Of course it does, and very good ones, it's just that I want to do a specific kind of research that my country is too poor to carry out, so I came West to do it. The fact that I had to go through college again (stuff I'd learned in highschool back home, in a style just different enough to force me to study the details all over again), that I had to pay for it through the nose, that I had to do so without assistance are just my particular stepping-stones.
My case is different because I had to work several jobs to go through college. Most college students don't do so because they don't have to, and they rarely live frugally (again because they don't have to) so they end up on average even more in debt when they come out than I do. This despite them paying far less tuition.
Quite right, I don't know the exact ratio of people going bankrupt due to health problems. I know the high and low points offhand though: the US has the highest rate and the UK has the lowest rate. Both are extreme outliers, most Western countries have similar in-between statistics (as does mine, Hungary).
Your grandfather was a clever man. I was quite disappointed that the dollar didn't collapse, or I would have gotten rid of quite a bit of debt which I used for an American education (see my other post in response to yours). But that's life.;)
I do believe the American economy is fundamentally sound and elastic, and I think it will recover once all traces have been removed of the irrealistic pipe dreaming that has collapsed into the financial-system mess which bled into the wider economy. But that will take another year or two. Until then, it's no consolation to the people whose jobs or houses have been lost, even if sometimes it's their fault. I'm glad that *something* seems to be happening on a public health front finally. There is an enormous difference, to my mind, between a safety net that bounces you back and a safety net that leaves you and your family financially broken at the bottom. The latter is not so much a safety net as a concrete pavement.
No, I've just been through it, in America. If I had the money to buy a house in the godforsaken University neighbourhood, I certainly wouldn't have spent it on that.
My case is a bit different than the average American's, because I paid three and a half times their tuition, being a foreigner; at the same time I was ineligible for financial aid of any sort. So I held down two jobs (typically working 20-30 hours per week), lived very frugally, and basically cut myself off for the duration of college -- no parties, vacations, etc. I didn't mind so much as I didn't have time to think about it, but it was very unpleasant. Now when I studied in Europe, I could afford to live with my family, I paid no transportation costs, my tuition was fully subsidised; only textbooks were not cheap but I could get those used. (I bought no textbooks in America thanks to libraries and torrents.) I would agree with you that extra expenses are a part of the huge education burden in this country, and some of these are cultural things (like a childish insistence on not living with your family) but I am sure that most could be fixed by the state firmly taking things in hand and not privatising things like housing and feeding the students, not to mention the ever-present "fees": fees for textbooks, for registration, for administration up the kazoo, for lab equipment, for computers, for what have you. In my country, the administration of a huge public university is the job of a couple of small offices in a picturesque building mostly owned by the pathology department. Here, for a smaller public university, they've got several large and ugly buildings devoted to nothing but administrators, and each department has its own army of bureaucrats larger than the whole staff back home.
What am I getting at? I concede that many things are shoddily run, starting with the school systems (where the bureaucracy ratio is far worse, it's gone completely mad), the healthcare (something like 40% of the costs are administrative), the army (an amazingly bottomless well) and up to public colleges. Even the private sector is infected with it. I think the only thing run efficiently in this country must be the public research centres like the NIH or Los Alamos or the other famous ones.
I'm sorry for rambling, but I am fascinated by this country and like to think about what could be improved in it, despite my not having a chance to do anything more than talk politics with friends and occasionally write to a congressman (yes, I know I can't vote, but I'm articulate enough to write).
I think you're missing the point. The policies you cite are woefully inadequate. I mean, what's the point of having emergency public health if the ensuing bankruptcy is going to absolutely break the person's and their entire family's life and career? And if they should ever climb out again, the insurers won't want to touch them unless for exorbitant high fess with exceptions for any pre-existing condition under the sun.
You don't think financing an education is a problem? The average debt out of undergraduate programmes in the US is some 30-40 thousand USD, and you that's just for those who can come up with enough loans? And that's just a peanuts BA/BS. Professional degrees will leave you an average of 100 thousand USD in debt. Do be realistic; this is not a viable system. The graduates are sometimes stuck with those loans for decades.
It's not growth that's been destructive. Not even "globalisation", that's a vague term, but neoliberalism. Shotgun neoliberalism, to modify an American phrase. Healthcare in third world countries has taken a huge hit since the 80s due to externally imposed globalisation, generally by loans or aid packages tied to right-wing policies. And not just in the Third World; in the 50s it hurt Britain a lot.
Yes, the point of Getting Things Done is getting things done. I've gained more efficiency by deciding what I didn't want to get done and doing the rest quickly than I ever learnt from that overcomplicated mess of a system. The best lesson I learned from my mother: keep a diary and write down what you want to do in there. Projects that don't fit can have separate outlines. Works a treat.
Anyway this isn't about GTD. Gmail is an inefficient and distracting interface. I just use pine running in screen, which I can access over ssh from any javascript-enabled browser. It's very fast and doesn't give you information you don't need. I recommend you to check it out but of course I couldn't care less if you don't.;)
If you advance on the efficiency ladder past the "Getting Things Done" phase, you will notice that GMail is a horribly inefficient interface. In all fairness, I know of only one really efficient mailer (Pine/Alpine), although I haven't tried a few of its main competitors like Mulberry. Mutt is usable (barely) for local mail, although it sucks for IMAP.
But this isn't cryptography. It's hidden parameters of the human brain. Once found they cannot be changed (only within tolerances, and that's no hindrance) and are worthless.
Sure, it was tedious, but it broke barriers even then. My personal favourite is The Goodies, which ran much longer and was tedious on maybe 2 episodes out of 74. The Goodies are probably the funniest stuff to hit TV screens, although they have been largely forgotten today -- perhaps because they were never dismissed for not being offensive enough, or for not making it big in America, who knows? Anyway, I'd far rather watch them, or Not the Nine O'Clock News, or Yes Minister, but you can't deny that Python broke ground and had moments of brilliance. Sort of like Peter Cook, who, however, has been largely forgotten today.
If you can generate the timings correctly enough for a human to understand the signal, you can use a bot to interpret the signals with accurate timing to decipher the signal. It just becomes a matter of a secret algorithm, or rather, secret parameters. Once found -- worthless.
That happens to me quite often. I always just view them in aview or cacaview (I have elinks set to open images with those viewers) and can always figure it out after a little zooming and panning.
On a related note, at my forum, I just have a system that doesn't let you post links or images in your first n posts (currently 5). Haven't had a single piece of spam since I put that in. Sure, plenty of fake accounts, but I filter out those with less than 5 posts from the member listing. Comment spammers don't tend to reuse accounts.:)
It would take the attackers all of five minutes to recognise this and simply fetch two images (or the whole set) and superimpose them. It's a neat trick but nothing more.
On a related note, what drives home the decline of Britain is when I compare old footage (or even fictional stuff from television shows) of statesmen being driven around. In the past, hell, only 50 years ago, it was always Rollers or Bentleys or Rovers -- all British-made cars, it went without saying. Nowadays those brands are all foreign; even the Queen rides in a German car (a gift Bentley). And all the way down, from the politicians to the policemen it's American or Japanese cars. Sure, some are still often made there -- the Vauxhalls, for instance, but it's a foreign company pulling the strings and making the profits.
This guy's answers are hilarious. They only make sense in a universe where everything is inherently locked down, and your customers are idiots to be abused.
Don't know if you've noticed, but that is the MSN universe, in a nutshell. For that matter, it's a lot of the Microsoft universe. And it's big.
It did -- or it would have, because it goes without saying that you don't subsequently just let him rebuild it all. The fact is, the British leaders of the 30s, MacDonald for instance, bet on lasting peace and they began an appalling disarmament programme. They bet wrong.
Had these leaders woken up to a sense of their history only a few years earlier than they did -- started rearming in 1936 and not 1938, for instance -- the whole war could have been avoided, or at least made a very simple, year-long affair.
Obviously. But the story's still flamebait. Want a non-flamebait title? "Ubuntu Workaround for Laptop-Killing BIOS Bug Released". See the difference? Subtle but important.
For goodness sakes' this is the government, with a century's history of truly excellent investment into research. Why the hell do you take them for incompetents? It's private companies that do inefficient, closed, duplicated and wasteful research.
I honestly think of the U.K. as a former democracy.
Well, you honestly have a problem with the term then. Sure, it is not a direct democracy like Switzerland, but it is a functioning parliamentary democracy, and this sort of thing happens all the time in them. In fact, it used to occur much more often in the past, when the country was also a democracy.
How did G&S put it? "who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own"
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it does, and very good ones, it's just that I want to do a specific kind of research that my country is too poor to carry out, so I came West to do it. The fact that I had to go through college again (stuff I'd learned in highschool back home, in a style just different enough to force me to study the details all over again), that I had to pay for it through the nose, that I had to do so without assistance are just my particular stepping-stones.
My case is different because I had to work several jobs to go through college. Most college students don't do so because they don't have to, and they rarely live frugally (again because they don't have to) so they end up on average even more in debt when they come out than I do. This despite them paying far less tuition.
Quite right, I don't know the exact ratio of people going bankrupt due to health problems. I know the high and low points offhand though: the US has the highest rate and the UK has the lowest rate. Both are extreme outliers, most Western countries have similar in-between statistics (as does mine, Hungary).
;)
Your grandfather was a clever man. I was quite disappointed that the dollar didn't collapse, or I would have gotten rid of quite a bit of debt which I used for an American education (see my other post in response to yours). But that's life.
I do believe the American economy is fundamentally sound and elastic, and I think it will recover once all traces have been removed of the irrealistic pipe dreaming that has collapsed into the financial-system mess which bled into the wider economy. But that will take another year or two. Until then, it's no consolation to the people whose jobs or houses have been lost, even if sometimes it's their fault. I'm glad that *something* seems to be happening on a public health front finally. There is an enormous difference, to my mind, between a safety net that bounces you back and a safety net that leaves you and your family financially broken at the bottom. The latter is not so much a safety net as a concrete pavement.
No, I've just been through it, in America. If I had the money to buy a house in the godforsaken University neighbourhood, I certainly wouldn't have spent it on that.
My case is a bit different than the average American's, because I paid three and a half times their tuition, being a foreigner; at the same time I was ineligible for financial aid of any sort. So I held down two jobs (typically working 20-30 hours per week), lived very frugally, and basically cut myself off for the duration of college -- no parties, vacations, etc. I didn't mind so much as I didn't have time to think about it, but it was very unpleasant. Now when I studied in Europe, I could afford to live with my family, I paid no transportation costs, my tuition was fully subsidised; only textbooks were not cheap but I could get those used. (I bought no textbooks in America thanks to libraries and torrents.) I would agree with you that extra expenses are a part of the huge education burden in this country, and some of these are cultural things (like a childish insistence on not living with your family) but I am sure that most could be fixed by the state firmly taking things in hand and not privatising things like housing and feeding the students, not to mention the ever-present "fees": fees for textbooks, for registration, for administration up the kazoo, for lab equipment, for computers, for what have you. In my country, the administration of a huge public university is the job of a couple of small offices in a picturesque building mostly owned by the pathology department. Here, for a smaller public university, they've got several large and ugly buildings devoted to nothing but administrators, and each department has its own army of bureaucrats larger than the whole staff back home.
What am I getting at? I concede that many things are shoddily run, starting with the school systems (where the bureaucracy ratio is far worse, it's gone completely mad), the healthcare (something like 40% of the costs are administrative), the army (an amazingly bottomless well) and up to public colleges. Even the private sector is infected with it. I think the only thing run efficiently in this country must be the public research centres like the NIH or Los Alamos or the other famous ones.
I'm sorry for rambling, but I am fascinated by this country and like to think about what could be improved in it, despite my not having a chance to do anything more than talk politics with friends and occasionally write to a congressman (yes, I know I can't vote, but I'm articulate enough to write).
I think you're missing the point. The policies you cite are woefully inadequate. I mean, what's the point of having emergency public health if the ensuing bankruptcy is going to absolutely break the person's and their entire family's life and career? And if they should ever climb out again, the insurers won't want to touch them unless for exorbitant high fess with exceptions for any pre-existing condition under the sun.
You don't think financing an education is a problem? The average debt out of undergraduate programmes in the US is some 30-40 thousand USD, and you that's just for those who can come up with enough loans? And that's just a peanuts BA/BS. Professional degrees will leave you an average of 100 thousand USD in debt. Do be realistic; this is not a viable system. The graduates are sometimes stuck with those loans for decades.
It's not growth that's been destructive. Not even "globalisation", that's a vague term, but neoliberalism. Shotgun neoliberalism, to modify an American phrase. Healthcare in third world countries has taken a huge hit since the 80s due to externally imposed globalisation, generally by loans or aid packages tied to right-wing policies. And not just in the Third World; in the 50s it hurt Britain a lot.
Yes, the point of Getting Things Done is getting things done. I've gained more efficiency by deciding what I didn't want to get done and doing the rest quickly than I ever learnt from that overcomplicated mess of a system. The best lesson I learned from my mother: keep a diary and write down what you want to do in there. Projects that don't fit can have separate outlines. Works a treat.
;)
Anyway this isn't about GTD. Gmail is an inefficient and distracting interface. I just use pine running in screen, which I can access over ssh from any javascript-enabled browser. It's very fast and doesn't give you information you don't need. I recommend you to check it out but of course I couldn't care less if you don't.
De minimis non curat lex.
(Or as it is better known...
There once was a young man named Rex
With a minuscule organ of sex.
When charged with exposure
He said with composure,
"De minimis non curat lex.)
If you advance on the efficiency ladder past the "Getting Things Done" phase, you will notice that GMail is a horribly inefficient interface. In all fairness, I know of only one really efficient mailer (Pine/Alpine), although I haven't tried a few of its main competitors like Mulberry. Mutt is usable (barely) for local mail, although it sucks for IMAP.
But this isn't cryptography. It's hidden parameters of the human brain. Once found they cannot be changed (only within tolerances, and that's no hindrance) and are worthless.
Sure, it was tedious, but it broke barriers even then. My personal favourite is The Goodies, which ran much longer and was tedious on maybe 2 episodes out of 74. The Goodies are probably the funniest stuff to hit TV screens, although they have been largely forgotten today -- perhaps because they were never dismissed for not being offensive enough, or for not making it big in America, who knows? Anyway, I'd far rather watch them, or Not the Nine O'Clock News, or Yes Minister, but you can't deny that Python broke ground and had moments of brilliance. Sort of like Peter Cook, who, however, has been largely forgotten today.
Good Lord, man. Have you ever watched the BBC, in its heyday?
If you can generate the timings correctly enough for a human to understand the signal, you can use a bot to interpret the signals with accurate timing to decipher the signal. It just becomes a matter of a secret algorithm, or rather, secret parameters. Once found -- worthless.
That happens to me quite often. I always just view them in aview or cacaview (I have elinks set to open images with those viewers) and can always figure it out after a little zooming and panning.
On a related note, at my forum, I just have a system that doesn't let you post links or images in your first n posts (currently 5). Haven't had a single piece of spam since I put that in. Sure, plenty of fake accounts, but I filter out those with less than 5 posts from the member listing. Comment spammers don't tend to reuse accounts. :)
It would take the attackers all of five minutes to recognise this and simply fetch two images (or the whole set) and superimpose them. It's a neat trick but nothing more.
On a related note, what drives home the decline of Britain is when I compare old footage (or even fictional stuff from television shows) of statesmen being driven around. In the past, hell, only 50 years ago, it was always Rollers or Bentleys or Rovers -- all British-made cars, it went without saying. Nowadays those brands are all foreign; even the Queen rides in a German car (a gift Bentley). And all the way down, from the politicians to the policemen it's American or Japanese cars. Sure, some are still often made there -- the Vauxhalls, for instance, but it's a foreign company pulling the strings and making the profits.
This guy's answers are hilarious. They only make sense in a universe where everything is inherently locked down, and your customers are idiots to be abused.
Don't know if you've noticed, but that is the MSN universe, in a nutshell. For that matter, it's a lot of the Microsoft universe. And it's big.
It did -- or it would have, because it goes without saying that you don't subsequently just let him rebuild it all. The fact is, the British leaders of the 30s, MacDonald for instance, bet on lasting peace and they began an appalling disarmament programme. They bet wrong.
Had these leaders woken up to a sense of their history only a few years earlier than they did -- started rearming in 1936 and not 1938, for instance -- the whole war could have been avoided, or at least made a very simple, year-long affair.
Over one in a hundred? Yikes! *nervous look*
Obviously. But the story's still flamebait. Want a non-flamebait title? "Ubuntu Workaround for Laptop-Killing BIOS Bug Released". See the difference? Subtle but important.
Considering this was a fault of the manufacturers, this story is pure and total flamebait. Just don't bother feeding the trolls; don't reply.
If I still had a CRT handy...
For goodness sakes' this is the government, with a century's history of truly excellent investment into research. Why the hell do you take them for incompetents? It's private companies that do inefficient, closed, duplicated and wasteful research.
I honestly think of the U.K. as a former democracy.
Well, you honestly have a problem with the term then. Sure, it is not a direct democracy like Switzerland, but it is a functioning parliamentary democracy, and this sort of thing happens all the time in them. In fact, it used to occur much more often in the past, when the country was also a democracy.
How did G&S put it? "who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own"
Simply because it's a feature that purports to be more than it is.