It's not just the blocks for organizations, it's also the addresses reserved for special purposes. IPv4 also uses a few of what could be called "8/". That is, as I'm sure most everyone knows, many addresses ending with.00 were reserved to indicate the whole subnet. Addresses ending in.255 are for broadcasting. Class C networks don't have 256 addresses, they have 254. Also spoils the purity of the address space. Can't make the blanket statement that any set of 4 bytes always represents what should appear to be 1 host.
We won't run out of IPv6 addresses unless we're stupid. But as the saying goes, human stupidity is infinite. I can see some people thinking that a way to make their mark on the history of networking is to reserve some kinds of addresses, maybe a "/32/" if you will, for some special, worthy purpose. Then that "/32/" is further divided for even more specialized purposes. Keep that up, and although the IPv6 address space as a whole will not come close to ever filling up, certain kinds of addresses could indeed become scarce. Suppose for example that instead of.xxx names, hosters of pr0n informally reserve their own block with suggestive combinations of hexademical digits, then divide and subdivide that up into kinds of pr0n.
At least, that's what I would guess. But there are other things, just look at the differences between IPv4 and IPv6. Of course, allow more than 2^32 IP addresses. Also, the way subnets are organized (/8,/16,/24) is very handy, but did waste huge amounts of address space. IPv6 could easily run short of address space if we're careless with the bits. 128 bits is not much if they're parceled out in ways similar to IPv4.
I used Paypal a handful of times, and never had a problem. Bought some business cards through Paypal. But the stories were worrisome. There are bad stories about every large business, but the horror stories about Paypal seemed more numerous and worse than average. Don't bank your money with Paypal, they might freeze the works over one dispute about less than 1% of it. I quit using it, and after a few years, the account was closed. I forget whether Paypal threatened to close it and then did, or whether I closed it in response to a message from Paypal.
I have doubts about the worthiness of the grievances, in that we are all still quite wealthy. Yes, financial people are doing plenty of theft and cheating. But we've wasted and squandered wealth on the foolish game of Keeping Up With the Joneses. We could and we should cut back, and we know it. Smaller houses, more economic cars, less suburban sprawl.
But of all the things we could cut, you suggest education? Like the rest of us, schools could do much more to cut costs. Use digital books, find cheaper housing than the dorms, and most of all, attend a public institution in your home state. But don't skip education altogether!
This shouldn't be a question of loyalty, but of professionalism on all sides. Nobody is irreplaceable. If he somehow is hard to replace, why is that? They keep him too busy with other work to document what any replacement would need to know? Many companies operate in this fashion, don't have a good answer to the "what if he's hit by a bus" question. If the best plan they have is hope an accident doesn't happen, and rely on "loyalty" to fend off better offers, they'll get hurt sooner or later. They're taking a chance. Business is all about risk management. Maybe they've calculated this risk, and decided to live with it, decided it would be too costly to mitigate? None of that is his fault. He's not responsible for such decisions. However, he should have been documenting all along, even without being explicitly asked, so that if he leaves his former employer can continue with someone else without undue difficulty.
No decent system administrator would withhold passwords from former employers. The same principle applies to other sorts of knowledge. I know making documentation for your replacement goes against most people's instincts to preserve their position any way they can, but you don't know the future and it can really help in surprising ways. At one place where I did some contracting work, I tried to leave all kinds of documentation so they could do it themselves, and build on what I had done for them. 2 years later, they contracted with me again. They'd updated their database software to a new version, and this broke a few things. I found the documentation I'd left a real help so I could quickly pick up where I had left off. I sure didn't remember all the details so painfully discovered earlier. The person you end up helping down the road may be yourself.
In short, he should take the better offer. "Better" is hard to assess, but in this case it sounds like moving on is the better bet. You can never know for sure what sort of management runs the new place. For that matter, you can work with someone for years and never really know them. If you've never seen how they handle a bad situation, you could be in for an ugly surprise. It's been said that employees join companies, and leave managers. Stay long enough to ease the transition, but don't stay out of a misguided sense of loyalty. They're professionals, or they should be.
He might also consider offering his services to his old employer while he is working at his new job. Consult part time for them on the side.
You aren't seeing the full picture. Yes, you're right, physical media is obsolete, and charging a fee for making physical copies won't make much money. But you don't think support and service works either, and Red Hat has made it work. You didn't mention ad revenue, and that's fine. Ad revenue cannot start projects, it can only help projects that have already achieved some popularity.
So what do you suggest for a solution? Copyright it and hope that respect for the law will persuade enough people to pay for a license? Sorry, I don't think that will work. Copyright evokes precious little respect any more, thanks in part to the crusade waged against millions of ordinary citizens, with lawsuits, 3 strikes laws, and DRM. Even if the reputation hadn't been ruined, we can see that copyright is too costly. It's insane the way businesses have to keep records of all their software purchases for each computer, in case they are audited. When we have to spend 10x as much solely to comply with copyright, we're going to question it. Evading copyright is actually easier than complying, and often results in a better product. People simply aren't going to jump through a bunch of pointless hoops. We can't force them to do it either, not through the law, and not through technological means. Even if you wrote some successful software and managed to sell access to it, it only takes a few people to duplicate its functionality, without breaking any laws, and then where are you? Sidelined, unless your software is so much better that it's worth the price. But when that software gets better than your own, then what? Resort to lock in and inertia, as MS has done? That can't last.
We need some other system. I think I know what it must be: some form of patronage. Exactly how it will be organized, operated, funded and its revenues distributed is wide open. I am thinking we will want many diverse organizations all working a little differently than any other, as that has the best chance of covering as much as possible so that no deserving software writer is left out.
For the value of my car, I talked directly with the other driver's insurer. They lowballed me, and after much arguing, they came up but were still a few hundred dollars low. The lawyer was not involved with that.
During the course of the medical treatment, I saw a lot of outrageous billing. No, of course it isn't a grand plan to bankrupt patients. It's more just cavalier sloppiness with expenses that verges into fraud. Glad to hear some of you do have some financial sense. And that you at least try to keep the costs of drugs down.
One doctor had us keep this WoundVac for an extra week, unused, "just in case". If I'd known at the time that it cost $1100 per week to rent, I would have squelched that in an instant. That office could never bill consistently either, and I wasted a lot of time arguing with insurance about it. While I was trying to get that straightened out, the hospital decided to sic the debt collectors on us. Just wonderful to have a slimy debt collector harassing us several times a week, calling us lowlife deadbeats who won't pay the doctors (pot, kettle, black), when the problem was that the bills and insurance coverage were wrong. I admit my manner with the billing department was hostile, and I suspect that figured in them deciding to turn us over. I suppose they thought I was just lying and stalling, and putting on a big act of umbrage. Insurance kept trying to characterize these appointments as "emergency", and therefore eligible for the emergency services deductable. They blamed billing for messing up the insurance claims, while billing blamed insurance for making it extremely difficult to get the claims right. Both sides were right, but that wasn't getting the bill straightened out. When they at last figured out that I was indeed correct about the bills, the hospital finally took us off their list of people to harass (cue Gilda Radner saying "never mind"). At a private hospital where one of us was sent for rehab on the broken ankle, they had her sign this "blank check" form for a wheelchair she did not need, just as they were discharging her. The form said that if insurance didn't cover it, we were responsible for paying. I asked how much the wheelchair cost, and was told that they didn't know but insurance would cover it. Then, why did they want that form signed? They hustled us through that form and others, and out of there, with the wheelchair. I should have fought that harder, but wasn't expecting to be taken like that by the hospital. One of the family friends offered us his deceased wife's wheelchair; we sure didn't need to buy one. And she wasn't supposed to use it anyway, she was supposed to use a walker and hop on the good leg, to keep her strength up. Turned out the wheelchair was $818, about 6 times what it should have cost.
Do you think those specific examples I gave, about the WoundVac and the wheelchair, are acceptable uses of and charges for medical resources? I do not. Nevertheless, I trustingly went along with most of it. When I learned the full truth, the fraud made me furious. And less trusting of doctors. You think I don't have reason for a bit of distrust? I trust your medical knowledge just fine. It's your billing I have little faith in. But I didn't threaten to sue any doctors, didn't even threaten to report them to the insurance's fraud division. If that kind of crap is common in the US, and I suspect it is, it's no wonder health care is so expensive here. This was all in the Dallas area. Perhaps Miami is different. I hear poorer cities have less wasteful medical care?
And do you think I was scrapping for every penny, for myself or family? No! I was doing it to do my small part to keep medical expenses down for the nation. I returned that wheelchair, and the guy who was taking it couldn't understand why I was turning down such a cheap wheelchair. After all, it cost us only $28, after insurance. Except I don't think of it that way. You know the drill. Hospital says the wheelchair is worth $818, insur
Read that again. I am using a unit of "sq km year". 3800000 = (2800+1000)* 1000 years. Hard data to back some of these numbers is not readily available, so I am working with what I admit are very crude guesses.
As for oil spills, no, we don't know how quickly nature is "taking care of it". Talk about abdicating our responsibility! We caused a lot of trouble, and now you think we can just blow it off with "nature can handle it"? It will, eventually, but it's not going to be very quick. As for what we can do about it, perhaps we should ban offshore oil drilling. The Exxon Valdez spill, now 22 years old, is still affecting the Alaska coast and marine environment. Fishing took a real hit. Oil tankers are now double hulled. They should have been double hulled from the beginning, but it took a disaster to convince enough people.
Hydroelectric is near 0. If we decide a dam was a mistake, the flooded land can be drained and used pretty much right away. Wind farms are even better. Land with windmills can continue to be used for other purposes such as agriculture. Does your figure reflect that fact? May need to spread windmills over 277,508 sq km of land, but the space required for the platforms and other infrastructure is only a tiny fraction of that, maybe less than 1%. Still, there isn't anything that doesn't have its issues. We've discovered that windmills kill bats. Can we stop that? If not, can we tolerate losing a lot of bats? Solar does need a lot of land. We should figure all that into our energy policies.
We need good information. And we don't have near enough. More than that, we need more honesty. We have a lot of disinformation and doubt, spread by people with agendas. BP very badly wants the Deepwater Horizon spill to all just blow over, and, like many of its peers has lied repeatedly. We should be wary of any data they've handled and "scientific" claims they've made.
Vote fraud, not voter fraud. We've had the infamous butterfly ballot, and ballots being rejected as invalid for dubious reasons such as the "hanging chad". The number of voting machines in Wisconsin districts has been very uneven, with a strong correlation between Democratic leaning districts and fewer machines. Takes hours of waiting in line to vote there, versus little to no wait in Republican leaning districts. Photo ID is just another barrier, another soft way to disenfranchise certain sorts of voters. See Caging.
I find it particularly hypocritical to make noise over alleged voter fraud, in order to commit all these other frauds with the vote.
Here we go again. Deaths is not a good measure of the risks. If you instead use pollution, as in "area (sq km) of land * years made unusable", you might see something like this:
Nuclear - 3800000 (Chernobyl = 2800 sq km, Fukushima = 1000 sq km, land may not be habitable for 1000 years)
Oil - 2000000 (Deepwater Horizon fouled 10000 sq km of the Gulf of Mexico, may represent half of all oil pollution, effects may last 100 years)
Coal - 100000 (Mining operations have fouled 2000 miles of streams, recovery may take 50 years)
everything else - nearly 0
These numbers are very crude and quick estimates. Perhaps little or no research has been done on this sort of question, for political reasons. Another measure is total costs. Hard to say how nuclear comes out, especially when external costs, and particularly future projections, are added in. For instance, if burning of coal and oil cause the ice sheets to melt, then that would make it far more costly than anything else, including nuclear power.
Was starting to wonder if anyone would get around to the political questions. I have 2. 1st one:
As a star of a SF show, what do you think about and what are you doing about the current anti-intellectual and anti-science stances of some (*cough* Republican *cough*) major political parties?
Dammit, read what I wrote. NO DOCTORS WERE SUED OR THREATENED! The insurance company of the driver at fault was the one that got threatened.
I have auto insurance. I don't have health insurance. I did not "run" to the legal system. I asked for advice first. I was strongly advised to get a lawyer, because of insurance. And so I went with a lawyer because of insurance, not doctors. Insurance cheated me on the value of my car, which I saw as confirmation of the sage advice I received to retain a lawyer. Just a few hundred more was all I wanted, to get it to KBB private party value (which is quite a bit less than dealer value), and they wouldn't. Why shouldn't they also cheat me on the cost of the health care? No reason I can see. No doctors were sued or even threatened in all this, only the other party's insurance company was threatened. I don't like it, but that's the way our system works. What am I supposed to do, let the insurance company screw me? Pretty cheeky of you to suggest I bear some blame for getting an ambulance chaser. And just what do you mean by "managed to blame"? You surely aren't suggesting that I'm not telling this straight, are you? Are you?
You didn't answer my question of what you doctors are doing about the horrendous expense of medical care. Am I to take it then that you are doing nothing, and you don't care? Doesn't it matter to you if in saving a life you bankrupt a family? But I know most doctors have zero financial sense. So I will tell you what I expect. I expect to be treated like a person, not a cut of meat however expensive. Meaning, you doctors will not keep me in the dark about costs, you will not ask me to sign blank checks, you will post prices of routine procedures and appointments. Obviously, that doesn't apply to ER. I'm talking non-emergency care, of which there was plenty. When I ask, you will tell me prices, you won't fob me off with "don't worry, insurance will cover it" or breezily dismiss it as not that expensive, or as not important next to my precious health. Oh yes it is important. I will decide whether something is worth the cost. But I can't, if you can't be bothered to give me prices. You will keep the costs of supplies and drugs reasonable, not 10 times what Walmart charges. Or I will bring my own. And you won't use that homeless guy down the hall as the excuse for why you are trying to charge me ridiculous rates. None of that is unreasonable. You, I suppose, think what I'm asking for here is unreasonable? I have never seen any other business operate the way the US medical business does. Even car sales, sleazy as it is, isn't that sleazy. Maybe I should double my rates, because medical care is so expensive? Think that would fly with any of my customers? No!
You're being unreasonable. We paid our part of all the medical bills, and paid on time. The doctors did very well out of the whole affair. We didn't sue or threaten any doctors with lawsuits. What exactly is your beef with that?
What I find funny is the contradiction. When you want to make data unrecoverable, you have to do some serious abuse. Drilling a hole might not be enough! But when a hard drive begins to fail, somehow that same data is so delicate that any mistake, or no mistake, will lose it all, no recovery possible.
Has it occurred to you that some people go for the lawsuits because of medical expenses? Just because some people sue is no reason to charge everyone such extreme prices. A few people blow up or crash a few airplanes, therefore we should have security grope millions of people who are trying to board a plane?
I've also seen the lawyers tacitly egging on the doctors. Lawyers want sky high prices, to inflate their own portion of any settlement. And what do the doctors do? Enthusiastically play along, of course! We weren't just any old pieces of meat, we were filet mignon! Made for distinctly unsettling hospital visits.
We were in an auto accident, and got a few cuts and bruises, and one broken ankle. Totalled both cars. It was entirely the other guy's fault. Could also make a case for it being a badly designed intersection. He simply did not see the red light and jumped into the intersection as we were passing through. So while recovering from the beating I took, I was faced with a lot of decisions. My first decision was whether I should accept medical care. I refused. I was only bruised, and I do not have insurance and was not at all sure how the billing would work out. Next, should I get a lawyer, or not? I asked around. Insurance companies all said I did not need a lawyer, lawyers all said I did, and I didn't ask any doctors. Neutral parties mostly favored getting a lawyer. Insurance companies have to be threatened, or they won't pay. So I got a lawyer. I don't like them, but I really don't trust insurance companies. The lawyer wanted medical bills, lots and lots of medical bills. And he wanted photos of us looking our very worst, all black and blue and bandaged. He regretfully informed me that since I had "foolishly" declined medical care, he couldn't do anything much for me, and would concentrate on the others. We sent him copies of everything, and gave necessary permissions for his organization to get medical records. He didn't mind any waste on the part of the medical providers, quite the contrary. He wanted more waste! When the medical care wound down, the game between the lawyer and the insurance started. He made an outrageous demand on our behalf, and insurance countered with an equally outrageous lowball amount that wouldn't cover the expenses, even before the lawyer's cut. Since the lawyer was getting 1/3rd, the expenses were much higher, of course. He scared the insurance company with stories of what nice, reasonable people we were. Sounds like they felt they would look very, very bad in front of a jury, so they made a very good offer, and we settled. What firmed up my resolve not to give the enemy insurance company any mercy was them cheating me on the value of my car (10% below private party Kelly Blue Book value for a good condition car, which they of course insisted didn't mean a thing), and then conveniently losing my title for a month.
The whole thing was dirty, but I was afraid to forgo the lawyer. What a messed up system! Where do you start on bringing some sanity to the whole thing? I realize that the system is a vicious cycle. Party A does outrageous things because of party B's outrages, which they do because of party C's outrages in response to the outrages of party A. I would very much liked to have been nice to the insurance company, in hopes they would reciprocate. If no lawyer had been involved, they could have paid 2/3rds of what they did pay, and we would have received the same as we did. But the way they chiselled me on the value of my car showed what I could expect. I did what I could, short of taking it all on the chin. I tried to save on expenses. I argued over the prices the doctors charged, I found cheaper alternatives for some of the medical products, I took over some of the nursing duties to save on the very expensive home visits, and I even backed the lawyer off when he was hunting around for even more excuses to run up medical expenses and amplify our pain and suffering. What are you doctors doing?
No, of course haggling has no place in ER. But I was talking about a wheelchair and other situations that were definitely not emergencies. You suggest patient expectations and lawsuits are the reasons for the high prices? I disagree. Sure, those are issues, but they aren't the primary reasons health care is so high in the US. Ultimately, it's the lack of competition.
The medical provider can pull stunts like having a patient rent a device longer than necessary, or take all sorts of extra tests that have very little chance of finding anything, because the patient is captive and kept ignorant. I had no idea that medical device was $1100 per week to rent, I assumed it was just part of the treatment and included in the costs of the various appointments. Now I know better. It was weeks after the care was all finished that the bills started coming. Quite a shock to see how they charged defense contractor prices for every little thing. Doctor was $400 per hour, the debridement was another $800, plus an additional $100 for $5 worth of supplies such as gauze, tape, and rubber gloves. Near $2500 per week for a cut! Insurance chopped that way down, to about 30% of their fantasy rates. And then our part was 10% of that 30%. But insurance tried to weasel out of a few items, and on those the doctors came after us for the full 100%. Wasted a lot of time arguing over the bills until I could finally get the insurance to pay up. All that about doctors having to charge such ridiculous rates is garbage. We sure call out banks on the nonsense fees they keep trying to impose. I don't see why doctors should be specially exempted.
Product reviews? Seems like just the sort of thing for another wikiwhatever site, if not Wikipedia itself. There is a wikireviews.info, but it doesn't look like much. Don't know about productwiki.com. Maybe a suitable wiki site should be created, becasue there isn't one?
User fees? I'm with the original poster. I won't park in a metered spot in which the "problem" of overstaying or not paying is "solved" with punitive fines. I'll use a metered spot if there aren't the fines. In some systems, they issue a timestamp, and collect the appropriate amount at the exit, when you leave. No fines involved. But parking meters almost always mean a system rigged to cause violations. I won't participate in those.
If avoiding the parking meter means I don't visit certain places, so be it. There are plenty of other places to go. Don't see why I should reward any muni for running a parking meter scam. Why didn't the businesses get the council to undo the changes before they were ruined?
No one will be turned away from an emergency room.
I beg to differ. Some years ago, one of my cousins was turned away from ER. He was uninsured of course, or he probably would have seen a doctor a lot sooner. He was suffering from terrible headaches, couldn't even sit down because that made the pounding worse. He died the next day, presumably from an aneurysm in his head. He was about 45 years old. ER might not have been able to save him, who knows? But it should never have escalated to that point. Could he have been saved if he'd had access to basic health care months before his problem reached the crisis point, when he himself probably didn't think it was anything serious?
Everyone seems aware of the problems with health insurance. But hardly anyone bashes the medical providers for their crazy billing practices. It's insane, and downright fraudulent the way doctors run the business. You see very few prices up front. They claim they can't give you any price until they know more. Maybe, but there are plenty of known prices they keep from you until well after the fact. If you ask about the price, they'll tell you not to worry (bad for your health, maybe?) insurance will cover it. Then they sometimes demand that you sign a blank check. They push you to sign a form that says you'll pay for something if insurance doesn't. And they won't tell you the price even when it's for something easy. They pulled that one on us for a wheelchair, and not a motorized one either, that turned out to be just over $800. Another stunt they pulled on us was having us keep a medical device for an extra week, unused, without informing us that it cost $1100 per week to rent!
Facial recognition is a difficult problem. Not just technically either. Too many people want this too much. They also don't appreciate all the difficulties. They're plums ripe for being taken in by scams.
Something I've come to appreciate is that comparisons are relatively easy. It's the representation that's the killer. Pixels are a completely brain dead way to represent an image. Very easy to do, but not useful for the kinds of comparisons needed for facial recognition.
Then there's the matter of scale. Can any facial recognition system handle millions of faces? Cops want to throw their entire photo collection of suspects into the system, so it can check anyone it sees against every suspect they have on file. Even if the system made an incorrect match in only 0.1% of the comparisons, that's still a match to a thousand of every million people in the database.
Let them have their fun. It's not entirely irrelevant, but near enough. For decades, sharing has been villified as piracy. And bans on the activity have proven time and again to be impractical to enforce. ACTA doesn't change any of that. If you aren't already, get used to being thought a criminal. And don't sweat about the possibility of being accused and threatened. The odds of it happening are low. Numbers are on our side.
We'll just have to wait for the older generations to lose power. They won't admit that sharing is not evil and not theft, not unless they take one hell of a beating over the issue, which they probably won't. Once they're gone, we'll ditch these idiotic laws. Be nice if it happens sooner, through the election of Pirate Party politicians, but it will happen eventually, one way or another, as mortality catches up with them.
Science has debunked many of the screwier claims and dogmas of many religions, such as the idea that the Earth is only 10000 years old. That's the kind of testable, falsifiable assertion that science rests on. Scientists have even explored such questions as why humans are religious. But as to the supernatural, that is unprovable. How do we know that an omnipotent being didn't just magically create the Earth any old time, complete with all sorts of evidence that suggests a different age? We don't. It's not a testable hypothesis.
Then there's the old "what's the meaning of life?" and "why are we here?" sorts of questions. Does life have a meaning, and if it does, what is it? What's the point of the universe? One popular idea suggests it's all a contest between good and evil, with God and Satan competing for our souls, and the contest to be ultimately decided when Armageddon happens. It could be true. The trouble with any explanation of an issue like that is it merely begs the question. Why is there a contest at all? What's the point? Another popular one is the notion that we just don't know, and can't know. Whichever idea appeals, we are free to speculate, free to create a religion and have faith in whatever we want. Science does not answer such questions.
Bored? You lucky jabby bastard! Many of us end up stressed by insane demands from sociopathic managers who don't know what they don't know, and who have no trust or confidence in their underlings. They do things for purposes of manipulation and political games, in part because they are also afraid. You're trying to accomplish something while these guys are ragging on you for doing it wrong, or not fast enough. They cast aspersions on their underlings' competence, value, judgment, loyalty, and commitment, and constantly threaten to fire people. You will of course be blamed and perhaps take the fall when things go wrong. If you are in a situation like that and for some reason you can't leave, that's the stress from hell.
1. Memristors! Memristor based flash memory devices for starters, with the ultimate goal being to replace RAM.
2. Try for the graphics market? And not by copying what NVidia and ATI did, but by introducing a new generation. Massively parallel ray tracing graphics.
3. Bionics. How about a "mouseless" pointer? User just puts on a skull cap and thinks where the pointer is to go. If that works, try to replace the keyboard.
That's the sort of thing that would make HP really cool again. The R&D would be costly, but maybe not as costly as these golden parachutes that generate absolutely no return.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the blocks for organizations, it's also the addresses reserved for special purposes. IPv4 also uses a few of what could be called "8/". That is, as I'm sure most everyone knows, many addresses ending with .00 were reserved to indicate the whole subnet. Addresses ending in .255 are for broadcasting. Class C networks don't have 256 addresses, they have 254. Also spoils the purity of the address space. Can't make the blanket statement that any set of 4 bytes always represents what should appear to be 1 host.
We won't run out of IPv6 addresses unless we're stupid. But as the saying goes, human stupidity is infinite. I can see some people thinking that a way to make their mark on the history of networking is to reserve some kinds of addresses, maybe a "/32/" if you will, for some special, worthy purpose. Then that "/32/" is further divided for even more specialized purposes. Keep that up, and although the IPv6 address space as a whole will not come close to ever filling up, certain kinds of addresses could indeed become scarce. Suppose for example that instead of .xxx names, hosters of pr0n informally reserve their own block with suggestive combinations of hexademical digits, then divide and subdivide that up into kinds of pr0n.
In short, handle "/x/" with great care.
The maximum allowed packet size.
At least, that's what I would guess. But there are other things, just look at the differences between IPv4 and IPv6. Of course, allow more than 2^32 IP addresses. Also, the way subnets are organized (/8, /16, /24) is very handy, but did waste huge amounts of address space. IPv6 could easily run short of address space if we're careless with the bits. 128 bits is not much if they're parceled out in ways similar to IPv4.
I used Paypal a handful of times, and never had a problem. Bought some business cards through Paypal. But the stories were worrisome. There are bad stories about every large business, but the horror stories about Paypal seemed more numerous and worse than average. Don't bank your money with Paypal, they might freeze the works over one dispute about less than 1% of it. I quit using it, and after a few years, the account was closed. I forget whether Paypal threatened to close it and then did, or whether I closed it in response to a message from Paypal.
I have doubts about the worthiness of the grievances, in that we are all still quite wealthy. Yes, financial people are doing plenty of theft and cheating. But we've wasted and squandered wealth on the foolish game of Keeping Up With the Joneses. We could and we should cut back, and we know it. Smaller houses, more economic cars, less suburban sprawl.
But of all the things we could cut, you suggest education? Like the rest of us, schools could do much more to cut costs. Use digital books, find cheaper housing than the dorms, and most of all, attend a public institution in your home state. But don't skip education altogether!
you should aim to be a Programmer
Try telling that to Human Resources.
This shouldn't be a question of loyalty, but of professionalism on all sides. Nobody is irreplaceable. If he somehow is hard to replace, why is that? They keep him too busy with other work to document what any replacement would need to know? Many companies operate in this fashion, don't have a good answer to the "what if he's hit by a bus" question. If the best plan they have is hope an accident doesn't happen, and rely on "loyalty" to fend off better offers, they'll get hurt sooner or later. They're taking a chance. Business is all about risk management. Maybe they've calculated this risk, and decided to live with it, decided it would be too costly to mitigate? None of that is his fault. He's not responsible for such decisions. However, he should have been documenting all along, even without being explicitly asked, so that if he leaves his former employer can continue with someone else without undue difficulty.
No decent system administrator would withhold passwords from former employers. The same principle applies to other sorts of knowledge. I know making documentation for your replacement goes against most people's instincts to preserve their position any way they can, but you don't know the future and it can really help in surprising ways. At one place where I did some contracting work, I tried to leave all kinds of documentation so they could do it themselves, and build on what I had done for them. 2 years later, they contracted with me again. They'd updated their database software to a new version, and this broke a few things. I found the documentation I'd left a real help so I could quickly pick up where I had left off. I sure didn't remember all the details so painfully discovered earlier. The person you end up helping down the road may be yourself.
In short, he should take the better offer. "Better" is hard to assess, but in this case it sounds like moving on is the better bet. You can never know for sure what sort of management runs the new place. For that matter, you can work with someone for years and never really know them. If you've never seen how they handle a bad situation, you could be in for an ugly surprise. It's been said that employees join companies, and leave managers. Stay long enough to ease the transition, but don't stay out of a misguided sense of loyalty. They're professionals, or they should be.
He might also consider offering his services to his old employer while he is working at his new job. Consult part time for them on the side.
You aren't seeing the full picture. Yes, you're right, physical media is obsolete, and charging a fee for making physical copies won't make much money. But you don't think support and service works either, and Red Hat has made it work. You didn't mention ad revenue, and that's fine. Ad revenue cannot start projects, it can only help projects that have already achieved some popularity.
So what do you suggest for a solution? Copyright it and hope that respect for the law will persuade enough people to pay for a license? Sorry, I don't think that will work. Copyright evokes precious little respect any more, thanks in part to the crusade waged against millions of ordinary citizens, with lawsuits, 3 strikes laws, and DRM. Even if the reputation hadn't been ruined, we can see that copyright is too costly. It's insane the way businesses have to keep records of all their software purchases for each computer, in case they are audited. When we have to spend 10x as much solely to comply with copyright, we're going to question it. Evading copyright is actually easier than complying, and often results in a better product. People simply aren't going to jump through a bunch of pointless hoops. We can't force them to do it either, not through the law, and not through technological means. Even if you wrote some successful software and managed to sell access to it, it only takes a few people to duplicate its functionality, without breaking any laws, and then where are you? Sidelined, unless your software is so much better that it's worth the price. But when that software gets better than your own, then what? Resort to lock in and inertia, as MS has done? That can't last.
We need some other system. I think I know what it must be: some form of patronage. Exactly how it will be organized, operated, funded and its revenues distributed is wide open. I am thinking we will want many diverse organizations all working a little differently than any other, as that has the best chance of covering as much as possible so that no deserving software writer is left out.
For the value of my car, I talked directly with the other driver's insurer. They lowballed me, and after much arguing, they came up but were still a few hundred dollars low. The lawyer was not involved with that.
During the course of the medical treatment, I saw a lot of outrageous billing. No, of course it isn't a grand plan to bankrupt patients. It's more just cavalier sloppiness with expenses that verges into fraud. Glad to hear some of you do have some financial sense. And that you at least try to keep the costs of drugs down.
One doctor had us keep this WoundVac for an extra week, unused, "just in case". If I'd known at the time that it cost $1100 per week to rent, I would have squelched that in an instant. That office could never bill consistently either, and I wasted a lot of time arguing with insurance about it. While I was trying to get that straightened out, the hospital decided to sic the debt collectors on us. Just wonderful to have a slimy debt collector harassing us several times a week, calling us lowlife deadbeats who won't pay the doctors (pot, kettle, black), when the problem was that the bills and insurance coverage were wrong. I admit my manner with the billing department was hostile, and I suspect that figured in them deciding to turn us over. I suppose they thought I was just lying and stalling, and putting on a big act of umbrage. Insurance kept trying to characterize these appointments as "emergency", and therefore eligible for the emergency services deductable. They blamed billing for messing up the insurance claims, while billing blamed insurance for making it extremely difficult to get the claims right. Both sides were right, but that wasn't getting the bill straightened out. When they at last figured out that I was indeed correct about the bills, the hospital finally took us off their list of people to harass (cue Gilda Radner saying "never mind"). At a private hospital where one of us was sent for rehab on the broken ankle, they had her sign this "blank check" form for a wheelchair she did not need, just as they were discharging her. The form said that if insurance didn't cover it, we were responsible for paying. I asked how much the wheelchair cost, and was told that they didn't know but insurance would cover it. Then, why did they want that form signed? They hustled us through that form and others, and out of there, with the wheelchair. I should have fought that harder, but wasn't expecting to be taken like that by the hospital. One of the family friends offered us his deceased wife's wheelchair; we sure didn't need to buy one. And she wasn't supposed to use it anyway, she was supposed to use a walker and hop on the good leg, to keep her strength up. Turned out the wheelchair was $818, about 6 times what it should have cost.
Do you think those specific examples I gave, about the WoundVac and the wheelchair, are acceptable uses of and charges for medical resources? I do not. Nevertheless, I trustingly went along with most of it. When I learned the full truth, the fraud made me furious. And less trusting of doctors. You think I don't have reason for a bit of distrust? I trust your medical knowledge just fine. It's your billing I have little faith in. But I didn't threaten to sue any doctors, didn't even threaten to report them to the insurance's fraud division. If that kind of crap is common in the US, and I suspect it is, it's no wonder health care is so expensive here. This was all in the Dallas area. Perhaps Miami is different. I hear poorer cities have less wasteful medical care?
And do you think I was scrapping for every penny, for myself or family? No! I was doing it to do my small part to keep medical expenses down for the nation. I returned that wheelchair, and the guy who was taking it couldn't understand why I was turning down such a cheap wheelchair. After all, it cost us only $28, after insurance. Except I don't think of it that way. You know the drill. Hospital says the wheelchair is worth $818, insur
Read that again. I am using a unit of "sq km year". 3800000 = (2800+1000)* 1000 years. Hard data to back some of these numbers is not readily available, so I am working with what I admit are very crude guesses.
As for oil spills, no, we don't know how quickly nature is "taking care of it". Talk about abdicating our responsibility! We caused a lot of trouble, and now you think we can just blow it off with "nature can handle it"? It will, eventually, but it's not going to be very quick. As for what we can do about it, perhaps we should ban offshore oil drilling. The Exxon Valdez spill, now 22 years old, is still affecting the Alaska coast and marine environment. Fishing took a real hit. Oil tankers are now double hulled. They should have been double hulled from the beginning, but it took a disaster to convince enough people.
Hydroelectric is near 0. If we decide a dam was a mistake, the flooded land can be drained and used pretty much right away. Wind farms are even better. Land with windmills can continue to be used for other purposes such as agriculture. Does your figure reflect that fact? May need to spread windmills over 277,508 sq km of land, but the space required for the platforms and other infrastructure is only a tiny fraction of that, maybe less than 1%. Still, there isn't anything that doesn't have its issues. We've discovered that windmills kill bats. Can we stop that? If not, can we tolerate losing a lot of bats? Solar does need a lot of land. We should figure all that into our energy policies.
We need good information. And we don't have near enough. More than that, we need more honesty. We have a lot of disinformation and doubt, spread by people with agendas. BP very badly wants the Deepwater Horizon spill to all just blow over, and, like many of its peers has lied repeatedly. We should be wary of any data they've handled and "scientific" claims they've made.
Vote fraud, not voter fraud. We've had the infamous butterfly ballot, and ballots being rejected as invalid for dubious reasons such as the "hanging chad". The number of voting machines in Wisconsin districts has been very uneven, with a strong correlation between Democratic leaning districts and fewer machines. Takes hours of waiting in line to vote there, versus little to no wait in Republican leaning districts. Photo ID is just another barrier, another soft way to disenfranchise certain sorts of voters. See Caging.
I find it particularly hypocritical to make noise over alleged voter fraud, in order to commit all these other frauds with the vote.
Here we go again. Deaths is not a good measure of the risks. If you instead use pollution, as in "area (sq km) of land * years made unusable", you might see something like this:
Nuclear - 3800000 (Chernobyl = 2800 sq km, Fukushima = 1000 sq km, land may not be habitable for 1000 years)
Oil - 2000000 (Deepwater Horizon fouled 10000 sq km of the Gulf of Mexico, may represent half of all oil pollution, effects may last 100 years)
Coal - 100000 (Mining operations have fouled 2000 miles of streams, recovery may take 50 years)
everything else - nearly 0
These numbers are very crude and quick estimates. Perhaps little or no research has been done on this sort of question, for political reasons. Another measure is total costs. Hard to say how nuclear comes out, especially when external costs, and particularly future projections, are added in. For instance, if burning of coal and oil cause the ice sheets to melt, then that would make it far more costly than anything else, including nuclear power.
And the 2nd question:
Piracy. What's your position on Star Trek episodes being available for free online?
Was starting to wonder if anyone would get around to the political questions. I have 2. 1st one:
As a star of a SF show, what do you think about and what are you doing about the current anti-intellectual and anti-science stances of some (*cough* Republican *cough*) major political parties?
Dammit, read what I wrote. NO DOCTORS WERE SUED OR THREATENED! The insurance company of the driver at fault was the one that got threatened.
I have auto insurance. I don't have health insurance. I did not "run" to the legal system. I asked for advice first. I was strongly advised to get a lawyer, because of insurance. And so I went with a lawyer because of insurance, not doctors. Insurance cheated me on the value of my car, which I saw as confirmation of the sage advice I received to retain a lawyer. Just a few hundred more was all I wanted, to get it to KBB private party value (which is quite a bit less than dealer value), and they wouldn't. Why shouldn't they also cheat me on the cost of the health care? No reason I can see. No doctors were sued or even threatened in all this, only the other party's insurance company was threatened. I don't like it, but that's the way our system works. What am I supposed to do, let the insurance company screw me? Pretty cheeky of you to suggest I bear some blame for getting an ambulance chaser. And just what do you mean by "managed to blame"? You surely aren't suggesting that I'm not telling this straight, are you? Are you?
You didn't answer my question of what you doctors are doing about the horrendous expense of medical care. Am I to take it then that you are doing nothing, and you don't care? Doesn't it matter to you if in saving a life you bankrupt a family? But I know most doctors have zero financial sense. So I will tell you what I expect. I expect to be treated like a person, not a cut of meat however expensive. Meaning, you doctors will not keep me in the dark about costs, you will not ask me to sign blank checks, you will post prices of routine procedures and appointments. Obviously, that doesn't apply to ER. I'm talking non-emergency care, of which there was plenty. When I ask, you will tell me prices, you won't fob me off with "don't worry, insurance will cover it" or breezily dismiss it as not that expensive, or as not important next to my precious health. Oh yes it is important. I will decide whether something is worth the cost. But I can't, if you can't be bothered to give me prices. You will keep the costs of supplies and drugs reasonable, not 10 times what Walmart charges. Or I will bring my own. And you won't use that homeless guy down the hall as the excuse for why you are trying to charge me ridiculous rates. None of that is unreasonable. You, I suppose, think what I'm asking for here is unreasonable? I have never seen any other business operate the way the US medical business does. Even car sales, sleazy as it is, isn't that sleazy. Maybe I should double my rates, because medical care is so expensive? Think that would fly with any of my customers? No!
You're being unreasonable. We paid our part of all the medical bills, and paid on time. The doctors did very well out of the whole affair. We didn't sue or threaten any doctors with lawsuits. What exactly is your beef with that?
What I find funny is the contradiction. When you want to make data unrecoverable, you have to do some serious abuse. Drilling a hole might not be enough! But when a hard drive begins to fail, somehow that same data is so delicate that any mistake, or no mistake, will lose it all, no recovery possible.
Has it occurred to you that some people go for the lawsuits because of medical expenses? Just because some people sue is no reason to charge everyone such extreme prices. A few people blow up or crash a few airplanes, therefore we should have security grope millions of people who are trying to board a plane?
I've also seen the lawyers tacitly egging on the doctors. Lawyers want sky high prices, to inflate their own portion of any settlement. And what do the doctors do? Enthusiastically play along, of course! We weren't just any old pieces of meat, we were filet mignon! Made for distinctly unsettling hospital visits.
We were in an auto accident, and got a few cuts and bruises, and one broken ankle. Totalled both cars. It was entirely the other guy's fault. Could also make a case for it being a badly designed intersection. He simply did not see the red light and jumped into the intersection as we were passing through. So while recovering from the beating I took, I was faced with a lot of decisions. My first decision was whether I should accept medical care. I refused. I was only bruised, and I do not have insurance and was not at all sure how the billing would work out. Next, should I get a lawyer, or not? I asked around. Insurance companies all said I did not need a lawyer, lawyers all said I did, and I didn't ask any doctors. Neutral parties mostly favored getting a lawyer. Insurance companies have to be threatened, or they won't pay. So I got a lawyer. I don't like them, but I really don't trust insurance companies. The lawyer wanted medical bills, lots and lots of medical bills. And he wanted photos of us looking our very worst, all black and blue and bandaged. He regretfully informed me that since I had "foolishly" declined medical care, he couldn't do anything much for me, and would concentrate on the others. We sent him copies of everything, and gave necessary permissions for his organization to get medical records. He didn't mind any waste on the part of the medical providers, quite the contrary. He wanted more waste! When the medical care wound down, the game between the lawyer and the insurance started. He made an outrageous demand on our behalf, and insurance countered with an equally outrageous lowball amount that wouldn't cover the expenses, even before the lawyer's cut. Since the lawyer was getting 1/3rd, the expenses were much higher, of course. He scared the insurance company with stories of what nice, reasonable people we were. Sounds like they felt they would look very, very bad in front of a jury, so they made a very good offer, and we settled. What firmed up my resolve not to give the enemy insurance company any mercy was them cheating me on the value of my car (10% below private party Kelly Blue Book value for a good condition car, which they of course insisted didn't mean a thing), and then conveniently losing my title for a month.
The whole thing was dirty, but I was afraid to forgo the lawyer. What a messed up system! Where do you start on bringing some sanity to the whole thing? I realize that the system is a vicious cycle. Party A does outrageous things because of party B's outrages, which they do because of party C's outrages in response to the outrages of party A. I would very much liked to have been nice to the insurance company, in hopes they would reciprocate. If no lawyer had been involved, they could have paid 2/3rds of what they did pay, and we would have received the same as we did. But the way they chiselled me on the value of my car showed what I could expect. I did what I could, short of taking it all on the chin. I tried to save on expenses. I argued over the prices the doctors charged, I found cheaper alternatives for some of the medical products, I took over some of the nursing duties to save on the very expensive home visits, and I even backed the lawyer off when he was hunting around for even more excuses to run up medical expenses and amplify our pain and suffering. What are you doctors doing?
No, of course haggling has no place in ER. But I was talking about a wheelchair and other situations that were definitely not emergencies. You suggest patient expectations and lawsuits are the reasons for the high prices? I disagree. Sure, those are issues, but they aren't the primary reasons health care is so high in the US. Ultimately, it's the lack of competition.
The medical provider can pull stunts like having a patient rent a device longer than necessary, or take all sorts of extra tests that have very little chance of finding anything, because the patient is captive and kept ignorant. I had no idea that medical device was $1100 per week to rent, I assumed it was just part of the treatment and included in the costs of the various appointments. Now I know better. It was weeks after the care was all finished that the bills started coming. Quite a shock to see how they charged defense contractor prices for every little thing. Doctor was $400 per hour, the debridement was another $800, plus an additional $100 for $5 worth of supplies such as gauze, tape, and rubber gloves. Near $2500 per week for a cut! Insurance chopped that way down, to about 30% of their fantasy rates. And then our part was 10% of that 30%. But insurance tried to weasel out of a few items, and on those the doctors came after us for the full 100%. Wasted a lot of time arguing over the bills until I could finally get the insurance to pay up. All that about doctors having to charge such ridiculous rates is garbage. We sure call out banks on the nonsense fees they keep trying to impose. I don't see why doctors should be specially exempted.
Product reviews? Seems like just the sort of thing for another wikiwhatever site, if not Wikipedia itself. There is a wikireviews.info, but it doesn't look like much. Don't know about productwiki.com. Maybe a suitable wiki site should be created, becasue there isn't one?
User fees? I'm with the original poster. I won't park in a metered spot in which the "problem" of overstaying or not paying is "solved" with punitive fines. I'll use a metered spot if there aren't the fines. In some systems, they issue a timestamp, and collect the appropriate amount at the exit, when you leave. No fines involved. But parking meters almost always mean a system rigged to cause violations. I won't participate in those.
If avoiding the parking meter means I don't visit certain places, so be it. There are plenty of other places to go. Don't see why I should reward any muni for running a parking meter scam. Why didn't the businesses get the council to undo the changes before they were ruined?
No one will be turned away from an emergency room.
I beg to differ. Some years ago, one of my cousins was turned away from ER. He was uninsured of course, or he probably would have seen a doctor a lot sooner. He was suffering from terrible headaches, couldn't even sit down because that made the pounding worse. He died the next day, presumably from an aneurysm in his head. He was about 45 years old. ER might not have been able to save him, who knows? But it should never have escalated to that point. Could he have been saved if he'd had access to basic health care months before his problem reached the crisis point, when he himself probably didn't think it was anything serious?
Everyone seems aware of the problems with health insurance. But hardly anyone bashes the medical providers for their crazy billing practices. It's insane, and downright fraudulent the way doctors run the business. You see very few prices up front. They claim they can't give you any price until they know more. Maybe, but there are plenty of known prices they keep from you until well after the fact. If you ask about the price, they'll tell you not to worry (bad for your health, maybe?) insurance will cover it. Then they sometimes demand that you sign a blank check. They push you to sign a form that says you'll pay for something if insurance doesn't. And they won't tell you the price even when it's for something easy. They pulled that one on us for a wheelchair, and not a motorized one either, that turned out to be just over $800. Another stunt they pulled on us was having us keep a medical device for an extra week, unused, without informing us that it cost $1100 per week to rent!
Facial recognition is a difficult problem. Not just technically either. Too many people want this too much. They also don't appreciate all the difficulties. They're plums ripe for being taken in by scams.
Something I've come to appreciate is that comparisons are relatively easy. It's the representation that's the killer. Pixels are a completely brain dead way to represent an image. Very easy to do, but not useful for the kinds of comparisons needed for facial recognition.
Then there's the matter of scale. Can any facial recognition system handle millions of faces? Cops want to throw their entire photo collection of suspects into the system, so it can check anyone it sees against every suspect they have on file. Even if the system made an incorrect match in only 0.1% of the comparisons, that's still a match to a thousand of every million people in the database.
Let them have their fun. It's not entirely irrelevant, but near enough. For decades, sharing has been villified as piracy. And bans on the activity have proven time and again to be impractical to enforce. ACTA doesn't change any of that. If you aren't already, get used to being thought a criminal. And don't sweat about the possibility of being accused and threatened. The odds of it happening are low. Numbers are on our side.
We'll just have to wait for the older generations to lose power. They won't admit that sharing is not evil and not theft, not unless they take one hell of a beating over the issue, which they probably won't. Once they're gone, we'll ditch these idiotic laws. Be nice if it happens sooner, through the election of Pirate Party politicians, but it will happen eventually, one way or another, as mortality catches up with them.
scientific people cannot be religious
Why not?
Science has debunked many of the screwier claims and dogmas of many religions, such as the idea that the Earth is only 10000 years old. That's the kind of testable, falsifiable assertion that science rests on. Scientists have even explored such questions as why humans are religious. But as to the supernatural, that is unprovable. How do we know that an omnipotent being didn't just magically create the Earth any old time, complete with all sorts of evidence that suggests a different age? We don't. It's not a testable hypothesis.
Then there's the old "what's the meaning of life?" and "why are we here?" sorts of questions. Does life have a meaning, and if it does, what is it? What's the point of the universe? One popular idea suggests it's all a contest between good and evil, with God and Satan competing for our souls, and the contest to be ultimately decided when Armageddon happens. It could be true. The trouble with any explanation of an issue like that is it merely begs the question. Why is there a contest at all? What's the point? Another popular one is the notion that we just don't know, and can't know. Whichever idea appeals, we are free to speculate, free to create a religion and have faith in whatever we want. Science does not answer such questions.
Bored? You lucky jabby bastard! Many of us end up stressed by insane demands from sociopathic managers who don't know what they don't know, and who have no trust or confidence in their underlings. They do things for purposes of manipulation and political games, in part because they are also afraid. You're trying to accomplish something while these guys are ragging on you for doing it wrong, or not fast enough. They cast aspersions on their underlings' competence, value, judgment, loyalty, and commitment, and constantly threaten to fire people. You will of course be blamed and perhaps take the fall when things go wrong. If you are in a situation like that and for some reason you can't leave, that's the stress from hell.
Sounds good, but needs more long range plans.
That's the sort of thing that would make HP really cool again. The R&D would be costly, but maybe not as costly as these golden parachutes that generate absolutely no return.