how many senior citizens actually earn enough money to pay even $300/month, a modest amount, for prescription drugs
Given how many prescriptions the average senior has, I wonder if doctors think about just how much they are paying before writing yet another prescription. I generally believe most people are over-medicated, too.
This reminds me of an episode of Jay Leno a while back where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis came out, shook hands, sat right next to each other, and said they are each supporting the same bill in California. Even after the recall and public mauling, Davis was actually quite cheerful and joking about his recent acting roles. The whole thing really took me by suprise.
What is the plan for dealing with Iraq if the citizens of Iraq vote in favor of a fundamentalist Islamic form of government that resembles the one currently existing in Iran?
Well, if the people who wrote their constitution were smart, they would have already addressed this. Have they?
Perhaps there is a way to word the question to address the severe discrimination among the insured. Insurance is a risk-sharing venture, and it doesn't seem quite right that people even in the same age group can pay ten times what other people pay. I almost never go to a doctor and pay very reasonable premiums, but it scares me to think what those premiums would become if I actually wanted to use my insurance.
How do you respond to that, and what would you do to restore our nation's reputation around the world?
Both canidates have already answered this question many times. Bush is in favor of spreading democracy the world over (as if it is as easy as spreading butter). Kerry has said he will push to restore the US' reputation and try to bring Iraq to a close multi-laterally and with the UN. This is one area where the canidates are suprising consistent in their answers.
I do hope people in other countries see that the USA is pretty divided over these issues (just like many people in their own countries) and that Americans just aren't a big bunch of bozos with grease stains on their shirts. Remember, you can hate us, but only in four-year intervals (you gotta wait and see if you can hate us for the next four).
Not to mention that Outlook has an atrocious UI trying to do everything at once. Of all the MS apps to clone, Outlook is probably the best one to overlook.
The machines were still spontaneously rebooting when I left six months ago. Sun's response was "upgrade to new hardware at full price."
The ecache problem was years ago. Your company passed up the warranty term and is now holding "as is" hardware. That sounds like its your company's problem, now, and not Sun's....a bug in SunOne AppServer...
The application server is made and sold by an entirely different division (subsidiary, even?) of Sun unrelated to Solaris development. Sun is a very large company. Every large company I've ever worked for presents a dozen different faces to their customers. At least Sun should be commended for trying to unify their branding (although re-doing it every two years is getting a bit old).
But it takes time to aquire the necessary amount of equipment to produce for a large country. It also takes time to be a productive farmer, where they can have some certainty the crop won't fail due to poor soil, climate, pests, etc.
If a large country like the USA lets too many things seep outside its borders, a savvy enemy could really catch the USA with its pants down.
This isn't an experimental science, it's simple accounting, very simple accounting, count ballots.
Elections are not entirely an accounting process, but also a statistical one. There are errors in the process, and there is a clear margin of error in the results. The statistics of the election results really are not that far different from experimental science. In the case of science, the scientists are modest enough to be uncertain when things get within the margins of error. In the case of elections, we have hundreds of people hopelessly counting and recounting, when the election was already clearly unwinnable (statistically we can't say if either canidate won)....go to a bank or large business and tell them that for every 100,000,000 million dollars they collect that they're either going to be 500,000 over or 500,000 under...
Banks already have the regulations and the sheer amount of money to afford to have very low error rates. To accomplish this, the banking infrastructure is very complex and very pervasive with checks and rechecks. The elections process has none of this. Also, no banking is anonymous; the elections have to be, making the problem domain very different.
...then you have tons of stuff designed to work with a flawed test suite and when the test suite is fixed, there is the potential that previously working code (tested with the suite) will be broken!
Welcome to standards development! Since you have such a good understanding of the process, let's get you to work right away!
(I'm serious...multi-thousand-page ISO documents are nauseating)
It's the fact that in most states if you win by one vote you win all the college votes.
Think of it in terms of each state voting for president. From the federal point of view, there are only 50 constituents that the federal government currently represents.
Your reasoning falls apart because small-town California concerns will be entirely ignored in favor of the Californian big cities...
For a state as enormous and diverse as California, the small towns basically have to rely on their state-level government to represent them internally. This isn't all that bad considering California is larger than many nations in the world and has lots of resources at its disposal. Also, the federal House of Representatives helps some.
And if the agricultural states started raising prices or halting production, we just tell them to piss off and buy from our foreign neighbors.
The value of domestic production should never be underestimated. Consider a wide-scale war, for example, where suddenly self-sufficiency makes all the difference. Sometimes defense interests trump otherwise sound economic ideas.
a difference of 543,895 votes, or one half percent, is statistically significant
No, it is not. Ask any experimental scientist if their equipment is reliable to 0.5% of the measured quantity. Only the most well funded scientists with the best equipment could say yes. The elections system is not particularly well funded.
Most measurements are lucky to be within a few percent of the true value, and the measurement of the people's vote is no different.
Shouldn't the priority be to help the most people possible?
I'm not sure what help you mean. People in less-populated states, such as many of the plains states, have a disproportionate influence on the rest of the country: agriculture. So what if a state has only 2% of the population if it also produces 10% of your grain and livestock? Suddenly, you might wonder if your source of food should gain fair representation. I think it should.
I don't know anything about Montana, but it seems a lot of Republican support in the south-east is for religious and "states rights" types of reasons. I've heard people say that "it's good to have a president who prays" and that "Bush isn't a baby killer," for example. Actually, Kerry and Bush both argue in different ways for about the same amount of states rights and federal intervention--meaning people are not voting Republican or Democrat for political ideology but for their moral ideology (abortion issues, etc.). The reason the election in November will be 50/50 is that the moral issues have equally sound (and unsound) arguments on both sides, convincing equal amounts of people on both sides. Essentially, I wonder if the election is completely arbitrary to the point that it will again be decided by the margin of error as in 2000.
Bush was already asked this at a press conference a while back. His answer: he completely avoided the question ("Everybody makes mistakes...I'm not prepared to answer this...etc.").
Why is it that Republicans don't act like Republicans and Democrats don't act like Democrats anymore? The only recent president who demonstrated overall fiscal responsibility was Bill Clinton, and the only recent president who wanted to so far as to amend the Constitution for increasing government intervention was George W. Bush. I see Kerry advocating free trade for pharmaceuticals, and I am just completely confused about what the two big parties actually stand for. The voters stubbornly vote Republican or Democrate, because they believe in their ideology. However, if they really listened to what the canidates were saying, they would probably glaze over in complete befuddlement.
They have claimed that open source cannot be trusted to deliver a standardized platform. They have also implied [crn.com] that Gnome is "open source crap" that requires effort from Sun to turn into a usable GUI...
Open source projects are often very volatile, with non-backwards-compatible changes occurring frequently. This can be very good, as it indicates a rapid development of new technology, but it makes people who don't like such drastic change uncomfortable.
I actually prefer to view open source as a nursery for technology, where it can develop rapidly, prove itself, and, when it reaches a critical mass, get adopted by more conservative ventures, like Sun and IBM. Solaris now ships with Perl, bash, apache, ant, GNU tar, samba, and a few others, for example. Users can feel fairly confident that Sun at least will package these tools, such that they don't change significantly with every quarterly release of Solaris.
First, Schwartz has been busy trying to redefine the meaning of "open"...
I think Schwartz has been consistent in his preference for open standards as being more useful than simply open source. Both closed source and open source software can implement open standards (e.g., TCP/IP), which gives the most flexibility to people writing software. Anyone writing software has to deal with the consequences of choosing either open source or closed source, but at least they can inter-operate with other companies and projects.
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how many senior citizens actually earn enough money to pay even $300/month, a modest amount, for prescription drugs
Given how many prescriptions the average senior has, I wonder if doctors think about just how much they are paying before writing yet another prescription. I generally believe most people are over-medicated, too.
Also, getting "excellent" karma and the bonus mod is rather trivial, now.
Perhaps this is because Kerry hasn't demonstrated much respect for the stance of his church to date.
Perhaps Kerry understands there are limits to what the federal government can or should do. I never thought I'd say that about a Democratic canidate.
This reminds me of an episode of Jay Leno a while back where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis came out, shook hands, sat right next to each other, and said they are each supporting the same bill in California. Even after the recall and public mauling, Davis was actually quite cheerful and joking about his recent acting roles. The whole thing really took me by suprise.
What is the plan for dealing with Iraq if the citizens of Iraq vote in favor of a fundamentalist Islamic form of government that resembles the one currently existing in Iran?
Well, if the people who wrote their constitution were smart, they would have already addressed this. Have they?
Perhaps there is a way to word the question to address the severe discrimination among the insured. Insurance is a risk-sharing venture, and it doesn't seem quite right that people even in the same age group can pay ten times what other people pay. I almost never go to a doctor and pay very reasonable premiums, but it scares me to think what those premiums would become if I actually wanted to use my insurance.
How do you respond to that, and what would you do to restore our nation's reputation around the world?
Both canidates have already answered this question many times. Bush is in favor of spreading democracy the world over (as if it is as easy as spreading butter). Kerry has said he will push to restore the US' reputation and try to bring Iraq to a close multi-laterally and with the UN. This is one area where the canidates are suprising consistent in their answers.
I do hope people in other countries see that the USA is pretty divided over these issues (just like many people in their own countries) and that Americans just aren't a big bunch of bozos with grease stains on their shirts. Remember, you can hate us, but only in four-year intervals (you gotta wait and see if you can hate us for the next four).
Why not just bundle everything up nicely?
Without the dozens of interdependent components, GNOME just wouldn't be GNOME.
Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...
Not to mention that Outlook has an atrocious UI trying to do everything at once. Of all the MS apps to clone, Outlook is probably the best one to overlook.
The machines were still spontaneously rebooting when I left six months ago. Sun's response was "upgrade to new hardware at full price."
...a bug in SunOne AppServer...
The ecache problem was years ago. Your company passed up the warranty term and is now holding "as is" hardware. That sounds like its your company's problem, now, and not Sun's.
The application server is made and sold by an entirely different division (subsidiary, even?) of Sun unrelated to Solaris development. Sun is a very large company. Every large company I've ever worked for presents a dozen different faces to their customers. At least Sun should be commended for trying to unify their branding (although re-doing it every two years is getting a bit old).
But it takes time to aquire the necessary amount of equipment to produce for a large country. It also takes time to be a productive farmer, where they can have some certainty the crop won't fail due to poor soil, climate, pests, etc.
If a large country like the USA lets too many things seep outside its borders, a savvy enemy could really catch the USA with its pants down.
This isn't an experimental science, it's simple accounting, very simple accounting, count ballots.
...go to a bank or large business and tell them that for every 100,000,000 million dollars they collect that they're either going to be 500,000 over or 500,000 under...
Elections are not entirely an accounting process, but also a statistical one. There are errors in the process, and there is a clear margin of error in the results. The statistics of the election results really are not that far different from experimental science. In the case of science, the scientists are modest enough to be uncertain when things get within the margins of error. In the case of elections, we have hundreds of people hopelessly counting and recounting, when the election was already clearly unwinnable (statistically we can't say if either canidate won).
Banks already have the regulations and the sheer amount of money to afford to have very low error rates. To accomplish this, the banking infrastructure is very complex and very pervasive with checks and rechecks. The elections process has none of this. Also, no banking is anonymous; the elections have to be, making the problem domain very different.
...then you have tons of stuff designed to work with a flawed test suite and when the test suite is fixed, there is the potential that previously working code (tested with the suite) will be broken!
Welcome to standards development! Since you have such a good understanding of the process, let's get you to work right away!
(I'm serious...multi-thousand-page ISO documents are nauseating)
...but it's still in a crappy
state.
South Carolina? Ha ha.
It's the fact that in most states if you win by one vote you win all the college votes.
Think of it in terms of each state voting for president. From the federal point of view, there are only 50 constituents that the federal government currently represents.
Your reasoning falls apart because small-town California concerns will be entirely ignored in favor of the Californian big cities...
For a state as enormous and diverse as California, the small towns basically have to rely on their state-level government to represent them internally. This isn't all that bad considering California is larger than many nations in the world and has lots of resources at its disposal. Also, the federal House of Representatives helps some.
And if the agricultural states started raising prices or halting production, we just tell them to piss off and buy from our foreign neighbors.
The value of domestic production should never be underestimated. Consider a wide-scale war, for example, where suddenly self-sufficiency makes all the difference. Sometimes defense interests trump otherwise sound economic ideas.
a difference of 543,895 votes, or one half percent, is statistically significant
No, it is not. Ask any experimental scientist if their equipment is reliable to 0.5% of the measured quantity. Only the most well funded scientists with the best equipment could say yes. The elections system is not particularly well funded.
Most measurements are lucky to be within a few percent of the true value, and the measurement of the people's vote is no different.
Shouldn't the priority be to help the most people possible?
I'm not sure what help you mean. People in less-populated states, such as many of the plains states, have a disproportionate influence on the rest of the country: agriculture. So what if a state has only 2% of the population if it also produces 10% of your grain and livestock? Suddenly, you might wonder if your source of food should gain fair representation. I think it should.
The foundation of prosperity is a Secure Nation.
The foundation of prosperity is a Free Nation, in the Libertarian sense and not the anarchist sense.
No, it's
mmmmmmm floor Pi
I don't know anything about Montana, but it seems a lot of Republican support in the south-east is for religious and "states rights" types of reasons. I've heard people say that "it's good to have a president who prays" and that "Bush isn't a baby killer," for example. Actually, Kerry and Bush both argue in different ways for about the same amount of states rights and federal intervention--meaning people are not voting Republican or Democrat for political ideology but for their moral ideology (abortion issues, etc.). The reason the election in November will be 50/50 is that the moral issues have equally sound (and unsound) arguments on both sides, convincing equal amounts of people on both sides. Essentially, I wonder if the election is completely arbitrary to the point that it will again be decided by the margin of error as in 2000.
Bush was already asked this at a press conference a while back. His answer: he completely avoided the question ("Everybody makes mistakes...I'm not prepared to answer this...etc.").
Why is it that Republicans don't act like Republicans and Democrats don't act like Democrats anymore? The only recent president who demonstrated overall fiscal responsibility was Bill Clinton, and the only recent president who wanted to so far as to amend the Constitution for increasing government intervention was George W. Bush. I see Kerry advocating free trade for pharmaceuticals, and I am just completely confused about what the two big parties actually stand for. The voters stubbornly vote Republican or Democrate, because they believe in their ideology. However, if they really listened to what the canidates were saying, they would probably glaze over in complete befuddlement.
They have claimed that open source cannot be trusted to deliver a standardized platform. They have also implied [crn.com] that Gnome is "open source crap" that requires effort from Sun to turn into a usable GUI...
Open source projects are often very volatile, with non-backwards-compatible changes occurring frequently. This can be very good, as it indicates a rapid development of new technology, but it makes people who don't like such drastic change uncomfortable.
I actually prefer to view open source as a nursery for technology, where it can develop rapidly, prove itself, and, when it reaches a critical mass, get adopted by more conservative ventures, like Sun and IBM. Solaris now ships with Perl, bash, apache, ant, GNU tar, samba, and a few others, for example. Users can feel fairly confident that Sun at least will package these tools, such that they don't change significantly with every quarterly release of Solaris.
First, Schwartz has been busy trying to redefine the meaning of "open"...
I think Schwartz has been consistent in his preference for open standards as being more useful than simply open source. Both closed source and open source software can implement open standards (e.g., TCP/IP), which gives the most flexibility to people writing software. Anyone writing software has to deal with the consequences of choosing either open source or closed source, but at least they can inter-operate with other companies and projects.