The special interests of which you speak are actually part of the CA statute, and have been since 1978
Actually I was thinking of the public sector unions more than anything else. You are looking at the funding side of things but not at the spending side.
Cue rants (well-deserved!) about textbook monopolies, planned obsolescence, and so forth, in 3... 2...
A better rant would be the rant of a California resident wondering why the special interests were allowed to drive the state into insolvency to begin with.....
Hey, you are preaching to the choir here. I became a NYS Elections Inspector primarily so I could see how the machines and procedures work behind the scenes. I'm convinced that we have a good system.
The new machines we use have two main components. The ballot scanner and ballot marking device (BMD). The BMD is only used by handicapped voters. It consists of different interfaces (a control pad, a sip/puff device, foot pedals, LCD screen and headphones) designed for people with various disabilities. It takes their votes and prints out a ballot that is then scanned by the ballot scanner. Regular voters get a paper ballot where they fill in the squares and drop it into the ballot scanner. The ballot scanner will catch under/over-votes and give you a chance to get a new ballot if you want.
All paper ballots are retained and can be referred back to in the event of a close/disputed election. The scanner is also smart enough to catch write-in votes and divert those to a different ballot box for easier tabulation. When it scans a ballot it also retains an image of the actual ballot on a memory card. At the end of the day we remove that memory card and transport it to the Board of Elections with the unused ballots and rest of our supplies. This memory card is primarily intended as a backup in the event that something (i.e: building the machine is in burns down) happens to the paper ballots.
Our system is pretty good. It took NYS years to adopt it but at least that gave us the chance to learn from the mistakes that other states made. I've seen the DRE machines in action (worked as a poll watcher during the Presidential Primaries in Ohio last year) and they scare the hell out of me. A single hardware failure and you lose every vote cast on that machine during the day. What idiot decided that was a good idea?
It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting. Have a few radio buttons that you click, then hit submit, each radio button corresponds to a candidate or a choice, they are added up and give you the results. How the crap do you screw that up?
Well, in the case of New York State, our fearless leaders in Albany changed the requirements no less than 15 times after signing a contract with the vendor for new voting machines. Then after they finally agreed on a set of requirements they decided that they needed voting machines for 62 counties right now so they'd have them in time for the election. Then after the machines arrived they changed the requirements again and needed the new software for them right now.
Doing business with the Government is not an easy undertaking. The only good thing that came out of it is our fearless leaders weren't stupid enough to go with a DRE (direct electronic recording) system. We still have paper ballots that can be counted by any human being if the computer system fails. All the computer does is tabulate them and provide an interface for those voters (the blind/handicapped) whom can't fill out paper ballots themselves.
I know that its bad that Microsoft silently installs things that are difficult to remove
I'm upset about the silent install but could someone please clarify the "difficult to remove" bit? I "removed" it by going into "add-ons" and clicking "disable". Problem solved as far as I'm concerned.....
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
You dislike running cable enough to drop your offer a few grand over it? For a few grand I'll come up and do it for you if you want;)
I usually wind up running new telco cable in every house/apartment I've ever lived in. I've never had the fortune to move into a place with good cable that's up to snuff for DSL. It's usually got a couple hundred feet of old wiring with corroded green connectors and splices held together with scotch tape. I helped a co-worker with a bad DSL connection once upon a time and discovered cloth insulated cable that was essentially acting like a giant antenna. If you disconnected the phones from the pole and picked one up you could hear a local AM radio station.
I usually replace it with Cat5. Twisted-pair is better than the old stuff and gives you a nice upgrade path for the future. Most of the installs I've done for were dry-loop DSL with no dialtone but I did do one with dialtone. We split that one in the basement and put all of the phones behind a single DSL filter instead of having individual ones at each phone. That works pretty well and usually brings the DSL signal levels up a bit.
For the most part, satellite imagery services have reached agreements with various governments about whether they can photograph sensitive locations and, if so, at what resolution. Similar informal agreements exist with companies such as Microsoft and Google, which provide maps and virtual earth services. For example, as shown here, the images available of the neighborhood near Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC start to get blurry as the service maps areas closer to the White House.
But these sorts of agreements are informal and, apparently, subject to revision without notice. That's the apparent message of a story that appeared in The Sun, which found that a military base that houses some of the country's nuclear-armed submarines had lost the protective fuzziness that had masked its appearance in earlier versions of Google's imagery service.
Maybe it's just newer pictures with a better satellite and there never was any "informal agreement" to begin with?
Yeah, except jobs and shareholder value. Stupid for-profit companies.
They simply create a set of tables to say "how much money can we skim off the top"
And that's different from what Uncle Sam does because.....?
Given that nobody really has a choice but to insure for healthcare, they have a guaranteed money line
You could say the same thing about Con-Agra, given that nobody really has a choice about whether or not they eat. We should get the for-profit companies out of food production and let Uncle Sam manage that too.
All socialised medicine does is ensure that everyone has the same crappy level of coverage
Fixed that for you. To quote Churchill, "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
As they'll have to compete properly in a market
They already have to compete in a market. Your blame directed at the insurance companies is misplaced. If it was all profit-skimming than why are the non-profit insurance companies just as expensive as the for-profit ones? Why can't a large employer like Google or the various state governments do better? Other factors are driving health care cost insurances, such as pharmaceutical prices, the overall poor health of Americans (what's the obesity rate again?) and a medical system that encourages treatment for symptoms rather than a more proactive approach. There's also the tort system that has driven up the cost of malpractice to the point that many Doctors are abandoning higher risk practices (OB/GYN) or the medical field entirely.
None of those problems will be addressed by socialized medicine. In fact it will probably make some of them worse. You think the medical brain drain is going to end when Uncle Sam comes along and starts telling them how much they charge, what procedures they can perform and which patients they can see?
nd their insurance is no longer a "buy this, or you'll bankrupt yourself if you have a problem"
That's what insurance is supposed to be. That's why you have homeowners insurance, auto insurance, travel insurance, long term care insurance, blah, blah, blah. The whole point of insurance is a "buy this, or you'll go bankrupt if there's a problem" proposition.
It's a take from everyone and give back to everyone.
Bullshit. Let me explain to you how this will work. The poor won't pay anything. They already don't pay any income taxes. The rich will be able to afford good lobbyists to get a lot of exceptions written into the law and will generally have an easier time absorbing whatever increases do happen. The bulk of the weight will be carried by the productive middle class.
ut socialised medicine has a good place as a baseline. A good workman looks after his tools.
This "tool" wants no part of Uncle Sam managing my health care and I personally hope that the Democrats fall on their ass (again) with this one. Why don't you try reforming the problems in the system that are driving up costs instead of trying to assume the role of my insurance carrier?
Comments about people being on waiting lists are easily rebutted with evidence of people in countries like the USA who do NOT get a service because they're not covered or are bankrupted or otherwise financially impoverished because they're not covered enough.
What's your point? Not all of us happen to believe that it's a proper role of Government to take money from people who aren't impoverished and use it to provide for those who are. There are better ways to address poverty than by taking money away from those who aren't poor at gunpoint and giving it to those who are.
The multiple 'heroic' attempts to save the life of grandma are extremely costly and have a very small benefit to society
I agree. That's why society should stop supporting programs that pay for this kind of treatment. If Grandma played her cards right and saved up enough money then she can pay for it herself. Sounds fair to me.
If we dont get old age expenses under control, there will be no Social Security or Medicare for the young.
I'd be perfectly fine with both of those programs being disbanded. Both of them amount to little more than generational theft.
Hey, I agree with you. Just saying that most people are too fat and happy to give a shit. We can barely get a majority of eligible citizens out to the polls during Presidential elections. It never happens during off-year Federal elections or State elections, both of which arguably influence policy more than the Presidential election. How many of your friends can name their state assemblyman or senator? How many can name their Congressman?
Democrats: Hollywood, the movies and recording industry, banks, unions, Detroit
Fixed that for you. You were missing a few. Funny how the bankers appear on both lists, isn't it? I don't know if I should complement them for being such clever bastards or hope that they are the first ones up against the wall if the brown stuff hits the fan.
That's a good idea. A revolution is long overdue! I'll bring the tar and feathers. You bring the pitchforks and torches. We'll get started tonight.
Oh wait, American Idol is on tonight. Hmm, can we do the revolution tomorrow? What were we talking about again? I remember being angry about something.... hmm, Kris Allen is cool isn't he?
It is a bit annoying that we always fall for the bread and fishes scam . . . will we ever learn!?
But, but... change and stuff! Surely we won't see the Federal Government still beholden to the well connected at the expense of John Q. Public, right? It's not like the Democrats just represent a different set of freedoms that will be eroded, is it?
Christ, what would you do with extra servers? Howitzer practice?
Naw, don't be ridiculous. You'd find your buddy with the NFA tax stamp and use a fully automatic weapon on them;) The howitzer would just be a waste of a perfectly good machine gun target.
For example is gun ownership a good thing for society or a bad thing for society?
I don't know, is free speech and the right against self incrimination a good or bad thing? Or do we accept that both are rights protected under the Constitution, for better or worse?
Is the constitution a flexible, living document into which we can read much or is it literal, limited only to the context in which its authors lived?
The problem I have with the "living constitution" argument is that the framers of the constitution were smart enough to realize that the times would change and the document might need to change with them. That's why they provided for an amendment process. Viewing it as a "living" document seems like nothing more than a cheap way to get around that process, at least from my perspective.
What... you'd rather the US government got out of the business of border security? Wow. Even the craziest right-wing loonies admit that the government's job is to protect the borders...
We have border security? Could have fooled me.....
Nothing sounds good in German. The words "I love you" sound so guttural that most people start thinking back to certain speeches at Nuremberg a few decades ago;)
Of course to be fair I'd imagine that English sounds the same way to non-native speakers, given it's Germanic roots. Italian on the other hand.... "I'm gonna kill you" sounds like "I love you" to a non-native speaker. I'm told this can lead to misunderstandings when being mugged in Rome.....;)
Slashdot Mirror
The special interests of which you speak are actually part of the CA statute, and have been since 1978
Actually I was thinking of the public sector unions more than anything else. You are looking at the funding side of things but not at the spending side.
Cue rants (well-deserved!) about textbook monopolies, planned obsolescence, and so forth, in 3 ... 2 ...
A better rant would be the rant of a California resident wondering why the special interests were allowed to drive the state into insolvency to begin with.....
And I thought New York was messed up.....
Hey, you are preaching to the choir here. I became a NYS Elections Inspector primarily so I could see how the machines and procedures work behind the scenes. I'm convinced that we have a good system.
The new machines we use have two main components. The ballot scanner and ballot marking device (BMD). The BMD is only used by handicapped voters. It consists of different interfaces (a control pad, a sip/puff device, foot pedals, LCD screen and headphones) designed for people with various disabilities. It takes their votes and prints out a ballot that is then scanned by the ballot scanner. Regular voters get a paper ballot where they fill in the squares and drop it into the ballot scanner. The ballot scanner will catch under/over-votes and give you a chance to get a new ballot if you want.
All paper ballots are retained and can be referred back to in the event of a close/disputed election. The scanner is also smart enough to catch write-in votes and divert those to a different ballot box for easier tabulation. When it scans a ballot it also retains an image of the actual ballot on a memory card. At the end of the day we remove that memory card and transport it to the Board of Elections with the unused ballots and rest of our supplies. This memory card is primarily intended as a backup in the event that something (i.e: building the machine is in burns down) happens to the paper ballots.
Our system is pretty good. It took NYS years to adopt it but at least that gave us the chance to learn from the mistakes that other states made. I've seen the DRE machines in action (worked as a poll watcher during the Presidential Primaries in Ohio last year) and they scare the hell out of me. A single hardware failure and you lose every vote cast on that machine during the day. What idiot decided that was a good idea?
It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting. Have a few radio buttons that you click, then hit submit, each radio button corresponds to a candidate or a choice, they are added up and give you the results. How the crap do you screw that up?
Well, in the case of New York State, our fearless leaders in Albany changed the requirements no less than 15 times after signing a contract with the vendor for new voting machines. Then after they finally agreed on a set of requirements they decided that they needed voting machines for 62 counties right now so they'd have them in time for the election. Then after the machines arrived they changed the requirements again and needed the new software for them right now.
Doing business with the Government is not an easy undertaking. The only good thing that came out of it is our fearless leaders weren't stupid enough to go with a DRE (direct electronic recording) system. We still have paper ballots that can be counted by any human being if the computer system fails. All the computer does is tabulate them and provide an interface for those voters (the blind/handicapped) whom can't fill out paper ballots themselves.
I know that its bad that Microsoft silently installs things that are difficult to remove
I'm upset about the silent install but could someone please clarify the "difficult to remove" bit? I "removed" it by going into "add-ons" and clicking "disable". Problem solved as far as I'm concerned.....
P1 is much, much, much, much, much, much greater than P2.
Yeah, but the headline didn't ask if it was likely. It asked if it was possible ;)
Yes.
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
You dislike running cable enough to drop your offer a few grand over it? For a few grand I'll come up and do it for you if you want ;)
I usually wind up running new telco cable in every house/apartment I've ever lived in. I've never had the fortune to move into a place with good cable that's up to snuff for DSL. It's usually got a couple hundred feet of old wiring with corroded green connectors and splices held together with scotch tape. I helped a co-worker with a bad DSL connection once upon a time and discovered cloth insulated cable that was essentially acting like a giant antenna. If you disconnected the phones from the pole and picked one up you could hear a local AM radio station.
I usually replace it with Cat5. Twisted-pair is better than the old stuff and gives you a nice upgrade path for the future. Most of the installs I've done for were dry-loop DSL with no dialtone but I did do one with dialtone. We split that one in the basement and put all of the phones behind a single DSL filter instead of having individual ones at each phone. That works pretty well and usually brings the DSL signal levels up a bit.
No, they'll mess with you.
Oh pa-leaze, they got better things to do. I've been doing this for almost a year and haven't attracted any atten/#s{J!WNr&D]g*,*7bp]:^30/=gNO CARRIER
Hmm, that article is interesting.
For the most part, satellite imagery services have reached agreements with various governments about whether they can photograph sensitive locations and, if so, at what resolution. Similar informal agreements exist with companies such as Microsoft and Google, which provide maps and virtual earth services. For example, as shown here, the images available of the neighborhood near Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC start to get blurry as the service maps areas closer to the White House.
But these sorts of agreements are informal and, apparently, subject to revision without notice. That's the apparent message of a story that appeared in The Sun, which found that a military base that houses some of the country's nuclear-armed submarines had lost the protective fuzziness that had masked its appearance in earlier versions of Google's imagery service.
Maybe it's just newer pictures with a better satellite and there never was any "informal agreement" to begin with?
Now nobody will ever be able to find it ;)
The insurance companies produce nothing
Yeah, except jobs and shareholder value. Stupid for-profit companies.
They simply create a set of tables to say "how much money can we skim off the top"
And that's different from what Uncle Sam does because.....?
Given that nobody really has a choice but to insure for healthcare, they have a guaranteed money line
You could say the same thing about Con-Agra, given that nobody really has a choice about whether or not they eat. We should get the for-profit companies out of food production and let Uncle Sam manage that too.
All socialised medicine does is ensure that everyone has the same crappy level of coverage
Fixed that for you. To quote Churchill, "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
As they'll have to compete properly in a market
They already have to compete in a market. Your blame directed at the insurance companies is misplaced. If it was all profit-skimming than why are the non-profit insurance companies just as expensive as the for-profit ones? Why can't a large employer like Google or the various state governments do better? Other factors are driving health care cost insurances, such as pharmaceutical prices, the overall poor health of Americans (what's the obesity rate again?) and a medical system that encourages treatment for symptoms rather than a more proactive approach. There's also the tort system that has driven up the cost of malpractice to the point that many Doctors are abandoning higher risk practices (OB/GYN) or the medical field entirely.
None of those problems will be addressed by socialized medicine. In fact it will probably make some of them worse. You think the medical brain drain is going to end when Uncle Sam comes along and starts telling them how much they charge, what procedures they can perform and which patients they can see?
nd their insurance is no longer a "buy this, or you'll bankrupt yourself if you have a problem"
That's what insurance is supposed to be. That's why you have homeowners insurance, auto insurance, travel insurance, long term care insurance, blah, blah, blah. The whole point of insurance is a "buy this, or you'll go bankrupt if there's a problem" proposition.
It's a take from everyone and give back to everyone.
Bullshit. Let me explain to you how this will work. The poor won't pay anything. They already don't pay any income taxes. The rich will be able to afford good lobbyists to get a lot of exceptions written into the law and will generally have an easier time absorbing whatever increases do happen. The bulk of the weight will be carried by the productive middle class.
ut socialised medicine has a good place as a baseline. A good workman looks after his tools.
This "tool" wants no part of Uncle Sam managing my health care and I personally hope that the Democrats fall on their ass (again) with this one. Why don't you try reforming the problems in the system that are driving up costs instead of trying to assume the role of my insurance carrier?
Comments about people being on waiting lists are easily rebutted with evidence of people in countries like the USA who do NOT get a service because they're not covered or are bankrupted or otherwise financially impoverished because they're not covered enough.
What's your point? Not all of us happen to believe that it's a proper role of Government to take money from people who aren't impoverished and use it to provide for those who are. There are better ways to address poverty than by taking money away from those who aren't poor at gunpoint and giving it to those who are.
The multiple 'heroic' attempts to save the life of grandma are extremely costly and have a very small benefit to society
I agree. That's why society should stop supporting programs that pay for this kind of treatment. If Grandma played her cards right and saved up enough money then she can pay for it herself. Sounds fair to me.
If we dont get old age expenses under control, there will be no Social Security or Medicare for the young.
I'd be perfectly fine with both of those programs being disbanded. Both of them amount to little more than generational theft.
Hey, I agree with you. Just saying that most people are too fat and happy to give a shit. We can barely get a majority of eligible citizens out to the polls during Presidential elections. It never happens during off-year Federal elections or State elections, both of which arguably influence policy more than the Presidential election. How many of your friends can name their state assemblyman or senator? How many can name their Congressman?
Sure, the government pays for health care
Republicans: Oil and gas, banks
Democrats: Hollywood, the movies and recording industry, banks, unions, Detroit
Fixed that for you. You were missing a few. Funny how the bankers appear on both lists, isn't it? I don't know if I should complement them for being such clever bastards or hope that they are the first ones up against the wall if the brown stuff hits the fan.
Is the only answer. Throw them all out.
That's a good idea. A revolution is long overdue! I'll bring the tar and feathers. You bring the pitchforks and torches. We'll get started tonight.
Oh wait, American Idol is on tonight. Hmm, can we do the revolution tomorrow? What were we talking about again? I remember being angry about something.... hmm, Kris Allen is cool isn't he?
It is a bit annoying that we always fall for the bread and fishes scam . . . will we ever learn!?
But, but... change and stuff! Surely we won't see the Federal Government still beholden to the well connected at the expense of John Q. Public, right? It's not like the Democrats just represent a different set of freedoms that will be eroded, is it?
Sorry to reply to my own post, but it just struck me, it actually would be a good idea if the nutjobs were forced to wear some distinguishing badge.
They already have one. Just look for people who jump up and down on couches and generally look like idiots.
Christ, what would you do with extra servers? Howitzer practice?
Naw, don't be ridiculous. You'd find your buddy with the NFA tax stamp and use a fully automatic weapon on them ;) The howitzer would just be a waste of a perfectly good machine gun target.
For example is gun ownership a good thing for society or a bad thing for society?
I don't know, is free speech and the right against self incrimination a good or bad thing? Or do we accept that both are rights protected under the Constitution, for better or worse?
Is the constitution a flexible, living document into which we can read much or is it literal, limited only to the context in which its authors lived?
The problem I have with the "living constitution" argument is that the framers of the constitution were smart enough to realize that the times would change and the document might need to change with them. That's why they provided for an amendment process. Viewing it as a "living" document seems like nothing more than a cheap way to get around that process, at least from my perspective.
What... you'd rather the US government got out of the business of border security? Wow. Even the craziest right-wing loonies admit that the government's job is to protect the borders...
We have border security? Could have fooled me.....
That doesn't sound so good in German either.
Nothing sounds good in German. The words "I love you" sound so guttural that most people start thinking back to certain speeches at Nuremberg a few decades ago ;)
Of course to be fair I'd imagine that English sounds the same way to non-native speakers, given it's Germanic roots. Italian on the other hand.... "I'm gonna kill you" sounds like "I love you" to a non-native speaker. I'm told this can lead to misunderstandings when being mugged in Rome..... ;)
Of course, I thought it was going to be as simple as knowing that the password was "Joshua".
Actually it's "joshua". Mr. Falken was lazy and didn't like having to reach for the shift key ;)