Well, that's just the way it goes. *nix makes the easy things hard, and the hard things possible. Windows makes the easy things kinda hard but you've done it that way since forever, and the hard things impossible.
Apple, of course, makes the easy things easy and you don't need to do the hard things anyway.
Yep, just for fun I ran a Java program I'd written for a class on my N900 (read an XML file using SAX, parse it into a relational format, put that in a database). After I installed a Debian image - using the EasyDebian installer that's available in the official app manager (which is itself just a pretty wrapper around some standard package manager, I think) - everything from the JRE to My-fucking-SQL worked perfectly the first time. Sure, it took 45 minutes to run instead of 2 seconds like on my desktop, but still! This was an app I'd written using nothing more than Eclipse, that needed to interoperate with a database, happily running on my phone (as was the database!).
There's even a guide out there on how to get Drupal running on the N900, but it basically consists of "install the debian image, apt-get install drupal".
I have no problem with you spending whatever you want to keep your grandmother alive for another four years; however, as a matter of social policy, at some point it is simply not reasonable to have everyone else pay to keep her alive. Instead of just saying "that idea is vile!" or "death panels!" and ignoring it, we need to have an actual debate in this country as to what is reasonable in terms of keeping someone alive. 80 was simply a cutoff I pulled out of my ass; I would imagine that the actual limit would be something like a total expenditure for acute symptoms over a certain age - e.g, we'll pay for your glaucoma medication and your insulin for as long as you're alive, but there's no point in giving you chemo at 80 when that money could be put towards setting ten thousand broken bones or vaccines for a hundred thousand children.
Employer provided health insurance is literally the worst of all possible health care provisioning systems. As far as I can tell, it has no upsides whatsoever.
It kills non-employer provided insurance: since a large proportion of all people are employed, they already have health care through their job; why would they shop around for anything else?
It destroys competition: a company will not change insurances lightly, since there will be a ton of paperwork and the employees will suffer through the transition. This means that the insurance you provide can be relatively shitty, as long as it's not bad enough that HR decides something needs to be done.
It artificially inflates the cost of insurance: because the cost is paid by the company, not the individual people, there's no need to try to keep costs down; the company itself will just pay the increased rates and pass that on to its employees as "no raise for you!"
It makes the labor market far more viscous: my job sucks, but I can't just quit and start looking for a new one! Lisa needs braces! Sure, there's COBRA, but because of the previous point that shit is horribly expensive since now that you no longer have any income, you're paying both your part of the insurance and the company's.
It makes entrepreneurship that much more dangerous: you can't leave your job to start a new company, because you'll lose your health care; COBRA (besides being ridiculously expensive) just doesn't last that long. Do you think you could go from zero to health insurance in six months? No? Then you better have a shitload of money in the bank, because if you break your arm while setting up the new company you are fucked. Or hope really really hard that your city/county/state has something set up.
It defeats the purpose of insurance, which is to spread risk around. If there are a hundred people in my office, that's a hundred people that will be exposed to the swine flu or whatever if it comes through the office; that's a hundred people who will be caught in the next earthquake or wildfire or flood or blizzard or hurricane or bombing or whatever; that's a hundred people who will be extra stressed at company-wide crunch times, a hundred people who'll eat the slightly off pizza they served at the last company meeting, a hundred people using the same filthy microwaves and refrigerators. That's a hundred people whose risk factors are highly interdependent, because they all work in the same office. That is not how you spread risk around.
IT MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL. Why should your health insurance be linked to your job? Sure, it's understandable for high-risk occupations like lumberjacks or firefighters, just like it makes sense for taxi companies to sponsor car insurance for their drivers. Beyond that, it's just ridiculous. How would you like to lose your car insurance if you lost your job? To lose your house insurance if you decided to start a new company? It just fucks people who are already in a delicate situation even more.
Basically, anything would be better than employer sponsored health insurance. The current American plan seems to be encouraging people to move away from that and towards buying in to group policies on an individual basis, which would be a far better system.
Yes, and with the money saved by letting his grandma die at 80 instead of keeping her on chemo and life support until 84, we could save the lives of two or three 25 year-olds with have cancer.
Seriously, there needs to be a point at which society throws up its hands and says "look, you've lived a full life - we're not helping you cling to life for another four".
Yes, but that's a scientific paper printed in a black-and-white journal, where space is frequently at a premium. I would relevant expect pictures in a presentation poster (if they have one, I don't know how common that is in their field) or a website (and indeed, there are pictures on the mindlesseating.org website). It's all a matter of providing appropriate content for the context, something newspaper failed to do. I mean seriously, did nobody over there realize that having a couple hundred words about research in a purely visual media is a stupid idea?
Are the Breeches of Trust related in any way to the Trousers of Time?
On a more serious note, this is exactly why Ars Technica's plea was in vain - they want users to stop blocking ads, because that will bring them more money from the people who buy ads on their site. However, the people who buy ads on their site aren't making enough revenue from the ads as it is, and so resort to these intrusive, virus-laden pieces of shit in a weird attempt to generate more revenue.
This is why I don't feel bad about blocking those big complex ads, even after reading Ars's article. The people who buy them will eventually go out of business, because their business model is unsupportable. They are simply not the future of the Internet - or at least, not the future of my Internet.
It meant she took advantage of the condoms her parents had left in a drawer, and explicitly said they never count and would NOT notice if any went missing. It meant lateron she said "yes" when her mom asked if an appointment with the doctor to get a prescription for the pill would be a good thing.
Sooo... in summary, they did count, they just didn't tell her about it.
I'm sorry that you didn't understand that, but I clearly said:
I would argue that GPL projects, by the requirements of the license, create a type of government that is neither democracy nor dictatorship
(relevant segment in bold)
The GPL is a license, yes. However, the form of government that gathers around GPL projects is a neat mixture of democracy and dictatorship, and one that I would argue brings together the best attributes of both.
I would argue that GPL projects, by the requirements of the license, create a type of government that is neither democracy nor dictatorship; it's a new form that only works when the resources that are being governed are freely and cheaply available for copying, and imo is far better than either democracy or dictatorship. The person who currently hosts the resources is an absolute dictator for that fork of the project - but anyone who thinks they can do better is free to fork the project and start their own version.
It's well-known that the best and most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship; there's just no beating having one person at the top who controls everything, as long as he's good at it. The reason why dictatorships in general suck as a system of government is because their effectiveness is directly related to how good of a dictator the guy at the top is - and there's no guarantee he won't be an inbred idiot. Democracies, on the other hand, have a sort of averaging effect; when everyone has to vote on policy, you'll rarely make obviously bad decisions, but you'll also rarely take necessary decisive action.
The current system we have in the United States is something of an attempt to merge the two; we have a bunch of dictators who are stringently limited in different ways, and are elected to office democratically. However, it's still not that great - in order to force these mini-dictators to relinquish their power eventually, we have to restrict them so much that they lose their effectiveness as dictators; besides curtailing their power, we effectively force them to spend a significant amount of time convincing people that they should be re-elected.
GPL projects, on the other hand, are much closer to an ideal mixture of democracy and dictatorship. When you fork a project, you and you alone have sole control over who contributes to the fork; you are an absolute, perfect dictator in that realm. However, at any time anyone who chooses to can decided to secede from your project's "nation", and in turn become the absolute dictator of their own project; unlike in real life, nobody loses anything but manpower when this happens, because all the "nation project"'s resources are freely copyable. Thus, every GPL project's dictator must compete with other GPL projects not on who has the best project resources, but who is the best dictator. If you think you could rule more fairly and evenly than Mark Shuttleworth, you are entirely free to fork Ubuntu and try your hand at it; if you think that Shuttleworth is not leading Ubuntu in the right direction as a project, you are free to fork it and lead it some other way. If Mark Shuttleworth dies and his replacement sucks as a leader, I'm sure someone will fork Ubuntu and carry on.
It is, I think, almost an ideal form of government: natural selection will kill off projects whose owners mismanage their resources, and projects whose owners manage things well will prosper.
The idea is that freedom allows people to reach their own potential and to pursue happiness in their own way, not that it guarantees three hots and a cot, and free healthcare, and the "right" to broadband, and so forth and so on.
That's weird - we're providing the first three things to 2.5 million people prison; why can't we provide the same to law abiding citizens? Just ignoring money for a moment; would you be opposed to offering, for free, the same sort of food, shelter and health care to every citizen of the United States that we currently provide to prison inmates?
If you would, why do you think that convicted criminals should have more "rights" than those who obey the law?
So no, universal health care is not what they had in mind. They were rightfully skeptical of government in a way that we, to our detriment, have forgotten.
Hey, if you hate universal health care so much, feel free to move to another country that doesn't have it.
Unfortunately, for some weird reason, the vast majority of the options are going third-world shitholes.
Actually that sounds like a fun challenge: find a country you would be okay living in that doesn't have universal health care.
This is, in my opinion, the worst part of American conservative fiscal policy - it seems like we are deathly afraid of someone, somewhere, potentially getting something they don't "deserve". It's almost pathological; we have ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy centered around making sure that nobody gets a benefit they don't deserve, when it would be more effective to just remove a lot of the bureaucracy and use the savings to loosen the criteria.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
That would be nice unfortunately your plan presumes those millions of unemployed all have the skills for those projects which they don't...
Yeah, because the millions of unemployed in America are untrainable monkeys who are cannot learn anything at all, and it's totally not worth our time to train them because there's no good that would come of a skilled national workforce.
Maxwell's Demon is impossible because it is 100% efficient. This thing is 18% efficient, which is entirely believable.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's not even counting the Americans of all political persuasions who are irate because Obama can't magic more than 11 million jobs out of his ass to fix unemployment. I mean presuming an average salary of 40k a year that'd involve finding 440 billion dollars a year somewhere, but never mind.
Heeeeey... you know, that's about half of what the Iraq War costs per year. Maybe if we hadn't had a complete moron for president twice in a row in the last decade, we could actually magic those jobs out of someone's ass! And instead of spending all that money blowing shit up and killing people in a foreign country, we could spend it improving our goddamn infrastructure so we don't have any more bridge collapses, or building a long, high-speed transcontinental rail line so we have a workforce that can compete with China in the mass transit area, or laying more fiber optic cables so we don't have stone-age Internet access, or hell just sending all those 11 million people to college so we'll actually have an educated workforce (and solve the problems with university funding at the same time!)
Pity that would all be socialist though, not good and republican like a nice big war.
It's been obvious that we need healthcare reform since Clinton's presidency. It's also been obvious that Republican politicians will do almost anything to stop it (for some weird reason - don't they like their socialized health care?) for just as long. The problem with waiting and studying is that things are simply not going to get better without intervention; even if this isn't the best of all possible worlds, it is at least something, instead of the whole loads of nothing we've had for the last sixteen years. If nothing else, it's a starting point; and if we can't work out actual universal health care coverage somehow with this, it'll be a good sign that it's time to move to a first-world country.
So? Total FOIA rejections doubled; this doesn't tell us anything, however, unless we know what the total number of FOIA requests were. If the total number of FOIA requests also doubled, this is basically as expected (for instance, I'm sure there was a flood of FOIA requests for Obama's birth certificate, after the birther bullshit). We can't just compare raw numbers of rejection, you need the context of the total number of requests.
Because at one point, all mammals were basically tiny shrew-like creatures. For a shrew, the difference between getting killed and being injured but recoverable is very very small; they wouldn't benefit very much at all from being able to regrow a limb (for instance), because when you get hit hard enough to lose a leg you're probably dead already. Also, since you're a warm-blooded animal, you can't just go to sleep for a week to blow through your reserves and regrow that leg; you'll starve to death first.
Thus, scarring is no worse, and possibly somewhat better than regeneration for small, shrew-like creatures - they need to be better now now now, not next week after they've already starved to death.
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Well, that's just the way it goes. *nix makes the easy things hard, and the hard things possible. Windows makes the easy things kinda hard but you've done it that way since forever, and the hard things impossible.
Apple, of course, makes the easy things easy and you don't need to do the hard things anyway.
Yep, just for fun I ran a Java program I'd written for a class on my N900 (read an XML file using SAX, parse it into a relational format, put that in a database). After I installed a Debian image - using the EasyDebian installer that's available in the official app manager (which is itself just a pretty wrapper around some standard package manager, I think) - everything from the JRE to My-fucking-SQL worked perfectly the first time. Sure, it took 45 minutes to run instead of 2 seconds like on my desktop, but still! This was an app I'd written using nothing more than Eclipse, that needed to interoperate with a database, happily running on my phone (as was the database!).
There's even a guide out there on how to get Drupal running on the N900, but it basically consists of "install the debian image, apt-get install drupal".
I have no problem with you spending whatever you want to keep your grandmother alive for another four years; however, as a matter of social policy, at some point it is simply not reasonable to have everyone else pay to keep her alive. Instead of just saying "that idea is vile!" or "death panels!" and ignoring it, we need to have an actual debate in this country as to what is reasonable in terms of keeping someone alive. 80 was simply a cutoff I pulled out of my ass; I would imagine that the actual limit would be something like a total expenditure for acute symptoms over a certain age - e.g, we'll pay for your glaucoma medication and your insulin for as long as you're alive, but there's no point in giving you chemo at 80 when that money could be put towards setting ten thousand broken bones or vaccines for a hundred thousand children.
Employer provided health insurance is literally the worst of all possible health care provisioning systems. As far as I can tell, it has no upsides whatsoever.
Basically, anything would be better than employer sponsored health insurance. The current American plan seems to be encouraging people to move away from that and towards buying in to group policies on an individual basis, which would be a far better system.
Yes, and with the money saved by letting his grandma die at 80 instead of keeping her on chemo and life support until 84, we could save the lives of two or three 25 year-olds with have cancer.
Seriously, there needs to be a point at which society throws up its hands and says "look, you've lived a full life - we're not helping you cling to life for another four".
You may be confusing reality with Better Off Ted.
I know, those goddamn copyright laws that still apply over a thousand years after the painting was made! Damn them!
I just did!
Oh wait...
Yes, but that's a scientific paper printed in a black-and-white journal, where space is frequently at a premium. I would relevant expect pictures in a presentation poster (if they have one, I don't know how common that is in their field) or a website (and indeed, there are pictures on the mindlesseating.org website). It's all a matter of providing appropriate content for the context, something newspaper failed to do. I mean seriously, did nobody over there realize that having a couple hundred words about research in a purely visual media is a stupid idea?
That article was worthless. It's about a series of paintings, and yet the only picture is of some athlete in the side column.
If this is the current standard of quality in newspapers, no wonder they're a dying breed.
tl;dr: relevant pics or gtfo!
Are the Breeches of Trust related in any way to the Trousers of Time?
On a more serious note, this is exactly why Ars Technica's plea was in vain - they want users to stop blocking ads, because that will bring them more money from the people who buy ads on their site. However, the people who buy ads on their site aren't making enough revenue from the ads as it is, and so resort to these intrusive, virus-laden pieces of shit in a weird attempt to generate more revenue.
This is why I don't feel bad about blocking those big complex ads, even after reading Ars's article. The people who buy them will eventually go out of business, because their business model is unsupportable. They are simply not the future of the Internet - or at least, not the future of my Internet.
Sooo... in summary, they did count, they just didn't tell her about it.
I'm sorry that you didn't understand that, but I clearly said:
(relevant segment in bold)
The GPL is a license, yes. However, the form of government that gathers around GPL projects is a neat mixture of democracy and dictatorship, and one that I would argue brings together the best attributes of both.
I would argue that GPL projects, by the requirements of the license, create a type of government that is neither democracy nor dictatorship; it's a new form that only works when the resources that are being governed are freely and cheaply available for copying, and imo is far better than either democracy or dictatorship. The person who currently hosts the resources is an absolute dictator for that fork of the project - but anyone who thinks they can do better is free to fork the project and start their own version.
It's well-known that the best and most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship; there's just no beating having one person at the top who controls everything, as long as he's good at it. The reason why dictatorships in general suck as a system of government is because their effectiveness is directly related to how good of a dictator the guy at the top is - and there's no guarantee he won't be an inbred idiot. Democracies, on the other hand, have a sort of averaging effect; when everyone has to vote on policy, you'll rarely make obviously bad decisions, but you'll also rarely take necessary decisive action.
The current system we have in the United States is something of an attempt to merge the two; we have a bunch of dictators who are stringently limited in different ways, and are elected to office democratically. However, it's still not that great - in order to force these mini-dictators to relinquish their power eventually, we have to restrict them so much that they lose their effectiveness as dictators; besides curtailing their power, we effectively force them to spend a significant amount of time convincing people that they should be re-elected.
GPL projects, on the other hand, are much closer to an ideal mixture of democracy and dictatorship. When you fork a project, you and you alone have sole control over who contributes to the fork; you are an absolute, perfect dictator in that realm. However, at any time anyone who chooses to can decided to secede from your project's "nation", and in turn become the absolute dictator of their own project; unlike in real life, nobody loses anything but manpower when this happens, because all the "nation project"'s resources are freely copyable. Thus, every GPL project's dictator must compete with other GPL projects not on who has the best project resources, but who is the best dictator. If you think you could rule more fairly and evenly than Mark Shuttleworth, you are entirely free to fork Ubuntu and try your hand at it; if you think that Shuttleworth is not leading Ubuntu in the right direction as a project, you are free to fork it and lead it some other way. If Mark Shuttleworth dies and his replacement sucks as a leader, I'm sure someone will fork Ubuntu and carry on.
It is, I think, almost an ideal form of government: natural selection will kill off projects whose owners mismanage their resources, and projects whose owners manage things well will prosper.
And error #-1: Always validate your array indexes.
That's weird - we're providing the first three things to 2.5 million people prison; why can't we provide the same to law abiding citizens? Just ignoring money for a moment; would you be opposed to offering, for free, the same sort of food, shelter and health care to every citizen of the United States that we currently provide to prison inmates?
If you would, why do you think that convicted criminals should have more "rights" than those who obey the law?
Hey, if you hate universal health care so much, feel free to move to another country that doesn't have it.
Unfortunately, for some weird reason, the vast majority of the options are going third-world shitholes.
Actually that sounds like a fun challenge: find a country you would be okay living in that doesn't have universal health care.
This is, in my opinion, the worst part of American conservative fiscal policy - it seems like we are deathly afraid of someone, somewhere, potentially getting something they don't "deserve". It's almost pathological; we have ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy centered around making sure that nobody gets a benefit they don't deserve, when it would be more effective to just remove a lot of the bureaucracy and use the savings to loosen the criteria.
Yeah, because the millions of unemployed in America are untrainable monkeys who are cannot learn anything at all, and it's totally not worth our time to train them because there's no good that would come of a skilled national workforce.
Maxwell's Demon is impossible because it is 100% efficient. This thing is 18% efficient, which is entirely believable.
Heeeeey... you know, that's about half of what the Iraq War costs per year. Maybe if we hadn't had a complete moron for president twice in a row in the last decade, we could actually magic those jobs out of someone's ass! And instead of spending all that money blowing shit up and killing people in a foreign country, we could spend it improving our goddamn infrastructure so we don't have any more bridge collapses, or building a long, high-speed transcontinental rail line so we have a workforce that can compete with China in the mass transit area, or laying more fiber optic cables so we don't have stone-age Internet access, or hell just sending all those 11 million people to college so we'll actually have an educated workforce (and solve the problems with university funding at the same time!)
Pity that would all be socialist though, not good and republican like a nice big war.
It's been obvious that we need healthcare reform since Clinton's presidency. It's also been obvious that Republican politicians will do almost anything to stop it (for some weird reason - don't they like their socialized health care?) for just as long. The problem with waiting and studying is that things are simply not going to get better without intervention; even if this isn't the best of all possible worlds, it is at least something, instead of the whole loads of nothing we've had for the last sixteen years. If nothing else, it's a starting point; and if we can't work out actual universal health care coverage somehow with this, it'll be a good sign that it's time to move to a first-world country.
So? Total FOIA rejections doubled; this doesn't tell us anything, however, unless we know what the total number of FOIA requests were. If the total number of FOIA requests also doubled, this is basically as expected (for instance, I'm sure there was a flood of FOIA requests for Obama's birth certificate, after the birther bullshit). We can't just compare raw numbers of rejection, you need the context of the total number of requests.
And thank God for that!
Because at one point, all mammals were basically tiny shrew-like creatures. For a shrew, the difference between getting killed and being injured but recoverable is very very small; they wouldn't benefit very much at all from being able to regrow a limb (for instance), because when you get hit hard enough to lose a leg you're probably dead already. Also, since you're a warm-blooded animal, you can't just go to sleep for a week to blow through your reserves and regrow that leg; you'll starve to death first.
Thus, scarring is no worse, and possibly somewhat better than regeneration for small, shrew-like creatures - they need to be better now now now, not next week after they've already starved to death.
It was, but since Google didn't use a condom that's not what they're worried about at all - they already got infected.