Either that, or a real public healthcare system where we could take advantage of cutting out the inefficiencies and the armies of middlemen taking their cut. What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
Indeed... while it's good that there are less uninsured people now, it doesn't fix the problem that the whole profit-driven (lack of) healthcare system is rotten to the core. I sure don't have any type of health care, public or private. I am expecting a fine at some point, though. Some of the regulatory patchwork like expanding medicare, or letting college students stay on their parents' insurance until 25, will pump up the numbers -- for a while. For some. Meanwhile, people will continue slipping through the cracks, costs will continue to rise. The only question for me is, how many years will it take for the house of cards to come tumbling down? When do we establish an actual healthcare system like every other developed country? How far will my teeth and spine have deteriorated and my carpal tunnel syndrome progressed in the meantime? Even if I do end up with a shitty, expensive healthcare plan before then, how much debt will the necessary surgeries put me in?
I can't believe they're still making the mistake of giving an inferior product to what the pirates get... I don't use the service, is it paid? If you're paying to watch ads, yeah, I'd go right back to piracy too. As for me, I never left piracy, but I don't watch much TV or movies anyway.
I've been very disappointed in how the YouTube video player has been getting worse on a technical level. In fact, it's been many years since it was in a state that I'd consider "good". Between videos failing halfway through, or just failing to load period, requiring a refresh... not to mention the extreme bandwidth waste while seeking. It used to be, once a video had loaded, you could seek to any point in that video and it would simply start playing the loaded video from that point. Now, it begins re-downloading the entire video, beginning at your seek point.
If Google will now be directly earning money from people subscribing to ad-free service, the AdBlock situation could change quickly. Frankly, I'm surprised Google hasn't already made the ads inseparable from the content - it's not hard. I suppose there hasn't been enough incentive for them to do that. If they bring out subscriptions, maybe they will have the incentive.
Verizon, being an ISP, has an interest in not discussing net neutrality. No neutrality means they get to take some comfortable money from "content providers" to fast-lane their data. As a side-effect, maybe they can delay expensive network upgrades even more so that these deals become critical for the content providers. The spying thing isn't so much directly related to their business -- but they do allow the government to spy on their networks, so there's a high probability of a spying story coming out that reflects negatively on Verizon due to them being complicit in it. That's the PR angle, but Verizon might also be concerned with their relationship with the three-letter agencies. I wouldn't say they are necessarily "in bed" with the agencies, but they certainly don't want to sour relations.
With the Windows monoculture being chipped away at, very slowly but surely, you don't even need to be using IE anymore. There have been plenty of exploits for Firefox, iOS, etc.
Those who amass more money than a person could conceivably use during multiple extravagantly luxurious lifetimes are afflicted with a type of megalomania/hoarding, more often than not. After a certain point it becomes simply a fixation with adding more digits to the bank balance. The difference between them and the person living knee deep in dollar-store baubles and cat shit is that those who hoard wealth cause significant harm to other people. If we imposed higher taxes on this money these people can't possibly use, we could end so much human suffering in 1 year. Our country could have a health care system, and sane working conditions with a few weeks of guaranteed vacation a year, like the rest of the civilized world. It is the duty of government to improve living conditions for as many people as possible, across the board -- to "promote the general welfare" as stated in the Constitution's preamble. The growing wealth disparity in past decades has shown that the hoarders have dug in deep. Many of the 1%ers are in positions of power, and they have proven they will not willfully provide the other classes with the fruits of their increased productivity. At this point it can only be done by force, through taxes.
There is no comparison between the working man ticking off his standardized deduction, and the 1%er slave-traders squeezing every last dime from their government and their fellow countrymen.
It should be clear that there's no segregation or anyone denying females from attending CS programs. The analogy with racially segregated sports, where the segregation was enforced (a black player would be not allowed on a white team) does not hold up. Speaking of lucrative career paths (and CS isn't much these days), I'm reminded of my days on campus seeing the groups of female nursing students wandering around the health science building. How do you think it would be for a man trying to fit in that program socially? It wouldn't be easy, but of course some men who really do feel the calling stick it through and end up in nursing. And they only number about 20%. And you know what? There's no problem with that. Men aren't being "denied lucrative careers" in nursing.
It's telling that you only hear this huge outcry when it's a deficit of females in a field, but not a deficit of males. It's a case of PC progressed to its awful conclusion - where it's so baked into peoples' subconscious that they don't even realize they are succumbing to the forces of irrational thought. The hyper-militant feminists (misandrists maybe?) who have brought this drivel into the public consciousness bring shame to the real feminist trailblazers who fought for women's rights in the 1920s-1970s. We have moved beyond providing an equal opportunity to all people, to trying to force an equal outcome for everyone with perverse incentives like affirmative action. I have hope tide of history will wash this stain away, and we can simply get back to appreciating who we are as people, and where we choose to go in our lives.
I think the quality-of-life improvement in China has been overstated. What's happening is simply that more Chinese are entering into the capitalist system. When you're getting by on subsistence farming, you have (on paper) no income, you contribute little to nothing to the country's GDP, have no bank account, etc. These subsistence farmers are slowly moving into the city. Once they are there, they suddenly come into existence, as measured by the capitalist metrics. But has their quality of life really improved if they can't walk outside without a face mask for the pollution, and they work 80 hour weeks at Foxconn? Do the occasional trip to McDonald's and the pair of Gap jeans after months of saving really make up for that?
On top of that you also have parts of China's GDP that are illusory, not real production. Look up the videos of the empty malls, apartment blocks, indeed entire cities that have been constructed and not used. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... Such building projects were undertaken to provide the appearance of economic growth on paper, but we see they are empty... and somewhere in China, 2 or 3 people walked away with a shitton of money from foreign investors due to this perception. Meanwhile, the peasants at Foxconn are throwing themselves off buildings.
I've recently went through quite a bit of footage of nuclear bomb tests. This started due to working on a slideshow regarding the bombing of Hiroshima, for YouTube which is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
It's set to the song/poem "I Come And Stand At Every Door", which is about Hiroshima and the larger picture of nuclear war. If you're into poetry or folk music, or just want to see before & after pictures of a bomb blast, you can click.
"Flat" relating to headphones usually means a flat frequency response, unless you are talking to people who don't have a clue (which is a very real possibility). A flat frequency response is the goal of a high fidelity system, the very word "fidelity" means trueness to the original source, which is what you get with a flat frequency response. The idea that a speaker needs to distort the sound because it "sounds good" is absurd, and in fact it's the exact same rationale audiofools have for preferring vinyl. Vinyl inherently has an uneven frequency response (among other things) and it is those characteristics that give it is distinctive sound, leading some to prefer it. It is distinctive but it is low fidelity, just like a poor set of speakers. Besides, if you want the treble or bass jacked up or some other frequency band notched, that's what equalizers are for. Although it should be noted they are called equalizers because the intent is to bring an equal loudness to all frequency bands - aka, a flat frequency response. To compensate for speakers that are not already flat.
It's not just video games either, Vorbis support has had time to penetrate deeply in many places, where its not immediately obvious, or listed on the spec sheet. DVD players, car stereos, lots of 'MP3' players (once again excepting Apple, they typically push their proprietary stuff). Basically anywhere that someone needed audio compression and didn't want to shell out to Fraunhofer for a license.
Ogg Vorbis certainly isn't dead - development has slowed in the past 5-7 years, due to the codec reaching maturity, but it remains the best choice for an open audio codec in the transparent bit rate range (100 kb/s+). Recently, Opus has taken a clear advantage at lower bit rates and in applications that need ultra-low-latency encoding, like video conferencing. But there is really no excuse for these browsers not to include Vorbis support. From the point of view of someone needing to encode content, Vorbis has the additional advantage of being much more widely-supported vs. Opus, oversights in these minor browsers notwithstanding.
I'm not sure what the state laws in Florida are like regarding marijuana, but the relevant federal law (which anyone can be charged under) is the Controlled Substances Act. Under this act, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I substance, and possession of any amount is a felony punishable by much more than 22 months. By contrast, drugs like opium, PCP, methamphetamine, and cocaine are in the less-restrictive Schedule II. Additionally, police are allowed to inflate the weight of seized drugs by adding in the weight of the container and anything else that may happen to be in it. For example, if 5 grams of weed were being carried in a container along with some lighters, rolling papers, and a metal herb grinder totaling 100 grams, that can be charged as possession of 100 grams of the drug. This is actually a common practice, and its legality was upheld by a federal court of appeals in the 90s. Indeed, there are more than a few examples of people who are currently serving life sentences for first-time non-violent weed-only offenses, never mind 22 months. Some of these cases are detailed at http://lifeforpot.org/ .
Alcohol is likely to induce the false self-confidence you speak of, whereas marijuana (and psychedelics) induce a sense of humility, which is one of the reasons for its use in religious groups like the Rastafari. If your only experience with psychoactive chemicals has been alcohol, and your only 'research' into marijuana has been the spoon-fed government propaganda, I could see your generalization being an easy trap to fall into. Although you can't force life experiences on someone, my advice would be to at least look at what the scientific literature has to say regarding marijuana.
Frankly I think it's a matter of more people now have actually tried it, and the old hardheads are drying out. The Time magazine poll from 1969 put the *lifetime* use of cannabis among the US population at somewhere in the low single-digit percentage - I want to say around 2% but I'm sure you can look it up if you need the exact number. It definitely shocked me. This was already many years into the hippie movement, so weed was firmly embedding itself into the pop-culture mythology, but how many people who weren't hippies had used it? Very few - only the most open-minded. Lifetime-use numbers did skyrocket through the following decades, reaching near to 50% by 2000. But politically it was/is still a very loaded issue. It's something that's easy to ignore and maintain the status quo, but political suicide to suggest to change, until it becomes such a *big* issue that the number people who know someone who's been fucked by prohibition gets to be bigger than the number of self-righteous assholes who won't listen. Gallup literally did a double-take in 2012 or 2013 when their polls showed, for the first time, that over 50% of the US favored legalization. They had to run the poll a second time. With stats like these rolling in, the political trepidation around this topic will begin to dissolve in short order. I think we've now reached the tipping point, just 40 years later than everyone thought. Presidents and governors now admit that they've smoked pot.
Revolutions happen from the bottom up, not the other way around.
Windows changes a lot of its behavior as soon as you change that radio button from "Workgroup" to "Domain". Before you even get to the log in prompt, Windows has to connect to a domain controller to download Group Policy settings and the like. Having to run login credentials through a DC and load config from it as well will add at least a slight amount of lag - possibly a lot, depending on how responsive the network and the DC are. Then, there's the matter of which Group Policy settings the admins have chosen, many of those can slow down the computer on their own.
If IT "had their way" with it, they might have also loaded it up with antivirus or some other bloatware.
^ This guy's right, I was thinking Elder Scrolls. Not necessarily Skyrim, since that's the most watered down game in the series. (I thought Oblivion was a step backwards when it came out, but Skyrim came and showed me how consolization is REALLY done.)
Hell, US cars have both on the speedometer. (In my location near an airport we even have MPH and KPH both on the road signs). If the UK cars don't, that would be a laugh, and something I need to remember to pull out when the smug British metric fetishists come out of the woodwork.
I think the GP's prediction of "utter chaos" is a bit off, though. The good drivers don't need to rely on speed limit signs to gauge the proper speed, and the bad drivers don't pay attention to the speed limit anyway. I think you'd see little difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Either that, or a real public healthcare system where we could take advantage of cutting out the inefficiencies and the armies of middlemen taking their cut. What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
Indeed... while it's good that there are less uninsured people now, it doesn't fix the problem that the whole profit-driven (lack of) healthcare system is rotten to the core. I sure don't have any type of health care, public or private. I am expecting a fine at some point, though. Some of the regulatory patchwork like expanding medicare, or letting college students stay on their parents' insurance until 25, will pump up the numbers -- for a while. For some. Meanwhile, people will continue slipping through the cracks, costs will continue to rise. The only question for me is, how many years will it take for the house of cards to come tumbling down? When do we establish an actual healthcare system like every other developed country? How far will my teeth and spine have deteriorated and my carpal tunnel syndrome progressed in the meantime? Even if I do end up with a shitty, expensive healthcare plan before then, how much debt will the necessary surgeries put me in?
I can't believe they're still making the mistake of giving an inferior product to what the pirates get... I don't use the service, is it paid? If you're paying to watch ads, yeah, I'd go right back to piracy too. As for me, I never left piracy, but I don't watch much TV or movies anyway.
I've been very disappointed in how the YouTube video player has been getting worse on a technical level. In fact, it's been many years since it was in a state that I'd consider "good". Between videos failing halfway through, or just failing to load period, requiring a refresh... not to mention the extreme bandwidth waste while seeking. It used to be, once a video had loaded, you could seek to any point in that video and it would simply start playing the loaded video from that point. Now, it begins re-downloading the entire video, beginning at your seek point.
If Google will now be directly earning money from people subscribing to ad-free service, the AdBlock situation could change quickly. Frankly, I'm surprised Google hasn't already made the ads inseparable from the content - it's not hard. I suppose there hasn't been enough incentive for them to do that. If they bring out subscriptions, maybe they will have the incentive.
Verizon, being an ISP, has an interest in not discussing net neutrality. No neutrality means they get to take some comfortable money from "content providers" to fast-lane their data. As a side-effect, maybe they can delay expensive network upgrades even more so that these deals become critical for the content providers.
The spying thing isn't so much directly related to their business -- but they do allow the government to spy on their networks, so there's a high probability of a spying story coming out that reflects negatively on Verizon due to them being complicit in it. That's the PR angle, but Verizon might also be concerned with their relationship with the three-letter agencies. I wouldn't say they are necessarily "in bed" with the agencies, but they certainly don't want to sour relations.
With the Windows monoculture being chipped away at, very slowly but surely, you don't even need to be using IE anymore. There have been plenty of exploits for Firefox, iOS, etc.
Those who amass more money than a person could conceivably use during multiple extravagantly luxurious lifetimes are afflicted with a type of megalomania/hoarding, more often than not. After a certain point it becomes simply a fixation with adding more digits to the bank balance. The difference between them and the person living knee deep in dollar-store baubles and cat shit is that those who hoard wealth cause significant harm to other people. If we imposed higher taxes on this money these people can't possibly use, we could end so much human suffering in 1 year. Our country could have a health care system, and sane working conditions with a few weeks of guaranteed vacation a year, like the rest of the civilized world. It is the duty of government to improve living conditions for as many people as possible, across the board -- to "promote the general welfare" as stated in the Constitution's preamble.
The growing wealth disparity in past decades has shown that the hoarders have dug in deep. Many of the 1%ers are in positions of power, and they have proven they will not willfully provide the other classes with the fruits of their increased productivity. At this point it can only be done by force, through taxes.
There is no comparison between the working man ticking off his standardized deduction, and the 1%er slave-traders squeezing every last dime from their government and their fellow countrymen.
It should be clear that there's no segregation or anyone denying females from attending CS programs. The analogy with racially segregated sports, where the segregation was enforced (a black player would be not allowed on a white team) does not hold up.
Speaking of lucrative career paths (and CS isn't much these days), I'm reminded of my days on campus seeing the groups of female nursing students wandering around the health science building. How do you think it would be for a man trying to fit in that program socially? It wouldn't be easy, but of course some men who really do feel the calling stick it through and end up in nursing. And they only number about 20%. And you know what? There's no problem with that. Men aren't being "denied lucrative careers" in nursing.
It's telling that you only hear this huge outcry when it's a deficit of females in a field, but not a deficit of males. It's a case of PC progressed to its awful conclusion - where it's so baked into peoples' subconscious that they don't even realize they are succumbing to the forces of irrational thought. The hyper-militant feminists (misandrists maybe?) who have brought this drivel into the public consciousness bring shame to the real feminist trailblazers who fought for women's rights in the 1920s-1970s. We have moved beyond providing an equal opportunity to all people, to trying to force an equal outcome for everyone with perverse incentives like affirmative action. I have hope tide of history will wash this stain away, and we can simply get back to appreciating who we are as people, and where we choose to go in our lives.
I think the quality-of-life improvement in China has been overstated. What's happening is simply that more Chinese are entering into the capitalist system. When you're getting by on subsistence farming, you have (on paper) no income, you contribute little to nothing to the country's GDP, have no bank account, etc.
These subsistence farmers are slowly moving into the city. Once they are there, they suddenly come into existence, as measured by the capitalist metrics. But has their quality of life really improved if they can't walk outside without a face mask for the pollution, and they work 80 hour weeks at Foxconn? Do the occasional trip to McDonald's and the pair of Gap jeans after months of saving really make up for that?
On top of that you also have parts of China's GDP that are illusory, not real production. Look up the videos of the empty malls, apartment blocks, indeed entire cities that have been constructed and not used. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... Such building projects were undertaken to provide the appearance of economic growth on paper, but we see they are empty... and somewhere in China, 2 or 3 people walked away with a shitton of money from foreign investors due to this perception. Meanwhile, the peasants at Foxconn are throwing themselves off buildings.
I've recently went through quite a bit of footage of nuclear bomb tests. This started due to working on a slideshow regarding the bombing of Hiroshima, for YouTube which is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... It's set to the song/poem "I Come And Stand At Every Door", which is about Hiroshima and the larger picture of nuclear war. If you're into poetry or folk music, or just want to see before & after pictures of a bomb blast, you can click.
"Flat" relating to headphones usually means a flat frequency response, unless you are talking to people who don't have a clue (which is a very real possibility). A flat frequency response is the goal of a high fidelity system, the very word "fidelity" means trueness to the original source, which is what you get with a flat frequency response. The idea that a speaker needs to distort the sound because it "sounds good" is absurd, and in fact it's the exact same rationale audiofools have for preferring vinyl. Vinyl inherently has an uneven frequency response (among other things) and it is those characteristics that give it is distinctive sound, leading some to prefer it. It is distinctive but it is low fidelity, just like a poor set of speakers. Besides, if you want the treble or bass jacked up or some other frequency band notched, that's what equalizers are for. Although it should be noted they are called equalizers because the intent is to bring an equal loudness to all frequency bands - aka, a flat frequency response. To compensate for speakers that are not already flat.
It's not just video games either, Vorbis support has had time to penetrate deeply in many places, where its not immediately obvious, or listed on the spec sheet. DVD players, car stereos, lots of 'MP3' players (once again excepting Apple, they typically push their proprietary stuff). Basically anywhere that someone needed audio compression and didn't want to shell out to Fraunhofer for a license.
Ogg Vorbis certainly isn't dead - development has slowed in the past 5-7 years, due to the codec reaching maturity, but it remains the best choice for an open audio codec in the transparent bit rate range (100 kb/s+).
Recently, Opus has taken a clear advantage at lower bit rates and in applications that need ultra-low-latency encoding, like video conferencing. But there is really no excuse for these browsers not to include Vorbis support. From the point of view of someone needing to encode content, Vorbis has the additional advantage of being much more widely-supported vs. Opus, oversights in these minor browsers notwithstanding.
"Standard" in this case probably means something more like "typical" than "adhering to a strict standard".
Generally soap doesn't kill anything, it just makes things that are not water soluble, soluble in the water-soap solution, and thus easy to wash away.
I'm not sure what the state laws in Florida are like regarding marijuana, but the relevant federal law (which anyone can be charged under) is the Controlled Substances Act. Under this act, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I substance, and possession of any amount is a felony punishable by much more than 22 months. By contrast, drugs like opium, PCP, methamphetamine, and cocaine are in the less-restrictive Schedule II.
Additionally, police are allowed to inflate the weight of seized drugs by adding in the weight of the container and anything else that may happen to be in it. For example, if 5 grams of weed were being carried in a container along with some lighters, rolling papers, and a metal herb grinder totaling 100 grams, that can be charged as possession of 100 grams of the drug. This is actually a common practice, and its legality was upheld by a federal court of appeals in the 90s.
Indeed, there are more than a few examples of people who are currently serving life sentences for first-time non-violent weed-only offenses, never mind 22 months. Some of these cases are detailed at http://lifeforpot.org/ .
Illuminati.
Alcohol is likely to induce the false self-confidence you speak of, whereas marijuana (and psychedelics) induce a sense of humility, which is one of the reasons for its use in religious groups like the Rastafari.
If your only experience with psychoactive chemicals has been alcohol, and your only 'research' into marijuana has been the spoon-fed government propaganda, I could see your generalization being an easy trap to fall into. Although you can't force life experiences on someone, my advice would be to at least look at what the scientific literature has to say regarding marijuana.
Frankly I think it's a matter of more people now have actually tried it, and the old hardheads are drying out. The Time magazine poll from 1969 put the *lifetime* use of cannabis among the US population at somewhere in the low single-digit percentage - I want to say around 2% but I'm sure you can look it up if you need the exact number. It definitely shocked me. This was already many years into the hippie movement, so weed was firmly embedding itself into the pop-culture mythology, but how many people who weren't hippies had used it? Very few - only the most open-minded.
Lifetime-use numbers did skyrocket through the following decades, reaching near to 50% by 2000. But politically it was/is still a very loaded issue. It's something that's easy to ignore and maintain the status quo, but political suicide to suggest to change, until it becomes such a *big* issue that the number people who know someone who's been fucked by prohibition gets to be bigger than the number of self-righteous assholes who won't listen. Gallup literally did a double-take in 2012 or 2013 when their polls showed, for the first time, that over 50% of the US favored legalization. They had to run the poll a second time. With stats like these rolling in, the political trepidation around this topic will begin to dissolve in short order. I think we've now reached the tipping point, just 40 years later than everyone thought. Presidents and governors now admit that they've smoked pot.
Revolutions happen from the bottom up, not the other way around.
On the other hand, I know of someone who went to Vegas specifically *to* commit suicide.
Windows changes a lot of its behavior as soon as you change that radio button from "Workgroup" to "Domain". Before you even get to the log in prompt, Windows has to connect to a domain controller to download Group Policy settings and the like. Having to run login credentials through a DC and load config from it as well will add at least a slight amount of lag - possibly a lot, depending on how responsive the network and the DC are. Then, there's the matter of which Group Policy settings the admins have chosen, many of those can slow down the computer on their own.
If IT "had their way" with it, they might have also loaded it up with antivirus or some other bloatware.
^ This guy's right, I was thinking Elder Scrolls. Not necessarily Skyrim, since that's the most watered down game in the series. (I thought Oblivion was a step backwards when it came out, but Skyrim came and showed me how consolization is REALLY done.)
1 cup = 8 fl. oz.
Similarly to how a "foot" may be either a unit of measure of a body part.
Hell, US cars have both on the speedometer. (In my location near an airport we even have MPH and KPH both on the road signs). If the UK cars don't, that would be a laugh, and something I need to remember to pull out when the smug British metric fetishists come out of the woodwork.
I think the GP's prediction of "utter chaos" is a bit off, though. The good drivers don't need to rely on speed limit signs to gauge the proper speed, and the bad drivers don't pay attention to the speed limit anyway. I think you'd see little difference.