Huzzah! If the government taxes me and provides a service, I'm okay with that. (Single Payer.)
If the government says I must buy some service from a private company, then I am living in Gilliam's Brazil, and people should be shot.
The insurance companies have no right to exist, and no right to my money. People say that increasing pool size will bring down costs, but the insurance companies will just pocket the savings. There is no reason to believe that they would reduce cost to consumers because you remove the key defining force of the market. Business must entice buyers to the market with valuable goods and services. Once you make purchasing mandatory, businesses no longer have to compete with the competetive market force of 'Fuck You.'
I agree with the sentiment, but I'm pretty sure you're already forced to buy a service from a private company.
Own a car? The liability part of car insurance required by law. And though some Canadian provinces manage auto insurance, I doubt your state does, forcing you to use a private company.
There are plenty of examples of gun CEOs turning $100M companies into $1B companies. If their leadership results in hundreds of millions in extra profit, they deserve a good slice of the pie.
I guarantee you that any CEO who turned a company around like that didn't give himself a slice anywhere near the size of the chunks gouged by some executives. The mentality and ethics of the efficient CEO are entirely at odds with the sponger CEO. One is good for the company, the other is not.
Case in point: Steve Jobs has an official salary of $1 a year. AFAIK he doesn't accept bonus pay, either. The rest of his compensation (private jet, stock options, etc) is directly tied to the company and its fortunes.
Executives raking in huge amounts of actual pay and bonuses are in it for the short haul, IMHO. Without a majority of their compensation tied to the company's stocks, they don't really care about the company's long-term performance.
Problem I see is that a joystick would be controlling two very different things, direction and speed. On the one hand, you don't want a left/right twitch to suddenly deflect the wheels; on the other, if you slam the stick to the braking position you don't want a delay in response.
A possible issue at high speed is the turn itself--you're pushing the stick one way, but centripetal force pushes you the other. In a plane this isn't an issue because left/right controls roll, not yaw.
Similarly, which direction is accelerate and which is brake? If you do it intuitively (forward=accelerate, backward=brake) you again have issues during emergency braking because you're pulling back while the rest of you is pushing forward. In a plane this doesn't matter because the throttles have moderate resistance; and in a helicopter that pitches the whole chopper forward or backward, too.
Apparently some cars already have stick controls, how have they handled these issues? Or is it assumed that handicapped drivers aren't likely to drive to such extremes?
This is nothing but corporate socialism. Why is this better than the government stepping in and providing health care and retirement?
Precisely because it's not the government stepping in to provide it. Or the tender mercies of the US medical insurance companies for that matter.
He likely could have gone on long-term disability until finally retiring. At least giving him a token job meant he was still contributing something. You think what he got was entitlement? Just imagine if he'd been in a union shop.
You know, I agree with you on one level, but it annoys me whenever shareholders are invoked like gods that must be appeased at all costs.
Problem is that even without money per se, there will still be people wanting to gain power over others. How that's handled, it's not clear. There are still politicians and even a president, but what interests are they elected on if money for any project isn't an issue and their citizens want for nothing?
The truly socialist/communist, everyone-is-equal society portrayed in Star Trek are the Borg (well, before they brought in the idea of the queen).
Loaded question--sexism may exist, but it doesn't necessarily explain why low FOSS involvement.
One possibility is that programmers are disproportionately male to begin with, and maybe most of the female developers are already working commercially. A lot of FOSS development is unpaid labour, and unless you're required to volunteer at something, you're probably passionate about it. Passionate enough to do it outside working hours, anyway.
This results in the stereotypical image of the programming geek image, coding away in their parents' basement. Either there's a good reason this image is almost always a male; or, if all things are equal, it's sexist against males.
I suspect it's statistics first, i.e. fewer female developers to start with and they aren't as likely to participate in FOSS if they program at work, with occasional sexist attacks directed against female FOSS coders by a small but outspoken minority.
Fuel economy estimates are LOWER than real world fuel economy? Really? I don't think so. I recently saw a window sticker that said (in fine print) the highway fuel economy was achieved at 37 mph. You'd be arrested for driving 37 on the highway.
Fuel economy estimates are good ideas that have just turned into more false marketing.
You're right, the sticker MPG is generally lower than real world.
However, some non-hybrids are an exception. My 2008 Honda Fit officially has city/highway MPG ratings of 28/34, but my real-world combined MPG is about 35.
I regularly do 120 on 100 km/h highways, and my old roommates claimed I had a lead foot starting from a stop. I don't hypermile either, unless "don't keep on the throttle until the last second" is considered hypermiling instead of common sense.
One hilarious example of this that made the local news: a cop pulls over a guy for speeding. After the guy is given his ticket, he drives away but makes an obscene gesture at the cop, who promptly pulls him over again for another ticket.
I've learned over the years, however, that pretty much anything you want from an Apple web site can be found by typing 'apple/foo' in your location bar. Your browser will autofill the 'apple' to 'www.apple.com' and Apple maps all of their resources to the first part of the path - even if it ends up redirecting you to 'foo.apple.com' in the end. So, try 'apple/quicktime' or 'apple/developer' (or 'safari', or 'macosx' or 'iphone', etc). Very handy.
This only works if your ISP doesn't hijack unresolved DNS lookups. I found this out last year when typing "apple/ca/store" took me to to a "helpful" Rogers info page (they at least now provide a DNS server address where this doesn't happen).
It also only works in Safari. Doing that in say Firefox goes to a Google page.
Now there's a thing to take into account: the sheer size of the territory. Canada's HUGE. Maps don't do justice to its immensity, only second to Russia. I would think that installing and maintaining such a huge network to cover such a small population does have a rather high cost... but that's no excuse for the ways those companies gouge us!
That excuse only gets them so far. Australia is also immense but its population density is even less than Canada (3.2 people per km^2 vs 2.6/km^2). Like Canada, large areas of the country don't have coverage, yet their cell provider service is far superior.
Though technically the same company, Fido has several advantages over their parent company:
- per-second billing instead of rounding up to the next minute - for free weeknight/weekend plans, free periods start at 7pm instead of outrageous 9pm. - no $7 "system access fee"
The only disadvantages compared to Rogers were that their normal data plans weren't as generous (though they had the $30/6 GB plan at the same time Rogers did), and there aren't as many voice plan deals like My5.
I am no weapons or naval expert, but since (most?) nukes detonate above ground/sea level, it makes it a very poor weapon if your goal is to actually sink a ship, particularly the large aircraft carriers the USA has.
A carrier is mostly flat deck. A nuclear blast above that deck might blow away the island but most of the downward force of the blast would be either reflected back upwards, or absorbed before punching out parts of the hull below the waterline.
I would think the key to actually sinking any surface ship in battle is to ensure whichever weapon you use, the bulk of the damage it causes occurs below the waterline.
But then Apple fixed the problem by simply cloning the entire Palm and calling the result the "iPhone".
Palm? Oh right, they're the company that cloned the entire Apple Newton and called the result the "Pilot."... just illustrating how idiotic your statement was.
On legacy ports, last year we bought a new HP workstation for the office. It came with a PS2 keyboard and PS2 mouse.
WTF, why are they still making an otherwise modern mouse using PS2 connectors!? 1999 called, there's these newfangled USB ports where input devices can be hot-swapped without locking up the computer--use them FFS!
Thank you for acknowledging the problem in your original post.
I can't think of a better term for you, but it extends beyond the ruling party itself and their bureaucrats; it also involves the prison wardens who allow this, and the doctors who perform the harvesting.
NO ONE who calls themselves a human being can hold their head up today, and yeah I'm well aware of my own country's recent atrocities
Fixed that for you. If you're going tar a quarter of the world's population (counting all the Chinese who've never lived in China) for the actions of a few thousand at most, you may as well be inclusive.
Why should I, a "hyphenated Chinese" born and raised in the west, three generations removed from mainland China, bear any shame or responsibility for the jackals in charge there now, who weren't voted in by the people anyway?
I put very little weight on either comments or ratings on the app store. I outright ignore 1 and 5 star ratings; the number of times I've seen comments raving about the app being the best in its category or whatever yet having a 1-star rating is ridiculous. Seriously how do you screw up understanding how a 5-star rating system works?
Then we have mmorpg trolls leaving tons of 5 star comments with their character codes for alliances and such; waste of space and tells me Jack about the app itself.
If a review is 2, 3, or 4 stars then I pay more attention to what they wrote.
Err, have you checked the android app store lately? Does you iphone have turn-by-turn directions?
Yes. I don't use them but Tom-Tom and smaller (cheaper) options are available. xGPS is also available for jailbroken iPhones.
Can you i-phone be used as a metal-detector?
Yes. The latest 3GS has an internal compass, and apps exist to use it as a metal detector
Did you iphone come with copy-and-paste enabled?
Yes - as of mid-June this year.
Can your iphone use google voice?
Finally, the first no (officially, anyway)
How much do your iphone apps add to the total cost of your phone?
Downloaded almost 200 apps, including games, traffic cameras, weather charts, fitness, stargazing, etc. Most are full and not demo/lite versions.
Total cost: $2.
(Apps like Pandora's Box and AppMiner are a godsend for tracking apps that are on sale)
I've yet to have to pay for an andriod app, but did dump some money toward andnav2. Is there anything even close to Enkin for iPhone?
Not personally aware of one yet but there was a/. article about London Tube system app working on that same principle.
There is nothing wrong with the hardware; pictures / advertisements of the Android don't do it any justice. The functionality that the keyboard and trackball on the G1 provides crush any hardware extras the iPhone may have.
What would do it justice then? Consider that the iPhone has no virtually no surface features, so its ads are all based on what's shown on the screen.
At $97 the Android is more than competitively priced. How much did all your iPhone apps end up costing you? Every app I've downloaded for android has been free (most in both senses).
Stopping being idiots and start (re)introducing 1 dollar coins, and add 0.5 and 2 dollar coins while you are at it.
Damn straight. I was in Vegas a couple of years ago and naively took the public transit. It was immensely annoying to have fare reading machines read in those dollar bills... first line it up just so, the machine sucks it in partway, pushes it partway back out again (verifying the bill?), then sucks it all the way in. Repeat as necessary.
I swear it took at least two minutes to get 10 people on that way. Taken along with the congested traffic on the strip, it would've been far faster to walk the mile or two if it wasn't so damn hot that day. Meanwhile, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have all been using $1 and $2 coins for years now (OTOH, the bus drivers in Adelaide, Australia actually gave change back if necessary, slowing things in a different way).
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Huzzah! If the government taxes me and provides a service, I'm okay with that. (Single Payer.)
If the government says I must buy some service from a private company, then I am living in Gilliam's Brazil, and people should be shot.
The insurance companies have no right to exist, and no right to my money. People say that increasing pool size will bring down costs, but the insurance companies will just pocket the savings. There is no reason to believe that they would reduce cost to consumers because you remove the key defining force of the market. Business must entice buyers to the market with valuable goods and services. Once you make purchasing mandatory, businesses no longer have to compete with the competetive market force of 'Fuck You.'
I agree with the sentiment, but I'm pretty sure you're already forced to buy a service from a private company.
Own a car? The liability part of car insurance required by law. And though some Canadian provinces manage auto insurance, I doubt your state does, forcing you to use a private company.
I guarantee you that any CEO who turned a company around like that didn't give himself a slice anywhere near the size of the chunks gouged by some executives. The mentality and ethics of the efficient CEO are entirely at odds with the sponger CEO. One is good for the company, the other is not.
Case in point: Steve Jobs has an official salary of $1 a year. AFAIK he doesn't accept bonus pay, either. The rest of his compensation (private jet, stock options, etc) is directly tied to the company and its fortunes.
Executives raking in huge amounts of actual pay and bonuses are in it for the short haul, IMHO. Without a majority of their compensation tied to the company's stocks, they don't really care about the company's long-term performance.
Problem I see is that a joystick would be controlling two very different things, direction and speed. On the one hand, you don't want a left/right twitch to suddenly deflect the wheels; on the other, if you slam the stick to the braking position you don't want a delay in response.
A possible issue at high speed is the turn itself--you're pushing the stick one way, but centripetal force pushes you the other. In a plane this isn't an issue because left/right controls roll, not yaw.
Similarly, which direction is accelerate and which is brake? If you do it intuitively (forward=accelerate, backward=brake) you again have issues during emergency braking because you're pulling back while the rest of you is pushing forward. In a plane this doesn't matter because the throttles have moderate resistance; and in a helicopter that pitches the whole chopper forward or backward, too.
Apparently some cars already have stick controls, how have they handled these issues? Or is it assumed that handicapped drivers aren't likely to drive to such extremes?
This is nothing but corporate socialism. Why is this better than the government stepping in and providing health care and retirement?
Precisely because it's not the government stepping in to provide it. Or the tender mercies of the US medical insurance companies for that matter.
He likely could have gone on long-term disability until finally retiring. At least giving him a token job meant he was still contributing something. You think what he got was entitlement? Just imagine if he'd been in a union shop.
You know, I agree with you on one level, but it annoys me whenever shareholders are invoked like gods that must be appeased at all costs.
Problem is that even without money per se, there will still be people wanting to gain power over others. How that's handled, it's not clear. There are still politicians and even a president, but what interests are they elected on if money for any project isn't an issue and their citizens want for nothing?
The truly socialist/communist, everyone-is-equal society portrayed in Star Trek are the Borg (well, before they brought in the idea of the queen).
Loaded question--sexism may exist, but it doesn't necessarily explain why low FOSS involvement.
One possibility is that programmers are disproportionately male to begin with, and maybe most of the female developers are already working commercially. A lot of FOSS development is unpaid labour, and unless you're required to volunteer at something, you're probably passionate about it. Passionate enough to do it outside working hours, anyway.
This results in the stereotypical image of the programming geek image, coding away in their parents' basement. Either there's a good reason this image is almost always a male; or, if all things are equal, it's sexist against males.
I suspect it's statistics first, i.e. fewer female developers to start with and they aren't as likely to participate in FOSS if they program at work, with occasional sexist attacks directed against female FOSS coders by a small but outspoken minority.
Right, just like IBM should have bought SCO when the latter sued IBM for violating "their" UNIX copyrights.
Simple... and it would've saved IBM years and millions of dollars in legal expenses.
So how do you get the girls to flock to science?
I don't hear a great debate over how to get more girls into plumbing, NASCAR, or masonry.
As an engineer, he was speaking out of self-interest. The plumbers, NASCAR drivers and masonry guys already got their girls ;-)
Fuel economy estimates are LOWER than real world fuel economy? Really? I don't think so. I recently saw a window sticker that said (in fine print) the highway fuel economy was achieved at 37 mph. You'd be arrested for driving 37 on the highway.
Fuel economy estimates are good ideas that have just turned into more false marketing.
You're right, the sticker MPG is generally lower than real world.
However, some non-hybrids are an exception. My 2008 Honda Fit officially has city/highway MPG ratings of 28/34, but my real-world combined MPG is about 35.
I regularly do 120 on 100 km/h highways, and my old roommates claimed I had a lead foot starting from a stop. I don't hypermile either, unless "don't keep on the throttle until the last second" is considered hypermiling instead of common sense.
The US EPA changed to more accurate MPG measures two model years ago.
The article is almost certainly using UK gallons, since Ford's website for the Taurus lists fuel economy as 18 mpg city and 28 mpg highway.
One hilarious example of this that made the local news: a cop pulls over a guy for speeding. After the guy is given his ticket, he drives away but makes an obscene gesture at the cop, who promptly pulls him over again for another ticket.
The offence? Improper use of hand signals.
Forget poor organization, the speed on even some of their main pages, never mind development pages, is atrocious.
Very surprising (and disappointing) for a company that sells high-performance, high-availability hardware and services.
I've learned over the years, however, that pretty much anything you want from an Apple web site can be found by typing 'apple/foo' in your location bar. Your browser will autofill the 'apple' to 'www.apple.com' and Apple maps all of their resources to the first part of the path - even if it ends up redirecting you to 'foo.apple.com' in the end. So, try 'apple/quicktime' or 'apple/developer' (or 'safari', or 'macosx' or 'iphone', etc). Very handy.
This only works if your ISP doesn't hijack unresolved DNS lookups. I found this out last year when typing "apple/ca/store" took me to to a "helpful" Rogers info page (they at least now provide a DNS server address where this doesn't happen).
It also only works in Safari. Doing that in say Firefox goes to a Google page.
Now there's a thing to take into account: the sheer size of the territory. Canada's HUGE. Maps don't do justice to its immensity, only second to Russia. I would think that installing and maintaining such a huge network to cover such a small population does have a rather high cost... but that's no excuse for the ways those companies gouge us!
That excuse only gets them so far. Australia is also immense but its population density is even less than Canada (3.2 people per km^2 vs 2.6/km^2). Like Canada, large areas of the country don't have coverage, yet their cell provider service is far superior.
Though technically the same company, Fido has several advantages over their parent company:
- per-second billing instead of rounding up to the next minute
- for free weeknight/weekend plans, free periods start at 7pm instead of outrageous 9pm.
- no $7 "system access fee"
The only disadvantages compared to Rogers were that their normal data plans weren't as generous (though they had the $30/6 GB plan at the same time Rogers did), and there aren't as many voice plan deals like My5.
Key words were "atmospheric nuclear tests."
I am no weapons or naval expert, but since (most?) nukes detonate above ground/sea level, it makes it a very poor weapon if your goal is to actually sink a ship, particularly the large aircraft carriers the USA has.
A carrier is mostly flat deck. A nuclear blast above that deck might blow away the island but most of the downward force of the blast would be either reflected back upwards, or absorbed before punching out parts of the hull below the waterline.
I would think the key to actually sinking any surface ship in battle is to ensure whichever weapon you use, the bulk of the damage it causes occurs below the waterline.
That was my intent--the first statement was idiotic, so I made an equally idiotic statement using the same "logic" to highlight it.
But then Apple fixed the problem by simply cloning the entire Palm and calling the result the "iPhone".
Palm? Oh right, they're the company that cloned the entire Apple Newton and called the result the "Pilot." ... just illustrating how idiotic your statement was.
On legacy ports, last year we bought a new HP workstation for the office. It came with a PS2 keyboard and PS2 mouse.
WTF, why are they still making an otherwise modern mouse using PS2 connectors!? 1999 called, there's these newfangled USB ports where input devices can be hot-swapped without locking up the computer--use them FFS!
Thank you for acknowledging the problem in your original post.
I can't think of a better term for you, but it extends beyond the ruling party itself and their bureaucrats; it also involves the prison wardens who allow this, and the doctors who perform the harvesting.
NO ONE who calls themselves a human being can hold their head up today, and yeah I'm well aware of my own country's recent atrocities
Fixed that for you. If you're going tar a quarter of the world's population (counting all the Chinese who've never lived in China) for the actions of a few thousand at most, you may as well be inclusive.
Why should I, a "hyphenated Chinese" born and raised in the west, three generations removed from mainland China, bear any shame or responsibility for the jackals in charge there now, who weren't voted in by the people anyway?
I put very little weight on either comments or ratings on the app store. I outright ignore 1 and 5 star ratings; the number of times I've seen comments raving about the app being the best in its category or whatever yet having a 1-star rating is ridiculous. Seriously how do you screw up understanding how a 5-star rating system works?
Then we have mmorpg trolls leaving tons of 5 star comments with their character codes for alliances and such; waste of space and tells me Jack about the app itself.
If a review is 2, 3, or 4 stars then I pay more attention to what they wrote.
Ever hear of "mob rule"?
Ever heard of "benevolent dictators?"
Err, have you checked the android app store lately? Does you iphone have turn-by-turn directions?
Yes. I don't use them but Tom-Tom and smaller (cheaper) options are available. xGPS is also available for jailbroken iPhones.
Can you i-phone be used as a metal-detector?
Yes. The latest 3GS has an internal compass, and apps exist to use it as a metal detector
Did you iphone come with copy-and-paste enabled?
Yes - as of mid-June this year.
Can your iphone use google voice?
Finally, the first no (officially, anyway)
How much do your iphone apps add to the total cost of your phone?
Downloaded almost 200 apps, including games, traffic cameras, weather charts, fitness, stargazing, etc. Most are full and not demo/lite versions.
Total cost: $2.
(Apps like Pandora's Box and AppMiner are a godsend for tracking apps that are on sale)
I've yet to have to pay for an andriod app, but did dump some money toward andnav2. Is there anything even close to Enkin for iPhone?
Not personally aware of one yet but there was a /. article about London Tube system app working on that same principle.
There is nothing wrong with the hardware; pictures / advertisements of the Android don't do it any justice. The functionality that the keyboard and trackball on the G1 provides crush any hardware extras the iPhone may have.
What would do it justice then? Consider that the iPhone has no virtually no surface features, so its ads are all based on what's shown on the screen.
At $97 the Android is more than competitively priced. How much did all your iPhone apps end up costing you? Every app I've downloaded for android has been free (most in both senses).
Again, of my 200 apps, I've only paid $2.
Stopping being idiots and start (re)introducing 1 dollar coins, and add 0.5 and 2 dollar coins while you are at it.
Damn straight. I was in Vegas a couple of years ago and naively took the public transit. It was immensely annoying to have fare reading machines read in those dollar bills... first line it up just so, the machine sucks it in partway, pushes it partway back out again (verifying the bill?), then sucks it all the way in. Repeat as necessary.
I swear it took at least two minutes to get 10 people on that way. Taken along with the congested traffic on the strip, it would've been far faster to walk the mile or two if it wasn't so damn hot that day. Meanwhile, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have all been using $1 and $2 coins for years now (OTOH, the bus drivers in Adelaide, Australia actually gave change back if necessary, slowing things in a different way).