If you had been paying attention you'd know. The law includes the requirement that insurance providers cannot refuse to cover those with pre-existing conditions. If just that part of the law was passed then everyone in the country would just cancel their insurance until they got sick. Insurance doesn't work when only sick people buy insurance.
You're absolutely right. I complained about how degrading the pat down is on slashdot in the past and some asshole has the gall to say I'm just overly sensitive. Fuck people like that. Apparently it's my problem that I don't like guys slamming their hands into my junk in the name of utterly pointless security theater.
Metal detectors. Bomb sniffing scanners. That's all we need. If anyone were to set up an airline that used just those things I'd pay a 50% premium (perhaps more) on my tickets just to avoid the whole airport security assault. I'd pay more if they actually made the whole airport and flying experience less like a trip through prison and more of a fun experience.
That's really how I feel about airports. It's a trip through prison.
Reverse domain names would be inconvenient to type. Right now I can type "s" in the address bar and slashdot.org will come up. Reverse that and I'd need to type "org.s" to get it to come up. Perhaps browser makers would have done things differently so that "s" would actually bring up "org.slashdot".
What advantage would reversing the order give anyone? My first thought is that it'd allow alphabetical sorting of domains so that all the tlds would be together. I can't think why that'd be useful to anyone though.
Unless you manage the server yourself I'm not sure what all this stuff is. I use XP at home and Win7 at work. It's the same. It's an OS. You run stuff and it runs. The only difference I see is that the gui looks a little different, configuration stuff is in slightly different places and I occasionally accidentally rotate my damn monitor when I hit ctrl+alt+left when I mean to hit ctrl+left.
Nevertheless, the next time I upgrade my home machine I'll go win7 for the 64 bit support. If you don't need more than 4gb of ram then I'd say just stick with XP.
So my personal space doesn't matter? I'm overly sensitive because I feel violated when another man slides his hands over me and slaps my groin several times? (Seriously, in my first rape, one slap of the groin wasn't enough. He had to go up my legs then slap it then go up my legs from behind and slap it twice more.)
What would you call it? Am I allowed to use the word "assault" or do my feelings of violation just not matter at all?
I'll make sure to ask you next time I have an emotional reaction to find out if I'm allowed to feel badly about it or not. I mean, I wouldn't want to have any feelings that are disallowed.
The enemy (the TSA and their traitorous allies) are perfectly happy to call us all terrorist lovers for objecting to pat downs and scans. Please don't make their life easier by trying to be reasonable toward them.
It is rape. It is a serious violation of my personal space and it serves no useful purpose other than to scare people into being scanned. Just because they aren't shoving a broomstick up my ass doesn't mean it's not rape.
For my part, I won't fly more than once a year. I've laid down the law with my wife that any vacation we take must be within a reasonable driving distance. Two rapes a year (one each way) at xmas when I go see my parents is more than enough.
Either they're dangerous or they're not. If they're dangerous then the planes need to be fixed to prevent terrorists from using this to cause problems. If they're not then stop adding one more pointless annoyance to plane travel which is already one of the least enjoyable activities that people undergo voluntarily.
Furthermore, if low em is ok, but badly shielded devices are a problem then the solution is simple. Have em sensors around the plane. If any of the sensors detects excessive em, the stewardess will come over with a hand detector and find the jackass with the bad device. You could probably set that up on each plane for less than the cost of a few plane tickets.
The proper solution is not to berate people for wanting to be able to pass the time using the devices they always use to pass the time. Plane travel fucking sucks. There's no reason to make it one bit worse than it needs to be.
The wikipedia page on his religious views is pretty explicit on these points. He gave some interesting quotes, but ultimately he didn't believe in a personal god and called himself an agnostic. That actually makes him a Deist, which is fine.
Believing in a god that created the universe doesn't hurt anything. It's a harmless belief. However, it is not scientific to believe that god regularly changes the rules of the universe in order to help or hurt individual people or groups. It's not testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Believing in something like that is the opposite of being scientific.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that people can compartmentalize. A person can have strict scientific beliefs when working on their car's engine or when writing code or designing electronics and then still believe nonsense about things they have no personal control over.
It's fine to believe religious nonsense about biology just so long as you aren't a doctor, biologist, or voter.
You're trying to define innovate to mean the same thing as invent. That's not what it means. It means "Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.". It's hard to argue that Apple doesn't do this. They find markets where there's room for improvement in the products and then release a product which is better is some way.
It's better to use some other leader that rose to power as a result of massive fraud which can be used as a comparison rather than Hitler. Using Hitler invariably invites people to spout off about Godwin even if the comparison is perfectly apt with regard to the illegal electioneering.
There are plenty: Putin, Bush Jr 2000, many middle east leaders, Kim Jung Il, etc.
I don't see how it devalues the media. If everyone on Earth has free use of a particular song, that song is likely worth more given that it's so well known. It would be useful in movies as a background song in the same way that Turn Turn Turn is used because everyone knows it and knows what they're supposed to feel when it is played. It can be played by bar bands. It can be used in mix tapes. The original singers could perform the song and sell more concert tickets. The economy would likely improve due to increased usage of the song.
If everyone on earth has an extra dollar, each of those dollars has less purchasing power than before. The economy would get worse as a result.
In short, a copyright term of 2 years for songs would probably result in a much larger positive economic impact, while allowing the copying of money after any period of time would always cause a negative economic impact.
Apple looks at markets that have crappy products and makes good ones. Anyone who comes in after Apple will have to show that their product is not just a me too product. Google was able to do this with Android by filling various niches with a high quality product which the iPhone wasn't addressing. Then they moved into direct competition by releasing high end phones that compete directly. It didn't hurt that Google still has a respected name.
Microsoft didn't do that. They released a high end product which competed directly with the iPod but which didn't really look as good (to most people) and came with the baggage of the Microsoft name (the name is either neutral or negative. I don't know anyone who considers it a positive.). That was the first impression and they never did anything with the Zune that was big enough to warrant second looks from most people.
There will always be people who defend any product, but the fact is that Microsoft is just no good at designing flashy products. Heck, they're not even good at making good me too products. It took years before Windows had a GUI that was as good as the Mac. Steve Jobs was angry at Google because Google has people who can look at a good product and do it just as well or better. He wasn't angry at Microsoft at that point because the people there are good but not great. He always said they put no soul in their products.
If someone has impulses that they want to repress, that person will assume that everyone else has the same impulses. Normal people aren't worried about those things because they don't have the impulses and assume (probably rightly) that most people don't have those impulses.
Anyone who strongly wants to control other people is someone whose personal behavior should be watched very very carefully.
Never allow your children to be near anyone who walks around proclaiming that the world is full of child rapists.
Bullshit. I need to pay for health insurance to prevent life destroying medical costs in the event of an accident. It's insane that the same should be needed for phone bills. Is it really rational that I should need to buy Excessive Phone Bill Insurance to prevent a crippling bill for accidental overages on the phone? The phone company could quite easily just cut you off if your bill goes over some limit that you can select yourself. Instead they play it dumb and then try to collect insane fees and then get to act all generous if they decide not to sue you for an eleventy billion $ call.
How was it screwed up before the TSA? I wasn't a fan of airport security at the time, but once they instituted the TSA approved cancer porno groping system I now have to have a give and take discussion with my family every 6 months to find out which of us is going to be forced to go through that stuff in order to visit. My dad actually pays me money so that I do the flying instead of him. If I could avoid flying entirely I would do it in a heartbeat, but the various members of my family are spread hither and yon.
I wish someone would set up a separate flying system where plane tickets were 50% higher, but none of the TSA sexual cancer stuff goes on. I'd take that path anytime.
It's my understanding that the energy required to put something into orbit is much higher than the energy required to just reach a certain location in space. Rather than orbiting anything why not just slowly pulse it over to the moon and land it there? Launch several rockets full of fuel and attach them to the station's boosters and run them very slowly over the course of 10 years (or whatever) and get the thing onto the moon.
It's so expensive to get things out of the atmosphere that it seems crazy to deorbit anything once we get it there. Toss it over to the moon so that once we get there one day we can make use of it.
Define "frequently". It's my understanding that adoption is incredibly expensive and actually adopting a newborn baby is very difficult to do. People who don't have $30k to burn may well turn to this avenue with nothing but good intentions. I would be astounded if more than a tiny percentage of baby buyers were intending anything other than raising a child that they couldn't have themselves.
If that was their goal they could have done their thing in a harmless way just to prove it could be done. Stealing info and publishing it to the world (without a white hat political goal like exposing corruption to back it up) is just throwing gas on the flames for fun.
In any case, what were the DDoS attacks supposed to prove? You can have perfect security on a site, but that doesn't help prevent DDoS attacks against it. They didn't do it for white hat reasons. They did it because they are jerks.
Any positive effects of their attacks are secondary to their primary goal of being dicks.
Simple code reviews can find SQL injections quite easily. Just search for the method names for executing queries then make sure that there are NEVER string concatenations which include user input.
It's all really quite simple. Use parameters for every query and you'll never have a problem with SQL injection unless the DB library itself has a hole (much less likely than the possibility that your home grown validation code has a hole in it).
Where I work I do this regularly. Every now and then I find crap like "foo="+ someParam in the code. When I do I call them on it loudly and publicly (in a reasonably nice way). I make sure all the developers in my group hear my criticisms. It's the only way to staunch this sort of dangerous behavior.
I don't care if you think you've validated it. I'm not going to waste time triple checking every place that parameter is used. It's very simple to just use parameters and be almost 100% safe from SQL injection.
I know that the IRS has strange rules these days for stock options, but is there really a rule that you have to pay for UN-exercised stock options that you have been granted? I know that exercising your options and then holding them is incredibly dangerous, but it sounds like you didn't even have the option of exercising them.
If you never exercised them is it possible for you to get your money back from the IRS now that you've sold them for much less than the taxes you paid?
If they were going to sell Oracle again they'd need to make it public domain (or something similar) to prevent the next buyer from taking control of it again. I suppose an alternative would be to buy Oracle, sell Java to Google for $1, then sell Oracle.
You had me until you talked about the broken window fallacy as if it is somehow wrong. In your example you are 1 coin poorer and all you got was the status quo before the window was broken. The glassier is now one beer richer, but the time they spent on that window could have been spent making a new window for a new house. If you had simply paid for a beer the economy would be 3 coins plus whatever the glassier got for making someone else's window. The final result is better than your original example because you got to have a beer and everyone else got the same thing.
The broken window fallacy shows that the system is not really improved even if some numbers are higher than they otherwise would have been.
Slashdot Mirror
> ...why did we need the law?
If you had been paying attention you'd know. The law includes the requirement that insurance providers cannot refuse to cover those with pre-existing conditions. If just that part of the law was passed then everyone in the country would just cancel their insurance until they got sick. Insurance doesn't work when only sick people buy insurance.
You're absolutely right. I complained about how degrading the pat down is on slashdot in the past and some asshole has the gall to say I'm just overly sensitive. Fuck people like that. Apparently it's my problem that I don't like guys slamming their hands into my junk in the name of utterly pointless security theater.
Metal detectors. Bomb sniffing scanners. That's all we need. If anyone were to set up an airline that used just those things I'd pay a 50% premium (perhaps more) on my tickets just to avoid the whole airport security assault. I'd pay more if they actually made the whole airport and flying experience less like a trip through prison and more of a fun experience.
That's really how I feel about airports. It's a trip through prison.
Reverse domain names would be inconvenient to type. Right now I can type "s" in the address bar and slashdot.org will come up. Reverse that and I'd need to type "org.s" to get it to come up. Perhaps browser makers would have done things differently so that "s" would actually bring up "org.slashdot".
What advantage would reversing the order give anyone? My first thought is that it'd allow alphabetical sorting of domains so that all the tlds would be together. I can't think why that'd be useful to anyone though.
The article is about slashing 78% of US employees at IBM. That's not a sign of a healthy company.
Unless you manage the server yourself I'm not sure what all this stuff is. I use XP at home and Win7 at work. It's the same. It's an OS. You run stuff and it runs. The only difference I see is that the gui looks a little different, configuration stuff is in slightly different places and I occasionally accidentally rotate my damn monitor when I hit ctrl+alt+left when I mean to hit ctrl+left.
Nevertheless, the next time I upgrade my home machine I'll go win7 for the 64 bit support. If you don't need more than 4gb of ram then I'd say just stick with XP.
So my personal space doesn't matter? I'm overly sensitive because I feel violated when another man slides his hands over me and slaps my groin several times? (Seriously, in my first rape, one slap of the groin wasn't enough. He had to go up my legs then slap it then go up my legs from behind and slap it twice more.)
What would you call it? Am I allowed to use the word "assault" or do my feelings of violation just not matter at all?
I'll make sure to ask you next time I have an emotional reaction to find out if I'm allowed to feel badly about it or not. I mean, I wouldn't want to have any feelings that are disallowed.
The enemy (the TSA and their traitorous allies) are perfectly happy to call us all terrorist lovers for objecting to pat downs and scans. Please don't make their life easier by trying to be reasonable toward them.
It is rape. It is a serious violation of my personal space and it serves no useful purpose other than to scare people into being scanned. Just because they aren't shoving a broomstick up my ass doesn't mean it's not rape.
For my part, I won't fly more than once a year. I've laid down the law with my wife that any vacation we take must be within a reasonable driving distance. Two rapes a year (one each way) at xmas when I go see my parents is more than enough.
Either they're dangerous or they're not. If they're dangerous then the planes need to be fixed to prevent terrorists from using this to cause problems. If they're not then stop adding one more pointless annoyance to plane travel which is already one of the least enjoyable activities that people undergo voluntarily.
Furthermore, if low em is ok, but badly shielded devices are a problem then the solution is simple. Have em sensors around the plane. If any of the sensors detects excessive em, the stewardess will come over with a hand detector and find the jackass with the bad device. You could probably set that up on each plane for less than the cost of a few plane tickets.
The proper solution is not to berate people for wanting to be able to pass the time using the devices they always use to pass the time. Plane travel fucking sucks. There's no reason to make it one bit worse than it needs to be.
The wikipedia page on his religious views is pretty explicit on these points. He gave some interesting quotes, but ultimately he didn't believe in a personal god and called himself an agnostic. That actually makes him a Deist, which is fine.
Believing in a god that created the universe doesn't hurt anything. It's a harmless belief. However, it is not scientific to believe that god regularly changes the rules of the universe in order to help or hurt individual people or groups. It's not testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Believing in something like that is the opposite of being scientific.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that people can compartmentalize. A person can have strict scientific beliefs when working on their car's engine or when writing code or designing electronics and then still believe nonsense about things they have no personal control over.
It's fine to believe religious nonsense about biology just so long as you aren't a doctor, biologist, or voter.
You're trying to define innovate to mean the same thing as invent. That's not what it means. It means "Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.". It's hard to argue that Apple doesn't do this. They find markets where there's room for improvement in the products and then release a product which is better is some way.
It's better to use some other leader that rose to power as a result of massive fraud which can be used as a comparison rather than Hitler. Using Hitler invariably invites people to spout off about Godwin even if the comparison is perfectly apt with regard to the illegal electioneering.
There are plenty: Putin, Bush Jr 2000, many middle east leaders, Kim Jung Il, etc.
I don't see how it devalues the media. If everyone on Earth has free use of a particular song, that song is likely worth more given that it's so well known. It would be useful in movies as a background song in the same way that Turn Turn Turn is used because everyone knows it and knows what they're supposed to feel when it is played. It can be played by bar bands. It can be used in mix tapes. The original singers could perform the song and sell more concert tickets. The economy would likely improve due to increased usage of the song.
If everyone on earth has an extra dollar, each of those dollars has less purchasing power than before. The economy would get worse as a result.
In short, a copyright term of 2 years for songs would probably result in a much larger positive economic impact, while allowing the copying of money after any period of time would always cause a negative economic impact.
Apple looks at markets that have crappy products and makes good ones. Anyone who comes in after Apple will have to show that their product is not just a me too product. Google was able to do this with Android by filling various niches with a high quality product which the iPhone wasn't addressing. Then they moved into direct competition by releasing high end phones that compete directly. It didn't hurt that Google still has a respected name.
Microsoft didn't do that. They released a high end product which competed directly with the iPod but which didn't really look as good (to most people) and came with the baggage of the Microsoft name (the name is either neutral or negative. I don't know anyone who considers it a positive.). That was the first impression and they never did anything with the Zune that was big enough to warrant second looks from most people.
There will always be people who defend any product, but the fact is that Microsoft is just no good at designing flashy products. Heck, they're not even good at making good me too products. It took years before Windows had a GUI that was as good as the Mac. Steve Jobs was angry at Google because Google has people who can look at a good product and do it just as well or better. He wasn't angry at Microsoft at that point because the people there are good but not great. He always said they put no soul in their products.
If someone has impulses that they want to repress, that person will assume that everyone else has the same impulses. Normal people aren't worried about those things because they don't have the impulses and assume (probably rightly) that most people don't have those impulses.
Anyone who strongly wants to control other people is someone whose personal behavior should be watched very very carefully.
Never allow your children to be near anyone who walks around proclaiming that the world is full of child rapists.
Bullshit. I need to pay for health insurance to prevent life destroying medical costs in the event of an accident. It's insane that the same should be needed for phone bills. Is it really rational that I should need to buy Excessive Phone Bill Insurance to prevent a crippling bill for accidental overages on the phone? The phone company could quite easily just cut you off if your bill goes over some limit that you can select yourself. Instead they play it dumb and then try to collect insane fees and then get to act all generous if they decide not to sue you for an eleventy billion $ call.
Then why did they fire you?
How was it screwed up before the TSA? I wasn't a fan of airport security at the time, but once they instituted the TSA approved cancer porno groping system I now have to have a give and take discussion with my family every 6 months to find out which of us is going to be forced to go through that stuff in order to visit. My dad actually pays me money so that I do the flying instead of him. If I could avoid flying entirely I would do it in a heartbeat, but the various members of my family are spread hither and yon.
I wish someone would set up a separate flying system where plane tickets were 50% higher, but none of the TSA sexual cancer stuff goes on. I'd take that path anytime.
Tim Cook is 50 years old. He's only 6 years younger than Steve Jobs. I don't think age is the thing here.
It's my understanding that the energy required to put something into orbit is much higher than the energy required to just reach a certain location in space. Rather than orbiting anything why not just slowly pulse it over to the moon and land it there? Launch several rockets full of fuel and attach them to the station's boosters and run them very slowly over the course of 10 years (or whatever) and get the thing onto the moon.
It's so expensive to get things out of the atmosphere that it seems crazy to deorbit anything once we get it there. Toss it over to the moon so that once we get there one day we can make use of it.
Define "frequently". It's my understanding that adoption is incredibly expensive and actually adopting a newborn baby is very difficult to do. People who don't have $30k to burn may well turn to this avenue with nothing but good intentions. I would be astounded if more than a tiny percentage of baby buyers were intending anything other than raising a child that they couldn't have themselves.
If that was their goal they could have done their thing in a harmless way just to prove it could be done. Stealing info and publishing it to the world (without a white hat political goal like exposing corruption to back it up) is just throwing gas on the flames for fun.
In any case, what were the DDoS attacks supposed to prove? You can have perfect security on a site, but that doesn't help prevent DDoS attacks against it. They didn't do it for white hat reasons. They did it because they are jerks.
Any positive effects of their attacks are secondary to their primary goal of being dicks.
Simple code reviews can find SQL injections quite easily. Just search for the method names for executing queries then make sure that there are NEVER string concatenations which include user input.
It's all really quite simple. Use parameters for every query and you'll never have a problem with SQL injection unless the DB library itself has a hole (much less likely than the possibility that your home grown validation code has a hole in it).
Where I work I do this regularly. Every now and then I find crap like "foo="+ someParam in the code. When I do I call them on it loudly and publicly (in a reasonably nice way). I make sure all the developers in my group hear my criticisms. It's the only way to staunch this sort of dangerous behavior.
I don't care if you think you've validated it. I'm not going to waste time triple checking every place that parameter is used. It's very simple to just use parameters and be almost 100% safe from SQL injection.
I know that the IRS has strange rules these days for stock options, but is there really a rule that you have to pay for UN-exercised stock options that you have been granted? I know that exercising your options and then holding them is incredibly dangerous, but it sounds like you didn't even have the option of exercising them.
If you never exercised them is it possible for you to get your money back from the IRS now that you've sold them for much less than the taxes you paid?
If they were going to sell Oracle again they'd need to make it public domain (or something similar) to prevent the next buyer from taking control of it again. I suppose an alternative would be to buy Oracle, sell Java to Google for $1, then sell Oracle.
You had me until you talked about the broken window fallacy as if it is somehow wrong. In your example you are 1 coin poorer and all you got was the status quo before the window was broken. The glassier is now one beer richer, but the time they spent on that window could have been spent making a new window for a new house. If you had simply paid for a beer the economy would be 3 coins plus whatever the glassier got for making someone else's window. The final result is better than your original example because you got to have a beer and everyone else got the same thing.
The broken window fallacy shows that the system is not really improved even if some numbers are higher than they otherwise would have been.