In fact, my parents gave some thought to the idea of procreating and the factors involved went beyond survival of the fittest. For all I know cro-magnum also thought with their big head once in a while. Doesn't this in fact make me a product of intelligent design?
No, not in the sense of there being a "supreme being" that is guiding our "design". Yes, we now have the ability to genetically engineer things and that could be called "intelligent design", but it has nothing to do with "God". We have evolved enough to do this and I think we're making BIG mistakes.
Here's my thoughts on Canadian healthcare, specifically Ontario. I really don't know what it's like in the US. It's definately not perfect here and Doctors and Nurses are paid less than in the US. I'm sure that there are some unmotivated doctors, etc. but from what I've seen and heard about (I have a few Nurse friends), most of them really want to save lives and help people. We do manage to keep some top skilled people as well...
Basically, if you go into emergency with a minor injury that is non life-threatening, you will wait, expect a few hours. We have clinics for these type of cases that cost the taxpayers a lot less and are generally fast. I hurt my knee a couple years ago and was in and out of a clinic, with X-rays done, in about an hour. I likely would have been in emerge for 4 hours or longer depending on other patients.
If you are in serious trouble, they fix you first and worry about insurance after. In general, you will get prompt high quality care when you need it. If you show up at emergency having a heart attack or some other serious issue, you will be taken care of right away.
They're trying to save money and sometimes emergency departments won't take ambulances, forcing the patient to go to a more distant hospital (I'm thinking about the Toronto area). I have heard of a lot of cases where people waited what seems to be a long time for diagnostic tests like CAT scans, etc. I think they are trying to improve this and I also know of cases where it was very fast to get diagnostic tests done.
Good news is that everyone is covered and you generally get quality care. It can be difficult to get a family doctor, it just isn't as lucrative as other fields. Yes, sometimes you do wait, but mostly if you really need help, it's pretty fast.
I'm far from an expert, but have worked on a couple patents. The claims are all that really matter, the rest (as far as I can tell) is just an example of a possible embodiment of the "invention". The way this silly system works is that you make it as obfuscated as possible, but the claims are what matters. Also, you make as many claims as possible, because if one or all but one gets thrown out, part of the patent is still valid. So, you want lots of claims, even if half of them are bullshit. The patent system in the US (I think Canada too) is fooked...
I think that this is a normal standard statement.
Well, I read the article. He didn't overtly support MS's campaign, but did mention the slogan a LOT of times in a relatively short article, same thing for marketing isn't it?
Personally, "blog", "blogger", "blogosphere" and the rest are definataly the most annoying new "words" that the idiot marketers have come up with regarding the Internet.
A "blogger" is not likely a journalist. If they can make some coin from MS, go for it.
The mainstream magazines and other supposedly neutral media are for sale. We've bought "awards" and good articles lots of times. They are there to make money, if someone can make money "blogging" (I cringe to use that word;-), go for it.
If you're smart, you'll take all written opinions with a grain of salt. Everyone has their agenda... Most "journalists" want to keep their job, thay seem to be especially bad in the computer (I was going to say "IT", my second most hated term) world.
Blog and all of its derivitives are the stupidest and most annoying new "words".
I agree, podcast is pretty dumb too.
This Internet thing is great, but a lot of dumb people are on it now and they're making up words to annoy the rest of us. Seriously, I can't even read certain sites and supposedly professional journalists.
Sitefinder's a great idea for dumb users.
I think it used to be called AOL...
Verispam abused their monopoly and should be replaced by a neutral non-profit company. If we want "site finder", redirections should be evenly distributed to everyone selling domins.
Here's what I sent to ICANN:
I would like to know who gave Verisign the right to have all of the unpaid
for domain name space to place their advertisements. I work for a company
who supports two large accredited domain registrars and neither they, nor we
get this opportunity. If Verisign is going to do this, in all fairness, the
DNS mapping should be shared, so that we can all have a piece of the free ads.
Maybe we can get all the mispelt addresses starting with 'c'?
This appears to be flagrant abuse of the DNS and the domain registration
system. Maybe it's time that some uncorrupt people take over the domain system
for the Internet.
This will also mess up a simple, yet effective control for some spam. If an
address doesn't map to an IP, it would be rejected. I guess now, we'll all
have to completely blackhole that IP address on mail systems and routers.
Please do something about this abuse of power. It's time to implement a fairer
system, not the silly monopolistic and corrupt one we have now.
I work for a large hosting company. We have a lot of customers who have monitoring companies monitor their websites (we actually use some). We obviously monitor our services ourselves, but it is not always objective doing this.
Having said that, monitoring once per second is *stupid*, generally 5 minutes is appropriate and we monitor some things internally every 60 seconds.
We charge for bandwidth and disk usage (including logs), so if people want to monitor every second, go for it, your credit card will get dinged next month.
For a smaller provider, I can see this being a problem, I would blackhole the IP. It is a DOS attack and I'm pretty sure you would have the legal right to do that. You do have a provision in your policies that you can take necessary action to protect your network, right? We do and will use it when necessary. Right after 9/11, we had a *very* popular and large image on our servers (the "eagle", if anyone has seen it). We "chmod 0"'d it and called the customer. They didn't realize what happened (getting so many hits), understood (once we explained bandwidth charges), and where happy we did it.
Monitoring every 5 minutes is reasonable and will catch almost all outages.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not in the sense of there being a "supreme being" that is guiding our "design". Yes, we now have the ability to genetically engineer things and that could be called "intelligent design", but it has nothing to do with "God". We have evolved enough to do this and I think we're making BIG mistakes.
Here's my thoughts on Canadian healthcare, specifically Ontario. I really don't know what it's like in the US. It's definately not perfect here and Doctors and Nurses are paid less than in the US. I'm sure that there are some unmotivated doctors, etc. but from what I've seen and heard about (I have a few Nurse friends), most of them really want to save lives and help people. We do manage to keep some top skilled people as well...
Basically, if you go into emergency with a minor injury that is non life-threatening, you will wait, expect a few hours. We have clinics for these type of cases that cost the taxpayers a lot less and are generally fast. I hurt my knee a couple years ago and was in and out of a clinic, with X-rays done, in about an hour. I likely would have been in emerge for 4 hours or longer depending on other patients.
If you are in serious trouble, they fix you first and worry about insurance after. In general, you will get prompt high quality care when you need it. If you show up at emergency having a heart attack or some other serious issue, you will be taken care of right away.
They're trying to save money and sometimes emergency departments won't take ambulances, forcing the patient to go to a more distant hospital (I'm thinking about the Toronto area). I have heard of a lot of cases where people waited what seems to be a long time for diagnostic tests like CAT scans, etc. I think they are trying to improve this and I also know of cases where it was very fast to get diagnostic tests done.
Good news is that everyone is covered and you generally get quality care. It can be difficult to get a family doctor, it just isn't as lucrative as other fields. Yes, sometimes you do wait, but mostly if you really need help, it's pretty fast.
I'm far from an expert, but have worked on a couple patents. The claims are all that really matter, the rest (as far as I can tell) is just an example of a possible embodiment of the "invention". The way this silly system works is that you make it as obfuscated as possible, but the claims are what matters. Also, you make as many claims as possible, because if one or all but one gets thrown out, part of the patent is still valid. So, you want lots of claims, even if half of them are bullshit. The patent system in the US (I think Canada too) is fooked... I think that this is a normal standard statement.
That's exactly what I thought ;-)
600mb??? Six hundred millibits? That's not much space.
Personally, "blog", "blogger", "blogosphere" and the rest are definataly the most annoying new "words" that the idiot marketers have come up with regarding the Internet.
A "blogger" is not likely a journalist. If they can make some coin from MS, go for it.
The mainstream magazines and other supposedly neutral media are for sale. We've bought "awards" and good articles lots of times. They are there to make money, if someone can make money "blogging" (I cringe to use that word ;-), go for it.
If you're smart, you'll take all written opinions with a grain of salt. Everyone has their agenda... Most "journalists" want to keep their job, thay seem to be especially bad in the computer (I was going to say "IT", my second most hated term) world.
Blog and all of its derivitives are the stupidest and most annoying new "words". I agree, podcast is pretty dumb too. This Internet thing is great, but a lot of dumb people are on it now and they're making up words to annoy the rest of us. Seriously, I can't even read certain sites and supposedly professional journalists.
Sitefinder's a great idea for dumb users. I think it used to be called AOL... Verispam abused their monopoly and should be replaced by a neutral non-profit company. If we want "site finder", redirections should be evenly distributed to everyone selling domins.
It's the new MS@stake now, yeah we're really gonna trust them in bugtraq...
Here's what I sent to ICANN: I would like to know who gave Verisign the right to have all of the unpaid for domain name space to place their advertisements. I work for a company who supports two large accredited domain registrars and neither they, nor we get this opportunity. If Verisign is going to do this, in all fairness, the DNS mapping should be shared, so that we can all have a piece of the free ads. Maybe we can get all the mispelt addresses starting with 'c'? This appears to be flagrant abuse of the DNS and the domain registration system. Maybe it's time that some uncorrupt people take over the domain system for the Internet. This will also mess up a simple, yet effective control for some spam. If an address doesn't map to an IP, it would be rejected. I guess now, we'll all have to completely blackhole that IP address on mail systems and routers. Please do something about this abuse of power. It's time to implement a fairer system, not the silly monopolistic and corrupt one we have now.
I work for a large hosting company. We have a lot of customers who have monitoring companies monitor their websites (we actually use some). We obviously monitor our services ourselves, but it is not always objective doing this. Having said that, monitoring once per second is *stupid*, generally 5 minutes is appropriate and we monitor some things internally every 60 seconds. We charge for bandwidth and disk usage (including logs), so if people want to monitor every second, go for it, your credit card will get dinged next month. For a smaller provider, I can see this being a problem, I would blackhole the IP. It is a DOS attack and I'm pretty sure you would have the legal right to do that. You do have a provision in your policies that you can take necessary action to protect your network, right? We do and will use it when necessary. Right after 9/11, we had a *very* popular and large image on our servers (the "eagle", if anyone has seen it). We "chmod 0"'d it and called the customer. They didn't realize what happened (getting so many hits), understood (once we explained bandwidth charges), and where happy we did it. Monitoring every 5 minutes is reasonable and will catch almost all outages.