Authority "the power or right to give orders or make decisions" Authorization "official permission or approval"
To say that the organization was "authorized" to hand out money implies that some higher power has granted it the right to do so.
To say that the organization has the authority to do so (which is what shutdown -p now said) implies that it inherently has the right to do so. I think that was shutdown -p now's point.
Perelman may well believe that no organization has the right to judge the works of others, which should stand on their worth alone, and arbitrarily decide which deserve renumeration. If indeed that is what he believes, he would have to sacrifice his principles in order to accept the money (which would simply reinforce the idea that this organization has the right to judge). I'm not exactly sure what it says about modern society when not sacrificing your moral principles for cash qualifies you as "insane."
Spoken like a true teapartyer. Money is not the most important thing in life. My current job pays barely half of what I could be making if I instead worked somewhere more "corporate." The sad thing is, you probably can't even understand why I would stay instead of roaming around to find the highest paying job.
Yes, with the full text available online and at 2,300 pages in gigantic font, yielding 25 lines per page that at some points has as many as 8 whole words per line, there is simply no way any mortal American could have read through that.
Liberals still have a 5-4 majority on the SCOTUS so that looms large in any court challenge.
Good God, I almost choked when I read that. By "liberals" you must mean anyone that doesn't vote down the conservative line every time. Let's run down the list, shall we?
Ginsberg, Stevens, and Breyer: all fairly consistent liberals.
Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia: all fairly to extremely conservative.
That leaves Kennedy and Sotomayor. Kennedy, while conservative, has typically been the swing vote since he does occasionally vote with a liberal viewpoint. Sotomayor is actually pretty centrist and unproven, but it's fairly likely that she'll vote liberal most of the time.
So, we've still got the 4-4-swing court. Let's not forget that the Court recently gave the conservative, "FUCK YOU AMERICA" middle finger so keep your pants on because I don't think you have much to worry about.
I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but I did some counting and it seems that the widest paragraphs have an average of about 8 words per line. Of course many lines have even fewer (e.g. line 16 of page 4 has 1 word "forms;"). The whole bill is 2309 pages long, with 25 lines per page which gives us 57,725 lines which at 8 words per line gives us 461,800 words. Comparatively, Atlas Shrugged is approximately 540,000 words.
So, I don't want to hear any bitching from conservatives (among whom a majority will have read or claim to have read Atlas Shrugged) who say it's too long to read.
The issue is not greedy companies, because frankly that would make them concerned about budgeting wisely -- the issue is that it's impossible to have a small business step in and offer insurance because of government regulations.
To be honest, I don't know enough about the regulations in the health insurance field to say how much or how little they affect a small business health insurance start-up. I can say that there's more to it than just regulations, though. Health insurance, like any insurance, is a managed risk pool. The bigger the pool, the more risk you can take on. A small business insurance provider simply could not compete with the established, larger corporations as payouts would probably have to be capped at lower levels.
This is facetious - lobbyists for the health insurance industry have helped to foster the corporatist sentiment in American government.
If you want to blame someone: blame corrupt politicians who set up the industry for failure in order to step in and pick up the reins.
The number of conspiracy claims that get leveled against the government and politicians is simply incredible. They didn't have some elaborate scheme to carefully plan laws to reduce costs and meet with their insurance exec buddies to get them to sabotage their own businesses all while covertly fostering in the populace a growing discontent with the existing system. It's much more simple, and you pointed it out yourself: lobbyists. The insurance companies have paid to get laws that benefit them on the books, just like every other major company in this country does. Recent history is replete with examples of short-sighted executives that thought no one would mind their ever-expanding and unsustainable profits.
Please, explain to me how it makes sense to have 10 years of taxes pay for 6 years of coverage. This is how it was actually budgeted -- and this is with fuzzy math like the nested provisions i listed!
The CBO report is blatantly wrong on two accounts: using their method for the decade after the first, we will be losing 100 billion+ yearly (they are relying on many successful budget cuts including a great amount from Medicare which has NEVER been able to cut their budget significantly). Secondly, they are trusting the figures provided (like the Medicare number) and not account for historically proven mis-budgeting. In the 60s, when Medicare was budgeted to be 12 billion in 1990, it came out to 110 billion, In 1988 When Medicaid was to be less than 1 billion in 1993, it was 17 billion.
You've provided no source and I haven't been able to find one for you, so I can't speak to the budgeting of Medicare (though I've always been told that it historically comes in under budget). However, in terms of relative GDP, $12 billion in 1965 is approx. $97 billion in 1990; $13.5 billion in 1965 would be about $110 billion in 1990 so it doesn't seem all that bad to me--off by 12% for a 25-year prediction.
Obama's false pretenses are that he is doing this for the good of the people. In fact, the majority of people do not want this. It will only benefit government expansion and set us up for further regulation (as seen by previous attempts -- there are very many but I provided you with at least some examples). This is about government-control, not about the good of the people.
Really? Are you sure the majority of people do not want this? Actually you could be right about this specific bill since it's decidedly not universal healthcare which we were all promised. As you may recall, Obama made a big deal about universal healthcare during his campaign and a majority of people voted for him, leading to his election. If you listened to
Again, do older people really need to have their life extended artificially forever? If they can pay for it that's certainly their privilege, but it's not one of the rights protected or granted by our founding documents.
Wait, I thought one of the "big scares" of government-run healthcare was the Death Panels that would decide when to stop paying for the elderly.
As a side note, why is the solution to every problem "throw in a profit motive!"? In many cases, it certainly can lead to a better product. In others, it necessarily effects a less efficient system by demanding extra resources to be reserved for profit.
Ah, right. I forgot we had to phrase things in absolute terms of good and bad. Capitalism, good; socialism, bad! Insurance companies, good; government, bad!
There are two views here. 1) You think health insurance is find as-is, in which case you're an idiot, or 2) you think that [something] needs to change to make the system better. Even Republicans realize they can't get away with saying #1 any more. So, Obama is trying #2. We've come to the point where Americans are not going to accept that millions of people do not have insurance and more continue to lose their insurance when they need it most due to the greedy practices of the health insurance industry. The bill describes changes which attempt to solve these problems by removing loopholes which allow insurance companies to deny or drop coverage, and also "guarantee" coverage by making it mandatory. You want this to fail.
You say that this is because this change is bad, and that Obama is a criminal attempting to bankrupt the country under "false pretenses." By "false pretenses," I'm assuming you mean Obama is supporting health care reform for ulterior motives. So what are these motives, exactly? The bill may be less than ideal, but the intentions are pretty clear. Further, the CBO reports that the bill will reduce the deficit, rather than drive us further into bankruptcy.
So, I ask you: What do you want to fail and why? As originally stated, you want the Obama Administration to fail "simply because they keep trying to do stupid things in a weak way." My interpretation of that is that you like neither what they're trying to do ("stupid things") nor how they're trying to do it ("in a weak way"). I really hope this is a grand misunderstanding over the word "fail," because it seems to me that either you want the goal (improving the healthcare system) to fail, or the method to fail, leading to an unachieved goal.
If it's the method, instead of just saying you want it to fail because it's "bad," why not explain yourself a little? Why is it bad? Who/what is it going to negatively affect? What are "they" lying about? Where have they miscalculated/cooked the numbers? From where do you source your information? Where is the "good" in wanting this "bad" thing to fail? And so on. Explaining why the method is bad, and how it's vulnerable to failure is a far cry from just saying you want it to fail. One makes you appear like you actually give a shit about the prosperity of the nation and its people, and the other makes you appear like all you care about is your schoolyard appearance.
Personally, I want what the Obama Administration does to fail simply because they keep trying to do stupid things in a weak way -- as soon as they support something rational I will support them in it.
Here it is folks; this is what is wrong with this country. Yes, the obvious problems are things like corporations buying laws and other corruption in government, but it only maintains because of the attitude of the citizenry. People have been so mind-fucked that they actually go out in public and declare that they want their leader to fail.
I completely understand not agreeing with his ideals, or the manner in which he tries to achieve his goals. However, I simply cannot support this childish notion of "in order for me to be right, you must be wrong and anything that demonstrates this should be cheered." As for me, my reaction to the proposed reform is "meh." I don't feel that it does enough; another might say it's too much. At the end of the day though, Obama is championing health care reform in an effort to do some good for the country. You want this to fail. You want the country to be weakened, just so you can say "see, you should have listened to me." Disgusting.
Here's what a really struggle with regarding the whole public vs. private health insurance debate. Every argument I see seems to apply to both the "government" or the private company. For example, taking your paragraph:
So, if the [government/health insurance company] has to pay for your entire rehabilitation when you get shot in the leg, should the [government/health insurance company] be allowed to determine where you are allowed to walk? You are asking the [government/health insurance company] to be responsible without having the power to control?
Why, if we substitute "government" in the brackets, must draconian laws accompany it? Even if we tone down the end-of-the-world rhetoric and instead talk about "regulation," why is it so horrible? Just because it's "the government" doing it? The people opposing public healthcare seem to have no problem with this "regulation" when it's a private company doing it. Why the double standard?
Humorously, I find your signature to be very apropos:
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
As far as I'm concerned, the only "value" in this report is as political bait. There's not enough information to form a reasoned response, so it can only be used to initiate emotional responses, which are what sell. (By the way, more than one exemption can be listed per denial).
As an example of how these numbers may be worthless and misrepresent the reality (although it's certainly possible that the situation is worse now than before as well):
Year 1: 500,000 requests, Year 2: 400,000; a 20% decline
Year 1: 400,000 exemptions, Year 2: 500,000; a 25% increase
--
So far it looks bad, right? Significant decrease in requests and a significant increase of exemptions? Must mean that few requests are being honored, right? If we add a critical, but missing, piece of data: average number of exemptions per denial.
Year 1: avg 1.5 per denial, Year 2: avg 2.5 per denial.
That gives us 266,666 denials in Year 1, and only 200,000 in Year 2. Not only is this an absolute reduction, but also a reduction relative to the total requests (53% in Year 1, 50% in Year 2).
As I said, since we don't have all the facts, it's also possible that "Obama's record" is worse than Bush's. Even if we had enough data to get to that comparison, it's still not worth all that much. If Bush had twice the number of denials but 90% of the requests were for ridiculous things that would never be granted (like troop positions or something), then it would be easy to say he has a better record despite Obama's lower totals.
In short, too many factors, too few of them presented.
If you do think that these 2,000 pages that "rebuild" 17% of the economy according to the whims of "a couple hundred Democrats" represent an oppressive regime, then I don't know what to tell you other than to get a reality check.
You're rather missing the point. Yes, an emergency room will treat you to the point of stabilization, regardless of your ability to pay. That's only one part of restoring an individual to health, though. If I'm brought to the ER after being shot in the leg, they'll make sure I don't bleed to death and stitch me up even without insurance. I'll still get the bill, though.
Beyond that, are they going to pay for pain medication? Food while I can't work my manual-labor job? Physical therapy? Of course not, but hey we get to show how we save lives even without payment! Who cares if they go on to live lives of permanent pain, disability, bankruptcy, and/or homelessness. They're just poor people, after all.
I don't really mean to be inflammatory when I say this but... if you want to be a UI designer, you might have a ways to go. Interestingly, you seem to think more like a programmer, that is "why use such an inefficient method of navigation when clicking a single dedicated button is so much faster?" It's what I call a "God Panel" which does anything and everything the user needs in the application, and is all too commonly found in in-house applications. It makes sense to the programmer who knows the program inside and out, and put every button that appears on the panel in its spot himself. After all, why spend the development time on an inefficient navigation system and why spend all the user time navigating those menus and dialogs? All the user need do is spend a few minutes learning the layout of the buttons on the God Panel and what each does.
The problem is, this is not well optimized for a human user. Our brains are made in particular to pattern match, not serially analyze. Take the standard 3-button media player control scheme of previous-play/pause-next. What do you suppose would happen if you swapped the positions of the previous and next buttons? A lot of angry and confused users, I would guess. Their brains have been trained to expect those functions in those positions, regardless of the fact that the buttons still have the appropriate label/icon on them.
The other problem is overwhelming the user with too much information at a time, which makes the brain's filtering abilities less efficient. Take a look at this thread for some examples (there's also a humorous comparison where Apple's interface is a single giant button, Google's is a text box and a button, and your company's app is a swamp of dialog controls). Almost all the "worst UIs" listed there, fail because they present too much information at once to the user. Your brain does its best to filter through all the information to get you to what you need, but it's a losing and frustrating proposition.
Now let's look at the iPhone's UI. The device is made with 4 purposes in mind: phone, personal data management, Internet browsing, and media playing. What are the 4 main virtual buttons on the home screen? A telephone, a mail envelope, the Safari icon (which, admittedly, is probably not intuitive to someone who doesn't know what Safari is), and an iPod icon. All immediately available with the thumb that is probably controlling the device. Just as important, the apps that open upon touching one of these icons support the user's train of thought. If I touch the telephone icon, it's because I want to make a phone call so it's very helpful that the interface changes to something that will help me accomplish that task, namely showing me a list of people to call or presenting me with a keypad to dial my desired number.
An ancedote that illustrates another example: getting my mom to understand how to operate a TV remote well enough to turn the devices on. In short, she can't (I'd argue won't since she's not dumb, but the end result is the same). It's pretty obvious to me and anyone familiar with technology in general: push one of the buttons at the top to select which device you want to control (cable box, TV, DVD player, etc.) and then push the big red "power" button. Easy, right? Bzzt. She see's all the buttons, half of which she'll never need, and her brain shuts off. If we could dumb-down the interface by adding intelligence to the system as a whole (i.e. devices talking to each other to get the result the user wants), she'd have no trouble. As a further example in support of the "dumbed-down interface": She could never figure out how to send text messages on her old Motorola, even with instruction. She figured it out on her own the first day she got her iPhone.
Would you go to France and be outraged when the lifeguard told you that you could not wear boardshorts into the swimming pool? Would you then be confused as to why no one else in the pool seemed to care about the restrictions or understand the righteousness of your cause?
Swimming pools used to be nude-only, and so were unisex in some countries. Over time these rules have changed, of course, but their effect has remained this same: if you want to swim in the pool, you follow the rules. If you feel the rules are draconian, go build your own pool where people are free to wear as much or as little as they wish. If your pool's rules are truly better and truly appeal to what most people are looking for in a pool, it will be a huge success and you can rub it the faces of everyone who doubted when you have your chain of clothing-free-as-in-speech pools.
I was pretty sure that you could do this with the Quartz Compositing APIs or with Core Animation, but I did some googling to see if I was wrong. I ended up stumbling across this blog which is apparently written by an Adobe engineer working on the Flash Player. Going by what he says, they've just recently started using the Core Animation API which gives them access to what they need with respect to features, and also access to OpenGL. They've already seen some performance improvement and with the ability to push stuff through OpenGL, more performance should be on the way. It's just a matter of Adobe programmers learning their way through the OS X programming model.
Except that Adobe have said they do want to fix it, but can't, because Apple refuses the provide the APIs they need.
Which is clearly bullshit. Adobe is claiming that Apple won't give anyone access to hardware acceleration APIs, and yet I have a number of games and video players that seem to work just fine. The problem is that Adobe refuses to use the available APIs for video acceleration. Why do you think Flash runs at 100% CPU on every platform (I guess not on Windows now that they have figured out some kind of acceleration)? Adobe insists on using their own, poorly written, software decoder.
Adobe could just send their h264 stream through the QuickTime API, or probably write something else using one of the Core APIs (Core Video, in particular, provides GPU rendering). Instead, apparently, they'd rather sit around bitching about how Apple won't write an API around their application.
Yes, you have the astounding ability to read forward one sentence, and then regurgitate it as your own idea:
The mutation prevents a molecule called CCR5 from appearing on the surface of cells. CCR5 acts as a kind of door for the virus. Since most HIV strains must bind to CCR5 to enter cells, the mutation bars the virus from entering. A new AIDS drug, Selzentry, made by Pfizer Inc., doesn't attack HIV itself but works by blocking CCR5.
Wow, let me see if I'm getting this right. She's bad for the gene pool (as well all know, given our physically intensive modern life, strong and healthy athletic children are what we need most going forward), so we shouldn't let her reproduce. As long as she's helping now though, doing something that genetically superior humans can't, we'll let her live--for now.
It's getting a lot better. Of course Blizzard has always been a shining example by doing cross-platform releases. EA seems to be jumping on the bandwagon as well, slowly but surely.
As far as DRM goes, seems like most of the games are ported by Aspyr and it seems like all of their newer releases don't use copy projection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspyr_Media
Except that can't ever happen. It costs extra* to develop for both PC and Mac vs developing for PC _or_ Mac. So either your PC and Mac version costs up to twice as much as the single platform version, or the single platform version (if one exists) is overpriced.
Your conjecture is easily to disprove by pointing to the Blizzard Theorem, which states "if your developers aren't mentally handicapped and your executives have semi-functioning brains, developing software for more than one platform does not take a significantly larger amount of effort than developing for a single platform."
Seriously, where do you get this idea that a dual-platform game costs twice as much as a single platform game? The only developer that I've purchased games from that are cross-platform discs (both Mac and PC on the same CDs) is Blizzard and their games cost the same as any other. The only difference I've seen is that other publishers usually build for Windows and hire out to some other company like Aspyr to port the game. Then they sell both for for the same price as a regular game (that is, if you're not buying from Blizzard and you want the game for both platforms you are paying $x * 2 whereas Starcraft 2 will just be $x and I'll be able to run it from my PC or my Mac).
Slashdot Mirror
Authority "the power or right to give orders or make decisions"
Authorization "official permission or approval"
To say that the organization was "authorized" to hand out money implies that some higher power has granted it the right to do so.
To say that the organization has the authority to do so (which is what shutdown -p now said) implies that it inherently has the right to do so. I think that was shutdown -p now's point.
Perelman may well believe that no organization has the right to judge the works of others, which should stand on their worth alone, and arbitrarily decide which deserve renumeration. If indeed that is what he believes, he would have to sacrifice his principles in order to accept the money (which would simply reinforce the idea that this organization has the right to judge). I'm not exactly sure what it says about modern society when not sacrificing your moral principles for cash qualifies you as "insane."
Spoken like a true teapartyer. Money is not the most important thing in life. My current job pays barely half of what I could be making if I instead worked somewhere more "corporate." The sad thing is, you probably can't even understand why I would stay instead of roaming around to find the highest paying job.
Yes, with the full text available online and at 2,300 pages in gigantic font, yielding 25 lines per page that at some points has as many as 8 whole words per line, there is simply no way any mortal American could have read through that.
Good God, I almost choked when I read that. By "liberals" you must mean anyone that doesn't vote down the conservative line every time. Let's run down the list, shall we?
Ginsberg, Stevens, and Breyer: all fairly consistent liberals.
Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia: all fairly to extremely conservative.
That leaves Kennedy and Sotomayor. Kennedy, while conservative, has typically been the swing vote since he does occasionally vote with a liberal viewpoint. Sotomayor is actually pretty centrist and unproven, but it's fairly likely that she'll vote liberal most of the time.
So, we've still got the 4-4-swing court. Let's not forget that the Court recently gave the conservative, "FUCK YOU AMERICA" middle finger so keep your pants on because I don't think you have much to worry about.
I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but I did some counting and it seems that the widest paragraphs have an average of about 8 words per line. Of course many lines have even fewer (e.g. line 16 of page 4 has 1 word "forms;"). The whole bill is 2309 pages long, with 25 lines per page which gives us 57,725 lines which at 8 words per line gives us 461,800 words. Comparatively, Atlas Shrugged is approximately 540,000 words.
So, I don't want to hear any bitching from conservatives (among whom a majority will have read or claim to have read Atlas Shrugged) who say it's too long to read.
To be honest, I don't know enough about the regulations in the health insurance field to say how much or how little they affect a small business health insurance start-up. I can say that there's more to it than just regulations, though. Health insurance, like any insurance, is a managed risk pool. The bigger the pool, the more risk you can take on. A small business insurance provider simply could not compete with the established, larger corporations as payouts would probably have to be capped at lower levels.
The number of conspiracy claims that get leveled against the government and politicians is simply incredible. They didn't have some elaborate scheme to carefully plan laws to reduce costs and meet with their insurance exec buddies to get them to sabotage their own businesses all while covertly fostering in the populace a growing discontent with the existing system. It's much more simple, and you pointed it out yourself: lobbyists. The insurance companies have paid to get laws that benefit them on the books, just like every other major company in this country does. Recent history is replete with examples of short-sighted executives that thought no one would mind their ever-expanding and unsustainable profits.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1588498&cid=31537760
You've provided no source and I haven't been able to find one for you, so I can't speak to the budgeting of Medicare (though I've always been told that it historically comes in under budget). However, in terms of relative GDP, $12 billion in 1965 is approx. $97 billion in 1990; $13.5 billion in 1965 would be about $110 billion in 1990 so it doesn't seem all that bad to me--off by 12% for a 25-year prediction.
Really? Are you sure the majority of people do not want this? Actually you could be right about this specific bill since it's decidedly not universal healthcare which we were all promised. As you may recall, Obama made a big deal about universal healthcare during his campaign and a majority of people voted for him, leading to his election. If you listened to
Wait, I thought one of the "big scares" of government-run healthcare was the Death Panels that would decide when to stop paying for the elderly.
As a side note, why is the solution to every problem "throw in a profit motive!"? In many cases, it certainly can lead to a better product. In others, it necessarily effects a less efficient system by demanding extra resources to be reserved for profit.
Ah, right. I forgot we had to phrase things in absolute terms of good and bad. Capitalism, good; socialism, bad! Insurance companies, good; government, bad!
There are two views here. 1) You think health insurance is find as-is, in which case you're an idiot, or 2) you think that [something] needs to change to make the system better. Even Republicans realize they can't get away with saying #1 any more. So, Obama is trying #2. We've come to the point where Americans are not going to accept that millions of people do not have insurance and more continue to lose their insurance when they need it most due to the greedy practices of the health insurance industry. The bill describes changes which attempt to solve these problems by removing loopholes which allow insurance companies to deny or drop coverage, and also "guarantee" coverage by making it mandatory. You want this to fail.
You say that this is because this change is bad, and that Obama is a criminal attempting to bankrupt the country under "false pretenses." By "false pretenses," I'm assuming you mean Obama is supporting health care reform for ulterior motives. So what are these motives, exactly? The bill may be less than ideal, but the intentions are pretty clear. Further, the CBO reports that the bill will reduce the deficit, rather than drive us further into bankruptcy.
So, I ask you: What do you want to fail and why? As originally stated, you want the Obama Administration to fail "simply because they keep trying to do stupid things in a weak way." My interpretation of that is that you like neither what they're trying to do ("stupid things") nor how they're trying to do it ("in a weak way"). I really hope this is a grand misunderstanding over the word "fail," because it seems to me that either you want the goal (improving the healthcare system) to fail, or the method to fail, leading to an unachieved goal.
If it's the method, instead of just saying you want it to fail because it's "bad," why not explain yourself a little? Why is it bad? Who/what is it going to negatively affect? What are "they" lying about? Where have they miscalculated/cooked the numbers? From where do you source your information? Where is the "good" in wanting this "bad" thing to fail? And so on. Explaining why the method is bad, and how it's vulnerable to failure is a far cry from just saying you want it to fail. One makes you appear like you actually give a shit about the prosperity of the nation and its people, and the other makes you appear like all you care about is your schoolyard appearance.
Here it is folks; this is what is wrong with this country. Yes, the obvious problems are things like corporations buying laws and other corruption in government, but it only maintains because of the attitude of the citizenry. People have been so mind-fucked that they actually go out in public and declare that they want their leader to fail.
I completely understand not agreeing with his ideals, or the manner in which he tries to achieve his goals. However, I simply cannot support this childish notion of "in order for me to be right, you must be wrong and anything that demonstrates this should be cheered." As for me, my reaction to the proposed reform is "meh." I don't feel that it does enough; another might say it's too much. At the end of the day though, Obama is championing health care reform in an effort to do some good for the country. You want this to fail. You want the country to be weakened, just so you can say "see, you should have listened to me." Disgusting.
Why, if we substitute "government" in the brackets, must draconian laws accompany it? Even if we tone down the end-of-the-world rhetoric and instead talk about "regulation," why is it so horrible? Just because it's "the government" doing it? The people opposing public healthcare seem to have no problem with this "regulation" when it's a private company doing it. Why the double standard?
Humorously, I find your signature to be very apropos:
As far as I'm concerned, the only "value" in this report is as political bait. There's not enough information to form a reasoned response, so it can only be used to initiate emotional responses, which are what sell. (By the way, more than one exemption can be listed per denial).
As an example of how these numbers may be worthless and misrepresent the reality (although it's certainly possible that the situation is worse now than before as well):
Year 1: 500,000 requests, Year 2: 400,000; a 20% decline
Year 1: 400,000 exemptions, Year 2: 500,000; a 25% increase
--
So far it looks bad, right? Significant decrease in requests and a significant increase of exemptions? Must mean that few requests are being honored, right? If we add a critical, but missing, piece of data: average number of exemptions per denial. Year 1: avg 1.5 per denial, Year 2: avg 2.5 per denial.
That gives us 266,666 denials in Year 1, and only 200,000 in Year 2. Not only is this an absolute reduction, but also a reduction relative to the total requests (53% in Year 1, 50% in Year 2).
As I said, since we don't have all the facts, it's also possible that "Obama's record" is worse than Bush's. Even if we had enough data to get to that comparison, it's still not worth all that much. If Bush had twice the number of denials but 90% of the requests were for ridiculous things that would never be granted (like troop positions or something), then it would be easy to say he has a better record despite Obama's lower totals.
In short, too many factors, too few of them presented.
If you do think that these 2,000 pages that "rebuild" 17% of the economy according to the whims of "a couple hundred Democrats" represent an oppressive regime, then I don't know what to tell you other than to get a reality check.
You're rather missing the point. Yes, an emergency room will treat you to the point of stabilization, regardless of your ability to pay. That's only one part of restoring an individual to health, though. If I'm brought to the ER after being shot in the leg, they'll make sure I don't bleed to death and stitch me up even without insurance. I'll still get the bill, though.
Beyond that, are they going to pay for pain medication? Food while I can't work my manual-labor job? Physical therapy? Of course not, but hey we get to show how we save lives even without payment! Who cares if they go on to live lives of permanent pain, disability, bankruptcy, and/or homelessness. They're just poor people, after all.
I don't really mean to be inflammatory when I say this but... if you want to be a UI designer, you might have a ways to go. Interestingly, you seem to think more like a programmer, that is "why use such an inefficient method of navigation when clicking a single dedicated button is so much faster?" It's what I call a "God Panel" which does anything and everything the user needs in the application, and is all too commonly found in in-house applications. It makes sense to the programmer who knows the program inside and out, and put every button that appears on the panel in its spot himself. After all, why spend the development time on an inefficient navigation system and why spend all the user time navigating those menus and dialogs? All the user need do is spend a few minutes learning the layout of the buttons on the God Panel and what each does.
The problem is, this is not well optimized for a human user. Our brains are made in particular to pattern match, not serially analyze. Take the standard 3-button media player control scheme of previous-play/pause-next. What do you suppose would happen if you swapped the positions of the previous and next buttons? A lot of angry and confused users, I would guess. Their brains have been trained to expect those functions in those positions, regardless of the fact that the buttons still have the appropriate label/icon on them.
The other problem is overwhelming the user with too much information at a time, which makes the brain's filtering abilities less efficient. Take a look at this thread for some examples (there's also a humorous comparison where Apple's interface is a single giant button, Google's is a text box and a button, and your company's app is a swamp of dialog controls). Almost all the "worst UIs" listed there, fail because they present too much information at once to the user. Your brain does its best to filter through all the information to get you to what you need, but it's a losing and frustrating proposition.
Now let's look at the iPhone's UI. The device is made with 4 purposes in mind: phone, personal data management, Internet browsing, and media playing. What are the 4 main virtual buttons on the home screen? A telephone, a mail envelope, the Safari icon (which, admittedly, is probably not intuitive to someone who doesn't know what Safari is), and an iPod icon. All immediately available with the thumb that is probably controlling the device. Just as important, the apps that open upon touching one of these icons support the user's train of thought. If I touch the telephone icon, it's because I want to make a phone call so it's very helpful that the interface changes to something that will help me accomplish that task, namely showing me a list of people to call or presenting me with a keypad to dial my desired number.
An ancedote that illustrates another example: getting my mom to understand how to operate a TV remote well enough to turn the devices on. In short, she can't (I'd argue won't since she's not dumb, but the end result is the same). It's pretty obvious to me and anyone familiar with technology in general: push one of the buttons at the top to select which device you want to control (cable box, TV, DVD player, etc.) and then push the big red "power" button. Easy, right? Bzzt. She see's all the buttons, half of which she'll never need, and her brain shuts off. If we could dumb-down the interface by adding intelligence to the system as a whole (i.e. devices talking to each other to get the result the user wants), she'd have no trouble. As a further example in support of the "dumbed-down interface": She could never figure out how to send text messages on her old Motorola, even with instruction. She figured it out on her own the first day she got her iPhone.
Would you go to France and be outraged when the lifeguard told you that you could not wear boardshorts into the swimming pool? Would you then be confused as to why no one else in the pool seemed to care about the restrictions or understand the righteousness of your cause?
Swimming pools used to be nude-only, and so were unisex in some countries. Over time these rules have changed, of course, but their effect has remained this same: if you want to swim in the pool, you follow the rules. If you feel the rules are draconian, go build your own pool where people are free to wear as much or as little as they wish. If your pool's rules are truly better and truly appeal to what most people are looking for in a pool, it will be a huge success and you can rub it the faces of everyone who doubted when you have your chain of clothing-free-as-in-speech pools.
I was pretty sure that you could do this with the Quartz Compositing APIs or with Core Animation, but I did some googling to see if I was wrong. I ended up stumbling across this blog which is apparently written by an Adobe engineer working on the Flash Player. Going by what he says, they've just recently started using the Core Animation API which gives them access to what they need with respect to features, and also access to OpenGL. They've already seen some performance improvement and with the ability to push stuff through OpenGL, more performance should be on the way. It's just a matter of Adobe programmers learning their way through the OS X programming model.
Which is clearly bullshit. Adobe is claiming that Apple won't give anyone access to hardware acceleration APIs, and yet I have a number of games and video players that seem to work just fine. The problem is that Adobe refuses to use the available APIs for video acceleration. Why do you think Flash runs at 100% CPU on every platform (I guess not on Windows now that they have figured out some kind of acceleration)? Adobe insists on using their own, poorly written, software decoder.
Adobe could just send their h264 stream through the QuickTime API, or probably write something else using one of the Core APIs (Core Video, in particular, provides GPU rendering). Instead, apparently, they'd rather sit around bitching about how Apple won't write an API around their application.
So... you stopped relying on a shotgun for home defense because it might allow you to defend your home without the loss of human life?
Wow, let me see if I'm getting this right. She's bad for the gene pool (as well all know, given our physically intensive modern life, strong and healthy athletic children are what we need most going forward), so we shouldn't let her reproduce. As long as she's helping now though, doing something that genetically superior humans can't, we'll let her live--for now.
This all sounds very familiar...
Another thing to add to my list of "Things I Learned on Slashdot": Socialism means air conditioning for everyone!
No, 5 is right out.
Yeah, what a noob. Real geeks have numerous USB ports throughout their intestines and patch their firmware frequently to keep functionality regular.
It's getting a lot better. Of course Blizzard has always been a shining example by doing cross-platform releases. EA seems to be jumping on the bandwagon as well, slowly but surely.
As far as DRM goes, seems like most of the games are ported by Aspyr and it seems like all of their newer releases don't use copy projection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspyr_Media
Your conjecture is easily to disprove by pointing to the Blizzard Theorem, which states "if your developers aren't mentally handicapped and your executives have semi-functioning brains, developing software for more than one platform does not take a significantly larger amount of effort than developing for a single platform."
Seriously, where do you get this idea that a dual-platform game costs twice as much as a single platform game? The only developer that I've purchased games from that are cross-platform discs (both Mac and PC on the same CDs) is Blizzard and their games cost the same as any other. The only difference I've seen is that other publishers usually build for Windows and hire out to some other company like Aspyr to port the game. Then they sell both for for the same price as a regular game (that is, if you're not buying from Blizzard and you want the game for both platforms you are paying $x * 2 whereas Starcraft 2 will just be $x and I'll be able to run it from my PC or my Mac).