Insurance - especially car insurance, which one is required by law to carry - is forced extortion. I have seen denied claims, paid claims with increased premiums that beyond-covered the paid-out claim, my own insurance premiums rise after my car was hit while parked, etc., etc., etc.
Insurance companies are evil, ladies and gentlemen, and will do everything in their power to stop from having to pay out a dime. While I'm now paying $35 copay for prescriptions through Aetna, they also have a new thing called "precertification" whereby the doctor has to call the insurance company and "approve" the use of a drug. Now, if the doctor hadn't wanted me to have the drug, I'm sure I wouldn't be at CVS with my prescription. Nonetheless, yet another roadblock to actual payout of insurance coverage.
You think Pharma = evil? Check out insurance. Especially in the case of Katrina. Home insurance doesn't cover flood insurance. Flood insurance doesn't cover mud damage. Etc.
Worse yet is finding out that that very post was the straw that broke the camels back, and it is the single identifiable reason that Allah curses you with an eternity of pain and torment. Now that would be some funny irony.
Fedora will help you setup dualboot.
Gentoo users [like me] just don't run Windows, e.g. not an issue.
See, Linux has such insider hate between the people involved. I'm Gentoo, I'm better, I do all my own compiling. Fedor is for Windows users... blah blah blah.
Mac fanboi's unite! Except for those 10.3.x users - upgrade to a real OS already. Geeze.
I think it'd get boring. Eternal life, I mean. No, seriously. After a while, you've done everything. Even God's Love has to get old eventually.
Meh, depends on how you think about it. I doubt "eternity" - and I sure hope their is one, and that I get to go to the good part - is hardly based on the same idea of linear time that we now understand. Our perception of time requires a beginning and an end. Eternity - the way I've figured it - probably exists outside of linear time, a sort of everything-happens-at-the-same-time kind of non-linear eternity.
But who knows. Right now, my biggest fear is, come my death, meeting Allah, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Buddah, Zeus, Zenu, or any other number of Gods or prophets I've chosen to not believe in, who will laugh and send me to whatever version of hell they sport.
ME: Hey! Sup Allah, Mohammad... How you guys been?
and its video streaming technology is more advanced.
Aside from Google killing babies, what's really up is:
Uses Flash 9, not Flash 8. Flash 9 has more built-in support for video streaming and compression.
No buffering is a setting... which means that for most without 6mbps lines, you're gonna get skips and jumps. Wow. Much more advanced technology.
Moral of the story? Utube just needs to compile it's player on Flash 9 and it will also have this magically "advanced" technology. Just, well, noone will yet HAVE the Flash 9 player.
If the Republicans were far "left", then there wouldn't be massive widening in the gap between the rich and the poor and a slide of the middle class into poverty as we're seeing. We would just all be equally poor.
I couldn't disagree more. Power corrupts completely, and the left elite fancy themselves as much as the right elite. Classes will always exist, and the rich will always get richer. While the left trys to portray itself as Robinhood in a social sense, new taxes that "benefit the poor" rarely tax the top of the tax bracket in any fashion.
I do, however, agree that both try to control, just through different methodologies.
'They have stalled every discovery request we've made' -- presumably because to reveal this information would also reveal the weakness of all the similar cases."
Imagine if Linux had to go through something like this...
Seriously. I can't wait until our music and movies do this too.
"This track cannot play - please connect your CD player to the internet so RightsInitiatedAuthenticAdvantage, or RIAA, can check to see if your copy of this song is legitimate."
Oh, did I mention "wartime powers", No Child Left Behind (both the horrible failure that it is, along with the complete lack of promised funding by the fed gov.), 2500+ dead Americans in Iraq, ignorance of the Geneva Convention, use of government funds for political propoganda...
How is it fortunate? Even the right side of the isle is starting to leave support for this president in droves. Illegal wiretapping, two (that's right, two) botched wars (the Taliban just took back two towns in Afganistan), extreme secrecy, Vallery Plame, calling for the State Secrets privledge across the board, botched operations after Katrina, Scooter Libby, Carl Rove, prosecution of reporters, prosecution of private citizens under the Espionage act, Free Speech zones, Halliburton, $7 trillion national debt, between $200-$400 billion spent in Iraq against estimates of $8B, depletion of the National Guard, NSA blanket collection of phone records, NSA collection of airline records, secret laws that dictate conduct at airports, secret laws that you are governed by but CANNOT READ. The tip of the iceberg.
And now the ability to squash investigations against himself. It's like killing someone and then having the power to say "um, no - you can't investigate me".
This presidency is perhaps the worst in the HISTORY of the United States. Its abuses of power, power grab, secrecy, and corruption know no bounds. The president has lost the support of all but the most extreme NWO right wing. Clinton was impeached for "lying" to the public, but Bush has been involved in every scandal listed above, and sits atop his throne with pure immunity against the checks and balances of this country.
Never before have I come to expect to learn of some new executive branch abuse on a daily basis.
Besides, over 700,000 people already HAVE voted to impeach him, as useless as this website may be.
Bush and his yes men have moved the right further left than it has ever been. Right and left have reversed roles in the 20 years since Regan. It's almost impossible to grasp the sheer size, power, secrecy, and surveilance of citizens of and by the federal government at this point in time.
This presidency is a farce, and I shudder when I think that 2.5 years remain.
Seriously, New Beta is more stable then Old Beta. A company takes the advice from beta testers and fixes issues the everyone complaines about.
Congratulations M$, you have amazed us all again!
Jeeze - MS releases their new OS to lots of beta testers and takes their advice and bugs and fixes them - and you are a sarcastic asshole. It's not news that the new beta is better than the old... but do you have to hate on MS just to try to fit in here?
I'm surprised you didn't compare how easy networking is in Linux, and MS is just copying, and Linux is this, and MS is that, and blah blah blah.
That's not to say that I love MS - I'm a Mac fanboi for sure. But why the abject sarcasm for doing a good job?
A: Everyone is aware that there is even an issue, and will become frustrated by DRM
Well, I think that hardly anyone outside of this circle is aware there is an issue, but I am almost certain that almost everyone will eventually be frustrated by it - whether it's the inability to put purchased music on the iPod they received for Christmas, or the inability to rip a DVD, or the automatic deletion of a movie on their DVR, or a DVD recording of a HD show being downcast to low def without their knowledge, or...
As DRM becomes more smothering, it smothers more people. It's not something many are aware of - it's something almost anyone that participates in the digital culture WILL eventually butt up against.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
comment doesn't make sense for the US; we have an all-volunteer military, so everyone is 'exempt' from serving in the military.
For the time being... and not for the entire history of the United States. A volunteer military is all good when things are all good. But when the shit hits the fan, the pres hits the "Draft" button, and suddenly "exemption" requires a trip to Canada.
We're volunteer except for when we're in the middle of a serious war. Don't fool yourself into thinking you will always be exempt from service.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
Curing diabetes will save tens of billions of dollars, no matter how cheap insulin gets.
Um, save for the consumer, not the supplier. Billions saved by the consumer and insurance industry, billions lost by Big Pharma.
The old saying "money is in the treatment, not the cure" is oh so very very true. I have a feeling that one of the greatest scandals of this century will be finding out that Big Pharma had cures for diseases for years, but never released them because of the concern of the financial impact on their bottom line.
But I also bend towards conspiracy theories, so what do I know?
Because of the very logic you impose. Besides, this also allows for:
1. Inventory before surgery, to be sure that all necessary parts for surgery are present 2. Inventory after surgery, to be sure that nothing is left in patient, and that all objects are accounted for 3. Generic inventory tracking of materials. 4. Alerts when inventory "walks" out of the hospital
RFID does have some potentially good uses. This is one of them - a brilliant one at that, because it saves lives - unlike putting them in IDs and passports, which has the potential to ruin lives.
Akamai uses tech to determine which of its servers is closest to you that can serve the file fastest. Akamai will go out and find super-fast connected hubs and pay to toss their software and content onto said servers, placing said content closer to the actual user. These servers are called "edge" servers because they sit close to the "edge" of the internet, or right on top of end-users.
Akamai has thousands of these so called "edge" servers around the world. Limelight is very similar, except for the fact that one of the companies owns all of its edge servers and one doesn't "own" any of them but rents space and bandwidth. I forget which is which.
Anywho, likelyhood is ExxonMobile has some rediculously fast direct-to-backbone server farm somewhere close to a major metropolitan location that rents space/bandwidth to Akamai. It happened to be the server that was able to serve the file fastest to you, so that's where you got it from.
Eh, what? Your freedom includes the right to blow me up? Your freedoms stop where my rights start.
Rights are things which are granted as inherent to your existance as a human being. Laws are put in to place to determine those things which one cannot do, or to dictate the process of a particular action from beginning to completion.
Laws exist that say that he cannot blow you up - murder is a crime. The law states that he cannot blow you up. However, there exists no law on record that grants you any right to security. Granting such a right would require that protection be given, and the protecting party be held responsible should you still be blown up.
It may seem like a matter of word-play, but indeed the GP poster is correct - there is no law giving you any security.
The Constitution and BoR are set up to outline what the founding fathers believed the inherent rights of humans are. The Consitution itself is not exactly "law", but a guide-book for managing and creating law based around what are considered your inherent rights as a human being. That's why "outlawing" anything via ammendment is a bad idea, because law is not the job of the Constitution. Prohibition was appealed, and since then, as far as I know, ammendments outline rights assumed.
The SCOTUS uses the Constitution as a guideline when determining if laws passed indeed represent the rights assumed by the Constitution. You have a right to free speech, but you don't have a right to live for any specified period of time or to be free of danger. Actually, the draft indeed assumes that you - accepting the rights granted you under the Constitution, will be willing to place yourself in harm's way to protect those rights for everyone else.
So it may scare you, but you have no right to be safe from being blown up.
This is usually things like vandalism, and harrasment - and at the moment, the people targetted are clearly acting anti-socially. As a result, they're really quite popular.
This is the very definition of a slippery slope - because soon file sharing of any kind, lending a DVD to a friend, etc. will all be considered anti-social. So will music sampling, reading out loud, bypassing Windows Genuine Advantage, encrypting communications, etc., etc.
being arrested for a felony should cause a second look when getting top clearance, Why the hell were you arrested in the first place, what was going on that you were a suspect. Those are valid questions when attempting to get a high level of clearance.
Call me an idealist, but if you're found innocent of a crime, that should be about it. Now yeah, the person may have covered it up well, but you're being subject to double jeopardy. I certainly understand concerns, but being arrested because my NAME is the same as a criminal may stop me from getting a clearance later is something of concern.
But my personal beliefs go further - like once your pennance to society is paid, you should be fully reinstated as a member of said society. Not being allowed to vote if you've ever been convicted of a felony, etc., is bullshit in my book. Either there is a debt to society that you can pay, or your crime is so great that there is no repayment (life w/o parole / death penalty) but these "in betweens" where once a criminal, always kinda sucks. Even if the evidence points to that trend...
... well, to me, I was just stunned that Microsoft claimed to own the Enterprise "search space."
It's funny, because it's such a threatening tone - as if MS had copyright or patent on Enterprise Search. Although, I'm too lazy to do a USPTO search to see if they do...
Slashdot Mirror
With such service - how about posting the name of said insurance company?
Insurance - especially car insurance, which one is required by law to carry - is forced extortion. I have seen denied claims, paid claims with increased premiums that beyond-covered the paid-out claim, my own insurance premiums rise after my car was hit while parked, etc., etc., etc.
Insurance companies are evil, ladies and gentlemen, and will do everything in their power to stop from having to pay out a dime. While I'm now paying $35 copay for prescriptions through Aetna, they also have a new thing called "precertification" whereby the doctor has to call the insurance company and "approve" the use of a drug. Now, if the doctor hadn't wanted me to have the drug, I'm sure I wouldn't be at CVS with my prescription. Nonetheless, yet another roadblock to actual payout of insurance coverage.
You think Pharma = evil? Check out insurance. Especially in the case of Katrina. Home insurance doesn't cover flood insurance. Flood insurance doesn't cover mud damage. Etc.
Makes me sick.
In the immediate sense, perhaps you should be.
God: "Pete, put a temporary override on the lawyer auto-filter. Apparently, I'm gonna need a few."
Me: *Shit...*
See, Linux has such insider hate between the people involved. I'm Gentoo, I'm better, I do all my own compiling. Fedor is for Windows users... blah blah blah.
Mac fanboi's unite! Except for those 10.3.x users - upgrade to a real OS already. Geeze.
Meh, depends on how you think about it. I doubt "eternity" - and I sure hope their is one, and that I get to go to the good part - is hardly based on the same idea of linear time that we now understand. Our perception of time requires a beginning and an end. Eternity - the way I've figured it - probably exists outside of linear time, a sort of everything-happens-at-the-same-time kind of non-linear eternity.
But who knows. Right now, my biggest fear is, come my death, meeting Allah, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Buddah, Zeus, Zenu, or any other number of Gods or prophets I've chosen to not believe in, who will laugh and send me to whatever version of hell they sport.
ME: Hey! Sup Allah, Mohammad... How you guys been?
Allah: Wrong religion bitch!
Me: *Shit...*
Aside from Google killing babies, what's really up is:
Moral of the story? Utube just needs to compile it's player on Flash 9 and it will also have this magically "advanced" technology. Just, well, noone will yet HAVE the Flash 9 player.
I couldn't disagree more. Power corrupts completely, and the left elite fancy themselves as much as the right elite. Classes will always exist, and the rich will always get richer. While the left trys to portray itself as Robinhood in a social sense, new taxes that "benefit the poor" rarely tax the top of the tax bracket in any fashion.
I do, however, agree that both try to control, just through different methodologies.
You're right. But it does outweigh your right to have the government take away our rights to help "protect" you from getting blown up.
Imagine if Linux had to go through something like this...
Seriously. I can't wait until our music and movies do this too.
"This track cannot play - please connect your CD player to the internet so RightsInitiatedAuthenticAdvantage, or RIAA, can check to see if your copy of this song is legitimate."
Oh, did I mention "wartime powers", No Child Left Behind (both the horrible failure that it is, along with the complete lack of promised funding by the fed gov.), 2500+ dead Americans in Iraq, ignorance of the Geneva Convention, use of government funds for political propoganda...
How is it fortunate? Even the right side of the isle is starting to leave support for this president in droves. Illegal wiretapping, two (that's right, two) botched wars (the Taliban just took back two towns in Afganistan), extreme secrecy, Vallery Plame, calling for the State Secrets privledge across the board, botched operations after Katrina, Scooter Libby, Carl Rove, prosecution of reporters, prosecution of private citizens under the Espionage act, Free Speech zones, Halliburton, $7 trillion national debt, between $200-$400 billion spent in Iraq against estimates of $8B, depletion of the National Guard, NSA blanket collection of phone records, NSA collection of airline records, secret laws that dictate conduct at airports, secret laws that you are governed by but CANNOT READ. The tip of the iceberg.
And now the ability to squash investigations against himself. It's like killing someone and then having the power to say "um, no - you can't investigate me".
This presidency is perhaps the worst in the HISTORY of the United States. Its abuses of power, power grab, secrecy, and corruption know no bounds. The president has lost the support of all but the most extreme NWO right wing. Clinton was impeached for "lying" to the public, but Bush has been involved in every scandal listed above, and sits atop his throne with pure immunity against the checks and balances of this country.
Never before have I come to expect to learn of some new executive branch abuse on a daily basis.
Besides, over 700,000 people already HAVE voted to impeach him, as useless as this website may be.
Bush and his yes men have moved the right further left than it has ever been. Right and left have reversed roles in the 20 years since Regan. It's almost impossible to grasp the sheer size, power, secrecy, and surveilance of citizens of and by the federal government at this point in time.
This presidency is a farce, and I shudder when I think that 2.5 years remain.
Jeeze - MS releases their new OS to lots of beta testers and takes their advice and bugs and fixes them - and you are a sarcastic asshole. It's not news that the new beta is better than the old... but do you have to hate on MS just to try to fit in here?
I'm surprised you didn't compare how easy networking is in Linux, and MS is just copying, and Linux is this, and MS is that, and blah blah blah.
That's not to say that I love MS - I'm a Mac fanboi for sure. But why the abject sarcasm for doing a good job?
Well, I think that hardly anyone outside of this circle is aware there is an issue, but I am almost certain that almost everyone will eventually be frustrated by it - whether it's the inability to put purchased music on the iPod they received for Christmas, or the inability to rip a DVD, or the automatic deletion of a movie on their DVR, or a DVD recording of a HD show being downcast to low def without their knowledge, or...
As DRM becomes more smothering, it smothers more people. It's not something many are aware of - it's something almost anyone that participates in the digital culture WILL eventually butt up against.
For the time being... and not for the entire history of the United States. A volunteer military is all good when things are all good. But when the shit hits the fan, the pres hits the "Draft" button, and suddenly "exemption" requires a trip to Canada.
We're volunteer except for when we're in the middle of a serious war. Don't fool yourself into thinking you will always be exempt from service.
Um, save for the consumer, not the supplier. Billions saved by the consumer and insurance industry, billions lost by Big Pharma.
The old saying "money is in the treatment, not the cure" is oh so very very true. I have a feeling that one of the greatest scandals of this century will be finding out that Big Pharma had cures for diseases for years, but never released them because of the concern of the financial impact on their bottom line.
But I also bend towards conspiracy theories, so what do I know?
Because of the very logic you impose. Besides, this also allows for:
1. Inventory before surgery, to be sure that all necessary parts for surgery are present
2. Inventory after surgery, to be sure that nothing is left in patient, and that all objects are accounted for
3. Generic inventory tracking of materials.
4. Alerts when inventory "walks" out of the hospital
RFID does have some potentially good uses. This is one of them - a brilliant one at that, because it saves lives - unlike putting them in IDs and passports, which has the potential to ruin lives.
Akamai uses tech to determine which of its servers is closest to you that can serve the file fastest. Akamai will go out and find super-fast connected hubs and pay to toss their software and content onto said servers, placing said content closer to the actual user. These servers are called "edge" servers because they sit close to the "edge" of the internet, or right on top of end-users. Akamai has thousands of these so called "edge" servers around the world. Limelight is very similar, except for the fact that one of the companies owns all of its edge servers and one doesn't "own" any of them but rents space and bandwidth. I forget which is which. Anywho, likelyhood is ExxonMobile has some rediculously fast direct-to-backbone server farm somewhere close to a major metropolitan location that rents space/bandwidth to Akamai. It happened to be the server that was able to serve the file fastest to you, so that's where you got it from.
Acid2 Test
Rights are things which are granted as inherent to your existance as a human being. Laws are put in to place to determine those things which one cannot do, or to dictate the process of a particular action from beginning to completion.
Laws exist that say that he cannot blow you up - murder is a crime. The law states that he cannot blow you up. However, there exists no law on record that grants you any right to security. Granting such a right would require that protection be given, and the protecting party be held responsible should you still be blown up.
It may seem like a matter of word-play, but indeed the GP poster is correct - there is no law giving you any security.
The Constitution and BoR are set up to outline what the founding fathers believed the inherent rights of humans are. The Consitution itself is not exactly "law", but a guide-book for managing and creating law based around what are considered your inherent rights as a human being. That's why "outlawing" anything via ammendment is a bad idea, because law is not the job of the Constitution. Prohibition was appealed, and since then, as far as I know, ammendments outline rights assumed.
The SCOTUS uses the Constitution as a guideline when determining if laws passed indeed represent the rights assumed by the Constitution. You have a right to free speech, but you don't have a right to live for any specified period of time or to be free of danger. Actually, the draft indeed assumes that you - accepting the rights granted you under the Constitution, will be willing to place yourself in harm's way to protect those rights for everyone else.
So it may scare you, but you have no right to be safe from being blown up.
Boom.
This is the very definition of a slippery slope - because soon file sharing of any kind, lending a DVD to a friend, etc. will all be considered anti-social. So will music sampling, reading out loud, bypassing Windows Genuine Advantage, encrypting communications, etc., etc.
Call me an idealist, but if you're found innocent of a crime, that should be about it. Now yeah, the person may have covered it up well, but you're being subject to double jeopardy. I certainly understand concerns, but being arrested because my NAME is the same as a criminal may stop me from getting a clearance later is something of concern.
But my personal beliefs go further - like once your pennance to society is paid, you should be fully reinstated as a member of said society. Not being allowed to vote if you've ever been convicted of a felony, etc., is bullshit in my book. Either there is a debt to society that you can pay, or your crime is so great that there is no repayment (life w/o parole / death penalty) but these "in betweens" where once a criminal, always kinda sucks. Even if the evidence points to that trend...
It's funny, because it's such a threatening tone - as if MS had copyright or patent on Enterprise Search. Although, I'm too lazy to do a USPTO search to see if they do...