I think the defining characteristic of fantasy is a reactionary ideology. That is, "fantasy" has some status quo, which is good, peaceful, etc. Some evil emerges that wants to disrupt this harmony, and the entire struggle is basically to return to the status quo. I use the term "evil" because there's no better way to characterize the baddies. Every minion is complete evil and deserves to be washed from the earth/planet. My favorite part is that the good guys technically more closely resemble antagonists (they don't "change" and in fact oppose it); whereas, the bad guys are usually trying to overthrow some thousand year-old harmony, making them protagonists.
I think you have missed out on some pretty good fantasy, or maybe misclassed some.
Look at a lot of the 'epic' fantasy stories -- the entire premise of a lot of them is that the protagonists are going to change the world.
Fantasy breaks down if one side isn't evil and single-minded.
Oh, I don't know about that. George R. R. Martin fans would likely disagree with you on that one. So would L. E. Modesitt fans (to be fair, one side is evil and single-minded in his books, just that which side it is varies between series).
Sturrock got old, went crackpot. Happens all the time, even to Nobel-prize winners. Check out Josephson or Weber.
I think what you mean to say is that you have observed an unexplained increase in the rate of mental decay in those scientists, and that further study is warranted.
But it's a different kind of awful to have friends and neighbors who just can't be bothered to stick up for the civil rights of their fellow citizens.
The problem is, that's not how they see it -- you're not asking them to stick up for the civil rights of their fellow citizens, you're asking them to stick up for the civil rights of criminals. In today's culture, suspicion == guilt.
Sure, if my goal is to sell my services building eCommerce sites, or if I plan on doing an entire site overhaul frequently. If you're someone with a smidgen of tech savvy with just the desire to open a web store, then a full platform is probably a better idea.
I mean, if I were to open "Red Flayer's Prosthetic Toe Emporium" online, I'd want to be focusing more on product selection, images, marketing, etc, rather than spending hours upon hours learning Joomla or Drupal and then learning how to integrate an eCommerce solution into my site. That's the nice thing about specialization.
Old working PCs are free (w/ pickup) if you browse freecycle or craigslist if you don't want to use a VM/emulator/underclock. Or you could visit one of the specialized sites that deal in old computers. I wouldn't want to waste the space on them, but I'm sure you could collect enough machines for your testing purposes quite easily.
These machines aren't that much older than a C64 anyway. The BBC Micro ran on the same 6502 as the Commodore PET, just one generation older than the C64. As I'm sure you know, the 6510 the C64 ran on is a 6502 variant...
For that matter, Atari 2600s also ran on a 6502, just with fewer pins. There were more 2600s sold than C64s... I'd be willing to bet the supply of still-working 2600s is bigger than the supply of working C64s.
There is no need to know anything about the hardware.
Modern programming is about algorithms and interfaces. Knowing how to simulate 4GB memory space with only 8 bit registers is not important.
B-b-but the article isn't about modern programming. It's about the A-level program, which is about how computers work, as per TFS/A. Some people need to actually work on hardware in order for your modern programmers to implement their algorithms using an interface.
What are you blabbering on about? The terms "ideal free market" and "perfect market" are both used, "perfect market" is a more recent name for the same thing, largely because ignoramuses kept conflating ideal free markets with markets free from regulation. Why not consult a real source instead of wikipedia (which, by the way, you incorrectly refer to as "the wiki" -- that's bad juju)?
I could pull out and dust off my old econ textbooks and show you. Or I could just refer you to one of the economists most often cited by free-market ideologies: Milton Friedman (you might have heard of him, he won a Nobel Prize). Friedman refers to it as an "ideal free market", as does Krugman (also a Nobel Prize winner), as have many economists when speaking about general equilibrium theory.
In short, stuff it. You're obviously the one without a background in economics, or you would have known this to be the case.
Kindly refrain from posting about others' supposed ignorance when posting blind on the topic, as you just did.
Here we are talking about a public health system with a country that has a GDP/per capita half the USA, and we still have decent health care. So please don't tell me that is too expensive to
provide a decent quality health care system to everyone, especially in US.
I didn't say that. I said it's impossible to provide the *best-level* care for everyone.
I think also that GDP/capita is a misleading metric by which to compare health care costs... since it is very likely that in your country doctors, nurses, nurses aides, custodial staff, etc all get paid less than in the US. Eliminating the profit is one thing that is necessary, IMO -- especially for insurance companies. But we can't get away from the fact that wages are very high here, and that the US is a litigious society -- meaning not only do we have huge malpractice insurance costs, we have lots of redundant/unnecessary care that we must pay for to protect our care providers from being sued.
Weird. I saw it on SoundPolitics yesterday, I think. I have politically active family who live in the same district as Pudge, so unfortunately I come across him when researching stuff to discuss with them. Maybe I misread it.
I don't know why he wouldn't have done that in the previous cycle when we were electing a new POTUS. Unless he is so dedicated to stopping Obama (from not doing anything) that he wants to invest all his time, effort, and resources into unseating incumbent democrats. But I think he could have accomplished that better by investing more effort into preventing Obama from being elected in the first place.
I don't think he was as actively involved in the GOP scene last election cycle. I think he's trying to make hay from the teabaggery and Obama-hate on the right.
Wrong. The ones who kill people and have money simple enter in agreement with their "costumers" not to go public.RTFA "(She lived in a small Kansas town, but because of a legal settlement with the hospital, her mother would not identify it.) "
That's one of the points I was trying to make (see the line further below about all of us having perfect information on the risks/level of service/price). Free Market Ideologues often forget that actual markets can only approach the behavior of ideal free markets when there is perfect information symmetry. This breaks the model they base their beliefs on. Instead they talk about regulatory barriers to entry, quickly dismissing natural barriers to entry (like huge equipment costs) and the other requirements of an ideal free market.
I can't argue with that. I'm one of those who thinks health care should be equal to everyone. We are talking about lives here, but it's difficult to argue with someone who puts a price on people's lifes. If it was up just to the market there's no need of heath care for the poor.
Well, yes and no. There is *some* need for healthcare for the poor... marginal workers are not infinite, after all. Plus we need to factor in things like herd immunity, which is dependent on immunization being provided to almost everyone, especially the dirty poor who live packed together in hovels.
Oh sorry there, I was slipping into FreeMarketIdeologueIdiot again.
My real position: It's just too damn expensive to provide the best-level care for everyone. Everyone should have the right to a decent level of healthcare; those who can afford to pay more should not be prevented from getting better care (a la the current situation, just with a single-payer system for the basic level of care). There's no reason the wealthy shouldn't be able to go to an exclusive, expensive provider at their own expense, or charities could not provide the same for regular or poor people. That's my only fear with a single-payer system -- the best care might not be available to those who can afford it.
Colorblindness is VERY misunderstood by the public, and as a result, we will be subjected to a great deal of discrimination because the assumption is that it's the equivalent of walking around blind.
Obviously, the problem is the term itself... people equate colorblind with blindness because it's got the damn word in it.
I think we should rename the condition, to get rid of that confusion, and introduce new, even better, confusion. "Color vision deficiency", which I've seen used, is obviously too filled with negative connotations... perhaps conic chromatic dysdifferentiation?
It doesn't surprise me. Medicine hasn't taken on process definition the way most other industries have. I doubt most medical environments would qualify for ISO9001, let alone anything more prescriptive.
What? Sure they have, moreso than most industries. The problems are (1) process compliance; (2) insane process environment; (3) high cost of qualified staff. You KNOW the hospital has a process defined for responding to patient requests for aid via the call button.
How many nurses did they have in the maternity ward/wing? How many mothers in recovery, how many newborns in postnatal care, how many actual births happening at that moment? Did they have an unplanned delivery happening at that time?
I've worked in ISO-9000 certified shops where actual compliance was shitty. If you want to get ISO-9000 certified, you just need to demonstrate that you have processes, and that you have processes for monitoring and evaluating compliance with processes. You don't actually NEED to comply.
Isn't the free market supposed to solve issues like this?
Well, you'd think so. People would avoid hospitals that make a lot of mistakes like this, so as long as there is competition in the hospital market, then there is no need to regulate hospitals. The ones that kill people by accident will go out of business due to lack of customers (or they'll need to compete by offering their less-good services at a cheaper price -- this is the optimal solution, since then the wealthy would still get excellent medical care while the poor could still afford *some kind* of medical care, even if it kills them).
The only reason we don't have effective competition in the hospital market is because of government interference in the market -- through subsidies and regulatory barriers to entry, the GOVERNMENT has granted legal monopolies to hospitals, so we don't have a real choice of hospitals to go to. Imagine if the government stopped interfering in the hospital market... we'd all have ten or twelve hospitals to choose from, with varying levels of risk and price, that we'd be perfectly informed of. The wost hopsitals would go out of business, which is fine, since we'd have a dozen other hospitals to choose from. Everyone wins!
/end FreeMarketIdealogueIdiot
How did I do? Does that just about sum up the FMII position on regulation?
According to him, he was done here effective 8/11, and is actively looking for other work.
I guess we now know why a "how do we see if a terminated employee left logic bombs or gaping backdoors" article made the front page:)
And he is well aware that the economy is in the toilet right now (even if he thinks the fault for it belongs exclusively to Obama) so he isn't likely arrogant enough to expect that job offers will beat a path to his door.
Which is why I think he may have gotten shitcanned. Or, since the election season is heating up, he's going into politics full-time.
Effectively, this is the case. But legally, artists are still free to negotiate directly with internet radio sites, and in the presence of such an agreement, no royalties need to be paid to Sound Exchange for redistribution.
Which, in turn, doesn't stop Youtube from sanctioning your account and prevent you from posting videos. Even if they do have to put the video in question back up.
Troll? Really? For posting a true statement without any kind of vitriol, name-calling, or other malarkey? Where I implicitly agreed with the parent poster, and then added on to his statement?
In the long run, decrease in demand leads to decrease in supply. This is because producers reduce production in response to the lower prices dictated by lower demand.
This is microeconomics 101 stuff. No idea how it's trolling...
And now to diverge even further... WTF is up with metamoderation? Now that Pudge is gone, maybe we can get a decent developer to re-implement a metamod system that works.
Quick, someone tell Pudge! He can make money off his batshite insane posts.
FYI... in case you didn't know it... he probably already is. Pudge is a partisan apparatchik; he is the 39th District Chair for the Republican Party in Snohomish County, Washington State. I don't know if it's a paid position, but he's deriving some benefit from it (at the very least, paid travel & lodging for conventions, etc).
FYI, he was either fired from Slashdot (good riddance!) or quit without another job lined up two weeks ago... he's actively seeking employment. I bet he's hoping he gets picked up by one of the Republican campaigns.
In fact, show me how any president has measurably shrunk the overall size and scope of government after getting elected.
OK, sure. Bill Clinton.
Look at the budgetary numbers. We spent less when he left than when he came in. Federal payroll was way down, because lots of things were privatized (that's reducing the scope of government, correct?). NAFTA - a reduction in government interference in regional markets. Repeal of Glass-Steagall. Other deregulation efforts (which Republicans are always quick to point out when GWB gets blamed for things).
Face it, righties -- the most conservative president we've had in decades has been none other than Bill "blowjob" Clinton.
Conservative was developed in opposition to FDR's New Deal, and since the 1940s has meant holding to Jeffersonian ideals, like obeying the Constitution's limit on government power.
What? The political terms 'liberal' and 'conservative' were in use far before that -- the actual origin of the term is from the late 1700s in response to the French Revolution.
In recent years (2002-8) some forgot those ideals because they were caught by anti-terrorist war fever, but the overall seventy year history has been towards less government.
Poppycock. We haven't seen true conservatism in that sense on the national stage since the 50s. It was hijacked then by McCarthyism, and we haven't gotten it back since then. Reagan? Not remotely a conservative, except in relation to corporate behavior. Bush Sr? Hah. The neo-conservatives have been running the show since before Nixon... and guess what? There's a reason they are distinguished in name from conservatives.
Furthermore, even that definition of conservatism is a hijacking. I suggest you actually read some political theory and history before espousing your made-up or poorly-researched "facts".
Slashdot Mirror
I think you have missed out on some pretty good fantasy, or maybe misclassed some.
Look at a lot of the 'epic' fantasy stories -- the entire premise of a lot of them is that the protagonists are going to change the world.
Oh, I don't know about that. George R. R. Martin fans would likely disagree with you on that one. So would L. E. Modesitt fans (to be fair, one side is evil and single-minded in his books, just that which side it is varies between series).
What did you use the fishing poles for? To reach the books on the high shelves, to lift the librarians skirt, or something else entirely?
Sure, but why would we observe changes in the quantum randomness based on season, solar flares, etc?
Yes, statistical effects smooth out quantum randomness -- but they do not smooth out non-random variation (when done properly).
I think what you mean to say is that you have observed an unexplained increase in the rate of mental decay in those scientists, and that further study is warranted.
The problem is, that's not how they see it -- you're not asking them to stick up for the civil rights of their fellow citizens, you're asking them to stick up for the civil rights of criminals. In today's culture, suspicion == guilt.
Sure, if my goal is to sell my services building eCommerce sites, or if I plan on doing an entire site overhaul frequently. If you're someone with a smidgen of tech savvy with just the desire to open a web store, then a full platform is probably a better idea.
I mean, if I were to open "Red Flayer's Prosthetic Toe Emporium" online, I'd want to be focusing more on product selection, images, marketing, etc, rather than spending hours upon hours learning Joomla or Drupal and then learning how to integrate an eCommerce solution into my site. That's the nice thing about specialization.
Old working PCs are free (w/ pickup) if you browse freecycle or craigslist if you don't want to use a VM/emulator/underclock. Or you could visit one of the specialized sites that deal in old computers. I wouldn't want to waste the space on them, but I'm sure you could collect enough machines for your testing purposes quite easily.
These machines aren't that much older than a C64 anyway. The BBC Micro ran on the same 6502 as the Commodore PET, just one generation older than the C64. As I'm sure you know, the 6510 the C64 ran on is a 6502 variant...
For that matter, Atari 2600s also ran on a 6502, just with fewer pins. There were more 2600s sold than C64s... I'd be willing to bet the supply of still-working 2600s is bigger than the supply of working C64s.
B-b-but the article isn't about modern programming. It's about the A-level program, which is about how computers work, as per TFS/A. Some people need to actually work on hardware in order for your modern programmers to implement their algorithms using an interface.
What are you blabbering on about? The terms "ideal free market" and "perfect market" are both used, "perfect market" is a more recent name for the same thing, largely because ignoramuses kept conflating ideal free markets with markets free from regulation. Why not consult a real source instead of wikipedia (which, by the way, you incorrectly refer to as "the wiki" -- that's bad juju)?
I could pull out and dust off my old econ textbooks and show you. Or I could just refer you to one of the economists most often cited by free-market ideologies: Milton Friedman (you might have heard of him, he won a Nobel Prize). Friedman refers to it as an "ideal free market", as does Krugman (also a Nobel Prize winner), as have many economists when speaking about general equilibrium theory.
In short, stuff it. You're obviously the one without a background in economics, or you would have known this to be the case.
Kindly refrain from posting about others' supposed ignorance when posting blind on the topic, as you just did.
I didn't say that. I said it's impossible to provide the *best-level* care for everyone.
I think also that GDP/capita is a misleading metric by which to compare health care costs... since it is very likely that in your country doctors, nurses, nurses aides, custodial staff, etc all get paid less than in the US. Eliminating the profit is one thing that is necessary, IMO -- especially for insurance companies. But we can't get away from the fact that wages are very high here, and that the US is a litigious society -- meaning not only do we have huge malpractice insurance costs, we have lots of redundant/unnecessary care that we must pay for to protect our care providers from being sued.
I don't think he was as actively involved in the GOP scene last election cycle. I think he's trying to make hay from the teabaggery and Obama-hate on the right.
That's one of the points I was trying to make (see the line further below about all of us having perfect information on the risks/level of service/price). Free Market Ideologues often forget that actual markets can only approach the behavior of ideal free markets when there is perfect information symmetry. This breaks the model they base their beliefs on. Instead they talk about regulatory barriers to entry, quickly dismissing natural barriers to entry (like huge equipment costs) and the other requirements of an ideal free market.
Well, yes and no. There is *some* need for healthcare for the poor... marginal workers are not infinite, after all. Plus we need to factor in things like herd immunity, which is dependent on immunization being provided to almost everyone, especially the dirty poor who live packed together in hovels.
Oh sorry there, I was slipping into FreeMarketIdeologueIdiot again.
My real position: It's just too damn expensive to provide the best-level care for everyone. Everyone should have the right to a decent level of healthcare; those who can afford to pay more should not be prevented from getting better care (a la the current situation, just with a single-payer system for the basic level of care). There's no reason the wealthy shouldn't be able to go to an exclusive, expensive provider at their own expense, or charities could not provide the same for regular or poor people. That's my only fear with a single-payer system -- the best care might not be available to those who can afford it.
Obviously, the problem is the term itself... people equate colorblind with blindness because it's got the damn word in it.
I think we should rename the condition, to get rid of that confusion, and introduce new, even better, confusion. "Color vision deficiency", which I've seen used, is obviously too filled with negative connotations... perhaps conic chromatic dysdifferentiation?
What? Sure they have, moreso than most industries. The problems are (1) process compliance; (2) insane process environment; (3) high cost of qualified staff. You KNOW the hospital has a process defined for responding to patient requests for aid via the call button.
How many nurses did they have in the maternity ward/wing? How many mothers in recovery, how many newborns in postnatal care, how many actual births happening at that moment? Did they have an unplanned delivery happening at that time?
I've worked in ISO-9000 certified shops where actual compliance was shitty. If you want to get ISO-9000 certified, you just need to demonstrate that you have processes, and that you have processes for monitoring and evaluating compliance with processes. You don't actually NEED to comply.
Well, you'd think so. People would avoid hospitals that make a lot of mistakes like this, so as long as there is competition in the hospital market, then there is no need to regulate hospitals. The ones that kill people by accident will go out of business due to lack of customers (or they'll need to compete by offering their less-good services at a cheaper price -- this is the optimal solution, since then the wealthy would still get excellent medical care while the poor could still afford *some kind* of medical care, even if it kills them).
The only reason we don't have effective competition in the hospital market is because of government interference in the market -- through subsidies and regulatory barriers to entry, the GOVERNMENT has granted legal monopolies to hospitals, so we don't have a real choice of hospitals to go to. Imagine if the government stopped interfering in the hospital market... we'd all have ten or twelve hospitals to choose from, with varying levels of risk and price, that we'd be perfectly informed of. The wost hopsitals would go out of business, which is fine, since we'd have a dozen other hospitals to choose from. Everyone wins!
/end FreeMarketIdealogueIdiot
How did I do? Does that just about sum up the FMII position on regulation?
No, but it explains why in Soviet Slashdot, the same old jokes rehash you!
We're not capable of being creative enough to think of original jokes.
Wow. That is really dumb of them. I don't feel so bad now (I sometimes have to think hard to remember how to spell the letter Q).
According to him, he was done here effective 8/11, and is actively looking for other work.
I guess we now know why a "how do we see if a terminated employee left logic bombs or gaping backdoors" article made the front page
Which is why I think he may have gotten shitcanned. Or, since the election season is heating up, he's going into politics full-time.
Effectively, this is the case. But legally, artists are still free to negotiate directly with internet radio sites, and in the presence of such an agreement, no royalties need to be paid to Sound Exchange for redistribution.
Which, in turn, doesn't stop Youtube from sanctioning your account and prevent you from posting videos. Even if they do have to put the video in question back up.
Troll? Really? For posting a true statement without any kind of vitriol, name-calling, or other malarkey? Where I implicitly agreed with the parent poster, and then added on to his statement?
In the long run, decrease in demand leads to decrease in supply. This is because producers reduce production in response to the lower prices dictated by lower demand.
This is microeconomics 101 stuff. No idea how it's trolling...
And now to diverge even further... WTF is up with metamoderation? Now that Pudge is gone, maybe we can get a decent developer to re-implement a metamod system that works.
FYI... in case you didn't know it... he probably already is. Pudge is a partisan apparatchik; he is the 39th District Chair for the Republican Party in Snohomish County, Washington State. I don't know if it's a paid position, but he's deriving some benefit from it (at the very least, paid travel & lodging for conventions, etc).
FYI, he was either fired from Slashdot (good riddance!) or quit without another job lined up two weeks ago... he's actively seeking employment. I bet he's hoping he gets picked up by one of the Republican campaigns.
OK, sure. Bill Clinton.
Look at the budgetary numbers. We spent less when he left than when he came in. Federal payroll was way down, because lots of things were privatized (that's reducing the scope of government, correct?). NAFTA - a reduction in government interference in regional markets. Repeal of Glass-Steagall. Other deregulation efforts (which Republicans are always quick to point out when GWB gets blamed for things).
Face it, righties -- the most conservative president we've had in decades has been none other than Bill "blowjob" Clinton.
I laugh myself to sleep thinking about that.
What? The political terms 'liberal' and 'conservative' were in use far before that -- the actual origin of the term is from the late 1700s in response to the French Revolution.
Poppycock. We haven't seen true conservatism in that sense on the national stage since the 50s. It was hijacked then by McCarthyism, and we haven't gotten it back since then. Reagan? Not remotely a conservative, except in relation to corporate behavior. Bush Sr? Hah. The neo-conservatives have been running the show since before Nixon... and guess what? There's a reason they are distinguished in name from conservatives.
Furthermore, even that definition of conservatism is a hijacking. I suggest you actually read some political theory and history before espousing your made-up or poorly-researched "facts".