"There is no new PIN, it's the same one used for the ATM"
At The Moment my credit card doesn't have a PIN
And I don't use it for getting cash, since that transaction costs, and they charge interest straight away.
When you get the card, the PIN (at least at my bank) is a separate choice from the ATM pin. I get to choose the pin for the Visa card, after a visit to my bank branch.
Healthcare can be quite expensive, and in a place like the US with a lot of high tech medical doohickeys, it can be astonishingly expensive. The government does not have unlimited funds; in extremis it can't spend more on healthcare than the GDP. So sooner or later the government is going to determine and limit what it will pay for, and it would not be surprising to see everything else prohibited. So what will be the basis on which the government decides whose problems it will pay to fix? Obviously, those who can be expected not to contribute much to government get cut first: hence Obama's pronouncement five years ago that grandma should just take a pain pill (and prepare to die.) If you're an opponent of those currently in power (especially if you're prominent and have no way to blackmail the leaders) expect to have payment for your life-saving procedure denied or be subject to mysterious bureaucratic delays. If you've made a personal enemy of someone sitting on a death panel, kiss your ass goodbye.
Remember also that ultimately the government pays for nothing; that generous benefit you're getting was stolen from your neighbor, your children or parents, your siblings or even yourself. That guy down the street who spends half his life in the hospital because every July he runs his motorcycle into a tree and every December gets a new form of VD from his favorite whore? You're paying for his medical expenses. He doesn't care, he's not paying, why should he be more cautious?
Actually, I live with a one-payer system. The hospitals have budgets and endowments. They are not free wheeling with useless technology. We have the tools (mris, microsurgery tools, robotics), where it is patient justified, not vendor justified). There is a concentration to improving operating theatre rooms utilisation, which means more surgeries permitted.
As an example, X rays are digitalized. During the day our radiologists do their analysis for my local hospital, and for a hospital in Australia (12 hrs difference in time). In our night, while our radiologoists are asleep, Australia radiologists look at our xrays. Ergo, we get good turnaround and can treat emergencies 24/7 with little lost time. This swap or exchanges started with abandonment of film xrays as being primary tool.
If I had to read through or process a few million transactions in hours, and it is done repetitively, text code, and probably C language or C++ would be used. Doing the visual programming shtick would work, but the overheads of interpretation and correct but inefficient solutions would mean that the overnight jobs could not get done. Many banks do statements and are typical of the organizations doing millions of transactions per day. Close to them is the government, and the online stores. Two counterexamples of why one method is still being deployed.
If the original author is present, ask for him to walk you through the code, Ask him to explain how he structured his application. Whatever you do, do not criticize the code, but ask him to review your proposed changes to make the product better.
By so doing, your rewrite or exorcism should get his support. All that if the original author is still available.
If he is not available, ask a second person to test his code and to advise you where to fix the unfixable. It is important to solve the political (people) problem first. And if there is a clock ticking, because you thought the work could be done with fixed cost/time, and it cant, document why. Be prepared to lose.
At least they get health coverage for the next 18 months.
If they can afford it. The charming thing about COBRA is that you get hit paying 100% of premiums when you can least afford it. Heaven forbid that we become a bunch of commies like those Canucks. I've heard that even the snow is red up there.
I am a Canadian, and government medicare has been a blessing. -- an absolute blessing. While I was in mid-age, my daughter suddenly succumbed to chronic MS. My group insurance covered canes, wheel chair, crutches, and some drug costs to a limit. But with the recession, it was a handshake and I was on my own fully. The government plan kicks in if private insurance does not cover enough or if there is no private insurance. I did not go bankrupt, lose my house, burn through my life savings to cover drugs. My daughter has daily injections to take, covered by my income taxes and government insurance. Drug costs to the tune of $30,000 per year. Our cost-- $1200/yr. There are some adjustments to make with government insurance. There is triage if you go to a hospital. Urgent attention is now, immediate, (faster than an I/O interrupt), mid importance (broken arm, etc,) may take a few hours, or if there is a need for some surgeries (cataracts) may take a a few short weeks awaiting an operating room availability. Would private for profit Insurance and treatment prolong my life? I think not. I can give you other stories as well, but for the RED care, I will take it anyday.
Here is a second final story. My son learned Russian, liked the language so much that he applied for a job in Moscow. The first night there, he has severe excrutiating backpains -- kidney stones. The hotel located the nearest medical clinic. He went there, and was treated with ultrasound, painkillers and admitted. No questions asked about papers, insurance, et. Everyone is insured so the state does not bother with that costly aspect of fee collection. It cost my son all of $20.00 for flowers as a gift to the attending staff.
So, which would I prefer to have, your system or our system.
Pardoning Snowden for all past crimes and enabling his return would prevent the release of any further damaging documents. If Snowden remains within US jurisdiction, any new leaks of his material can lead prosecutors directly to him.
Once the bleeding has stopped, the NSA and the Justice Department should together explain to the voting population the legal concept of "the fruit of the poison tree" - any intelligence gained by espionage should be inadmissible in court outside of direct, existential threats.
All governments engage in espionage to some extent, and our goal should not be to remove our "poison garden" and blind ourselves, but to ensure that state secrets are not used as a weapon against the populace.
Snowdon has no documents, they were distributed to a number of newspapers. He is not a criminal, but a citizen who pointed out, via the public, the wrong doing that happens when the government institutions are not audited.
Imagine if you actually audited the senators or congress for expenses or lobbying. Wow, would you find excesses galore.
I have purchased multiple keyboards over the years, and as the lettering or dirt soils the unit, I replace same. Most of these are not deep dished on the keytops, and have that grating feeling when depressing a key.
My IBM keyboard with the ps2 plug was borrowed by my grandchild, and the plug was damaged by her, when she tryed to reinsert the plug into the socket.
Is it possible to just snip off the ps2 plug and put on a USB2 one in its place, or is there a big difference between keyboard electronics manufactured with one or the other? My other option, probably what I may do, is open up the keyboard, and replace the full cable. Before I regret taking the wrong action, your advice would be appreciated.
When I arrived on the shore of America I had nothing.
I didn't even speak English.
To make the long story short - two of the three factors were very vital for my survival, and ultimately put me to where I am - except for the "superiority" factor, because I was less than a nothing back then.
As I grow more accustomed to the American lives, I get to know people from different cultures - for one reason or another, I find one group very very interesting - the Jews.
They are in so many ways so similar to the Chinese - and yet, they are far superior to the Chinese (yes, insecurity complex at play here) in that the Jews have a purpose in their own private lives and also for their community lives - on the other hand, most Chinese do not.
At the end of the day, the success of the Jews is not a fluke - their culture is structured in such a way that death of one member is nothing - even a massacre of millions to the Jews is nothing - as long as their culture gets to live on.
BBC has a very interesting program on the revival of Jewish culture in Krakow, Poland -
=== As a Jew, we were given the top three important qualities to rank careers. Teacher, Doctor, and Business Man. Teacher to spread knowledge, Doctor to heal the sick, and Business man to give employment to the citizens, so that they may live without stress. The rabbi was number 4.
Our parents wanted us to have careers that are portable. If we had to leave a country because of war, we would be able to start up elsewhere. That obliged us to do well in school, to include fluency in a second language, and to chose friends who were as studious as were we. We also shunned wine, women and song.
Today, we have become soft, seaking leasure instead of knowledge and skills. We live in the TV set age, where we want to watch shows, instead of study. I believe that is the reason that Jews, Chinese, and other first and second generation immigrants surpass native borns is due to their instinct to have security.
but a pardon for his crimes, a pack of beers and a a badge that says "I stated the obvious"
My view is that the only reason for Snowdon to return to the USA would be health problems of his parents. He is comfortable where he is, and over time, will fall in love and marry an educated woman. Putin will not make efforts to force Snowdon to leave Russia, as Putin will be preoccupied with internal affairs pertaining to cost overruns for SEW CHEE (grin)
By the time they get to college, this "tiny difference" adds up to more than one semester.
Not all tiny differences add up. My parents used to pull me out of school for a week most years for family vacations etc. Over the course of school from K-12 then I lost a full semester easy. Plus the flus, doctors appointments, deaths in the family, snow days, easily another couple months. I STILL maintain it didn't cost my education anything at all -- and that was me actively "missing" actual classroom time where the other students were still present, vs the school just not having school for that time.
This applies to everyone, including people from Chicago. If you consider that people "clock out" an hour early, then Chicago students (and teachers) also do, so the gap remains the same.
Again no. They don't mentally check out an "hour early"; they mentally check out after they've hit their concentration / absorption / knowledge retention limit, or whatever you'd like to call it; or completed their major tasks for the day. Extending or shortening the "day" by an hour makes no difference to how long you can concentrate. It just changes how much time you waste after your 'done'.
[...] you can discard that because it's a mere 0.13$ in his pockets every minute...
No I can't discard taht. Because that's 13 cents a minute every minute. Its a small value, but it accumulates in a very understable way. But not everything works like that. Learning is more "chunky"; in that you learn in chunks. When I took math, for example, I was good at it, I absorbed a typical "lesson" within the first 10-15 minutes of the class, and then got bored. Some of my classmates had a rougher time, and it took most of the lesson. Others just didn't grok it even with 45 minutes, and needed after school tutors etc.
But the point is the lesson is absorbed as a chunk. Adding 1 minute to each math class I ever took would have been several hours more "math class" in my life but with no benefit to me whatsoever. The teacher wouldn't present 1/60th of a new concept in that extra minute that would graually accumulate and be the equivalent of university Calculus I by the end of highschool. That's not how learning works, spending 1 extra minute each day doesn't give you an extra lesson learned after the end of each month.
Either the teacher has enough time to teach the concepts or they don't. Kids learn at different rates, so the average lesson is designed around most of the kids fully understanding it within the first half of the period; the last half is is for the slower kids, and for practice problems.
Adding a minute to each class would have accomplished essentially nothing. It doesn't accumulate benefit the way getting paid a few cents extra per minute does.
There is a difference between a poor teacher and a poor performing teacher. Take a bright person, and put him/her in a school with limited resources, and continue to take away the resources, a little per year, and who do you blame? Of course, the teacher, not the school board.
Second, instead of 21 to 23 students per class, assign 31-33 per class. Do that and you say goodbye to individual attention. I bet in some schools, the teachers have to shell out money from their own pockets to buy resources that the schoolboard considers frivolous.
Yeah, put the blame where it belongs. Parents who never sit with their child to see what they are learning. Some of our public schools are offering extra programming. My grandkids get 3 days per week of after class homework time, paid for by the parents at a small fee ($40/child/semester). The kids in that group get what the parent should be providing-- follow up and explanations, and encouragement to the students. Time for inward inspection. Parents, are you doing what is a normal parent role? To both parents work, find time with your child to oversee what they are understanding. Our school classrooms now have a basket where ipads, androids, cellphones, and electronic gadgets are dropped therein, until the class is out. No facebook access allowed, except at lunch hours..
It is easy to ridicule this as a benefit to the privileged, but our current funding of education, primarily with property taxes, is the root of much of the inequality in America. Property taxes are high in areas with high incomes, and low in areas of low incomes. Low income people also tend to have more school age kids. So the result is that rich kids attend schools with good teachers, libraries, computer labs, music programs, etc., where they only associate with other rich kids. Moving to a system of funding based on a broader tax base would do a lot to create more equality of opportunity.
Here where I live, school boards derive their revenue from property taxes and from provincial handouts. Both are based on head-counts, and not locations. The provincial government wanted to have two school boards -- an English one and a French one for the province. Each would not have government representatives on the board of directors. The question is, "for how long?" The idea was defeated.
In my 1000 square foot house I spend $1000 a year on electricity. How exactly would I pay for $15K - $20K worth of solar cells in 5 years?
At that price, you would be looking at a 15-20 kW system. You would also have a hard time fitting that many solar panels on a 1000 square foot house, unless you redesigned the roof specifically for solar. A more realistic estimate for your house would be $5-6k for a 5 kW system.
I guess I could go all electric, which would cost me another $5 in appliances.
I would be more interested in knowing if a motorized generator could provide electric power to the wheels in place of a transmission. I am wondering if the losses in gas engine, and drive train consume more fuel per kilometer (mile) tnan the generator with electric drive motors. I am curious to know about the comparison of a gasoline powered car, powering electric drive motors.
A new 40 gallon electric water heater goes for $240 and a new freestanding electric range goes for $350 at Lowes. A new electric heat pump (Air Conditioner/Heater) would be a bit more, but still well under $5k (I'm assuming you meant five thousand with your $5 number)
I might break even in 15 years, about the time I would need to replace the solar cells.
Modern panels decrease their output by less than one half of one percent per year, often with a warranty backing up their claims. For example, the SunPower X-Series solar panel warranty guaranties a less than 0.4% decline per year for 25 years. So at 15 years, you are looking at panels that are still producing at least 94% of their original capacity - hardly needing replacement.
By then they should be cheeper and more efficient. So yea by about 2030 solar would probably take care of my needs.
Solar panels will continue to get cheaper (a few cents per watt) as production scales up. They will also get a bit more efficient (a few percent) as manufacturing processes improve. However, don't plan on any disruptive technology advancements to occur in the next 15 years that fundamentally change how home solar installations work.
Princeton will have the last laugh as facebook will be dead before it.
I am not sure of that. The USA trend is to ship good jobs offshore, and keep the service jobs. Service jobs are low paying. If tuition is beyon the abilities of the low paying earners, who will attend. If Princton hit 75% occupency, they probably going to lose money. And the much lower tuition costs of non-USA universities means that there will be a substantial brain-drain, compounding the problem.
Montreal Canada student rentals are about $1000, sharable for two or three students. Foreign fees are about 12-14K/year, (7k/semester), and our universities compare with UCLA, Stanford, MIT, and all the IVY league names. Students who come here, pickup a French boy/girl friend, and a second language, enjoyment with a city that has great schools and great reasonable cost cuisine. Enroll in a European University, (if you have the marks), and here again, you will not have to mortgage your life with Education debt.
Imagine what these numbers would be if they actually knew what the fuck they were doing.
If you cant sell windows 8.x then you do not require the support staff. That translates into big big expense savings. Also, netwokring costs are down, because of the number of W8 pcs sold. And by no longer really supporting W7, because it is almost legacy bullet proof, again, more savings. And yes, the xbox is a winner, particularly with Kinect. An overpriced toy (XB) that is purely for wel heeled gamers. Or is it for home computing too?
I'd be less cynical in this particular case: it looks like a genuinely innovative bit of middle-man work, which could serve its target audience better than the current solutions. (If it doesn't, it will of course fail.)
PayPal was an innovation at the time it was new, and served its users better than anything else out there. T-Mobile's new idea looks similar: it aims to serve customers in a way banks are for some reason reluctant or unable to do.
There is a place in the world for these 'middle-men' roles.
In Canada we have ING bank, which is a branchless bank. You get a debit and credit card, can have your payroll deposited to your account, or transfer money to it. Their fees are the lowest in the country, and their interest a touch better than banks. You may even get your mortgage from them. We are a checkless society, but for a fee, you may get checks to issue. (Many landlords want a dozen post-dated cheques for the rent, so you may obtain this).
My favourite passwords are with words I made up. Gronk, eilsel and rabuf (or is that fubar), Then I add a character or two of punctionation, from the dollar sign, to the octothorpe (# ) to the pound £ and even the character which is not part of the USA keyboard () or Euro Symbol. If the word is too short, I append a 001 to extend it.
The recording industry, the biggest bunch of middleman thieves ever, is finally losing its free ride. You don't NEED a record company anymore, you can be your own! If they didn't think they were dying they wouldn't be violently throwing tantrums everywhere - lobbying for really radical unilateral changes to the law, suing regular everyday people for "piracy" to the point of bankruptcy, hassling bars/restaurants (usually mom and pop operations, barely making it as it is) into paying commercial licensing fees for music, etc.
A band now can cut their own album and sell it on iTunes, Amazon or a host of other music sites and retain a lot more of the proceeds. Back in the day even large, famous acts were getting stiffed by the record companies! Thanks in part to the way that record companies have pushed musicians up against the wall now for many years the market is now to a point where the artists don't even make money on the albums themselves. Instead they make the money at concerts, both on tickets and on merchandise. An artist now almost has to *give away* the music (many seem to - look on Youtube for all of the "full album" videos) as the loss leader in hopes of getting people to their concert. Artists can post samples on Youtube (at no cost) to drive sales and exposure. The record company middleman has less and less importance in a marketplace like this.
I'm glad to see that more and more musicians are standing up for themselves and taking advantage of the offerings that don't involve RIAA-related entities. If the entity doesn't add value they shouldn't have a role in the marketplace anymore.
The RIAA reminds me of Kodak corp. Kodak Corp was ill equiped to move from film to digital. And today we know that even our dental xrays or other xrays are being digitalized.
So, RIAA, realize you are a Kodak Corp. Your days are numbered, We really know that change is difficult for you to accept, but, thats life. Do you require other examples of businesses that have died because of technology? One that is gone is the carbon ink ribbon manufacturer, the typewriter for which it was manufactured, line printers and more.
When I hear news like these I always wonder what type of idiot thinks that shooting the texter solves anything?
Thank you for providing an answer.
p.s. The shooter will spend the rest of his life in jail, how's that preferable to someone annoyingly texting in a movie?
And as a Canadian, I wonder about all the gun killings in the USA and the school shootings and the anger shooting and anger killings and the NRA and their $$$ lobbying. Americans, keep on killing innocents, nothing wrong with having guns for everyone. After all, there are snakes, and other dangerious vermon roaming the streets, cattle rustlers, and the need to protect your ranch, (stolen from the indians) from being stolen from you. And to make certain your slaves don't excape.
Time to become civil, don't you think? Without universal right to guns, a good 1/3 of US prisons would empty as there would have been no incarcerations due to shootings and people injured or killed.
Microsoft refuses to acknowledge the one simple truth that could save them:
No one who chooses to use a PC instead of a tablet wants to see Metro. Ever.
My son-in-law, a staunch windows 7 user, won a laptop with W8.1 on it. He is a techie, and after about two weeks, stated he liked it. I really found it good, fast, and easy to use.
With Ballmer leaving the company and a major reorganization underway, it'll be the next Microsoft CEO's task to make sure that Windows 9 is a hit; in fact, considering that rumored 2015 release date, shepherding the OS could become that executive's first major test."
Actually, it could be both the next executive's first and last test.
Momentum is important, Windows lost momentum. MS will have to beat Google. Can MS do it? (only if they give W9 away for free, as a base version, and sell add-ons. That is my perspective.
To answer your questions: - It runs at about 35W under normal load. - The $200 included brand-new from NewEgg power supply, RAM, CPU and motherboard as well as a used 2U rackmount case w/ CD-ROM drive and fans. The SSD was new from a local PC shop. - It's 1 port on the mobo and a 4-port PCIe NIC
Sure, there may be bottlenecks, but pretty much every home router has bottlenecks too. I can't tell you how many 802.11n routers I've seen with only 10/100 wired ports. If just comparing on price, a DIY jobbie will almost always beat a store-bought router. In the end, all you're truly paying for is convenience. It's worth it to some people, but not to others.
Can you start with a Raseberry, and build up to a 8 port DD-WRT router running 1AC? Not all ports would be at the speed capability of a 1AC, but at least one to be reserved for it
That isn't true at all, in fact quite the opposite. The information age has empowered customers over the last two decades, and marketing departments have to work with this fact (the exact words I've heard used are "more powerful customers," which are customers described as having easier access to competitors as well as doing research on the internet.)
With a lot of the cheap stuff I buy, I've had so many of these companies follow up and ask me to write a review of their product, because it tends to be a lot harder to sell something with few reviews (or negative reviews) and that is a direct result of customer empowerment.
And I don't know what all this talk about shit products is either - the quality of everything I buy these days is much better than before, and I pay less for it. I very rarely have to replace something because the old one broke, it's almost always because I wanted something new and improved instead. I own a lot of material goods that are very nice, ranging from my Nexus 4 to my 55" Sony TV, both of which I paid peanuts for relative to what stuff used to cost a long time ago, and it's much better than the stuff I bought back when. If this so called "race to the bottom" of yours was true, then my Nexus 4 would be something worse than the 90's brick phone, and my old big rear projection 55" HDTV that cost $3,800 back in 2001 would have better picture quality than the 55" $1,500 LED-LCD HDTV I have now - yet it doesn't, it looks like garbage in comparison.
Personally I think these changes are working out great. I know you socialist types reject anything that isn't somehow "organic" or "wholesome" but I prefer working smart over working hard, and that's exactly what these changes are. Being able to avoid using somebody's services is a good thing because it frees up that labor resource to work on something else. On the down side you get frictional unemployment, but on the up side the economy grows. This is why today's poor are wealthier than ever, and food is cheaper than ever.
In other words, who needs a middle class when the poor have a higher standard of living today than the middle class and even some of the wealthy of any period earlier than the 60's? The difference between middle class after all is just an arbitrary number on a spreadsheet that some government bureaucrat decided upon.
I have a real problem to find a universal definition of middle class. I am writing as a man, so understand the following.
In my day, my wife could and did stay home to look after the kids full time, on my single salary. To me that was middle class living. Middle class gave us the freedom to buy a home, to send the kids to camp, to save for their education, and to enjoy a 40 hour work week. Today, a work-week as I recently experienced my last contract started the moment we get to our project at the office, and because of VPN, and long commute times, we add extra work at home after hours. We give free hours to the job because we love our work, and we take the hours away from a social life or participating with family. Away from the job is as important as being dedicated. Middle class today requires two salaries, and little to no free time the partner and the kids.
What is your definition of middle class? Material wealth? Collections of smart phones, laptops, TVs in every room, swimming pool in the back yard, travel?
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no new PIN, it's the same one used for the ATM"
At The Moment my credit card doesn't have a PIN
And I don't use it for getting cash, since that transaction costs, and they charge interest straight away.
When you get the card, the PIN (at least at my bank) is a separate choice from the ATM pin. I get to choose the pin for the Visa card, after a visit to my bank branch.
Healthcare can be quite expensive, and in a place like the US with a lot of high tech medical doohickeys, it can be astonishingly expensive. The government does not have unlimited funds; in extremis it can't spend more on healthcare than the GDP. So sooner or later the government is going to determine and limit what it will pay for, and it would not be surprising to see everything else prohibited. So what will be the basis on which the government decides whose problems it will pay to fix? Obviously, those who can be expected not to contribute much to government get cut first: hence Obama's pronouncement five years ago that grandma should just take a pain pill (and prepare to die.) If you're an opponent of those currently in power (especially if you're prominent and have no way to blackmail the leaders) expect to have payment for your life-saving procedure denied or be subject to mysterious bureaucratic delays. If you've made a personal enemy of someone sitting on a death panel, kiss your ass goodbye.
Remember also that ultimately the government pays for nothing; that generous benefit you're getting was stolen from your neighbor, your children or parents, your siblings or even yourself. That guy down the street who spends half his life in the hospital because every July he runs his motorcycle into a tree and every December gets a new form of VD from his favorite whore? You're paying for his medical expenses. He doesn't care, he's not paying, why should he be more cautious?
Actually, I live with a one-payer system. The hospitals have budgets and endowments. They are not free wheeling with useless technology. We have the tools (mris, microsurgery tools, robotics), where it is patient justified, not vendor justified). There is a concentration to improving operating theatre rooms utilisation, which means more surgeries permitted.
As an example, X rays are digitalized. During the day our radiologists do their analysis for my local hospital, and for a hospital in Australia (12 hrs difference in time). In our night, while our radiologoists are asleep, Australia radiologists look at our xrays. Ergo, we get good turnaround and can treat emergencies 24/7 with little lost time. This swap or exchanges started with abandonment of film xrays as being primary tool.
What are you, some kind of left-liberal, gun-banning, Obama-voting, pinko-commie? I bet you watch BBC news.
How did you know? Did Edward Snowdon tell you?
If I had to read through or process a few million transactions in hours, and it is done repetitively, text code, and probably C language or C++ would be used.
Doing the visual programming shtick would work, but the overheads of interpretation and correct but inefficient solutions would mean that the overnight jobs could not get done.
Many banks do statements and are typical of the organizations doing millions of transactions per day. Close to them is the government, and the online stores.
Two counterexamples of why one method is still being deployed.
I cant wait for my personal drone to fly me to worj=k, with Lois Lane in my arms
If the original author is present, ask for him to walk you through the code, Ask him to explain how he structured his application.
Whatever you do, do not criticize the code, but ask him to review your proposed changes to make the product better.
By so doing, your rewrite or exorcism should get his support. All that if the original author is still available.
If he is not available, ask a second person to test his code and to advise you where to fix the unfixable. It is important to solve the political (people) problem first. And if there is a clock ticking, because you thought the work could be done with fixed cost/time, and it cant, document why. Be prepared to lose.
It just takes micromanagement to an entirely new level. No thanks to these.
Make man into machines, However, the good side is, there is no good side.
Slave away programmer, architect. Only one exempt would be the dead individual.
At least they get health coverage for the next 18 months.
If they can afford it. The charming thing about COBRA is that you get hit paying 100% of premiums when you can least afford it. Heaven forbid that we become a bunch of commies like those Canucks. I've heard that even the snow is red up there.
I am a Canadian, and government medicare has been a blessing. -- an absolute blessing. While I was in mid-age, my daughter suddenly succumbed to chronic MS. My group insurance covered canes, wheel chair, crutches, and some drug costs to a limit. But with the recession, it was a handshake and I was on my own fully.
The government plan kicks in if private insurance does not cover enough or if there is no private insurance. I did not go bankrupt, lose my house, burn through my life savings to cover drugs. My daughter has daily injections to take, covered by my income taxes and government insurance. Drug costs to the tune of $30,000 per year. Our cost-- $1200/yr.
There are some adjustments to make with government insurance. There is triage if you go to a hospital. Urgent attention is now, immediate, (faster than an I/O interrupt), mid importance (broken arm, etc,) may take a few hours, or if there is a need for some surgeries (cataracts) may take a a few short weeks awaiting an operating room availability. Would private for profit Insurance and treatment prolong my life? I think not. I can give you other stories as well, but for the RED care, I will take it anyday.
Here is a second final story. My son learned Russian, liked the language so much that he applied for a job in Moscow. The first night there, he has severe excrutiating backpains -- kidney stones. The hotel located the nearest medical clinic. He went there, and was treated with ultrasound, painkillers and admitted. No questions asked about papers, insurance, et. Everyone is insured so the state does not bother with that costly aspect of fee collection. It cost my son all of $20.00 for flowers as a gift to the attending staff.
So, which would I prefer to have, your system or our system.
Pardoning Snowden for all past crimes and enabling his return would prevent the release of any further damaging documents. If Snowden remains within US jurisdiction, any new leaks of his material can lead prosecutors directly to him.
Once the bleeding has stopped, the NSA and the Justice Department should together explain to the voting population the legal concept of "the fruit of the poison tree" - any intelligence gained by espionage should be inadmissible in court outside of direct, existential threats.
All governments engage in espionage to some extent, and our goal should not be to remove our "poison garden" and blind ourselves, but to ensure that state secrets are not used as a weapon against the populace.
Snowdon has no documents, they were distributed to a number of newspapers. He is not a criminal, but a citizen who pointed out, via the public, the wrong doing that happens when the government institutions are not audited.
Imagine if you actually audited the senators or congress for expenses or lobbying. Wow, would you find excesses galore.
I have purchased multiple keyboards over the years, and as the lettering or dirt soils the unit, I replace same. Most of these are not deep dished on the keytops, and have that grating feeling when depressing a key.
My IBM keyboard with the ps2 plug was borrowed by my grandchild, and the plug was damaged by her, when she tryed to reinsert the plug into the socket.
Is it possible to just snip off the ps2 plug and put on a USB2 one in its place, or is there a big difference between keyboard electronics manufactured with one or the other?
My other option, probably what I may do, is open up the keyboard, and replace the full cable. Before I regret taking the wrong action, your advice would be appreciated.
When I arrived on the shore of America I had nothing.
I didn't even speak English.
To make the long story short - two of the three factors were very vital for my survival, and ultimately put me to where I am - except for the "superiority" factor, because I was less than a nothing back then.
As I grow more accustomed to the American lives, I get to know people from different cultures - for one reason or another, I find one group very very interesting - the Jews.
They are in so many ways so similar to the Chinese - and yet, they are far superior to the Chinese (yes, insecurity complex at play here) in that the Jews have a purpose in their own private lives and also for their community lives - on the other hand, most Chinese do not.
At the end of the day, the success of the Jews is not a fluke - their culture is structured in such a way that death of one member is nothing - even a massacre of millions to the Jews is nothing - as long as their culture gets to live on.
BBC has a very interesting program on the revival of Jewish culture in Krakow, Poland -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...
What the Chinese have is number. What the Jews have is determination.
But other than that, in many other aspect in lives, what the Jews are can very much be found in the Chinese.
And I am not the only one who is saying this - read the following article (written by a Jew) to find out what he says ---
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/C...
===
As a Jew, we were given the top three important qualities to rank careers. Teacher, Doctor, and Business Man.
Teacher to spread knowledge, Doctor to heal the sick, and Business man to give employment to the citizens, so that they may live without stress. The rabbi was number 4.
Our parents wanted us to have careers that are portable. If we had to leave a country because of war, we would be able to start up elsewhere. That obliged us to do well in school, to include fluency in a second language, and to chose friends who were as studious as were we. We also shunned wine, women and song.
Today, we have become soft, seaking leasure instead of knowledge and skills. We live in the TV set age, where we want to watch shows, instead of study. I believe that is the reason that Jews, Chinese, and other first and second generation immigrants surpass native borns is due to their instinct to have security.
but a pardon for his crimes, a pack of beers and a a badge that says "I stated the obvious"
My view is that the only reason for Snowdon to return to the USA would be health problems of his parents. He is comfortable where he is, and over time, will fall in love and marry an educated woman. Putin will not make efforts to force Snowdon to leave Russia, as Putin will be preoccupied with internal affairs pertaining to cost overruns for SEW CHEE (grin)
By the time they get to college, this "tiny difference" adds up to more than one semester.
Not all tiny differences add up. My parents used to pull me out of school for a week most years for family vacations etc. Over the course of school from K-12 then I lost a full semester easy. Plus the flus, doctors appointments, deaths in the family, snow days, easily another couple months. I STILL maintain it didn't cost my education anything at all -- and that was me actively "missing" actual classroom time where the other students were still present, vs the school just not having school for that time.
This applies to everyone, including people from Chicago. If you consider that people "clock out" an hour early, then Chicago students (and teachers) also do, so the gap remains the same.
Again no. They don't mentally check out an "hour early"; they mentally check out after they've hit their concentration / absorption / knowledge retention limit, or whatever you'd like to call it; or completed their major tasks for the day. Extending or shortening the "day" by an hour makes no difference to how long you can concentrate. It just changes how much time you waste after your 'done'.
[...] you can discard that because it's a mere 0.13$ in his pockets every minute...
No I can't discard taht. Because that's 13 cents a minute every minute. Its a small value, but it accumulates in a very understable way. But not everything works like that. Learning is more "chunky"; in that you learn in chunks. When I took math, for example, I was good at it, I absorbed a typical "lesson" within the first 10-15 minutes of the class, and then got bored. Some of my classmates had a rougher time, and it took most of the lesson. Others just didn't grok it even with 45 minutes, and needed after school tutors etc.
But the point is the lesson is absorbed as a chunk. Adding 1 minute to each math class I ever took would have been several hours more "math class" in my life but with no benefit to me whatsoever. The teacher wouldn't present 1/60th of a new concept in that extra minute that would graually accumulate and be the equivalent of university Calculus I by the end of highschool. That's not how learning works, spending 1 extra minute each day doesn't give you an extra lesson learned after the end of each month.
Either the teacher has enough time to teach the concepts or they don't. Kids learn at different rates, so the average lesson is designed around most of the kids fully understanding it within the first half of the period; the last half is is for the slower kids, and for practice problems.
Adding a minute to each class would have accomplished essentially nothing. It doesn't accumulate benefit the way getting paid a few cents extra per minute does.
There is a difference between a poor teacher and a poor performing teacher. Take a bright person, and put him/her in a school with limited resources, and continue to take away the resources, a little per year, and who do you blame? Of course, the teacher, not the school board.
Second, instead of 21 to 23 students per class, assign 31-33 per class. Do that and you say goodbye to individual attention. I bet in some schools, the teachers have to shell out money from their own pockets to buy resources that the schoolboard considers frivolous.
Yeah, put the blame where it belongs. Parents who never sit with their child to see what they are learning. Some of our public schools are offering extra programming. My grandkids get 3 days per week of after class homework time, paid for by the parents at a small fee ($40/child/semester). The kids in that group get what the parent should be providing-- follow up and explanations, and encouragement to the students.
Time for inward inspection. Parents, are you doing what is a normal parent role? To both parents work, find time with your child to oversee what they are understanding. Our school classrooms now have a basket where ipads, androids, cellphones, and electronic gadgets are dropped therein, until the class is out. No facebook access allowed, except at lunch hours..
It is easy to ridicule this as a benefit to the privileged, but our current funding of education, primarily with property taxes, is the root of much of the inequality in America. Property taxes are high in areas with high incomes, and low in areas of low incomes. Low income people also tend to have more school age kids. So the result is that rich kids attend schools with good teachers, libraries, computer labs, music programs, etc., where they only associate with other rich kids. Moving to a system of funding based on a broader tax base would do a lot to create more equality of opportunity.
Here where I live, school boards derive their revenue from property taxes and from provincial handouts. Both are based on head-counts, and not locations. The provincial government wanted to have two school boards -- an English one and a French one for the province. Each would not have government representatives on the board of directors. The question is, "for how long?" The idea was defeated.
In my 1000 square foot house I spend $1000 a year on electricity. How exactly would I pay for $15K - $20K worth of solar cells in 5 years?
At that price, you would be looking at a 15-20 kW system. You would also have a hard time fitting that many solar panels on a 1000 square foot house, unless you redesigned the roof specifically for solar. A more realistic estimate for your house would be $5-6k for a 5 kW system.
I guess I could go all electric, which would cost me another $5 in appliances.
I would be more interested in knowing if a motorized generator could provide electric power to the wheels in place of a transmission. I am wondering if the losses in gas engine, and drive train consume more fuel per kilometer (mile) tnan the generator with electric drive motors.
I am curious to know about the comparison of a gasoline powered car, powering electric drive motors.
A new 40 gallon electric water heater goes for $240 and a new freestanding electric range goes for $350 at Lowes. A new electric heat pump (Air Conditioner/Heater) would be a bit more, but still well under $5k (I'm assuming you meant five thousand with your $5 number)
I might break even in 15 years, about the time I would need to replace the solar cells.
Modern panels decrease their output by less than one half of one percent per year, often with a warranty backing up their claims. For example, the SunPower X-Series solar panel warranty guaranties a less than 0.4% decline per year for 25 years. So at 15 years, you are looking at panels that are still producing at least 94% of their original capacity - hardly needing replacement.
By then they should be cheeper and more efficient. So yea by about 2030 solar would probably take care of my needs.
Solar panels will continue to get cheaper (a few cents per watt) as production scales up. They will also get a bit more efficient (a few percent) as manufacturing processes improve. However, don't plan on any disruptive technology advancements to occur in the next 15 years that fundamentally change how home solar installations work.
Princeton will have the last laugh as facebook will be dead before it.
I am not sure of that. The USA trend is to ship good jobs offshore, and keep the service jobs. Service jobs are low paying.
If tuition is beyon the abilities of the low paying earners, who will attend. If Princton hit 75% occupency, they probably going to lose money. And the much lower tuition costs of non-USA universities means that there will be a substantial brain-drain, compounding the problem.
Montreal Canada student rentals are about $1000, sharable for two or three students. Foreign fees are about 12-14K/year, (7k/semester), and our universities compare with UCLA, Stanford, MIT, and all the IVY league names. Students who come here, pickup a French boy/girl friend, and a second language, enjoyment with a city that has great schools and great reasonable cost cuisine.
Enroll in a European University, (if you have the marks), and here again, you will not have to mortgage your life with Education debt.
Imagine what these numbers would be if they actually knew what the fuck they were doing.
If you cant sell windows 8.x then you do not require the support staff. That translates into big big expense savings.
Also, netwokring costs are down, because of the number of W8 pcs sold.
And by no longer really supporting W7, because it is almost legacy bullet proof, again, more savings.
And yes, the xbox is a winner, particularly with Kinect. An overpriced toy (XB) that is purely for wel heeled gamers.
Or is it for home computing too?
I'd be less cynical in this particular case: it looks like a genuinely innovative bit of middle-man work, which could serve its target audience better than the current solutions. (If it doesn't, it will of course fail.)
PayPal was an innovation at the time it was new, and served its users better than anything else out there. T-Mobile's new idea looks similar: it aims to serve customers in a way banks are for some reason reluctant or unable to do.
There is a place in the world for these 'middle-men' roles.
In Canada we have ING bank, which is a branchless bank. You get a debit and credit card, can have your payroll deposited to your account, or transfer money to it. Their fees are the lowest in the country, and their interest a touch better than banks. You may even get your mortgage from them.
We are a checkless society, but for a fee, you may get checks to issue. (Many landlords want a dozen post-dated cheques for the rent, so you may obtain this).
My favourite passwords are with words I made up. Gronk, eilsel and rabuf (or is that fubar), Then I add a character or two of punctionation, from the dollar sign, to the octothorpe (# ) to the pound £ and even the character which is not part of the USA keyboard () or Euro Symbol.
If the word is too short, I append a 001 to extend it.
The recording industry, the biggest bunch of middleman thieves ever, is finally losing its free ride. You don't NEED a record company anymore, you can be your own! If they didn't think they were dying they wouldn't be violently throwing tantrums everywhere - lobbying for really radical unilateral changes to the law, suing regular everyday people for "piracy" to the point of bankruptcy, hassling bars/restaurants (usually mom and pop operations, barely making it as it is) into paying commercial licensing fees for music, etc.
A band now can cut their own album and sell it on iTunes, Amazon or a host of other music sites and retain a lot more of the proceeds. Back in the day even large, famous acts were getting stiffed by the record companies! Thanks in part to the way that record companies have pushed musicians up against the wall now for many years the market is now to a point where the artists don't even make money on the albums themselves. Instead they make the money at concerts, both on tickets and on merchandise. An artist now almost has to *give away* the music (many seem to - look on Youtube for all of the "full album" videos) as the loss leader in hopes of getting people to their concert. Artists can post samples on Youtube (at no cost) to drive sales and exposure. The record company middleman has less and less importance in a marketplace like this.
I'm glad to see that more and more musicians are standing up for themselves and taking advantage of the offerings that don't involve RIAA-related entities. If the entity doesn't add value they shouldn't have a role in the marketplace anymore.
The RIAA reminds me of Kodak corp. Kodak Corp was ill equiped to move from film to digital. And today we know that even our dental xrays or other xrays are being digitalized.
So, RIAA, realize you are a Kodak Corp. Your days are numbered, We really know that change is difficult for you to accept, but, thats life. Do you require other examples of businesses that have died because of technology? One that is gone is the carbon ink ribbon manufacturer, the typewriter for which it was manufactured, line printers and more.
Now to tackle e-books....
When I hear news like these I always wonder what type of idiot thinks that shooting the texter solves anything?
Thank you for providing an answer.
p.s. The shooter will spend the rest of his life in jail, how's that preferable to someone annoyingly texting in a movie?
And as a Canadian, I wonder about all the gun killings in the USA and the school shootings and the anger shooting and anger killings and the NRA and their $$$ lobbying. Americans, keep on killing innocents, nothing wrong with having guns for everyone. After all, there are snakes, and other dangerious vermon roaming the streets, cattle rustlers, and the need to protect your ranch, (stolen from the indians) from being stolen from you. And to make certain your slaves don't excape.
Time to become civil, don't you think? Without universal right to guns, a good 1/3 of US prisons would empty as there would have been no incarcerations due to shootings and people injured or killed.
Microsoft refuses to acknowledge the one simple truth that could save them:
No one who chooses to use a PC instead of a tablet wants to see Metro. Ever.
My son-in-law, a staunch windows 7 user, won a laptop with W8.1 on it. He is a techie, and after about two weeks, stated he liked it. I really found it good, fast, and easy to use.
With Ballmer leaving the company and a major reorganization underway, it'll be the next Microsoft CEO's task to make sure that Windows 9 is a hit; in fact, considering that rumored 2015 release date, shepherding the OS could become that executive's first major test."
Actually, it could be both the next executive's first and last test.
Momentum is important, Windows lost momentum. MS will have to beat Google. Can MS do it? (only if they give W9 away for free, as a base version, and sell add-ons. That is my perspective.
To answer your questions:
- It runs at about 35W under normal load.
- The $200 included brand-new from NewEgg power supply, RAM, CPU and motherboard as well as a used 2U rackmount case w/ CD-ROM drive and fans. The SSD was new from a local PC shop.
- It's 1 port on the mobo and a 4-port PCIe NIC
Sure, there may be bottlenecks, but pretty much every home router has bottlenecks too. I can't tell you how many 802.11n routers I've seen with only 10/100 wired ports. If just comparing on price, a DIY jobbie will almost always beat a store-bought router. In the end, all you're truly paying for is convenience. It's worth it to some people, but not to others.
Can you start with a Raseberry, and build up to a 8 port DD-WRT router running 1AC? Not all ports would be at the speed capability of a 1AC, but at least one to be reserved for it
That isn't true at all, in fact quite the opposite. The information age has empowered customers over the last two decades, and marketing departments have to work with this fact (the exact words I've heard used are "more powerful customers," which are customers described as having easier access to competitors as well as doing research on the internet.)
With a lot of the cheap stuff I buy, I've had so many of these companies follow up and ask me to write a review of their product, because it tends to be a lot harder to sell something with few reviews (or negative reviews) and that is a direct result of customer empowerment.
And I don't know what all this talk about shit products is either - the quality of everything I buy these days is much better than before, and I pay less for it. I very rarely have to replace something because the old one broke, it's almost always because I wanted something new and improved instead. I own a lot of material goods that are very nice, ranging from my Nexus 4 to my 55" Sony TV, both of which I paid peanuts for relative to what stuff used to cost a long time ago, and it's much better than the stuff I bought back when. If this so called "race to the bottom" of yours was true, then my Nexus 4 would be something worse than the 90's brick phone, and my old big rear projection 55" HDTV that cost $3,800 back in 2001 would have better picture quality than the 55" $1,500 LED-LCD HDTV I have now - yet it doesn't, it looks like garbage in comparison.
Personally I think these changes are working out great. I know you socialist types reject anything that isn't somehow "organic" or "wholesome" but I prefer working smart over working hard, and that's exactly what these changes are. Being able to avoid using somebody's services is a good thing because it frees up that labor resource to work on something else. On the down side you get frictional unemployment, but on the up side the economy grows. This is why today's poor are wealthier than ever, and food is cheaper than ever.
In other words, who needs a middle class when the poor have a higher standard of living today than the middle class and even some of the wealthy of any period earlier than the 60's? The difference between middle class after all is just an arbitrary number on a spreadsheet that some government bureaucrat decided upon.
I have a real problem to find a universal definition of middle class. I am writing as a man, so understand the following.
In my day, my wife could and did stay home to look after the kids full time, on my single salary. To me that was middle class living. Middle class gave us the freedom to buy a home, to send the kids to camp, to save for their education, and to enjoy a 40 hour work week. Today, a work-week as I recently experienced my last contract started the moment we get to our project at the office, and because of VPN, and long commute times, we add extra work at home after hours. We give free hours to the job because we love our work, and we take the hours away from a social life or participating with family. Away from the job is as important as being dedicated. Middle class today requires two salaries, and little to no free time the partner and the kids.
What is your definition of middle class? Material wealth? Collections of smart phones, laptops, TVs in every room, swimming pool in the back yard, travel?