I willingly and knowingly eat peanut butter with trans fat (hydrogenated oil).
"Natural" peanut butter always gets gross and oily and has a texture that I can't stand. Having food that I like to eat is kind of important to me as otherwise I simply don't eat enough food.
You know that your redneck in Alabama doesn't actually have to buy health insurance, right? If he's poor enough he can pay nothing. If the cheapest plan would be over a certain percentage of his income, he can pay nothing. If he just doesn't feel like paying for it he can instead pay a fee. If he doesn't feel like paying a fee then he can pay nothing and the worst that happens is they take the fee out of his income tax return. If he really wants to he can do his taxes in a way that he won't get an income tax return and lose nothing.
Though, honestly, if you look at the rates they are rather reasonable even for lower and middle income people. They're pretty high for people that are well off but I don't think Mr. Alabama redneck is in that group. And health insurance as it is right now, even without the Affordable Care Act, is not insurance like life insurance. It's already a socialized system where the healthy subsidize the sick.
How would you fix the health care system? The system was obviously broken and costing way too much of our GDP for worse results compared to other countries. And the baby boomers are getting to that age where there's going to be a glut of people needing care. There's no way around that.
I'm honestly more in favor of a single-payer system but I'm all for giving the ACA the benefit of the doubt. It's not like it can't be changed if it turns out that it just doesn't work.
Indeed, I find her interest in discourse on the subject frightening because she's the official that ordered spying, including theft of credit card info, on UN officials.
And then you can be drafted and die for your country (unless you're female...then you have to volunteer) but you can't purchase alcohol until you're 21.
And then there's good evidence (National Institute of Health study among others) that the part of our brain that inhibits risky behavior doesn't fully develop until about 25.
Mantle does sound like good news but they also said it is an open API and so I wouldn't be too worried about Nvidia...they'll just implement it themselves if it's so good.
And Nvidia has been crushing AMD/ATI in the PC market for a while (the Steam hardware survey shows 52.38% Nvidia to 33.08% AMD/ATI with 14% Intel). Hopefully this will even things out some but I don't see it making OpenGL or DirectX obsolete. OpenGL and DirectX have so much momentum and market share that game devs are going to have to target and support them for a while yet.
Also, until we get more solid details about Mantle we won't know how good it really is. I am cautiously optimistic but at most this will cause me to delay my next video card purchase until things shake out.
Wait a second, so the TSA makes me take my shoes off and treats me like a criminal but people can just drive their car right up to the runway with nothing to stop them?
Re:Interactive Fiction is very alive
on
Boot To Zork
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· Score: 1
I've always enjoyed that rockpapershotgun (game review/news site) has an error page http://rockpapershotgun.com/503test that is an interactive fiction game made using https://code.google.com/p/parchment/
He doesn't pay for internet. He uses free public wifi in a park. He mainly survives off of food stamps but uses the bitcoin revenue to supplement that. I seriously doubt he pays a phone bill unless it's prepaid, certainly not for data. Bitcoin doesn't require a bank account (which often charges a monthly fee if you have too little money) and people can't beat you up and take your bitcoins.
And exactly how is selling your laptop to maybe afford one more month of rent going to help your living situation? Then you're just homeless without a laptop. I think he has proved that keeping the laptop is worth its weight in food as a potential income source.
I don't understand why people always hate on the homeless. Is it so impossible to imagine a situation where you're down on your luck and fall through the cracks? Not everyone has a safety net of family and friends. I almost feel like the idea scares people so much that they get reflexively angry about as a form of denial.
"It's impossible! This could obviously never happen to me and so these people must be scammers, scum, or addicts!"
As a beggar it is quite obvious that he is cleaning windows in hope of recompense and in that case it is rude to let someone do work to your benefit when you have no intention of rewarding said behavior. It costs you nothing to roll down a window and politely tell him off.
If you replaced the beggar with a penitent monk then it would be different. I mean, this is simple apply the Golden Rule morality. I don't get what is so difficult about it?
Yes, I think it would be immoral and indecent if you were to let him clean your windshield and not tip him or at the very least thank him if you cannot afford charity.
Now, if you made it clear that you don't want him cleaning your windshield and he did it anyway then it would be different.
Obviously FOSS is work and consumed at no cost in good morale standing.
Your fart analogy falls short. That isn't work in line with the context that I used work and your smelling it is not consumption with regards to how I was using consumption. Yes, it is consumption but in the way that reading a book is also consumption and thus pedantry.
Or perhaps people who tend to get more cavities don't live as long (maybe even only for socioeconomic reasons) and thus are less likely to develop cancer?
I have no reason to believe that's true one way or another, it's just another potential idea.
Then it's fraud and covered by such laws and does not need special intellectual property laws to cover it.
Personally, I can perhaps see some use in copyright. It certainly seems obviously immoral to consume someone else's work at no return. However, I think the terms are exceedingly expansive now and that much of the alarmist rhetoric is not logically sound as by their own logic piracy would eventually be self regulating.
If enough people pirated that it hurt the industry to the point that it were not profitable to create new media then there would be no media to pirate and so there would be no piracy. Such a clean, new market seems like it would be very enterprising to me.
I don't think demand would ever let it come to that point but rather that it will always settle on some middle ground. Granted, the issue is complex and there is the potential that the alarmists are correct.
Also, why always the disparaging remarks about neckbeards these days? There's no reason to believe that anyone with any given belief will look the same or that anyone that looks the same will be given to any certain belief. That's simple prejudice and not a worthy sentiment in any moral person's mind.
They knew where the signal was coming from geographically and recognized the scheme/time/pattern that said 'Hey, I'm German encryption!' or 'Hey, I'm Japanese encryption!'
There are very few absolutes in life, if any, and it is probable that one can be absolutely sure that they were not spying on law abiding citizens in their own country when intercepting German messages.
The NSA is spying on its citizens in the name of preventing a terrorist attack, right? Ok, so at best they'll save a few thousand lives at the cost of billions of dollars while violating laws and rights.
That doesn't really seem worth it to me. If the goal is to save a few thousand lives we could certainly spend the money better. Simple educational programs for drivers would save more lives.
You can easily pass 150 GB a month just watching 720p video from youtube or twitch.tv every day. Maybe even 420p, I'd have to do the math. Don't even think about 1080p. I know that with my 300GB cap that I have to be very choosy about what content I get to watch in 1080p.
If you're a gamer then you can use up large portions of 150GB just from game patches. Actually downloading a new game is frequently 15GB or more (your typical MMO is over 20GB these days, even FPS games get up to 30GB).
You like to clone big projects on github and tinker with them? Tough luck.
And that's just for ONE person without any file sharing; imagine a house full of people that actually use their technology. You wouldn't even be able to buy a plan with a cap that accommodates their needs (the highest my US ISP goes to is 450GB). And if they're all streaming their media then you're actually multiplying the bandwidth cost for any individual media item as they can't just push it over the local network.
Tell me 150 GB / month is plenty when you retire and you're actually home to use your internet more than a couple hours a day. I mean, sure, you don't NEED the internet. You could survive perfectly fine from subsistence farming. But sometimes nice things are nice to have...
The argument that it's expensive to be an ISP as a reason for caps is flawed. That's a reason to raise prices but not a reason for caps. Hell, do ISPs even pay for bandwidth in their peering agreements? No?
Amazon doesn't set book prices. Publishers set book prices. Well, unless selling at a loss, which is part of what the big price fixing lawsuit was about as publishers didn't want to let Amazon do that.
It's obvious to everyone that ebooks don't cost $8 to $15 to produce and distribute. Publishers have always said that they set ebook prices higher to prop up dead tree sales. This makes some sense as hardcover sales are still very important for things like the New York Times' Bestsellers lists. I think they also need to make back the money they make on the first run of books but I don't remember exactly how the publisher<->book store monetization works (I remember something about unsold books getting their covers ripped off and publishers not making money on those books?).
I imagine Amazon negotiated with the publishers and was like "Hey, people really want to bundle ebooks with their dead tree books and we could all make a little extra cash if you let us bundle ebooks at a reduced price without hurting your dead tree sales!"
You do realize that my point was that Hanzie seemed to be implying that the author was a hypocrite for putting her kids in preschool while most states don't actually have public education before age 5 or 6?
Head start doesn't count as you have to qualify as a low income family, which the author is unlikely to be in. And that Kansas state program, while very interesting, is only for "at risk" children. Yes, I see that they made it easier for children to get in but you still have to qualify as one of: impoverished, a single parent, obtained a government department referral, a teen parent, a parent with no high school education, a migrant, poor english proficiency, or low development progress.
When I said public I mean in comparison to public K-12 (and kindergarten isn't really preschool either in common usage in the states). Basically if you aren't poor and you want to put your kids in preschool your only option is a private school. Thus it's not weird for someone advocating that every kid to be put in public schools to have put their kids through a private preschool.
>> consider that ICANN is definitely the most inept entity in existence
I hope you meant that as hyperbole. Objectively things have gone rather well for the Internet since 1998. Though I guess one could claim ICANN's ineffectiveness as the reason? But I would still call that effective due to results.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that they don't make TVs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siragon,_C.A.
I willingly and knowingly eat peanut butter with trans fat (hydrogenated oil).
"Natural" peanut butter always gets gross and oily and has a texture that I can't stand.
Having food that I like to eat is kind of important to me as otherwise I simply don't eat enough food.
Do you think that --easy-off-store-extension-install will work for this?
I always just wanted a 'Do you think this is a shit question?' option.
You know that your redneck in Alabama doesn't actually have to buy health insurance, right?
If he's poor enough he can pay nothing.
If the cheapest plan would be over a certain percentage of his income, he can pay nothing.
If he just doesn't feel like paying for it he can instead pay a fee.
If he doesn't feel like paying a fee then he can pay nothing and the worst that happens is they take the fee out of his income tax return.
If he really wants to he can do his taxes in a way that he won't get an income tax return and lose nothing.
Though, honestly, if you look at the rates they are rather reasonable even for lower and middle income people. They're pretty high for people that are well off but I don't think Mr. Alabama redneck is in that group. And health insurance as it is right now, even without the Affordable Care Act, is not insurance like life insurance. It's already a socialized system where the healthy subsidize the sick.
How would you fix the health care system? The system was obviously broken and costing way too much of our GDP for worse results compared to other countries. And the baby boomers are getting to that age where there's going to be a glut of people needing care. There's no way around that.
I'm honestly more in favor of a single-payer system but I'm all for giving the ACA the benefit of the doubt. It's not like it can't be changed if it turns out that it just doesn't work.
Indeed, I find her interest in discourse on the subject frightening because she's the official that ordered spying, including theft of credit card info, on UN officials.
Citation for the curious: Spying on United Nations leaders by United States diplomats
And then you can be drafted and die for your country (unless you're female...then you have to volunteer) but you can't purchase alcohol until you're 21.
And then there's good evidence (National Institute of Health study among others) that the part of our brain that inhibits risky behavior doesn't fully develop until about 25.
Mantle does sound like good news but they also said it is an open API and so I wouldn't be too worried about Nvidia...they'll just implement it themselves if it's so good.
And Nvidia has been crushing AMD/ATI in the PC market for a while (the Steam hardware survey shows 52.38% Nvidia to 33.08% AMD/ATI with 14% Intel).
Hopefully this will even things out some but I don't see it making OpenGL or DirectX obsolete.
OpenGL and DirectX have so much momentum and market share that game devs are going to have to target and support them for a while yet.
Also, until we get more solid details about Mantle we won't know how good it really is. I am cautiously optimistic but at most this will cause me to delay my next video card purchase until things shake out.
Wait a second, so the TSA makes me take my shoes off and treats me like a criminal but people can just drive their car right up to the runway with nothing to stop them?
I've always enjoyed that rockpapershotgun (game review/news site) has an error page http://rockpapershotgun.com/503test that is an interactive fiction game made using https://code.google.com/p/parchment/
He doesn't pay for internet. He uses free public wifi in a park. He mainly survives off of food stamps but uses the bitcoin revenue to supplement that.
I seriously doubt he pays a phone bill unless it's prepaid, certainly not for data. Bitcoin doesn't require a bank account (which often charges a monthly fee if you have too little money) and people can't beat you up and take your bitcoins.
And exactly how is selling your laptop to maybe afford one more month of rent going to help your living situation? Then you're just homeless without a laptop.
I think he has proved that keeping the laptop is worth its weight in food as a potential income source.
I don't understand why people always hate on the homeless. Is it so impossible to imagine a situation where you're down on your luck and fall through the cracks? Not everyone has a safety net of family and friends. I almost feel like the idea scares people so much that they get reflexively angry about as a form of denial.
"It's impossible! This could obviously never happen to me and so these people must be scammers, scum, or addicts!"
As a beggar it is quite obvious that he is cleaning windows in hope of recompense and in that case it is rude to let someone do work to your benefit when you have no intention of rewarding said behavior. It costs you nothing to roll down a window and politely tell him off.
If you replaced the beggar with a penitent monk then it would be different. I mean, this is simple apply the Golden Rule morality. I don't get what is so difficult about it?
Yes, I think it would be immoral and indecent if you were to let him clean your windshield and not tip him or at the very least thank him if you cannot afford charity.
Now, if you made it clear that you don't want him cleaning your windshield and he did it anyway then it would be different.
You are being pedantic and you know it.
Obviously FOSS is work and consumed at no cost in good morale standing.
Your fart analogy falls short. That isn't work in line with the context that I used work and your smelling it is not consumption with regards to how I was using consumption. Yes, it is consumption but in the way that reading a book is also consumption and thus pedantry.
Or perhaps people who tend to get more cavities don't live as long (maybe even only for socioeconomic reasons) and thus are less likely to develop cancer?
I have no reason to believe that's true one way or another, it's just another potential idea.
Then it's fraud and covered by such laws and does not need special intellectual property laws to cover it.
Personally, I can perhaps see some use in copyright. It certainly seems obviously immoral to consume someone else's work at no return. However, I think the terms are exceedingly expansive now and that much of the alarmist rhetoric is not logically sound as by their own logic piracy would eventually be self regulating.
If enough people pirated that it hurt the industry to the point that it were not profitable to create new media then there would be no media to pirate and so there would be no piracy. Such a clean, new market seems like it would be very enterprising to me.
I don't think demand would ever let it come to that point but rather that it will always settle on some middle ground. Granted, the issue is complex and there is the potential that the alarmists are correct.
Also, why always the disparaging remarks about neckbeards these days? There's no reason to believe that anyone with any given belief will look the same or that anyone that looks the same will be given to any certain belief. That's simple prejudice and not a worthy sentiment in any moral person's mind.
Yes, because all of the retired people in the world are always so busy murdering each other.
It's truly tragic.
They knew where the signal was coming from geographically and recognized the scheme/time/pattern that said 'Hey, I'm German encryption!' or 'Hey, I'm Japanese encryption!'
There are very few absolutes in life, if any, and it is probable that one can be absolutely sure that they were not spying on law abiding citizens in their own country when intercepting German messages.
The NSA is spying on its citizens in the name of preventing a terrorist attack, right? Ok, so at best they'll save a few thousand lives at the cost of billions of dollars while violating laws and rights.
That doesn't really seem worth it to me. If the goal is to save a few thousand lives we could certainly spend the money better.
Simple educational programs for drivers would save more lives.
You can easily pass 150 GB a month just watching 720p video from youtube or twitch.tv every day. Maybe even 420p, I'd have to do the math. Don't even think about 1080p. I know that with my 300GB cap that I have to be very choosy about what content I get to watch in 1080p.
If you're a gamer then you can use up large portions of 150GB just from game patches. Actually downloading a new game is frequently 15GB or more (your typical MMO is over 20GB these days, even FPS games get up to 30GB).
You like to clone big projects on github and tinker with them? Tough luck.
And that's just for ONE person without any file sharing; imagine a house full of people that actually use their technology. You wouldn't even be able to buy a plan with a cap that accommodates their needs (the highest my US ISP goes to is 450GB). And if they're all streaming their media then you're actually multiplying the bandwidth cost for any individual media item as they can't just push it over the local network.
Tell me 150 GB / month is plenty when you retire and you're actually home to use your internet more than a couple hours a day.
I mean, sure, you don't NEED the internet. You could survive perfectly fine from subsistence farming. But sometimes nice things are nice to have...
The argument that it's expensive to be an ISP as a reason for caps is flawed. That's a reason to raise prices but not a reason for caps. Hell, do ISPs even pay for bandwidth in their peering agreements? No?
Amazon doesn't set book prices. Publishers set book prices. Well, unless selling at a loss, which is part of what the big price fixing lawsuit was about as publishers didn't want to let Amazon do that.
It's obvious to everyone that ebooks don't cost $8 to $15 to produce and distribute. Publishers have always said that they set ebook prices higher to prop up dead tree sales.
This makes some sense as hardcover sales are still very important for things like the New York Times' Bestsellers lists.
I think they also need to make back the money they make on the first run of books but I don't remember exactly how the publisher<->book store monetization works (I remember something about unsold books getting their covers ripped off and publishers not making money on those books?).
I imagine Amazon negotiated with the publishers and was like "Hey, people really want to bundle ebooks with their dead tree books and we could all make a little extra cash if you let us bundle ebooks at a reduced price without hurting your dead tree sales!"
You do realize that my point was that Hanzie seemed to be implying that the author was a hypocrite for putting her kids in preschool while most states don't actually have public education before age 5 or 6?
Head start doesn't count as you have to qualify as a low income family, which the author is unlikely to be in.
And that Kansas state program, while very interesting, is only for "at risk" children. Yes, I see that they made it easier for children to get in but you still have to qualify as one of: impoverished, a single parent, obtained a government department referral, a teen parent, a parent with no high school education, a migrant, poor english proficiency, or low development progress.
When I said public I mean in comparison to public K-12 (and kindergarten isn't really preschool either in common usage in the states).
Basically if you aren't poor and you want to put your kids in preschool your only option is a private school.
Thus it's not weird for someone advocating that every kid to be put in public schools to have put their kids through a private preschool.
There are public preschools?
>> consider that ICANN is definitely the most inept entity in existence
I hope you meant that as hyperbole. Objectively things have gone rather well for the Internet since 1998.
Though I guess one could claim ICANN's ineffectiveness as the reason? But I would still call that effective due to results.
What if I decide that you only have the right to travel...by catapult? Into a wall.
If we're going to limit amendments then we should do it with other amendments. Not through interpretation.
If it's too hard to pass an amendment to do that then it's obvious that it's wrong.
Or two weeks without power in a southern state's summer heat after a hurricane...
Deadly.