IMO these statements about there not being government funded health care in the US are all bullcrap.
Why do I say that? Well, personal experience. My income is about $12,000 a year, and about two months ago I had an operation to diagnose a kidney disease. That is, this was not life threatening, but for diagnostic purposes. I didn't have to wait two years either, rather I only waited about a month and a half.
What did I pay for it? Nothing. No co-pay, no co-insurance, no cost for anethesia, no deductable. Nothing. Nada. Even my prescription drugs are free, everything from simple pain killers to the latest and greatest name brands. Who paid for it all? The state of Arizona. One acronym: AHCCCS. Similar programs exist in all 50 states.
If this isn't providing health care to those who can't afford it, then I don't know what is. It has all of the benefits of private health care, in fact it works into the private health care system, so you get all of the same doctors and everything you would get in most private health care plans. The particular plan I am on is called Health Choice AZ, and there are many such plans to choose from, including a few PPO plans. I am not making any of this up, google it and you shall see. The information is sitting right at your fingertips.
Why do people like Michael Moore completely omit this fact when they bash America's health care system? They act as though poor people get nothing here - its just not true. If our health care system was like Canada's, hell I could be on dialysis right about now with how long it would have taken for me to get a proper diagnosis. I don't know about anybody else, but I wouldn't trade our current health care system for anything else.
What exactly is supposed to be "higher priority for the mankind?" Perhaps something that oh say...mankind desires?
How about this: If somebody spends years learning how to manipulate genetic material, and spends all of that money and time to obtain the lab equipment for doing so, shouldn't they be allowed to research whatever the hell they want to research?
That is like saying that no programmer should ever write any games, they should only write software like folding at home. We aren't communists here, we do whatever we want to do and not what somebody else thinks we should do. If nobody is allowed to pursue their true interests, then they'll eventually lose interest completely, which is where communism ultimately fails.
The US is the last to adopt any kind of standard. They still haven't even picked up on the metric system yet. How do you expect then to standardize of document formats?
The American people go wherever they want to go. The government does adopt standards, for example all US federal government agencies use metric for *everything*, but it doesn't force anybody else to. It is part of our idea of what a free society should be. We don't want governments micromanaging us. Some states began to deploy road signs that were in metric Km/h, but most people of those districts complained so they quickly removed them. Any single individual state in the US is still free to do this if they want, but they choose not to.
That said, what ultimately decides what format we use to store our office documents in (as if that is a somehow peace making, profoundly world changing topic in the first place) is up to the users themselves. The government can say that all government usage will follow x standard, but in the US that only affects the government, because they have no right to tell us what we will use.
Frankly I think ODF is a joke. I read a good argument as to why we should use HTML instead, and IMO that would be the way to go. Completely open, everybody uses it already and there are many programs that can view it, and it already supports a *hell* of a lot more formatting options than *any* office document standard. All that you need to add is an editor that is more geared towards e.g. letter style writing, and an easier page break system.
The internet is owned by everybody who takes part of it. That includes the government who facilitates it (the US government at least, who started it, provides laws which facilitate its continued existence, as well as funding a centralized name system, which everybody highly depends on,) the corporations who build the infrastructures that no individuals could possibly build, and the users who ultimately provide the content.
If you remove any one of those three, you don't have an internet. So yes, they do own it, but so do you.
Nobody designed capitalism. Capitalism more or less happened as people felt the need for certain things like e.g. money. I tend to think of as being the more civilized cousin of natural selection. Natural selection doesn't guarantee you a better species, nor a perfect one. But it does move in the direction of providing the fittest. Likewise, capitalism doesn't guarantee the best outcome or the best products. It does however move rapidly into the direction that the society as a whole chooses. In the course of this, some people win, and some people lose.
Communism, on the other hand, moves in the direction that the state chooses, and this is more comparable to selective selection. Selective selection, for those who don't know, is the process with which humans selectively bred animals like wolves into animals like pugs. This is entirely the result of somebody saying "hey, lets make this." Pugs are not a naturally occurring animal, wolves are on the other hand. Pugs are only useful to humans, and not to themselves. Likewise, a communist society is only useful to its state, and not necessarily to itself. The end result is that everybody is equally miserable.
Natural selection isn't fair, and neither is life. Capitalism works in harmony with that, whereas communism tries to work against it.
But Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said Army soldiers and Marines are not forbidden to come up with new ways to do their jobs, especially in Iraq's ever-evolving battlefield. And he said commanders are given money to buy nonstandard supplies as needed.
1. After being shocked repeatedly, could he even have been ABLE to "just" stand up?
Yes.
2. After being shocked repeatedly, would be have been in a mental state to understand the cops' commands?
Yes.
How do I know this? Because I have volunteered to be tazed for an educational demonstration before, and I know this first hand. A tazer wakes you up and makes you much more alert and more focused than anything else. In fact, its well known that electric shock does this. Why do you think they used to use shock therapy for schizophrenic patients?
One of you may argue that different people will react differently, and yes, this is true. However, the way he was yelling and screaming at them, he was definitely in a reactive state of mind, and he could easily have complied with them, but he chose not to. In my earlier post, I stated that there is probably something wrong with his personality that would make him behave this way to begin with, and it turns out that I was right:
If you get hit by a tazer it's pretty impossible to stand up for at least a few minutes.
Actually it isn't. I know this because I have been tazed myself.
I volunteered to be tazed once as part of a demonstration for a criminal justice class I was taking. The damn things hurt, and they make your muscles contract pretty badly, but immediately after the shock stops there is no disorientation or anything like that. It actually wakes you up more than anything, and your first instinct is "ok, what do I need to do to get this to stop" and that'll include following orders.
Most of the time when people get tazed, they'll readily submit to anything, unless they are on some kind of exotic drug that is numbing up the pain they feel, but even that is pretty rare.
The fact that this guy just sat there and yelled at them after he got tazed says something about his personality. I've seen videos of very violent criminals do exactly as they are told right after they've been tazed.
As for why they didn't just drag him after the first time he was tazed, my guess would be due to the circumstances. This wasn't like cops where they chase down a bad guy and have four or five officers pinning him to the ground. Instead there are just two of them in a big hallway full of lots of people. If they try to drag that guy around they stand the possibility of him kicking and knocking them and other people around. The tazer brought the least possibility of injury to anybody, including the offender.
No, I think you've just already made up your mind that you are correct, and no amount of evidence to contrary will change it. I salute you as a shining example of American ignorance.
No, I think the problem is I've proven to you that poverty stricken people here have health care options available, and your numbers couldn't prove otherwise so your only option left was to call me ignorant.
But I think the teapot is calling the kettle black here. If we really wanted to change our system in the US, we would have done so, but we aren't terribly interested in it. You just don't like the fact that America is different from everybody else, and therefore you immediately want to view us as being somehow inferior. That makes you ignorant.
Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans.
No, I did not, I didn't even say anything close to that, here is exactly what I said:
The federal government runs a Medicaid system that assists in health care related issues.
How do you get "provides health care to all americans" out of the word "assists?"
The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing.
No, I said I am a student, and thus I have no income. How do you get "available to all American students" out of that when I specifically mentioned that I have no income? Didn't you at least think for a second that the key words are "no income?" FWIW I have yet to receive any grade less than an A on any paper that I have ever written since starting college, and I have been going to college for almost four years now. I think you are just retarded as a reader.
and despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still 46 million Americans without health insurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
I can't answer about the 46 million figure because I honestly don't know and I haven't looked at it. But I can tell you this: I've already shown you that AHCCCS covers people who can't pay for health insurance in Arizona, and even includes small businesses with less than 50 employees regardless of their income. But here is the best question: Why exactly do they not have health coverage? Whatever the answer is, being too poor can't be included into that figure. Maybe some of them just don't give a damn? Who knows. But that 18.7% figure proves my point either way, because if those 18.7% were simply unable to afford health care, they could always use AHCCCS, as it is made specifically for them.
And that said, another thing to consider is that if your income is above $50k, then depending on where you live (Arizona would count, but some place like New York wouldn't,) you make enough income that health insurance isn't terribly important for you, and you'd rather just spend as the expenses come. This would especially apply if you were self employed, and that could very well be a significant number of that 18.7%.
Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence".
I know the difference, but unlike you I don't have time to spend looking up websites and then individually inserting each URL into HTML code just to try to one up some person I don't even know on slashdot. But I can type very fast, therefore I'll just tell you what I know, and what I know for a fact is that people who are impoverished have plenty of health care options available in the US, which is a direct contradiction to the excerpt I was replying to. My example of AHCCCS, combined with your 18.7% figure, is proof that these numbers you are flashing around don't mean a whole lot.
The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world.
Interesting, but if this is true then doesn't it seem a bit unlikely that we would have the highest number of people who simply can't pay for health care at all?
As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.
Oh come on. They are doing a study related to health care and poverty, and they don't include health care plans that are specifically setup for this category in their research? That is a very stupid and irresponsible thing for any competent researcher to do.
Well, the fact is that doctors and nurses have the highest migration rates of any other profession in Canada. That is, migrating from Canada to the US.
So, the "federal" Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) program is providing universal health coverage to all American students?
Where did I say AHCCCS was federal idiot? God damn, read what I type instead of making these half assed assumptions. I said Medicaid was federal, and it funds every state. AHCCCS receives funding from both Medicaid and additional state revenues. Hell, who am I kidding, you probably don't even know the difference between Medicaid and Medicare, its all just one big government coverup to you. AHCCCS is the manifestation of Medicaid in Arizona. Other states have equivalents with different names.
You might want to actually learn something about the universal health care in countries to which you've never travelled before you proclaim your system to be so infinitely better. Listening to "conservative" pundits complain about a system that works pretty damn well won't teach you anything real about it.
I don't know which "conservative pundits" you are referring to because I haven't heard anything about this from any pundits. I hear this from both Canadians themselves and medical personell who have moved from Canada to here because here they earn much more money in their field and their income taxes are much lower. In fact most competent doctors who earn their degrees in Canada move to the US because there is no possibility of advancement in Canada. The same thing happens with doctors in the UK. In fact I happen to be friends with two such people who came here with the specific intent of advancing beyond a social system that was essentially holding them back.
There are approximately 46 million Americans without health care coverage (16%), why do they not have coverage? Is it because they're lazy or illegal immigrants? Well the National Coalition on Healthcare has this to say:
I don't know where those figures came from, but the data they gathered was probably intentionally misinterpreted for who knows what assanine political agenda. My parents for example just started a small business and the government even provides them with subsidized health care under a plan called Care1st. It subsidizes all small businesses with less than 50 employees in both the state of Arizona and the state of California. In Arizona this plan works under AHCCCS and Medicaid. Again, other states have varying plans that are unique for that particular state.
You know how much my health care costs the state of Arizona every month? The underwriters bill the state $450 a month for my particular plan (called Health Choice AZ.) Now in the UK somebody with equivalent coverage is going to pay roughly $650 a month in taxes just for the health care, and the care they receive won't be anywhere near the quality of care I receive, and they also have to pay for their prescription meds whereas I don't. You know who told me this? A doctor who left the UK.
Arizona is not a rich state either mind you. Our average income and GDP is very low compared to the rest of the US. And on that same token, people in the medical field earn more money than any other career in the state of AZ by far. So we aren't some one in 50 aristocratic state that can have free health care for everybody.
Now here is my question to you, how come your NCHC website doesn't mention anywhere that plans like AHCCCS even exist? I know for a fact that these plans exist in far more states than just Arizona, if not all 50 states, yet that website makes no mention of this fact anywhere.
12. Americans are blind to many of their own people who live in poverty and without access to decent health care, and their gov't ignore their plight even when a disaster unfolds which attracts the attention of the world
This is stupidly false and I am not sure why people continue to believe it. The federal government runs a Medicaid system that assists in health care related issues. I for example, as a college student, have no income at all, and yet I have full health care coverage. How? I am on a program called AHCCCS (google that term.)
Again let me restate that. My income is zero, and I have full and complete health care coverage that costs zero. The government is paying for it. And unlike the broken health care coverage seen in countries that have so called "universal health care," my coverage goes through the private health care system, which doesn't put you on hold for two years before you can have any surgery. And I can see an actual doctor any time I want to for free unlike these other countries. My prescription drugs are also covered 100%, and thus I pay nothing for them, which is more than you can even say about Canada for you Michael Moore fans out there.
Google AHCCCS and you can learn more about what I am talking about. This program, and many like it in other states, has existed for decades and yet for whatever reason everybody keeps saying that poverty stricken people in the US have no health care, which is an outright lie. The fact is that those who don't have it either don't apply for it or they just don't care. Either that or they are illegal immigrants.
I mean think about it, how are you truly supposed to measure freedom of the press? If the media was being censored, then how are you supposed to hear about it? Through unconfirmed rumors or something? Honestly.
I would think that if you are able to hear about certain things such as gag orders, without knowing what the gag order actually contained (and IMO a gag order morally makes sense in order to protect the accused and allow for a fair trial, and protection from the government in itself is yet another liberty) then you probably have freedom of the press. Freedom of the press strikes me as something you either do or you don't have, and nothing in between.
It was a fair response to "nya nya his vote cancels out yours," don't you think?
But are you trying to say that democrats don't do these things?
Gray Davis didn't put California into a multi-billion dollar defecit?
The democrats didn't approve of laws allowing the government to take your property and hand it over to private corporations?
Bill Clinton didn't have this woman arrested for excersizing her right of free speech?
Democrat Representative from Louisiana wasn't caught taking a $100,000 bribe from an FBI informant, and still denied it anyways?
Gerry Studds wasn't caught having sex with a 17 year old boy, and wasn't still re-elected by liberals anyways for another 5 terms? Hell, at least Foley had the decency to resign, and unlike Gerry Studds he actually admitted to it when he was caught, and Gerry Studds didn't admit it until much later.
But to be honest I don't really like conservatives much either. Like I said, I am a "little l" libertarian (as in I don't associate myself with the Libertarian party.)
There's a quote by somebody who you've no doubt at least heard of before, which I am reminded of:
"I hate conservatives, but I REALLY fucking hate liberals." -- Matt Stone
Well, in the US we have something carefully crafted by the founding fathers called the electoral college system, if you've ever heard of that. My votes reinforce those of us in my state of Arizona who have 10 electors (and quickly rising,) and also have a history of being a red state. Odds are he lives in a different state, so his vote probably doesn't impact mine at all.
When I hear people talk about the evils of the "religious right," it makes me think a bit. The left are equally religious, the difference is that their religion doesn't center around any deity or spiritual beliefs. Instead it centers around this psuedo-scientific faith called environmentalism.
The religious right always talk about how its better to believe in god, and how you should change your lifestyle to accomodate the bible or the qu'ran or whatever holy book they might have, because if they are right and god exists, then you're doomed to eternal damnation, and if they're wrong...well then no big deal. Ok whatever *cough*bullshit*cough*. They are pretty sure in their beliefs though, and they even believe that modern science can prove their beliefs. But none of them have ever been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
The religious left do the same thing, only with a different argument. They believe that the earth is this extremely precious ecosystem, and if we don't stop driving SUV's, and adjust the crap out of our lifestyles to follow the findings of their psuedo-science in order to stop "polluting" the environment, then we're all doomed to die in some hellfire called global warming. But they too acknowledge that if they are wrong, then no big deal, but we should still alter our lifestyles anyways just to accomodate their beliefs anyways rather than risk a fiery end. And like the religious right, their beliefs have never been proven either, and IMO are equally retarded.
FWIW (and slightly off topic) I know some of you are thinking "what side of the aisle does this blasphemous polluting asshole sit on?" well, unlike people like Michael Moore who attempt to decieve by hiding their political affiliations, even though they are in fact democrats, I believe in being honest. I am an Atheist libertarian who has a long history of voting Republican. There, I said it. As a person who votes Republican, I am a minority of the slashdot crowd, and in all likelyhood I am going to be downmoderated as a troll by at least one person because of that fact. Unless of course they read that sentence and actually think about how predictable they are, in which case they would take a route I often take: when in doubt, or if you just don't know, then don't vote.
To add to that, the DMCA was anacted as part of our entering the WIPO treaty, which was based on the Berne convention, which is european in origin. Truth be told the WIPO treaty demands even more than the DMCA provides. In fact every time you hear about a "Super DMCA" it is really just another country falling more in line with the WIPO treaty than the US actually does. The WTO is also ultimately responsible for why we have 90 year copyrights now.
If you say something which is needlessly offensive you will be modded flaimbait, the same would go if you're trying to start a flame war with comments like "GNOME smells of cheese and suX!!11!". If you make some "GNAA!!!!!" type posts, that'll be a troll. If you say something which is completely off topic, it gets modded as such. Both of these things mean that modding becomes pretty much a true/false kind of thing, which meta modding can comfirm. It also stops being seeing it as a default and makes the best shine out...
This is not true. I have seen posts where somebody points out a mere fact about microsoft that gives them a positive light get moderated as a troll just because somebody doesn't like microsoft. It also occurs often that somebody will post comments that have mere facts which support a particular conservative viewpoint, yet just because somebody who may be a liberal doesn't like it they downmoderate it as overrated or as flamebait.
Then the karma system basically says "don't make these kinds of comments again, or else all future comments you make will be ignored." People realize this, thus they are reluctant to speak their mind when they already know that the group (due to its demographic) is going to disagree with them. By having a karma system, you essentially introduce the "fear" element common among e.g. dictatorships. That is, fear of speaking your mind lest you offend somebody who reduces your group reputation. Another fitting way of describing group think would be "group censorship."
The meta moderation system attempts to solve this, but it falls far short for various reasons. First of all the meta moderator could agree with the moderator, even though both of them are biased. Second of all, not everybody wants to spend enough time reading each subject and then each post in order to understand the context fully, but they still want the moderator points anyways so they may just pick answers at random.
This would be terrible for an encyclopedia, since if somebody doesn't like a fact (even though it may be true) they can go along with the groupthink and censor it anyways. An encyclopedia is not, nor should it ever be, a democracy. An encyclopedia should follow the facts as they are, not the facts how people want them to be.
If you still feel that this isn't the case, then explain why it often occurs that people feel the need to post as anonymous coward when posting a view that they already know the group won't like?
Somewhat interesting how anytime you need any living thing to perform work for you, you have to make it entertaining or otherwise rewarding for them. For example, getting dogs to find drugs has to be turned into a game for them whereas they get praise when they find something.
Kinda goes to show how when it comes down to it, people can be pretty simple.
Think of encryption as having a bunch of switches which can be off or on lined up in a sequence. In order to break the encryption, you have to somehow be able to guess the exact position of each and every one of these switches. In the case of 64-bit encryption, you have 64 of those on or off switches. In the case of 128-bit encryption, you have 128.
For those who aren't mathematically inclined, what you effectively have is 2 as your base number (on is one, off is another one, thus two total positions for each switch) and the total number of switches is your exponent (remember from 8th grade math, 2^3 = 2*2*2, if you had three switches that is.) If you are still lost, put it this way: 64-bit encryption is 2^64 different possibilities, and 128-bit encryption is 2^128 different possibilities. Thus 128-bit encryption is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 times stronger than 64-bit encryption.
If you encrypt in 64-bit, and then encrypt it in 64-bit again, you only double the strength as you are basically adding 2^64 plus 2^64, which equals 2^65, or 65-bit encryption effectively. Whereas 2^128 on the other hand, is actually 2^64 times 2^64. So if your friend wanted to achieve 128-bit encryption this way, he would effectively have to encrypt that 64-bit file 64 times, not just two times.
Now 2^64 may sound like a pretty big number, but with computers being as fast as they are today, we always can factor (or in laymens terms, "brute force") the encryption keys in order to figure out what that switch sequence would be at a pretty fast rate, so that number isn't really that large in the grand scheme of things. However, if it is 2^64 times that amount, then that number suddenly becomes much much larger, and thus takes exponentionally longer for an everyday home computer or even a cluster of computers to break.
To cryptography know-it-alls: I know, this is an oversimplified explanation, but it completely answers the full scope of his question, so spare me of the "but you forgot this" or "you can break some encryption without factoring" replies.
A lot of people out there like to accuse the US of forcing other countries into enacting laws that are draconian, such as the DMCA and 90 year copyrights. However, the US is actually adopting these laws, such as the DMCA and the CTEA, as part of the WTO and WIPO treaties. It is actually many countries in Europe that these originate from.
The WIPO and WTO actually call for laws much more strict than what the US has. Those "super DMCA" laws that other countries have are really just falling inline with what these treaties ask for, and the US is not at all to blame for them.
Your basic responsibility to society is to procreate. The reason society puts up with capitalism is that it allows people to procreate. If you can't do one or the other, there's a failure someplace.
I don't know about you, but I live in the land of the free. Free of despotism, and free of that bastard stepchild of despotism known as communism. I am free to do (in the words of Penn Jillette) "whatever the fuck I want." I don't owe society anything. I am my own person, I am not some drone that belongs to a hive.
Here, society gives back whatever you give to it. If you give it nothing, you get nothing in return, and your life becomes somewhat meaningless. How much you give to it, and how much you accept in return, is entirely up to you. Whether or not you want to procreate is entirely up to you. You don't have to answer to anybody but yourself. That is the glory of freedom, you ought to try it one day; let go of those borg like shackles you're wearing.
Problem with that though is checking each bit at a time would take a lot of time, which would probably annoy most of the users. But that wouldn't matter anyways as it should be easy enough for the firmware code to tell the difference between regular program execution and a read coming from the other side of the IDE controller. Afterall, the firmware code itself is responsible for carrying out such reads.
In terms of storage space for carrying spoof data, you could always substitute the original firmware chip with a larger one that is compatible. Assuming that is even necessary in the first place, as I don't think the x360 dvd firmware uses up the entire chip.
Hell, the bios firmware for the original xbox was only 256kb large and it resided on a 1MB tsop.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO these statements about there not being government funded health care in the US are all bullcrap.
Why do I say that? Well, personal experience. My income is about $12,000 a year, and about two months ago I had an operation to diagnose a kidney disease. That is, this was not life threatening, but for diagnostic purposes. I didn't have to wait two years either, rather I only waited about a month and a half.
What did I pay for it? Nothing. No co-pay, no co-insurance, no cost for anethesia, no deductable. Nothing. Nada. Even my prescription drugs are free, everything from simple pain killers to the latest and greatest name brands. Who paid for it all? The state of Arizona. One acronym: AHCCCS. Similar programs exist in all 50 states.
If this isn't providing health care to those who can't afford it, then I don't know what is. It has all of the benefits of private health care, in fact it works into the private health care system, so you get all of the same doctors and everything you would get in most private health care plans. The particular plan I am on is called Health Choice AZ, and there are many such plans to choose from, including a few PPO plans. I am not making any of this up, google it and you shall see. The information is sitting right at your fingertips.
Why do people like Michael Moore completely omit this fact when they bash America's health care system? They act as though poor people get nothing here - its just not true. If our health care system was like Canada's, hell I could be on dialysis right about now with how long it would have taken for me to get a proper diagnosis. I don't know about anybody else, but I wouldn't trade our current health care system for anything else.
What exactly is supposed to be "higher priority for the mankind?" Perhaps something that oh say...mankind desires?
How about this: If somebody spends years learning how to manipulate genetic material, and spends all of that money and time to obtain the lab equipment for doing so, shouldn't they be allowed to research whatever the hell they want to research?
That is like saying that no programmer should ever write any games, they should only write software like folding at home. We aren't communists here, we do whatever we want to do and not what somebody else thinks we should do. If nobody is allowed to pursue their true interests, then they'll eventually lose interest completely, which is where communism ultimately fails.
The US is the last to adopt any kind of standard. They still haven't even picked up on the metric system yet. How do you expect then to standardize of document formats?
The American people go wherever they want to go. The government does adopt standards, for example all US federal government agencies use metric for *everything*, but it doesn't force anybody else to. It is part of our idea of what a free society should be. We don't want governments micromanaging us. Some states began to deploy road signs that were in metric Km/h, but most people of those districts complained so they quickly removed them. Any single individual state in the US is still free to do this if they want, but they choose not to.
That said, what ultimately decides what format we use to store our office documents in (as if that is a somehow peace making, profoundly world changing topic in the first place) is up to the users themselves. The government can say that all government usage will follow x standard, but in the US that only affects the government, because they have no right to tell us what we will use.
Frankly I think ODF is a joke. I read a good argument as to why we should use HTML instead, and IMO that would be the way to go. Completely open, everybody uses it already and there are many programs that can view it, and it already supports a *hell* of a lot more formatting options than *any* office document standard. All that you need to add is an editor that is more geared towards e.g. letter style writing, and an easier page break system.
The internet is owned by everybody who takes part of it. That includes the government who facilitates it (the US government at least, who started it, provides laws which facilitate its continued existence, as well as funding a centralized name system, which everybody highly depends on,) the corporations who build the infrastructures that no individuals could possibly build, and the users who ultimately provide the content. If you remove any one of those three, you don't have an internet. So yes, they do own it, but so do you.
Nobody designed capitalism. Capitalism more or less happened as people felt the need for certain things like e.g. money. I tend to think of as being the more civilized cousin of natural selection. Natural selection doesn't guarantee you a better species, nor a perfect one. But it does move in the direction of providing the fittest. Likewise, capitalism doesn't guarantee the best outcome or the best products. It does however move rapidly into the direction that the society as a whole chooses. In the course of this, some people win, and some people lose.
Communism, on the other hand, moves in the direction that the state chooses, and this is more comparable to selective selection. Selective selection, for those who don't know, is the process with which humans selectively bred animals like wolves into animals like pugs. This is entirely the result of somebody saying "hey, lets make this." Pugs are not a naturally occurring animal, wolves are on the other hand. Pugs are only useful to humans, and not to themselves. Likewise, a communist society is only useful to its state, and not necessarily to itself. The end result is that everybody is equally miserable.
Natural selection isn't fair, and neither is life. Capitalism works in harmony with that, whereas communism tries to work against it.
Or how apple charges you $40 for quicktime to play in full-screen mode, whereas Microsoft gives you that for free.
They do, and if you read TFA you'd know that:
But Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said Army soldiers and Marines are not forbidden to come up with new ways to do their jobs, especially in Iraq's ever-evolving battlefield. And he said commanders are given money to buy nonstandard supplies as needed.
1. After being shocked repeatedly, could he even have been ABLE to "just" stand up?
r eshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=16925738#16 926942
d =16925790
Yes.
2. After being shocked repeatedly, would be have been in a mental state to understand the cops' commands?
Yes.
How do I know this? Because I have volunteered to be tazed for an educational demonstration before, and I know this first hand. A tazer wakes you up and makes you much more alert and more focused than anything else. In fact, its well known that electric shock does this. Why do you think they used to use shock therapy for schizophrenic patients?
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207666&th
One of you may argue that different people will react differently, and yes, this is true. However, the way he was yelling and screaming at them, he was definitely in a reactive state of mind, and he could easily have complied with them, but he chose not to. In my earlier post, I stated that there is probably something wrong with his personality that would make him behave this way to begin with, and it turns out that I was right:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207666&ci
If you get hit by a tazer it's pretty impossible to stand up for at least a few minutes.
Actually it isn't. I know this because I have been tazed myself.
I volunteered to be tazed once as part of a demonstration for a criminal justice class I was taking. The damn things hurt, and they make your muscles contract pretty badly, but immediately after the shock stops there is no disorientation or anything like that. It actually wakes you up more than anything, and your first instinct is "ok, what do I need to do to get this to stop" and that'll include following orders.
Most of the time when people get tazed, they'll readily submit to anything, unless they are on some kind of exotic drug that is numbing up the pain they feel, but even that is pretty rare.
The fact that this guy just sat there and yelled at them after he got tazed says something about his personality. I've seen videos of very violent criminals do exactly as they are told right after they've been tazed.
As for why they didn't just drag him after the first time he was tazed, my guess would be due to the circumstances. This wasn't like cops where they chase down a bad guy and have four or five officers pinning him to the ground. Instead there are just two of them in a big hallway full of lots of people. If they try to drag that guy around they stand the possibility of him kicking and knocking them and other people around. The tazer brought the least possibility of injury to anybody, including the offender.
No, I think you've just already made up your mind that you are correct, and no amount of evidence to contrary will change it. I salute you as a shining example of American ignorance.
No, I think the problem is I've proven to you that poverty stricken people here have health care options available, and your numbers couldn't prove otherwise so your only option left was to call me ignorant.
But I think the teapot is calling the kettle black here. If we really wanted to change our system in the US, we would have done so, but we aren't terribly interested in it. You just don't like the fact that America is different from everybody else, and therefore you immediately want to view us as being somehow inferior. That makes you ignorant.
Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans.
No, I did not, I didn't even say anything close to that, here is exactly what I said:
The federal government runs a Medicaid system that assists in health care related issues.
How do you get "provides health care to all americans" out of the word "assists?"
The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing.
No, I said I am a student, and thus I have no income. How do you get "available to all American students" out of that when I specifically mentioned that I have no income? Didn't you at least think for a second that the key words are "no income?" FWIW I have yet to receive any grade less than an A on any paper that I have ever written since starting college, and I have been going to college for almost four years now. I think you are just retarded as a reader.
and despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still 46 million Americans without health insurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance.
I can't answer about the 46 million figure because I honestly don't know and I haven't looked at it. But I can tell you this: I've already shown you that AHCCCS covers people who can't pay for health insurance in Arizona, and even includes small businesses with less than 50 employees regardless of their income. But here is the best question: Why exactly do they not have health coverage? Whatever the answer is, being too poor can't be included into that figure. Maybe some of them just don't give a damn? Who knows. But that 18.7% figure proves my point either way, because if those 18.7% were simply unable to afford health care, they could always use AHCCCS, as it is made specifically for them.
And that said, another thing to consider is that if your income is above $50k, then depending on where you live (Arizona would count, but some place like New York wouldn't,) you make enough income that health insurance isn't terribly important for you, and you'd rather just spend as the expenses come. This would especially apply if you were self employed, and that could very well be a significant number of that 18.7%.
Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence".
I know the difference, but unlike you I don't have time to spend looking up websites and then individually inserting each URL into HTML code just to try to one up some person I don't even know on slashdot. But I can type very fast, therefore I'll just tell you what I know, and what I know for a fact is that people who are impoverished have plenty of health care options available in the US, which is a direct contradiction to the excerpt I was replying to. My example of AHCCCS, combined with your 18.7% figure, is proof that these numbers you are flashing around don't mean a whole lot.
The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world.
Interesting, but if this is true then doesn't it seem a bit unlikely that we would have the highest number of people who simply can't pay for health care at all?
As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.
Oh come on. They are doing a study related to health care and poverty, and they don't include health care plans that are specifically setup for this category in their research? That is a very stupid and irresponsible thing for any competent researcher to do.
Well, the fact is that doctors and nurses have the highest migration rates of any other profession in Canada. That is, migrating from Canada to the US.
So, the "federal" Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) program is providing universal health coverage to all American students?
Where did I say AHCCCS was federal idiot? God damn, read what I type instead of making these half assed assumptions. I said Medicaid was federal, and it funds every state. AHCCCS receives funding from both Medicaid and additional state revenues. Hell, who am I kidding, you probably don't even know the difference between Medicaid and Medicare, its all just one big government coverup to you. AHCCCS is the manifestation of Medicaid in Arizona. Other states have equivalents with different names.
You might want to actually learn something about the universal health care in countries to which you've never travelled before you proclaim your system to be so infinitely better. Listening to "conservative" pundits complain about a system that works pretty damn well won't teach you anything real about it.
I don't know which "conservative pundits" you are referring to because I haven't heard anything about this from any pundits. I hear this from both Canadians themselves and medical personell who have moved from Canada to here because here they earn much more money in their field and their income taxes are much lower. In fact most competent doctors who earn their degrees in Canada move to the US because there is no possibility of advancement in Canada. The same thing happens with doctors in the UK. In fact I happen to be friends with two such people who came here with the specific intent of advancing beyond a social system that was essentially holding them back.
There are approximately 46 million Americans without health care coverage (16%), why do they not have coverage? Is it because they're lazy or illegal immigrants? Well the National Coalition on Healthcare has this to say:
I don't know where those figures came from, but the data they gathered was probably intentionally misinterpreted for who knows what assanine political agenda. My parents for example just started a small business and the government even provides them with subsidized health care under a plan called Care1st. It subsidizes all small businesses with less than 50 employees in both the state of Arizona and the state of California. In Arizona this plan works under AHCCCS and Medicaid. Again, other states have varying plans that are unique for that particular state.
You know how much my health care costs the state of Arizona every month? The underwriters bill the state $450 a month for my particular plan (called Health Choice AZ.) Now in the UK somebody with equivalent coverage is going to pay roughly $650 a month in taxes just for the health care, and the care they receive won't be anywhere near the quality of care I receive, and they also have to pay for their prescription meds whereas I don't. You know who told me this? A doctor who left the UK.
Arizona is not a rich state either mind you. Our average income and GDP is very low compared to the rest of the US. And on that same token, people in the medical field earn more money than any other career in the state of AZ by far. So we aren't some one in 50 aristocratic state that can have free health care for everybody.
Now here is my question to you, how come your NCHC website doesn't mention anywhere that plans like AHCCCS even exist? I know for a fact that these plans exist in far more states than just Arizona, if not all 50 states, yet that website makes no mention of this fact anywhere.
12. Americans are blind to many of their own people who live in poverty and without access to decent health care, and their gov't ignore their plight even when a disaster unfolds which attracts the attention of the world
This is stupidly false and I am not sure why people continue to believe it. The federal government runs a Medicaid system that assists in health care related issues. I for example, as a college student, have no income at all, and yet I have full health care coverage. How? I am on a program called AHCCCS (google that term.)
Again let me restate that. My income is zero, and I have full and complete health care coverage that costs zero. The government is paying for it. And unlike the broken health care coverage seen in countries that have so called "universal health care," my coverage goes through the private health care system, which doesn't put you on hold for two years before you can have any surgery. And I can see an actual doctor any time I want to for free unlike these other countries. My prescription drugs are also covered 100%, and thus I pay nothing for them, which is more than you can even say about Canada for you Michael Moore fans out there.
Google AHCCCS and you can learn more about what I am talking about. This program, and many like it in other states, has existed for decades and yet for whatever reason everybody keeps saying that poverty stricken people in the US have no health care, which is an outright lie. The fact is that those who don't have it either don't apply for it or they just don't care. Either that or they are illegal immigrants.
I mean think about it, how are you truly supposed to measure freedom of the press? If the media was being censored, then how are you supposed to hear about it? Through unconfirmed rumors or something? Honestly.
I would think that if you are able to hear about certain things such as gag orders, without knowing what the gag order actually contained (and IMO a gag order morally makes sense in order to protect the accused and allow for a fair trial, and protection from the government in itself is yet another liberty) then you probably have freedom of the press. Freedom of the press strikes me as something you either do or you don't have, and nothing in between.
It was a fair response to "nya nya his vote cancels out yours," don't you think?
But are you trying to say that democrats don't do these things?
Gray Davis didn't put California into a multi-billion dollar defecit?
The democrats didn't approve of laws allowing the government to take your property and hand it over to private corporations?
Bill Clinton didn't have this woman arrested for excersizing her right of free speech?
Democrat Representative from Louisiana wasn't caught taking a $100,000 bribe from an FBI informant, and still denied it anyways?
Gerry Studds wasn't caught having sex with a 17 year old boy, and wasn't still re-elected by liberals anyways for another 5 terms? Hell, at least Foley had the decency to resign, and unlike Gerry Studds he actually admitted to it when he was caught, and Gerry Studds didn't admit it until much later.
But to be honest I don't really like conservatives much either. Like I said, I am a "little l" libertarian (as in I don't associate myself with the Libertarian party.)
There's a quote by somebody who you've no doubt at least heard of before, which I am reminded of:
"I hate conservatives, but I REALLY fucking hate liberals." -- Matt Stone
Well, in the US we have something carefully crafted by the founding fathers called the electoral college system, if you've ever heard of that. My votes reinforce those of us in my state of Arizona who have 10 electors (and quickly rising,) and also have a history of being a red state. Odds are he lives in a different state, so his vote probably doesn't impact mine at all.
When I hear people talk about the evils of the "religious right," it makes me think a bit. The left are equally religious, the difference is that their religion doesn't center around any deity or spiritual beliefs. Instead it centers around this psuedo-scientific faith called environmentalism.
The religious right always talk about how its better to believe in god, and how you should change your lifestyle to accomodate the bible or the qu'ran or whatever holy book they might have, because if they are right and god exists, then you're doomed to eternal damnation, and if they're wrong...well then no big deal. Ok whatever *cough*bullshit*cough*. They are pretty sure in their beliefs though, and they even believe that modern science can prove their beliefs. But none of them have ever been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
The religious left do the same thing, only with a different argument. They believe that the earth is this extremely precious ecosystem, and if we don't stop driving SUV's, and adjust the crap out of our lifestyles to follow the findings of their psuedo-science in order to stop "polluting" the environment, then we're all doomed to die in some hellfire called global warming. But they too acknowledge that if they are wrong, then no big deal, but we should still alter our lifestyles anyways just to accomodate their beliefs anyways rather than risk a fiery end. And like the religious right, their beliefs have never been proven either, and IMO are equally retarded.
FWIW (and slightly off topic) I know some of you are thinking "what side of the aisle does this blasphemous polluting asshole sit on?" well, unlike people like Michael Moore who attempt to decieve by hiding their political affiliations, even though they are in fact democrats, I believe in being honest. I am an Atheist libertarian who has a long history of voting Republican. There, I said it. As a person who votes Republican, I am a minority of the slashdot crowd, and in all likelyhood I am going to be downmoderated as a troll by at least one person because of that fact. Unless of course they read that sentence and actually think about how predictable they are, in which case they would take a route I often take: when in doubt, or if you just don't know, then don't vote.
To add to that, the DMCA was anacted as part of our entering the WIPO treaty, which was based on the Berne convention, which is european in origin. Truth be told the WIPO treaty demands even more than the DMCA provides. In fact every time you hear about a "Super DMCA" it is really just another country falling more in line with the WIPO treaty than the US actually does. The WTO is also ultimately responsible for why we have 90 year copyrights now.
If you say something which is needlessly offensive you will be modded flaimbait, the same would go if you're trying to start a flame war with comments like "GNOME smells of cheese and suX!!11!". If you make some "GNAA!!!!!" type posts, that'll be a troll. If you say something which is completely off topic, it gets modded as such. Both of these things mean that modding becomes pretty much a true/false kind of thing, which meta modding can comfirm. It also stops being seeing it as a default and makes the best shine out...
This is not true. I have seen posts where somebody points out a mere fact about microsoft that gives them a positive light get moderated as a troll just because somebody doesn't like microsoft. It also occurs often that somebody will post comments that have mere facts which support a particular conservative viewpoint, yet just because somebody who may be a liberal doesn't like it they downmoderate it as overrated or as flamebait.
Then the karma system basically says "don't make these kinds of comments again, or else all future comments you make will be ignored." People realize this, thus they are reluctant to speak their mind when they already know that the group (due to its demographic) is going to disagree with them. By having a karma system, you essentially introduce the "fear" element common among e.g. dictatorships. That is, fear of speaking your mind lest you offend somebody who reduces your group reputation. Another fitting way of describing group think would be "group censorship."
The meta moderation system attempts to solve this, but it falls far short for various reasons. First of all the meta moderator could agree with the moderator, even though both of them are biased. Second of all, not everybody wants to spend enough time reading each subject and then each post in order to understand the context fully, but they still want the moderator points anyways so they may just pick answers at random.
This would be terrible for an encyclopedia, since if somebody doesn't like a fact (even though it may be true) they can go along with the groupthink and censor it anyways. An encyclopedia is not, nor should it ever be, a democracy. An encyclopedia should follow the facts as they are, not the facts how people want them to be.
If you still feel that this isn't the case, then explain why it often occurs that people feel the need to post as anonymous coward when posting a view that they already know the group won't like?
Somewhat interesting how anytime you need any living thing to perform work for you, you have to make it entertaining or otherwise rewarding for them. For example, getting dogs to find drugs has to be turned into a game for them whereas they get praise when they find something.
Kinda goes to show how when it comes down to it, people can be pretty simple.
Think of encryption as having a bunch of switches which can be off or on lined up in a sequence. In order to break the encryption, you have to somehow be able to guess the exact position of each and every one of these switches. In the case of 64-bit encryption, you have 64 of those on or off switches. In the case of 128-bit encryption, you have 128.
For those who aren't mathematically inclined, what you effectively have is 2 as your base number (on is one, off is another one, thus two total positions for each switch) and the total number of switches is your exponent (remember from 8th grade math, 2^3 = 2*2*2, if you had three switches that is.) If you are still lost, put it this way: 64-bit encryption is 2^64 different possibilities, and 128-bit encryption is 2^128 different possibilities. Thus 128-bit encryption is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 times stronger than 64-bit encryption.
If you encrypt in 64-bit, and then encrypt it in 64-bit again, you only double the strength as you are basically adding 2^64 plus 2^64, which equals 2^65, or 65-bit encryption effectively. Whereas 2^128 on the other hand, is actually 2^64 times 2^64. So if your friend wanted to achieve 128-bit encryption this way, he would effectively have to encrypt that 64-bit file 64 times, not just two times.
Now 2^64 may sound like a pretty big number, but with computers being as fast as they are today, we always can factor (or in laymens terms, "brute force") the encryption keys in order to figure out what that switch sequence would be at a pretty fast rate, so that number isn't really that large in the grand scheme of things. However, if it is 2^64 times that amount, then that number suddenly becomes much much larger, and thus takes exponentionally longer for an everyday home computer or even a cluster of computers to break.
To cryptography know-it-alls: I know, this is an oversimplified explanation, but it completely answers the full scope of his question, so spare me of the "but you forgot this" or "you can break some encryption without factoring" replies.
A lot of people out there like to accuse the US of forcing other countries into enacting laws that are draconian, such as the DMCA and 90 year copyrights. However, the US is actually adopting these laws, such as the DMCA and the CTEA, as part of the WTO and WIPO treaties. It is actually many countries in Europe that these originate from.
The WIPO and WTO actually call for laws much more strict than what the US has. Those "super DMCA" laws that other countries have are really just falling inline with what these treaties ask for, and the US is not at all to blame for them.
I don't know about you, but I live in the land of the free. Free of despotism, and free of that bastard stepchild of despotism known as communism. I am free to do (in the words of Penn Jillette) "whatever the fuck I want." I don't owe society anything. I am my own person, I am not some drone that belongs to a hive.
Here, society gives back whatever you give to it. If you give it nothing, you get nothing in return, and your life becomes somewhat meaningless. How much you give to it, and how much you accept in return, is entirely up to you. Whether or not you want to procreate is entirely up to you. You don't have to answer to anybody but yourself. That is the glory of freedom, you ought to try it one day; let go of those borg like shackles you're wearing.
In terms of storage space for carrying spoof data, you could always substitute the original firmware chip with a larger one that is compatible. Assuming that is even necessary in the first place, as I don't think the x360 dvd firmware uses up the entire chip.
Hell, the bios firmware for the original xbox was only 256kb large and it resided on a 1MB tsop.