I'm far from a vb programmer, but the code on that site looks useless. Looks like he just set up a "generic" database and whipped up a 5-minute gui front-end to fiddle some values in it.
I don't see anything that makes me think his code has any knowledge of a particular e-voting vendor's database format. I've heard that Diebold does use MS Access which is apparently what he's using, but if it is suppossed to work on diebold systems, there would have to be some other indication that the database has a larger structure than what his code "knows" about. Heck, his database is is named "Setup" -- despite their public display of ineptness, I can't believe that diebold or any other e-vote machine maker would name their vote records database "Setup."
In other words, his code doesn't seem to be even the barest possible minimum to be considered an actual proof of concept, much less a real tool for fraud.
I'm not particularly christian, but I like Joan of Arcadia, I don't think it is mundane (I also really like "The Shield" -- the target of one of their 'e-mail alerts' last season).
But, whenever I hear the theme song I can't help but think of the parody version -- "What if God Smoked Cannabis?" which might explain my proclivity for watching the show.
they are only showing snippets of a show in order to present criticism. This is defensible under fair use, the same as a book critic quoting a passage of a book in a review.
Yay Broadcast Flag!
Once the broadcast flag implementation is mandated (July of 2005) and all the shows are flagged (you know they will do it) then even this fair-use will be an illegal violation of the DMCA (circumvention of a totally inept copy prevention scheme).
If the atheists removed all religion from the gov't do you think that would somehow make the gov't force everyone to become atheist?
Forgot this one. Removing religion from the government does not make the government atheist. No more than a car without a fish bumper is sticker is an atheist car.
A government that "practices" atheism is what China has today and what the USSR was and those gvoernments are and were all about enforcing that atheism to the point of killing "believers" if they won't deconvert.
So your whole argument is that kids ought to be allowed to pray in school on their own?
Big fucking deal.
No, really.
You won't find a single person of any political orientation who disagrees with that. You also won't find a single public school that prevents it. If for no other reason than it would be impossible to enforce.
But what you will find banned are:
1) Prayer as part graduation the official graduation ceremonies. You seem to kind of think that ought to be ok. Think about it harder. Would you mind it if instead of christian prayer, there was a Muslim prayer? Maybe a Sikh prayer?
2) "Student lead prayer." You didn't spell it out, but you kind of hinted at this one too and it is such a standard talking point so I'll shoot it down while I'm at it. The same reasoning that forbis prayers at graduation prevents student led prayer over the PA system or in a classroom during school hours. After all, would you want your tax dollars paying for a Muslim prayer group on school time using school facilities? How about those 5 goths who think they are satanists - do they get to "lead" a prayer over the PA?
If the gov't wants to practice religion then that is okay too. Even if the gov't endorsed one it is in no way forcing anyone to have the same religion.
Woah. I didn't read this initially. Ok, you are just knucking futs. You let me know when you will be OK when the government of the USA starts spending tax dollars so satanists can have black masses all over the country. Any arguing that whatever religiion is shared by the majority of the population should be the state-sanctioned religion instead of satanism is to completely miss the point. What if George Bush is secretly a devil worshipper? He is, after all, a member of skull & bones and they have some nasty history. He gets elected by the "christians" and then decides to change the state religion. Can't happen? If your whole margin of safety relies on that, then your argument is meaningless.
Rumsfeld resigned? Where the frig did you read that?
Didn't you know? Not only do paid subscribers to slashdot get access to articles before other readers, they get access to them before the rest of the universe.
I pull up the logs, and it's FULL of porn sites being blocked at times when she was at work. He tried to blame it on spam and spyware, and I was non-committal, just wanted to get the thing working for her, but I think she had a little talk with him after I left.
Can you say "uncomfortable?"
Easy solution for that.
Turn the kid on to Linux, give him the URL for knoppix or one of the other live linux distros.
Then he can boot to linux for his porn viewing needs and his mom won't have to be embarrased by any of the porn entries in nannysitter's logs.
No one speaks Latin any more because we needed to communicate more information in fewer syllables,
Hah! I sincerely doubt that syllabic efficiency had a thing to do with the death of Latin, even if Latin is possibly less efficient. I expect politics had a lot more to do with it - rise of the middle class, fall of Rome, etc.
This is what I do too, and it works a treat. I *had* a landline for a while, solely for DSL and gave the phone number out to NO ONE. I STILL GOT CALLS.
Yep, that happened to me too since it is usually impossible to get DSL without a land-line (aka "naked DSL").
The solution? No telephones plugged into the landline. They can ring me all they want but I've got now way of ever even hearing it. If I really need to use the landline, in an emergecny or something, I can always plug one phone in for the duration. After a year or so, I have not needed to do that even once.
Now, if I could just get back the $20/month I waste on having a landline just for DSL...
PS, if by some amazing coincidence all these ideas aren't yet patented, consider the parent post to be prior art which I am giving away for free to any and all.
To all the pro-sumer video camera manufacturers out there, here is how to make a good hard disk based camera:
Leave the hard disk out.
That's right no hard disk in the camera unit. Instead either tether it with a heavy-duty, reinforced, industrial-grade firewire link. Or better yet, use something like wi-fi, or the new faster bluetooth or even your own proprietary scheme, to record wirelessly.
That opens up all kinds of flexibility and convenience. If the shooting is all going to be in a confined space of say, 30' then the disk can just sit on a table in the same room. Same thing if you are shooting from a car, just sit in on the floor by itself. If you need to move around a lot and cover a lot of ground, you can clip it to your belt or stick in in a backpack, or even designate your an assistant to carry it for the camera-man.
Also, by decoupling it from the camera we can use those new, big honking 400GB disks (or next years big honking 600GB disks) without having to worry that the camera now ways 5 lbs for disk and the battery to power it.
Next up - wireless viewfinders. Come out with a pair of glasses where one lens is actually a display that shows what the camera is recording - you will no longer need to hold the camera up to your face to know what you are shooting. You could even film around corners without much trouble. The great thing about this is that the same exact datastream going to the hard disk could be used by the wireless viewfinder too, so no extra work engineering work on the camera side to add this functionality.
We have cost of living differences throughout the USA too, and the playing field within the US is considered equal already, right? The way the capitalistic system is set up, the invisible hand tends to level them out pretty rapidly. Unlike worker protections which also tend to level out "on their own," but at a far slower pace.
Your example of Mumbai is actually a good one because, for equivalent standards of living, pricing is already approaching parity with major western cities. That $100/month apartment is going to be really ghetto in Mumbai, so ghetto that we probably have few equivalents in the USA. A decent western-standards apartment in Mumbai costs a whole lot more.
Also require that telephone representatives provide their actual names.
That won't work, they will just add a western name to their official name and use that.
6. Require that companies comply with U.S. labor and environmental laws when they open plants overseas.
This is the big one. All this talk of "leveling the playing field" from the outsourcing advocates seems to conveniently side-step this issue. Our worker protections are a major component in our costs - if we export the protections along with the jobs then the playing field really is levelled.
I know this is perhaps a controversial view on/. but DRM isn't evil per se.
That thinking is far too short term. The problem with DRM is that it does a lot more than just "protect their investment."
It kills the public domain.
Not that copyright law hasn't been mangled to do the same thing, at least in the USA, but the law can be undone. Correctly implemented DRM can not be undone, especially if the "owner" ceases to exist such that the unlocking mechanism no longer exists either.
As far as I am concerned, using DRM is outright theft from the public domain. All those people running around calling copyright violators "thieves" should take heed -- the companies implementing DRM are "stealing" from the entire nation, if not the entire human race. That is a heck of a lot more weighty than a bunch of individuals "stealing" from a couple of corporations.
Certainly they are not alone in creating the situation, but they are an easy target to pick out and their role in creating/maintaing the current problems is key. Whether they are an easy target for legislative change in the USA is whole different question - that big lobby of their's and all.
But, at the very least, if India is smart enough they won't let the health insurance industry develop over there the way it has over here, thus avoiding our current set of problems.
Whether he was or not doesn't negate the fact that he shared similar beliefs and did not mind that other people who may have been more Christian than he would practice their religion in the public schools.
Prove it.
Let's see just one verifiable document from Washington where he explicitly advocates christianity be taught or endorsed in the public schools. You won't find it.
But you will find numerous writings where he advocates religious tolerance of ALL faiths. A concept that is completely at odds with the idea of teaching one particular faith in the public schools.
> Insurance companies don't shield the careers of medical practictioners.
Yes they do, I'm too lazy to dig up examples of first order shielding of specific doctors, but second order shielding is easy to see because they enable the typical corporate distribution of responsibility so that systemic failures are "no one's fault." Thus the groups making the decisions that ultimately result in systemic failures don't get overhauled and bad processes either continue or are replaced by new bad processes designed by the same people responsible for the original bad processes.
> They don't force companies to purchase insurance that covers > routine care, cosmetic surgery, or experimental proceedures.
The insurance lobby is one of the strongest proponents of federally-mandated health insurance for employers over a certain size (I think it is 25 employees).
> And insurance companies certainly aren't responsible > for the litigious environment of modern healthcare.
Like I said before, they provide the incentive by enabling the "deep pockets" attitude. It is a reciprocal system where they like the current litigious environment because it allows them to justify ever increasing rates - when your profit is effectively a percentage of the money that passes through your hands, that means more dollars for them the more lawsuits they pay out on. But, what's worse is that even in states where litigation is not ridiculous they still use it as justification for rate hikes.
Some HDTV quality video is only in WM9, and some HDTV-DVD's also.
Unfortunately, almost all of those are wrapped up in Microsoft's digital restriction mandates and thus won't play on linux even with DVD Jon's work here.
MS's DRM is particularly nasty because it enables "phone home" authorization just to play the video thus you end up with silliness like the HD-DVD release of Terminator 2 not working (without a proxy) outside of the US or Canada as well as HD movie trailers (not actual movies, just the "previews" for upcoming movies) phoning home each time you play them, allowing the movie studios to do god knows what with that information -- and you not to play them without an internet connection (and all the assorted risks that come with it).
George Washington was probably not a Christian, but a Deist, and while there are spiritual overtones to that proclamation, he clearly avoided any Christian references.
Indeed. Not only in that proclamation (which congress voted for requiring him to make with religion as its basis) but in all of his writings, Washington never once makes reference to Jesus Christ or any other figure of Christian mythology. Instead the only deity he ever refers to is "our lord the creator," "the great almighty," etc, which is sufficiently generic enough to be a shade of agnostic.
Furhtermore, fundamentalist christians tend to cite Washington's Washington's Farewell Address, 1796 as proof that Washington believed that church and state should not be seperate. The passage they refer to is:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense ofrelig ious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
The more self-aware of such advocates often leave out the phrase which I have bolded, probably realizing that it significantly detracts from their argument. Essentially, Washington said that for the people who really can't think things through, which compromise a majority of the population, religion is necessary to keep them in line.
Not quite what most people would consider a ringing endorsement for religion.
Insurance companies are definitely responsible for the out of control healthcare costs in the USA:
Health Insurance - seperates responsibility for the bills from responsibility for the results. Thus you get patients who insist on all kinds of expensive tests and procedures because, from their perspective, "it's all free anyway." People who must pay for their own medical treatment personally understand the costs involved and thus make much more rational decisions about trade-offs between costs and results.
Actual "health insurance" ought to be limited to catastrophic insurance only, where it follows the original concept of insurance to mitigate the risk of catastrophe rendering the patient unable to pay for the rare big-bucks treatement that is necessary for the patients very survival.
Malpractice Insurance - These guys provide the deep pockets that make suing doctors and hospitals for malpractice so attractive. If their deep pockets weren't there such that a malpractice judgement might actually bankrupt a doctor or hospital (and thus result in little to no actual money being paid out) then there would be a whole lot less malpractice suits in the first place, and probably a whole lot more accountability within the medical profession as well because they would no longer have the shield that insurance provides them.
As an alternative to malpractice insurance, each patient should buy "operation insurance," kind of like flight insurance. The cost for coverage would vary by factors such as the type of oepration, the surgeon's experience, the surgeon's history of success and failure, etc. The point being to take the fortune-hunting, deep-pockets attitude out of the system and replace it with something that is actually based on the risk of real complications and attempts to mitigate those risks as insurance was originally designed to do.
God help you if you should get sick while over there working in India -- most Western medical plans will not cover your overseas "deployment". (Well, you could rely on the herbal remedies available locally -- just put enough money aside to have your body shipped home to Mum and Pop.)
Actually, India is becoming somewhat of a medical tourist destination, you probably won't have to worry about medical bills and health insurance so much if you "self-insure" -- the health insurance companies don't seem to have their claws in the system over there like they do in the US so medicine is still reasonably affordable, especially for someone with a decent (indian) job.
Regular contract agencies are designed to rip off their clients and their people. Either go in as an independent, or go in using an "umbrella company" like www.mybizoffice.com - Umbrellas take a small fee (2-4% of gross) do your paperwork, hold your security clearance, file your 'corporate' taxes, and provide the appearance of normal employment as far as places like banks are concerned. They also sell you benefits like health insurance and really good retirement options (way better than what a regular employee can get) which you pay for with pre-tax money.
Also, as a general rule of thumb you should expect to bill your client an hourly rate equal to the equivalent yearly salary divided by 1000 - so a $75,000/yr job would equal a $75/hr rate. This rate covers your additional expenses for insurance and retirement as well as the extra taxes the self-employed must give to uncle sam and finally it also pays for the risk of downtime between gigs. You should expect to sock away at *least* three months of expenses and preferrably 6 or more to be secure.
Finally, go to www.realrates.com and check out the rate surveys and the discussion forums for advice from guys who have been contracting through the thick and thin of the last 10+ years. That forum will get you a lot higher quality of answers than asking slashdot where you have more chance of getting advice from a 12 year old poser than you do of hearing from actual contractors.
> People are discovering that when you buy any > product that is subject to "activation", you > haven't really bought anything.
OK? That's the stupidest thing I've read on/. in a long time;
No, actually what you wrote is the stupidest thing you've read on/. in a long time.
The vast majority of the population have no clue about how digital restriction management can be used to take away something that they think they own. Whether they "stole" it or not does not matter here.
What matters is that more than 50,000 people just learned that their continued use of a product that they thought they owned (after all, they have posession of it, like a car) is in constant jeopordy of someone pressing the big red stop button.
Should Valve go under and their steam network be turned off, all legit purchasers of half-life2 will be in the exact same situation that these suspected pirates are today. People who paid for divx dvds are in the same boat already, they just weren't widespread enough for the lesson to make an impact.
Maybe this time the lesson will have an impact, especially on the teenagers of today who will be the ones who have to live in the DRM-ruled world the copyright cartel envisions. Maybe the fact that people have paid money for something that could disappear in an instant leaving them no recourse, will sink in enough on these kids that they will decide that the next product, be it music from the iTunes store or WMV-HD DVDs with "phone-home" DRM or the entire MS "Trusted Computing" baloney is not worth their money.
A free market requires education and Michael's comment is exactly the kind of education that the masses need to avoid a DRM-ruled world.
In recent years, science fiction has suffered a great decline in quality of content, in no small part due to the excessive commercialization of unimaginative "world of..." series.
So science has had to look to other forms of art for inspiration and development of new technologies. Scientists at Brain-Port Inc have found their new beacon of innovation in that aging rocker, Ozzy Osbourne.
During the development of the Brain-Port tonque interface, it was code-named the "Fly High Helmet" after Ozzy's song, "Fly High Again" in which he asked the question -- "Swallowing colors of the sound I hear, am I just a crazy guy?"
Brain-Port is rumoured to be working on another product which they are calling the "Hagar Helmet." Expected to be a huge boon to the auto insurance industry, the Hagar Helmet is designed to prevent the wearer from exceeding the speed limit. The exact mechanism by which it ensures that the wearer can only drive 55 is considered one of Brain-Port's most valuable trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm far from a vb programmer, but the code on that site looks useless. Looks like he just set up a "generic" database and whipped up a 5-minute gui front-end to fiddle some values in it.
I don't see anything that makes me think his code has any knowledge of a particular e-voting vendor's database format. I've heard that Diebold does use MS Access which is apparently what he's using, but if it is suppossed to work on diebold systems, there would have to be some other indication that the database has a larger structure than what his code "knows" about. Heck, his database is is named "Setup" -- despite their public display of ineptness, I can't believe that diebold or any other e-vote machine maker would name their vote records database "Setup."
In other words, his code doesn't seem to be even the barest possible minimum to be considered an actual proof of concept, much less a real tool for fraud.
It's just a mock-up is all.
I'm not particularly christian, but I like Joan of Arcadia, I don't think it is mundane (I also really like "The Shield" -- the target of one of their 'e-mail alerts' last season).
But, whenever I hear the theme song I can't help but think of the parody version -- "What if God Smoked Cannabis?" which might explain my proclivity for watching the show.
they are only showing snippets of a show in order to present criticism. This is defensible under fair use, the same as a book critic quoting a passage of a book in a review.
Yay Broadcast Flag!
Once the broadcast flag implementation is mandated (July of 2005) and all the shows are flagged (you know they will do it) then even this fair-use will be an illegal violation of the DMCA (circumvention of a totally inept copy prevention scheme).
If the atheists removed all religion from the gov't do you think that would somehow make the gov't force everyone to become atheist?
Forgot this one. Removing religion from the government does not make the government atheist. No more than a car without a fish bumper is sticker is an atheist car.
A government that "practices" atheism is what China has today and what the USSR was and those gvoernments are and were all about enforcing that atheism to the point of killing "believers" if they won't deconvert.
So your whole argument is that kids ought to be allowed to pray in school on their own?
Big fucking deal.
No, really.
You won't find a single person of any political orientation who disagrees with that. You also won't find a single public school that prevents it. If for no other reason than it would be impossible to enforce.
But what you will find banned are:
1) Prayer as part graduation the official graduation ceremonies. You seem to kind of think that ought to be ok. Think about it harder. Would you mind it if instead of christian prayer, there was a Muslim prayer? Maybe a Sikh prayer?
2) "Student lead prayer." You didn't spell it out, but you kind of hinted at this one too and it is such a standard talking point so I'll shoot it down while I'm at it. The same reasoning that forbis prayers at graduation prevents student led prayer over the PA system or in a classroom during school hours. After all, would you want your tax dollars paying for a Muslim prayer group on school time using school facilities? How about those 5 goths who think they are satanists - do they get to "lead" a prayer over the PA?
If the gov't wants to practice religion then that is okay too. Even if the gov't endorsed one it is in no way forcing anyone to have the same religion.
Woah. I didn't read this initially. Ok, you are just knucking futs. You let me know when you will be OK when the government of the USA starts spending tax dollars so satanists can have black masses all over the country. Any arguing that whatever religiion is shared by the majority of the population should be the state-sanctioned religion instead of satanism is to completely miss the point. What if George Bush is secretly a devil worshipper? He is, after all, a member of skull & bones and they have some nasty history. He gets elected by the "christians" and then decides to change the state religion. Can't happen? If your whole margin of safety relies on that, then your argument is meaningless.
I didn't say teach religion in public schools. I said practice.
I said, teach or endorse.
Define "practice." Specifically, demonstrate how your definition of "practice" is not endorsement.
Rumsfeld resigned? Where the frig did you read that?
Didn't you know?
Not only do paid subscribers to slashdot get access to articles before other readers,
they get access to them before the rest of the universe.
Consider this one a freebie.
I pull up the logs, and it's FULL of porn sites being blocked at times when she was at work. He tried to blame it on spam and spyware, and I was non-committal, just wanted to get the thing working for her, but I think she had a little talk with him after I left.
Can you say "uncomfortable?"
Easy solution for that.
Turn the kid on to Linux, give him the URL for knoppix or one of the other live linux distros.
Then he can boot to linux for his porn viewing needs and his mom won't have to be embarrased by any of the porn entries in nannysitter's logs.
Everybody wins.
No one speaks Latin any more because we needed to communicate more information in fewer syllables,
Hah! I sincerely doubt that syllabic efficiency had a thing to do with the death of Latin, even if Latin is possibly less efficient. I expect politics had a lot more to do with it - rise of the middle class, fall of Rome, etc.
This is what I do too, and it works a treat. I *had* a landline for a while, solely for DSL and gave the phone number out to NO ONE. I STILL GOT CALLS.
Yep, that happened to me too since it is usually impossible to get DSL without a land-line (aka "naked DSL").
The solution? No telephones plugged into the landline. They can ring me all they want but I've got now way of ever even hearing it. If I really need to use the landline, in an emergecny or something, I can always plug one phone in for the duration. After a year or so, I have not needed to do that even once.
Now, if I could just get back the $20/month I waste on having a landline just for DSL...
PS, if by some amazing coincidence all these ideas aren't yet patented, consider the parent post to be prior art which I am giving away for free to any and all.
To all the pro-sumer video camera manufacturers out there, here is how to make a good hard disk based camera:
Leave the hard disk out.
That's right no hard disk in the camera unit. Instead either tether it with a heavy-duty, reinforced, industrial-grade firewire link. Or better yet, use something like wi-fi, or the new faster bluetooth or even your own proprietary scheme, to record wirelessly.
That opens up all kinds of flexibility and convenience. If the shooting is all going to be in a confined space of say, 30' then the disk can just sit on a table in the same room. Same thing if you are shooting from a car, just sit in on the floor by itself. If you need to move around a lot and cover a lot of ground, you can clip it to your belt or stick in in a backpack, or even designate your an assistant to carry it for the camera-man.
Also, by decoupling it from the camera we can use those new, big honking 400GB disks (or next years big honking 600GB disks) without having to worry that the camera now ways 5 lbs for disk and the battery to power it.
Next up - wireless viewfinders. Come out with a pair of glasses where one lens is actually a display that shows what the camera is recording - you will no longer need to hold the camera up to your face to know what you are shooting. You could even film around corners without much trouble. The great thing about this is that the same exact datastream going to the hard disk could be used by the wireless viewfinder too, so no extra work engineering work on the camera side to add this functionality.
There is still the entire cost of living aspect
We have cost of living differences throughout the USA too, and the playing field within the US is considered equal already, right? The way the capitalistic system is set up, the invisible hand tends to level them out pretty rapidly. Unlike worker protections which also tend to level out "on their own," but at a far slower pace.
Your example of Mumbai is actually a good one because, for equivalent standards of living, pricing is already approaching parity with major western cities. That $100/month apartment is going to be really ghetto in Mumbai, so ghetto that we probably have few equivalents in the USA. A decent western-standards apartment in Mumbai costs a whole lot more.
Also require that telephone representatives provide their actual names.
That won't work, they will just add a western name to their official name and use that.
6. Require that companies comply with U.S. labor and environmental laws when they open plants overseas.
This is the big one. All this talk of "leveling the playing field" from the outsourcing advocates seems to conveniently side-step this issue. Our worker protections are a major component in our costs - if we export the protections along with the jobs then the playing field really is levelled.
I know this is perhaps a controversial view on /. but DRM isn't evil per se.
That thinking is far too short term. The problem with DRM is that it does a lot more than just "protect their investment."
It kills the public domain.
Not that copyright law hasn't been mangled to do the same thing, at least in the USA, but the law can be undone. Correctly implemented DRM can not be undone, especially if the "owner" ceases to exist such that the unlocking mechanism no longer exists either.
As far as I am concerned, using DRM is outright theft from the public domain. All those people running around calling copyright violators "thieves" should take heed -- the companies implementing DRM are "stealing" from the entire nation, if not the entire human race. That is a heck of a lot more weighty than a bunch of individuals "stealing" from a couple of corporations.
Certainly they are not alone in creating the situation, but they are an easy target to pick out and their role in creating/maintaing the current problems is key. Whether they are an easy target for legislative change in the USA is whole different question - that big lobby of their's and all.
But, at the very least, if India is smart enough they won't let the health insurance industry develop over there the way it has over here, thus avoiding our current set of problems.
Whether he was or not doesn't negate the fact that he shared similar beliefs and did not mind that other people who may have been more Christian than he would practice their religion in the public schools.
Prove it.
Let's see just one verifiable document from Washington where he explicitly advocates christianity be taught or endorsed in the public schools. You won't find it.
But you will find numerous writings where he advocates religious tolerance of ALL faiths. A concept that is completely at odds with the idea of teaching one particular faith in the public schools.
> Insurance companies don't shield the careers of medical practictioners.
Yes they do, I'm too lazy to dig up examples of first order shielding of specific doctors, but second order shielding is easy to see because they enable the typical corporate distribution of responsibility so that systemic failures are "no one's fault." Thus the groups making the decisions that ultimately result in systemic failures don't get overhauled and bad processes either continue or are replaced by new bad processes designed by the same people responsible for the original bad processes.
> They don't force companies to purchase insurance that covers
> routine care, cosmetic surgery, or experimental proceedures.
The insurance lobby is one of the strongest proponents of federally-mandated health insurance for employers over a certain size (I think it is 25 employees).
> And insurance companies certainly aren't responsible
> for the litigious environment of modern healthcare.
Like I said before, they provide the incentive by enabling the "deep pockets" attitude. It is a reciprocal system where they like the current litigious environment because it allows them to justify ever increasing rates - when your profit is effectively a percentage of the money that passes through your hands, that means more dollars for them the more lawsuits they pay out on. But, what's worse is that even in states where litigation is not ridiculous they still use it as justification for rate hikes.
Some HDTV quality video is only in WM9, and some HDTV-DVD's also.
Unfortunately, almost all of those are wrapped up in Microsoft's digital restriction mandates and thus won't play on linux even with DVD Jon's work here.
MS's DRM is particularly nasty because it enables "phone home" authorization just to play the video thus you end up with silliness like the HD-DVD release of Terminator 2 not working (without a proxy) outside of the US or Canada as well as HD movie trailers (not actual movies, just the "previews" for upcoming movies) phoning home each time you play them, allowing the movie studios to do god knows what with that information -- and you not to play them without an internet connection (and all the assorted risks that come with it).
Indeed. Not only in that proclamation (which congress voted for requiring him to make with religion as its basis) but in all of his writings, Washington never once makes reference to Jesus Christ or any other figure of Christian mythology. Instead the only deity he ever refers to is "our lord the creator," "the great almighty," etc, which is sufficiently generic enough to be a shade of agnostic.
Furhtermore, fundamentalist christians tend to cite Washington's Washington's Farewell Address, 1796 as proof that Washington believed that church and state should not be seperate. The passage they refer to is:
The more self-aware of such advocates often leave out the phrase which I have bolded, probably realizing that it significantly detracts from their argument. Essentially, Washington said that for the people who really can't think things through, which compromise a majority of the population, religion is necessary to keep them in line.
Not quite what most people would consider a ringing endorsement for religion.
Insurance companies are definitely responsible for the out of control healthcare costs in the USA:
Health Insurance - seperates responsibility for the bills from responsibility for the results. Thus you get patients who insist on all kinds of expensive tests and procedures because, from their perspective, "it's all free anyway." People who must pay for their own medical treatment personally understand the costs involved and thus make much more rational decisions about trade-offs between costs and results.
Actual "health insurance" ought to be limited to catastrophic insurance only, where it follows the original concept of insurance to mitigate the risk of catastrophe rendering the patient unable to pay for the rare big-bucks treatement that is necessary for the patients very survival.
Malpractice Insurance - These guys provide the deep pockets that make suing doctors and hospitals for malpractice so attractive. If their deep pockets weren't there such that a malpractice judgement might actually bankrupt a doctor or hospital (and thus result in little to no actual money being paid out) then there would be a whole lot less malpractice suits in the first place, and probably a whole lot more accountability within the medical profession as well because they would no longer have the shield that insurance provides them.
As an alternative to malpractice insurance, each patient should buy "operation insurance," kind of like flight insurance. The cost for coverage would vary by factors such as the type of oepration, the surgeon's experience, the surgeon's history of success and failure, etc. The point being to take the fortune-hunting, deep-pockets attitude out of the system and replace it with something that is actually based on the risk of real complications and attempts to mitigate those risks as insurance was originally designed to do.
God help you if you should get sick while over
there working in India -- most Western medical
plans will not cover your overseas "deployment".
(Well, you could rely on the herbal remedies
available locally -- just put enough money aside
to have your body shipped home to Mum and Pop.)
Actually, India is becoming somewhat of a medical tourist destination, you probably won't have to worry about medical bills and health insurance so much if you "self-insure" -- the health insurance companies don't seem to have their claws in the system over there like they do in the US so medicine is still reasonably affordable, especially for someone with a decent (indian) job.
Regular contract agencies are designed to rip off their clients and their people. Either go in as an independent, or go in using an "umbrella company" like www.mybizoffice.com - Umbrellas take a small fee (2-4% of gross) do your paperwork, hold your security clearance, file your 'corporate' taxes, and provide the appearance of normal employment as far as places like banks are concerned. They also sell you benefits like health insurance and really good retirement options (way better than what a regular employee can get) which you pay for with pre-tax money.
Also, as a general rule of thumb you should expect to bill your client an hourly rate equal to the equivalent yearly salary divided by 1000 - so a $75,000/yr job would equal a $75/hr rate. This rate covers your additional expenses for insurance and retirement as well as the extra taxes the self-employed must give to uncle sam and finally it also pays for the risk of downtime between gigs. You should expect to sock away at *least* three months of expenses and preferrably 6 or more to be secure.
Finally, go to www.realrates.com and check out the rate surveys and the discussion forums for advice from guys who have been contracting through the thick and thin of the last 10+ years. That forum will get you a lot higher quality of answers than asking slashdot where you have more chance of getting advice from a 12 year old poser than you do of hearing from actual contractors.
> People are discovering that when you buy any
/. in a long time;
/. in a long time.
> product that is subject to "activation", you
> haven't really bought anything.
OK? That's the stupidest thing I've read on
No, actually what you wrote is the stupidest thing you've read on
The vast majority of the population have no clue about how digital restriction management can be used to take away something that they think they own. Whether they "stole" it or not does not matter here.
What matters is that more than 50,000 people just learned that their continued use of a product that they thought they owned (after all, they have posession of it, like a car) is in constant jeopordy of someone pressing the big red stop button.
Should Valve go under and their steam network be turned off, all legit purchasers of half-life2 will be in the exact same situation that these suspected pirates are today. People who paid for divx dvds are in the same boat already, they just weren't widespread enough for the lesson to make an impact.
Maybe this time the lesson will have an impact, especially on the teenagers of today who will be the ones who have to live in the DRM-ruled world the copyright cartel envisions. Maybe the fact that people have paid money for something that could disappear in an instant leaving them no recourse, will sink in enough on these kids that they will decide that the next product, be it music from the iTunes store or WMV-HD DVDs with "phone-home" DRM or the entire MS "Trusted Computing" baloney is not worth their money.
A free market requires education and Michael's comment is exactly the kind of education that the masses need to avoid a DRM-ruled world.
In recent years, science fiction has suffered a great decline in quality of content, in no small part due to the excessive commercialization of unimaginative "world of..." series.
So science has had to look to other forms of art for inspiration and development of new technologies. Scientists at Brain-Port Inc have found their new beacon of innovation in that aging rocker, Ozzy Osbourne.
During the development of the Brain-Port tonque interface, it was code-named the "Fly High Helmet" after Ozzy's song, "Fly High Again" in which he asked the question -- "Swallowing colors of the sound I hear, am I just a crazy guy?"
Brain-Port is rumoured to be working on another product which they are calling the "Hagar Helmet." Expected to be a huge boon to the auto insurance industry, the Hagar Helmet is designed to prevent the wearer from exceeding the speed limit. The exact mechanism by which it ensures that the wearer can only drive 55 is considered one of Brain-Port's most valuable trade secrets.