Why four bucks is some magic number to someone, who knows. If broken in to equally as arbitrary but halfway sensible thirds, I'm sure it would look something exciting like:
This is where one appears to be "obsessively pedantic." The statement was not meant to be taken so narrowly and literally....and, yes, I have read it, so you may cease with the philosophy lesson.
Certainly, not in entirety, unless you wish to be obsessively pedantic.
I'm not saying the USofA took to lot verbatim--note my use of the term "A NOD to the Greeks and Romans"--but it is asininely silly to suggest that we didn't inherit our form of government from them, not least as we originally separated out just as much the land-owning classes, women and slaves.
Before getting overly petulant about it, perhaps you could just google "George Washington Zeus." It's actually quite famous--and, yes, he's on a throne. The statue in question was also meant to be placed in the center of the Capitol Rotunda--directly below the painting on the inside of the dome, appropriately titled "The Apotheosis of Washington" (apotheosis="making into a god"). Directly below that spot was built a crypt in which to place the actual body of Washington. By the time this was to come about, the whole idea seemed just a bit much, so while the painting stayed, the statue went outside and later into the Smithsonian, while the old man's bones went to Mt. Vernon. Old man Zeus is still prominently displayed just of the lobby of the American History Museum.
Incidentally, the inscription inside the Lincoln Memorial even refers to it as a temple and a shrine. Not saying we're actually worshipping these guys, though one could do quite some valid analysis of how we invoke "The Founding Fathers" with near divine reverence, just that we are giving a blatantly obvious and deliberate nod to the Greeks and Romans in our national icons. If you step back a bit and take it a little less seriously than the buildings seem to demand, it's all pretty amusingly campy.//The More You Know(tm)
Marx didn't think humans particularly good OR bad. Oddly enough, his ideas about human "goodness" in this respect were roughly the same as Plato's and we all know how political ideologies based on The Republic have played out.
ANGOLA. Particularly as it relates to UNITA and FNLA. You might want to do a bit of reading on how that little fuck-up created that other raging mess that is currently known as Congo and our direct relationship to that evil son-of-a-bitch Mobutu Sese Seko as late as ten years ago....and that's just one long-enduring example. I mean, come on, we actively funded and armed them to the teeth to ensure they wouldn't become socialists, which, predictably, wasn't exactly successful, except in totally destroying what little development there was. Hell, even South Africa is now run by a socialist-communist coalition. So, when do we storm the beaches of Durban?
Support contracts are most certainly the bread and butter of closed-source and hardware companies too. IBM's entire business model has been based on that for decades. Hell, not that long ago, they wouldn't actually SELL you ANYTHING--even the hardware was effectively packaged as an ongoing support contract. Look at SUN's business model today. They sell hardware and give away software, but the money is all in the support services.
Guy was talking about living in hab modules on the moon and you jump to TERRAFORMING? You might as well lob-off all the way to Dyson spheres.
See, a diving bell is a piece of technology that allows you to survive in a hostile environment for some period of time, but without someone there to resupply you and quickly haul you back in an emergency, it's a tomb. That is the state of human life beyond the earth now and for the foreseeable future until we find a naturally inhabitable planet, which even after useful interstellar travel is a reality will be a stretch, or until such time as we can terraform the Moon or Mars, which is arguably a level of technology further away than viable interstellar transport.
So, yes, in the distant, distant future when it is possible for us to inhabit some other object be it the Moon, Mars or some yet unknown exosolar planet without the aid of terrestrial industry, then such an exit will make sense. But, if the slightest necessity of life requires anything from earth or if unaided exposure to the natural environment is certain death, it is not a viable escape.
...by getting into a diving bell. Sure, they might all die horrible, unceremonious early deaths at some indeterminate future time, but you're now guaranteed it on quite a predictable schedule.
The idea of giving yet more money to COMCAST, much less Verizon, for the same service makes me even more nauseous. So, a little less schadenfreude, please.
I don't recall the source (might have been in Dawkin's 'Selfish Gene'), but I do remember an interesting article that suggested the entire white light, meeting your god of choice, life-flashes-before-you bit and all the various similar sensations during and long prior to the process of death, including the development of the notion of afterlife, could be explained in an evolutionary sense as being useful companions to the fact that we can predict our own demise and that such functions allow us to not become completely neurotic from the moment we start appreciating our mortality to when we know our doom is imminent and might be better off not spending those last few hours, months or years in a complete nervous breakdown. For instance, sensing some benevolent presence that assures you of peace, whether "god" or a long-deceased parent etc., may help you proceed with effectively executing strategies like "women and children first," rather than becoming a raving hysterical loon who ends up taking his descendants with him in death, rather than ensuring their survival, or rather, the survival of his genetic contribution.
I have to disagree with one point...the UML bit (I know, I know, groan). IF someone is crazy enough to blithely jump into something like this and has no relevant programming experience and will have to fork out major money for someone who does, planning out on paper in minute detail everything they think they need, even if it's just a couple use-cases and bunch of simple flowcharts and sequence diagrams, will serve to indicate roughly how far over their head they've just gotten themselves. Frankly, one weekend of that tedious bullshit might be sufficient to derail a potential nightmare before it begins.
I agree, though, once you start actual work, avoid at all costs revisiting said tedious bullshit until you're at the point where/customers/ need some form of it...and even then, keep it at the big-red-crayon level.
1) You can get a very nice shrink-wrapped POS system, including hardware, for a lot less than $5k. 2) You will not be able to develop even a very crappy POS system from scratch, sans hardware, for $5k--even at Bangalore rates. 3) While you develop a going-to-be-crap-for-a-long-time POS system, you need a reliable one to run your business. 4) Many software development projects die unceremonious yet expensive deaths. 5) This may be nothing but a colossal waste of time and money.
Because of all of the above, if you really are peeved to the point of diving into building something from scratch, you're going to need to know/something/ about programming, even if you eventually hire someone else to do it. Research the existing commercial offerings and open source offerings. Find one of each that you think works for you. BUY the one to run your business now, TRY the open source one in your own time, then learn enough about the language behind the open source one to modify it for your needs. After you've got enough chops to tweak around the open source project, then start thinking about branching or starting your own, with or without the aid of hired guns. Chances are, by the end of this, you'll find that:
1) The commercial product is sufficient 2) The cost-benefit exchange makes rolling your own FAR from cost-effective 3) You're not a software company 4) The time and money it would take to become one is enormous and way too risky 5) You have better things to do with your time and money anyway
Is it the government's fault that people extend credit to those they know are likely not to repay it? There are times where companies have bad luck (hurricane wipes out a whole town and lots of people start defaulting for example) and I feel for them when they have to write off the accounts. But, companies that keep extending more and more credit to those whose debt-to-income ratios are way out of whack and FICO scores are in the basement but the company knows it's collecting enough in fees that it will still turn a tidy profit by selling the accounts for less than they're worth, writing off the difference against profits thus avoiding taxation I have no sympathy for. Why should it require more government regulation? No one forced them to open the accounts. They should have to live with the consequences of their own avarice rather than run to daddy government to make it all better.
Try convincing 99.9% of the population that over-the-air HDTV is actually/superior/ in quality to what they pay $200/month for over their highly reprocessed overly compressed digital cable. This I think is the entire reason for this annoying marketing and lobbying campaign. "Competition works?" Right, which is why they're trying desperately to ensure most people don't even know they can get HDTV over frakking rabbit ears and they certainly don't want them to know that 80% of the HD content they'll get over paid subscription is available for free, without having the contrast and color saturation bumped to cover the horrible compression artifacts.
No, really, once you're past the front gate, it is absolutely astonishing how little security there is. Unless you're obviously over-the-top out of place (like, say, streaking, maybe), people just leave you alone--and hauling a cart full of equipment back and forth to the parking lot is actually/less/ suspicious in that environment than wandering around with nothing in hand.
I mean, just imagine what a nightmare a facility like that would be if they stopped and questioned everyone pushing a loaded dolly.
I can't, and it really, really pains me because I love telling stories about jerk cops.
However, I've been stopped--each time with good reasons--twice in the middle of the night in the Pentagon parking lot (having an M16 at your window at 3AM is great fun) and a half dozen times within three blocks of the U.S. Capitol building and gotten nothing but warnings. On one of those occasions, in addition to the original offense (blowing through a red light in a screwy intersection), I had out-of-state dead tags (long story). I didn't get a ticket for either. He just said, "look, garage the car and don't let me see it again until it's current."
Maybe it's a strange irony that despite the severely ramped-up security culture around here, they have a sense that they really have much better things to look out for, rather than turning every conceivable thing into that bogeyman for the sake of feeling important.
I AM in business, sweets and have been for decades.
The original point supported by other posters is that these barriers are too much for many, many others to shoulder and that very, very simple changes in healthcare policy would effectively remove the largest of them. It would seem that you are using this as a platform to rant against any need for change using the de rigueur argument of ignorance, laziness and incompetence. This is not a terribly productive argument, nor is it particularly interesting. It is in fact rather insipid.
Slashdot Mirror
It would appear the spread was:
$0.00 : 62%
$0.01-4 : 17%
$4.01+ : 21%
Why four bucks is some magic number to someone, who knows. If broken in to equally as arbitrary but halfway sensible thirds, I'm sure it would look something exciting like:
$00.00-00.00 : 62%
$00.01-05.00 : 12.6%
$05.01-10.00 : 12.6%
$10.01-15.00 : 12.6%
But, that would make for a terribly boring PowerPoint presentation.
Could just as likely be the state legislature enacting the guidelines and mandatory minimums.
...perhaps you should look further in the thread rather than obsess on two exchanges of trivialities.
This is where one appears to be "obsessively pedantic." The statement was not meant to be taken so narrowly and literally.
The United States of America.
Certainly, not in entirety, unless you wish to be obsessively pedantic.
I'm not saying the USofA took to lot verbatim--note my use of the term "A NOD to the Greeks and Romans"--but it is asininely silly to suggest that we didn't inherit our form of government from them, not least as we originally separated out just as much the land-owning classes, women and slaves.
Before getting overly petulant about it, perhaps you could just google "George Washington Zeus." It's actually quite famous--and, yes, he's on a throne. The statue in question was also meant to be placed in the center of the Capitol Rotunda--directly below the painting on the inside of the dome, appropriately titled "The Apotheosis of Washington" (apotheosis="making into a god"). Directly below that spot was built a crypt in which to place the actual body of Washington. By the time this was to come about, the whole idea seemed just a bit much, so while the painting stayed, the statue went outside and later into the Smithsonian, while the old man's bones went to Mt. Vernon. Old man Zeus is still prominently displayed just of the lobby of the American History Museum.
//The More You Know(tm)
Incidentally, the inscription inside the Lincoln Memorial even refers to it as a temple and a shrine. Not saying we're actually worshipping these guys, though one could do quite some valid analysis of how we invoke "The Founding Fathers" with near divine reverence, just that we are giving a blatantly obvious and deliberate nod to the Greeks and Romans in our national icons. If you step back a bit and take it a little less seriously than the buildings seem to demand, it's all pretty amusingly campy.
Marx didn't think humans particularly good OR bad. Oddly enough, his ideas about human "goodness" in this respect were roughly the same as Plato's and we all know how political ideologies based on The Republic have played out.
The Americans didn't get it out of thin air. The Greeks and Romans had figured it out a long time before.
I mean, why do you think Washington, DC looks the way it does? Hell, we even have a monumental statue of George Washington as Zeus.
The American Ideal. ...or...
more to your point.
ANGOLA. Particularly as it relates to UNITA and FNLA. You might want to do a bit of reading on how that little fuck-up created that other raging mess that is currently known as Congo and our direct relationship to that evil son-of-a-bitch Mobutu Sese Seko as late as ten years ago. ...and that's just one long-enduring example. I mean, come on, we actively funded and armed them to the teeth to ensure they wouldn't become socialists, which, predictably, wasn't exactly successful, except in totally destroying what little development there was. Hell, even South Africa is now run by a socialist-communist coalition. So, when do we storm the beaches of Durban?
Support contracts are most certainly the bread and butter of closed-source and hardware companies too. IBM's entire business model has been based on that for decades. Hell, not that long ago, they wouldn't actually SELL you ANYTHING--even the hardware was effectively packaged as an ongoing support contract. Look at SUN's business model today. They sell hardware and give away software, but the money is all in the support services.
Guy was talking about living in hab modules on the moon and you jump to TERRAFORMING? You might as well lob-off all the way to Dyson spheres.
See, a diving bell is a piece of technology that allows you to survive in a hostile environment for some period of time, but without someone there to resupply you and quickly haul you back in an emergency, it's a tomb. That is the state of human life beyond the earth now and for the foreseeable future until we find a naturally inhabitable planet, which even after useful interstellar travel is a reality will be a stretch, or until such time as we can terraform the Moon or Mars, which is arguably a level of technology further away than viable interstellar transport.
So, yes, in the distant, distant future when it is possible for us to inhabit some other object be it the Moon, Mars or some yet unknown exosolar planet without the aid of terrestrial industry, then such an exit will make sense. But, if the slightest necessity of life requires anything from earth or if unaided exposure to the natural environment is certain death, it is not a viable escape.
The idea of giving yet more money to COMCAST, much less Verizon, for the same service makes me even more nauseous. So, a little less schadenfreude, please.
Besides, selection works on traits related to what happens to an organism before is reproduces.
Wrong. Very, very wrong. Natural selection works on a scope larger than the individual.
No wonder you're an anonymous coward.
I don't recall the source (might have been in Dawkin's 'Selfish Gene'), but I do remember an interesting article that suggested the entire white light, meeting your god of choice, life-flashes-before-you bit and all the various similar sensations during and long prior to the process of death, including the development of the notion of afterlife, could be explained in an evolutionary sense as being useful companions to the fact that we can predict our own demise and that such functions allow us to not become completely neurotic from the moment we start appreciating our mortality to when we know our doom is imminent and might be better off not spending those last few hours, months or years in a complete nervous breakdown. For instance, sensing some benevolent presence that assures you of peace, whether "god" or a long-deceased parent etc., may help you proceed with effectively executing strategies like "women and children first," rather than becoming a raving hysterical loon who ends up taking his descendants with him in death, rather than ensuring their survival, or rather, the survival of his genetic contribution.
I have to disagree with one point...the UML bit (I know, I know, groan). IF someone is crazy enough to blithely jump into something like this and has no relevant programming experience and will have to fork out major money for someone who does, planning out on paper in minute detail everything they think they need, even if it's just a couple use-cases and bunch of simple flowcharts and sequence diagrams, will serve to indicate roughly how far over their head they've just gotten themselves. Frankly, one weekend of that tedious bullshit might be sufficient to derail a potential nightmare before it begins.
/customers/ need some form of it...and even then, keep it at the big-red-crayon level.
I agree, though, once you start actual work, avoid at all costs revisiting said tedious bullshit until you're at the point where
1) You can get a very nice shrink-wrapped POS system, including hardware, for a lot less than $5k.
/something/ about programming, even if you eventually hire someone else to do it. Research the existing commercial offerings and open source offerings. Find one of each that you think works for you. BUY the one to run your business now, TRY the open source one in your own time, then learn enough about the language behind the open source one to modify it for your needs. After you've got enough chops to tweak around the open source project, then start thinking about branching or starting your own, with or without the aid of hired guns. Chances are, by the end of this, you'll find that:
2) You will not be able to develop even a very crappy POS system from scratch, sans hardware, for $5k--even at Bangalore rates.
3) While you develop a going-to-be-crap-for-a-long-time POS system, you need a reliable one to run your business.
4) Many software development projects die unceremonious yet expensive deaths.
5) This may be nothing but a colossal waste of time and money.
Because of all of the above, if you really are peeved to the point of diving into building something from scratch, you're going to need to know
1) The commercial product is sufficient
2) The cost-benefit exchange makes rolling your own FAR from cost-effective
3) You're not a software company
4) The time and money it would take to become one is enormous and way too risky
5) You have better things to do with your time and money anyway
Is it the government's fault that people extend credit to those they know are likely not to repay it? There are times where companies have bad luck (hurricane wipes out a whole town and lots of people start defaulting for example) and I feel for them when they have to write off the accounts. But, companies that keep extending more and more credit to those whose debt-to-income ratios are way out of whack and FICO scores are in the basement but the company knows it's collecting enough in fees that it will still turn a tidy profit by selling the accounts for less than they're worth, writing off the difference against profits thus avoiding taxation I have no sympathy for. Why should it require more government regulation? No one forced them to open the accounts. They should have to live with the consequences of their own avarice rather than run to daddy government to make it all better.
So, great, they got their grubby hands on a copy of the HL7 schema and dropped in into an encrypted database. Whoop-dee-doo.
Try convincing 99.9% of the population that over-the-air HDTV is actually /superior/ in quality to what they pay $200/month for over their highly reprocessed overly compressed digital cable. This I think is the entire reason for this annoying marketing and lobbying campaign. "Competition works?" Right, which is why they're trying desperately to ensure most people don't even know they can get HDTV over frakking rabbit ears and they certainly don't want them to know that 80% of the HD content they'll get over paid subscription is available for free, without having the contrast and color saturation bumped to cover the horrible compression artifacts.
...so I'm getting a kick...
/less/ suspicious in that environment than wandering around with nothing in hand.
No, really, once you're past the front gate, it is absolutely astonishing how little security there is. Unless you're obviously over-the-top out of place (like, say, streaking, maybe), people just leave you alone--and hauling a cart full of equipment back and forth to the parking lot is actually
I mean, just imagine what a nightmare a facility like that would be if they stopped and questioned everyone pushing a loaded dolly.
I can't, and it really, really pains me because I love telling stories about jerk cops.
However, I've been stopped--each time with good reasons--twice in the middle of the night in the Pentagon parking lot (having an M16 at your window at 3AM is great fun) and a half dozen times within three blocks of the U.S. Capitol building and gotten nothing but warnings. On one of those occasions, in addition to the original offense (blowing through a red light in a screwy intersection), I had out-of-state dead tags (long story). I didn't get a ticket for either. He just said, "look, garage the car and don't let me see it again until it's current."
Maybe it's a strange irony that despite the severely ramped-up security culture around here, they have a sense that they really have much better things to look out for, rather than turning every conceivable thing into that bogeyman for the sake of feeling important.
I AM in business, sweets and have been for decades.
The original point supported by other posters is that these barriers are too much for many, many others to shoulder and that very, very simple changes in healthcare policy would effectively remove the largest of them. It would seem that you are using this as a platform to rant against any need for change using the de rigueur argument of ignorance, laziness and incompetence. This is not a terribly productive argument, nor is it particularly interesting. It is in fact rather insipid.