Insurance IS gambling. Gambling is a good deal for the Casino because the risk is spread over a lot of bets, so the fact that the Casino's edge might be 51% means that make a steady, small percentage of a lot of money. Insurance is good for the insurance companies for the same reason. It's also good for those who make the bet with the insurance company because they trade a finite, small chance of catastrophic costs for a known, steady, affordable payment over time.
If genetic information were used to set insurance rates, I wouldn't have much problem with it.
Ironically, I would have a problem with that. We need to let insurance be what insurance is, and make sure that *no one* can make the bet with substantially better information than the other. The Casinos shouldn't be able to know in advance who is going to win keno and choose not to make bets with them any more than the keno players ought to be able to only bet when they know they're going to win.
The solution is pretty obvious: start insuring patients at a stage before genetic tests are practical, and insure against the possibility of a disorder being discovered by said tests. If you've had continuous insurance, then you shouldn't ever have to worry about pre-existing conditions. If it predates your current insurance, your previous insurance should take care of it. If that's not the law, it ought to be, and insurance should be priced accordingly. No discounts for shady behavior.
If you haven't had continuous insurance, well, I suppose there ought to be some framework for mitigating that issue
Insurance companies aren't the "wrong hands." If the information exists, it will either be used by insurance companies to establish fair prices or patients to buy "insurance" when they already know they're going to exercise it.
Insurance is gambling. You can't give one party (or any party) the right to change the bet or make the bet after the cards are revealed.
"pre-existing conditions" are only a problem because, for some reason, insurance isn't structured such that the insurer you had at the time of diagnosis is responsible for that condition and its complications from then on. They should only be a problem for the people who aren't insured at the time of diagnosis, who should still be able to get insurance for everything else.
At time of diagnosis will eventually be quite early for genetic disorders. So there needs to be an option to have continuous coverage from the time of conception.
On the other hand, suppose one use just dominates the bandwidth and other "more critical" uses just don't require nearly as much such that even at their peak, they only need 1% of the total, but the "big use" is greedy and hogs 99.5%?
Then doesn't it make sense to throttle them down to 99% so that the other uses can have enough? Especially if the "big use" is games that that have stutter-y performance at 99.5%, and will therefore have slightly more stutter at 99?
Disclaimer: numbers have been fabricated out of whole cloth for dramatic purposes.
Guy with the fancy cowboy boots;
Woman wearing Prada shoes; Urbanite with Evian;
Helicopter-Soccer Mom; Socially Enabled 12-Year Old;
Electronic [game]-Dependent Child; and PhotoAmateur Dad...
When it was a private security firm hired by the airlines, it was a perfectly reasonable term of sale. "You want to travel on my plane, you agree to my let agents verify that you're not taking anything aboard that will increase my liability. You don't agree, well, here's a refund." They were conspicuous about it, too, the security checkpoint was a selling point.
But it is no longer a reasonable term of sale. The TSA is a federal agency, and the officers are federal agents. They are governed by the Constitution, which not only does not grant them the authority to molest passengers, but also specifically forbids them from unwarranted search and seizure, which a choke point search of EVERYBODY who passes certainly is.
It is also not the same thing as customs enforcement, which obviously must happen at a border, or at least at a virtual border. Completely domestic travel most certainly does not justify border search authority, let alone for reasons unrelated to customs enforcement.
Also, they don't actually have any constitutional authority to search you (something that they didn't need when it was just a private company and terms of sale).
Not that that stops them. I've a good mind to say, "no thank you" next time I travel and they ask to search something. Or say, "I've got a pass." and hand them a copy of the constitution.
Except that I'm a coward, and I usually have somewhere to be when I travel, so I don't rock the boat. Mostly the coward thing, though. I don't need to justify my cowardice. I'm not proud of it either, but I don't see anyone behaving any less cowardly than myself either.
- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I might switch my bulb from 40 to 10 watts, but I still have a 10,000 watt heat pump running. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills
That's odd. You must be running a crappy heat pump with a COP of unity.
Ditch that sucka. You should have a COP of 5 or more if you're in a region where heat pumps make sense, which translates to 24 watts of savings for each of those 10W bulbs. (although.. a 10W bulb isn't really quite enough to replace a 40W.) If the unit is ok, maybe you've got it behind a hedge or something blocking air flow or there's a pinhole in the ground return (are you using a ground-source heat pump or air?).
There shouldn't be any circumstance where electric resistance heating makes sense from an efficiency point of view.
The boom kind has two 'n's in the middle. The "say cheese" kind, I assume, is the one that has roots in the same word, as it implies accuracy and permanence.
Now what someone ought to do is get some historical data from pricewatch, and plot log(price/gb) vs year for all the data points, get some trendlines from the scatter plot and determine the likely intercept year.
Someone did do a weak version of that a couple years ago, and guessed that the intercept would be fairly soon iirc. Within the next couple of years even.
I don't know how accurate that estimate is, but I find suspicious that the 2020 estimate comes from a maker of hard drives...
But.. why would you do this? DVD's successor is *already* mainstream, and the successor's successor is already being hinted at.
What you should be doing is trying to get as much for your second-hand DVDs as you can now, before their value drops even further, and just renting Blu-Rays on an as-needed basis. (no point in owning blu-rays, they're an interim medium to ease the adoption of HD and digital sets. I don't know what the longish term medium will be, but it won't be blu-ray.)
Lynx doesn't come out until April, though. That's half a year for the next LTS release, which people who struggle with an operating system for a year will prefer over the bi-yearly schedule...
It's a cutesy internal name for the developers to avoid having to spend all day spouting numbers when talking about stuff, or for "people in the know" to sound smarter.
Current version is Jaunty Jackolope, and they all try to be clever by using {adjective} {noun} alliterative scheme where {noun} is an animal that inhabits the isle of man.
Like "Snow Leopard" or "Longhorn"*
*What kind of jackass names an operating system after a cow??
The problem with bitlocker is that it's only part of the ultimatextremeultra most expensive version of Windows. Most people would be too cheap to get that version, even if they knew what the benefit was. So your home computer probably doesn't have it. Your company provided laptop probably also doesn't have it, unless you're fairly high up in importance.
There's nothing wrong with dynamic range compression in audio...As long as I get to be the one in control and not some faraway studio.
You don't know my listening conditions: I could be in a noisy room with juuust powerful enough speakers, and a friend who gets annoyed if my music has brief really loud parts, so I can't just turn the volume way up even if I want to.
Why can't I tell my machine to analyze the audio track and compress everything into a comfortable range that I specify?
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Insurance IS gambling. Gambling is a good deal for the Casino because the risk is spread over a lot of bets, so the fact that the Casino's edge might be 51% means that make a steady, small percentage of a lot of money. Insurance is good for the insurance companies for the same reason. It's also good for those who make the bet with the insurance company because they trade a finite, small chance of catastrophic costs for a known, steady, affordable payment over time.
If genetic information were used to set insurance rates, I wouldn't have much problem with it.
Ironically, I would have a problem with that. We need to let insurance be what insurance is, and make sure that *no one* can make the bet with substantially better information than the other. The Casinos shouldn't be able to know in advance who is going to win keno and choose not to make bets with them any more than the keno players ought to be able to only bet when they know they're going to win.
The solution is pretty obvious: start insuring patients at a stage before genetic tests are practical, and insure against the possibility of a disorder being discovered by said tests. If you've had continuous insurance, then you shouldn't ever have to worry about pre-existing conditions. If it predates your current insurance, your previous insurance should take care of it. If that's not the law, it ought to be, and insurance should be priced accordingly. No discounts for shady behavior.
If you haven't had continuous insurance, well, I suppose there ought to be some framework for mitigating that issue
Insurance companies aren't the "wrong hands." If the information exists, it will either be used by insurance companies to establish fair prices or patients to buy "insurance" when they already know they're going to exercise it.
Insurance is gambling. You can't give one party (or any party) the right to change the bet or make the bet after the cards are revealed.
"pre-existing conditions" are only a problem because, for some reason, insurance isn't structured such that the insurer you had at the time of diagnosis is responsible for that condition and its complications from then on. They should only be a problem for the people who aren't insured at the time of diagnosis, who should still be able to get insurance for everything else.
At time of diagnosis will eventually be quite early for genetic disorders. So there needs to be an option to have continuous coverage from the time of conception.
On the other hand, suppose one use just dominates the bandwidth and other "more critical" uses just don't require nearly as much such that even at their peak, they only need 1% of the total, but the "big use" is greedy and hogs 99.5%?
Then doesn't it make sense to throttle them down to 99% so that the other uses can have enough? Especially if the "big use" is games that that have stutter-y performance at 99.5%, and will therefore have slightly more stutter at 99?
Disclaimer: numbers have been fabricated out of whole cloth for dramatic purposes.
BluRay is an interim format. I'm not convinced "buying" movies on currently available media is a good idea at all.
Is there anyone you don't have contempt for?
When it was a private security firm hired by the airlines, it was a perfectly reasonable term of sale. "You want to travel on my plane, you agree to my let agents verify that you're not taking anything aboard that will increase my liability. You don't agree, well, here's a refund." They were conspicuous about it, too, the security checkpoint was a selling point.
But it is no longer a reasonable term of sale. The TSA is a federal agency, and the officers are federal agents. They are governed by the Constitution, which not only does not grant them the authority to molest passengers, but also specifically forbids them from unwarranted search and seizure, which a choke point search of EVERYBODY who passes certainly is.
It is also not the same thing as customs enforcement, which obviously must happen at a border, or at least at a virtual border. Completely domestic travel most certainly does not justify border search authority, let alone for reasons unrelated to customs enforcement.
Also, they don't actually have any constitutional authority to search you (something that they didn't need when it was just a private company and terms of sale).
Not that that stops them. I've a good mind to say, "no thank you" next time I travel and they ask to search something. Or say, "I've got a pass." and hand them a copy of the constitution.
Except that I'm a coward, and I usually have somewhere to be when I travel, so I don't rock the boat. Mostly the coward thing, though. I don't need to justify my cowardice. I'm not proud of it either, but I don't see anyone behaving any less cowardly than myself either.
I've never had one that was that bad. Maybe you just need fewer retarded friends.
- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I might switch my bulb from 40 to 10 watts, but I still have a 10,000 watt heat pump running. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills
That's odd. You must be running a crappy heat pump with a COP of unity.
Ditch that sucka. You should have a COP of 5 or more if you're in a region where heat pumps make sense, which translates to 24 watts of savings for each of those 10W bulbs. (although.. a 10W bulb isn't really quite enough to replace a 40W.) If the unit is ok, maybe you've got it behind a hedge or something blocking air flow or there's a pinhole in the ground return (are you using a ground-source heat pump or air?).
There shouldn't be any circumstance where electric resistance heating makes sense from an efficiency point of view.
Seems to appear in the canonical text...
Yeah I was also disappointed that they didn't divide the screen and turn it into a video stereo-opticon. These google goggles are greatly gimpy.
The boom kind has two 'n's in the middle. The "say cheese" kind, I assume, is the one that has roots in the same word, as it implies accuracy and permanence.
You are forgetting that area is the square of length.
Where are you buying games for only $20? And how are you managing to get $10 for them used?
I'm not so sure about that.
Now what someone ought to do is get some historical data from pricewatch, and plot log(price/gb) vs year for all the data points, get some trendlines from the scatter plot and determine the likely intercept year.
Someone did do a weak version of that a couple years ago, and guessed that the intercept would be fairly soon iirc. Within the next couple of years even.
I don't know how accurate that estimate is, but I find suspicious that the 2020 estimate comes from a maker of hard drives...
But.. why would you do this? DVD's successor is *already* mainstream, and the successor's successor is already being hinted at.
What you should be doing is trying to get as much for your second-hand DVDs as you can now, before their value drops even further, and just renting Blu-Rays on an as-needed basis. (no point in owning blu-rays, they're an interim medium to ease the adoption of HD and digital sets. I don't know what the longish term medium will be, but it won't be blu-ray.)
Lynx doesn't come out until April, though. That's half a year for the next LTS release, which people who struggle with an operating system for a year will prefer over the bi-yearly schedule...
It's a cutesy internal name for the developers to avoid having to spend all day spouting numbers when talking about stuff, or for "people in the know" to sound smarter.
Current version is Jaunty Jackolope, and they all try to be clever by using {adjective} {noun} alliterative scheme where {noun} is an animal that inhabits the isle of man.
Like "Snow Leopard" or "Longhorn"*
*What kind of jackass names an operating system after a cow??
The problem with a PEBKAC diagnosis is that even when you replace the offending filter, you're still taking input from a chair...
The problem with bitlocker is that it's only part of the ultimatextremeultra most expensive version of Windows. Most people would be too cheap to get that version, even if they knew what the benefit was. So your home computer probably doesn't have it. Your company provided laptop probably also doesn't have it, unless you're fairly high up in importance.
Something like this, I imagine:
V0 1 0 AC 1 SIN(0V 1V 60HZ)
R1 1 2 470
C1 2 0 220 U
Are you suggesting creating some kind of mouse neuron ASIC?
There's nothing wrong with dynamic range compression in audio...As long as I get to be the one in control and not some faraway studio.
You don't know my listening conditions: I could be in a noisy room with juuust powerful enough speakers, and a friend who gets annoyed if my music has brief really loud parts, so I can't just turn the volume way up even if I want to.
Why can't I tell my machine to analyze the audio track and compress everything into a comfortable range that I specify?
These employees, who would take months on the transition between two sets of software with extremely similar feature sets...
How productive are they again?
But.. does it have to have all the drivers you don't need, too?
I mean, it's custom compiled, right? So we can assume it only runs on one hardware config, right?