The bottom line is that we're paying a lot for healthcare and not receiving great outcomes. The status quo is not acceptable. The "Republican plan" that was waived around was a cover sheet with blank paper behind it. We need to do something, and the current plan is the only one that has been fleshed out and worked through the process, votes whipped, etc.
It's not great, but at least we're starting to get some momentum on reforming a system that needs lots and lots of reform.
But the Republicans did do healthcare. Remember Medicare Part D, one of the largest pork fests and inefficient government programs ever? The one that buys prescription medicine at such a high price that it actually cost more than the current bill?
So let's take a look at this. For the price of this healthcare bill, the Democrats are somewhat protecting us from abuse from insurance companies, and insuring 30+ million more Americans, allowing them to go to the doctor, get better and get back to work. The Republicans for the same price managed to get some more prescriptions for seniors and line the pockets of the pharma companies.
Because.......colleges are ALWAYS ranked on the percentage of students that make it through. "Bad" colleges don't graduate as high of a percentage of their students, obviously because they don't have proper facilities, tutoring, etc. Whereas "Good" colleges graduate nearly everyone; proving that they have the capability to teach the students enough to make it through their tough coursework.
Every department in every University has this metric, and it's highly focused upon. If you're failing people you accepted, it's viewed as a big flaw of the department; why accept them if you're going to fail such a high number?
Of course, what happens is that the pressure rolls down hill and the professors get lots and lots pressure to push that curve down so that the vast majority can pass. Obviously, if the majority of the students are just playing bejeweled and not learning anything, then that's what the University is going to graduate.
Professors don't want to graduate students like that, so they're pushing back. They want their department to stay top-notch and graduate individuals whom know their respective field.
Having read lots of publications, let me tell you that there's a big difference between publishing something, and achieving something.....
Silly academics with their insular communities. Here in my side of the world, publishing means nothing, but saving the government money or saving some lives means everything.
Anayway, the city of Hoofddorp, where I live, forbids the placement of cellular base station antennas on top of residential buildings. I support this policy; better safe than sorry.
Huh? Residential roof tops would be one of the safer places, I would think. A simple regulation requiring the base station operator to put down a quick metal screen around the base station would provide excellent shielding, and would keep it away from most people....
They typically take the radiation pattern, determine the part that radiates into your head and how much power that is out of the total with respect to how much flesh it's hitting and penetrating (different penetration depth for bone, skin, etc).
They also have a pretty sophisticated series of models for different sized people, different manners of holding the phone, etc and typically use some type of average.
Microwaves without mode stirrers would indeed heat food. It just wouldn't heat them evenly. Even with mode stirrers, you don't get consistent constructive interference evenly enough through the chamber (and from enough angles where containers don't partially block the signal) to not require a rotating tray to put the food on. There's a reason that lots of microwaves have 1kW power draw, and that's because they deliver 500W+ of RF energy into the cavity, which is enough to close a megabit communication link across thousands of miles with antennas the size of a large pizza plate. It's nothing to laugh at and would most definitely hurt if you were in front of it. There's a reason why the Colombian drug runners that dry their product with open-door microwaves have exceedingly short lifespans.
That said, microwaves are non-ionizing, but they do enough to cause damage. Lots of S-Band RADARS have caused cancer (including lots of L-Band, UHF, etc transmitters, not to mention police RADAR guns). So, energy does count for something. I don't really worry because the intermittent transmissions up to ~3.5W (while typically being less than 1W) really probably aren't going to do that much.
So, cut people a little slack when it is already widely known in the literature that radiation at that frequency can and will cause cancer and other problems in people (at high power).
Buy a Nexus One. No carrier branding or add-ons. When a new version of Android comes out,m you just upgrade your N1. No waiting on a carrier or manufacturer. It's a raw Android device, and as such new versions will just work. Kinda like the difference running a stock kernel or a kernel provided by the distro.
This is why Google pumped out the Nexus One (N1). It's a raw, native device. If a new version of Android is released, just put it on your N1. It will work.
Everyone else has their own skin on top, and their own special "value added" apps, which in many cases are quite nice to have. But then you're at the mercy of that company to update their stack and push it out to your phone. With the N1 there's no "extras", there's no "value added", which adds value in that you don't have to worry about fragmentation; you just get the upgrade.
You do realize that the Android development environment has extremely strong requirement capabilities built in, right? If you only want your app displayed in the market to phones running Android 1.6+, with a trackball, screen DPI of X and processor of 1GHz, you just set that in your environment, and it just happens.
The problem comes in when you code a beautiful app for the above, that guy with an Android phone without the trackball (which your app requires) gets pissy and complains when he can't find your app in the marketplace. You don't have this problem when there's only one or two hardware revisions that are nearly identical. But you do get it when you have lots of hardware revs.
Either that, or you're a lazy/unethical dev and will let your app run on any Android phone even if it doesn't have the necessary features, because that's more money for you. I expect that this is the real problem; the developers don't want to put in the effort to learn the new features and to test across multiple hardware types. This is/can be a problem currently. A slightly more strict review process wouldn't hurt.
Bad orbits are typically unstable and do come crashing down. It's generally considered a successful launch if the spacecraft can boost itself to a stable orbit and get some work done. The launch people just get dinged some money since that ends up shortening the life of the spacecraft due to using extra fuel to get to a usable orbit.
Yea, god forbid the government "suggest" something! Run in horror! Freedoms lost! Oh wait, it's just a suggestion.....A federal goal released by the federal government...
My bet is that that "regulation" was a law pushed for by the cable company. I know that in my old apartment complex area, there was a similar law. The apartment complex next door had a different provider with different services, which were much better than mine. But they couldn't supply my apartment. Why? The companies got together, got a law passed and divided up the town. Multiple providers, but no competition. Both companies make much more money this way rather than competing (and therefore operating on razor thin margins).
I have inherited huge code bases. I actually kind of like it. Lots of people whom I thought were idiots, and cursed their code, I later found out that they were quite smart. Others, I found that they just thought about problems vastly different than I, and learning how they tackled problems gave me many more tools in my personal arsenal.
That said, find a big wall or something. Use a debugger or code analysis tool to find the main execution paths (what calls what and when, etc). Diagram that up on the wall really large. Then use the tools to determine when and why certain auxiliary functions get called. Diagram that up, and you'll start getting a spider on your wall. Go from there using your new understanding to re-arrange the program flow not in terms that make sense to you, but rather seem to be how they are programmed (functional, objective, some pattern). Rinse and repeat until you know pretty much what the code is trying to accomplish in 90+% of the situations, and it's general plan for attack.
With that diagram, dive in! There's tons of little details in every function that look useless but are usually bug fixes. Use a scalpel, not a hatchet.
I was deployed remotely with no way for the main programmer to get at me. We had prepared 9 months to collect 4 minutes of data, and the test wouldn't wait for us. I found an odd bug hidden somewhere in ~22k lines of code. I did this over a weekend, and found about 4-5 nasty bugs that were combining to produce what I was seeing, and fixed them. I did this with zero input or help, over a weekend in code I had never seen spread around about 60 files. I spent the first half day just diving in and trying things, and nearly shot myself. That's when I went high-level and dug in from there.
When that was done, I the took over code maintenance and updates on that project. The other guy had wrote it 100% himself, but because after that exercise I knew the code better him. Sometimes being new is good; you don't have all that cruft of implementations that didn't work, etc, but still linger in the original programmer's head.
You mean despite the areas where the framers actually intentionally left it vague (and say so in their writings at the time)?
In general, we should alter by amendment rather than changing our interpretations, but to say that the constitutional is so well-defined that two people couldn't have a justifiable difference over what two sections mean is just plain absurdity.
Yes. ComboFix is the greatest thing ever. Whenever someone is having a problem, I tell them to go use ComboFix, and if that doesn't work, give me the computer. I've never had anyone give me their computer. It just works....flawlessly.
News to me that they were profitable. They managed to barely eek out a profit some quarters while relying on some of the other GM network services to lighten the load. The brand name recognition was horrible, and demographics showed that their buyer pool was being hit extraordinarily hard (single, working mothers were their largest demographic) in the recession, and that they were going to dip back into being very not profitable.
I agree with you with the whole let them fail deal. If we can't let them fail, then we should have bailed them out, parted them up and sold them to other banks.
alt+tab to window A, hold down the shift, press a couple of arrow keys, Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab back to B, Ctrl+V.
Fast as can be. I swear, it's amazing how many people are befuddled by how quickly and easily I can select text using the keyboard in nearly any application. If you're used to home/end/pg keys and the arrows, it's extremely quick and intuitive.
Why the hell would I want the focus to only follow the mouse, especially for something as basic and copy and paste? I typically like to have my mouse pre-positioned near the net menu/item that I need to click, and operate pretty much everything else via the keyboard. Less mousing usually means less interruption of workflow/thought to ensure that you're clicking or moving to the exact right item.
Not an old-timer here, 28, grew up using GUI's, and grew up learning the quick ways around them. Keyboard ftw!
GMD actually had a strong series of successes with FTG-02 and the FTG-03 series. They looked on track. They also have the hardest problem. They're the only system that shoots down the target in midcourse (hence the M in GMD). This is when the incoming warhead has cold-soaked in space and is very hard to find. This also means that they have to reach out obscenely long distances. At launch and terminal phases, the target is very hot and easy to find.
That said, from what I have read the decoys did deploy. In the previous tests the target malfunctioned and the decoys did not deploy. Maybe SBX not working had something to do with the presence of the decoys?
They also use this for helicopter seats. A helicopter can stall out and hit the ground doing 15G's, and the pilot can walk away. They have an absurdly huge amount of crumple. Let me tell you though, a pain in the ass to build things around the pilot that can withstand the 15G's also, so that something doesn't fly off and otherwise kill him, especially when they want them light as can be and cheap.
In the apartment complexes I've lived in, nearly no one owned desktops, and everyone had at least a laptop. So, yea, every apartment would still need a WiFi router. Come on into the digital age man! Laptops are becoming vastly more common than desktops in the typical apartment.
I agree with you about the games versus hands-on learning, and hopefully the results of the research that the commission is funding will show a strong need for hands-on education.
What I don't get is your "God knows we need more million dollar executive bonuses." comment. How in the hell is this going to exacerbate that problem? The head of DARPA doesn't get big bonuses, the head of the NSF doesn't get big bonuses, etc. I believe that federal employees *can't* get million dollar bonuses. If anything, this helps that situation...
Could you please explain to me how the federal government researching better educational methods violates the 10th amendment? Please. I'd love to hear it. This program isn't taking any power away from anything. It is just funding research into educational methods.
For those whom do not know, 10th Amendment is: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Really? Are you sure? If we strip away all regulations, the cost of business here would still be much higher than in China, because their standard of living is just lower. Period. There's nothing that we can do about them having billions of dirt-poor people that they can train to manufacture items, and pay next to nothing. They have a virtual slave class, and an American worker isn't going to be cost-competitive with that until all 1 billion people are pulled out of the poverty well.
Slashdot Mirror
God I wish that we could mod you more than +5.
The bottom line is that we're paying a lot for healthcare and not receiving great outcomes. The status quo is not acceptable. The "Republican plan" that was waived around was a cover sheet with blank paper behind it. We need to do something, and the current plan is the only one that has been fleshed out and worked through the process, votes whipped, etc.
It's not great, but at least we're starting to get some momentum on reforming a system that needs lots and lots of reform.
But the Republicans did do healthcare. Remember Medicare Part D, one of the largest pork fests and inefficient government programs ever? The one that buys prescription medicine at such a high price that it actually cost more than the current bill?
So let's take a look at this. For the price of this healthcare bill, the Democrats are somewhat protecting us from abuse from insurance companies, and insuring 30+ million more Americans, allowing them to go to the doctor, get better and get back to work. The Republicans for the same price managed to get some more prescriptions for seniors and line the pockets of the pharma companies.
Because.......colleges are ALWAYS ranked on the percentage of students that make it through. "Bad" colleges don't graduate as high of a percentage of their students, obviously because they don't have proper facilities, tutoring, etc. Whereas "Good" colleges graduate nearly everyone; proving that they have the capability to teach the students enough to make it through their tough coursework.
Every department in every University has this metric, and it's highly focused upon. If you're failing people you accepted, it's viewed as a big flaw of the department; why accept them if you're going to fail such a high number?
Of course, what happens is that the pressure rolls down hill and the professors get lots and lots pressure to push that curve down so that the vast majority can pass. Obviously, if the majority of the students are just playing bejeweled and not learning anything, then that's what the University is going to graduate.
Professors don't want to graduate students like that, so they're pushing back. They want their department to stay top-notch and graduate individuals whom know their respective field.
Having read lots of publications, let me tell you that there's a big difference between publishing something, and achieving something.....
Silly academics with their insular communities. Here in my side of the world, publishing means nothing, but saving the government money or saving some lives means everything.
Anayway, the city of Hoofddorp, where I live, forbids the placement of cellular base station antennas on top of residential buildings. I support this policy; better safe than sorry.
Huh? Residential roof tops would be one of the safer places, I would think. A simple regulation requiring the base station operator to put down a quick metal screen around the base station would provide excellent shielding, and would keep it away from most people....
They typically take the radiation pattern, determine the part that radiates into your head and how much power that is out of the total with respect to how much flesh it's hitting and penetrating (different penetration depth for bone, skin, etc).
They also have a pretty sophisticated series of models for different sized people, different manners of holding the phone, etc and typically use some type of average.
Microwaves without mode stirrers would indeed heat food. It just wouldn't heat them evenly. Even with mode stirrers, you don't get consistent constructive interference evenly enough through the chamber (and from enough angles where containers don't partially block the signal) to not require a rotating tray to put the food on. There's a reason that lots of microwaves have 1kW power draw, and that's because they deliver 500W+ of RF energy into the cavity, which is enough to close a megabit communication link across thousands of miles with antennas the size of a large pizza plate. It's nothing to laugh at and would most definitely hurt if you were in front of it. There's a reason why the Colombian drug runners that dry their product with open-door microwaves have exceedingly short lifespans.
That said, microwaves are non-ionizing, but they do enough to cause damage. Lots of S-Band RADARS have caused cancer (including lots of L-Band, UHF, etc transmitters, not to mention police RADAR guns). So, energy does count for something. I don't really worry because the intermittent transmissions up to ~3.5W (while typically being less than 1W) really probably aren't going to do that much.
So, cut people a little slack when it is already widely known in the literature that radiation at that frequency can and will cause cancer and other problems in people (at high power).
Buy a Nexus One. No carrier branding or add-ons. When a new version of Android comes out,m you just upgrade your N1. No waiting on a carrier or manufacturer. It's a raw Android device, and as such new versions will just work. Kinda like the difference running a stock kernel or a kernel provided by the distro.
This is why Google pumped out the Nexus One (N1). It's a raw, native device. If a new version of Android is released, just put it on your N1. It will work.
Everyone else has their own skin on top, and their own special "value added" apps, which in many cases are quite nice to have. But then you're at the mercy of that company to update their stack and push it out to your phone. With the N1 there's no "extras", there's no "value added", which adds value in that you don't have to worry about fragmentation; you just get the upgrade.
You do realize that the Android development environment has extremely strong requirement capabilities built in, right? If you only want your app displayed in the market to phones running Android 1.6+, with a trackball, screen DPI of X and processor of 1GHz, you just set that in your environment, and it just happens.
The problem comes in when you code a beautiful app for the above, that guy with an Android phone without the trackball (which your app requires) gets pissy and complains when he can't find your app in the marketplace. You don't have this problem when there's only one or two hardware revisions that are nearly identical. But you do get it when you have lots of hardware revs.
Either that, or you're a lazy/unethical dev and will let your app run on any Android phone even if it doesn't have the necessary features, because that's more money for you. I expect that this is the real problem; the developers don't want to put in the effort to learn the new features and to test across multiple hardware types. This is/can be a problem currently. A slightly more strict review process wouldn't hurt.
Bad orbits are typically unstable and do come crashing down. It's generally considered a successful launch if the spacecraft can boost itself to a stable orbit and get some work done. The launch people just get dinged some money since that ends up shortening the life of the spacecraft due to using extra fuel to get to a usable orbit.
Yea, god forbid the government "suggest" something! Run in horror! Freedoms lost! Oh wait, it's just a suggestion.....A federal goal released by the federal government...
My bet is that that "regulation" was a law pushed for by the cable company. I know that in my old apartment complex area, there was a similar law. The apartment complex next door had a different provider with different services, which were much better than mine. But they couldn't supply my apartment. Why? The companies got together, got a law passed and divided up the town. Multiple providers, but no competition. Both companies make much more money this way rather than competing (and therefore operating on razor thin margins).
Well that, and also tune some of the vibrations down so that you don't vibe the astronauts beyond repair.
But I'm with ya; man rating the Delta IV is the right answer.
Definitely what parent said. Also:
I have inherited huge code bases. I actually kind of like it. Lots of people whom I thought were idiots, and cursed their code, I later found out that they were quite smart. Others, I found that they just thought about problems vastly different than I, and learning how they tackled problems gave me many more tools in my personal arsenal.
That said, find a big wall or something. Use a debugger or code analysis tool to find the main execution paths (what calls what and when, etc). Diagram that up on the wall really large. Then use the tools to determine when and why certain auxiliary functions get called. Diagram that up, and you'll start getting a spider on your wall. Go from there using your new understanding to re-arrange the program flow not in terms that make sense to you, but rather seem to be how they are programmed (functional, objective, some pattern). Rinse and repeat until you know pretty much what the code is trying to accomplish in 90+% of the situations, and it's general plan for attack.
With that diagram, dive in! There's tons of little details in every function that look useless but are usually bug fixes. Use a scalpel, not a hatchet.
I was deployed remotely with no way for the main programmer to get at me. We had prepared 9 months to collect 4 minutes of data, and the test wouldn't wait for us. I found an odd bug hidden somewhere in ~22k lines of code. I did this over a weekend, and found about 4-5 nasty bugs that were combining to produce what I was seeing, and fixed them. I did this with zero input or help, over a weekend in code I had never seen spread around about 60 files. I spent the first half day just diving in and trying things, and nearly shot myself. That's when I went high-level and dug in from there.
When that was done, I the took over code maintenance and updates on that project. The other guy had wrote it 100% himself, but because after that exercise I knew the code better him. Sometimes being new is good; you don't have all that cruft of implementations that didn't work, etc, but still linger in the original programmer's head.
You mean despite the areas where the framers actually intentionally left it vague (and say so in their writings at the time)?
In general, we should alter by amendment rather than changing our interpretations, but to say that the constitutional is so well-defined that two people couldn't have a justifiable difference over what two sections mean is just plain absurdity.
Yes. ComboFix is the greatest thing ever. Whenever someone is having a problem, I tell them to go use ComboFix, and if that doesn't work, give me the computer. I've never had anyone give me their computer. It just works....flawlessly.
Went from fixing ~1 computer a month to none.
News to me that they were profitable. They managed to barely eek out a profit some quarters while relying on some of the other GM network services to lighten the load. The brand name recognition was horrible, and demographics showed that their buyer pool was being hit extraordinarily hard (single, working mothers were their largest demographic) in the recession, and that they were going to dip back into being very not profitable.
I agree with you with the whole let them fail deal. If we can't let them fail, then we should have bailed them out, parted them up and sold them to other banks.
Why use the mouse? That's what cursors are for!
alt+tab to window A, hold down the shift, press a couple of arrow keys, Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab back to B, Ctrl+V.
Fast as can be. I swear, it's amazing how many people are befuddled by how quickly and easily I can select text using the keyboard in nearly any application. If you're used to home/end/pg keys and the arrows, it's extremely quick and intuitive.
Why the hell would I want the focus to only follow the mouse, especially for something as basic and copy and paste? I typically like to have my mouse pre-positioned near the net menu/item that I need to click, and operate pretty much everything else via the keyboard. Less mousing usually means less interruption of workflow/thought to ensure that you're clicking or moving to the exact right item.
Not an old-timer here, 28, grew up using GUI's, and grew up learning the quick ways around them. Keyboard ftw!
GMD actually had a strong series of successes with FTG-02 and the FTG-03 series. They looked on track. They also have the hardest problem. They're the only system that shoots down the target in midcourse (hence the M in GMD). This is when the incoming warhead has cold-soaked in space and is very hard to find. This also means that they have to reach out obscenely long distances. At launch and terminal phases, the target is very hot and easy to find.
That said, from what I have read the decoys did deploy. In the previous tests the target malfunctioned and the decoys did not deploy. Maybe SBX not working had something to do with the presence of the decoys?
They also use this for helicopter seats. A helicopter can stall out and hit the ground doing 15G's, and the pilot can walk away. They have an absurdly huge amount of crumple. Let me tell you though, a pain in the ass to build things around the pilot that can withstand the 15G's also, so that something doesn't fly off and otherwise kill him, especially when they want them light as can be and cheap.
In the apartment complexes I've lived in, nearly no one owned desktops, and everyone had at least a laptop. So, yea, every apartment would still need a WiFi router. Come on into the digital age man! Laptops are becoming vastly more common than desktops in the typical apartment.
I agree with you about the games versus hands-on learning, and hopefully the results of the research that the commission is funding will show a strong need for hands-on education.
What I don't get is your "God knows we need more million dollar executive bonuses." comment. How in the hell is this going to exacerbate that problem? The head of DARPA doesn't get big bonuses, the head of the NSF doesn't get big bonuses, etc. I believe that federal employees *can't* get million dollar bonuses. If anything, this helps that situation...
Could you please explain to me how the federal government researching better educational methods violates the 10th amendment? Please. I'd love to hear it. This program isn't taking any power away from anything. It is just funding research into educational methods.
For those whom do not know, 10th Amendment is: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Seriously. Comprehend before ranting.
Really? Are you sure? If we strip away all regulations, the cost of business here would still be much higher than in China, because their standard of living is just lower. Period. There's nothing that we can do about them having billions of dirt-poor people that they can train to manufacture items, and pay next to nothing. They have a virtual slave class, and an American worker isn't going to be cost-competitive with that until all 1 billion people are pulled out of the poverty well.