Joining a group plan through your local chamber of commerce or other small business association Joining a group policy through some other small business association Joining a group policy through a professional organization (such as ACM, IEEE, etc.)
Right, be a member of a group policy. Not all chambers, SBAs and professional organizations have this and the choices of such organizations are limited by geography and membership eligibility.
Get an employee. Two employees (yourself and your other employee) make you a group
Bullshit. If one of you has a heart condition, you will not receive group coverage for your "organization." Small groups are treated little better than individuals. I've had a closely held corporation with twelve employees. The size of your group matters. If you have a group of two and one has a heart condition, they will deny your "organization" group coverage entirely. It's just not as simple as hiring your grandmother as a maid to get group coverage, dear. Even if they DO chance to give it to you with a high risk partner, the premiums will be absolutely stratospheric.
Combining health insurance with your other insurance (homeowners, auto, etc.) for a multiline discount
This is not helpful if the carrier will not provide the health insurance in the first place and very few carriers offer all of the above.
Catastrophic high-deductible plan + HSA
Yes, I can shove cash in the bank and write checks to doctors. Thanks for that advice. The problem with health insurance isn't the catastrophic anyway. EVERYONE in the United States has de facto catastrophic coverage in the sense of access to care in life-threatening situations. It is the preventive and maintenance care that is required to keep you from using catastrophic coverage in the first place. So, this suggestion doesn't even address the actual problem.
Perhaps you have a spouse who can obtain coverage through his/her employer?
No, perhaps I should acquire one? OBVIOUSLY that is an option, but that goes back to my original point: in most circumstances, someone has to work for a large organization with group coverage.
The biggest problem with getting health insurance on your own is that there are so many choices and so many variables that it is difficult to evaluate them all.
You're right. Having to reorganize your entire life, moving to another state, getting a marriage of convenience to someone who works for IBM, acquiring relevant advanced degrees for membership in professional organizations then waiting for a year or more (or reaching some other arbitrary criterion) to be eligible for benefits just to get access to an affordable cardiologist and preventive care and in the meantime dropping dead -- yeah, that is a MAJOR problem.
That's the whole point of making eligibility universal. You get the same shake as the person with all those other arbitrary circumstances without having to jump through a bunch of silly hoops just because you're an "individual" just like everyone else.
All of these issues are barriers for many people considering working as independent contractors. Your suggestions actually go to further prove it. People's lives are already complex. This added complexity and uncertainty is enough to keep most of them with simple employer-sponsored health insurance. That was my only point and you've illustrated it quite well, thanks.
That's great to a point--I'm also a contractor and prefer it for precisely the same reasons.
HOWEVER, there are circumstances of our current economy that make it simply not an option for many people. Namely, if you have any sort of medical condition, especially of the chronic and/or cardiac variety, and you don't want to die an early death or live in poverty conditions despite making $100k+ per year, getting individual or small group health insurance is a near impossibility and you're pretty much forced to work for a company with decent large group coverage.
Despite the FUD about "HillaryCare," it is essentially just attacking the primary root problem of that: eligibility. For most of the population, it's not a monetary entitlement, it's just an eligibility entitlement. Essentially, the entire country is the "group" and you are entitled membership in that group, which is as it should be. You still pay for it, sometimes through the nose, but at least you can GET IT.
Should that go through and that major risk is effectively removed, I imagine you'll find a lot more people leaving the ranks of th W2's into the promised land of independent contracting.
Sun was actively discouraging the use of applets over five years ago. The use of Java on the web has since been almost entirely server-side. There's no reason an applet is necessary to perform a binary upload. See Google's file attachment method as an example and Jakarta Commons FileUpload as the likely back-end to what is little more than a standard multipart form submission.
Just because the people implementing the technology suck doesn't mean the technology itself does.
These guys are complaining about infinitesimally small kernel components causing irreparable harm to the OS as it functions wherever on the continuum from general purpose desktop/laptop to specialized workstations and servers. Are these components important? Yes, obviously. Are the differences THAT catastrophically profound? No. The problem is mostly that project A has one person's name on it and project B made it to release, so the author of A runs around the net screaming that this horrible injustice will be the doom of the whole project.
In the end, this is little more than a childish tantrum over a favorite toy and the perpetrators seriously need to go to their rooms for a time-out until they grow the hell up.
The primary item on the ACLU's agenda should be bullshit precisely like this--and I don't mean the original complaint.
The idea that to end a case of asserting constitutional rights one must explicitly give up more constitutional rights--in particular, even free speech (don't say negative things about police? W-T-F? [insert In Soviet Russia jokes here]), and then to consider it a "victory?!?"--is arguably the greatest indication of how frightfully corrupt the foundations of our entire legal system are. The fact that even the local newspaper grabbed onto the inconvenient malquote and quickly rectified it to appear doubleplus ungood for the marginal victor isn't particularly heartening either...
The UCLA tasering was not a public library in the same sense, since it belongs to the school rather than the community at large
The entire university, library included, belongs to the people of California. I rather consider that the "community at large." UC libraries are in fact public libraries. Anyone resident can walk in and get a lending card, regardless of student status.
Even stupid thieves understand the concept of the "chop shop" and the ones that are too stupid to do it themselves will sell it to someone who isn't. Your laptop may be worth $1000 to you, but it's worth $50 of crank to the original thief and double what you paid for it parted out to an organized shop in the next state....and, yeah, the police are so abundantly aware of this they won't even take the time to finish chewing, much less put the donut down.
Mark Shuttleworth, the South African-born founder of the Ubuntu project, told me this week that "it would be reasonable to say that this is not ready for the mass market." And Dell's Web site for its Ubuntu computers warns that these machines are for "for advanced users and tech enthusiasts."
Armed with that knowledge, he goes out to write a column about:
So, what do I mean when I say Ubuntu is too rough around the edges for average users?
Apparently, though it is "too rough" it is not rough enough to keep the uninitiated away despite warnings precisely to that effect, which is a damned sight more interesting by itself than the litany of peeves he enumerates.
...and here's betting you'll be less satisfied then.
I have 5,528 emails on one account totally 773MB. That's about 146K each. 13 million of those translates to a sustained 3.2Mb/s 24x7, which in my area is the maximum burst speed they're advertising.
If you don't think that's excessive use on a $39.95 cable plan, what on earth would you consider "reasonable?"
...and yet there's a HUGE campaign going on right now with cable repeating ad nauseam "When Cable Competes, We All Win!" which is code for "when Cable stifles all competing information to perpetuate their unholy monopoly, they win."
The problem is, Cable(tm) has succeeded in ensuring that people don't seem to grasp what "Digital Broadcast" really means. It means more channels, all in perfect quality--superior to 1080p HD over digital cable because it isn't filtered and compressed to all hell--with digital surround sound over rabbit ears. It means the potential for Cable to lose a good portion of its customers as they realize in many cases, the superior product is free.
For that latter reason, Cable is doing everything it can to ensure the average schmuck has no idea what is going on and simply equates HDTV=Cable.
Sociopaths love being in charge. Arguably, there are quite a few of them in the upper ranks of many organizations.
However, sociopaths do not like competition and the non-sociopaths below them will make quick work of dispensing with any pretenders to the throne. They may not agree with your strategies, but they've read your playbook.
So for the non-megalomaniac, it is probably advisable for success to not be a raging sociopath.
"Stallman doesn't care about any of that, per se:"
Stallman is pretty clear he doesn't care about anything else AT ALL--and if YOU do, you're stupid, doomed to slavery or both. This does not win him a vastly growing pool of allies. But, he doesn't care about that either, because those people aren't RMS clones and who would want to associate with anyone but RMS or an exact copy? Only stupid, doomed, enslaved fools, that's who.
There's a fine line between single-minded yet reasoned devotion to an idea and just being a fanatical loon. I sense lately that RMS has irrecoverably fallen over the cliffs of insanity into the latter category.
They're shutting down legitimately purchased copies, the keys of which have been compromised.
So, you buy a new computer with Vista installed. Some lackey on the disk image bench jots down the activation key and hands it out to everyone at his community college campus. After the 500th "activation," Microsoft determines that key is pirated. You now have a dead installation along with everyone else.
Good luck reactivating it without purchasing a new shrink-wrapped copy.
If your development house of choice wouldn't hire you sans "degree" from one of these places, they're not likely to hire you with one either. Most of these places are to games what the "Guitar Institute of Technology" is to music.
You'd think a/. submitter would understand the vagaries of such advertising relationships and the rotation systems employed. It's not like NetFlix specifically paid to be seen by members of "Neo-Nazi movie-lovers for the destruction of Israel."
Sending them snarky letters as if that was the case is pretty childish...
#1: Assuming what you think your customer needs is what your customer wants. #2: Assuming they are the ones who made the mistake when you lost the job.
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Joining a group plan through your local chamber of commerce or other small business association
Joining a group policy through some other small business association
Joining a group policy through a professional organization (such as ACM, IEEE, etc.)
Right, be a member of a group policy. Not all chambers, SBAs and professional organizations have this and the choices of such organizations are limited by geography and membership eligibility.
Get an employee. Two employees (yourself and your other employee) make you a group
Bullshit. If one of you has a heart condition, you will not receive group coverage for your "organization." Small groups are treated little better than individuals. I've had a closely held corporation with twelve employees. The size of your group matters. If you have a group of two and one has a heart condition, they will deny your "organization" group coverage entirely. It's just not as simple as hiring your grandmother as a maid to get group coverage, dear. Even if they DO chance to give it to you with a high risk partner, the premiums will be absolutely stratospheric.
Combining health insurance with your other insurance (homeowners, auto, etc.) for a multiline discount
This is not helpful if the carrier will not provide the health insurance in the first place and very few carriers offer all of the above.
Catastrophic high-deductible plan + HSA
Yes, I can shove cash in the bank and write checks to doctors. Thanks for that advice. The problem with health insurance isn't the catastrophic anyway. EVERYONE in the United States has de facto catastrophic coverage in the sense of access to care in life-threatening situations. It is the preventive and maintenance care that is required to keep you from using catastrophic coverage in the first place. So, this suggestion doesn't even address the actual problem.
Perhaps you have a spouse who can obtain coverage through his/her employer?
No, perhaps I should acquire one? OBVIOUSLY that is an option, but that goes back to my original point: in most circumstances, someone has to work for a large organization with group coverage.
The biggest problem with getting health insurance on your own is that there are so many choices and so many variables that it is difficult to evaluate them all.
You're right. Having to reorganize your entire life, moving to another state, getting a marriage of convenience to someone who works for IBM, acquiring relevant advanced degrees for membership in professional organizations then waiting for a year or more (or reaching some other arbitrary criterion) to be eligible for benefits just to get access to an affordable cardiologist and preventive care and in the meantime dropping dead -- yeah, that is a MAJOR problem.
That's the whole point of making eligibility universal. You get the same shake as the person with all those other arbitrary circumstances without having to jump through a bunch of silly hoops just because you're an "individual" just like everyone else.
All of these issues are barriers for many people considering working as independent contractors. Your suggestions actually go to further prove it. People's lives are already complex. This added complexity and uncertainty is enough to keep most of them with simple employer-sponsored health insurance. That was my only point and you've illustrated it quite well, thanks.
Since in Excel 2002 at least, DEC2BIN can only handle 9-bits, so anything over 511 borks to #NUM! and BIN2DEC(1111111111) returns -1.
WTF?
That's great to a point--I'm also a contractor and prefer it for precisely the same reasons.
HOWEVER, there are circumstances of our current economy that make it simply not an option for many people. Namely, if you have any sort of medical condition, especially of the chronic and/or cardiac variety, and you don't want to die an early death or live in poverty conditions despite making $100k+ per year, getting individual or small group health insurance is a near impossibility and you're pretty much forced to work for a company with decent large group coverage.
Despite the FUD about "HillaryCare," it is essentially just attacking the primary root problem of that: eligibility. For most of the population, it's not a monetary entitlement, it's just an eligibility entitlement. Essentially, the entire country is the "group" and you are entitled membership in that group, which is as it should be. You still pay for it, sometimes through the nose, but at least you can GET IT.
Should that go through and that major risk is effectively removed, I imagine you'll find a lot more people leaving the ranks of th W2's into the promised land of independent contracting.
Sun was actively discouraging the use of applets over five years ago. The use of Java on the web has since been almost entirely server-side. There's no reason an applet is necessary to perform a binary upload. See Google's file attachment method as an example and Jakarta Commons FileUpload as the likely back-end to what is little more than a standard multipart form submission.
Just because the people implementing the technology suck doesn't mean the technology itself does.
These guys are complaining about infinitesimally small kernel components causing irreparable harm to the OS as it functions wherever on the continuum from general purpose desktop/laptop to specialized workstations and servers. Are these components important? Yes, obviously. Are the differences THAT catastrophically profound? No. The problem is mostly that project A has one person's name on it and project B made it to release, so the author of A runs around the net screaming that this horrible injustice will be the doom of the whole project.
In the end, this is little more than a childish tantrum over a favorite toy and the perpetrators seriously need to go to their rooms for a time-out until they grow the hell up.
The primary item on the ACLU's agenda should be bullshit precisely like this--and I don't mean the original complaint.
The idea that to end a case of asserting constitutional rights one must explicitly give up more constitutional rights--in particular, even free speech (don't say negative things about police? W-T-F? [insert In Soviet Russia jokes here]), and then to consider it a "victory?!?"--is arguably the greatest indication of how frightfully corrupt the foundations of our entire legal system are. The fact that even the local newspaper grabbed onto the inconvenient malquote and quickly rectified it to appear doubleplus ungood for the marginal victor isn't particularly heartening either...
The UCLA tasering was not a public library in the same sense, since it belongs to the school rather than the community at large
The entire university, library included, belongs to the people of California. I rather consider that the "community at large." UC libraries are in fact public libraries. Anyone resident can walk in and get a lending card, regardless of student status.
...all individually posted on eBay.
...and, yeah, the police are so abundantly aware of this they won't even take the time to finish chewing, much less put the donut down.
Even stupid thieves understand the concept of the "chop shop" and the ones that are too stupid to do it themselves will sell it to someone who isn't. Your laptop may be worth $1000 to you, but it's worth $50 of crank to the original thief and double what you paid for it parted out to an organized shop in the next state.
Con and Ingo are just continuing the bitch session about the scheduler.
Yet with nightsticks and guns the threshold for beat-down rises slightly above "being annoying."
Mark Shuttleworth, the South African-born founder of the Ubuntu project, told me this week that "it would be reasonable to say that this is not ready for the mass market." And Dell's Web site for its Ubuntu computers warns that these machines are for "for advanced users and tech enthusiasts."
Armed with that knowledge, he goes out to write a column about:
So, what do I mean when I say Ubuntu is too rough around the edges for average users?
Apparently, though it is "too rough" it is not rough enough to keep the uninitiated away despite warnings precisely to that effect, which is a damned sight more interesting by itself than the litany of peeves he enumerates.
...and here's betting you'll be less satisfied then.
I have 5,528 emails on one account totally 773MB. That's about 146K each. 13 million of those translates to a sustained 3.2Mb/s 24x7, which in my area is the maximum burst speed they're advertising.
If you don't think that's excessive use on a $39.95 cable plan, what on earth would you consider "reasonable?"
Cost $49
Time to make $49 < 1 hour
Time to steal > 1 hour
= cheaper to buy than steal
Bauble du Jour: $49
Time to make $49: 1 hour
________________________
= Stealing more expensive than purchasing
...coming from Icelandic stock myself, I wouldn't necessarily rule that out either...
...and yet there's a HUGE campaign going on right now with cable repeating ad nauseam "When Cable Competes, We All Win!" which is code for "when Cable stifles all competing information to perpetuate their unholy monopoly, they win."
The problem is, Cable(tm) has succeeded in ensuring that people don't seem to grasp what "Digital Broadcast" really means. It means more channels, all in perfect quality--superior to 1080p HD over digital cable because it isn't filtered and compressed to all hell--with digital surround sound over rabbit ears. It means the potential for Cable to lose a good portion of its customers as they realize in many cases, the superior product is free.
For that latter reason, Cable is doing everything it can to ensure the average schmuck has no idea what is going on and simply equates HDTV=Cable.
Sociopaths love being in charge. Arguably, there are quite a few of them in the upper ranks of many organizations.
However, sociopaths do not like competition and the non-sociopaths below them will make quick work of dispensing with any pretenders to the throne. They may not agree with your strategies, but they've read your playbook.
So for the non-megalomaniac, it is probably advisable for success to not be a raging sociopath.
"Stallman doesn't care about any of that, per se:"
Stallman is pretty clear he doesn't care about anything else AT ALL--and if YOU do, you're stupid, doomed to slavery or both. This does not win him a vastly growing pool of allies. But, he doesn't care about that either, because those people aren't RMS clones and who would want to associate with anyone but RMS or an exact copy? Only stupid, doomed, enslaved fools, that's who.
There's a fine line between single-minded yet reasoned devotion to an idea and just being a fanatical loon. I sense lately that RMS has irrecoverably fallen over the cliffs of insanity into the latter category.
They're shutting down legitimately purchased copies, the keys of which have been compromised.
So, you buy a new computer with Vista installed. Some lackey on the disk image bench jots down the activation key and hands it out to everyone at his community college campus. After the 500th "activation," Microsoft determines that key is pirated. You now have a dead installation along with everyone else.
Good luck reactivating it without purchasing a new shrink-wrapped copy.
If your development house of choice wouldn't hire you sans "degree" from one of these places, they're not likely to hire you with one either. Most of these places are to games what the "Guitar Institute of Technology" is to music.
WoW works okay, but EVE does not, sadly.
Canceled NetFlix over this?
You'd think a
Sending them snarky letters as if that was the case is pretty childish...
If you will recall Wipro, Tata, InfoSys, InfoTech, Tech Mahindra, Satyam, Mphasis, Panti, and i-Flex have all been nailed for precisely this.
n t/jun2007/db20070626_139605.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/conte
"Moreover, you seem to think this is automatically bad. As a generally benign tax-paying and extremely low crime population"
You seem to be making a great deal of assumptions there that one might think betrays are certain corollary bias.
You can bet your paycheck they will be looking to hire a gaggle of H1-Bs they've already selected back home.
This ploy is not new.
#1: Assuming what you think your customer needs is what your customer wants.
#2: Assuming they are the ones who made the mistake when you lost the job.