come over that happens) the dye-sub printer is used.
So that is my attitude. Do not fool around with ink anymore. It was SUCH a hassle for me that it was just not worth it in terms of time and ink lost. It all just led to aggravation. I cannot even name the printers that I use now, and I like it this way, because everything just works. The printer I hated, oh I REMEMBER that one alright, a BJC-70. I remember that from all the times I was on the net searching for help and because of hassle it was!
Probably because if they did, and then everyone reading were to login with the bugmenot username and password, then not too many more people would be able to read the article. Don't you think that many news sites that require registration keep track of whether there are say more than a hundred people using the same username at about the same time from different IP addresses no less? More often than not, once someone mentions bugmenot in a slashdot story like you just did, the username stop works very soon afterwards.
Coming from a person who lived more than twenty years in Illinois and California I see exactly your points. Both states have large agricultural areas but tend to be dominated by large urban areas in national and statewide elections. (Well now I was generalizing, it IS more sophisticated than that in practice.) I agree it is in fact bad in many states for the rural areas where the more densely populated centers tend to dominate politics, the very issue that the Connecticut compromise addressed so long ago. Yet in Illinois there is enough population (and agribusiness) outside of the Chicagoland area that to a large extent the interests of the farming areas are represented better than they would be otherwise. (At least in the issues directly related to farming, other issues such as schools and roads are a constant source of contention between the two areas.)
I was looking at the issue from a historical perspective and noting that by ignoring it completely this would hurt rural areas because they would be out numbered by the more populous centers and I completely missed the issue that by now there are many states where the old distinction between city and rural has become problematic. Thanks for pointing that out to me. The problem is that I still believe that it IS important to somehow protect the interests of farmers (I grew-up with too many corn, soybean, and dairy farmer friends to ignore this) otherwise the interests of rural areas would be largely ignored. Simply adopting a majority system would not address this at all.
Maybe someone has an idea of how to address this. How could any fair system be adopted when it means that those states that currently have 'too much' influence would lose that? Possibly there is a way to still protect the rural areas from the city centers but have it reflect the current boundaries?
we don't allow any of those categorizations to change the strength of someone's vote. Why should rural residents be special?
Because there was a desire for the states to unite. In order to unite the more populous states had to reach a compromise with the less populous (and more rural) states, so that the union would even be a possibility. Consider this in the same light as the northern states that allowed the 3/5 compromise so that the southern states would be willing to join the union.
I am married and so the whole online dating thing does not apply, but I still think it could be fun to take a serious marriage compatibility test. We took a good online test for political orientation not too long ago, and that was fun (and funny) and we have done some cheesy tests in Women's magazines. Those are only fun to a limited degree, because well they are so cheesy.
So how about something "based on what psychologists know works" that we could take together. I guess something like the eHarmony test you referred to that would let us see how we matched-up afterward. Not only might that be fun (and funny to see where we are 'incompatible'), it would be revealing, and could give some useful insight into our marriage.
The smaller more rural states were concerned about being dominated by the larger states with cities in the national arena. It was seen that the interests of the rural and city populations would be different. The scheme of the Senate with two votes per state regardless of population and the two to three bonus (there are no fractional electors after-all, consider this as round-off error depending on where the state falls in relation to other states in the last census) electors for smaller states was devised in part because of that concern.
David is from NY, a state with a number of large cities and he feels underrepresented, but consider the point of view of farmers and ranchers. We can have raging debates ad nausea for example about whether the federal government does too much or too little to assist farmers and ranchers, but the fact of the matter is that if it were not for the systems in place to grant disproportionate weight to rural areas, there would indeed be less aid.
Also, is there really a surprise that cities tend Democratic and rural areas Republican? Again this seems to be sour grapes from David based on his comments.
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M-Audio Transit available now. Digital audio in/out via USB.
I have not read any of the articles on this, but when I heard the NPR story, I wondered what evidence they had against it simply being a scavenger along the lines of a modern hyena?
Think about the size of the box without the keyboard. Now think how many more of these boxes CompUSA or BestBuy will be willing to stock. Think about how much less Apple will pay for inventory and shipping. And think about people have always complained about the one button mouse anyway...
Wow that's neat history to know, thanks! And actually it makes sense now that I think about it. You would like the segments at least for stack, heap, and code. The protections at the segment level are there already, so it would make sense to leave that in.
Actually the i80376 was not meant for workstations and servers. It was targeted at the embedded market. The reason it would not work as a replacement for the i80386SX was that it lacked the integrated MMU. It is true that it only supported protected mode though, but it would not have been able to do the sort of unique segments with different protections for each app deal that a real 32-bit OS does.
The reason most people never heard of it is because it was not supposed to compete with the i80386SX/DX/SL chips. In its intended market for embedded systems it did, well... well enough for me to have heard about it at least, though for the systems from that vintage here the people before me went mainly went with 68K.
Actually I had a model I and later added a expansion interface and floppy disk. Tandy even had a cartridge addapter for the CoCo, so you could connect floppy drives to pretty much any of the pre 1000 home computers.
No, it had two 8 bit DACs and two 8 bit ADCs. That set it apart from the original Sound Blaster which had only one of each. This meant that the pro was stereo while the original was mono. It was also a full ISA (16 pin) card (well maybe some pins were unused) and had a ribbon cable connector at the back for connecting a CDROM drive and a controller chip for Panasonic style drives.
My sense is the poster wants to get a rise seeing his post be moderated informative. The first clues is where it states that SRAM is smaller than DRAM which false.
Fewer polling places would also make it harder for the poor to reach 'super' polling places especially if they were located with ill intent. Remember that there were long lines at many of the 'super' polling places open early in Florida this year all through the voting season. Having fewer places open longer is not necessarily a panacea.
The insurance companies do not seem to care about the overcharges and I do not know why. Two situations happened to me like that, though not on the scale of your father's. Once my wife went in to have her birth induced because she should have given birth about two weeks ago. When she went in the nurse first checked to see if she was dilated and since my wife was, they did not do any of the procedure. Later we found that the hospital had charged for the procedure anyway.
Another time when my wife was pregnant and went to the dentist for a regular visit she did not get the x-ray. The dentist still charged the insurance company for it though. In both cases we reported it to the insurance companies, but it was clear that they did not care.
The only time that any insurance company seemed to care was in this case: We called and found an anesthesiologist that was covered under our plan. So when my wife gave birth, this was the fellow that gave my wife an epidural. Well a long time later we get a bill. I call and the lady says that in fact that this doctor was never a member of our insurance so we have to pay. This was a PPO so the insurance had paid a portion and the doctor wanted more. (The PPO paid 80% of what it pays its member doctors which was not even close to what this doctor was charging.) I would have been fine, except for the fact that I had worked so hard getting everything together to find clinics whose doctors worked at a hospital that was in the plan and an anesthesiologist that was also working in that particular hospital. This was no easy feat, really that was the only combination that worked anywhere within an hour of where we lived. Now when I called the insurance they said that this doctor was not working for them and never did! This whole dispute was dragging on and in one of the later times I called the insurance company gathering information for the impending arbitration phase as I was giving the information of my case, the lady on the phone said that this doctor was in their system...
BINGO! This rung some alarm bells for this lady and she connected me with some higher-up. It turned-out that it looked like this particular doctor was playing a sort of game. He was repeatedly asking to become a member of the insurance, would be sent the paperwork, but would never fill it out. So while he was pending he was listed in the system and every 60 days or so would be removed. Then after a while he would start this process again. I was sent some paperwork that we signed that basically amounted to the insurance company would pay the bill but I would not sue the insurance company. The understanding from the conversation was that the lawyers for the insurance company would go after this doctor.
After that I never dealt with the doctor again. The threats about being reported to a collection agency stopped so I assume he got paid. Then later out of the blue I got some letter from the doctor with some lame explanation that a hospital he worked for kept putting him under this insurance as if he was trying to protect his back from a lawsuit.
The thing that always bothered me was that when dealing with the insurance company, if it had not been for the fluke that I had called while his status was pending, we would have never figured-out what was going on. Really the insurance company should have been able to immediately see that he was taking patients for 60 days at a time every few months right away instead of telling me that he is not a member doctor and never was. But I have to wonder how many people did pay the guy.
But back to the over billing, The first kid we had cost almost twice as much as the second. These were under different insurance plans and in different parts of the country so that may have something to do with it. But the second kid had many more problems. For example she was not growing properly and that meant monthly ultrasounds followed by bi-weekly. Also we had numerous cases of preterm labor that required trips to hospitals, once to a hospital that was out of network even. Because of this I expected the bill for the second one to have been much more than the first. It was not, and it just makes me wonder how many things like the inducement procedure we never had were sent to the insurance company to pay.
Wow Whedon's own words really seem to contradict his recent statement. My guess is that the producers' faith is shaken and that they are better liars than Whedon is used to.
It seems to me that this would make it so much easier for election fraud to take place. Seriously consider if someone wanted to rig the election nationally how much easier it would be to do so if there was a central way to do so. I did not come-up with this idea myself, I read it somewhere, and wish I could remember where right now.
Also the idea of the credit card like device, that is just along the same lines as other technological solutions. This approach is no panacea. There is a long history of adopting newer technologies in the USA to try and 'solve' the perceived problems at the polling place. What I view as the real problem here in the USA is that voters are not informed about the candidates and issues. For example check-out this statistic:
23% of lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals voted for Bush.
Think about that. Only 4% of the sample claimed to belong to that category so there is the issue of small sample size and in addition to that anyone fibbing would have a greater effect, but at 23% you cannot seriously discount it all. Then there must be some people where certain issues out weighed the Bush administration's take on gay rights. For example very wealthy gays may have had a serious reason to vote for Bush since Kerry was promising to increase their taxes. Now some could have voted because of being fearful of terrorism or something like this, but now you are getting to the issue of the voting public not making well informed rational decisions. (I know that people can reach a 'rational' decision to have voted for Bush based on weighing evidence in a particular way, but I would group that in the previous category anyway, I am talking about an irrational decision based on fear here.) Now what does that leave, that leaves some percentage of gays that voted for Bush out of a Pavlovian response to always vote Republican, I am convinced that there was a non-negligible percentage of gays that just did not know the Bush administration stance on gay rights issues.
I think that is a serious problem about the voting populace here in the USA. I am not being elitist or anything of the sort, I just think that there is a sizable proportion of individuals that just take the word of others as Gospel and do not form informed decisions. What is the percentage of Americans that still believe that Iraq was behind 9/11? Until voters take voting much more seriously, no amount of better voting technology, methodology, or legislation is going to solve the real problem.
But about technology, I personally am a fan of optical scan systems. You fill in the sheet and send it through a reader that immediately deposits it into a locked ballot box. If the counts do not match exit polls or are close, you can manually recount the ballots in the box. Also you can manually spot check a certain percentage of the ballots. Also at each polling place (not each precinct, there can be multiple precincts per polling location) you would have one computer system for those challenged in anyway to vote in the manner that others were. For example the blind. This would produce an optical scan ballot with the proper choices selected, which would be fed through the appropriate reader. This would be low cost and have a verifiable paper trail.
I have to close this off quickly, but as for actual voting method I personally like Condorcet schemes. You can explain what to do to the voter the same way you would what to do with the ballot with instant run-off. You would have a harder time explaining how the winner(s) are chosen if there is not an apparent winner. There are two methods I like for choosing the winner in such a case which I cannot remember the names of. One was written-up in a paper in the 80's and the other in a paper in the 90's. There are two reasons I prefer Condorcet to IRV. First IRV i
You are probably thinking of Earl Warren. He was appointed as Chief Justice after being the Governor of California. Because of his influence in getting the Californian delegation of the Republican National Convention to nominate Eisenhower, President elect Eisenhower promised Warren that he would be appointed to the Supreme Court with the first vacancy in the Court.
When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died, Warren expected Eisenhower to be true to his pledge. There was considerable out-cry about this because the nation was at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement and Warren was seen as too liberal by many at the time. They brought forward the argument that Warren had never been a judge in his life and that to make him the Chief Justice was clearly political graft. In the end Warren was a recess appointment and later confirmed.
Earl Warren is best remembered for his hard work to make sure Brown v. Board of Education was a unanimous decision and a(n in)famous quote attributed to Eisenhower about Warren is, "The biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made."
I did, or rather I tried to. It was one gigantic mess that looked mostly approximately something like this:
Really, I cannot understand how anyone could understand this. To me it was like trying to understand a huge body of source code solely by looking at diff output.
Thankfully a number of other posters have already expressed some valid argument against this. The whole genius bit justs makes me think this is a Troll we are feeding here, but whatever, personal experience makes me a good candidate to respond to this...
My wife had a VERY scary experience, along the lines of to satisfy their sexual urges on you against your will only it was TWO men, in a dark elevator, with our infant son present. Now first, how would have this situation resolved itself in any positive manner had my wife been packing heat? Do you live is some TV fiction-land where you think my wife could have successfully defended herself in such a situation? You ARE a stupid dick, but I will go on anyway.
Now this is what happened. In fact my wife kept a (relatively) cool head, and we believe that this was VERY important so that these piss-for-brains did not get-off on some power trip. In the end the fact that there were two men was what caused the situation to end better than it could have. Simply, one of the perpetrators had a conscience and basically said, "look man, there's a kid, let's leave, we've done enough, look at her."
Now the serious gun angle to this story. This happened in the morning, it was not until the evening that my wife had gathered her senses enough to talk to the police. We were home waiting for hours, but she finally admitted that she had NOT called the police like she had said she had. All I can say is that until you have been through something like this you will never understand the logic, the level of humiliation is indescribable.
When the police officer finally arrived in the evening, the emotions ran high, but in retrospect, with such a long delay and the fact that an actual rape, in a technical sense but the emotional effects on my wife's well being were disastrous, had not taken place led the police nowhere. Now understand how this only made the situation worse. It made it clear that the police, who we thought were there to protect us from 'bad people' were in fact only there as the law enforcement arm of the criminal justice system. They were not there to prevent us from being victims, but rather only there to catch the criminals when a serious enough crime had taken place to warrant their attention - which tearing of clothes, threatening rape, groping, and shoving of an immigrant woman clearly were not - ahem.
I have experience with guns from my youth. (Very positive experiences shooting with my father's family on vacations and the Boy Scouts.) I felt it would be very good if my wife got a handgun and the training to learn how to use it. I saw it as an empowering thing, something that would help her get back a feeling of safety. Heck it would even alter dynamics of our relationship. But she is afraid of guns, largely having never grown-up around them. But she made a very good point. How could we keep a gun in our apartment if we had a child living with us?
Seriously think back to when you were a teenager. Wasn't it difficult with all the changes? The statistics my wife and I have seen are horrendous for kids that kill themselves as part of teenage angst when there is a gun in the house. This cannot be seriously addressed, in the statistics we saw gun locks and lockers had little impact on those suicides. (They were much more effective for preventing accidents.)
Now on the other hand, I plan on exposing my children to guns in the same way that I was when I was younger. I really believe that installing the proper respect is key for preventing kids from being involved in some tragic accident. Even though we will not have guns in our house, little Jimmy probably will figure-out where his dad hides his gun in the house and may want to show it one of our kids. It is very important to teach kids that guns are not toys.
I still remember that evening with my scout troops when one o
Male (46%)
Female (54%)
Moreover considering that according to the same exit polls women favored Kerry by 52% while men favored Bush by 54%, that may lend credence to the hypothesis that simply the fact that more women were interviewed at the polling place than men had a non-negligible influence on the exit polling results.
Also, consider the leads of 1-2% in the exit polls, what was the margin of error in the exit polls? It has been a long night, time for me to finally hit the sack...
I think this was designed for me, it is SO VERY peculiar. I was recently trying to get a 3G 40GB iPod at an Apple store. (They still have them, and are trying to move them for $370.) I do not want the 4G 40 GB because the icelink does not fit that model yet. Also the 4G 20GB does not come with a dock. This U2 one comes with two cables and a dock! More than adequate for leaving one at work and one at home. Also the interior of my car is black as well as the icelink connectors and proclip which will match the iPod case. Even better the red click wheel, it matches the majority of the interior lights in the car! And the blue screen, the same color that my dash instruments are. (I drive a VW Golf.)
So if you take into account the extra dock (which I would buy anyway) this makes the U2 iPod only $10 more than the regular iPod. Also when I went to college I gave my tape collection to my little brother. All of my old music collection including everything by U2 I had is gone anyway! More than 400 hundred U2 songs for 100$ is a great deal to me. I was a pretty big U2 fan back in the day, mostly because they were so politically and socially relevant to me at that time. By the time I was in college, well they did not seem to be at the same level in those respects. But they did make some good (ie successful on the charts) songs after I stopped caring so it would be nice to have such a round collection again.
The only bad thing is the signatures on the back. I really wanted to laser engrave some silly 'government warning' on the back of my iPod, oh well.
Now I just need to convince my wife that this is something worthwhile to purchase...
Try as I might, I can only think of one example of such behavior from Democrats
I do not think that you looked hard enough. Voter fraud is worked on both sides of the aisle. Consider mayor Richard Daley's 'vote early and vote often' campaign that many consider gave JFK the presidency over Richard M. Nixon in 1960.
Or how about the 1948 Texas Senate race that gave LBJ the victory by a scant 87, yes only 87, votes. Most people believe that thousands of those votes were bought in south Texas or stuffed at the ballot boxes.
Think how different things could have been if... What if Johnson had never been president to escalate us into Vietnam? How would have Nixon handled the Cuban Missile Crisis?
nader 106 hits
badnarik 0 hits
Maybe Moore is afraid of mentioning anyone other than Kerry and Bush at this point, but I would have expected something about the free speech zone quote, being blocked from FOX news, his arrest, or this Arizona debates to have made his site somewhere.
I had an early HP ink jet, and it was fantastic. How early, well it used a tractor feed so it had to have the kind of paper where you tore off the sides and was connected to Victor (XT class machine). That thing was fantastic, lasted more than a decade, the print head was NEVER changed. I would just squirt more (inexpensive) ink into the reservoir. Many years later I bought an early color bubble jet from Canon, to get color and experienced ALL of the hassles that people now know are common with ink type printers. It was so wasteful and expensive to run that for charts I used my trusty old imagewriter with a color ribbon until last year.
What changed about a year ago? The price of both new and used color laser printers fell into range. I believe that you can get a new duplex capable color laser printer from Xerox for $400 at todays prices. (That is if my memory serves, possibly there was a mail in rebate involved.) Our laserprinter is used for almost everything and it natively supports PS and has an RJ-45 and print server built-in, it is an HP something or other.
That printer is used for almost everything my wife and I print. For photos we have a small dye-sub printer. Sony something or other. We just have it hooked-up to the TV, not even to a computer and we only use it rarely because it is cheaper to just go to pretty-much any photo place. It is nice though for when you care about the color to be exactly predictable. (Each photo place seems to get the colors a bit different in my experience.) And I have had some problems with photo places having bad card readers which will sometimes be unable to read a few of the pictures out of the multitude on the card. So for situations like that or when you want the pictures now (trust me when you have kids and your relatives or friends come over that happens) the dye-sub printer is used.
So that is my attitude. Do not fool around with ink anymore. It was SUCH a hassle for me that it was just not worth it in terms of time and ink lost. It all just led to aggravation. I cannot even name the printers that I use now, and I like it this way, because everything just works. The printer I hated, oh I REMEMBER that one alright, a BJC-70. I remember that from all the times I was on the net searching for help and because of hassle it was!
Probably because if they did, and then everyone reading were to login with the bugmenot username and password, then not too many more people would be able to read the article. Don't you think that many news sites that require registration keep track of whether there are say more than a hundred people using the same username at about the same time from different IP addresses no less? More often than not, once someone mentions bugmenot in a slashdot story like you just did, the username stop works very soon afterwards.
Coming from a person who lived more than twenty years in Illinois and California I see exactly your points. Both states have large agricultural areas but tend to be dominated by large urban areas in national and statewide elections. (Well now I was generalizing, it IS more sophisticated than that in practice.) I agree it is in fact bad in many states for the rural areas where the more densely populated centers tend to dominate politics, the very issue that the Connecticut compromise addressed so long ago. Yet in Illinois there is enough population (and agribusiness) outside of the Chicagoland area that to a large extent the interests of the farming areas are represented better than they would be otherwise. (At least in the issues directly related to farming, other issues such as schools and roads are a constant source of contention between the two areas.)
I was looking at the issue from a historical perspective and noting that by ignoring it completely this would hurt rural areas because they would be out numbered by the more populous centers and I completely missed the issue that by now there are many states where the old distinction between city and rural has become problematic. Thanks for pointing that out to me. The problem is that I still believe that it IS important to somehow protect the interests of farmers (I grew-up with too many corn, soybean, and dairy farmer friends to ignore this) otherwise the interests of rural areas would be largely ignored. Simply adopting a majority system would not address this at all.
Maybe someone has an idea of how to address this. How could any fair system be adopted when it means that those states that currently have 'too much' influence would lose that? Possibly there is a way to still protect the rural areas from the city centers but have it reflect the current boundaries?
Because there was a desire for the states to unite. In order to unite the more populous states had to reach a compromise with the less populous (and more rural) states, so that the union would even be a possibility. Consider this in the same light as the northern states that allowed the 3/5 compromise so that the southern states would be willing to join the union.
I am married and so the whole online dating thing does not apply, but I still think it could be fun to take a serious marriage compatibility test. We took a good online test for political orientation not too long ago, and that was fun (and funny) and we have done some cheesy tests in Women's magazines. Those are only fun to a limited degree, because well they are so cheesy.
So how about something "based on what psychologists know works" that we could take together. I guess something like the eHarmony test you referred to that would let us see how we matched-up afterward. Not only might that be fun (and funny to see where we are 'incompatible'), it would be revealing, and could give some useful insight into our marriage.
The smaller more rural states were concerned about being dominated by the larger states with cities in the national arena. It was seen that the interests of the rural and city populations would be different. The scheme of the Senate with two votes per state regardless of population and the two to three bonus (there are no fractional electors after-all, consider this as round-off error depending on where the state falls in relation to other states in the last census) electors for smaller states was devised in part because of that concern.
David is from NY, a state with a number of large cities and he feels underrepresented, but consider the point of view of farmers and ranchers. We can have raging debates ad nausea for example about whether the federal government does too much or too little to assist farmers and ranchers, but the fact of the matter is that if it were not for the systems in place to grant disproportionate weight to rural areas, there would indeed be less aid.
Also, is there really a surprise that cities tend Democratic and rural areas Republican? Again this seems to be sour grapes from David based on his comments.