Also worth noting that this is elective surgery. Non-essential care. I don't care that you have to wait a couple months to get a nosejob. I *do* care that even with fairly good private insurance (though Cigna) in the US, it cost me $300 to get a prescription for antibiotics for a simple infection because there was a three month wait (minimum) to see a freakin' general practice physician. For what would have been a 10 minute appointment at the most. Ended up going with some company that outsources the doctors, you pay out-of-pocket and they give you a phone consultation then schedule tests at a local lab if needed...which ironically was totally worth the cost for the speed and convenience, and I'll probably be using again, paying out of pocket again, because it's just not worth using my insurance. Yup, private insurance works great -- for the insurance companies. My company's paying them hundreds a month for shit I'm not even using!
Taxes instead of paying out of pocket don't reduce the cost, true. The ACA is unlikely to help much in that respect, as it's not a single-payer system and is just a forced corporate handout.
Single-payer systems like Canada DO reduce costs in a number of ways though. No massive profits, huge CEO bonuses, and absurd executive pay. No administrative mess of billing to various insurance companies and their various restrictions (I work in retail pharmacy software, Fortune 500 client. On some prescriptions we end up just eating the cost because it's too much of a pain to bill the insurance. We have entire departments of people working full-time just to triage third-party billing issues. We have entire releases of the software package -- a hundred or so developers working for a few months -- designed around a single insurance company changing a couple policies. Single-payer wouldn't ELIMINATE these, but it would greatly reduce it.) Oh, and single-payer systems have better negotiating power on drug prices, which is particularly important given the patent issues surrounding most modern drugs.
Nah, maybe add in the middle: "I'm your boss now, never forget who you ---!" then the guy gets shot mid-sentence and the sequence repeats with someone else. A dozen times or so. And a few dozen repetitions of 'OH CRAP WE'RE BUSTED DUMP EVERYTHING' in steadily increasing levels of insanity too.
For the first season or two I may have agreed with you somewhat. Wouldn't call it the 'best show ever', but it was decent.
But now? I stopped watching during the last season when I noticed that for the past season or two they'd been adding new characters every episode just to then kill them off on the next episode. Hallmark of a show that's run out of ideas and is devolving into a daytime soap. About time they ended it.
I dunno, when I was in highschool (graduated '08) all the rich kids were buying Blackberries as a status symbol....they probably could have been alright if they just doubled the price; why buy a $600 iPhone when you can have a $1000 Blackberry! With a primary market of businesses and rich kids, at worst nobody would care; at best it would have made their products even more desirable!
Yeah, but electric motors are 4x more efficient than internal combustion engines, so if it's 1/4 the energy density in storage, it's actually equal once used.
Plus, since electric motors are generally smaller than internal combustion engines, you can stick in more batteries. A 15x improvement in battery storage would actually give you a greater range with an EV than a gas engine...although you still have to figure out a better way to charge the things.
Internal combustion engines are, on average, less than 20% efficient. Motors used in electric cars are around 80% efficient. Probably what the GP was referring to.
The gas may contain 60x more energy, but you're getting at most 15x more to the wheels. And electric systems are smaller so you can stick in a bigger battery to reduce that discrepancy further. Battery tech seems to be improving a lot faster than engine tech, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think batteries may eventually equal or surpass gasoline.
Yeah, seconded. My mother is a nurse. They don't ask nurses to turn off this crap. She brings a phone and a kindle and an iPad (connected to the official hospital wifi network...) every day. And it's not like they don't know -- hell, they use her cellphone sometimes to get in touch with her while she's in the building! And she's hardly the most tech-savvy person there either; she only got the Kindle and later the iPad after seeing a bunch of her coworkers using them. If cellphones and wifi interfered with hospital equipment that hospital would lose every patient that came in!
What oath did he break? He swore an oath to the *constitution*, not the government. He saw what he believed to be a violation; it would have been a violation of his oath to *not* try to put an end to it.
Well...it took many years and millions of dollars to get Bin Laden. His arms certainly made it harder. Also, the fact that he was armed certainly limited the government's actions. Sure, they were still able to execute him, but they weren't able to indefinitely imprison and torture him. For *some* people, limiting that choice or increasing the difficulty may be sufficient. It's like any other security -- sure, PGP can be brute-forced eventually, but it's still useful because it still makes recovering the plaintext harder.
I don't think it's quite the same though, as countermeasures are readily available. We've already got RF jammers and GPS spoofing tools in the hands of private citizens. Not a ton, but there's no real call for them yet either. They're reasonably simple (at least to reproduce in an age of commodity hardware) devices that can knock out an entire fleet of drones if you do it right. And we can buy our own drones cheap enough. They won't be an F16, but they could still be rather effective. Wonder if a small hobby quadcopter would even show up on their radar systems...
If SAAS and proprietary is so bad then why does the free market let it not only exist but thrive with some corps willing to pay millions for it! XP die hards love their OS so much they wont switch. Even though Linux is free. Same with Office.
Sure, it's superior -- for the corporations producing it! Most of these "XP die hards" don't know a damn thing about the OS itself; and those who do will usually admit it's inferior. Their explanation for why they stay with it boils down to: EA doesn't make games for Linux. Because it is in EA's best interest to stay closed-source. Not the users'.
Most teenage girls do not care about hacking their phones. They are willing to pay Apple handsomely. My opinion is very unpopular here but the free market says otherwise for everyone else. People are willing to work hard and sacrafice to pay for such clouds and software. If RMS were right the software industry would be struggling.
Most people would save money by switching to a laser printer. Yet most people still own inkjets. (just went though this with my mother-- she's finally about to buy a laser that'll last at least a decade, probably without even a toner change, for less than she spends on ink cartridges in 6 months -- after using that inkjet for over a decade, despite me extolling the virtues of laser printers since I got mine seven years ago!) Marketing is powerful stuff; if the large corporations decide something is more profitable for them, that thing will dominate the marketplace for a long time.
They remove it if they're sent a DMCA request or some other similar legal assertion from the copyright holder. That's really the best they can do. What else do you want, block The Pirate Bay (for example) entirely? They're even already partially doing that, restricting non-infringing files from their results because of it.
How exactly do you tell the difference between an advance copy posted to a blog by the artist themselves and an advance copy illegally leaked to a blog by someone else?
You want me to do the work for you?
No, I want to know how the hell Google is supposed to program an algorithm to determine something that even human beings can't manage to figure out. There is just not enough information, and short of establishing a massive database of all copyright works, along with the contact information of the copyright holder, in every possible format, creating some sort of hash of each of those, comparing to every file they come across and then contacting the copyright holder for every single media file and asking if it is authorized....that's a much harder proposition than 'that girl looks under 18 and her nipples are showing'. That's my point. Filtering out piracy requires a massive amount of additional data that Google just does not have access to. Might as well demand that they build a wormhole to Alpha Centauri.
Last time I encountered it (earlier this week) there was a 'take me back' button, and beside that was a small 'advanced options' link. Click the advanced options link and it'll give you a 'continue anyway' button. Been that way for quite a while.
I don't want Netflix as it currently exists, that's my point. I don't use XBMC (which is the single slowest media player I've ever seen,) I use omxplayer and some custom PHP and Bash code on a model B Pi. Works great. Plays all my media just fine, kicks on the news as I walk in the door from work, turns the projector and stereo on/off as I start or finish watching something, handles YouTube subscriptions, torrents...Next project is integrating it with my room lighting and gaming systems. It does more than the usual HTPC at a fraction of the cost. Does *far* more than Chromecast, for the same price (plus a couple wires, diodes, and relays.) In fact, my projector has no audio output, so if I were to use Chromecast I coudn't use a cheap dongle, I'd need either a full PC or a $35 dongle plus a $100+ device to split out the audio signal...
Point is, when I buy music, I give them money and they give me a high quality MP3 that I can do whatever I want with. And all the meta tags are perfect, which by itself is worth the price. Give me a system that works the same way for movies and I'd gladly pay for it. Give me a high quality video file, preferably in a known format (by which I mean both codec and file naming convention/meta tags) that doesn't require a whole stack of proprietary locks to play it and I'll gladly pay. Would be well worth it as such a system would have literally saved *months* (and counting) of work on my media center setup.
"Casual" use of Java is fairly rare - if there's an applet on a website, I'm probably going there to find it and won't be worried about it being unsigned. Most sites use Flash or Javascript rather than fire up the JVM.
The typical user will just click "Run" no matter what it says anyways, that's why Google's malware blocking doesn't even give the option to proceed to the website on its warning page.
That's exactly what this is, but worse. They're saying that in some future release there will be no 'just run it anyway' button. Google's malware page *does* give an option to continue, it just takes a couple extra clicks to get there. This will have no such option. Also, appealing Google's block is quick, easy, and free. There's no appeal here, just extortion.
Essentially what Oracle is doing here is saying to all the applet developers: "It'd be a real shame if something were to happen to that app of yours...how about we provide some protection, for a small fee of course..."
High frequency trading isn't investment, it's gambling. It's hard to do any "meaningful economic activity" when the amount of money you have to do it with changes every couple milliseconds....
Investments are long-term. Investments are saying 'here's some money, you go build X and give me Y% of your profits'. That's an investment. And you don't need millisecond speed trades and specialized FPGA NICs if you're leaving your money there long enough for R&D, marketing, and sales. Investments last months or years, not minutes or milliseconds.
Tell that to someone who's been subjected systematic verbal and psychological abuse. Tell it to people who are subject to discrimination. Or rather, don't. Because telling them that what hurt them wasn't real, will also hurt them. There's good reason why even the US has anti-bullying legislation. Because very real people really are hurt by it.
Yeah, the US has anti-bullying legislation. Usually designed to protect minors. Rational adults would just walk away. Sure there are instances where that's not possible or legally permitted, and there need to be laws to defend against that (like workplace harassment) but in general public you have no right to not be offended, and every right to walk away.
This is also distinct from laws (sometimes the same laws) that ban actual threats. Holocaust denial is not a threat and should not be treated as one.
And again, if any law is reasonable to prevent harm, and you consider Holocaust denial to be harmful enough to be banned...there are a million types of common speech that are far more harmful. Throw the warmongers and the anarcho-capitalists (who would advocate removing life-saving social services) in prison first, then you can go for the holocaust deniers. But that would never work, because those ideas are more popular. Which is what this is really about. You can prove the buildup to the Iraq War was based on lies, lies which caused very real, measurable, immediate harm...but you don't see the people who supported it being thrown in prison, because those lies were popular.
Discussion and debate have nothing to do with this. You are allowed to discuss and debate the Holocaust in Germany. Just don't present as factual that it didn't happen. There's no way that could possibly enhance any discussion on the subject.
Well, for one thing, allowing such speech makes it a lot easier to spot the dangerous lunatics...even the KKK uses politically correct terminology these days; doesn't make them any less racist. Same goes here. You can ban a specific expression of an idea, but you can't ban the idea itself.
And it does contribute to debates, even if it's indirect. If there weren't holocaust deniers, we wouldn't be having this discussion on the limits of free speech. All ideas should be out in the open so society can examine the idea, see if it has any merits, and if not so they can examine why people hold such ideas and what to do about it. It's just like any other forms of prohibition -- banning drugs doesn't stop people from using them, but it *does* stop people from getting treatment, it stops research on possible medical uses, stops research on addiction treatments, enriches the black market, etc...
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Also worth noting that this is elective surgery. Non-essential care. I don't care that you have to wait a couple months to get a nosejob. I *do* care that even with fairly good private insurance (though Cigna) in the US, it cost me $300 to get a prescription for antibiotics for a simple infection because there was a three month wait (minimum) to see a freakin' general practice physician. For what would have been a 10 minute appointment at the most. Ended up going with some company that outsources the doctors, you pay out-of-pocket and they give you a phone consultation then schedule tests at a local lab if needed...which ironically was totally worth the cost for the speed and convenience, and I'll probably be using again, paying out of pocket again, because it's just not worth using my insurance. Yup, private insurance works great -- for the insurance companies. My company's paying them hundreds a month for shit I'm not even using!
Taxes instead of paying out of pocket don't reduce the cost, true. The ACA is unlikely to help much in that respect, as it's not a single-payer system and is just a forced corporate handout.
Single-payer systems like Canada DO reduce costs in a number of ways though. No massive profits, huge CEO bonuses, and absurd executive pay. No administrative mess of billing to various insurance companies and their various restrictions (I work in retail pharmacy software, Fortune 500 client. On some prescriptions we end up just eating the cost because it's too much of a pain to bill the insurance. We have entire departments of people working full-time just to triage third-party billing issues. We have entire releases of the software package -- a hundred or so developers working for a few months -- designed around a single insurance company changing a couple policies. Single-payer wouldn't ELIMINATE these, but it would greatly reduce it.) Oh, and single-payer systems have better negotiating power on drug prices, which is particularly important given the patent issues surrounding most modern drugs.
Nah, maybe add in the middle: "I'm your boss now, never forget who you ---!" then the guy gets shot mid-sentence and the sequence repeats with someone else. A dozen times or so. And a few dozen repetitions of 'OH CRAP WE'RE BUSTED DUMP EVERYTHING' in steadily increasing levels of insanity too.
For the first season or two I may have agreed with you somewhat. Wouldn't call it the 'best show ever', but it was decent.
But now? I stopped watching during the last season when I noticed that for the past season or two they'd been adding new characters every episode just to then kill them off on the next episode. Hallmark of a show that's run out of ideas and is devolving into a daytime soap. About time they ended it.
I dunno, when I was in highschool (graduated '08) all the rich kids were buying Blackberries as a status symbol....they probably could have been alright if they just doubled the price; why buy a $600 iPhone when you can have a $1000 Blackberry! With a primary market of businesses and rich kids, at worst nobody would care; at best it would have made their products even more desirable!
Every blackberry I've ever seen uses a standard micro- or mini-USB charger...unlike the 3GS or S3...
Yeah, but electric motors are 4x more efficient than internal combustion engines, so if it's 1/4 the energy density in storage, it's actually equal once used.
Plus, since electric motors are generally smaller than internal combustion engines, you can stick in more batteries. A 15x improvement in battery storage would actually give you a greater range with an EV than a gas engine...although you still have to figure out a better way to charge the things.
Internal combustion engines are, on average, less than 20% efficient. Motors used in electric cars are around 80% efficient. Probably what the GP was referring to.
The gas may contain 60x more energy, but you're getting at most 15x more to the wheels. And electric systems are smaller so you can stick in a bigger battery to reduce that discrepancy further. Battery tech seems to be improving a lot faster than engine tech, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think batteries may eventually equal or surpass gasoline.
Yeah, seconded. My mother is a nurse. They don't ask nurses to turn off this crap. She brings a phone and a kindle and an iPad (connected to the official hospital wifi network...) every day. And it's not like they don't know -- hell, they use her cellphone sometimes to get in touch with her while she's in the building! And she's hardly the most tech-savvy person there either; she only got the Kindle and later the iPad after seeing a bunch of her coworkers using them. If cellphones and wifi interfered with hospital equipment that hospital would lose every patient that came in!
What oath did he break? He swore an oath to the *constitution*, not the government. He saw what he believed to be a violation; it would have been a violation of his oath to *not* try to put an end to it.
Well...it took many years and millions of dollars to get Bin Laden. His arms certainly made it harder. Also, the fact that he was armed certainly limited the government's actions. Sure, they were still able to execute him, but they weren't able to indefinitely imprison and torture him. For *some* people, limiting that choice or increasing the difficulty may be sufficient. It's like any other security -- sure, PGP can be brute-forced eventually, but it's still useful because it still makes recovering the plaintext harder.
I don't think it's quite the same though, as countermeasures are readily available. We've already got RF jammers and GPS spoofing tools in the hands of private citizens. Not a ton, but there's no real call for them yet either. They're reasonably simple (at least to reproduce in an age of commodity hardware) devices that can knock out an entire fleet of drones if you do it right. And we can buy our own drones cheap enough. They won't be an F16, but they could still be rather effective. Wonder if a small hobby quadcopter would even show up on their radar systems...
If SAAS and proprietary is so bad then why does the free market let it not only exist but thrive with some corps willing to pay millions for it! XP die hards love their OS so much they wont switch. Even though Linux is free. Same with Office.
Sure, it's superior -- for the corporations producing it! Most of these "XP die hards" don't know a damn thing about the OS itself; and those who do will usually admit it's inferior. Their explanation for why they stay with it boils down to: EA doesn't make games for Linux. Because it is in EA's best interest to stay closed-source. Not the users'.
Most teenage girls do not care about hacking their phones. They are willing to pay Apple handsomely. My opinion is very unpopular here but the free market says otherwise for everyone else. People are willing to work hard and sacrafice to pay for such clouds and software. If RMS were right the software industry would be struggling.
Most people would save money by switching to a laser printer. Yet most people still own inkjets. (just went though this with my mother-- she's finally about to buy a laser that'll last at least a decade, probably without even a toner change, for less than she spends on ink cartridges in 6 months -- after using that inkjet for over a decade, despite me extolling the virtues of laser printers since I got mine seven years ago!) Marketing is powerful stuff; if the large corporations decide something is more profitable for them, that thing will dominate the marketplace for a long time.
Yeah, that's the problem.
People do still do that though. Wall Street doesn't, but that's still how everyone else invests. From venture capitalists to 401(k)s
They remove it if they're sent a DMCA request or some other similar legal assertion from the copyright holder. That's really the best they can do. What else do you want, block The Pirate Bay (for example) entirely? They're even already partially doing that, restricting non-infringing files from their results because of it.
How exactly do you tell the difference between an advance copy posted to a blog by the artist themselves and an advance copy illegally leaked to a blog by someone else?
You want me to do the work for you?
No, I want to know how the hell Google is supposed to program an algorithm to determine something that even human beings can't manage to figure out. There is just not enough information, and short of establishing a massive database of all copyright works, along with the contact information of the copyright holder, in every possible format, creating some sort of hash of each of those, comparing to every file they come across and then contacting the copyright holder for every single media file and asking if it is authorized....that's a much harder proposition than 'that girl looks under 18 and her nipples are showing'. That's my point. Filtering out piracy requires a massive amount of additional data that Google just does not have access to. Might as well demand that they build a wormhole to Alpha Centauri.
Who said anything about showing it to someone else? I was talking about possession, not distribution.
Last time I encountered it (earlier this week) there was a 'take me back' button, and beside that was a small 'advanced options' link. Click the advanced options link and it'll give you a 'continue anyway' button. Been that way for quite a while.
I don't want Netflix as it currently exists, that's my point. I don't use XBMC (which is the single slowest media player I've ever seen,) I use omxplayer and some custom PHP and Bash code on a model B Pi. Works great. Plays all my media just fine, kicks on the news as I walk in the door from work, turns the projector and stereo on/off as I start or finish watching something, handles YouTube subscriptions, torrents...Next project is integrating it with my room lighting and gaming systems. It does more than the usual HTPC at a fraction of the cost. Does *far* more than Chromecast, for the same price (plus a couple wires, diodes, and relays.) In fact, my projector has no audio output, so if I were to use Chromecast I coudn't use a cheap dongle, I'd need either a full PC or a $35 dongle plus a $100+ device to split out the audio signal...
Point is, when I buy music, I give them money and they give me a high quality MP3 that I can do whatever I want with. And all the meta tags are perfect, which by itself is worth the price. Give me a system that works the same way for movies and I'd gladly pay for it. Give me a high quality video file, preferably in a known format (by which I mean both codec and file naming convention/meta tags) that doesn't require a whole stack of proprietary locks to play it and I'll gladly pay. Would be well worth it as such a system would have literally saved *months* (and counting) of work on my media center setup.
Personal projects you trust and can push continue on.
RTFS:
Running applications by UNKNOWN publishers will be blocked in a future release...
There is a 'continue on' button right now, but this is stage one of phasing that out entirely.
"Casual" use of Java is fairly rare - if there's an applet on a website, I'm probably going there to find it and won't be worried about it being unsigned. Most sites use Flash or Javascript rather than fire up the JVM.
The typical user will just click "Run" no matter what it says anyways, that's why Google's malware blocking doesn't even give the option to proceed to the website on its warning page.
That's exactly what this is, but worse. They're saying that in some future release there will be no 'just run it anyway' button. Google's malware page *does* give an option to continue, it just takes a couple extra clicks to get there. This will have no such option. Also, appealing Google's block is quick, easy, and free. There's no appeal here, just extortion.
Essentially what Oracle is doing here is saying to all the applet developers: "It'd be a real shame if something were to happen to that app of yours...how about we provide some protection, for a small fee of course..."
Right now all Amazon is doing is driving more business to the dealers, so I don't see why they would complain....
Yeah, interesting challenges like properly timing your insider trades to not appear to defy the laws of physics ;)
High frequency trading isn't investment, it's gambling. It's hard to do any "meaningful economic activity" when the amount of money you have to do it with changes every couple milliseconds....
Investments are long-term. Investments are saying 'here's some money, you go build X and give me Y% of your profits'. That's an investment. And you don't need millisecond speed trades and specialized FPGA NICs if you're leaving your money there long enough for R&D, marketing, and sales. Investments last months or years, not minutes or milliseconds.
Tell that to someone who's been subjected systematic verbal and psychological abuse. Tell it to people who are subject to discrimination. Or rather, don't. Because telling them that what hurt them wasn't real, will also hurt them. There's good reason why even the US has anti-bullying legislation. Because very real people really are hurt by it.
Yeah, the US has anti-bullying legislation. Usually designed to protect minors. Rational adults would just walk away. Sure there are instances where that's not possible or legally permitted, and there need to be laws to defend against that (like workplace harassment) but in general public you have no right to not be offended, and every right to walk away.
This is also distinct from laws (sometimes the same laws) that ban actual threats. Holocaust denial is not a threat and should not be treated as one.
And again, if any law is reasonable to prevent harm, and you consider Holocaust denial to be harmful enough to be banned...there are a million types of common speech that are far more harmful. Throw the warmongers and the anarcho-capitalists (who would advocate removing life-saving social services) in prison first, then you can go for the holocaust deniers. But that would never work, because those ideas are more popular. Which is what this is really about. You can prove the buildup to the Iraq War was based on lies, lies which caused very real, measurable, immediate harm...but you don't see the people who supported it being thrown in prison, because those lies were popular.
Discussion and debate have nothing to do with this. You are allowed to discuss and debate the Holocaust in Germany. Just don't present as factual that it didn't happen. There's no way that could possibly enhance any discussion on the subject.
Well, for one thing, allowing such speech makes it a lot easier to spot the dangerous lunatics...even the KKK uses politically correct terminology these days; doesn't make them any less racist. Same goes here. You can ban a specific expression of an idea, but you can't ban the idea itself.
And it does contribute to debates, even if it's indirect. If there weren't holocaust deniers, we wouldn't be having this discussion on the limits of free speech. All ideas should be out in the open so society can examine the idea, see if it has any merits, and if not so they can examine why people hold such ideas and what to do about it. It's just like any other forms of prohibition -- banning drugs doesn't stop people from using them, but it *does* stop people from getting treatment, it stops research on possible medical uses, stops research on addiction treatments, enriches the black market, etc...