Proprietary solutions do not advance the arts and sciences. Full stop.
If you are engaged in some endeavor that will not be released fully open, and you hope your efforts will be developed into something that will cause true social change then you are engaged in a masturbatory fantasy that will not bear fruit. Proprietary solutions do not advance the arts and sciences. They only advance the causes of their sponsors.
Read Maslow. Part of the democratization of the Internet is that we permit on the troglodyte. Your gender is a part of your self. Every portion of your self must be defended or anonomized. That's part of the game. Deal with it or play on a different field.
The best course is to ignore them. If you can't bring yourself to do that, being the naughty geek girl that despises them for their level of fail can be a satisfying substitute.
/has three geek girls of his own. Tells them to have gender neutral ID's like his.
Look, I'm not saying individuals should not be fiscally responsible for their actions, like in the case of mandatory auto insurance.
I'm saying if it's that important, the government should be the insurance agency. Enforcement of government mandates always devolve to enforcement by men with guns. Men with guns should not be forcing citizens to buy products from private companies. Not in my country.
The government should not mandate the purchase of products. Full stop.
They're doing mandatory medicine the wrong way here. When you enact a law that forces the poorest 25% of your nation to violate the law or die of starvation you are inviting anarchy.
Mandating medical insurance without regulating the cost does just that. There is no way the poorest 1/4 of americans can afford medical insurance at its current cost. Making it legally required does not change that fact. In Europe there are other methods in place to deal with this. Those methods are not considered in the US currently for various reasons. I do agree that some minimum level of medical care is necessary to the security of the State. I don't agree that this is the best way to go about it. To have a vast segment of the population deprived of medical care is to invite plague. An issue of this importance must not be left to the free market.
Basic medicine is already important enough that if you don't have it you will die. In the US system we nearly prohibit the provision of medicine without insurance coverage, so if you can't afford the insurance you must accept your fate, barring stuff that federally funded emergency rooms can treat. Our poor already go to Mexico or Canada if they can to get treatment for cash money that doctors here won't take for insurance reasons. For an example from my personal experience (yes, although I am not poor I have been), emergency rooms don't treat dental issues and that means if you can't afford dental insurance and you have a dental abscess, you are going to suffer horribly and die and noone will help you. Can you imagine what it's like to be so ill with an abscessed tooth you call every dentist in your city and beg them to pull the infected tooth to find the only ones who will even talk to you are willing to pencil you in for an appointment nine months in the future?
Oh, and that socialized medicine like they have in Europe is working so well for Canada that I can get medical services alacarte there for cash next week, when no US doctor would talk to me at all until I read the numbers off this medical insurance card. If you don't believe me, try it yourself: call any doctor out of the yellow pages and try to get an appointment for an urgent issue for cash, claiming not to have insurance. You can't do it in the US, but you can in Canada.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know this ain't it. Requiring people buy the products of private companies is not capitalism. It's not democracy. It doesn't manage the costs the way markets do. And once you start this nonsense you get less and less necessary companies wanting their products to be required too, like the one in this fine article.
The provision of a certain level of medical care is necessary to the security of the State. To have a vast segment of the population deprived of medical care is to invite plague.
The ultimate in marketing is to make your product compulsory.
All of the examples given and the subject of the fine article are about making products compulsory, therefore they are all related in this way.
There is no reason why a free citizen should be compelled to purchase the product of a private company in order to get or do some unrelated thing. It's just wrong. If I were to propose some constitutional amendments, one of them would prohibit this.
If auto insurance and health insurance are that important they should be nationalized. I'm really not opposed to that. I personally know how hard it is to get treatment when you can't afford coverage. I'm sure there's a government bureaucracy out there that can compute the ideal rate of new physicians that makes the career worthwhile without leaving the country shy of enough doctors to serve the need, and nationalized health care can abolish the lawsuits that drive much of the expense just by barring the claims. Leaving the sale of it in the public market and the marketing of it done by government agents with guns, without regulating the flows that drive the cost is just dumb. That, and it doesn't really solve the problem because it does quite the opposite of the necessary steps to get the costs back down where most people can afford it.
The fine article points out what happens when you start down this path: absurdly unnecessary industries would like to make their products compulsory too, and there is no limit to the influence their billions can buy. Will fast food conglomerates demand fair play in federally funded school lunch programs? Will the cell phone industry demand citizens be required to carry their products for their own safety? Will deodorant manufacturers get stinky pits added to the list of public indecencies? There is no limit to this compulsory product madness. There is, however, a limit to how much of this the poor can endure before they drop out from sheer necessity and get their business done outside the formal economy and that's bad for all of us.
Is to let people select information according to their predisposed bias and then by gentle steps migrate them to a new world view by delivering content that's enough in the desired direction to be interesting but not enough to be annoying. It's deliberate programming and should be avoided. I know the meme is trite, but it's true: In Microsoft Russia, computers program you!
If you're going to deliberately program your mind, deliberately do it for your own ends not someone else's.
... going to practice some positive self-talk now.
We have this thing too, I think it's called universal health care. Maybe you should ask Michael Moore.
In Finland I really doubt they achieve this is the same way that is proposed here.
Family health insurance here costs 100% of the after tax income of a person working full time earning the minimum wage. That's no money for food, housing, heat, gasoline or mandatory auto insurance. BTW, where I live if you don't have a car you are considered "unemployable".
The proposals I've heard involve fining this poor person for presenting himself to an emergency room for treatment without having bought insurance he can't afford.
That doesn't seem likely to work out well in the end.
I realize that I'm making a slippery slope argument here. The government has no business requiring people to pay businesses for anything. If a good or service is important enough to be required it's too important to leave to business to provide it.
I believe this was covered in Grumbles From The Grave. I'll check it out. It could take a while. Send to the obvious gmail, hotmail or any address at the obvious domain for a persistent contact.
I was going for informative here. They did play bridge at the time in question (ca. 1963) at RAH's house. They were the authors in question. They did discuss the subject. They were both the competetive sort. This was the result.
RAH got disgusted with the dirty hippies camped on his lawn or showing up at all hours scaring his wife with their offer to share water. He quit the theme after one book. We got the 60's anyway before it died down.
LRH on the other hand fell in love with being an Idol, continuing to crank out book after book until it his cult consumed his personality. The result is we still have TFA today when people should have laughed it off and got over it.
Sure, I wrote the dialog to recreate the event but I believed it happened much this way.
I've built machines with 16 cores, 40GB of RAM and scores of U320 drives. You know what? Those machines don't browse the Internet, send email or load office programs any faster than the $200 gPC you can get at Walmart. They do however sound like a blow drier on high, which might distract my kids while they're doing their homework.
Depictions of people are restricted by their rights of privacy and publicity. You may object to the unrestricted release of your picture or video into the public domain, even if you consented to be in a video released by the US government for a particular purpose.
This is not precisely on point because the notice was from the government and not the actors, but it's an issue for people who would republish US government works so I thought I'd point this gotcha out to everyone here.
The US government publishes an amazing quantity of content that enriches us all. I use some of it in web design. But not pictures of people without their permission.
When half of the WinTel duopoly puts out a new processor two years after the introduction of the other half's latest operating system, that won't even run it, that is significant.
Microsoft should not have started OEM'ing AMD PCs in India with Zenith.
You'll be wanting to hang out at that incredibly popular blog where the merits of Windows are discussed. There with your pals you can discuss the pitfalls of the long haired smellies and their open sores software.
My google-fu must not be working this morning. I tried to find you a link and couldn't.
I'm just trying to think of how I would react, knowing that a computer was going to take 3 years to finish a task. Can you imagine staring at the status bar for that?
I'm copying 2GB of photos from a share to my pen drive under Vista right now, so I don't have to imagine it.
Slashdot Mirror
Replyiing twice to the same post is bad form but I feel I must.
Once I was employed at a major chip vendor's technology development lab that was being downsized. A coworker suggested I might find work at Microsoft.
My reply: My local septic tank cleaning company has openings too. I will try them first. At least it's honest work.
It's easy to pin down.
Proprietary solutions do not advance the arts and sciences. Full stop.
If you are engaged in some endeavor that will not be released fully open, and you hope your efforts will be developed into something that will cause true social change then you are engaged in a masturbatory fantasy that will not bear fruit. Proprietary solutions do not advance the arts and sciences. They only advance the causes of their sponsors.
Read Maslow. Part of the democratization of the Internet is that we permit on the troglodyte. Your gender is a part of your self. Every portion of your self must be defended or anonomized. That's part of the game. Deal with it or play on a different field.
The best course is to ignore them. If you can't bring yourself to do that, being the naughty geek girl that despises them for their level of fail can be a satisfying substitute.
/has three geek girls of his own. Tells them to have gender neutral ID's like his.
Not where you wanted to go with that. Females have breasts. Get over it.
Try: "Sharp knees. Sorry."
They're experts that happen to be on Microsoft's payroll.
That means they've accepted or ignored Microsoft's business practices in order to accept that money.
That's a filter, whether you like it or not.
Look, I'm not saying individuals should not be fiscally responsible for their actions, like in the case of mandatory auto insurance.
I'm saying if it's that important, the government should be the insurance agency. Enforcement of government mandates always devolve to enforcement by men with guns. Men with guns should not be forcing citizens to buy products from private companies. Not in my country.
The government should not mandate the purchase of products. Full stop.
They're doing mandatory medicine the wrong way here. When you enact a law that forces the poorest 25% of your nation to violate the law or die of starvation you are inviting anarchy.
Mandating medical insurance without regulating the cost does just that. There is no way the poorest 1/4 of americans can afford medical insurance at its current cost. Making it legally required does not change that fact. In Europe there are other methods in place to deal with this. Those methods are not considered in the US currently for various reasons. I do agree that some minimum level of medical care is necessary to the security of the State. I don't agree that this is the best way to go about it. To have a vast segment of the population deprived of medical care is to invite plague. An issue of this importance must not be left to the free market.
Basic medicine is already important enough that if you don't have it you will die. In the US system we nearly prohibit the provision of medicine without insurance coverage, so if you can't afford the insurance you must accept your fate, barring stuff that federally funded emergency rooms can treat. Our poor already go to Mexico or Canada if they can to get treatment for cash money that doctors here won't take for insurance reasons. For an example from my personal experience (yes, although I am not poor I have been), emergency rooms don't treat dental issues and that means if you can't afford dental insurance and you have a dental abscess, you are going to suffer horribly and die and noone will help you. Can you imagine what it's like to be so ill with an abscessed tooth you call every dentist in your city and beg them to pull the infected tooth to find the only ones who will even talk to you are willing to pencil you in for an appointment nine months in the future?
Oh, and that socialized medicine like they have in Europe is working so well for Canada that I can get medical services alacarte there for cash next week, when no US doctor would talk to me at all until I read the numbers off this medical insurance card. If you don't believe me, try it yourself: call any doctor out of the yellow pages and try to get an appointment for an urgent issue for cash, claiming not to have insurance. You can't do it in the US, but you can in Canada.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know this ain't it. Requiring people buy the products of private companies is not capitalism. It's not democracy. It doesn't manage the costs the way markets do. And once you start this nonsense you get less and less necessary companies wanting their products to be required too, like the one in this fine article.
The provision of a certain level of medical care is necessary to the security of the State. To have a vast segment of the population deprived of medical care is to invite plague.
When you preview a comment lately, it replaces your changed subject with RE: Parent. in the form.
If you just change the subject and submit it works like it's supposed to. You just can no longer preview your comment with the subject intact.
That's why so many thread are re: parent subject. lately.
The ultimate in marketing is to make your product compulsory.
All of the examples given and the subject of the fine article are about making products compulsory, therefore they are all related in this way.
There is no reason why a free citizen should be compelled to purchase the product of a private company in order to get or do some unrelated thing. It's just wrong. If I were to propose some constitutional amendments, one of them would prohibit this.
If auto insurance and health insurance are that important they should be nationalized. I'm really not opposed to that. I personally know how hard it is to get treatment when you can't afford coverage. I'm sure there's a government bureaucracy out there that can compute the ideal rate of new physicians that makes the career worthwhile without leaving the country shy of enough doctors to serve the need, and nationalized health care can abolish the lawsuits that drive much of the expense just by barring the claims. Leaving the sale of it in the public market and the marketing of it done by government agents with guns, without regulating the flows that drive the cost is just dumb. That, and it doesn't really solve the problem because it does quite the opposite of the necessary steps to get the costs back down where most people can afford it.
The fine article points out what happens when you start down this path: absurdly unnecessary industries would like to make their products compulsory too, and there is no limit to the influence their billions can buy. Will fast food conglomerates demand fair play in federally funded school lunch programs? Will the cell phone industry demand citizens be required to carry their products for their own safety? Will deodorant manufacturers get stinky pits added to the list of public indecencies? There is no limit to this compulsory product madness. There is, however, a limit to how much of this the poor can endure before they drop out from sheer necessity and get their business done outside the formal economy and that's bad for all of us.
Is to let people select information according to their predisposed bias and then by gentle steps migrate them to a new world view by delivering content that's enough in the desired direction to be interesting but not enough to be annoying. It's deliberate programming and should be avoided. I know the meme is trite, but it's true: In Microsoft Russia, computers program you!
If you're going to deliberately program your mind, deliberately do it for your own ends not someone else's.
... going to practice some positive self-talk now.
In Finland I really doubt they achieve this is the same way that is proposed here.
Family health insurance here costs 100% of the after tax income of a person working full time earning the minimum wage. That's no money for food, housing, heat, gasoline or mandatory auto insurance. BTW, where I live if you don't have a car you are considered "unemployable".
The proposals I've heard involve fining this poor person for presenting himself to an emergency room for treatment without having bought insurance he can't afford.
That doesn't seem likely to work out well in the end.
I realize that I'm making a slippery slope argument here. The government has no business requiring people to pay businesses for anything. If a good or service is important enough to be required it's too important to leave to business to provide it.
RIAA wants the government to mandate payments to them from essentially everybody?
That would be like insurance companies wanting auto insurance to be mandatory.
Or hospitals being in favor of mandatory medical insurance.
Or Microsoft insisting on Windows installed on every PC
Or sports teams wanting every citizen to subsidize their business.
or... wait... what were we talking about again?
Yes.
I believe this was covered in Grumbles From The Grave. I'll check it out. It could take a while. Send to the obvious gmail, hotmail or any address at the obvious domain for a persistent contact.
I was going for informative here. They did play bridge at the time in question (ca. 1963) at RAH's house. They were the authors in question. They did discuss the subject. They were both the competetive sort. This was the result.
RAH got disgusted with the dirty hippies camped on his lawn or showing up at all hours scaring his wife with their offer to share water. He quit the theme after one book. We got the 60's anyway before it died down.
LRH on the other hand fell in love with being an Idol, continuing to crank out book after book until it his cult consumed his personality. The result is we still have TFA today when people should have laughed it off and got over it.
Sure, I wrote the dialog to recreate the event but I believed it happened much this way.
At the dining room table, two couples playing bridge:
LRH: My books aren't selling. Who makes the most popular books?
RAH: The Boy Scouts. After that the Q'uran and the Bible.
LRH: Religion sure sells a lot of books.
RAH: Yeah, I thought about writing out some book for that a while back. I turned it into a short story "Gulf".
LRH: I don't think you could do it with a short story. All the big religions have high word counts. I would think a trilogy at least.
RAH: I could do it in one book.
LRH: I bet a dollar I could do it better than you.
RAH: Done and done. Now shuffle the cards.
... Three years later ...
LRH: Can you believe it? I've got groupies! They worship me!
RAH: You can have mine too if you want them. They're camped on the lawn. They're scaring Ginny. Here's your buck. The bet's over.
LRH: Win!
RAH: Whatever. Shuffle the cards.
I have this computer. It's not lousy at all.
I've built machines with 16 cores, 40GB of RAM and scores of U320 drives. You know what? Those machines don't browse the Internet, send email or load office programs any faster than the $200 gPC you can get at Walmart. They do however sound like a blow drier on high, which might distract my kids while they're doing their homework.
They're tools. Use the right tool for the job.
Depictions of people are restricted by their rights of privacy and publicity. You may object to the unrestricted release of your picture or video into the public domain, even if you consented to be in a video released by the US government for a particular purpose.
This is not precisely on point because the notice was from the government and not the actors, but it's an issue for people who would republish US government works so I thought I'd point this gotcha out to everyone here.
The US government publishes an amazing quantity of content that enriches us all. I use some of it in web design. But not pictures of people without their permission.
Yes. It's turtles all the way down.
When half of the WinTel duopoly puts out a new processor two years after the introduction of the other half's latest operating system, that won't even run it, that is significant.
Microsoft should not have started OEM'ing AMD PCs in India with Zenith.
Then the answer is: "More than it's worth."
You'll be wanting to hang out at that incredibly popular blog where the merits of Windows are discussed. There with your pals you can discuss the pitfalls of the long haired smellies and their open sores software.
My google-fu must not be working this morning. I tried to find you a link and couldn't.
The grandparent post was moderated: Insightful, Funny, Informative, Overrated and Flamebait
See? Moderation works. That's what I was going for.
I'm copying 2GB of photos from a share to my pen drive under Vista right now, so I don't have to imagine it.
often contain the most important answers