Who said anything about getting rid of emergency services?
We could always replace the POTS networks with some kind of IP based telephony that is on a separate power system from the normal power grid, effectively making it every bit as robust as POTS service if not more so. Then in addition to voice you've also got data.
I'd imagine an engineering solution could be worked up so that you don't even have to replace most of the existing copper wiring, it would just be a matter of replacing the equipment at the head end and replacing all of your phone handsets. If you're feeling nostalgic for your old phone, there already exist converters that bridge the DTMF/pulse dialing to VoIP anyways, and they're cheep too.
I've heard similar arguments against killing analog TV and switching to digital. We've done that though and the world hasn't ended yet. I am sure somebody somewhere has somehow been negatively hit by this, but overall we're talking about progress here because a decadent technology has finally been done away with.
The content I'm getting now is already more content than I can even consume. Why on earth would I go find, sign up, and build reputation (as a sharer) for private trackers when the public trackers already provide speeds that are already faster than I actually need, not to mention offer a much greater diversity of content, and don't require me to jump through any hoops and make friends with 21 year old going on 12 trolls who like to use l33t speak? Seriously when I started downloading the entire fourth season of dexter one night before bed via piratebay, it was already ready by the time I got home the next day. And I still haven't had time to even watch it yet, meanwhile I've downloaded some other stuff too.
Sounds to me your ISP sold more bandwidth than they can deliver.
So now you're trying to insult my intelligence here? This would imply that my connection would be totally saturated while they are downloading. On the contrary, I had two people playing starcraft on battle.net in an 8 player match while the last linux ISO I have ever obtained was in progress (it was a copy of ubuntu that I was going to use for a VDR backend.) And let me tell you, Starcraft is VERY finnicky about latency, especially in an 8 player match. Sold more bandwidth than they can deliver? Don't make me laugh.
Not much faster. I tend to find that the limit is the number of people seeding, not necessarily their connection speed. Personally I simply don't have the hard disk space to hold on to everything I download for seeding. Even if I did, lets say I had 40 different hd shows I was seeding at the same time, and suppose they were all equally in high demand. How fast are each of those 40 different threads going to be able to take content from my end? Yeah. Anyways, typically though I'll seed something for about a week and then I'll end up deleting the file (How many times am I going to watch dexter season 2 episode 3 for example? Typically I'll only watch something once before deleting it.)
If most people have the same habits as I do (and I think they do, just most don't admit to it, whereas I'm not afraid to,) the speed of torrents will always be limited by that, and this is one of the shortcomings of p2p.
Not only that but I've taken a peek at the speeds several of the seeders are pushing to me when I download, and typically I am pushing out data faster than they are sending it to me, and many of these people are in countries where bandwidth is supposedly dirt cheap, meanwhile I've only got 2mbit upstream speed. Go figure.
While I could be wrong about this, I think broadband speed capabilities are growing faster than the need for them (read: available content) are growing, at least in most areas of the US. Think about it: Outside of p2p (which is illegal anyways) how would having more bandwidth help you once you could, say for example, stream four simultaneous HD streams at once? Because I can already do this, and I don't really even need to do this.
Even with p2p, I literally download more stuff than I even have the time to watch. I have an entire season of dexter I haven't watched yet, and I'll probably watch those after I've finished watching the last season of penn and teller.
On a serious note, I personally tend to find that anything above say 6-9mbit is just a number. My local ISP offers up to 50mbit, but I'm only interested in the 9mbit package (the next highest one is 3mbit.)
I mostly play games, download some games via steam, and somewhat often download high def tv show torrents (illegal ones too mind you, I'm no saint) but it doesn't happen very often that the server(s) or other peers on the other end will offer me a combined bandwidth of more than 600kbyte/sec. I don't download very many linux ISO's, but the few I have downloaded weren't going any faster than 200kbyte/sec, which my connection is ample for. Even if it could provide the full 1125kbyte/sec my connection is capable of, it would still take me about as much time to burn/verify the ISO as it would take me to download it.
That said, why would I want a 15mbit/sec or higher front end connection when most of my preferred content providers won't give me anymore than 5mbit/sec? I hear so many people talk about how the US is bad and in the stone age because we don't have 1gbit connections for $2 a month, but honestly I'd like to know how you'd take advantage of that kind of bandwidth.
I consider myself a pretty heavy user and I'm still trying to figure out how to fully take advantage of 9mbit, because again, most places I download from won't even touch that, and my personal internet connection speed doesn't ever seem to be the bottleneck. In fact I wouldn't mind paying less and getting a 6mbit connection, I probably wouldn't even notice the difference.
But do a tracer[t/oute] and you'll find you really do get that speed... to the local router, where you get 80kbps and not a penny more.
With DOCSIS cable modems (read: pretty much every cable provider in the US) the throttling is only done in your cable modem itself, so you're going to get exactly what speeds they advertise. If you don't trust it, there are ways you can download your modems operational parameter file (given to it by your ISP) via tftp and see them for yourself. If you still think your ISP is capping you at the head end, you can always test this by uncapping your cable modem by sending it a different set of operational parameters, but you will get in trouble for doing so if you're caught.
And I'm fairly certain that latency throttling (for e.g. video games) isn't something you can do with DOCSIS modems so long as you aren't exceeding the bandwidth limitations that your modem has been given by your ISP. That said, the conspiracy theory introduced by this post isn't true, at least not for most cable ISP's in the US.
I imagine with DSL, fiber, or some other kind of connection this may be possible, but I don't know.
A perfect implementation would be fantastic. I need a car, I go pick up a new car, it's free. The mechanic who has a sore back goes to a doctor who for no fee directs him to a physiotherapist, who then for free goes to a mechanic to change the oil in his car.
What if everybody in the world hates being a mechanic because you always end up with a sore back? What if there aren't ever enough mechanics to fill the need because not enough people want to be mechanics? Then what do you do?
If the answer is: Provide incentives for more people to be mechanics, welcome to capitalism.
If the answer is: Everybody needs to just get in line and wait 9 years to see a mechanic, welcome to socialism.
If the answer is: Force more people to become mechanics who otherwise don't want to be mechanics, welcome to communism.
"Year of delusion" sounds about right. Don't get me wrong I love linux to death, but this year just won't be different from the other years. If people really want linux to become mainstream then the elitiest attitude will need to be droped and it needs to be more user friendly...just my two cents.
To be honest, I think it would be cheaper still to have windows installed on the PC. The reason why is because being as competitive as the computer industry is, OEM's are operating on a very thin profit margin as far as the computer itself goes (the real money is in the attachments - monitors, wifi cards, extra hard disks, REAL (as opposed to trial) software, service plans, etc.)
This is mainly thanks to the crapplets that are bundled with windows which software vendors pay the OEM to install on the computer. They in effect subsidize the cost of the computer for the end user - effectively canceling out the cost of windows, and some. Try building a computer for what OEM's sell their lower end systems for. Even if you can get the parts wholesale, it is damn near impossible to match the big box OEM prices without even factoring in the labor and shipping costs that are also involved in building a computer. The crapplets are what make this possible for the bigger brands.
If you have linux on the other hand, the options for adding crapplets are greatly reduced. Oddly enough, we are in a market situation where it is cheaper to effectively buy windows and then replace it with another OS. Support issues aside entirely, IMO this is the main reason why most PC makers will not bundle linux - it raises the cost of the computer itself.
Personally the whole situation doesn't really bother me. I can effectively buy hardware at reduced cost, and I am not required to keep the crapplets that are bundled with it. The first thing I do when I need a new cheap laptop is reformat the hard disk and install either linux, or windows using one of those 9 in 1 images and the key from the COA on the computer so that it is legit and I can get the windows update whatnots, and I end up with a totally vanilla windows install with no crapplets or OEM "help center" garbage. Effectively these companies that provide the crapplets are paying me for nothing - it's hard to complain about that.
IMO the ACLU is just the lawyer team of the Democratic party. The politicians of the democratic party can't set case law, so this is what the ACLU is for.
The fact that the ACLU, who supposedly supports civil liberties, doesn't support the liberty of owning firearms alone is proof enough of this.
If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still? Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada
BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.
The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.
The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.
It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan
...
In short, the CIA had very limited dealings with the Afghans, let alone with the Afghan Arabs. And for good reason, there was simply no point in the CIA and the Afghan Arabs being in contact with each other. The Agency worked through ISI during the Afghan war, while the Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding. The CIA did not need the Afghan Arabs, and the Afghan Arabs did not need the CIA. So the notion that the Agency funded and trained the Afghan Arabs is, at best, misleading.
No, he was not. Osama had his own money, lots of it in fact, and had no need for the CIA. In fact, he hated the CIA, and America, every bit then as he does now. Just the very thought of "infidels" being in what he considers "muslim holy land" (pretty much the whole middle east) was offensive to him. Contrary to popular belief, the US had nothing to do with the mujahideen (however its spelled) and never gave them anything. The CIA was indeed involved with some other factions in Afghanistan (in fact, many of the same ones that we are on friendly terms with now,) but then just as much as now, Osama and his group have always been enemies of the US.
What you are saying here is one of those urban myths, which no matter how hard you try to dispel them, never go away. Also contrary to popular belief, the radical muslims who hate us do so entirely because of their religious beliefs. They have had a deep enmity towards the west, and Christianity in particular, since days long before the US was even around. "Stealing oil" or "invading their homeland" really has nothing to do with it, and if you think it does then you are a moron, in fact this is exactly what reformed radicals have said on numerous occasions, and said they laughed every time they heard somebody in the media claim this because it always played in their favor even though it wasn't true.
And its a shame because there are positive things happening at Microsoft and there are negative things just like there are positive and negative things in the Linux world and so forth. Open-source developers, like a scientist, need to put aside egos and see what works and what doesn't, no matter who came up with it.
I agree. This is why I tend to look at Open Source the same way Linus Torvalds does instead of Richard Stallman. Stallman is more interested in communism, and generally believes that the ownership of anything, including software, is reprehensible. Torvalds is more interested in being practical. The kernel is more like a standard, like USB for example, that numerous companies and individuals can invest in and develop and still capitalize off of, because it allows for the interoperability of their products, or just allows them a highly scalable platform that can work on top of any hardware they sell.
But some software, like games for example, is best owned and sold for a profit, or else the entire industry wouldn't really be practical, and wouldn't be nearly as advanced as it is today had it not been for that. And that is the beauty of capitalism, is that if somebody isn't motivated to do it on their own, you can always pay them to do it.
When I read the headline, the first thing I couldn't help but think was if the roles were reversed there would be hundreds of people saying "Good to hear you got something Linux had for a year already." Good ideas are good ideas. Why can't people just be happy when their ideas are recognized as good by others?
Well, this is slashdot. This is the reason I had to emphasize heavily that I am not trying to troll here. I've had it happen more than once where I've said something positive about Microsoft and immediately get modded down as trolling.
FWIW, not trying to troll, but thought I would point out that this feature is one of Vista's improvements over XP, and simultaneously the primary reason why Vista's compatibility isn't that great right now, and thus the primary reason why many people don't switch to Vista yet. Most of the hardware vendors have to make big changes to their drivers in order to accommodate this, especially nvidia who has to make about 4 different user space drivers (one for d3d, one for opengl, and an SLI version of both of those.) This is a good thing to have for both security and stability reasons, and I was waiting for when somebody would add this to the Linux kernel.
Linux has the advantage in that with Linux you can use both the old "kernel only" drivers, and the user space drivers at the same time. Vista could have done this as well, however Microsoft felt that if they allowed this to happen, then most hardware vendors would be lazy and continue to use their old kernel mode drivers, thus defeating the purpose. And to be honest, I agree with them. Linux doesn't need this on the other hand, as eventually somebody who is interested will make these kinds of changes to all of the open source drivers anyways as needed, which can't really happen because most windows drivers are binary only, so Linux can more or less take the "phased change" approach.
Disclaimer: I use both Vista and Linux (gentoo is my preferred distribution,) and am not afraid to say that I don't hate either of them, and rather like both of them.
There is quite a difference between a minority and an illegal immigrant, although they are not mutually exclusive. People like me do not like illegal immigrants not for racial reasons. I don't like illegal immigrants because in the case of Mexico they ruin the economies of both countries involved, and they often have a huge enmity towards my country, always talk about how great their country is and how much ours sucks, but in reality they know that their home country sucks so badly that they would outright refuse a free pass back there, and they'll be damned if they give up the free government handouts that they receive from this country that they hate so badly. Honestly, when they think you can't understand Spanish, they openly talk about how stupid they think Americans are for giving them all of these freebies; I've heard this on well more than one occasion.
And again I need to emphasize that this has nothing to do with race. This is one reason I don't like George W. Bush, and most of the left, is because if you say you are anti-illegal immigrant then they try to label you as a racist when that is quite simply not the case. I am not racist, but I hate illegal immigrants, and I am really not afraid to say so. FWIW there are many Mexicans who just by looking at them, you can't even tell they are from Mexico. You have to remember that many of them are of European descent.
If it were up to me, I would make it so that people who cross the border illegally must forfeit all property they own when they are found out, and their employer may sue them for all money that they have earned while working for them due to fraudulent employment (employers can already do this to legal citizens who e.g. provide false credentials or fake degree certificates when they apply for a job.) America would NOT be the only first world country to do these things. Then also remove birthright citizenship, which the US is the only first world country to have. If we made those three changes, just you watch how fast the illegals move south of the border. The "12 million here" problem will be solved so fast it'll make your head spin because it would be damn near impossible for them to make any kind of living here. The problem is that our politicians (left and right) really don't give a crap about what most Americans want. Like Osama once said; we have a soft underbelly.
Also FWIW, a xenophile would of course hire an illegal immigrant. Note the differences between the two suffixes:
Xenophile technically isn't a word in that it isn't in any official English dictionary, but it would mean the exact opposite of xenophobe.
Disclaimer: Yeah I used wikipedia, and under normal circumstances I never would use it as a source, but I couldn't be assed to find another one right now.
They have plans that cover this. My parents own a small business and have no dependents, and they are under a plan that covers businesses with less than 50 employees. The annual income limits are pretty high as well (somewhere above $60k per year.) Unlike my health choice AZ plan, it isn't free, but it is still much cheaper than regular health insurance.
Also there are other non-free plans available that cover families (as opposed to individuals) that earn around the same amount.
A lot of the problem isn't with the poor. It is in the gap between poor enough to be granted state-funded medi-care, and rich enough to afford health-care on your own. They are the working poor.
Not really. Remember AHCCCS stands for Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. This does not mean it only provides free health care to the poor. It is a program that subsidizes the costs of health care for everybody. That can range from free to not so free.
That said, as I posted elsewhere a few minutes ago, my parents are middle class and own a small business, yet they are eligible for AHCCCS. Although they don't get 100% free coverage like I do, theirs is subsidized by the state under a plan called Care 1st AZ (FWIW this exact same plan is available in California.) This plan covers small businesses with less than 49 employees, and is much cheaper and more comprehensive than most private health care plans. They do pay a small monthly premium, and they do pay some co-pays and co-insurance fees.
I stop being eligible for the Health Choice AZ plan I am on after I make around $18,000 a year, and after that point I am eligible for another plan that provides all of the same coverage I have now, only I do pay $20 copays, and $10 for prescription drugs no matter the cost. There are some other costs as well but I am not certain what they are as I haven't looked at it yet.
Plan - why are there plans? Either the state covers you or it doesn't. No need for plans (unless tey charge you after all)
Glad you asked actually. The different plans are for different people with different levels of income, different family situations, and differing socioeconomic status.
Take my parents for example. They own a small business, so they aren't eligible for health choice AZ. They are middle class. Therefore they are on the plan called "Care 1st AZ."
Care 1st AZ covers *any* small business with less than 50 employees, and it basically provides health care for all employees working for that business. Now, it doesn't cover all costs, but it does cover most of them. It has a low monthly premium, $20 copays, and you'll pay a small percentage of the costs for prescription drugs. If your employees make less than $15,000 a year, they are still eligible for free plans like Health Choice AZ.
FWIW, the other free plans are for different status as well. For example, the PPO plans are usually for elderly or disabled people, but are still free - PPO plans cost more for the state to provide, so they don't give them to everybody. The big difference between HMO and PPO being that you can go directly to specialists without having to see general physicians first, thus speeding up your care.
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Who said anything about getting rid of emergency services?
We could always replace the POTS networks with some kind of IP based telephony that is on a separate power system from the normal power grid, effectively making it every bit as robust as POTS service if not more so. Then in addition to voice you've also got data.
I'd imagine an engineering solution could be worked up so that you don't even have to replace most of the existing copper wiring, it would just be a matter of replacing the equipment at the head end and replacing all of your phone handsets. If you're feeling nostalgic for your old phone, there already exist converters that bridge the DTMF/pulse dialing to VoIP anyways, and they're cheep too.
I've heard similar arguments against killing analog TV and switching to digital. We've done that though and the world hasn't ended yet. I am sure somebody somewhere has somehow been negatively hit by this, but overall we're talking about progress here because a decadent technology has finally been done away with.
2 words: private trackers.
3 words: Too much work.
The content I'm getting now is already more content than I can even consume. Why on earth would I go find, sign up, and build reputation (as a sharer) for private trackers when the public trackers already provide speeds that are already faster than I actually need, not to mention offer a much greater diversity of content, and don't require me to jump through any hoops and make friends with 21 year old going on 12 trolls who like to use l33t speak? Seriously when I started downloading the entire fourth season of dexter one night before bed via piratebay, it was already ready by the time I got home the next day. And I still haven't had time to even watch it yet, meanwhile I've downloaded some other stuff too.
Sounds to me your ISP sold more bandwidth than they can deliver.
So now you're trying to insult my intelligence here? This would imply that my connection would be totally saturated while they are downloading. On the contrary, I had two people playing starcraft on battle.net in an 8 player match while the last linux ISO I have ever obtained was in progress (it was a copy of ubuntu that I was going to use for a VDR backend.) And let me tell you, Starcraft is VERY finnicky about latency, especially in an 8 player match. Sold more bandwidth than they can deliver? Don't make me laugh.
Not much faster. I tend to find that the limit is the number of people seeding, not necessarily their connection speed. Personally I simply don't have the hard disk space to hold on to everything I download for seeding. Even if I did, lets say I had 40 different hd shows I was seeding at the same time, and suppose they were all equally in high demand. How fast are each of those 40 different threads going to be able to take content from my end? Yeah. Anyways, typically though I'll seed something for about a week and then I'll end up deleting the file (How many times am I going to watch dexter season 2 episode 3 for example? Typically I'll only watch something once before deleting it.)
If most people have the same habits as I do (and I think they do, just most don't admit to it, whereas I'm not afraid to,) the speed of torrents will always be limited by that, and this is one of the shortcomings of p2p.
Not only that but I've taken a peek at the speeds several of the seeders are pushing to me when I download, and typically I am pushing out data faster than they are sending it to me, and many of these people are in countries where bandwidth is supposedly dirt cheap, meanwhile I've only got 2mbit upstream speed. Go figure.
While I could be wrong about this, I think broadband speed capabilities are growing faster than the need for them (read: available content) are growing, at least in most areas of the US. Think about it: Outside of p2p (which is illegal anyways) how would having more bandwidth help you once you could, say for example, stream four simultaneous HD streams at once? Because I can already do this, and I don't really even need to do this.
Even with p2p, I literally download more stuff than I even have the time to watch. I have an entire season of dexter I haven't watched yet, and I'll probably watch those after I've finished watching the last season of penn and teller.
On a serious note, I personally tend to find that anything above say 6-9mbit is just a number. My local ISP offers up to 50mbit, but I'm only interested in the 9mbit package (the next highest one is 3mbit.)
I mostly play games, download some games via steam, and somewhat often download high def tv show torrents (illegal ones too mind you, I'm no saint) but it doesn't happen very often that the server(s) or other peers on the other end will offer me a combined bandwidth of more than 600kbyte/sec. I don't download very many linux ISO's, but the few I have downloaded weren't going any faster than 200kbyte/sec, which my connection is ample for. Even if it could provide the full 1125kbyte/sec my connection is capable of, it would still take me about as much time to burn/verify the ISO as it would take me to download it.
That said, why would I want a 15mbit/sec or higher front end connection when most of my preferred content providers won't give me anymore than 5mbit/sec? I hear so many people talk about how the US is bad and in the stone age because we don't have 1gbit connections for $2 a month, but honestly I'd like to know how you'd take advantage of that kind of bandwidth.
I consider myself a pretty heavy user and I'm still trying to figure out how to fully take advantage of 9mbit, because again, most places I download from won't even touch that, and my personal internet connection speed doesn't ever seem to be the bottleneck. In fact I wouldn't mind paying less and getting a 6mbit connection, I probably wouldn't even notice the difference.
But do a tracer[t/oute] and you'll find you really do get that speed... to the local router, where you get 80kbps and not a penny more.
With DOCSIS cable modems (read: pretty much every cable provider in the US) the throttling is only done in your cable modem itself, so you're going to get exactly what speeds they advertise. If you don't trust it, there are ways you can download your modems operational parameter file (given to it by your ISP) via tftp and see them for yourself. If you still think your ISP is capping you at the head end, you can always test this by uncapping your cable modem by sending it a different set of operational parameters, but you will get in trouble for doing so if you're caught.
And I'm fairly certain that latency throttling (for e.g. video games) isn't something you can do with DOCSIS modems so long as you aren't exceeding the bandwidth limitations that your modem has been given by your ISP. That said, the conspiracy theory introduced by this post isn't true, at least not for most cable ISP's in the US.
I imagine with DSL, fiber, or some other kind of connection this may be possible, but I don't know.
What if everybody in the world hates being a mechanic because you always end up with a sore back? What if there aren't ever enough mechanics to fill the need because not enough people want to be mechanics? Then what do you do?
If the answer is: Provide incentives for more people to be mechanics, welcome to capitalism. If the answer is: Everybody needs to just get in line and wait 9 years to see a mechanic, welcome to socialism. If the answer is: Force more people to become mechanics who otherwise don't want to be mechanics, welcome to communism.
"Year of delusion" sounds about right. Don't get me wrong I love linux to death, but this year just won't be different from the other years. If people really want linux to become mainstream then the elitiest attitude will need to be droped and it needs to be more user friendly...just my two cents.
Fixed. You had the chronological order wrong.
Whats supposed to happen? Well, after the 13th year...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/687996.stm
Vegetarian diets are not natural.
Well, if apple products were so good, then why would it be necessary to force them to do this in the first place?
iPods have a hard enough time being in the city without getting all scratched up and having their batteries die prematurely.
To be honest, I think it would be cheaper still to have windows installed on the PC. The reason why is because being as competitive as the computer industry is, OEM's are operating on a very thin profit margin as far as the computer itself goes (the real money is in the attachments - monitors, wifi cards, extra hard disks, REAL (as opposed to trial) software, service plans, etc.)
This is mainly thanks to the crapplets that are bundled with windows which software vendors pay the OEM to install on the computer. They in effect subsidize the cost of the computer for the end user - effectively canceling out the cost of windows, and some. Try building a computer for what OEM's sell their lower end systems for. Even if you can get the parts wholesale, it is damn near impossible to match the big box OEM prices without even factoring in the labor and shipping costs that are also involved in building a computer. The crapplets are what make this possible for the bigger brands.
If you have linux on the other hand, the options for adding crapplets are greatly reduced. Oddly enough, we are in a market situation where it is cheaper to effectively buy windows and then replace it with another OS. Support issues aside entirely, IMO this is the main reason why most PC makers will not bundle linux - it raises the cost of the computer itself.
Personally the whole situation doesn't really bother me. I can effectively buy hardware at reduced cost, and I am not required to keep the crapplets that are bundled with it. The first thing I do when I need a new cheap laptop is reformat the hard disk and install either linux, or windows using one of those 9 in 1 images and the key from the COA on the computer so that it is legit and I can get the windows update whatnots, and I end up with a totally vanilla windows install with no crapplets or OEM "help center" garbage. Effectively these companies that provide the crapplets are paying me for nothing - it's hard to complain about that.
FWIW - I work retail.
IMO the ACLU is just the lawyer team of the Democratic party. The politicians of the democratic party can't set case law, so this is what the ACLU is for.
The fact that the ACLU, who supposedly supports civil liberties, doesn't support the liberty of owning firearms alone is proof enough of this.
Disclaimer: I am a little l libertarian.
If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still?
Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada
BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.
The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.
The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.
http://books.google.com/books?id=sRhZDrJb0zgC&pg=
It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan
...
In short, the CIA had very limited dealings with the Afghans, let alone with the Afghan Arabs. And for good reason, there was simply no point in the CIA and the Afghan Arabs being in contact with each other. The Agency worked through ISI during the Afghan war, while the Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding. The CIA did not need the Afghan Arabs, and the Afghan Arabs did not need the CIA. So the notion that the Agency funded and trained the Afghan Arabs is, at best, misleading.
Osama (who was trained by the CIA I may add)
No, he was not. Osama had his own money, lots of it in fact, and had no need for the CIA. In fact, he hated the CIA, and America, every bit then as he does now. Just the very thought of "infidels" being in what he considers "muslim holy land" (pretty much the whole middle east) was offensive to him. Contrary to popular belief, the US had nothing to do with the mujahideen (however its spelled) and never gave them anything. The CIA was indeed involved with some other factions in Afghanistan (in fact, many of the same ones that we are on friendly terms with now,) but then just as much as now, Osama and his group have always been enemies of the US.
What you are saying here is one of those urban myths, which no matter how hard you try to dispel them, never go away. Also contrary to popular belief, the radical muslims who hate us do so entirely because of their religious beliefs. They have had a deep enmity towards the west, and Christianity in particular, since days long before the US was even around. "Stealing oil" or "invading their homeland" really has nothing to do with it, and if you think it does then you are a moron, in fact this is exactly what reformed radicals have said on numerous occasions, and said they laughed every time they heard somebody in the media claim this because it always played in their favor even though it wasn't true.
And its a shame because there are positive things happening at Microsoft and there are negative things just like there are positive and negative things in the Linux world and so forth. Open-source developers, like a scientist, need to put aside egos and see what works and what doesn't, no matter who came up with it.
I agree. This is why I tend to look at Open Source the same way Linus Torvalds does instead of Richard Stallman. Stallman is more interested in communism, and generally believes that the ownership of anything, including software, is reprehensible. Torvalds is more interested in being practical. The kernel is more like a standard, like USB for example, that numerous companies and individuals can invest in and develop and still capitalize off of, because it allows for the interoperability of their products, or just allows them a highly scalable platform that can work on top of any hardware they sell.
But some software, like games for example, is best owned and sold for a profit, or else the entire industry wouldn't really be practical, and wouldn't be nearly as advanced as it is today had it not been for that. And that is the beauty of capitalism, is that if somebody isn't motivated to do it on their own, you can always pay them to do it.
When I read the headline, the first thing I couldn't help but think was if the roles were reversed there would be hundreds of people saying "Good to hear you got something Linux had for a year already." Good ideas are good ideas. Why can't people just be happy when their ideas are recognized as good by others? Well, this is slashdot. This is the reason I had to emphasize heavily that I am not trying to troll here. I've had it happen more than once where I've said something positive about Microsoft and immediately get modded down as trolling.
FWIW, not trying to troll, but thought I would point out that this feature is one of Vista's improvements over XP, and simultaneously the primary reason why Vista's compatibility isn't that great right now, and thus the primary reason why many people don't switch to Vista yet. Most of the hardware vendors have to make big changes to their drivers in order to accommodate this, especially nvidia who has to make about 4 different user space drivers (one for d3d, one for opengl, and an SLI version of both of those.) This is a good thing to have for both security and stability reasons, and I was waiting for when somebody would add this to the Linux kernel.
Linux has the advantage in that with Linux you can use both the old "kernel only" drivers, and the user space drivers at the same time. Vista could have done this as well, however Microsoft felt that if they allowed this to happen, then most hardware vendors would be lazy and continue to use their old kernel mode drivers, thus defeating the purpose. And to be honest, I agree with them. Linux doesn't need this on the other hand, as eventually somebody who is interested will make these kinds of changes to all of the open source drivers anyways as needed, which can't really happen because most windows drivers are binary only, so Linux can more or less take the "phased change" approach.
Disclaimer: I use both Vista and Linux (gentoo is my preferred distribution,) and am not afraid to say that I don't hate either of them, and rather like both of them.
There is quite a difference between a minority and an illegal immigrant, although they are not mutually exclusive. People like me do not like illegal immigrants not for racial reasons. I don't like illegal immigrants because in the case of Mexico they ruin the economies of both countries involved, and they often have a huge enmity towards my country, always talk about how great their country is and how much ours sucks, but in reality they know that their home country sucks so badly that they would outright refuse a free pass back there, and they'll be damned if they give up the free government handouts that they receive from this country that they hate so badly. Honestly, when they think you can't understand Spanish, they openly talk about how stupid they think Americans are for giving them all of these freebies; I've heard this on well more than one occasion.
And again I need to emphasize that this has nothing to do with race. This is one reason I don't like George W. Bush, and most of the left, is because if you say you are anti-illegal immigrant then they try to label you as a racist when that is quite simply not the case. I am not racist, but I hate illegal immigrants, and I am really not afraid to say so. FWIW there are many Mexicans who just by looking at them, you can't even tell they are from Mexico. You have to remember that many of them are of European descent.
If it were up to me, I would make it so that people who cross the border illegally must forfeit all property they own when they are found out, and their employer may sue them for all money that they have earned while working for them due to fraudulent employment (employers can already do this to legal citizens who e.g. provide false credentials or fake degree certificates when they apply for a job.) America would NOT be the only first world country to do these things. Then also remove birthright citizenship, which the US is the only first world country to have. If we made those three changes, just you watch how fast the illegals move south of the border. The "12 million here" problem will be solved so fast it'll make your head spin because it would be damn near impossible for them to make any kind of living here. The problem is that our politicians (left and right) really don't give a crap about what most Americans want. Like Osama once said; we have a soft underbelly.
Also FWIW, a xenophile would of course hire an illegal immigrant. Note the differences between the two suffixes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-phob-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-phil-
Xenophile technically isn't a word in that it isn't in any official English dictionary, but it would mean the exact opposite of xenophobe.
Disclaimer: Yeah I used wikipedia, and under normal circumstances I never would use it as a source, but I couldn't be assed to find another one right now.
They have plans that cover this. My parents own a small business and have no dependents, and they are under a plan that covers businesses with less than 50 employees. The annual income limits are pretty high as well (somewhere above $60k per year.) Unlike my health choice AZ plan, it isn't free, but it is still much cheaper than regular health insurance.
Also there are other non-free plans available that cover families (as opposed to individuals) that earn around the same amount.
There are plans that cover the middle class. In my county alone there are over 10 of them.
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http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238779&th
Not true, I'll bet there is a plan for you too:
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http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238779&th
It varies by state, but in general they especially help people with families more than single people.
A lot of the problem isn't with the poor. It is in the gap between poor enough to be granted state-funded medi-care, and rich enough to afford health-care on your own. They are the working poor.
Not really. Remember AHCCCS stands for Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. This does not mean it only provides free health care to the poor. It is a program that subsidizes the costs of health care for everybody. That can range from free to not so free.
That said, as I posted elsewhere a few minutes ago, my parents are middle class and own a small business, yet they are eligible for AHCCCS. Although they don't get 100% free coverage like I do, theirs is subsidized by the state under a plan called Care 1st AZ (FWIW this exact same plan is available in California.) This plan covers small businesses with less than 49 employees, and is much cheaper and more comprehensive than most private health care plans. They do pay a small monthly premium, and they do pay some co-pays and co-insurance fees.
I stop being eligible for the Health Choice AZ plan I am on after I make around $18,000 a year, and after that point I am eligible for another plan that provides all of the same coverage I have now, only I do pay $20 copays, and $10 for prescription drugs no matter the cost. There are some other costs as well but I am not certain what they are as I haven't looked at it yet.
Plan - why are there plans? Either the state covers you or it doesn't. No need for plans (unless tey charge you after all)
Glad you asked actually. The different plans are for different people with different levels of income, different family situations, and differing socioeconomic status.
Take my parents for example. They own a small business, so they aren't eligible for health choice AZ. They are middle class. Therefore they are on the plan called "Care 1st AZ."
Care 1st AZ covers *any* small business with less than 50 employees, and it basically provides health care for all employees working for that business. Now, it doesn't cover all costs, but it does cover most of them. It has a low monthly premium, $20 copays, and you'll pay a small percentage of the costs for prescription drugs. If your employees make less than $15,000 a year, they are still eligible for free plans like Health Choice AZ.
FWIW, the other free plans are for different status as well. For example, the PPO plans are usually for elderly or disabled people, but are still free - PPO plans cost more for the state to provide, so they don't give them to everybody. The big difference between HMO and PPO being that you can go directly to specialists without having to see general physicians first, thus speeding up your care.
Fully private misses the poorest who can't afford it, fully social always has limited funding and waiting lists.
d =19547901
How about a health care system that has neither of those problems?
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