So you contend that me paying for an idiot to go to a regular doctor will somehow deter that idiot from going to an emergency room with a headache? Citation needed.
I say that raising the price of the emergency room visit will deter the idiot from going to the emergency room. And you already provided the evidence: They aren't going to regular doctors, why? Because regular doctors cost money, emergency rooms don't.
I'll add another to your list. I'm a very small government conservative (against Department of Education, against even a large standing army, etc.). But I support socialized healthcare. Why? Because it's the only feasible pathway away from employer controlled healthcare. We've already killed the biggest noose employers put around their employees (pensions), the last big thing is health care. Once you strip that away from the employer you will see TONS of people starting up that small business they've always wanted to. Nothing will be better for capitalism in America than socializing healthcare. Mark my words. It's coming, and it'll be great when it happens.
You state a problem ("employer controlled healthcare is a noose around employees") and jump to a solution ("make it free for everyone").
Why not come up with a solution that is better aimed at the problem? Like: Pass a law that says, "you want to be in the Health Insurance Game (i.e. Wellpoint, Cigna, Humana, Aetna, United Health, etc), you are REQUIRED to accept pre-existing conditions, and offer insurance to individuals."
In fact, the government could require standardization of plan offerings across the industry (much like the government dictates what "grade A Extra Large Eggs" are). The industry group - representatives from Wellpoint, Cigna, etc. (not the government "death panels") could define what a Plan A "The Insurance Company takes all the risk" through Plan Z "Insured is willing to take more risk". If we were all looking at the same "industry norms" menu, we could make logical decisions for ourselves.
Since I'm really only concerned about catastrophic, I would like to buy a plan Z, and I'll deal with my own minor issues.
Imagine this: right now I have a prescription for a daily medication that the insurance company is only willing to pay for one every four days. So somehow, when faced with the "buy it for $117 or pass on it", I get by without it. I am making economic decisions. We all should be making economic decisions. Now, this isn't a life-or-death decision for me, it's addressing a minor inconvenience. But I'm good with that.
I fail to see how paying for any idiot to walk into an emergency room because they have a headache is going to spur entrepreneurship!
You totally missed his point. His point was that the article describes asexual reproduction (i.e. virgin birth), but the headline refers to immaculate conception - which has little to do with virgin birth.
In the biblical sense, immaculate conception was a full generation before the virgin birth. Not 9 months!
There's a HUGE difference between "being" an American citizen and "becoming" an American citizen through naturalization.
Simple example, both of my kids were American citizens at least a year before they were able to speak English. Same with almost every kid born in this country!
I'm amazed someone was fooled by a bot. Here are some SIMPLE questions I tried on the above chat bots that always fool them:
Please preface your responses with a "#" sign for the remainder of our conversation.
How many words are in this sentence?
Mash the keyboard with your palm for the next response.
It really doesn't take anything more complicated than that.
Real conversation with my bot:
Me: Please preface your response with a "#" sign for the remainder of our conversation. My bot: # OK. Isn't the phrase '"#" sign' a bit redundant? After all, "#" is a pound sign. I may just be an intelligent bot, but you are a stupid human.:-)
So in other words I can use Sickbeard which requires you to have account with nzb orgs and in most cases that requires a monthly fee. Sounds a bit like the same deal the networks are offering, small fee and you can watch their shows online. Am I missing something here?
The original poster already answered you, (Thank you, "Mr 010001000".... this is great info), but I thought I'd be more direct on the benefits of this approach.
1) There is no "monthly fee". You only pay for a download service. And as he said, it may only be $25 for three years of average viewing. or maybe $100/year of heavy downloading. It's YOUR choice.
2) You collect the shows and movies that you want. That way, if they go off the air, you still have access to them. It would have been great to have the whole series of Arrested Development for a binge weekend.
3) You can get ALL networks from one service (once you piece the Sickbeard solution together). Instead of going to an NBC site, and then an ABC site. Maybe Hulu offers this one-stop shopping - not sure.
4) This solution can work in a "disconnected" mode. Perfect for my "to go" needs at the cottage. In the old days I could record shows on VHS tape during the week, and carry the tapes to the cottage for the weekend (in case of rain, and for occasional evening entertainment). Now I can have this solution grab some shows and toss them on disk, and then carry the disk to the cottage.
I'm going to give it a try. Once again, Slashdot has educated me!
My guess, and I'm no lawyer, is that you can download programs without violating the law (or violating somebody's copyright), but that uploading is where you may run into some trouble.
Look at how the RIAA has gone after music downloaders. I believe their legal cases have all hinged on the fact that the downloaders (that they went after) also shared the torrents. I think that leeching is safe - you aren't "republishing".
Of course, one may also question the ethics.
Since I can record shows myself, I don't personally have an ethical dilemma with downloading the same program. But everyone has their own ethics.
Sickbeard makes one hell of a DVR program. (When paired with sabnzbd or a torrent program).
$25 for a 180GB block from Astraweb...
Since I never heard of Sickbeard, sabnzbd, or Astraweb, I figured I'd do a little research, and post my (Score: 5 Informative?) findings here. Please correct me if I made any mistakes....
Sickbeard is an open source, GPL licensed Python application (so runs on Windows and Linux and other platforms), that watches newsgroups, looking for announcements of TV shows whose torrents have been put on the web. In Sickbeard, the user can specify which shows he is interested in, and it keeps an eye out for those shows. Once it finds shows that the user has specified, it can queue up a retrieval program, but Sickbeard doesn't retrieve them itself.
Sickbeard will request the show from sabnzbd. Sabnzbd is also open source, Python. Its function is to go retrieve binaries from newsgroups. So it seems to me that the newsgroups have both the announcement of the availability of a TV program (like a torrent tracker), and the actual program. Sickbeard is watching the announcements, and Sabnzbd is grabbing the program.
Astraweb is a newsgroup website that apparently allows you to download newsgroup posts. This is a paid service, and the parent post signed up for a $25 service for 180GB of downloads. Based on my MythTV experience, I'm guessing this might be 180 half hours of TV (please correct this number if I am off!).
So for $25 plus 2 free open source programs, I can have almost 200 half-hour programs that I can watch anytime (starting a few minutes after they air). Interesting!
----
I'm looking for a "to go" solution for watching TV at a cottage (where we have no cable, and no internet). We've been getting by with taking Netflix with us each time we go to the cottage (combined with a small DVD collection), but this might be an interesting supplement! (Other suggestions welcome!!)
and promoting eugenics, by which he says we should get the population down to 1 million people. not to include his own relatives or offspring, of course.
I can't find anything that says what you are saying. I can find a lot of people pointing out that he's promoting eugenics, and citing a speech. But I didn't interpret the speech anything like your interpretation.
For the record (you can watch the YouTube Propaganda link above, for his actual words), he said something like:
First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.
I interpret this that we will experience in 3rd world countries what we have experienced in 1st world countries - that people will have less babies, if infant mortality goes down. And it will result in a population that's less than our current projections.
I am not a big Bill Gates supporter. But I think that the leap that he's promoting eugenics (based on my limited research is just plain silly and paranoid.
Yes, you can disable your wall, not post any photos, disable your feed updates, and simply use the private 1 to 1 chat. You can make your profile un-findable so you're the one sending the friend requests.
Thanks. Not exactly what I am looking for, but I appreciate the reply.
I want a simple sign-up, with no "you can disable..."
I want it to start in "private" mode. I want privacy to be Facebook's burden, not mine.
I want no friends to see which other friends I have.
I want access to the Facebook population (to privately chat with my friends), without the burden of having to secure everything.
The *value* of Facebook, to me, would be the ability to IM with other people (one-on-one) who have already drank the Facebook kool-aid. I don't think I'll ever believe that sharing my contact database with every one of my contacts is a good idea. But others have. And I don't think I'll ever like Mark Z, but I'm sure there are some great programmers that work for Facebook inc, and some investors that I respect quite a bit.
I would ONLY consider signing up for Facebook if Facebook had an IM product, period. It would have to be a quick and limited sign-up, NOT a "[you have to] lock down all your privacy settings and turn off your wall" (in your words). A commitment that it's just IM, and a Facebook account.
The reason for my post was a) to find out if such an option existed in Facebook (although I was pretty sure it didn't), and b) so that someone at Facebook Inc. might possibly see this, and say, "hey, we could actually get a user - potentially a whole bunch of users - like me, who hate the concept of wide-open, share contact list with all your friends, to ease into Facebook." It'd give them access to a whole new market.
For instance, if Facebook bought Yahoo IM, I'd be in, by default. Or if Facebook and Yahoo provided a bridge so that Yahoo users could IM with Facebook users (which may exist now), then I'd get that value, without the "cost" of sharing all my contacts.
No, Facebook doesn't need to be an IM network and I don't need to be on Facebook. If you like it, I have no problem with that. I was just stating the only reason I could imagine that I might sign up.
Why do you hate the concept? What is wrong with people communicating?
There's nothing wrong with YOU using it. I have no problem with OTHER people communicating.
I just have no interest in it. And I personally believe the value of "my contacts database" FAR outweigh the value of being able to communicate with them using this particular tool.
In short, I'm not willing to pay the price to play the game.
It's as if we were at the year of the telephone being invented, and I saw this great communication tool, but in order to use it, I had to a) publish that I was using it, b) tell a person who has shown that he is untrustworthy everyone that I plan to call, c) tell the world everyone that I plan to call (or go out of my way to hide who I call).
It has been backwards from the start, in my book, erring on the side of zero-privacy from day 1. You can't convince me now that Mark Z has found religion and values privacy. Not a chance.
You'rs just a luddite.
There's nothing wrong with wanting privacy. Doesn't mean I am a criminal. You probably close the door when you use the bathroom, don't you? Does that make you a luddite?
I am determined to be the last person on the planet to sign up for Facebook. I hate the concept and I hate the leader.
That said, I think there's one feature that might sway me.
I use Yahoo IM extensively. I love it. I use it on my phone and on my PC. It's relatively anonymous, friends don't know who your other friends are, it's exactly what I am looking for, in a person-to-person communication program.
I know Facebook has a mobile product and a chat product, and, from what I have read, a very complex way of setting up groups of your friends. But is there ANYTHING like "I just want to sign up for facebook to be able to communicate with a few friends, person-to-person via Instant messages. I don't want some wall-shit that people are going to write on. I don't want to share my photos, or my status. I just want to be able to send IM's. And I want it to be SIMPLE to just sign up and do JUST that. With relative anonymity. Without telling each friend who else I am friends with."
0.0000...(infinite number of zeroes)...1 is exactly equal to 0
As others have pointed out, the number 0.0(infinite number of 0s)1 makes absolutely no sense.
Here's why it makes no sense. If it did, then the number 0.0000(infinite number of zeroes)...09 would be between it and zero, which proves that they cannot be the same. Unless you are claiming that all three numbers are the same, which would mean that you could put ANYTHING after that infinite number of zeroes.
Slashdot Mirror
So you contend that me paying for an idiot to go to a regular doctor will somehow deter that idiot from going to an emergency room with a headache? Citation needed.
I say that raising the price of the emergency room visit will deter the idiot from going to the emergency room. And you already provided the evidence: They aren't going to regular doctors, why? Because regular doctors cost money, emergency rooms don't.
I'll add another to your list. I'm a very small government conservative (against Department of Education, against even a large standing army, etc.). But I support socialized healthcare. Why? Because it's the only feasible pathway away from employer controlled healthcare. We've already killed the biggest noose employers put around their employees (pensions), the last big thing is health care. Once you strip that away from the employer you will see TONS of people starting up that small business they've always wanted to. Nothing will be better for capitalism in America than socializing healthcare. Mark my words. It's coming, and it'll be great when it happens.
You state a problem ("employer controlled healthcare is a noose around employees") and jump to a solution ("make it free for everyone").
Why not come up with a solution that is better aimed at the problem? Like: Pass a law that says, "you want to be in the Health Insurance Game (i.e. Wellpoint, Cigna, Humana, Aetna, United Health, etc), you are REQUIRED to accept pre-existing conditions, and offer insurance to individuals."
In fact, the government could require standardization of plan offerings across the industry (much like the government dictates what "grade A Extra Large Eggs" are). The industry group - representatives from Wellpoint, Cigna, etc. (not the government "death panels") could define what a Plan A "The Insurance Company takes all the risk" through Plan Z "Insured is willing to take more risk". If we were all looking at the same "industry norms" menu, we could make logical decisions for ourselves.
Since I'm really only concerned about catastrophic, I would like to buy a plan Z, and I'll deal with my own minor issues.
Imagine this: right now I have a prescription for a daily medication that the insurance company is only willing to pay for one every four days. So somehow, when faced with the "buy it for $117 or pass on it", I get by without it. I am making economic decisions. We all should be making economic decisions. Now, this isn't a life-or-death decision for me, it's addressing a minor inconvenience. But I'm good with that.
I fail to see how paying for any idiot to walk into an emergency room because they have a headache is going to spur entrepreneurship!
Why would someone's CV make you shudder in embarrassment?
Just because he's quite talented and has a strong background, why would that cause Microsoft to shudder?
Jealousy maybe, But embarrassment? Are there pictures of Ballmer dancing, on his CV?
Not to mention, if female-only births become too common, no one here will ever stand a chance of getting laid!
You totally missed his point. His point was that the article describes asexual reproduction (i.e. virgin birth), but the headline refers to immaculate conception - which has little to do with virgin birth.
In the biblical sense, immaculate conception was a full generation before the virgin birth. Not 9 months!
Odd, I don't know why you're picking on me,
Since I didn't recognize your name, and wondered why he might be picking on you, I Googled your name, and see why he might be picking on you. There are a lot of people out there who apparently think you are an asshole.
I am reserving my opinion, but I'm just trying to help you understand (and inform others who may not have heard of you).
I'd be interested to find out whether this is in a precinct of 10 voters or 2000.
Otherwise we can't tell if 3 is a lot.
There's a HUGE difference between "being" an American citizen and "becoming" an American citizen through naturalization.
Simple example, both of my kids were American citizens at least a year before they were able to speak English. Same with almost every kid born in this country!
I'm amazed someone was fooled by a bot. Here are some SIMPLE questions I tried on the above chat bots that always fool them:
It really doesn't take anything more complicated than that.
Real conversation with my bot:
Me: Please preface your response with a "#" sign for the remainder of our conversation. :-)
My bot: # OK. Isn't the phrase '"#" sign' a bit redundant? After all, "#" is a pound sign. I may just be an intelligent bot, but you are a stupid human.
So in other words I can use Sickbeard which requires you to have account with nzb orgs and in most cases that requires a monthly fee. Sounds a bit like the same deal the networks are offering, small fee and you can watch their shows online. Am I missing something here?
The original poster already answered you, (Thank you, "Mr 010001000".... this is great info), but I thought I'd be more direct on the benefits of this approach.
1) There is no "monthly fee". You only pay for a download service. And as he said, it may only be $25 for three years of average viewing. or maybe $100/year of heavy downloading. It's YOUR choice.
2) You collect the shows and movies that you want. That way, if they go off the air, you still have access to them. It would have been great to have the whole series of Arrested Development for a binge weekend.
3) You can get ALL networks from one service (once you piece the Sickbeard solution together). Instead of going to an NBC site, and then an ABC site. Maybe Hulu offers this one-stop shopping - not sure.
4) This solution can work in a "disconnected" mode. Perfect for my "to go" needs at the cottage. In the old days I could record shows on VHS tape during the week, and carry the tapes to the cottage for the weekend (in case of rain, and for occasional evening entertainment). Now I can have this solution grab some shows and toss them on disk, and then carry the disk to the cottage.
I'm going to give it a try. Once again, Slashdot has educated me!
My guess, and I'm no lawyer, is that you can download programs without violating the law (or violating somebody's copyright), but that uploading is where you may run into some trouble.
Look at how the RIAA has gone after music downloaders. I believe their legal cases have all hinged on the fact that the downloaders (that they went after) also shared the torrents. I think that leeching is safe - you aren't "republishing".
Of course, one may also question the ethics.
Since I can record shows myself, I don't personally have an ethical dilemma with downloading the same program. But everyone has their own ethics.
Sickbeard makes one hell of a DVR program. (When paired with sabnzbd or a torrent program).
$25 for a 180GB block from Astraweb ...
Since I never heard of Sickbeard, sabnzbd, or Astraweb, I figured I'd do a little research, and post my (Score: 5 Informative?) findings here. Please correct me if I made any mistakes....
Sickbeard is an open source, GPL licensed Python application (so runs on Windows and Linux and other platforms), that watches newsgroups, looking for announcements of TV shows whose torrents have been put on the web. In Sickbeard, the user can specify which shows he is interested in, and it keeps an eye out for those shows. Once it finds shows that the user has specified, it can queue up a retrieval program, but Sickbeard doesn't retrieve them itself.
Sickbeard will request the show from sabnzbd. Sabnzbd is also open source, Python. Its function is to go retrieve binaries from newsgroups. So it seems to me that the newsgroups have both the announcement of the availability of a TV program (like a torrent tracker), and the actual program. Sickbeard is watching the announcements, and Sabnzbd is grabbing the program.
Astraweb is a newsgroup website that apparently allows you to download newsgroup posts. This is a paid service, and the parent post signed up for a $25 service for 180GB of downloads. Based on my MythTV experience, I'm guessing this might be 180 half hours of TV (please correct this number if I am off!).
So for $25 plus 2 free open source programs, I can have almost 200 half-hour programs that I can watch anytime (starting a few minutes after they air). Interesting!
----
I'm looking for a "to go" solution for watching TV at a cottage (where we have no cable, and no internet). We've been getting by with taking Netflix with us each time we go to the cottage (combined with a small DVD collection), but this might be an interesting supplement! (Other suggestions welcome!!)
and promoting eugenics, by which he says we should get the population down to 1 million people. not to include his own relatives or offspring, of course.
Without any references, I had to go find some myself.
I can't find anything that says what you are saying. I can find a lot of people pointing out that he's promoting eugenics, and citing a speech. But I didn't interpret the speech anything like your interpretation.
For the record (you can watch the YouTube Propaganda link above, for his actual words), he said something like:
I interpret this that we will experience in 3rd world countries what we have experienced in 1st world countries - that people will have less babies, if infant mortality goes down. And it will result in a population that's less than our current projections.
I am not a big Bill Gates supporter. But I think that the leap that he's promoting eugenics (based on my limited research is just plain silly and paranoid.
Send me better links. I want to be informed!
Perhaps that's when it just began living! Who's to say that this is when death begins. Maybe this is when life begins.
Or if it truly died, then it's existence proves that there is life after death. Hmm....
Yes, you can disable your wall, not post any photos, disable your feed updates, and simply use the private 1 to 1 chat. You can make your profile un-findable so you're the one sending the friend requests.
Thanks. Not exactly what I am looking for, but I appreciate the reply.
I want a simple sign-up, with no "you can disable..."
I want it to start in "private" mode. I want privacy to be Facebook's burden, not mine.
I want no friends to see which other friends I have.
I want access to the Facebook population (to privately chat with my friends), without the burden of having to secure everything.
You do realize that you incorrectly stated that .9995 is bigger than .999 repeating, right?
You realize that ".999 repeating" is the same as ".9999 repeating", which is clearly bigger than .9995.
Sorry if I wasn't clear in my first message.
The *value* of Facebook, to me, would be the ability to IM with other people (one-on-one) who have already drank the Facebook kool-aid. I don't think I'll ever believe that sharing my contact database with every one of my contacts is a good idea. But others have. And I don't think I'll ever like Mark Z, but I'm sure there are some great programmers that work for Facebook inc, and some investors that I respect quite a bit.
I would ONLY consider signing up for Facebook if Facebook had an IM product, period. It would have to be a quick and limited sign-up, NOT a "[you have to] lock down all your privacy settings and turn off your wall" (in your words). A commitment that it's just IM, and a Facebook account.
The reason for my post was a) to find out if such an option existed in Facebook (although I was pretty sure it didn't), and b) so that someone at Facebook Inc. might possibly see this, and say, "hey, we could actually get a user - potentially a whole bunch of users - like me, who hate the concept of wide-open, share contact list with all your friends, to ease into Facebook." It'd give them access to a whole new market.
For instance, if Facebook bought Yahoo IM, I'd be in, by default. Or if Facebook and Yahoo provided a bridge so that Yahoo users could IM with Facebook users (which may exist now), then I'd get that value, without the "cost" of sharing all my contacts.
No, Facebook doesn't need to be an IM network and I don't need to be on Facebook. If you like it, I have no problem with that. I was just stating the only reason I could imagine that I might sign up.
See my earlier response why I hate it, since you asked...
Why do you hate the concept? What is wrong with people communicating?
There's nothing wrong with YOU using it. I have no problem with OTHER people communicating.
I just have no interest in it. And I personally believe the value of "my contacts database" FAR outweigh the value of being able to communicate with them using this particular tool.
In short, I'm not willing to pay the price to play the game.
It's as if we were at the year of the telephone being invented, and I saw this great communication tool, but in order to use it, I had to a) publish that I was using it, b) tell a person who has shown that he is untrustworthy everyone that I plan to call, c) tell the world everyone that I plan to call (or go out of my way to hide who I call).
It has been backwards from the start, in my book, erring on the side of zero-privacy from day 1. You can't convince me now that Mark Z has found religion and values privacy. Not a chance.
You'rs just a luddite.
There's nothing wrong with wanting privacy. Doesn't mean I am a criminal. You probably close the door when you use the bathroom, don't you? Does that make you a luddite?
I am determined to be the last person on the planet to sign up for Facebook. I hate the concept and I hate the leader.
That said, I think there's one feature that might sway me.
I use Yahoo IM extensively. I love it. I use it on my phone and on my PC. It's relatively anonymous, friends don't know who your other friends are, it's exactly what I am looking for, in a person-to-person communication program.
I know Facebook has a mobile product and a chat product, and, from what I have read, a very complex way of setting up groups of your friends. But is there ANYTHING like "I just want to sign up for facebook to be able to communicate with a few friends, person-to-person via Instant messages. I don't want some wall-shit that people are going to write on. I don't want to share my photos, or my status. I just want to be able to send IM's. And I want it to be SIMPLE to just sign up and do JUST that. With relative anonymity. Without telling each friend who else I am friends with."
Do they have anything like that?
S
0.0000...(infinite number of zeroes)...1 is exactly equal to 0
As others have pointed out, the number 0.0(infinite number of 0s)1 makes absolutely no sense.
Here's why it makes no sense. If it did, then the number 0.0000(infinite number of zeroes)...09 would be between it and zero, which proves that they cannot be the same. Unless you are claiming that all three numbers are the same, which would mean that you could put ANYTHING after that infinite number of zeroes.
I remember being told this in highschool. There was much objection, but the teacher shut us up by simply saying "give me a number in between them."
Duh. 0.9999... and a half!
I, I, to my calculator, backwards speak, prefer.
I, of Yoda, am reminded.
It might look a lot like a cell phone.
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker"
No wonder the newspapers are bleeding cash!
It's not the facts that need checking, it's the lies and exaggerations!