Which, proves the point that perhaps China should not be allowed to have any DNS root servers.
I would say that if a DNS server does not return the same information as all other root servers in the world that it should not be allowed to be a root server.
Speak my mind on political matters, Attend any church I want, Assemble with like minded citizens, Be allowed to maintain the privacy of my home, Not incriminate myself in any crime, Own a gun,
BUT
I wouldn't be able to eat a cheesburger??? I wouldn't be able to smoke (I'm not a smoker, but don't you dare tell me what I can and can't eat without telling all the smokers, Obama included, that they MUST quit)
I don't think so.
My personal opinion is that single payer is single payer and that means that the government takes in in taxes enough money to cover the medical services the populace needs. We the taxpayer can save money if we're healthier, but its our choice. Now taxes could be increased on fast food to cover health care and that might not be so bad, but that tax would be heavily regressive, just like the cigarette tax is. Far better and less preachy would be to use payroll and income taxes to cover the costs. But then I'm talking about a country that cares about balanced budgets. Presently, we're just spending whatever we want. So really, I should get to eat cheeseburgers anyway because the government doesn't really care what things cost anyway. At least you could infer that from their actions....
That's what really bothers me. Health care doesn't pay any attention at all to cycle times and utilization with respect to their equipment.
The cost of running a cat scan machine can probably be expressed very easily as a constant $ per year.
So to recover your cost you need to charge enough to foot the bill. Now, what happens is that for very few patients you have a very large cost per patient. So then costs become an issue, well what do you do to reduce costs, you do less right??! Nope. In this case its counter intuitive. You've already sunk most of the costs on the equipment, you need to recoup them. What you need is MORE patients to use the cat scan machine. Perhaps you would even go so far as to encourage people to have annual scans. Now, lets rethink our covering the cost of the machine. More patients and a fairly constant cost can drastically lower the costs that need to be charged to cover the equipment, the staff, the supplies, everything. Now, admiteddly the radiologist that's reading the scan would have to become more efficient and wouldn't be able to charge the same rate per scan, but he could still get paid the big salary for the time he's working. Oh and reading cat scans is the kind of thing that could easily be distributed and not local to you hospital so you could reap economies of scale.
Manufacturing, especially automated manufacturing in this country (and in others) have decades of experience minimizing the costs of running machines and maximizing their utilization. Health care always cuts costs by doing less. There is so much cost containment/optimization that could be done in health care, it almost unbelievable...
Actually, no it doesn't. I agree as simplified as I made the math that would be possible.
Medicare income will remain/constant or fall as the baby boom retires. So the money really won't be there in the future anyway. Besides, I don't think they'll even come close to saving $500b on medicare in the next 10 years.
A agree with your sentiment, but don't agree that this bill is slightly better. It's quite worse. Now before the lefties here flame me, I think the actual bill we're getting is worse than a bill with a public option. But the public option meant eventual death to the insurance companies, so it was certain from the beginning that that wouldn't pass.
This current bill is just a ball of lies. The numbers don't add up.
So the CBO says that for the first 10 years after this bill passes the deficit will go down $100 billion.
Thats all fine and good, but breaking that down, it means that the gov't will bring in $500 billion in taxes and save $500 billion from Medicare (good luck on that, we've been trying to eliminate waste and corruption in Medicare for 3 decades, which means that real savings in Medicare will only be achieved by cutting services, Obama really means it when he insinuates that maybe people should keep taking pills vs. getting surgery, so grandma is not going to get hip replacement, she's going to get hooked on oxycontin). Anyway back to the math.
$500b + $500b = $1t in "funding" over 10 years.
$1t - $900b = $100b extra!! Yay!!!
But this entitlement DOESN'T GO AWAY!!! I've already mentioned that saving $500b on Medicare is unlikely, but in the second decade it will be even MORE unlikely (if you've trimmed all the fat, all you have left is to cut to the bone). So lets leave that out no 2nd $500b savings from Medicare. So over the second decade starting in 2020....
$500b in funding.....
$1.5t in outlays (remember the first 4 years of this just built up a surplus)
leaving us $1 trillion dollars in debt, under the most optimistic projections in the second decade of this system!!!!
This bill is horseshit!!! By 2020 we will be faced with the only remaining option. We will have to go single payer and raise the taxes to cover it, or just keep building the debt. I think by then this will have so many problems and the insurance companies will be considered so evil that single payer will win the day. Not to say that single payer might not be the way, but is has its pluses and minuses.
However, at the end of the day, the bill we see before us now is designed to FAIL. We are wholesale ignoring other things that could be done to bring down the costs of health care (like we've admittedly been doing for decades) and enacting a giant giveaway to the insurance companies, and the question you have to ask is why. The answer is that once this is enacted, single payer will be the only way out of the hole.....
I totally agree. Google is taking a stand for freedom on the internet here and it will hurt their business. Microsoft doesn't give a shit about freedom and will increase their business.
People need to really look at what companies do and judge who they should do business with or not. If Microsoft will be willing to sell the internet freedoms of Chinese citizens down the river for a buck, whats to say that someday they won't sell the internet freedoms of American citizens too?
The interesting thing is that Obama's proposal to 'privatize' manned space launches, flys directly in the face of all the other stuff he's doing.
In Obama's view the housing, banking, auto, and insurance companies all need very strict government oversight. It ironic that he thinks manned space flight needs less. Note: I said ironic there. At heart, I believe and hope that Boeing and/or SpaceX can create manned rated rockets with appropriate funding from NASA. So while Obama's acting counter to what I think his instincts are, I also think there's a chance this will work.
BUT, as for this bill, I think extending the shuttle is a necessary step too.
IMHO any tech support staff that can't handle supporting at least firefox on a Windows machine, shouldn't be allowed to have a tech support job.
Too many people want to be tech support and know the script for the supported software. These people are entirely useless in all but the very smallest organizations.
You are correct it is a very Microsoft kind of thing to do. This is definately in the realm of embrace-extend-extinguish.
BTW: Note to Google, embrace-extend-extinguish is evil.
Its looking more and more like its well past time for Google to admit that the "Don't be evil." slogan no longer applies anymore.... If it ever really did.
Actually 2 sentences after the statement you use to indicate that the next ice age is 50,000 instead of 12,000 years away (two different theories) there is a discussion of scientific studies that theorize that added CO2 could keep an ice age at bay.
I'll concede this, which is what I stated before. We DON'T know. One of the points I'm making is that increased greenhouse effect is always assumed to be bad, when it might have good factors too....
You know, regarding your carousel comment. Its kind of ironic that the referencing of Logan's Run as a corollary explanation for why there are so few older programmers, is a reference that younger programmers wouldn't know.
Umm, we are due/overdue for another ice age. We have no idea what triggers them. Perhaps CO2 based warming could stave off another ice age. So yeah perhaps decreasing emissions will make things worse. We really DON'T know.
Now the non-renewable aspect of our current energy generation and usage is another discussion entirely.....
Often, professors are reluctant to drop the big instatutional hammer on cheating right away. So yes, discretion has to be used when you have to figure out who to send up the river and who to slap on the wrist.
I personally would be very reluctant to bring down the full wrath of the University unless the cheating was very blatant and repeated.
Actually they do. CS courses have somewhat arbitrary deadlines (due dates) for assignments. Failing to meet them (lacking speed) affects grades profoundly.
I agree. My kids and I like the Clone Wars cartoons a lot. I think there is so much potential material between Ep. 2 and 3. The big mistake Lucas made was having Anakin be so young in Episode 1. Ep. 1 should have been scratched and the prequels should have started with 2 and made a real War Movie (ala the clone wars series) in between 2 and 3.
Yes it would be. We are now faced with ALL ISPs being FORCED to block bittorrent.
Before some companies were choosing to block bittorrent and getting bad press because of it.
Now government regulation could screw everyone and there will be nothing we could do about it.
It appears that the government getting involved in net neutrality could make things much much worse.
It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly adept the government is at taking something the people want, working on it, and then delivering something that is EXACTLY what the people DIDN'T want.
Net neutrality goes from allowing a free internet to mandating ISP filtering. Cheaper health care goes from actually trying to lower health care costs for most people to increasing them for most people.
Be careful what you wish for because the government will screw it up. This net neutrality thing is becoming our worst nightmare....
Dude, NASA doesn't design the craft then just issue requirements and specs. The contract companies then build the crafts.
You are wrong. Continuing to post over and over again how NASA designs everything and the private companies are just putting stuff together isn't going to make you correct.
No, I'm sorry what you said doesn't hold. NASA comes up with requirements and specifications. Words, sentences, numbers etc. Contractors then work from those and build the REAL stuff. Sure they review (ad nauseum) things with NASA along the way, but the Contractors are designing and building almost everything.
With respect to Pixar. What I always find really interesting is that Pixar can make things in their movies extremely accurate, but to date they always impart some sort of cartoon quality to all their human characters. This is especially noticeable in Up and in the Incredibles, their two movies that focus almost exclusively on purely human characters. All the characters in the Incredibles have a comic book quality to them, and all the characters in Up have exaggerated features, nose, ears, etc.
I think Pixar knows the uncanny valley exists for them and tries very very hard to stay away from it.
Perhaps they learned from their short film "Tin Toy" which featured a CGI baby that tried to be accurate and was amazingly disturbing to watch. I think that short convinced them to consistently and actively try to avoid uncanny valley.
I understand what you're saying, and that sounds like a horrendous situation. For some reason, your business leaders cannot ascertain the lost value during downtime, proving that they are poor business leaders....
My suggestion would be to either get very detailed with your analysis including financial impacts. You might want to enlist the help of an accountant working at the business if you can. A hard and fast number helps a lot. I know that in the past, I'd been able to quantify downtime as a matter of cost per hour. But, I have both succeeded and failed to convince businesses to spend the money necessary to minimize downtime. In the end that's still a business decision.
User action destroying production systems is a definite cause for heightened security. I'm flabbergasted that the business folks can't be convinced, but there are some REALLY stupid business people out there.
Your story indicates to me that perhaps you need to find a company where reasonable business folks exist that will at least listen to well reasoned policies. Thats really the crux of the article. Organizations that work that way WILL succeed.
Screw it, I was going to mod a whole bunch of posts in this thread, but your comment is so stupid I just have to respond.
While you're right that "IT as a Business" is wrong, what your advocating is "IT as Lord high protector of all Technology" and its just as wrong.
IT must work to achieve the business goals, and IT's software must work to achieve the business goals. The buisness' primary goal is to make money, not to have secure IT. Sure, a secondary goal of the business is secure IT, but its SECONDARY to the functioning of the business.
When the business needs a system to perform some function it must either be:
1) involved in creating the product of the business 2) involved in managing the process of creating the product of the business (the accounting, sales, marketing, etc.) big area here 3) directly selling or distributing the product (web sales, digital data, etc.)
That's it. Your tight security is not one of the business needs. Now, for option 3 above, your site better be secure and safe and reliable, or you risk not moving product. But your security decisions in this case are to protect the business model, not to pretend you're an NSA agent. You need to reasonably expound on the business case for the security protection you want to install, because its an overhead cost to the business in producing the product. Do your risk analysis, show the costs, do the BUSINESS focused due diligence to achieve the security you need to have while still providing the services to customers that need to be provided. In too many cases I've seen security edicts that would rather shut down or routinely break a business function (many times for the lamest of reason) than be flexible or even cooperative with security policies and settings.
When IT touts security guidelines that live outside the business they're setting themselves up to get cut out of the process until all the people who keep the hard and fast "thou shalt not" security rules get pushed aside.
Its better to work with the business folks and present real business cases, that to point to some complicated software exploit and say "we need to stop this". The money you get paid should be used to support being able to bridge the knowledge difference and be able to convey a complicated software exploit to the business.
IT exists to provide the business with technology to do what the business needs to do. Too often IT embraces its separation from the "regular" parts of the company. And it always does this at its own peril.
Risk makes health care expensive? I though that including malpractice reform in health care reform wouldn't really matter with respect to cost......
Note as shown very directly by this article, the cost of malpractice insurance at every level of healthcare is a major driver of the enormous cost and leaving tort reform out of the current health care "reform" was unacceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, proves the point that perhaps China should not be allowed to have any DNS root servers.
I would say that if a DNS server does not return the same information as all other root servers in the world that it should not be allowed to be a root server.
So, in the US I'd be free to:
Speak my mind on political matters,
Attend any church I want,
Assemble with like minded citizens,
Be allowed to maintain the privacy of my home,
Not incriminate myself in any crime,
Own a gun,
BUT
I wouldn't be able to eat a cheesburger???
I wouldn't be able to smoke (I'm not a smoker, but don't you dare tell me what I can and can't eat without telling all the smokers, Obama included, that they MUST quit)
I don't think so.
My personal opinion is that single payer is single payer and that means that the government takes in in taxes enough money to cover the medical services the populace needs. We the taxpayer can save money if we're healthier, but its our choice. Now taxes could be increased on fast food to cover health care and that might not be so bad, but that tax would be heavily regressive, just like the cigarette tax is. Far better and less preachy would be to use payroll and income taxes to cover the costs. But then I'm talking about a country that cares about balanced budgets. Presently, we're just spending whatever we want. So really, I should get to eat cheeseburgers anyway because the government doesn't really care what things cost anyway. At least you could infer that from their actions....
That's what really bothers me. Health care doesn't pay any attention at all to cycle times and utilization with respect to their equipment.
The cost of running a cat scan machine can probably be expressed very easily as a constant $ per year.
So to recover your cost you need to charge enough to foot the bill. Now, what happens is that for very few patients you have a very large cost per patient. So then costs become an issue, well what do you do to reduce costs, you do less right??! Nope. In this case its counter intuitive. You've already sunk most of the costs on the equipment, you need to recoup them. What you need is MORE patients to use the cat scan machine. Perhaps you would even go so far as to encourage people to have annual scans. Now, lets rethink our covering the cost of the machine. More patients and a fairly constant cost can drastically lower the costs that need to be charged to cover the equipment, the staff, the supplies, everything. Now, admiteddly the radiologist that's reading the scan would have to become more efficient and wouldn't be able to charge the same rate per scan, but he could still get paid the big salary for the time he's working. Oh and reading cat scans is the kind of thing that could easily be distributed and not local to you hospital so you could reap economies of scale.
Manufacturing, especially automated manufacturing in this country (and in others) have decades of experience minimizing the costs of running machines and maximizing their utilization. Health care always cuts costs by doing less. There is so much cost containment/optimization that could be done in health care, it almost unbelievable...
Actually, no it doesn't. I agree as simplified as I made the math that would be possible.
Medicare income will remain/constant or fall as the baby boom retires. So the money really won't be there in the future anyway. Besides, I don't think they'll even come close to saving $500b on medicare in the next 10 years.
A agree with your sentiment, but don't agree that this bill is slightly better. It's quite worse. Now before the lefties here flame me, I think the actual bill we're getting is worse than a bill with a public option. But the public option meant eventual death to the insurance companies, so it was certain from the beginning that that wouldn't pass.
This current bill is just a ball of lies. The numbers don't add up.
So the CBO says that for the first 10 years after this bill passes the deficit will go down $100 billion.
Thats all fine and good, but breaking that down, it means that the gov't will bring in $500 billion in taxes and save $500 billion from Medicare (good luck on that, we've been trying to eliminate waste and corruption in Medicare for 3 decades, which means that real savings in Medicare will only be achieved by cutting services, Obama really means it when he insinuates that maybe people should keep taking pills vs. getting surgery, so grandma is not going to get hip replacement, she's going to get hooked on oxycontin). Anyway back to the math.
$500b + $500b = $1t in "funding" over 10 years.
$1t - $900b = $100b extra!! Yay!!!
But this entitlement DOESN'T GO AWAY!!! I've already mentioned that saving $500b on Medicare is unlikely, but in the second decade it will be even MORE unlikely (if you've trimmed all the fat, all you have left is to cut to the bone). So lets leave that out no 2nd $500b savings from Medicare. So over the second decade starting in 2020....
$500b in funding.....
$1.5t in outlays (remember the first 4 years of this just built up a surplus)
leaving us $1 trillion dollars in debt, under the most optimistic projections in the second decade of this system!!!!
This bill is horseshit!!! By 2020 we will be faced with the only remaining option. We will have to go single payer and raise the taxes to cover it, or just keep building the debt. I think by then this will have so many problems and the insurance companies will be considered so evil that single payer will win the day. Not to say that single payer might not be the way, but is has its pluses and minuses.
However, at the end of the day, the bill we see before us now is designed to FAIL. We are wholesale ignoring other things that could be done to bring down the costs of health care (like we've admittedly been doing for decades) and enacting a giant giveaway to the insurance companies, and the question you have to ask is why. The answer is that once this is enacted, single payer will be the only way out of the hole.....
I totally agree. Google is taking a stand for freedom on the internet here and it will hurt their business. Microsoft doesn't give a shit about freedom and will increase their business.
People need to really look at what companies do and judge who they should do business with or not. If Microsoft will be willing to sell the internet freedoms of Chinese citizens down the river for a buck, whats to say that someday they won't sell the internet freedoms of American citizens too?
You've got a bit of a point there.
The interesting thing is that Obama's proposal to 'privatize' manned space launches, flys directly in the face of all the other stuff he's doing.
In Obama's view the housing, banking, auto, and insurance companies all need very strict government oversight. It ironic that he thinks manned space flight needs less. Note: I said ironic there. At heart, I believe and hope that Boeing and/or SpaceX can create manned rated rockets with appropriate funding from NASA. So while Obama's acting counter to what I think his instincts are, I also think there's a chance this will work.
BUT, as for this bill, I think extending the shuttle is a necessary step too.
IMHO any tech support staff that can't handle supporting at least firefox on a Windows machine, shouldn't be allowed to have a tech support job.
Too many people want to be tech support and know the script for the supported software. These people are entirely useless in all but the very smallest organizations.
You are correct it is a very Microsoft kind of thing to do. This is definately in the realm of embrace-extend-extinguish.
BTW: Note to Google, embrace-extend-extinguish is evil.
Its looking more and more like its well past time for Google to admit that the "Don't be evil." slogan no longer applies anymore.... If it ever really did.
Actually 2 sentences after the statement you use to indicate that the next ice age is 50,000 instead of 12,000 years away (two different theories) there is a discussion of scientific studies that theorize that added CO2 could keep an ice age at bay.
I'll concede this, which is what I stated before. We DON'T know. One of the points I'm making is that increased greenhouse effect is always assumed to be bad, when it might have good factors too....
You know, regarding your carousel comment. Its kind of ironic that the referencing of Logan's Run as a corollary explanation for why there are so few older programmers, is a reference that younger programmers wouldn't know.
Umm, we are due/overdue for another ice age. We have no idea what triggers them. Perhaps CO2 based warming could stave off another ice age. So yeah perhaps decreasing emissions will make things worse. We really DON'T know.
Now the non-renewable aspect of our current energy generation and usage is another discussion entirely.....
Often, professors are reluctant to drop the big instatutional hammer on cheating right away. So yes, discretion has to be used when you have to figure out who to send up the river and who to slap on the wrist.
I personally would be very reluctant to bring down the full wrath of the University unless the cheating was very blatant and repeated.
I'm not so sure that the expanded rigor you espouse would have cost less then the Y2K triage that was actually done....
Actually they do. CS courses have somewhat arbitrary deadlines (due dates) for assignments. Failing to meet them (lacking speed) affects grades profoundly.
I agree. My kids and I like the Clone Wars cartoons a lot. I think there is so much potential material between Ep. 2 and 3. The big mistake Lucas made was having Anakin be so young in Episode 1. Ep. 1 should have been scratched and the prequels should have started with 2 and made a real War Movie (ala the clone wars series) in between 2 and 3.
Dude that's one of the best /. comments ever. Why post anonymously.
Umm, the dude is question is a world class tinkerer and computer INVENTOR. Yeah, he might know how to diagnose electronic control logic problems.
Yes it would be. We are now faced with ALL ISPs being FORCED to block bittorrent.
Before some companies were choosing to block bittorrent and getting bad press because of it.
Now government regulation could screw everyone and there will be nothing we could do about it.
It appears that the government getting involved in net neutrality could make things much much worse.
It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly adept the government is at taking something the people want, working on it, and then delivering something that is EXACTLY what the people DIDN'T want.
Net neutrality goes from allowing a free internet to mandating ISP filtering.
Cheaper health care goes from actually trying to lower health care costs for most people to increasing them for most people.
Be careful what you wish for because the government will screw it up. This net neutrality thing is becoming our worst nightmare....
Dude, NASA doesn't design the craft then just issue requirements and specs. The contract companies then build the crafts.
You are wrong. Continuing to post over and over again how NASA designs everything and the private companies are just putting stuff together isn't going to make you correct.
No, I'm sorry what you said doesn't hold. NASA comes up with requirements and specifications. Words, sentences, numbers etc. Contractors then work from those and build the REAL stuff. Sure they review (ad nauseum) things with NASA along the way, but the Contractors are designing and building almost everything.
With respect to Pixar. What I always find really interesting is that Pixar can make things in their movies extremely accurate, but to date they always impart some sort of cartoon quality to all their human characters. This is especially noticeable in Up and in the Incredibles, their two movies that focus almost exclusively on purely human characters. All the characters in the Incredibles have a comic book quality to them, and all the characters in Up have exaggerated features, nose, ears, etc.
I think Pixar knows the uncanny valley exists for them and tries very very hard to stay away from it.
Perhaps they learned from their short film "Tin Toy" which featured a CGI baby that tried to be accurate and was amazingly disturbing to watch. I think that short convinced them to consistently and actively try to avoid uncanny valley.
I understand what you're saying, and that sounds like a horrendous situation. For some reason, your business leaders cannot ascertain the lost value during downtime, proving that they are poor business leaders....
My suggestion would be to either get very detailed with your analysis including financial impacts. You might want to enlist the help of an accountant working at the business if you can. A hard and fast number helps a lot. I know that in the past, I'd been able to quantify downtime as a matter of cost per hour. But, I have both succeeded and failed to convince businesses to spend the money necessary to minimize downtime. In the end that's still a business decision.
User action destroying production systems is a definite cause for heightened security. I'm flabbergasted that the business folks can't be convinced, but there are some REALLY stupid business people out there.
Your story indicates to me that perhaps you need to find a company where reasonable business folks exist that will at least listen to well reasoned policies. Thats really the crux of the article. Organizations that work that way WILL succeed.
Screw it, I was going to mod a whole bunch of posts in this thread, but your comment is so stupid I just have to respond.
While you're right that "IT as a Business" is wrong, what your advocating is "IT as Lord high protector of all Technology" and its just as wrong.
IT must work to achieve the business goals, and IT's software must work to achieve the business goals. The buisness' primary goal is to make money, not to have secure IT. Sure, a secondary goal of the business is secure IT, but its SECONDARY to the functioning of the business.
When the business needs a system to perform some function it must either be:
1) involved in creating the product of the business
2) involved in managing the process of creating the product of the business (the accounting, sales, marketing, etc.) big area here
3) directly selling or distributing the product (web sales, digital data, etc.)
That's it. Your tight security is not one of the business needs. Now, for option 3 above, your site better be secure and safe and reliable, or you risk not moving product. But your security decisions in this case are to protect the business model, not to pretend you're an NSA agent. You need to reasonably expound on the business case for the security protection you want to install, because its an overhead cost to the business in producing the product. Do your risk analysis, show the costs, do the BUSINESS focused due diligence to achieve the security you need to have while still providing the services to customers that need to be provided. In too many cases I've seen security edicts that would rather shut down or routinely break a business function (many times for the lamest of reason) than be flexible or even cooperative with security policies and settings.
When IT touts security guidelines that live outside the business they're setting themselves up to get cut out of the process until all the people who keep the hard and fast "thou shalt not" security rules get pushed aside.
Its better to work with the business folks and present real business cases, that to point to some complicated software exploit and say "we need to stop this". The money you get paid should be used to support being able to bridge the knowledge difference and be able to convey a complicated software exploit to the business.
IT exists to provide the business with technology to do what the business needs to do. Too often IT embraces its separation from the "regular" parts of the company. And it always does this at its own peril.
Risk makes health care expensive? I though that including malpractice reform in health care reform wouldn't really matter with respect to cost......
Note as shown very directly by this article, the cost of malpractice insurance at every level of healthcare is a major driver of the enormous cost and leaving tort reform out of the current health care "reform" was unacceptable.