Obama: We need Obamacare so that more people will have better health insurance for less money.
(health insurance costs skyrocket that lots of people, including many who gained coverage under Obamacare, cannot afford to actually use their insurance)
Obamacare critics: See!?!? We told you so!
Obama: It would have been far worse without Obamacare.
(Obama goes on to reelection in 2012)
Trump: We need tax cuts to boost the economy.
(economy improves for some but not all)
Trump critics: See?!?!? We told you so!
Trump: It would have been far worse without the tax cuts.
(Trump goes on to reelection in 2020??)
You see, Trump is actually playing out almost the same playbook as Obama. The thing is that he is using the same tactics to promote policies that are the polar opposite of what Obama pushed. That may be why the media and so many liberals are so utterly incapable of seeing it. They are so blinded by their personal hatred of Trump (face it they have no objectivity when it comes to Trump) that they cannot see what he is doing.
All of that to say that Trump's supporters are as fanatical about supporting him as Obama's supporters were about him (Obama). I honestly thought that Obama had overplayed his hand in his first term (Obamacare was just the start) and would not get re-elected. I was wrong. I think Trump is on track for about the same level of overplaying his hand as Obama. If not for Obama being re-elected in 2012 I would have said that Trump does not stand a chance in 2020. Having seen how Obama was able to get re-elected, I would put Trump at even odds in 2020.
it does not say that the ISPs must disable Internet access until consumers acknowledge the notification. The law even says that ISPs may make the notification "with a consumer's bill," which shouldn't disable anyone's Internet access.
First, what they did actually complies with Subsection (1)(b)(ii)(A). We may not like their approach, but it does comply with the law. Go read the law, it is a rather sparse 5 pages.
Coincidentally, CenturyLink's blocking of customer Internet access occurred days before the one-year anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission repeal of net neutrality rules, which prohibited blocking and throttling of Internet access.
Second, the proximity to the anniversary of the NN deregulation is both specious and disingenuous. If you know anything about how corporations work you know that legal compliance is an exercise in minimization. The CenturyLink corporate counsel (probably more than one) had to weigh in on this and conclude that this was done in a way that both met the requirements of the law and also did not expose the company to additional liability. It probably had to clear multiple similar hurdles.
So, just like I do when a programmer implements a spec and I look at the product and say, "wow that was wrong," my first thought is always, "the spec must be defective." Granted, there are times where the programmer just makes the wrong choice, but more often than not, the spec really is deficient. If it was a whole team of programmers that produced the wrong thing then the only sensible conclusion is that the spec was faulty.
In this case, the army of lawyers came to a conclusion on a course of action that is making people say, "wow, that cannot be right.". Based on my earlier reasoning, the law is poorly written.
The supply-chain attacks show one of the weaknesses of open source code. Because of its openness and the lack of funds of many of its hobbyist developers and users, open source code can be subject to malicious modifications that often escape notice.
Every time I read something like this I have to imagine it was written by someone who works for or owns stock in one of those companies that produces "compliance" tools/services targeted at businesses that use open source.
I mean, come on. This exact same problem exists for closed source software. Face it, you know about as much about the developers of any random closed source application or library as you do about any random open source application or library. In fact, it is less likely that a malicious change will be discovered if you do not have access to the source code.
Hopefully this will lead to increased adoption of cleaner power production - that is not so bad for the environment.
I agree. When I was younger I spent lots of time outdoors. Preserving the natural beauty of the world should be something humanity strives to do.
I am not saying that all clean power is cheaper but the more of it that gets used the cheaper that it will become.
I think what was happened is that we have reached the "tipping point" where clean energy is actually competitive in the marketplace. Interestingly, all the various governments around the world that have pushed for clean energy production have varying economic and regulatory philosophies (as evidenced by the various approaches to regulation of dirty power and economic incentives/penalties for varies participants in the energy market), but the end result has been the same: for the longest time it just looked like a money pit, and now we start to see some large scale benefit.
I think that a solution based on market forces (i.e, people doing what benefits them economically) will always be stronger, healthier, and more effective than one based on regulatory forces. Granted, sometimes regulatory forces are required (e.g., to maintain clean air and water in the era of industrial production and dirty power), but those are never as good as market forces because regulations mean people do what they are required to do (and people will try to find ways to avoid meeting the requirements) while market forces mean people act in their own best interests.
Anyone know how operating a cashless business is legal by refusing Legal Tender?
It would only be a problem if they let the customer incur the obligation and then refuse the legal tender.
If the merchant makes incurring the obligation contingent on the form of payment, then I suspect the merchant is legally in the clear. It is no different than a sign on the cash register that reads, "no bills over $20."
I wonder how they will write the law. For example, if it is not written in a clear and precise way, I could have a coffee shop with a sign on the door: "cash transactions require exact change." I am in compliance with the law (I technically accept cash), but I suspect that it would have a discriminatory effect. That would be because the people who pay cash will be those who do not care about how much they spend and can hand over $10 for an $8.91 transaction and not care about getting the change back.
Another aspect would be that the law might make it illegal to refuse certain denominations of bills, as I already mentioned is common practice. That might make merchants more attractive targets for petty thieves (you have to keep more cash on hand in order to make change for larger bills) and also more attractive targets for counterfeiters (nobody bothers to counterfeit $5 bills, but $100 bills are a different story).
I do not think that this politician can get where he wants without a good deal of collateral damage.
I have desk that I can raise and lower. It is most helpful after lunch when I'm fighting the food coma that usually occurs. It is nice to move around and stretch your legs, but I could survive without it. A nice option, but not strictly necessary.
I don't know about the health benefits, but fighting the after lunch drag is definitely easier while standing. Also, there are times when when I am doing more thinking than typing and I find I can be more productive in a standing posture. Sometimes reading is easier while standing. The main thing is it enables to me to pace, walk to the whiteboard, go back to the desk, and immediately type stuff without having to sit first. It really is a productivity enhancer. A-plus, would recommend.
Modern corporations continue to fester this flawed mentality that every employee is just a cog in the machine; if one breaks, replace it with another. But humans aren't machinery.
Not just modern companies. In a graduate software engineering class I took (mumble mumble) years ago we had a rather vigorous discussion about people versus process. That is, if you have a sufficiently sophisticated and well implemented process, do the people matter that much? And the reverse, if you have sufficiently excellent people, does the process matter that much?
Big companies seem to tilt heavily toward the process side, while small companies and especially start ups seem to tilt heavily toward the people side. Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
Sadly, none of this is new, nor does it show any real signs of changing.
...debates about whether the work [...] could really be called art at all
This happens all the time with human-created art, especially experimental, avant-garde, and other artistic expressions that are "ahead of their time." Seems to me like the debate is a solid indicator that it actually is art.
When I teach my students about the MVC paradigm I describe the model component this way:
The model is the simplified representation of reality that describes those things which are important to your application.
For example, a maintenance work scheduling application for a school probably needs to know how many display screens are in a classroom, and maybe their positions. Suppose that the decision was made that it does not need to know the make, model and version of the multimedia control panel at the instructor workstation.
Now, if somebody came along and tried to make maintenance purchasing decisions to replace the multimedia control panel based on just the number of display screens in the classroom, they might find the decisions to be faulty because of the lack of information. That does not mean that the lecture hall defied the model. It just means that when the model was developed, the important aspects of the reality being modeled were not considered properly and some were left out. In this example, somebody would need to walk to the classroom and look at the actual control panel to be replaced and gather information on that.
It could be that perhaps the researches described in the article need more detailed models to accurately describe the behaviors they are interested in for these systems.
I would have to agree with this. Things like quarterly "CPU" releases (critical patch update) that mix security fixes with "feature updates" (and those being the only way to obtain security fixes, not annotating CVE IDs in the commit messages of related commits, and forbidding Oracle personnel from helping outside project personnel identify specific commits associated with specific security vulnerability fixes (very useful for backporting purposes) makes for Oracle having a well earned reputation for being obnoxious to the open source community in general.
That is, unless they only have, say, 1 TB and 2 TB drives and maybe two or three physical memory configurations and they can factory disable the "extra" that the customer didn't pay for.
If Apple did that, if could actually be cheaper than managing the large number of variations and still allow them to maximize profits by price discrimination.
As I understand it, HP or IBM did something similar with their servers ages ago (maybe they still do), where you paid for additional CPU, memory, or whatever, and what you paid for was a code that granted you access to the extra capacity because the machine shipped with it from the factory in a disabled state.
That'd definitely a non-sequitur - you haven't provided any data on NZ to support that.
Good point. I did not even try to find those figures and just found data to support my position. After reading your reply, I took a look at the population density map on the Demographics of New Zealand Wikipedia article. It is difficult to tell just going by that, but it sure seems like there are far fewer high concentration urban areas in New Zealand than most places in the US. It does say that 86% of the population lives in those urban areas and the remaining 14% in rural areas, which appear to be less dense than the typical rural area in the US. I would expect that it would be fairly difficult to connect those people.
That said, even though the two situations look more comparable than I initially considered (at least from a population density and dispersion perspective), the matter of scale is huge (no pun intended). The solution is not immediately apparent to me.
If we're going to be picky, then none of the population density data you or I could come up with will give a watertight prediction of the cost of implementing broadband. An empty field more sparsely populated (zero population density) than any county in the US. But note that a more heterogeneously distributed population is not necessarily more expensive to wire up than a more uniform one - quite the opposite, in fact. Vast uninhabited wastes do not need broadband at all; the individual cost of wiring up a small number of isolated people is high, but the cost per head of population in the country can be low. Meanwhile, the flip side of an uneven population distribution is that many people live close to each other, so are cheaper to wire up.
Of course, while Internet infrastructure gets more expensive as the population spreads out, other things are the reverse. For instance, produce and other fresh grocery items (e.g., milk, OJ, etc.) are more expensive in NYC than they are in, say, Lake Charles, Louisiana. I guess on thing that I never realized is that the market economy tends to favor those things with a cost gradient toward higher population density (higher density is also an indicator of higher overall incomes) than those things with a cost gradient in the other direction.
New Zealand has HALF the population density of the US, so connecting it up is actually MORE difficult (per capita).
What you say is a non sequitur. For example, the least densely populated county in Rhode Island (385.67/sq mi) is more densely populated the most densely populated counties in Nevada (382.09/sq mi), Idaho, Mississippi, Maine, Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming (34.15/sq mi). All the stats are here.
That indicates that while the average US population density is twice that of NZ, the imbalance (i.e., density of densely populated areas compared to density of sparsely populated areas) is far greater in the US. I think the grand-parent post had it right. It is far more difficult to solve the rural access problem in the US than in NZ. Of course, I'll bet that in comparison Russia's problem are quite a bit worse than the US's problems in this regard.
American car culture was literally developed from advertising - just like how weddings were transformed by a few De Beers ads insisting you must have a diamond ring.
And if we could get the major car companies to stockpile their cars in great big warehouses to constrict supply and keep prices high, like DeBeers does with most of the diamonds pulled from the earth, we might be a great deal better off.
Gas tax comes nowhere near to paying for the cost of building and maintaining our streets and roads.
Which is something that I never said.
What I did say, however, is that governments like the tax revenue. That is a true statement. Additionally, in places where electric vehicle adoption has been high and gas tax revenues have fallen, there have been proposals for taxing electric vehicle owners to help make up for the shortfall. That is also a true statement.
The percentage of road maintenance which gas taxes pay for is independent of both things which I said.
Because, on the whole, people like cars and governments like (gas) tax revenue.
Public transit takes both of those things away. Electric cars help with the pollution, but costs government the gas tax revenues, hence the sometimes "innovative" proposals you are starting to hear about how to tax electric car owners for their utilization of road infrastructure.
Still, in practically every city, outside of the places where there is simply no possible way to increase road capacity, people will prefer increased road capacity to any public transport solution.
It's truly amazing how much abuse some users are willing to take just to use Windows. The only explanation that makes any sense at this point is that they like the abuse.
I am pretty sure that I have said this before, but for home users the issue is not that they like the abuse. At least, that seems to be the case with the family and other folks who I know who come to me for tech support. Rather, the situation exhibits the classic signs of co-dependency: the person remains in the abusive relationship because they fear that things will actually be worse if they leave the abusive the relationship.
In fact, I recall one friend, who had a history of tech support problems, who was considering getting a new system and who came to me for advice. About the only thing this person used the computer for was web, email, Facbook, and photos. I recommended a Mac for them instead of a Windows machine and the look on their face was practically terrified. As bad as the problems were they had experienced with Windows, they were yet more afraid of something different.
Of course, for businesses the situation is really all about institutional inertia.
The old MSMail had this on NT server. You could unsend an unread message, but not if it was read. Seemed to work fine.
Long ago I was advised that my email tone was typically...abrasive, let's say. Over the years as I have made an effort to work better with people, I have observed two fundamental rules that I think "simulate" the feature you describe:
1. As my hand hovers, ready to hit the "send" button, I stop myself and re-read the entire message start to finish, slowly.
2. If I am mad, upset, etc. I either delete the message or move it to drafts and return to it later (making sure to repeat the process starting with rule 1). If I am level-headed and the message has no errors (errors include things that will hurt someone's feelings unnecessarily, inflammatory words, etc.), and I am comfortable pressing send at that moment, then I press send.
I actually even apply that strategy here on Slashdot. I write more comments than what my comment history shows. Many times, I will write a scathing reply to someone here on Slashdot, just to get it out of my system, then close the tab without actually posting the message. Of course, sometimes I still can't help but post something that I know will be inflammatory; but that's why we all come to Slashdot. Right?
Writing messages that you never send is therapeutic without spreading negativity. It lets you get the emotions out of your system. For me it works well enough that sometimes I write one message saying exactly what I think with no regard for the impact of my words, instead focusing on getting my feelings out. Then when I delete it and start over I am much more moderate in what I write.
Everybody should try it.
I used to pride in speaking my mind without any output filter. I have grown up and realized that is not always the best or most productive approach.
I see stories like this and I have to ask myself, "Is Windows still viable as a development platform? Will it continue to be viable as a development platform in the future?"
I develop exclusively on Linux (some libraries in C/C++, some Python applications, Java server and desktop stuff, occasionally dabble in mobile, etc.). I have some colleagues who use Mac OS X as their platform and are happy with that. I do know a small number of developers working on Windows, but as far as I can tell they don't particularly like Windows as a development platform, especially those who have had to move to Windows 10 (precisely because they no longer control the updates and stuff can just randomly break).
Hmm. Looks like someone accidentally hit the "Overrated" mod instead of the "Informative" mod that is customary when one brings facts to a Slashdot discussion. Perhaps it is that the particular facts I am bringing are inconvenient. Actually, it was probably just an honest mistake.
Here, I'll quote it again for your convenience:
No. Obamacare was always about the rich/healthy subsidizing the poor/sick. Nobody ever said that everyone's premiums would go down.
It turns out, that Obama (you know, the guy after whom "Obamacare" was named), gave an Address on Health Care at George Mason University on March 19, 2010, where he said this:
Now, the third thing that this legislation does is it brings down the cost of health care for families and businesses and the federal government. Americans who are buying comparable coverage in the individual market would end up seeing their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent. Americans who get their insurance through the workplace, cost savings could be as much as $3,000 less per employer than if we do nothing. Now, think about that. ThatÃ(TM)s $3,000 your employer doesnÃ(TM)t have to pay, which means maybe she can afford to give you a raise.
Maybe I am misreading, but it sure seems like President Obama is saying there that everybody's costs (premiums for families) were going to go down. While I know of plenty of people getting raises after the recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts helped boost the economy, I have never heard of a single person getting a raise from their employer because of all the money Obamacare saved them.
OK. Cool. Since it is going to be like that and since my other comment was down-modded "Overrated." I will go ahead and repeat my comment here. I guess we don't like facts that go against the narrative. But, oh well.
No. Obamacare was always about the rich/healthy subsidizing the poor/sick. Nobody ever said that everyone's premiums would go down.
It turns out, that Obama (you know, the guy after whom "Obamacare" was named), gave an Address on Health Care at George Mason University [americanrhetoric.com] on March 19, 2010, where he said this:
Now, the third thing that this legislation does is it brings down the cost of health care for families and businesses and the federal government. Americans who are buying comparable coverage in the individual market would end up seeing their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent. Americans who get their insurance through the workplace, cost savings could be as much as $3,000 less per employer than if we do nothing. Now, think about that. ThatÃ(TM)s $3,000 your employer doesnÃ(TM)t have to pay, which means maybe she can afford to give you a raise.
Maybe I am misreading, but it sure seems like President Obama is saying there that everybody's costs (premiums for families) were going to go down. While I know of plenty of people getting raises after the recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts helped boost the economy, I have never heard of a single person getting a raise from their employer because of all the money Obamacare saved them.
GOP has been gradually sabotaging it via various SCOTUS rulings; removing the mandate, which makes it more expensive for seniors and those with pre-existing conditions (Legislative branch); and intentionally mis-managing the implementation and oversight of it (Executive branch).
The Democrats have had no issue, however, using the courts to try to "sabotage" the Trump administration. So, I guess the takeaway is is perfectly OK for Democrats to do it when Republicans are in power, but when the roles are reversed it is an abuse of power.
Also, as it happens, the Republicans were not all that successful in the SCOTUS. The court upheld the ACA, using some rather tortured logic that boiled down to, "we get what Congress meant to say and even though the law doesn't say that, we are going to pretend that it does".
Obama has often said that if someone presents a better plan than ACA tied to real numbers, not just talking points, he would back it. One should have realistic alternatives before complaining.
It was kind of unfair of Obama to rely on fake numbers and talking points and then insist that challengers use real numbers and no talking points. Seems like he did not really want anyone to challenge him.
GOP can promise flying cars that get 200 mph and cost only 3 grand. The hard part is delivering a blue-print that doesn't violate physics and math.
Right. And Obamacare was billed as more better quality healthcare for more people that costs less. Anybody who has taken project management 101 knows you don't get all three sides of the triangle.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. How are these two different?
Obama: We need Obamacare so that more people will have better health insurance for less money.
(health insurance costs skyrocket that lots of people, including many who gained coverage under Obamacare, cannot afford to actually use their insurance)
Obamacare critics: See!?!? We told you so!
Obama: It would have been far worse without Obamacare.
(Obama goes on to reelection in 2012)
Trump: We need tax cuts to boost the economy.
(economy improves for some but not all)
Trump critics: See?!?!? We told you so!
Trump: It would have been far worse without the tax cuts.
(Trump goes on to reelection in 2020??)
You see, Trump is actually playing out almost the same playbook as Obama. The thing is that he is using the same tactics to promote policies that are the polar opposite of what Obama pushed. That may be why the media and so many liberals are so utterly incapable of seeing it. They are so blinded by their personal hatred of Trump (face it they have no objectivity when it comes to Trump) that they cannot see what he is doing.
All of that to say that Trump's supporters are as fanatical about supporting him as Obama's supporters were about him (Obama). I honestly thought that Obama had overplayed his hand in his first term (Obamacare was just the start) and would not get re-elected. I was wrong. I think Trump is on track for about the same level of overplaying his hand as Obama. If not for Obama being re-elected in 2012 I would have said that Trump does not stand a chance in 2020. Having seen how Obama was able to get re-elected, I would put Trump at even odds in 2020.
it does not say that the ISPs must disable Internet access until consumers acknowledge the notification. The law even says that ISPs may make the notification "with a consumer's bill," which shouldn't disable anyone's Internet access.
First, what they did actually complies with Subsection (1)(b)(ii)(A). We may not like their approach, but it does comply with the law. Go read the law, it is a rather sparse 5 pages.
Coincidentally, CenturyLink's blocking of customer Internet access occurred days before the one-year anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission repeal of net neutrality rules, which prohibited blocking and throttling of Internet access.
Second, the proximity to the anniversary of the NN deregulation is both specious and disingenuous. If you know anything about how corporations work you know that legal compliance is an exercise in minimization. The CenturyLink corporate counsel (probably more than one) had to weigh in on this and conclude that this was done in a way that both met the requirements of the law and also did not expose the company to additional liability. It probably had to clear multiple similar hurdles.
So, just like I do when a programmer implements a spec and I look at the product and say, "wow that was wrong," my first thought is always, "the spec must be defective." Granted, there are times where the programmer just makes the wrong choice, but more often than not, the spec really is deficient. If it was a whole team of programmers that produced the wrong thing then the only sensible conclusion is that the spec was faulty.
In this case, the army of lawyers came to a conclusion on a course of action that is making people say, "wow, that cannot be right.". Based on my earlier reasoning, the law is poorly written.
The supply-chain attacks show one of the weaknesses of open source code. Because of its openness and the lack of funds of many of its hobbyist developers and users, open source code can be subject to malicious modifications that often escape notice.
Every time I read something like this I have to imagine it was written by someone who works for or owns stock in one of those companies that produces "compliance" tools/services targeted at businesses that use open source.
I mean, come on. This exact same problem exists for closed source software. Face it, you know about as much about the developers of any random closed source application or library as you do about any random open source application or library. In fact, it is less likely that a malicious change will be discovered if you do not have access to the source code.
Hopefully this will lead to increased adoption of cleaner power production - that is not so bad for the environment.
I agree. When I was younger I spent lots of time outdoors. Preserving the natural beauty of the world should be something humanity strives to do.
I am not saying that all clean power is cheaper but the more of it that gets used the cheaper that it will become.
I think what was happened is that we have reached the "tipping point" where clean energy is actually competitive in the marketplace. Interestingly, all the various governments around the world that have pushed for clean energy production have varying economic and regulatory philosophies (as evidenced by the various approaches to regulation of dirty power and economic incentives/penalties for varies participants in the energy market), but the end result has been the same: for the longest time it just looked like a money pit, and now we start to see some large scale benefit.
I think that a solution based on market forces (i.e, people doing what benefits them economically) will always be stronger, healthier, and more effective than one based on regulatory forces. Granted, sometimes regulatory forces are required (e.g., to maintain clean air and water in the era of industrial production and dirty power), but those are never as good as market forces because regulations mean people do what they are required to do (and people will try to find ways to avoid meeting the requirements) while market forces mean people act in their own best interests.
Anyone know how operating a cashless business is legal by refusing Legal Tender?
It would only be a problem if they let the customer incur the obligation and then refuse the legal tender.
If the merchant makes incurring the obligation contingent on the form of payment, then I suspect the merchant is legally in the clear. It is no different than a sign on the cash register that reads, "no bills over $20."
I wonder how they will write the law. For example, if it is not written in a clear and precise way, I could have a coffee shop with a sign on the door: "cash transactions require exact change." I am in compliance with the law (I technically accept cash), but I suspect that it would have a discriminatory effect. That would be because the people who pay cash will be those who do not care about how much they spend and can hand over $10 for an $8.91 transaction and not care about getting the change back.
Another aspect would be that the law might make it illegal to refuse certain denominations of bills, as I already mentioned is common practice. That might make merchants more attractive targets for petty thieves (you have to keep more cash on hand in order to make change for larger bills) and also more attractive targets for counterfeiters (nobody bothers to counterfeit $5 bills, but $100 bills are a different story).
I do not think that this politician can get where he wants without a good deal of collateral damage.
I have desk that I can raise and lower. It is most helpful after lunch when I'm fighting the food coma that usually occurs. It is nice to move around and stretch your legs, but I could survive without it. A nice option, but not strictly necessary.
I don't know about the health benefits, but fighting the after lunch drag is definitely easier while standing. Also, there are times when when I am doing more thinking than typing and I find I can be more productive in a standing posture. Sometimes reading is easier while standing. The main thing is it enables to me to pace, walk to the whiteboard, go back to the desk, and immediately type stuff without having to sit first. It really is a productivity enhancer. A-plus, would recommend.
Modern corporations continue to fester this flawed mentality that every employee is just a cog in the machine; if one breaks, replace it with another. But humans aren't machinery.
Not just modern companies. In a graduate software engineering class I took (mumble mumble) years ago we had a rather vigorous discussion about people versus process. That is, if you have a sufficiently sophisticated and well implemented process, do the people matter that much? And the reverse, if you have sufficiently excellent people, does the process matter that much?
Big companies seem to tilt heavily toward the process side, while small companies and especially start ups seem to tilt heavily toward the people side. Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
Sadly, none of this is new, nor does it show any real signs of changing.
...debates about whether the work [...] could really be called art at all
This happens all the time with human-created art, especially experimental, avant-garde, and other artistic expressions that are "ahead of their time." Seems to me like the debate is a solid indicator that it actually is art.
I am a qualified test engineer. Let me help Netflix with the test plan.
Objective: determine if customers are able to achieve the same level of enjoyment while paying less.
Procedure: 1. Lower prices.
Conclusion: Yes, they can.
If you have to test for this, then I have some bad news for you...
When I teach my students about the MVC paradigm I describe the model component this way:
The model is the simplified representation of reality that describes those things which are important to your application.
For example, a maintenance work scheduling application for a school probably needs to know how many display screens are in a classroom, and maybe their positions. Suppose that the decision was made that it does not need to know the make, model and version of the multimedia control panel at the instructor workstation.
Now, if somebody came along and tried to make maintenance purchasing decisions to replace the multimedia control panel based on just the number of display screens in the classroom, they might find the decisions to be faulty because of the lack of information. That does not mean that the lecture hall defied the model. It just means that when the model was developed, the important aspects of the reality being modeled were not considered properly and some were left out. In this example, somebody would need to walk to the classroom and look at the actual control panel to be replaced and gather information on that.
It could be that perhaps the researches described in the article need more detailed models to accurately describe the behaviors they are interested in for these systems.
Oracle WANTS VIRTUALBOX TO DIE. Same with MySql.
I would have to agree with this. Things like quarterly "CPU" releases (critical patch update) that mix security fixes with "feature updates" (and those being the only way to obtain security fixes, not annotating CVE IDs in the commit messages of related commits, and forbidding Oracle personnel from helping outside project personnel identify specific commits associated with specific security vulnerability fixes (very useful for backporting purposes) makes for Oracle having a well earned reputation for being obnoxious to the open source community in general.
That is, unless they only have, say, 1 TB and 2 TB drives and maybe two or three physical memory configurations and they can factory disable the "extra" that the customer didn't pay for.
If Apple did that, if could actually be cheaper than managing the large number of variations and still allow them to maximize profits by price discrimination.
As I understand it, HP or IBM did something similar with their servers ages ago (maybe they still do), where you paid for additional CPU, memory, or whatever, and what you paid for was a code that granted you access to the extra capacity because the machine shipped with it from the factory in a disabled state.
That'd definitely a non-sequitur - you haven't provided any data on NZ to support that.
Good point. I did not even try to find those figures and just found data to support my position. After reading your reply, I took a look at the population density map on the Demographics of New Zealand Wikipedia article. It is difficult to tell just going by that, but it sure seems like there are far fewer high concentration urban areas in New Zealand than most places in the US. It does say that 86% of the population lives in those urban areas and the remaining 14% in rural areas, which appear to be less dense than the typical rural area in the US. I would expect that it would be fairly difficult to connect those people.
That said, even though the two situations look more comparable than I initially considered (at least from a population density and dispersion perspective), the matter of scale is huge (no pun intended). The solution is not immediately apparent to me.
If we're going to be picky, then none of the population density data you or I could come up with will give a watertight prediction of the cost of implementing broadband. An empty field more sparsely populated (zero population density) than any county in the US. But note that a more heterogeneously distributed population is not necessarily more expensive to wire up than a more uniform one - quite the opposite, in fact. Vast uninhabited wastes do not need broadband at all; the individual cost of wiring up a small number of isolated people is high, but the cost per head of population in the country can be low. Meanwhile, the flip side of an uneven population distribution is that many people live close to each other, so are cheaper to wire up.
Of course, while Internet infrastructure gets more expensive as the population spreads out, other things are the reverse. For instance, produce and other fresh grocery items (e.g., milk, OJ, etc.) are more expensive in NYC than they are in, say, Lake Charles, Louisiana. I guess on thing that I never realized is that the market economy tends to favor those things with a cost gradient toward higher population density (higher density is also an indicator of higher overall incomes) than those things with a cost gradient in the other direction.
New Zealand has HALF the population density of the US, so connecting it up is actually MORE difficult (per capita).
What you say is a non sequitur. For example, the least densely populated county in Rhode Island (385.67/sq mi) is more densely populated the most densely populated counties in Nevada (382.09/sq mi), Idaho, Mississippi, Maine, Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming (34.15/sq mi). All the stats are here.
That indicates that while the average US population density is twice that of NZ, the imbalance (i.e., density of densely populated areas compared to density of sparsely populated areas) is far greater in the US. I think the grand-parent post had it right. It is far more difficult to solve the rural access problem in the US than in NZ. Of course, I'll bet that in comparison Russia's problem are quite a bit worse than the US's problems in this regard.
American car culture was literally developed from advertising - just like how weddings were transformed by a few De Beers ads insisting you must have a diamond ring.
And if we could get the major car companies to stockpile their cars in great big warehouses to constrict supply and keep prices high, like DeBeers does with most of the diamonds pulled from the earth, we might be a great deal better off.
Gas tax comes nowhere near to paying for the cost of building and maintaining our streets and roads.
Which is something that I never said.
What I did say, however, is that governments like the tax revenue. That is a true statement. Additionally, in places where electric vehicle adoption has been high and gas tax revenues have fallen, there have been proposals for taxing electric vehicle owners to help make up for the shortfall. That is also a true statement.
The percentage of road maintenance which gas taxes pay for is independent of both things which I said.
Why do we live like this?
Because, on the whole, people like cars and governments like (gas) tax revenue.
Public transit takes both of those things away. Electric cars help with the pollution, but costs government the gas tax revenues, hence the sometimes "innovative" proposals you are starting to hear about how to tax electric car owners for their utilization of road infrastructure.
Still, in practically every city, outside of the places where there is simply no possible way to increase road capacity, people will prefer increased road capacity to any public transport solution.
It's truly amazing how much abuse some users are willing to take just to use Windows. The only explanation that makes any sense at this point is that they like the abuse.
I am pretty sure that I have said this before, but for home users the issue is not that they like the abuse. At least, that seems to be the case with the family and other folks who I know who come to me for tech support. Rather, the situation exhibits the classic signs of co-dependency: the person remains in the abusive relationship because they fear that things will actually be worse if they leave the abusive the relationship.
In fact, I recall one friend, who had a history of tech support problems, who was considering getting a new system and who came to me for advice. About the only thing this person used the computer for was web, email, Facbook, and photos. I recommended a Mac for them instead of a Windows machine and the look on their face was practically terrified. As bad as the problems were they had experienced with Windows, they were yet more afraid of something different.
Of course, for businesses the situation is really all about institutional inertia.
The old MSMail had this on NT server. You could unsend an unread message, but not if it was read. Seemed to work fine.
Long ago I was advised that my email tone was typically...abrasive, let's say. Over the years as I have made an effort to work better with people, I have observed two fundamental rules that I think "simulate" the feature you describe:
1. As my hand hovers, ready to hit the "send" button, I stop myself and re-read the entire message start to finish, slowly.
2. If I am mad, upset, etc. I either delete the message or move it to drafts and return to it later (making sure to repeat the process starting with rule 1). If I am level-headed and the message has no errors (errors include things that will hurt someone's feelings unnecessarily, inflammatory words, etc.), and I am comfortable pressing send at that moment, then I press send.
I actually even apply that strategy here on Slashdot. I write more comments than what my comment history shows. Many times, I will write a scathing reply to someone here on Slashdot, just to get it out of my system, then close the tab without actually posting the message. Of course, sometimes I still can't help but post something that I know will be inflammatory; but that's why we all come to Slashdot. Right?
Writing messages that you never send is therapeutic without spreading negativity. It lets you get the emotions out of your system. For me it works well enough that sometimes I write one message saying exactly what I think with no regard for the impact of my words, instead focusing on getting my feelings out. Then when I delete it and start over I am much more moderate in what I write.
Everybody should try it.
I used to pride in speaking my mind without any output filter. I have grown up and realized that is not always the best or most productive approach.
I see stories like this and I have to ask myself, "Is Windows still viable as a development platform? Will it continue to be viable as a development platform in the future?"
I develop exclusively on Linux (some libraries in C/C++, some Python applications, Java server and desktop stuff, occasionally dabble in mobile, etc.). I have some colleagues who use Mac OS X as their platform and are happy with that. I do know a small number of developers working on Windows, but as far as I can tell they don't particularly like Windows as a development platform, especially those who have had to move to Windows 10 (precisely because they no longer control the updates and stuff can just randomly break).
I guess, all I can say is, "wow."
Hmm. Looks like someone accidentally hit the "Overrated" mod instead of the "Informative" mod that is customary when one brings facts to a Slashdot discussion. Perhaps it is that the particular facts I am bringing are inconvenient. Actually, it was probably just an honest mistake.
Here, I'll quote it again for your convenience:
No. Obamacare was always about the rich/healthy subsidizing the poor/sick. Nobody ever said that everyone's premiums would go down.
It turns out, that Obama (you know, the guy after whom "Obamacare" was named), gave an Address on Health Care at George Mason University on March 19, 2010, where he said this:
Now, the third thing that this legislation does is it brings down the cost of health care for families and businesses and the federal government. Americans who are buying comparable coverage in the individual market would end up seeing their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent. Americans who get their insurance through the workplace, cost savings could be as much as $3,000 less per employer than if we do nothing. Now, think about that. ThatÃ(TM)s $3,000 your employer doesnÃ(TM)t have to pay, which means maybe she can afford to give you a raise.
Maybe I am misreading, but it sure seems like President Obama is saying there that everybody's costs (premiums for families) were going to go down. While I know of plenty of people getting raises after the recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts helped boost the economy, I have never heard of a single person getting a raise from their employer because of all the money Obamacare saved them.
Premiums did go down they started climbing again when Trump pulled funding and generally sabotaged the exchanges.
Huh? How do account for the premium spikes that happened each of the 6 years from when the ACA went into effect until Trump was inaugurated?
I cannot tell if you are trolling or just willfully ignorant.
No.
OK. Cool. Since it is going to be like that and since my other comment was down-modded "Overrated." I will go ahead and repeat my comment here. I guess we don't like facts that go against the narrative. But, oh well.
No. Obamacare was always about the rich/healthy subsidizing the poor/sick. Nobody ever said that everyone's premiums would go down.
It turns out, that Obama (you know, the guy after whom "Obamacare" was named), gave an Address on Health Care at George Mason University [americanrhetoric.com] on March 19, 2010, where he said this:
Now, the third thing that this legislation does is it brings down the cost of health care for families and businesses and the federal government. Americans who are buying comparable coverage in the individual market would end up seeing their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent. Americans who get their insurance through the workplace, cost savings could be as much as $3,000 less per employer than if we do nothing. Now, think about that. ThatÃ(TM)s $3,000 your employer doesnÃ(TM)t have to pay, which means maybe she can afford to give you a raise.
Maybe I am misreading, but it sure seems like President Obama is saying there that everybody's costs (premiums for families) were going to go down. While I know of plenty of people getting raises after the recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts helped boost the economy, I have never heard of a single person getting a raise from their employer because of all the money Obamacare saved them.
Care to comment?
GOP has been gradually sabotaging it via various SCOTUS rulings; removing the mandate, which makes it more expensive for seniors and those with pre-existing conditions (Legislative branch); and intentionally mis-managing the implementation and oversight of it (Executive branch).
The Democrats have had no issue, however, using the courts to try to "sabotage" the Trump administration. So, I guess the takeaway is is perfectly OK for Democrats to do it when Republicans are in power, but when the roles are reversed it is an abuse of power.
Also, as it happens, the Republicans were not all that successful in the SCOTUS. The court upheld the ACA, using some rather tortured logic that boiled down to, "we get what Congress meant to say and even though the law doesn't say that, we are going to pretend that it does".
Obama has often said that if someone presents a better plan than ACA tied to real numbers, not just talking points, he would back it. One should have realistic alternatives before complaining.
It was kind of unfair of Obama to rely on fake numbers and talking points and then insist that challengers use real numbers and no talking points. Seems like he did not really want anyone to challenge him.
GOP can promise flying cars that get 200 mph and cost only 3 grand. The hard part is delivering a blue-print that doesn't violate physics and math.
Right. And Obamacare was billed as more better quality healthcare for more people that costs less. Anybody who has taken project management 101 knows you don't get all three sides of the triangle.
This is fake news. I saw Hair Furor on the TV last night and he said the only thing on the ballot is him.
And he is only saying that because the Democrats said it first. In fact, he is probably annoyed it didn't occur to him to say it first.