It might actually be nice to have an election won on the back of how bright your geeks are, rather than just how much money you have.
I would impose the condition that you are only allowed to use geeks that support your politics though. Rather than permitting outsourcing, I want to see this work being done by card-carrying members of your political party.
We had plans to do so ; for a while the documents were publicly available from the Department of Transport website (they may still be there, linked below).
They were dressed up as plans to implement "road pricing" - a scheme whereby you are charged a differential toll rate for driving on certain "congested" roads at peak times, which allegedly would create incentive for you to drive at different times, or via different routes, thus reducing congestion.
The implementation was to be a small black box with a GPS locator and a GPRS modem, which would log and upload your movements to the DoT. The estimated cost was £100 a unit ; even if you accept this optimistic number, a back-of-the-napkin calculation tells you that it would be MUCH cheaper to mandate an active RFID tag in the number plate (on the order of £10, rather than 100), and fit induction loops on these roads that are deemed "congested" for tolling purposes - a sort of universal SpeedPass.
So wielding Occam's Razor, the plan was to install and operate a tracking device in every vehicle in the country (it also mentioned linking up with a European system, so this was presumably a pan-European initiative), and since their stated aim could be achieved via much cheaper means, you have to assume that the real aim was indeed to provide the capacity to track everyone.
But in the event of an accident (which you acknowledge is inevitable because the bell curve means that there are always idiots on the road), speed is the biggest contributor to the damage it produces.
E = 1/2 mv^2
So energy scales with the square of velocity, which means more fatalities as speeds increase.
I would absolutely pay for an internet tax, as long as any service receiving aid from that government tax coffer was forced to provide network neutrality by law.
As it stands, what this is actually earmarked to pay for is probably the "lawful intercept" features that government want to add to everyone's internet.
Nerve conduction isn't a purely electrical process ; it's a rolling wave of membrane depolarisation, has a biochemical element, and is much slower than an electrical impulse through a copper wire.
Couple that with the fact that the brain itself has no ability to sense pain, and the.50 cal round to the head method of execution probably is painless. Soldiers used to commit suicide by holding a grenade to their head and that's probably painless too.
It could well be physical shock ; I've changed from spinning disks in a 2.5" caddy to an SSD. Some of the problems I had were to do with cheap-assed caddies with lousy power electronics that would fail. But I had three disks die in about a year ; I changed to SSD and it's been going strong ever since.
These disks were only transported twice a day ; to work, and then home. But they inevitably got dropped sooner sorter or later.
Actually, a lot less than that. If you watch Sicko, the healthcare industry contributions to politicians are all a lot lower than that - even for the President it was less than $1M ; and this is for an industry with a lot more money and power than the RIAA.
For $5M you could probably get yourself a whole committee.
The only thing I really agree with there is that Apple products are inferior - but that stands alone as having many degrees of freedom as to the criteria on which you are judging it ; aka "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view"
I find Apple products to be inferior overall because they don't meet my needs in certain areas. I'm happy to concede that their hardware has some nice features, but things like the non-standard keyboard layouts, total unavailability of matt screen coatings on laptops, etc, bug the living crap out of me. I'd love to see a laptop with a metal unibody construction and a magsafe connector that had a decent keyboard (chiclet keys, yuch) with a standard layout. As it is, the Apple keyboard layout moves keys away from places that my fingers remember instinctively, and has craptastic keycaps and switches. The OS may well be very nice, but the majority of the time I'm in a terminal or a cross-platform IDE like Eclipse, for which OS/X which doesn't buy me any advantages.
Also I don't get why unvaccinated students are putting other students at risk.
A couple of reasons ;
i) Vaccination isn't a perfect shield against disease.
If vaccination gives you 90% immunity, and you spray a whole school with the disease, 10% of the kids will get it. But happily, diseases don't spread like that - they need human hosts. If the only person you come into contact with is your teacher, and they get the disease, you'll be exposed. But if he's vaccinated too, your chances of getting it just went down to 1%, because his chance of contracting it is lower. Herd immunity matters because it reduces the number of carriers, which decreases the risk that anyone, vaccinated or otherwise, will even contact the disease, let alone contract it.
ii) The more hosts a disease has, the more it will mutate.
Viruses reproduce at a prodigous rate under great selection pressure - they mutate quickly. Chances are, that one will develop a mutation that makes the current vaccines less effective, or ineffective. The more chances the virus has to reproduce, the more likely this will happen. Therefore unvaccinated folks are doing the equivalent of putting a sign in their lot saying "Terrorists welcome! Come experiment here to discover new ways to kill decadent infidels!"
He didn't need to be paid, the mind control nanobots they put in the vaccines made him do it.
Alternate hypothesis ; anti-vaxxers are actually a shadowy conspiracy of the radical Green movement who want the human race thinning out a bit to lower our impact on Mother Earth.
These diseases cause not just death, but maiming and suffering on a grand scale when allowed to spread unchecked. Not being vaccinated is on a par with smoking - it's a stupid and bad for not just your health but for the health of those around you.
Vaccination must have been very successful for us to even HAVE an anti vaccination movement, because the memory of the horrors of childhood diseases makes anyone bearing it a lifeline proponent of getting your shots...
More evidence of this ; one of our prominent politicians, Michael Portillo, did a BBC documentary where he researched for the perfect method of execution - something quick and humane. While I don't agree with the death penalty, if you have to have it, you may as well be humane about it.
The current methods used by America seem barbaric - burning someone to death with electricity, or filling their veins with painful toxic chemicals.
He came to the conclusion that the method used by slaughterhouses for killing pigs, nitrogen asphyxiation, was cheap, quick, and humane. He even went so far as to experience the effects of asphyxiation via some Air Force test chambers.
All the Americans (currently involved in the Death Row process) that he spoke to were vehemently opposed to it, on the grounds that they couldn't accept an execution method that invokes mild euphoria in the subject before they expire.
Despite the Constitution forbidding "cruel and unusual" punishments, they see nothing wrong with strapping someone into something that wouldn't be out of place in a severe BDSM fetish and then frying them to death with electricity. Or gassing them with cyanide, a deeply unpleasant experience. Given the opportunity to remove all that nastiness from the proceedings, they resist - revealing that their mentality is not about justice, but about revenge.
Ask yourself why all this "dicking around with the insurance company arguing about whether illness X or medication Y are covered on a particular plan, for a particular patient, during a particular phase of the moon, etc." got there in the first place. Any answers?
Because insurance companies make more money when they fail to provide the service that they offer. Therefore they have an incentive to make it as hard as possible to make a successful claim. They employ personnel who are specifically tasked with denying claims, both before payout, and after. They make their systems as byzantine and difficult as possible to this end. They "dilute the risk pool" as much as possible by excluding people for pre-existing conditions.
Some might suspect that the incredible proliferation of codes in systems like ICD-10 is not to provide a more accurate way to classify illnesses, but instead to make it easier to misfile the paperwork. - "Oh, I'm sorry, you used the code for *burrito* induced flatulence when it was a chimichenga, your claim is denied".
All of this produces a system where a vast amount of effort is diverted into wrangling with insurance companies. Labour is one of the big two costs of healthcare (the other being drugs). Anything that introduces more labour makes things disproportionately more expensive.
Contrast this to the situation in the UK, where we have a National Health Service - because there is a single payer, practitioners all pretty much know what is and what is not "covered" in their field, rather than there being different rules for each patient depending on their policy. No-one has to contact the insurer to see whether a drug is covered - there is a single reference manual for drug prescription in the UK, which covers the availability, usage, dosage, and even lists the cost price for reference. Because everyone is covered, you don't have to check their policy. Instead of the payer having an incentive to deny people care for whatever reason they can think of, practitioners have incentives to improve their patients health - they get paid per vaccination, they get paid for lowering the blood pressure of their patients, getting them to give up smoking, etc.
And we all get taxed right up the ass for this, right? We spend less than half, per capita, what America does on publicly funded healthcare. We only pay for our "National Insurance" when we are working. And we have universal coverage, with very similar healthcare outcomes to the US. The US spending covers less than a third of your population.
Our current incumbent Conservative government are doing their best to destroy this state of affairs because their corporate cronies obviously weep into their pillows at night at the wasted profit opportunity. As a nation, most of us have forgotten what it was like to wonder whether you could afford the doctor this month. Concepts like being bankrupted and forced to live in your daughters basement eating Ramen because your husband died and the medical bills were really expensive, are alien to us.
Yes, as a "commons" there are tragedies in the NHS. There are waiting lists for non-essential care. A hospital stay in the UK is probably not the comfortable hotel experience it is in the US. But none of us (apart from very rich people distanced far from the madding crowd) would be without it.
There are specific keyboards for hospital settings. Things like keyboards covered entirely in a flat membrane of silicone rubber, with two conductive sensors to detect wiping, and firmware that refuses to let you type unless you wipe it every ten minutes or so.
Security is all about raising the cost of intrusion beyond the value of intrusion ; the cost of intrusion for these locks will decrease rapidly as the knowledge of how to build the lock-cracker spreads. At first it will only be people with the time to reproduce the hack ; then when one of these is unscrupulous enough to spread this information, it will be enough to be merely proficient with a computer and a soldering iron. Then people will start selling them and anyone who just knows it's possible will be able to acquire the means to do it, and the rate of it actually being used to steal from hotel rooms will skyrocket.
I have a medical degree, but I only practised for about 18 months. I knew that I hated the profession during my studies, but by then I was already in the hole for 4 years so I thought I'd tough it out and maybe things would get better.
I don't have a computer science degree but I like to think that I'm a better programmer than I was a doctor. I'm definitely a better programmer than the average doctor-who-now-programs, having seen the source code of quite a few of them. I have selection bias though, I work for a government program for healthcare IT.
I don't think the kind of guy you get making this transition is the kind of guy who finds coding to be "tedium" though. As you note, doctors are busy enough with their practise. It takes a special kind of bee in your bonnet to divert your attention to programming on top of that.
You fail to explain how this will reduce the cost of insurance.
If 75% of your costs are dicking around with the insurance company arguing about whether illness X or medication Y are covered on a particular plan, for a particular patient, during a particular phase of the moon, etc., then you could spend 3 times more on everything else, and still come out of it spending less, if you had a single payer system where you just send them the bill (the charges being determined by the payer), and they pay it.
LCP is a codification of care practices from the hospice movement. A hospice is arguably one of the more dignified and comfortable places to die, but they are heavily oversubscribed (which puts the lie to the notion that they are something that people want to avoid). So LCP provides a training manual for normal hospital wards to attempt to approach this level of service.
Whereas in the States, the patient would approach the end of their life not because they or their relatives have accepted it, but because their insurance can't cover the heroic measures being deployed to prolong their suffering^W life any more. The minds of the patient and their families will not just be full of grief, but also the anxiety of how they are going to pay the hospital bills, and what kind of hardship that will mean going forward.
Would you rather that decisions about your healthcare were made by a single individual? Or didn't benefit from the advice of experts in the field? "Death Panel" is just trolling by the people who'd rather keep healthcare in private hands ; and as a multi-billion dollar industry with a 15% profit margin on peoples suffering, who can blame them?
That's Windows Update, which frequently reboots before the desktop shows in order to replace system components. Because it knows nothing of setting the default OS entry in Grub, you reboot into Linux if it's your default.
You can change the menu to default to whatever was booted last with the savedefault command.
You do need admin rights to edit it - it's nested in the system folders, on both Windows and Unix.
It does this for Facebook - you could argue that was reasonable, because it prevents malicious software redirecting you and phishing your Facebook password.
But it also does this for Doubleclick, which sounds more like someone sucking up to their corporate partners.
I'm willing to be that he's including in his numbers all the people who bought editions of the game that came with the DLC included.
For DAO, these included a home base with a storage chest. I mean, FFS, a home base with a storage facility has been part of the RPG milieu for as long as I can remember (in games where you have a limited inventory capacity). You have sufficient camp followers with wagons in DAO to justify a chest being part of your camp, so it's not done for narrative reasons - it's done to exploit the well-known hoarding tendencies of RPG players.
I think the main reason he's doing it is because Microsoft became really boring.
Operating Systems? Meh. Office? Meh.
What, in the world of pure software, is going to make a real difference in peoples lives (not just a marginal difference)? Or a real difference to his bank balance?
if I was even 1 / 10,000th as rich as Bill Gates (a respectable $6,000,000 dollars) I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to gild my corporate cage a bit more ; I'd be working on problems that interest me.
Slashdot Mirror
It might actually be nice to have an election won on the back of how bright your geeks are, rather than just how much money you have.
I would impose the condition that you are only allowed to use geeks that support your politics though. Rather than permitting outsourcing, I want to see this work being done by card-carrying members of your political party.
We had plans to do so ; for a while the documents were publicly available from the Department of Transport website (they may still be there, linked below).
They were dressed up as plans to implement "road pricing" - a scheme whereby you are charged a differential toll rate for driving on certain "congested" roads at peak times, which allegedly would create incentive for you to drive at different times, or via different routes, thus reducing congestion.
The implementation was to be a small black box with a GPS locator and a GPRS modem, which would log and upload your movements to the DoT. The estimated cost was £100 a unit ; even if you accept this optimistic number, a back-of-the-napkin calculation tells you that it would be MUCH cheaper to mandate an active RFID tag in the number plate (on the order of £10, rather than 100), and fit induction loops on these roads that are deemed "congested" for tolling purposes - a sort of universal SpeedPass.
So wielding Occam's Razor, the plan was to install and operate a tracking device in every vehicle in the country (it also mentioned linking up with a European system, so this was presumably a pan-European initiative), and since their stated aim could be achieved via much cheaper means, you have to assume that the real aim was indeed to provide the capacity to track everyone.
But in the event of an accident (which you acknowledge is inevitable because the bell curve means that there are always idiots on the road), speed is the biggest contributor to the damage it produces.
E = 1/2 mv^2
So energy scales with the square of velocity, which means more fatalities as speeds increase.
They sell them. Samsung makes the Galaxy Nexus ; Asus makes the Nexus 7.
I would absolutely pay for an internet tax, as long as any service receiving aid from that government tax coffer was forced to provide network neutrality by law.
As it stands, what this is actually earmarked to pay for is probably the "lawful intercept" features that government want to add to everyone's internet.
Nerve conduction isn't a purely electrical process ; it's a rolling wave of membrane depolarisation, has a biochemical element, and is much slower than an electrical impulse through a copper wire.
Couple that with the fact that the brain itself has no ability to sense pain, and the .50 cal round to the head method of execution probably is painless. Soldiers used to commit suicide by holding a grenade to their head and that's probably painless too.
But it is definitely gross.
It could well be physical shock ; I've changed from spinning disks in a 2.5" caddy to an SSD. Some of the problems I had were to do with cheap-assed caddies with lousy power electronics that would fail. But I had three disks die in about a year ; I changed to SSD and it's been going strong ever since.
These disks were only transported twice a day ; to work, and then home. But they inevitably got dropped sooner sorter or later.
Actually, a lot less than that. If you watch Sicko, the healthcare industry contributions to politicians are all a lot lower than that - even for the President it was less than $1M ; and this is for an industry with a lot more money and power than the RIAA.
For $5M you could probably get yourself a whole committee.
The most commonly used agent in the gas chamber is hydrogen cyanide. Did you do any amount of research?
The only thing I really agree with there is that Apple products are inferior - but that stands alone as having many degrees of freedom as to the criteria on which you are judging it ; aka "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view"
I find Apple products to be inferior overall because they don't meet my needs in certain areas. I'm happy to concede that their hardware has some nice features, but things like the non-standard keyboard layouts, total unavailability of matt screen coatings on laptops, etc, bug the living crap out of me. I'd love to see a laptop with a metal unibody construction and a magsafe connector that had a decent keyboard (chiclet keys, yuch) with a standard layout. As it is, the Apple keyboard layout moves keys away from places that my fingers remember instinctively, and has craptastic keycaps and switches. The OS may well be very nice, but the majority of the time I'm in a terminal or a cross-platform IDE like Eclipse, for which OS/X which doesn't buy me any advantages.
Also I don't get why unvaccinated students are putting other students at risk.
A couple of reasons ;
i) Vaccination isn't a perfect shield against disease.
If vaccination gives you 90% immunity, and you spray a whole school with the disease, 10% of the kids will get it. But happily, diseases don't spread like that - they need human hosts. If the only person you come into contact with is your teacher, and they get the disease, you'll be exposed. But if he's vaccinated too, your chances of getting it just went down to 1%, because his chance of contracting it is lower. Herd immunity matters because it reduces the number of carriers, which decreases the risk that anyone, vaccinated or otherwise, will even contact the disease, let alone contract it.
ii) The more hosts a disease has, the more it will mutate.
Viruses reproduce at a prodigous rate under great selection pressure - they mutate quickly. Chances are, that one will develop a mutation that makes the current vaccines less effective, or ineffective. The more chances the virus has to reproduce, the more likely this will happen. Therefore unvaccinated folks are doing the equivalent of putting a sign in their lot saying "Terrorists welcome! Come experiment here to discover new ways to kill decadent infidels!"
It's implicit in the definition of "society". If you don't participate, you're just a parasite clinging to the side.
He didn't need to be paid, the mind control nanobots they put in the vaccines made him do it.
Alternate hypothesis ; anti-vaxxers are actually a shadowy conspiracy of the radical Green movement who want the human race thinning out a bit to lower our impact on Mother Earth.
These diseases cause not just death, but maiming and suffering on a grand scale when allowed to spread unchecked. Not being vaccinated is on a par with smoking - it's a stupid and bad for not just your health but for the health of those around you.
Vaccination must have been very successful for us to even HAVE an anti vaccination movement, because the memory of the horrors of childhood diseases makes anyone bearing it a lifeline proponent of getting your shots...
More evidence of this ; one of our prominent politicians, Michael Portillo, did a BBC documentary where he researched for the perfect method of execution - something quick and humane. While I don't agree with the death penalty, if you have to have it, you may as well be humane about it.
The current methods used by America seem barbaric - burning someone to death with electricity, or filling their veins with painful toxic chemicals.
He came to the conclusion that the method used by slaughterhouses for killing pigs, nitrogen asphyxiation, was cheap, quick, and humane. He even went so far as to experience the effects of asphyxiation via some Air Force test chambers.
All the Americans (currently involved in the Death Row process) that he spoke to were vehemently opposed to it, on the grounds that they couldn't accept an execution method that invokes mild euphoria in the subject before they expire.
Despite the Constitution forbidding "cruel and unusual" punishments, they see nothing wrong with strapping someone into something that wouldn't be out of place in a severe BDSM fetish and then frying them to death with electricity. Or gassing them with cyanide, a deeply unpleasant experience. Given the opportunity to remove all that nastiness from the proceedings, they resist - revealing that their mentality is not about justice, but about revenge.
Ask yourself why all this "dicking around with the insurance company arguing about whether illness X or medication Y are covered on a particular plan, for a particular patient, during a particular phase of the moon, etc." got there in the first place. Any answers?
TLDR : Nixon approves the creation of HMOs
Because insurance companies make more money when they fail to provide the service that they offer. Therefore they have an incentive to make it as hard as possible to make a successful claim. They employ personnel who are specifically tasked with denying claims, both before payout, and after. They make their systems as byzantine and difficult as possible to this end. They "dilute the risk pool" as much as possible by excluding people for pre-existing conditions.
Some might suspect that the incredible proliferation of codes in systems like ICD-10 is not to provide a more accurate way to classify illnesses, but instead to make it easier to misfile the paperwork. - "Oh, I'm sorry, you used the code for *burrito* induced flatulence when it was a chimichenga, your claim is denied".
All of this produces a system where a vast amount of effort is diverted into wrangling with insurance companies. Labour is one of the big two costs of healthcare (the other being drugs). Anything that introduces more labour makes things disproportionately more expensive.
Contrast this to the situation in the UK, where we have a National Health Service - because there is a single payer, practitioners all pretty much know what is and what is not "covered" in their field, rather than there being different rules for each patient depending on their policy. No-one has to contact the insurer to see whether a drug is covered - there is a single reference manual for drug prescription in the UK, which covers the availability, usage, dosage, and even lists the cost price for reference. Because everyone is covered, you don't have to check their policy. Instead of the payer having an incentive to deny people care for whatever reason they can think of, practitioners have incentives to improve their patients health - they get paid per vaccination, they get paid for lowering the blood pressure of their patients, getting them to give up smoking, etc.
And we all get taxed right up the ass for this, right? We spend less than half, per capita, what America does on publicly funded healthcare. We only pay for our "National Insurance" when we are working. And we have universal coverage, with very similar healthcare outcomes to the US. The US spending covers less than a third of your population.
Our current incumbent Conservative government are doing their best to destroy this state of affairs because their corporate cronies obviously weep into their pillows at night at the wasted profit opportunity. As a nation, most of us have forgotten what it was like to wonder whether you could afford the doctor this month. Concepts like being bankrupted and forced to live in your daughters basement eating Ramen because your husband died and the medical bills were really expensive, are alien to us.
Yes, as a "commons" there are tragedies in the NHS. There are waiting lists for non-essential care. A hospital stay in the UK is probably not the comfortable hotel experience it is in the US. But none of us (apart from very rich people distanced far from the madding crowd) would be without it.
There are specific keyboards for hospital settings. Things like keyboards covered entirely in a flat membrane of silicone rubber, with two conductive sensors to detect wiping, and firmware that refuses to let you type unless you wipe it every ten minutes or so.
Security is all about raising the cost of intrusion beyond the value of intrusion ; the cost of intrusion for these locks will decrease rapidly as the knowledge of how to build the lock-cracker spreads. At first it will only be people with the time to reproduce the hack ; then when one of these is unscrupulous enough to spread this information, it will be enough to be merely proficient with a computer and a soldering iron. Then people will start selling them and anyone who just knows it's possible will be able to acquire the means to do it, and the rate of it actually being used to steal from hotel rooms will skyrocket.
I have a medical degree, but I only practised for about 18 months. I knew that I hated the profession during my studies, but by then I was already in the hole for 4 years so I thought I'd tough it out and maybe things would get better.
I don't have a computer science degree but I like to think that I'm a better programmer than I was a doctor. I'm definitely a better programmer than the average doctor-who-now-programs, having seen the source code of quite a few of them. I have selection bias though, I work for a government program for healthcare IT.
I don't think the kind of guy you get making this transition is the kind of guy who finds coding to be "tedium" though. As you note, doctors are busy enough with their practise. It takes a special kind of bee in your bonnet to divert your attention to programming on top of that.
You fail to explain how this will reduce the cost of insurance.
If 75% of your costs are dicking around with the insurance company arguing about whether illness X or medication Y are covered on a particular plan, for a particular patient, during a particular phase of the moon, etc., then you could spend 3 times more on everything else, and still come out of it spending less, if you had a single payer system where you just send them the bill (the charges being determined by the payer), and they pay it.
LCP is a codification of care practices from the hospice movement. A hospice is arguably one of the more dignified and comfortable places to die, but they are heavily oversubscribed (which puts the lie to the notion that they are something that people want to avoid). So LCP provides a training manual for normal hospital wards to attempt to approach this level of service.
Whereas in the States, the patient would approach the end of their life not because they or their relatives have accepted it, but because their insurance can't cover the heroic measures being deployed to prolong their suffering^W life any more. The minds of the patient and their families will not just be full of grief, but also the anxiety of how they are going to pay the hospital bills, and what kind of hardship that will mean going forward.
Would you rather that decisions about your healthcare were made by a single individual? Or didn't benefit from the advice of experts in the field? "Death Panel" is just trolling by the people who'd rather keep healthcare in private hands ; and as a multi-billion dollar industry with a 15% profit margin on peoples suffering, who can blame them?
More like the Cherenkov radiation blue screen of death...
That's Windows Update, which frequently reboots before the desktop shows in order to replace system components. Because it knows nothing of setting the default OS entry in Grub, you reboot into Linux if it's your default.
You can change the menu to default to whatever was booted last with the savedefault command.
You do need admin rights to edit it - it's nested in the system folders, on both Windows and Unix.
It does this for Facebook - you could argue that was reasonable, because it prevents malicious software redirecting you and phishing your Facebook password.
But it also does this for Doubleclick, which sounds more like someone sucking up to their corporate partners.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I'm willing to be that he's including in his numbers all the people who bought editions of the game that came with the DLC included.
For DAO, these included a home base with a storage chest. I mean, FFS, a home base with a storage facility has been part of the RPG milieu for as long as I can remember (in games where you have a limited inventory capacity). You have sufficient camp followers with wagons in DAO to justify a chest being part of your camp, so it's not done for narrative reasons - it's done to exploit the well-known hoarding tendencies of RPG players.
I think the main reason he's doing it is because Microsoft became really boring.
Operating Systems? Meh. Office? Meh.
What, in the world of pure software, is going to make a real difference in peoples lives (not just a marginal difference)? Or a real difference to his bank balance?
if I was even 1 / 10,000th as rich as Bill Gates (a respectable $6,000,000 dollars) I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to gild my corporate cage a bit more ; I'd be working on problems that interest me.