The benefit is if the burning of this fuel displaces burning of other hydrocarbon based fuels that are extracted from the ground. Burning those fuels adds more carbon to the atmosphere. Burning this new fuel returns carbon that was recently in the atmosphere, which would still be there if that last gallon you burned was gas, rather than whatever they're calling this new elixer. To the extent that you can use this fuel, you're reducing the rate of growth of CO2 in the air, as long as your buring hydro fuels at all.
I haven't looked at 2007 yet, but in Word 2003 there is a reveal formatting window you can turn on. "Format"/"Reveal formatting", or Shift F1. They musta thought it was important, putting it on the menu like that...;-) I have to think they'd continue that feature.
Re:The way it works isn't the problem
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
Meaning no disrespect, if the creative part is taking you that long, you should check out one of the Word for Imbeciles books. Word is many bad things, and I have voiced many of the complaints uttered here (particularly about moving commands around between versions). However, it handles it's core mission, producing business documents, pretty well. For knowledgable users, it does it quite efficiently as well. If you learn how the styles work, and do your formatting via styles, you get the format you want, easily and automatically. If you want to change a heading through the document, you do it in one place. It's pretty similar to how CSS works.
It says all that needs to be said about the complexity of the UI, that I am one of the few people I know how to do this, out of maybe 4 dozen current active business associates that use word, and probably 200 over the past 10 years. The core formatting features of word are some of it's least known and used.
I can appreciate the complaints about 'corruption' having heard those myself. A problem was blamed on 'corruption' in a contract that went sideways for a bit last year in my office. Half a page went missing. It happened to be in the middle of the section that controlled our scope on the project. It was clearly inadvertant, as it chopped off sentences. The edit history revealed what had happened - someone in a lawyer's office trying to make a table fit on a page. Everyone was in a hue and cry about how..."f*ing Word did it again!" but the edit history pointed to the lawyers office, and an intentional edit. I think most of these complaints about Word corrupting things is people being caught off guard by an unintentional formatting function. That doesn't speak the best towards the intuitiveness of the UI, or maybe it just points out that a tool that can do a lot of things requires a lot of commands to do them. Wordstar, in it's way, was much easier to use. I wouldn't want to go back.
I probably use Word 2-3 hours a day on average, and have done so since the DOS version. It ain't perfect, but it ain't bad. I use Vi, Notepad++ and/or Kdevelop for technical purposes. I really like Notepad++ - it gets installed on every client windows machine we install on.
CDs natively have the ability to play a much higher dynamic range than vinyl, about 85 db range compared to 45 db, if memory serves. The reason that current cd recordings don't make use of that is due to the studios' decisions about how to make the recording. Basically, cramping the range makes CDs play better in cars, portable disc players, and other high ambient noise situations. It isn't a technical problem, it's a product design issue.
Re:Why should the labels be in control anyway?
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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· Score: 1
I don't know about the word 'should', but the actual reason is the nature of entertainment material (movies, songs, performances) is such that competing goods don't exist. If you want to watch Chuck Norris' latest movie, there is no substitutable good that will do. Steven Seagal's last movie won't satisfy you. This is unlike microwaves or refrigerators, where another brand's model can be made highly competitive through price management. When you have the hot movie, you do whatever it takes to milk it, because next month you might not have a hot movie. The good thing is (if you're the studio) when you -do- have the hot movie, it's all people want. You are in a power position.
The Hollywood studios have learned a certain asshole-ish behavior from these temporary king of the hill moments over the years, which is the emotional backstory for why they act like they do. They are used to being able to prescribe whatever terms they want in the moment they have the hot product, and getting the smelly end of the stick when they don't have the hot product. That's why they have wanted to and been able to retain the power that they have.
In the entertainment business, the distributors and retailers are in a weaker position than other businesses, because of this momentary monopoly nature of the goods. The channels have historically been left with just enough of the income stream to keep them going. So they have learned their own extortive behavior - witness snack prices at movie theatres.
1) "more exposure leads to more addicts". You assume that prohibition reduces exposure. Since prohibition dramatically increases the profits to be made from drugs, it creates a pretty significant incentive to promote drug usage. Crack, for example, was highly promoted in various markets in the US. If the large profits weren't available, do you think the import supply would be as large? For some actual evidence, consider what happened after the pure food and drug act of 1906 passed, which required accurate labeling of patent medicines. At this time, morphine and cocaine were as legal as sugar, and almost as available. When the Act passed, it -killed- the patent medicine industry. Usage dropped, despite complete legality. It was only after the Harrison Act of 1914 passed, pushing drugs underground, that street addiction started to climb again.
2) "more addicts is worse than all the negative effects of the war..." "this observation does not hold for... alcohol and nicotine". Nicotine is going to kill about 400,000 people this year. And next year. And the next year after that. Alchohol is good for about 60,000 direct deaths a year, plus collateral damage. (source, US Government SAMHSA statistics, http://oas.samhsa.gov/) The estimated combined cocaine, heroin, and meth active using population is on the order of about 3-4,000,000 people. (again, SAMSHSA stats). Census statistics show that most users actually clean up rather than dying. If you look into the age trends of users (see ibid) most users age out of heavy drug use. Or they die, obviously. However, if you compare statistics of current usage to past usage, there are orders of magnitude more -past- users than current users, indicating that lots of people move on. So it's not clear that simple usage of these drugs is a death sentence.
3) every time a commodity is made illegal, an incentive develops to concentrate it to make it easier to smuggle, and more valuable per unit of sale. It is more profitable to smuggle gin than beer, for example, so Alcohol prohibition in the states saw a trend from beer consumption changing to hard liquor. When pot was made more illegal, smugglers increased their loads of cocaine and heroin, as pot now had a bad risk/reward ration per pound. Pot growers learned how to make sinsemilla. Prohibition directly incentivizes the creation of these stronger drugs.
4) "purified cocaine is pure addiction". As I mentioned above, there are 10's of millions of ex-cocaine users. There are 10's of millions of ex amphetamine users. There were thousands of GI's who came back from Vietnam and instantly quit using heroin. Usage does not an addict make. Strength doesn't change the addictive nature of a drug - alcoholics (of which I am one) will cheerfully use beer, wine or whiskey to do the same damage.
The evidence in front of us doesn't support your statements. The War on Some Drugs hasn't lowered usage. It has ruined the governments of countries, and thrown millions of people in jail. Maybe we should consider other approaches.
I know addiction, I've been there. Laws don't work.
Well, a more relevant example would be the temporary relaxation of prosecution of heroin addicts, as well as the provision of maintenance dosages, in Britain in the 70's and 80's. This overwhelmingly resulted in them getting jobs, rejoining their families, and being productive members of society, even though they were still addicted and using. The overall point is that the societal behaviors surrounding the drug use seem to be more important than the contributions of the drug itself. Similarly, coca tea is widely and legally available in Colombia today. Colombia doesn't have a cocaine usage problem, despite ready availability. We (sort of) do, despite draconian laws and massive expenditures.
Proponents for legalization generally aren't wanting it so that we can freely use drugs. Rather, we believe that the current legal system does not achieve the ends that we, as society, want, and fails to do so in a spectacularly expensive and damaging manner. It's easier for teen age kids to get pot than beer. Over 95% of high school seniors state that drugs are easy to get in their school (SAMSHA statistics). Does that sound like our current policy works?
It may be morally 'right', as you state, to make these drugs illegal. However, if you do so, history seems to prove that you do not reduce their availability, you increase their pernicious effects, you make them more available to children, and generally society suffers. So enjoy your morally pure stance, but please, ask yourself, what are we really trying to accomplish here, and is our current approach working?
Speaking as an ardent propopent of legalization, I think this is potentially a good thing. I'd hate to see it mandated, much as I hate to see most things mandated. However, I'm not sure the case is easily made that, just because something is addictive, it should be illegal, or people should be vaccinated against it. The historical data shows quite clearly that legal heroin, amphetamines and cocaine did not particularly cause any great social problems for most people, and I don't think society has much stake in what adults do with their own bodies. Having a vaccine available for people who have problems with usage strengthens that case, because it provides a mechanism for dealing with the few with problems, that would allow others to use if they wish.
I've done about everything under the sun, BTW, and the only two drugs that I've had issues with are alcohol and tobacco. What I'd like is a vaccine against nicotine.
I don't have a link, but I do have a cite, sort of. My mother ran a halfway house program in Oregon for 10 years or so, providing treatment to cocaine and other hard drug abusers. The facility was in a small town in Eastern Oregon, a long way from most of the users supply lines. When people fell out of the program, as they often did, they would trot down to the Safeway, steal a gallon of wine, and get drunk. It was accepted wisdom in the clinic that abusers had a drug of choice, and would substitute if the drug of choice was not available. Clinicians felt that the drug was not the issue, rather, some people, from 10 to 25% of the population, depending on what subsegment of the population, have a tendency towards addictive use of drugs. Mom only has 25+ years of experience in the field, so maybe she doesn't know anything.
Maybe the vaccine will affect that behavior, and that would be good. It is however, pretty well supported that users substitute drugs.
Actually, if you had any sort of realistic training set, using the computer would at least be objective. However, you can't use any sort of neural net or other machine learning technique, because we have NO positive examples to train on.
Terrorists have they caught? The answer is, none. If they had caught a single actual terrorist, it would have been all over the press, as justification for the silliness. Yet, in literally hundreds of millions of scrutinized travelers, we have had exactly ZERO actual detections.
Now, if you overlay this with the recent findings that it is relatively easy to get knives and such through the detection stations (AP article in the Seattle Times about two months ago, sorry I don't have the exact cite ) this leads one to wonder about the actual rate of terrorists in the population. If we're not finding them, and yet the planes aren't falling out of the sky, what should we conclude about the necessity of these measures? Is it possible that the AL Queda types think that the passengers won't idly stand by and let their plane be launched into a building anymore? Is it possible that, like Napolean's generals, we are planning how to fight the last war?
I would argue that the only reason that the weak and the stupid put up with civilization is that they think it benefits them and protects them. The strong need no such protection. Since civilization can't continue if the masses refuse to play along, this suggests that the original poster's opinion may have some merit.
I don't see how you can have differing intervals for individuals and corporations. If an individual has a property right, in this case a right to the revenue stream from a copyrighted work, how can you prevent them from selling the right to another legal entity, which might be a corporation? It's either property and a right, or it isn't.
Technically, I don't think it's accurate to term this a 'racist' smear. Rednecks come in many races and ethnicities. It's really more of a descriptor, like 'Bush Republican' or 'thoughtless fool'.
Having more than a bit of experience with rednecks, I don't find them to be much more prejudiced than the average big city liberal. They're just more open about it.
More to the point, Kellerman's study included suicides. I'm not sure that intentional use of a gun to end one's life is properly measured as a safety attribute of the gun. In a proper society, that's a legitimate reason for a free person to want a gun.
Disclosure: two of my family members have intentionally ended their lives after long illnesses with terminal diseases. I do not regret their choice, and would not have wanted them to not have had what they needed, when they needed it. Neither used a gun - both may have wished for one if the doctors had not been generous with pain medication, which they did use.
If Steve Jobs did it, we'd be cooing about his avante garde leadership. If you were trying to keep your best and brightest people, wouldn't this be kind of a good way to keep those people motivated? Wouldn't demonstrating that your company can do something pretty cool, and not being real uptight about letting them have some fun with it, as part of a major company meeting, wouldn't that be kind of a good way to keep those people happy and possibly more contented and pleased with his place of employment? Wouldn't most of us get at least a little pleasure out of this that probably wouldn't hurt our day job productivity? Frankly, it makes me think about buying their stock.
I've worked for companies of this scale, and one of them did stuff like this to pump us up. Not technology, but similarly unrelated activities. They had Colin Powell come to a global management meeting and speak to primarily the new managers. We played golf. We met, we drank, we bonded. It was genuine, and quite effective team building. It was very motivating to me, and made me think I had one of the best jobs around. I still think that of that time. The company was a private partnership (one of the big Declining Small Integers) and I absolutely believe they got business value out of these things. So did the partners/owners, who paid for this out of their (admittedly tax deduction assisted) own pockets year after year.
You need to get your accounting firms straight. KPMG/Bearing Point had nothing to do with Arthur Andersen or Enron. Several local offices of KPMG hired personnel formerly from Arthur after the firm disbanded.
The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc.
And you think Linux is gonna fix that? A bad performing application can kill any environment, if you let it. I like Linux as much as anybody, but I think OS's are OS's. Just like people and assholes, every computer has to have one, and they all stink sometimes. Usually when you put shit into them.
The off the install disk support for ATI is consistently bad, but the recent driver I downloaded from the web site cured all that. My fedora system is now a joy. However, I can't get the install disk of Ubuntu to "just load", as it goes into X and stalls dead. I have yet to find a way past that, so Gutsy Gibbon has Given Up the Ghost on my desktop.
But let's turn it around. Let us say for the sake of argument that from the age of five until the age of 70, you never needed medical care. You never broke anything, never had any serious illness, etc. Now, based on those 65 years of healthy bliss, do you think it is fair that you paid what probably amounted to well over $250K in taxes to subsidize someone else? In other words, you paid for something but got no benefit from your spent money.
Let's turn this around. Let's say that you live in the US, and you and your employer pay health insurance premiums from the time that you are 25 to the time you are 50. Those currently run about $800/month for a family of four, split between you and your employer, or about 9600/year. Over 25 years, let's just use constant dollars for simplicity, that will come to what, about $220,000? During these years, you're a low activity user of health care. Now, let's say you lose your job, and have a history of high blood pressure. You seek private health care insurance, and can't get it because of your prior history. You've paid close to a quarter of a million dollars, which has gone in about a 60/40 split to paying for other's care and insurance company overhead and profit, and at the very time in your life where it's time for you to be able to draw from the pool, you can't get to it.
That's the miracle of the US system.
In both cases, what you'd like to see happen is that you form a pool of risk, and individuals pay into the pool at the cost of their average risk, and take from the pool based on the individual experience. On average, people pay less. You can do it from taxes, or your can do it from a hodgepodge of private companies. If you do it from the hodgepodge of private companies, the private companies have an incentive to deny coverage to the folks who actually need health care. The private system sets up to create the exact situation you are proetsting might happen in the socialist approach.
I'm a died in the wool capitalist, but there are some problems that markets don't solve well, and this is one of them.
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The benefit is if the burning of this fuel displaces burning of other hydrocarbon based fuels that are extracted from the ground. Burning those fuels adds more carbon to the atmosphere. Burning this new fuel returns carbon that was recently in the atmosphere, which would still be there if that last gallon you burned was gas, rather than whatever they're calling this new elixer. To the extent that you can use this fuel, you're reducing the rate of growth of CO2 in the air, as long as your buring hydro fuels at all.
I haven't looked at 2007 yet, but in Word 2003 there is a reveal formatting window you can turn on. "Format"/"Reveal formatting", or Shift F1. They musta thought it was important, putting it on the menu like that... ;-) I have to think they'd continue that feature.
Meaning no disrespect, if the creative part is taking you that long, you should check out one of the Word for Imbeciles books. Word is many bad things, and I have voiced many of the complaints uttered here (particularly about moving commands around between versions). However, it handles it's core mission, producing business documents, pretty well. For knowledgable users, it does it quite efficiently as well. If you learn how the styles work, and do your formatting via styles, you get the format you want, easily and automatically. If you want to change a heading through the document, you do it in one place. It's pretty similar to how CSS works.
..."f*ing Word did it again!" but the edit history pointed to the lawyers office, and an intentional edit. I think most of these complaints about Word corrupting things is people being caught off guard by an unintentional formatting function. That doesn't speak the best towards the intuitiveness of the UI, or maybe it just points out that a tool that can do a lot of things requires a lot of commands to do them. Wordstar, in it's way, was much easier to use. I wouldn't want to go back.
It says all that needs to be said about the complexity of the UI, that I am one of the few people I know how to do this, out of maybe 4 dozen current active business associates that use word, and probably 200 over the past 10 years. The core formatting features of word are some of it's least known and used.
I can appreciate the complaints about 'corruption' having heard those myself. A problem was blamed on 'corruption' in a contract that went sideways for a bit last year in my office. Half a page went missing. It happened to be in the middle of the section that controlled our scope on the project. It was clearly inadvertant, as it chopped off sentences. The edit history revealed what had happened - someone in a lawyer's office trying to make a table fit on a page. Everyone was in a hue and cry about how
I probably use Word 2-3 hours a day on average, and have done so since the DOS version. It ain't perfect, but it ain't bad. I use Vi, Notepad++ and/or Kdevelop for technical purposes. I really like Notepad++ - it gets installed on every client windows machine we install on.
Amen, brother. And for what Word is not good for, I heartily recommend Notepad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm/
CDs natively have the ability to play a much higher dynamic range than vinyl, about 85 db range compared to 45 db, if memory serves. The reason that current cd recordings don't make use of that is due to the studios' decisions about how to make the recording. Basically, cramping the range makes CDs play better in cars, portable disc players, and other high ambient noise situations. It isn't a technical problem, it's a product design issue.
I don't know about the word 'should', but the actual reason is the nature of entertainment material (movies, songs, performances) is such that competing goods don't exist. If you want to watch Chuck Norris' latest movie, there is no substitutable good that will do. Steven Seagal's last movie won't satisfy you. This is unlike microwaves or refrigerators, where another brand's model can be made highly competitive through price management. When you have the hot movie, you do whatever it takes to milk it, because next month you might not have a hot movie. The good thing is (if you're the studio) when you -do- have the hot movie, it's all people want. You are in a power position.
The Hollywood studios have learned a certain asshole-ish behavior from these temporary king of the hill moments over the years, which is the emotional backstory for why they act like they do. They are used to being able to prescribe whatever terms they want in the moment they have the hot product, and getting the smelly end of the stick when they don't have the hot product. That's why they have wanted to and been able to retain the power that they have.
In the entertainment business, the distributors and retailers are in a weaker position than other businesses, because of this momentary monopoly nature of the goods. The channels have historically been left with just enough of the income stream to keep them going. So they have learned their own extortive behavior - witness snack prices at movie theatres.
My kids each received multiple Itunes Gift cards. In past years, they received Cds and guft certificates to Silver Platters/Tower Records.
Cds are dead. The studios just don't realize it yet.
Let's look at your assumptions.
... alcohol and nicotine". Nicotine is going to kill about 400,000 people this year. And next year. And the next year after that. Alchohol is good for about 60,000 direct deaths a year, plus collateral damage. (source, US Government SAMHSA statistics, http://oas.samhsa.gov/) The estimated combined cocaine, heroin, and meth active using population is on the order of about 3-4,000,000 people. (again, SAMSHSA stats). Census statistics show that most users actually clean up rather than dying. If you look into the age trends of users (see ibid) most users age out of heavy drug use. Or they die, obviously. However, if you compare statistics of current usage to past usage, there are orders of magnitude more -past- users than current users, indicating that lots of people move on. So it's not clear that simple usage of these drugs is a death sentence.
1) "more exposure leads to more addicts". You assume that prohibition reduces exposure. Since prohibition dramatically increases the profits to be made from drugs, it creates a pretty significant incentive to promote drug usage. Crack, for example, was highly promoted in various markets in the US. If the large profits weren't available, do you think the import supply would be as large? For some actual evidence, consider what happened after the pure food and drug act of 1906 passed, which required accurate labeling of patent medicines. At this time, morphine and cocaine were as legal as sugar, and almost as available. When the Act passed, it -killed- the patent medicine industry. Usage dropped, despite complete legality. It was only after the Harrison Act of 1914 passed, pushing drugs underground, that street addiction started to climb again.
2) "more addicts is worse than all the negative effects of the war..." "this observation does not hold for
3) every time a commodity is made illegal, an incentive develops to concentrate it to make it easier to smuggle, and more valuable per unit of sale. It is more profitable to smuggle gin than beer, for example, so Alcohol prohibition in the states saw a trend from beer consumption changing to hard liquor. When pot was made more illegal, smugglers increased their loads of cocaine and heroin, as pot now had a bad risk/reward ration per pound. Pot growers learned how to make sinsemilla. Prohibition directly incentivizes the creation of these stronger drugs.
4) "purified cocaine is pure addiction". As I mentioned above, there are 10's of millions of ex-cocaine users. There are 10's of millions of ex amphetamine users. There were thousands of GI's who came back from Vietnam and instantly quit using heroin. Usage does not an addict make. Strength doesn't change the addictive nature of a drug - alcoholics (of which I am one) will cheerfully use beer, wine or whiskey to do the same damage.
The evidence in front of us doesn't support your statements. The War on Some Drugs hasn't lowered usage. It has ruined the governments of countries, and thrown millions of people in jail. Maybe we should consider other approaches.
I know addiction, I've been there. Laws don't work.
Well, a more relevant example would be the temporary relaxation of prosecution of heroin addicts, as well as the provision of maintenance dosages, in Britain in the 70's and 80's. This overwhelmingly resulted in them getting jobs, rejoining their families, and being productive members of society, even though they were still addicted and using. The overall point is that the societal behaviors surrounding the drug use seem to be more important than the contributions of the drug itself. Similarly, coca tea is widely and legally available in Colombia today. Colombia doesn't have a cocaine usage problem, despite ready availability. We (sort of) do, despite draconian laws and massive expenditures. Proponents for legalization generally aren't wanting it so that we can freely use drugs. Rather, we believe that the current legal system does not achieve the ends that we, as society, want, and fails to do so in a spectacularly expensive and damaging manner. It's easier for teen age kids to get pot than beer. Over 95% of high school seniors state that drugs are easy to get in their school (SAMSHA statistics). Does that sound like our current policy works? It may be morally 'right', as you state, to make these drugs illegal. However, if you do so, history seems to prove that you do not reduce their availability, you increase their pernicious effects, you make them more available to children, and generally society suffers. So enjoy your morally pure stance, but please, ask yourself, what are we really trying to accomplish here, and is our current approach working?
Speaking as an ardent propopent of legalization, I think this is potentially a good thing. I'd hate to see it mandated, much as I hate to see most things mandated. However, I'm not sure the case is easily made that, just because something is addictive, it should be illegal, or people should be vaccinated against it. The historical data shows quite clearly that legal heroin, amphetamines and cocaine did not particularly cause any great social problems for most people, and I don't think society has much stake in what adults do with their own bodies. Having a vaccine available for people who have problems with usage strengthens that case, because it provides a mechanism for dealing with the few with problems, that would allow others to use if they wish.
I've done about everything under the sun, BTW, and the only two drugs that I've had issues with are alcohol and tobacco. What I'd like is a vaccine against nicotine.
I don't have a link, but I do have a cite, sort of. My mother ran a halfway house program in Oregon for 10 years or so, providing treatment to cocaine and other hard drug abusers. The facility was in a small town in Eastern Oregon, a long way from most of the users supply lines. When people fell out of the program, as they often did, they would trot down to the Safeway, steal a gallon of wine, and get drunk. It was accepted wisdom in the clinic that abusers had a drug of choice, and would substitute if the drug of choice was not available. Clinicians felt that the drug was not the issue, rather, some people, from 10 to 25% of the population, depending on what subsegment of the population, have a tendency towards addictive use of drugs. Mom only has 25+ years of experience in the field, so maybe she doesn't know anything.
Maybe the vaccine will affect that behavior, and that would be good. It is however, pretty well supported that users substitute drugs.
Actually, if you had any sort of realistic training set, using the computer would at least be objective. However, you can't use any sort of neural net or other machine learning technique, because we have NO positive examples to train on.
Terrorists have they caught? The answer is, none. If they had caught a single actual terrorist, it would have been all over the press, as justification for the silliness. Yet, in literally hundreds of millions of scrutinized travelers, we have had exactly ZERO actual detections.
Now, if you overlay this with the recent findings that it is relatively easy to get knives and such through the detection stations (AP article in the Seattle Times about two months ago, sorry I don't have the exact cite ) this leads one to wonder about the actual rate of terrorists in the population. If we're not finding them, and yet the planes aren't falling out of the sky, what should we conclude about the necessity of these measures? Is it possible that the AL Queda types think that the passengers won't idly stand by and let their plane be launched into a building anymore? Is it possible that, like Napolean's generals, we are planning how to fight the last war?
I would argue that the only reason that the weak and the stupid put up with civilization is that they think it benefits them and protects them. The strong need no such protection. Since civilization can't continue if the masses refuse to play along, this suggests that the original poster's opinion may have some merit.
I don't see how you can have differing intervals for individuals and corporations. If an individual has a property right, in this case a right to the revenue stream from a copyrighted work, how can you prevent them from selling the right to another legal entity, which might be a corporation? It's either property and a right, or it isn't.
Technically, I don't think it's accurate to term this a 'racist' smear. Rednecks come in many races and ethnicities. It's really more of a descriptor, like 'Bush Republican' or 'thoughtless fool'.
Having more than a bit of experience with rednecks, I don't find them to be much more prejudiced than the average big city liberal. They're just more open about it.
More to the point, Kellerman's study included suicides. I'm not sure that intentional use of a gun to end one's life is properly measured as a safety attribute of the gun. In a proper society, that's a legitimate reason for a free person to want a gun.
Disclosure: two of my family members have intentionally ended their lives after long illnesses with terminal diseases. I do not regret their choice, and would not have wanted them to not have had what they needed, when they needed it. Neither used a gun - both may have wished for one if the doctors had not been generous with pain medication, which they did use.
If Steve Jobs did it, we'd be cooing about his avante garde leadership. If you were trying to keep your best and brightest people, wouldn't this be kind of a good way to keep those people motivated? Wouldn't demonstrating that your company can do something pretty cool, and not being real uptight about letting them have some fun with it, as part of a major company meeting, wouldn't that be kind of a good way to keep those people happy and possibly more contented and pleased with his place of employment? Wouldn't most of us get at least a little pleasure out of this that probably wouldn't hurt our day job productivity? Frankly, it makes me think about buying their stock.
I've worked for companies of this scale, and one of them did stuff like this to pump us up. Not technology, but similarly unrelated activities. They had Colin Powell come to a global management meeting and speak to primarily the new managers. We played golf. We met, we drank, we bonded. It was genuine, and quite effective team building. It was very motivating to me, and made me think I had one of the best jobs around. I still think that of that time. The company was a private partnership (one of the big Declining Small Integers) and I absolutely believe they got business value out of these things. So did the partners/owners, who paid for this out of their (admittedly tax deduction assisted) own pockets year after year.
You need to get your accounting firms straight. KPMG/Bearing Point had nothing to do with Arthur Andersen or Enron. Several local offices of KPMG hired personnel formerly from Arthur after the firm disbanded.
The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc.
And you think Linux is gonna fix that? A bad performing application can kill any environment, if you let it. I like Linux as much as anybody, but I think OS's are OS's. Just like people and assholes, every computer has to have one, and they all stink sometimes. Usually when you put shit into them.
In Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least,
And even if you don't bounce windows server on your own, Microsoft Update will do it for you on a regular basis.
The off the install disk support for ATI is consistently bad, but the recent driver I downloaded from the web site cured all that. My fedora system is now a joy. However, I can't get the install disk of Ubuntu to "just load", as it goes into X and stalls dead. I have yet to find a way past that, so Gutsy Gibbon has Given Up the Ghost on my desktop.
But let's turn it around. Let us say for the sake of argument that from the age of five until the age of 70, you never needed medical care. You never broke anything, never had any serious illness, etc. Now, based on those 65 years of healthy bliss, do you think it is fair that you paid what probably amounted to well over $250K in taxes to subsidize someone else? In other words, you paid for something but got no benefit from your spent money.
Let's turn this around. Let's say that you live in the US, and you and your employer pay health insurance premiums from the time that you are 25 to the time you are 50. Those currently run about $800/month for a family of four, split between you and your employer, or about 9600/year. Over 25 years, let's just use constant dollars for simplicity, that will come to what, about $220,000? During these years, you're a low activity user of health care. Now, let's say you lose your job, and have a history of high blood pressure. You seek private health care insurance, and can't get it because of your prior history. You've paid close to a quarter of a million dollars, which has gone in about a 60/40 split to paying for other's care and insurance company overhead and profit, and at the very time in your life where it's time for you to be able to draw from the pool, you can't get to it.
That's the miracle of the US system.
In both cases, what you'd like to see happen is that you form a pool of risk, and individuals pay into the pool at the cost of their average risk, and take from the pool based on the individual experience. On average, people pay less. You can do it from taxes, or your can do it from a hodgepodge of private companies. If you do it from the hodgepodge of private companies, the private companies have an incentive to deny coverage to the folks who actually need health care. The private system sets up to create the exact situation you are proetsting might happen in the socialist approach.
I'm a died in the wool capitalist, but there are some problems that markets don't solve well, and this is one of them.
Um, no. Though the time is takes to open a bag of Doritos does seem to expand to approximately infinity, for some reason.
And your point is what, precisely? That government agencies are willing to throw money around stupidly? I'd have to concur. ;-)
Facetiousness aside, I don't think it's a secret that it's often easier for large organizations to get funding for things rather than people.