The problem with using "insurance" to pay for routine things is it separates the buyer from the seller with a third-party. Whenever you do this you decrease the efficiency of the market. The seller will adjust prices according to what he thinks the third-party will pay, and the buyer won't care.
Under a federally-mandated and/or controlled health insurance plan, now you've introduced a fourth party to the equation. This isn't to say it can't work, but I wouldn't bet on it. And in 10 years we'll be bitching to replace the reform because it's clearly not working.
This reform could have been a lot simpler. Allow insurance companies to sell across state lines. Mandate that health care providers advertise prices. Make health insurance premiums tax-free, whether employer paid or self paid. Establish a bare minimum of insurance coverage, explicitly spelled out by law, established by looking at a baseline healthy citizen's average risks and costs and bumping it up a bit, with a reasonable maximum coverage cap, say $750,000. Provide federal funding for the bottom 10-20% of income earners to buy minimum coverage policies from private insurers. Forbid dropping coverage for pre-existing conditions, and allow for refusal of payment for pre-existing conditions for 1 year after establishing the policy.
Basically, remove perverse incentives, increase transparency in health care costs, and provide funding for those who simply cannot afford it otherwise. Those that can afford it will have information available to them so that they can make better decisions on where to go and won't have to be taxed for money spent on health care.
I've known more than a few electricians whose natural skin resistance allowed them to grab bare 110 wires while they're still hot. It's quite something to see somebody wire in a new receptacle while it's still live.
I would be very interested to see the stats of death per capita due to electrical shock in the home for USA and UK.
That wouldn't tell you anything re: the 2-prong vs. 3-prong debate unless the data is broken out by how the electrical shock occurred.
The purpose of the third ground prong is to provide a path to ground for the appliance's casing. Interestingly enough, most appliances are built reasonably carefully so that their case won't become electrified. Crispy chunks of long pig do not buy new blenders, so they've got an incentive to do so. I imagine most deaths due to electric shock occur when the homeowner is dicking around with the wiring in the wall or ceiling while adding a ceiling fan or a hot tub, not from getting a fatal jolt of juice from the Cuisinart.
It's not that serious of a safety issue. It will sort itself out in time, without Chicken Littling everybody to death.
I've gotten tired of dealing with "almost" myself.
This.
Every few weeks I think I want to try to put OS X on my netbook. I start reading the various how-tos, and they all look hideous. Dozens of links to dozens of forums, each one providing a tiny piece of the puzzle and execrably spelled.
Then once you get out the other end of this nightmare you have a netbook with no (or bad) power management and probably no sound. Oh, and you have to troll eBay for a wireless card to replace the included one.
This was the creepiest fucking thread I've seen on Slashdot. I like the way you keep replying to yourself. As if you think, "Oh, hey, here's a creepy fact about college-age strippers and drugs the Slashdot community is dying to learn from me."
Disney Corp. is now much more about managing a stable of properties. Which is not a sin, professional management is valuable. But by itself it'll only take you so far. Buying Pixar helps with this problem, but you can't keep making Toy Story movies.
If the FCC regulates the Internet's backbones, even in the name of "preserving a free and open Internet," they'll have to monitor the Internet. Somehow.
When did nerds start salivating over the FCC acting as an Internet gatekeeper? Are they really that pissed off at AT&T for not letting them use Skype on their iPhones? Or whatever?
Sun also provides enterprise ops center software that can be used to manage the zones via a gui. Copy/create/rollback, etc..
This is very important. One of the most important traits of a 3-tiered development system is setting it up so that the "test" environment can be rebooted back to a clone of the live site. "Test" should be just that--for testing. If your test environment goes pear-shaped, who cares? Clone the live site, run the updates from "dev", and your "test" is back.
In general it's rarely a good idea to provide a migration path from "test" to "live". As development teams get larger it may make sense to have intermediate changes done on "test" and then ported up to "live" and down to "dev". At this point you'll be looking at a migration manager of some sort.
CVS (of whatever flavor) can help you do this. It's a pain in the ass, and everybody will hate it, but it works.
I've done this with virtual machines as well. It's kinda whizzy to do, but probably overkill.
The simplest way for me was to simply use rsync. Rigid delineation between live and test/dev environments is important. Use a completely separate database (not just a different schema), and if possible a completely separate database server. Changes to the database schema should be encapsulated in update scripts and tightly controlled and thoroughly tested in the test environment. Use a database that supports transactions and use them. Updating the live site should be performed by updating a clone of the live site in another directory. That way if everything goes tits up for some unexpected reason you can revert back to the old site while you lick your wounds. Virtual machines definitely make this all techy and bitchin', but editing httpd.conf and restarting Apache also works.
The best solution is going to be customized to the needs of the project. Most projects don't need a dev/test/live arrangement. Dev and live are sufficient. The most important thing is to establish a framework of how changes are to be made to the code base or database, and stick to it. CVS will help enforce this, but at the cost of having to use CVS.
Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?
Yes, it would be "in development" until 2015, and then released to practically nobody, who would promptly sue.
I've ceased to be excited by the "potential" of any hardware platform. The history of technology is littered with a lot of potentially great things that failed to do anything remotely great.
If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered." Apple didn't promise the world, they merely delivered a continent or two. Here's a product: you can do these things with it.
I have a hard time believing that any government is capable of that much forethought. Democracies are split by competing bureaucracies and dictatorships are hampered by short-sighted corruption to enact anything like a grand plan for pervasive TIA.
Whenever one feels the urge to use the phrase "By that logic...", one should stop and think about what one is going to write. Because it's likely to be ridiculous.
People tend to confuse hyperbole with logical extension of a statement.
That's not true. Originally it was going to be the successor to NWN, without BioWare having to work within the restrictions of D&D and Forgotten Realms. Their own story, their own rules. They were talking about a toolset just like Aurora as well. This is going way back, before there was even so much as a screenshot.
For every woman who is willing to stick it out in the face of something like Shuttleworth's comments, there are uncounted numbers who hear the message loud and clear: They are not welcome as FOSS developers.
"Stick it out in the face of..." Seriously?
The message "They are not welcome" is loud and clear? Seriously?
While I'm all for a general air of civility, overreaching, like you do here, isn't helping. Actually, I wonder if you even know any women, or if you're just white-knighting. While the plural of anecdote is not data, I don't know many women who would be particularly bothered by the weak-tea examples of sexism I've seen mentioned so far. Most women seem to put their big-girl panties on along with the guys in their big-boy shorts and can take the occasional joke at their expense without fainting dead away. They're not "sticking it out," they're simply not as big a weenie as you think they are.
The ratio of women in programming positions, Free or otherwise, very likely has nothing to do with sexism. There aren't many women garbage collectors either. What of it? There are some jobs that women as a rule do not want to do. I don't want to be a nurse, but scads of women do. They're not keeping me out of nursing with all the "Cathy" comics around the hospital break room.
Interestingly, the only reason I cared at all about Dragon Age was because it was supposed to be basically the next Neverwinter Nights. When they turned it into a single-player RPG, I stopped caring. So Dragon Age is my invisible neighbor's invisible car.
Because pissing off the Russians isn't that big of a deal. The country has so many internal problems that complaining about missile defense systems is about the best they can manage. If you agree with a burly foreign policy, putting anti-missile systems in their back yard with little consequence is a good move.
Obama is, I suspect, having to think about scaling back our military expenditures. Not because he particularly wants to, as defense spending is a great way to buy support in Congress, but because he's going to have to. The US just can't afford to have the largest military budget in the world. Other countries are going to have to foot their own bills. There's upsides and downsides to this, but reality is setting in.
Since you're interested in cheap cooking, investigate a pressure cooker. It's very hard to beat dried beans on a price-per-calorie basis. Going largely meatless also saves a bunch of dough. Curries are cheap, cheap, cheap with beans and veg, especially if you buy whole spices and grind your own. Fresher, too.
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The problem with using "insurance" to pay for routine things is it separates the buyer from the seller with a third-party. Whenever you do this you decrease the efficiency of the market. The seller will adjust prices according to what he thinks the third-party will pay, and the buyer won't care.
Under a federally-mandated and/or controlled health insurance plan, now you've introduced a fourth party to the equation. This isn't to say it can't work, but I wouldn't bet on it. And in 10 years we'll be bitching to replace the reform because it's clearly not working.
This reform could have been a lot simpler. Allow insurance companies to sell across state lines. Mandate that health care providers advertise prices. Make health insurance premiums tax-free, whether employer paid or self paid. Establish a bare minimum of insurance coverage, explicitly spelled out by law, established by looking at a baseline healthy citizen's average risks and costs and bumping it up a bit, with a reasonable maximum coverage cap, say $750,000. Provide federal funding for the bottom 10-20% of income earners to buy minimum coverage policies from private insurers. Forbid dropping coverage for pre-existing conditions, and allow for refusal of payment for pre-existing conditions for 1 year after establishing the policy.
Basically, remove perverse incentives, increase transparency in health care costs, and provide funding for those who simply cannot afford it otherwise. Those that can afford it will have information available to them so that they can make better decisions on where to go and won't have to be taxed for money spent on health care.
I've known more than a few electricians whose natural skin resistance allowed them to grab bare 110 wires while they're still hot. It's quite something to see somebody wire in a new receptacle while it's still live.
Thank you for your insight into the butthole region.
That wouldn't tell you anything re: the 2-prong vs. 3-prong debate unless the data is broken out by how the electrical shock occurred.
The purpose of the third ground prong is to provide a path to ground for the appliance's casing. Interestingly enough, most appliances are built reasonably carefully so that their case won't become electrified. Crispy chunks of long pig do not buy new blenders, so they've got an incentive to do so. I imagine most deaths due to electric shock occur when the homeowner is dicking around with the wiring in the wall or ceiling while adding a ceiling fan or a hot tub, not from getting a fatal jolt of juice from the Cuisinart.
It's not that serious of a safety issue. It will sort itself out in time, without Chicken Littling everybody to death.
That's nothing. Psoriasis, anal prolapse and crotch-chiggers are also the inevitable result of "private funding of campaigns"!
This.
Every few weeks I think I want to try to put OS X on my netbook. I start reading the various how-tos, and they all look hideous. Dozens of links to dozens of forums, each one providing a tiny piece of the puzzle and execrably spelled.
Then once you get out the other end of this nightmare you have a netbook with no (or bad) power management and probably no sound. Oh, and you have to troll eBay for a wireless card to replace the included one.
No thanks.
Maybe you were too sarcastic in high school?
A lot of people don't like that, you know.
This was the creepiest fucking thread I've seen on Slashdot. I like the way you keep replying to yourself. As if you think, "Oh, hey, here's a creepy fact about college-age strippers and drugs the Slashdot community is dying to learn from me."
This.
Disney Corp. is now much more about managing a stable of properties. Which is not a sin, professional management is valuable. But by itself it'll only take you so far. Buying Pixar helps with this problem, but you can't keep making Toy Story movies.
Why is it called "Open Internet"?
If the FCC regulates the Internet's backbones, even in the name of "preserving a free and open Internet," they'll have to monitor the Internet. Somehow.
When did nerds start salivating over the FCC acting as an Internet gatekeeper? Are they really that pissed off at AT&T for not letting them use Skype on their iPhones? Or whatever?
This is very important. One of the most important traits of a 3-tiered development system is setting it up so that the "test" environment can be rebooted back to a clone of the live site. "Test" should be just that--for testing. If your test environment goes pear-shaped, who cares? Clone the live site, run the updates from "dev", and your "test" is back.
In general it's rarely a good idea to provide a migration path from "test" to "live". As development teams get larger it may make sense to have intermediate changes done on "test" and then ported up to "live" and down to "dev". At this point you'll be looking at a migration manager of some sort.
CVS (of whatever flavor) can help you do this. It's a pain in the ass, and everybody will hate it, but it works.
I've done this with virtual machines as well. It's kinda whizzy to do, but probably overkill.
The simplest way for me was to simply use rsync. Rigid delineation between live and test/dev environments is important. Use a completely separate database (not just a different schema), and if possible a completely separate database server. Changes to the database schema should be encapsulated in update scripts and tightly controlled and thoroughly tested in the test environment. Use a database that supports transactions and use them. Updating the live site should be performed by updating a clone of the live site in another directory. That way if everything goes tits up for some unexpected reason you can revert back to the old site while you lick your wounds. Virtual machines definitely make this all techy and bitchin', but editing httpd.conf and restarting Apache also works.
The best solution is going to be customized to the needs of the project. Most projects don't need a dev/test/live arrangement. Dev and live are sufficient. The most important thing is to establish a framework of how changes are to be made to the code base or database, and stick to it. CVS will help enforce this, but at the cost of having to use CVS.
Yes, it would be "in development" until 2015, and then released to practically nobody, who would promptly sue.
I've ceased to be excited by the "potential" of any hardware platform. The history of technology is littered with a lot of potentially great things that failed to do anything remotely great.
If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered." Apple didn't promise the world, they merely delivered a continent or two. Here's a product: you can do these things with it.
I have a hard time believing that any government is capable of that much forethought. Democracies are split by competing bureaucracies and dictatorships are hampered by short-sighted corruption to enact anything like a grand plan for pervasive TIA.
Whenever one feels the urge to use the phrase "By that logic...", one should stop and think about what one is going to write. Because it's likely to be ridiculous.
People tend to confuse hyperbole with logical extension of a statement.
That's not true. Originally it was going to be the successor to NWN, without BioWare having to work within the restrictions of D&D and Forgotten Realms. Their own story, their own rules. They were talking about a toolset just like Aurora as well. This is going way back, before there was even so much as a screenshot.
"Stick it out in the face of..." Seriously?
The message "They are not welcome" is loud and clear? Seriously?
While I'm all for a general air of civility, overreaching, like you do here, isn't helping. Actually, I wonder if you even know any women, or if you're just white-knighting. While the plural of anecdote is not data, I don't know many women who would be particularly bothered by the weak-tea examples of sexism I've seen mentioned so far. Most women seem to put their big-girl panties on along with the guys in their big-boy shorts and can take the occasional joke at their expense without fainting dead away. They're not "sticking it out," they're simply not as big a weenie as you think they are.
The ratio of women in programming positions, Free or otherwise, very likely has nothing to do with sexism. There aren't many women garbage collectors either. What of it? There are some jobs that women as a rule do not want to do. I don't want to be a nurse, but scads of women do. They're not keeping me out of nursing with all the "Cathy" comics around the hospital break room.
Interestingly, the only reason I cared at all about Dragon Age was because it was supposed to be basically the next Neverwinter Nights. When they turned it into a single-player RPG, I stopped caring. So Dragon Age is my invisible neighbor's invisible car.
Octavia E. Butler and Samuel Delany as well.
Old Volvos are like that. Completely cup-holder free.
The conversation was probably similar, only more like this:
Manager: Orgee borgee bork bork bork!
Engineer: Der chicken in de pot bork bork bork!
Manager: Bork bork bork!
Engineer: Bork bork bork!
"Run, coward!" would be good too. Like a zombie early warning detection system.
For fertilizer, cremation is actually the better option.
Because pissing off the Russians isn't that big of a deal. The country has so many internal problems that complaining about missile defense systems is about the best they can manage. If you agree with a burly foreign policy, putting anti-missile systems in their back yard with little consequence is a good move.
Obama is, I suspect, having to think about scaling back our military expenditures. Not because he particularly wants to, as defense spending is a great way to buy support in Congress, but because he's going to have to. The US just can't afford to have the largest military budget in the world. Other countries are going to have to foot their own bills. There's upsides and downsides to this, but reality is setting in.
Since you're interested in cheap cooking, investigate a pressure cooker. It's very hard to beat dried beans on a price-per-calorie basis. Going largely meatless also saves a bunch of dough. Curries are cheap, cheap, cheap with beans and veg, especially if you buy whole spices and grind your own. Fresher, too.
I don't think any smoker would be bothered by a restaurant banning smoking.
It's the bans that force restaurants or bars to ban smoking even if they want to allow smoking that's a problem.