I suppose not knowing bonnie++ means its newbie sysadmin day here. So an endless loop script looks a heck of a lot like this:
rm -Rf /
Oh no wait just kidding about that one. I meant to type (hopefully no typos) :
#!/bin/bash # the name of this file is endlessbonnietest.sh and it had chmod a+x endlessbonnietest.sh run on it while [ 42 = 42 ] do
bonnie++ "whole bunch of interesting b++ options go here without quotes obviously" done
Obviously this works a hell of a lot better after running apt-get install bonnie++ and if for some godforsaken reason you are bashless, apt-get install bash
AC has it correct. Even shorter summary : "I personally promise to never allow this specific line of data to ever be released. 72 years later I'm dead, so its public domain now"
Also I'm mystified by the GP hidden assumption that if its a govt law, it can't be corrupt. LOL
Unless they were doing a lot of extra work to match isotopes, most of the "bulk" radiation in the ocean from power generation is from burning coal. There's really quite a bit of U in coal, and if you burn a gigatons of the stuff a ppm here and there starts to add up.
That was the latter years. The old ones were beyond awesome. A good rule of thumb for wyse terms was if you could not flash it, it was old enough to be fantastic, and if you could, its a turd. I have an old one on my desk for embedded work... Hey I've got the space, can always use another screen, etc. Kinda sucks for cut and paste, but perfect for watching logs and boot messages scroll by...
Database design and admin has a steep learning curve. A dedicated 11 year old couldn't do much worse than the average DB schemas I see every day. Starting up in a field where the bar is extremely low is probably a good strategy. My first thought is its probably a good field for a 11 year old kid to enter.
The loser schools in Nova Scotia have "upgraded" to Robo calls.
I live in the US and I hate those fucking things. If I get a robo call announcing the coordination meeting for open enrollment in the bilingual education program (note we are not a bilingual household so I could not possibly care less) then I hang up, the mother Fing robocaller calls me back within seconds and restarts the 5 minute story.
The "old fashioned" way of sending the kid home with a photocopy could have been handled in less than 5 seconds at my leisure by glancing at the sheet and throwing it in the trash, instead of invasively attacking my phone line on their schedule.
Why this fear mongering? Lawyers. The district is afraid that a parent will sue and so the entire educational environment is stifled in the community.
Its not just the extreme stuff they're worried about, but the little stuff.
Lets say the risk of lawsuit is 1 in X for communication where X is hopefully a very large number. The current legal budget is Y and frankly they can't afford it. You'd like to increase the level of communication by a factor of 100 "to improve educational blah". Whoops the risk of lawsuit just went up by to 100 * (1 in X) and the legal budget just increase to 100 * Y. Couldn't afford a legal budget of Y, how the hell are you going to afford a budget of 100 * Y? Doesn't matter how much the education level improves, you just can't afford the legal risk. So, shut it down.
There is also the MBA manager herd effect, where there's no way in hell you'll do anything other than follow the herd. No one will do online whatever until the majority are already doing it.
LOL human death back then, as now, was a bathtub distribution, like electronics parts. So most people died as little kids or elderly. Back then pretty much all preemies died as a general rule, for example, unlike now. All the "average" means is the ratio of how many died as a baby vs died as an old man. I'd guess that means about two kids died young for every 8 or so that died elderly, which seems to fit in with actual genealogical data I have on my ancestors...
The "real story" (in quotes because even pages of and pages of this stuff is still merely a summary of the real sources) can be read at
The exact number 72 was selected because in 1952 they wanted to give away the 1880 census information. Essentially declassify it by transfer from the BC to the NA. I think you can see the math there, 1952 - 72 = 1880 The exact 72 year range has stuck since then.
The legal BS behind the general range of "more than 70 years" was selected, as you'll read at the link above, because the census officers had to / have to take an oath to never release the data. Assuming someone lied on their application and got hired anyway at 10 (unlikely), and assuming that even in extenuating circumstances there are no govt employees of any sort over the age of 82 (unlikely), that means waiting 72 years means the oath takers successfully did their duty and while it was in their power, blah blah blah, they never released the data. Essentially its your usual govt corruption. Technically according to the rule of the law the folks who gathered your 2010 census data will Never permit the release of the 2010 census data.... Never... of course they'll be dead or retired eventually at which point it'll be released anyway in 2082, assuming the country doesn't self destruct first, at which time the oath takers will all be dead or retired.
Its legal bullshit because if you're convicted of a crime by a judge, just because a judge dies or retires doesn't mean you're a free man. Another example would be the priest who married me and my wife about a dozen years ago by the process of signing the marriage license recently died... that does not automagically make us single. Also from my military experience the death of a guy who classified a document doesn't automagically free that document.
If someone invents an immortality treatment, we'll have to come up with some new legal technicality bullshit. But for now 72 years works and is the tradition.
There's more to life than mere absence of pain. Presumably you get something for that $3500 like a better smile or better long term dental outlook. Kind of like how the best treatment for gunshot wounds in the civil war was limb amputation, but we've come a ways since then. I suppose when poor people come in with a peripheral gunshot wound, unless they're rich we'll give them a shot of whiskey, a bullet to bite on, and get out the bone saw because thats the cheapest which is all that matters and the pain eventually goes away, but it seems a bit inhumane according to the golden rule. I wouldn't treat my dog like that, so I'm not going to treat a poor minority person like that either.
My limited knowledge of dentistry is that a root canal IS a filling and cap, its just that a filling and cap aren't gonna work if the nerve is hopelessly infected so you have to dig out the infected root and otherwise fix it up. That brings us back to you have to trust the professionals instead of letting random/.ers and beancounters make the decisions. Putting me in charge of dental treatment programs is going to about as much of a disaster as asking my dentist to design a multi-watt microwave communications amplifier. Fundamentally no matter how ideal the theoretical results of competition and distrust, you eventually have to trust "somebody" "sometime".
Finally again I've not had a root canal, but I've had fillings done, and my wife's had a root canal, and as a guy who doesn't like The Chair, I would select a simple filling if at all possible based on what I've seen and heard. Two hours in the chair for a root canal at a dental surgeon or whatever its called vs 10 minutes at my local dentist for a filling? F root canals I'm getting a filling if its medically advisable.
And what 8 bit processor can address 16MB of RAM? An 8 bit processor can only address 64K at a time, unless they had some bank switching going on..
We had MMUs... very old concept you know. Back in 87 I had a 6809 box with 512K of ram and a MMU running OS-9 level 2 with a serial terminal hooked up to it and everything. Excellent basic, pretty good c compiler... It was 1993 before I had software and OS that technologically advanced on a IBM PC.
I only had 40 meg HD on my first SLS install back in 93. 20 megs should have been OK if you used something a little more... vintage, like SLS. SLS was only something like "two boxes of 3.5 floppy disks" in total, so a completely loaded install should have easily fit in 20... I don't remember the details.
See a/. post like this, is where the 6 digit and larger UIDs start talking smack about stuff the 5 digit UIDs actually did only two decades ago.
Probably a pentium 75, which was fairly popular and 16 megs sounds about right for the mid/late 90s.
In the early 90s I ran SLS on a 386dx/40 with 4 megs of ram, squeezing in another meg using 4 256K sims cut the kernel compile time by something like a factor of 5. Also it enabled the use of early x windows. Well, early on linux, it was "old stuff" in on the sunos (not yet solaris) boxes at school.
Incidentally, why are they running Ubuntu on this? They could have taken Minix, which was originally written for 16 bit CPUs, and tried compiling it on this one. That's the smallest Unix that would run on an 8-bit CPU.
The problem is the native processor has very little memory and storage... I ran minix on a 8-bit Tandy machine with 640K ram as an experiment and that has several orders of magnitude more storage both disk and ram than this processor.. As seen above he interfaced a simm as memory but that won't work natively, so he has to emulate...
Correction after correction and still wrong. You also need free choice which usually translates to free time.
For example, this is why health care is not even remotely a free market... after the car accident while unconscious... etc etc.
Look here is the full list for a free market:
1) Perfect knowledge. The opposite of the dr patient relationship where one side is a moron and the other is a magic wizard. 2) A demand curve exists and has a usable slope 3) Govt is not paid by the future winners to regulate the game such that the govt selects winners and losers before the market even tries to play it out. (This seems obvious, but so few people get it, especially in the USA) 4) Free will / free choice. Not the govt says you will buy this or go to jail, or while you're unconscious and/or in critical condition the doc will decide what to do.
Reasonably similar sized actors on both sites; closely tied to #4 above; no freedom of choice if its you as an individual vs a multinational government owning corporation.
Closely tied to #1 and #2 and #3 above, there's some control theory stuff that only another EE would understand but basically it boils down to try to critically damp, but whatever you do don't make a freaking oscillator or it'll all fly apart.
Much like "futures", there is only benefit to causing trouble and turmoil in the market.
Sounds like you don't even know what futures are, other than "they're bad", since they pretty much cause the opposite of what you're claiming. How about options?
In theory, companies that produce shitty service and charge too much for it go out of business.
In reality, the government metes out frequencies in a bidding process that generally shuts out competition.
The alternative would be to close down the FCC and let people broadcast whatever they want wherever they want at whatever power pleases them. There are probably people who think this is a good idea, and won't believe otherwise until Anonymous gets a hold of a transmitter.
A more realistic libertarian alternative would be to create an actual free market, not allow a handful of nationwide corporation to own the infrastructure.
1) Your corporation may only own towers and provide service to one metropolitan service area. 2) The government will only grant licenses to X-number providers per MSA. In return for this grant of public space and slightly limited competition, you are legally required by law to sign service contracts with anyone who asks for a contract. 3) The govt will regulate and F around with your tax rates to socially engineer it such that your service contracts will be standardized across the industry (different rates per location, of course, but identical format) and you'll get paid a fixed amount per month minus tower outright downtime, minus any time the backhaul network runs above 85% utilization, minus any time the RF side doesn't meet specs. The summary being you don't make any money unless you provide good service
This seems like a well regulated fair free market, genuine competition, etc. Needless to say it'll never happen because its not corrupt enough. It is vaguely based on pre-clearchannel broadcast radio regulation, which worked pretty well but was not corrupt enough, which led to our current previously-profitable wasteland.
So... whats the problem exactly... you paid taxes for that root canal, its a better option, you should have it.
Its like complaining that you aren't being given cheaper treatment options for cancer... lets see you could get chemo for $100K, or leechs for $100, or bloodletting for $50, how horrible that some people might not select leech treatment...
Shouldn't "bad healthcare" be allowed to go extinct?
Its like saying having a socialized fire department is wrong, because last time I was in a car accident (minor little fender bender) they dispatched an truck in case of gas or oil leaks since I was in a parking lot adjacent to the river (there were no leaks, as if it matters) and if I were the fire chief I would like to have preferred the opportunity to dispatch a free market cheaper pumper truck instead of a full ladder truck blah blah blah. Naah thats all armchair quarterbacking.
At least theoretically the docs, dentists, firemen, and cops are professionals who "do the most appropriate thing". If the fire chief thinks sending a ladder truck is correct, if my dentist thinks fillings are the wrong way to go, if my doctor no longer offers leech service, well, thats what we pay them for.
I don't get the whole "I wish I could have inferior service" meme. If we wasted less money on paper shuffling and huge profits, we could all afford the golden tier, instead of burning money to argue about who gets silver and bronze tier.
Really the only solution is to pay for health care service like we pay for fire and police service... outta the local property taxes. You wanna live 6 blocks from one of the top neonatal care units in the midwest like I do, well you're gonna pay, and that's the right way to do it. Some dude at corporate HQ in NYC, or in a unibomber shack remote site in MT where the only medical care for 200 miles is the first aid kit in his truck, shouldn't have to pay for my god tier local medical service. Churchill had some saying about the americans always do the right thing, but not until they try every other idiotic thing possible first, and that is going to be our path toward paying for medical care out of prop taxes.
This times a hundred. In the ER waiting room no one speaks english, the wait time is a fractional day unless you're a trauma case in that situation the wait time is zero (in my unfortunate multiple experiences).
And as for the grandparent post, the ER is not free. You'll still be waiting on the couch at the ER long after you'd already be home if you waited for urgent care to open at 6am.
My longest ever wait at urgent care was about 45 minutes, I suppose it depends on location.
I've never understood why there cannot be side by side ER and urgent care, and why urgent care cannot be 24 hours. ER rooms are full of exotic medical tech for trauma and heart attack patients. Urgent care is just a cheapie office. Think how incredibly convenient it would be to direct traffic... "Oh you think you have a broken rib, no you're having a heart attack, go to that desk. Oh you have a sore back and came to the ER... well step over to urgent care instead."
Why we'd want sawfish is interesting. So its got a lispy config file. So does my "awesome window manager". Well awesome uses Lua which is vaguely distantly scheme inspired. Doesn't sound like much difference. So I'd want to use "awesome" because... or "sawfish" because...
The standard/. car analogy is this is like a new car model press release that primarily mentions our new car has four tires, in contrast to the toyota camry which has 4 wheels. Um, OK, thats really interesting.
Its a social networking tool. Right there in the name... "social". Not "NSA nuclear missile super secret launch codes storage website". Not "your secret place to store passwords safe from your mom dot com". Its called "social networking". Privacy settings are a conceptual bug, and anachronism, like putting horse reins on an automobile or a ships rudder wheel on a starship to steer it. Its a lot like putting a morse code telegraph key on your cellphone, which would be kinda cool...
The standard/. car analogy is its like attending a NASCAR race and being surprised they're driving cars instead of riding unicorns.
It is exactly like these ladies willfully and intentionally attending a "upskirt photography convention" and then acting surprised at what the guys take pictures of.
When you spend someone elses money on someone else... you have no incentive to care about cost or benefit.
Ah but we're talking about medical care here, and only a microscopic minority of freaks enjoy pain.
As a thought experiment, put out a sign offering "free" root canals. Yes, yes for about a week you'll get a huge backlog of uninsured people with horrific dental pain who could not get any care before and now will joyously sign up for your free root canal. Once you work thru the backlog, the only people voluntarily going to your free-root-canal office are the same tiny fraction of people who really need one, and a couple of freaks with whip lashes and rope burns all other their bodies who do it for the pain. The price of a root canal seems to have very little correlation with the desire of the population for a root canal.
I'm thinking the market for prostate exams, mammograms, broken bone casts is kind of the same.
It's a completely different market from offering, say, free "adult" non-therapeutic massages, or free pr0n pixs, or free movies/music/tv, or addictive drugs, where demand is basically infinite.
Lets say you offered "free" atmospheric oxygen. Well, first I'd breathe deeply, for free, just because I can, but that would get boring real fast. Then I'd probably have a few bonfires in my backyard, since oxygen is free so why the heck not. Hell I'd probably get a pet cat that breathes "free" oxygen. But extremely rapidly the demand kinda levels off. I had "free" water and "free" heat at my bachelor pad apartment years ago, and there is no fundamental reason to waste it, so I didn't. How much water do you think I can drink per day, anyway?
Too simplistic. Force all hospitals and insurance companies into non-profit status and the execs will still demand claims be denied to maximize executive bonuses.
What could work is just categorically eliminating waste by changing the system.
Pass a law that no claims can be denied. Instant improvement in customer service. Probably more money is spent trying to catch fraud than is actually spent via fraud. In the adult sex services industry I could imagine high levels of fraud. I'm not seeing why it would exist in the prostate examination industry as that is not quite as much fun.
Billing too much of a PITA and waste of money? Single payer clearinghouse... you can select which "script reader in India service provider" you'd like to talk to, but the checks will all flow in and out of one address. Much like there is a universal clearinghouse for all paper checks, or just a handful of universal clearinghouses for credit reports.
Hmm I think we agree the majority controls. I'm going further and saying truth or falsehood is in the eye of the 51%. You're saying a false transaction believed by 51% is still false, I'm saying it defines truth, at least in-band. If you also had GPG signed web of trust receipts to compare with the in-band history... well thats cheating, kinda, because its out of band.
Slashdot Mirror
Endless loop of bonnie++
I suppose not knowing bonnie++ means its newbie sysadmin day here. So an endless loop script looks a heck of a lot like this:
rm -Rf /
Oh no wait just kidding about that one. I meant to type (hopefully no typos) :
#!/bin/bash
# the name of this file is endlessbonnietest.sh and it had chmod a+x endlessbonnietest.sh run on it
while [ 42 = 42 ]
do
bonnie++ "whole bunch of interesting b++ options go here without quotes obviously"
done
Obviously this works a hell of a lot better after running apt-get install bonnie++ and if for some godforsaken reason you are bashless, apt-get install bash
thats all folks!
You could do better than that with a Tandy color computer and BASIC09. for a BASIC, it was pretty nice..
AC has it correct. Even shorter summary : "I personally promise to never allow this specific line of data to ever be released. 72 years later I'm dead, so its public domain now"
Also I'm mystified by the GP hidden assumption that if its a govt law, it can't be corrupt. LOL
Unless they were doing a lot of extra work to match isotopes, most of the "bulk" radiation in the ocean from power generation is from burning coal.
There's really quite a bit of U in coal, and if you burn a gigatons of the stuff a ppm here and there starts to add up.
Wyse is a bit of a relic. What next? Zenith Data Systems? Kaypro?
I'd like Altair to make a tablet. No more of this glass sheet crap, give me about 50 toggle switches and blinking lights.
That was the latter years. The old ones were beyond awesome. A good rule of thumb for wyse terms was if you could not flash it, it was old enough to be fantastic, and if you could, its a turd. I have an old one on my desk for embedded work... Hey I've got the space, can always use another screen, etc. Kinda sucks for cut and paste, but perfect for watching logs and boot messages scroll by...
Database design and admin has a steep learning curve. A dedicated 11 year old couldn't do much worse than the average DB schemas I see every day. Starting up in a field where the bar is extremely low is probably a good strategy. My first thought is its probably a good field for a 11 year old kid to enter.
The loser schools in Nova Scotia have "upgraded" to Robo calls.
I live in the US and I hate those fucking things. If I get a robo call announcing the coordination meeting for open enrollment in the bilingual education program (note we are not a bilingual household so I could not possibly care less) then I hang up, the mother Fing robocaller calls me back within seconds and restarts the 5 minute story.
The "old fashioned" way of sending the kid home with a photocopy could have been handled in less than 5 seconds at my leisure by glancing at the sheet and throwing it in the trash, instead of invasively attacking my phone line on their schedule.
Why this fear mongering? Lawyers. The district is afraid that a parent will sue and so the entire educational environment is stifled in the community.
Its not just the extreme stuff they're worried about, but the little stuff.
Lets say the risk of lawsuit is 1 in X for communication where X is hopefully a very large number. The current legal budget is Y and frankly they can't afford it. You'd like to increase the level of communication by a factor of 100 "to improve educational blah". Whoops the risk of lawsuit just went up by to 100 * (1 in X) and the legal budget just increase to 100 * Y. Couldn't afford a legal budget of Y, how the hell are you going to afford a budget of 100 * Y? Doesn't matter how much the education level improves, you just can't afford the legal risk. So, shut it down.
There is also the MBA manager herd effect, where there's no way in hell you'll do anything other than follow the herd. No one will do online whatever until the majority are already doing it.
LOL human death back then, as now, was a bathtub distribution, like electronics parts. So most people died as little kids or elderly. Back then pretty much all preemies died as a general rule, for example, unlike now. All the "average" means is the ratio of how many died as a baby vs died as an old man. I'd guess that means about two kids died young for every 8 or so that died elderly, which seems to fit in with actual genealogical data I have on my ancestors...
The "real story" (in quotes because even pages of and pages of this stuff is still merely a summary of the real sources) can be read at
http://www.census.gov/history/www/reference/genealogy/the_72_year_rule.html
The exact number 72 was selected because in 1952 they wanted to give away the 1880 census information. Essentially declassify it by transfer from the BC to the NA. I think you can see the math there, 1952 - 72 = 1880 The exact 72 year range has stuck since then.
The legal BS behind the general range of "more than 70 years" was selected, as you'll read at the link above, because the census officers had to / have to take an oath to never release the data. Assuming someone lied on their application and got hired anyway at 10 (unlikely), and assuming that even in extenuating circumstances there are no govt employees of any sort over the age of 82 (unlikely), that means waiting 72 years means the oath takers successfully did their duty and while it was in their power, blah blah blah, they never released the data. Essentially its your usual govt corruption. Technically according to the rule of the law the folks who gathered your 2010 census data will Never permit the release of the 2010 census data .... Never ... of course they'll be dead or retired eventually at which point it'll be released anyway in 2082, assuming the country doesn't self destruct first, at which time the oath takers will all be dead or retired.
Its legal bullshit because if you're convicted of a crime by a judge, just because a judge dies or retires doesn't mean you're a free man. Another example would be the priest who married me and my wife about a dozen years ago by the process of signing the marriage license recently died... that does not automagically make us single. Also from my military experience the death of a guy who classified a document doesn't automagically free that document.
If someone invents an immortality treatment, we'll have to come up with some new legal technicality bullshit. But for now 72 years works and is the tradition.
There's more to life than mere absence of pain. Presumably you get something for that $3500 like a better smile or better long term dental outlook. Kind of like how the best treatment for gunshot wounds in the civil war was limb amputation, but we've come a ways since then. I suppose when poor people come in with a peripheral gunshot wound, unless they're rich we'll give them a shot of whiskey, a bullet to bite on, and get out the bone saw because thats the cheapest which is all that matters and the pain eventually goes away, but it seems a bit inhumane according to the golden rule. I wouldn't treat my dog like that, so I'm not going to treat a poor minority person like that either.
My limited knowledge of dentistry is that a root canal IS a filling and cap, its just that a filling and cap aren't gonna work if the nerve is hopelessly infected so you have to dig out the infected root and otherwise fix it up. That brings us back to you have to trust the professionals instead of letting random /.ers and beancounters make the decisions. Putting me in charge of dental treatment programs is going to about as much of a disaster as asking my dentist to design a multi-watt microwave communications amplifier. Fundamentally no matter how ideal the theoretical results of competition and distrust, you eventually have to trust "somebody" "sometime".
Finally again I've not had a root canal, but I've had fillings done, and my wife's had a root canal, and as a guy who doesn't like The Chair, I would select a simple filling if at all possible based on what I've seen and heard. Two hours in the chair for a root canal at a dental surgeon or whatever its called vs 10 minutes at my local dentist for a filling? F root canals I'm getting a filling if its medically advisable.
And what 8 bit processor can address 16MB of RAM? An 8 bit processor can only address 64K at a time, unless they had some bank switching going on..
We had MMUs ... very old concept you know. Back in 87 I had a 6809 box with 512K of ram and a MMU running OS-9 level 2 with a serial terminal hooked up to it and everything. Excellent basic, pretty good c compiler... It was 1993 before I had software and OS that technologically advanced on a IBM PC.
I only had 40 meg HD on my first SLS install back in 93. 20 megs should have been OK if you used something a little more... vintage, like SLS.
SLS was only something like "two boxes of 3.5 floppy disks" in total, so a completely loaded install should have easily fit in 20... I don't remember the details.
See a /. post like this, is where the 6 digit and larger UIDs start talking smack about stuff the 5 digit UIDs actually did only two decades ago.
Probably a pentium 75, which was fairly popular and 16 megs sounds about right for the mid/late 90s.
In the early 90s I ran SLS on a 386dx/40 with 4 megs of ram, squeezing in another meg using 4 256K sims cut the kernel compile time by something like a factor of 5. Also it enabled the use of early x windows. Well, early on linux, it was "old stuff" in on the sunos (not yet solaris) boxes at school.
Incidentally, why are they running Ubuntu on this? They could have taken Minix, which was originally written for 16 bit CPUs, and tried compiling it on this one. That's the smallest Unix that would run on an 8-bit CPU.
The problem is the native processor has very little memory and storage... I ran minix on a 8-bit Tandy machine with 640K ram as an experiment and that has several orders of magnitude more storage both disk and ram than this processor.. As seen above he interfaced a simm as memory but that won't work natively, so he has to emulate...
Correction after correction and still wrong. You also need free choice which usually translates to free time.
For example, this is why health care is not even remotely a free market... after the car accident while unconscious... etc etc.
Look here is the full list for a free market:
1) Perfect knowledge. The opposite of the dr patient relationship where one side is a moron and the other is a magic wizard.
2) A demand curve exists and has a usable slope
3) Govt is not paid by the future winners to regulate the game such that the govt selects winners and losers before the market even tries to play it out. (This seems obvious, but so few people get it, especially in the USA)
4) Free will / free choice. Not the govt says you will buy this or go to jail, or while you're unconscious and/or in critical condition the doc will decide what to do.
Reasonably similar sized actors on both sites; closely tied to #4 above; no freedom of choice if its you as an individual vs a multinational government owning corporation.
Closely tied to #1 and #2 and #3 above, there's some control theory stuff that only another EE would understand but basically it boils down to try to critically damp, but whatever you do don't make a freaking oscillator or it'll all fly apart.
Much like "futures", there is only benefit to causing trouble and turmoil in the market.
Sounds like you don't even know what futures are, other than "they're bad", since they pretty much cause the opposite of what you're claiming. How about options?
In theory, companies that produce shitty service and charge too much for it go out of business.
In reality, the government metes out frequencies in a bidding process that generally shuts out competition.
The alternative would be to close down the FCC and let people broadcast whatever they want wherever they want at whatever power pleases them. There are probably people who think this is a good idea, and won't believe otherwise until Anonymous gets a hold of a transmitter.
A more realistic libertarian alternative would be to create an actual free market, not allow a handful of nationwide corporation to own the infrastructure.
1) Your corporation may only own towers and provide service to one metropolitan service area.
2) The government will only grant licenses to X-number providers per MSA. In return for this grant of public space and slightly limited competition, you are legally required by law to sign service contracts with anyone who asks for a contract.
3) The govt will regulate and F around with your tax rates to socially engineer it such that your service contracts will be standardized across the industry (different rates per location, of course, but identical format) and you'll get paid a fixed amount per month minus tower outright downtime, minus any time the backhaul network runs above 85% utilization, minus any time the RF side doesn't meet specs. The summary being you don't make any money unless you provide good service
This seems like a well regulated fair free market, genuine competition, etc. Needless to say it'll never happen because its not corrupt enough. It is vaguely based on pre-clearchannel broadcast radio regulation, which worked pretty well but was not corrupt enough, which led to our current previously-profitable wasteland.
So... whats the problem exactly... you paid taxes for that root canal, its a better option, you should have it.
Its like complaining that you aren't being given cheaper treatment options for cancer... lets see you could get chemo for $100K, or leechs for $100, or bloodletting for $50, how horrible that some people might not select leech treatment...
Shouldn't "bad healthcare" be allowed to go extinct?
Its like saying having a socialized fire department is wrong, because last time I was in a car accident (minor little fender bender) they dispatched an truck in case of gas or oil leaks since I was in a parking lot adjacent to the river (there were no leaks, as if it matters) and if I were the fire chief I would like to have preferred the opportunity to dispatch a free market cheaper pumper truck instead of a full ladder truck blah blah blah. Naah thats all armchair quarterbacking.
At least theoretically the docs, dentists, firemen, and cops are professionals who "do the most appropriate thing". If the fire chief thinks sending a ladder truck is correct, if my dentist thinks fillings are the wrong way to go, if my doctor no longer offers leech service, well, thats what we pay them for.
I don't get the whole "I wish I could have inferior service" meme. If we wasted less money on paper shuffling and huge profits, we could all afford the golden tier, instead of burning money to argue about who gets silver and bronze tier.
Really the only solution is to pay for health care service like we pay for fire and police service... outta the local property taxes. You wanna live 6 blocks from one of the top neonatal care units in the midwest like I do, well you're gonna pay, and that's the right way to do it. Some dude at corporate HQ in NYC, or in a unibomber shack remote site in MT where the only medical care for 200 miles is the first aid kit in his truck, shouldn't have to pay for my god tier local medical service. Churchill had some saying about the americans always do the right thing, but not until they try every other idiotic thing possible first, and that is going to be our path toward paying for medical care out of prop taxes.
This times a hundred. In the ER waiting room no one speaks english, the wait time is a fractional day unless you're a trauma case in that situation the wait time is zero (in my unfortunate multiple experiences).
And as for the grandparent post, the ER is not free. You'll still be waiting on the couch at the ER long after you'd already be home if you waited for urgent care to open at 6am.
My longest ever wait at urgent care was about 45 minutes, I suppose it depends on location.
I've never understood why there cannot be side by side ER and urgent care, and why urgent care cannot be 24 hours. ER rooms are full of exotic medical tech for trauma and heart attack patients. Urgent care is just a cheapie office. Think how incredibly convenient it would be to direct traffic... "Oh you think you have a broken rib, no you're having a heart attack, go to that desk. Oh you have a sore back and came to the ER... well step over to urgent care instead."
Why we'd want sawfish is interesting. So its got a lispy config file. So does my "awesome window manager". Well awesome uses Lua which is vaguely distantly scheme inspired. Doesn't sound like much difference. So I'd want to use "awesome" because... or "sawfish" because...
The standard /. car analogy is this is like a new car model press release that primarily mentions our new car has four tires, in contrast to the toyota camry which has 4 wheels. Um, OK, thats really interesting.
chosen privacy settings
Its a social networking tool. Right there in the name... "social". Not "NSA nuclear missile super secret launch codes storage website". Not "your secret place to store passwords safe from your mom dot com". Its called "social networking". Privacy settings are a conceptual bug, and anachronism, like putting horse reins on an automobile or a ships rudder wheel on a starship to steer it. Its a lot like putting a morse code telegraph key on your cellphone, which would be kinda cool...
The standard /. car analogy is its like attending a NASCAR race and being surprised they're driving cars instead of riding unicorns.
It is exactly like these ladies willfully and intentionally attending a "upskirt photography convention" and then acting surprised at what the guys take pictures of.
Kinda missing the whole point, ladies...
When you spend someone elses money on someone else ... you have no incentive to care about cost or benefit.
Ah but we're talking about medical care here, and only a microscopic minority of freaks enjoy pain.
As a thought experiment, put out a sign offering "free" root canals. Yes, yes for about a week you'll get a huge backlog of uninsured people with horrific dental pain who could not get any care before and now will joyously sign up for your free root canal. Once you work thru the backlog, the only people voluntarily going to your free-root-canal office are the same tiny fraction of people who really need one, and a couple of freaks with whip lashes and rope burns all other their bodies who do it for the pain. The price of a root canal seems to have very little correlation with the desire of the population for a root canal.
I'm thinking the market for prostate exams, mammograms, broken bone casts is kind of the same.
It's a completely different market from offering, say, free "adult" non-therapeutic massages, or free pr0n pixs, or free movies/music/tv, or addictive drugs, where demand is basically infinite.
Lets say you offered "free" atmospheric oxygen. Well, first I'd breathe deeply, for free, just because I can, but that would get boring real fast. Then I'd probably have a few bonfires in my backyard, since oxygen is free so why the heck not. Hell I'd probably get a pet cat that breathes "free" oxygen. But extremely rapidly the demand kinda levels off. I had "free" water and "free" heat at my bachelor pad apartment years ago, and there is no fundamental reason to waste it, so I didn't. How much water do you think I can drink per day, anyway?
Too simplistic. Force all hospitals and insurance companies into non-profit status and the execs will still demand claims be denied to maximize executive bonuses.
What could work is just categorically eliminating waste by changing the system.
Pass a law that no claims can be denied. Instant improvement in customer service. Probably more money is spent trying to catch fraud than is actually spent via fraud. In the adult sex services industry I could imagine high levels of fraud. I'm not seeing why it would exist in the prostate examination industry as that is not quite as much fun.
Billing too much of a PITA and waste of money? Single payer clearinghouse... you can select which "script reader in India service provider" you'd like to talk to, but the checks will all flow in and out of one address. Much like there is a universal clearinghouse for all paper checks, or just a handful of universal clearinghouses for credit reports.
Hmm I think we agree the majority controls. I'm going further and saying truth or falsehood is in the eye of the 51%. You're saying a false transaction believed by 51% is still false, I'm saying it defines truth, at least in-band. If you also had GPG signed web of trust receipts to compare with the in-band history... well thats cheating, kinda, because its out of band.