So . . . You claim to have developed some software at work on your employer's dime (I'm assuming this because you don't say otherwise and it makes my rhetorical point stronger). Then when you quit your job, you deliberately left the code in a place where it would be vulnerable to unrecoverable deletion. Then when it disappeared (as, I again presume, you intended) and they called asking you where the files were you tried to extort them for something they had already paid for (again, I'm assuming you wrote the thing on work time because that's the sort of lazy dishonest person you appear to be). Gosh I hope your employer realises what a great hire they made.
Ray "Bones" Barboni: "Let me explain something to you. Momo is dead. Which means everything he had now belongs to Jimmy Cap, including you. Which also means, when I speak, I speak for Jimmy. E.g., from now on, you start showing me the proper fuckin' respect."
Chili Palmer: ""E.g." means "for example". What I think you want to use is "i.e."."
Ray "Bones" Barboni: "Bullshit! That's short for "ergo"."
Chili Palmer: "Ask your man."
Bodyguard: "To the best of my knowledge, "e.g." means "for example"."
Ray "Bones" Barboni: "E.g., i.e., fuck you! The point is this: When I say "jump", you say "OK", okay?"
"I cant even count the number of people I knew when I was in college who threw away the chance to become succesfull engineers (I went to an engineering school) to play WoW/Everquest/Counterstrike 15 hours a day. For every guy like this who makes a career out of gaming there are hundreds of thousands who give up their careers because they spend too much time playing video games.
Really? You can't count the number of people you personally knew who were smart and ambitious enough to get into engineering school and then (presumably) dropped out to play video games? Even 4 strikes me as an astonishingly high number (and my school had 30,000 undergrad students though that was well before the apparent plague that is WoW was invented). And you think that "hundreds of thousands" give up their careers to play video games? For argument's sake let's say 200,000 dropouts and 200,000,000 people between the ages of 18 and 65. So you think at least.1% of working age Americans have dropped out to play games. Really?
This wasn't bad but I think some clarifications might help:
1) It is extremely important to distinguish between employer-provided insurance and privately-purchased insurance. The theoretical purpose of medical insurance is not, as you say, to protect you in case of a large number of bills. It is to pool risk and collect enough money from each insured to cover the cost and a bit of rake-off for the insurer. The purpose of medical insurance *companies* is to make as much money as possible. Therein lies the rub.
Employer-provided insurance tends to be pretty good. Most people work for large companies and these companies use their bulk purchasing power to get something very close to this risk-pooling arrangement. People trying to buy insurance on their own, however, are completely at the mercy of insurance companies. They will face possibly ruinous exclusions, especially the nebulous "pre-existing condition", and a great many hurdles. The insurance companies work hard (which is expensive) to find reasons not to pay the claims of these people.
2) The long-term problem is a bit similar. If you work for a long time for a large company, you are generally well covered until Medicare (*not* Medicaid) kicks in. Increased worker mobility (i.e. decreased job security) makes the insurance problem greater.
3) Medicare hasn't been gutted (though there was a debacle recently with the new PHARMA welfare act, err, new drug benefit) because it is for old people and old people vote. Medicaid has always been pretty crappy because it is for poor people.
4) The US already has a decent program in Medicare and a very good program in the Veteran's Administration Hospitals. However, expanding these programs to universal coverage is politically impossible at the moment.
Even the mediocre NHS is far better (even Canada's crappy system is better though France's system may be best of all) from a coverage per dollar standpoint. The administrative costs associated with the US system are extreme and provide no medical benefit to anyone.
I remain convinced that the US will eventually embrace single-payer under a less corrupt Republican administration (a Nixon-to-China moment if you will) when big business republicans realize they cannot afford it any longer and faux libertarian (that's a bit of snark since I don't believe there are any *real*, i.e. uniformly consistent, libertarians) entrepreneur types realize that the dangers of leaving a job and foregoing insurance can make entrepreneurship far too risky. (I'm not entrepreneurially inclined but if I were, I'd worry a lot less about losing my house since I could always go back to the rat race and rent than losing my insurance since I might get cancer while uninsured and simply die).
As an Amurrican living in the UK, this explains something that puzzled me: All UK toilets don't seem able to flush. All you get is an anemic flow which is woefully insufficient. And not just because of my gigantic red-white-and-blue steamers either. EVERYWHERE you go in the UK you find a toilet brush next to the toilet. Including public facilities. Why? Because their toilets can't flush (for) shit. I have this vision of the queen having a jewel-encrusted gold-plated toilet brush and having to get it out whenever she pinches off some spotted dick. I mean, it isn't the sort of thing one would want one's servants to deal with, right? Pictures would probably end up in the Sun or something.
Echostar willfully infringed Tivo's patent. Doing it millions of times doesn't make it more aceptable. To the contrary. Echostar will now license (on less favorable terms) the technology from Tivo. They will do this because if they don't, their customers will sue them. So they can either go through a bankruptcy proceeding or pay their way out of a mess entirely of their own making. The consumers are at risk because Echostar placed them there. (Anyone remember when Kodak made instant film cameras?) Tough tittie.
"Wow, isn't that the whole argument against EULAs? That there's no consideration?
"Either this ruling or EULAs will be overturned. Anything else is a double standard."
Of course there is consideration in EULAs. It doesn't take a hell of a lot for there to be consideration (think of the $1 contracts that are upheld). The money you pay is your consideration. The software (or access rights thereto) they provide is theirs. All it means is giving up something (ANYTHING!) you din't have to give up.
"Consideration" does not mean "carefully considered all the ramifications" which might be what you be getting at. I.e. a policy consideration that the parties to a EULA are so unequal in bargaining power that enforcnig the contract "offends the conscience".
The best reason to use electornic voting machines is that they allow many people with disabilities (especially the visually impaired) vote in private w/o assistance of the 97 year olds working the election. This is not a good reason to use shitty electronic voting machines however.
I want "Jurassic Park"-style cloning and futuristic intelligence enhancement for the SOLE PURPOSE of creating an army of Tyranosaurs that will repeatedly rape W and anyone that voted for him in 2004. But even I acknowledge that this was a joke that he INTENDED to tell. This is too stupid even for Slashdot. That's what Fark is for.
That's just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-capitalistic garbage. I'll have you know that outgoing Exxon CEO, to whom you obliquely refer, was earning a mere $26,384.62/hour. ($686 million over 13 years, assuming 2000 working hours a year.) And I bet you pretend you'd be willing to handle the demanding tasks of a planet-raping CEO for half that. As if! It'll be a sad day for America when our CEOs are outsourced to India. Won't someone think of the billionaires?
"It's like AMD or Intel selling an OS. And saying 'you must use this OS with this processor'. That trick didn't fan out to well for IBM (System/360 anyone?) and wouldn't work for x86 processors either."
Yeah, nobody, not AMD, not Intel, NOBODY would want to repeat the s/360 debacle. Domintaing an industry for decades, tens of billions in sales. Really. Who wants that?
My all time favorite magazine cover is the Spetember 10-16, 1994 Economist which bears the headline "The Trouble with Mergers" which features two camels humping and the female looks decidedly unhappy. And yes, I used humping deliberately.
I was forced to conclude that Peter Jackson hates the audience. Now, it is true that just before viewing LOTR:FOTR I drank a washtub-sized coke at the piza joint. But *man* that's a long movie. And I'm holding out, crossing my legs, trying to concentrate on the action instead of my bladder. And then there's a fuckin' WATERFALL. Oh man I gotta go. And then he does it AGAIN with the flood during the ent attack in Two Towers. Fortunately I was prepared that time. I saved my cup from the pizza joint.
I recently moved to Cumbria in the UK and signed up for DSL. I went to the library for some slightly overpriced (2 quid per hour) net access and checked that my exchange was supported by BT for DSL. It was. I went to virgin.net and signed up because, although not the cheapest, they were reasonable and have no minimum contract. They provided a free modem that came about 5 days after I placed the order and two days before it was scheduled to be turned on. Morning of, I hooked it up and it worked. I'm paying for 512K but (for now anyway) getting 2Mb. I had a technical glitch with a Win2K installation, I sent them an email, and they sent me an accurate helpful answer in 4 hours.
In short, while there may barely be indoor plumbing in Cumbria, broadband is no big deal. OTOH, getting a bank account was a pain in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess: the auditors are political appointees?
So . . . You claim to have developed some software at work on your employer's dime (I'm assuming this because you don't say otherwise and it makes my rhetorical point stronger). Then when you quit your job, you deliberately left the code in a place where it would be vulnerable to unrecoverable deletion. Then when it disappeared (as, I again presume, you intended) and they called asking you where the files were you tried to extort them for something they had already paid for (again, I'm assuming you wrote the thing on work time because that's the sort of lazy dishonest person you appear to be). Gosh I hope your employer realises what a great hire they made.
Personally, I'm glad he's gone. If Bill were alive today, the idea of a second President Bush would have killed him.
I hope you get raped to death.
Ray "Bones" Barboni: "Let me explain something to you. Momo is dead. Which means everything he had now belongs to Jimmy Cap, including you. Which also means, when I speak, I speak for Jimmy. E.g., from now on, you start showing me the proper fuckin' respect."
Chili Palmer: ""E.g." means "for example". What I think you want to use is "i.e."."
Ray "Bones" Barboni: "Bullshit! That's short for "ergo"."
Chili Palmer: "Ask your man."
Bodyguard: "To the best of my knowledge, "e.g." means "for example"."
Ray "Bones" Barboni: "E.g., i.e., fuck you! The point is this: When I say "jump", you say "OK", okay?"
In other words, we shouldn't blame you because you voted for Kodos.
Really? You can't count the number of people you personally knew who were smart and ambitious enough to get into engineering school and then (presumably) dropped out to play video games? Even 4 strikes me as an astonishingly high number (and my school had 30,000 undergrad students though that was well before the apparent plague that is WoW was invented). And you think that "hundreds of thousands" give up their careers to play video games? For argument's sake let's say 200,000 dropouts and 200,000,000 people between the ages of 18 and 65. So you think at least .1% of working age Americans have dropped out to play games. Really?
This wasn't bad but I think some clarifications might help:
1) It is extremely important to distinguish between employer-provided insurance and privately-purchased insurance. The theoretical purpose of medical insurance is not, as you say, to protect you in case of a large number of bills. It is to pool risk and collect enough money from each insured to cover the cost and a bit of rake-off for the insurer. The purpose of medical insurance *companies* is to make as much money as possible. Therein lies the rub.
Employer-provided insurance tends to be pretty good. Most people work for large companies and these companies use their bulk purchasing power to get something very close to this risk-pooling arrangement. People trying to buy insurance on their own, however, are completely at the mercy of insurance companies. They will face possibly ruinous exclusions, especially the nebulous "pre-existing condition", and a great many hurdles. The insurance companies work hard (which is expensive) to find reasons not to pay the claims of these people.
2) The long-term problem is a bit similar. If you work for a long time for a large company, you are generally well covered until Medicare (*not* Medicaid) kicks in. Increased worker mobility (i.e. decreased job security) makes the insurance problem greater.
3) Medicare hasn't been gutted (though there was a debacle recently with the new PHARMA welfare act, err, new drug benefit) because it is for old people and old people vote. Medicaid has always been pretty crappy because it is for poor people.
4) The US already has a decent program in Medicare and a very good program in the Veteran's Administration Hospitals. However, expanding these programs to universal coverage is politically impossible at the moment.
Even the mediocre NHS is far better (even Canada's crappy system is better though France's system may be best of all) from a coverage per dollar standpoint. The administrative costs associated with the US system are extreme and provide no medical benefit to anyone.
I remain convinced that the US will eventually embrace single-payer under a less corrupt Republican administration (a Nixon-to-China moment if you will) when big business republicans realize they cannot afford it any longer and faux libertarian (that's a bit of snark since I don't believe there are any *real*, i.e. uniformly consistent, libertarians) entrepreneur types realize that the dangers of leaving a job and foregoing insurance can make entrepreneurship far too risky. (I'm not entrepreneurially inclined but if I were, I'd worry a lot less about losing my house since I could always go back to the rat race and rent than losing my insurance since I might get cancer while uninsured and simply die).
Not to start a semantic argument or anything but I think you should get your terms straight first.
As an Amurrican living in the UK, this explains something that puzzled me: All UK toilets don't seem able to flush. All you get is an anemic flow which is woefully insufficient. And not just because of my gigantic red-white-and-blue steamers either. EVERYWHERE you go in the UK you find a toilet brush next to the toilet. Including public facilities. Why? Because their toilets can't flush (for) shit. I have this vision of the queen having a jewel-encrusted gold-plated toilet brush and having to get it out whenever she pinches off some spotted dick. I mean, it isn't the sort of thing one would want one's servants to deal with, right? Pictures would probably end up in the Sun or something.
Echostar willfully infringed Tivo's patent. Doing it millions of times doesn't make it more aceptable. To the contrary. Echostar will now license (on less favorable terms) the technology from Tivo. They will do this because if they don't, their customers will sue them. So they can either go through a bankruptcy proceeding or pay their way out of a mess entirely of their own making. The consumers are at risk because Echostar placed them there. (Anyone remember when Kodak made instant film cameras?) Tough tittie.
Slashdot has finally bottomed: basic literacy now marks you as teh man.
Are there any tarballs though?
Of course there is consideration in EULAs. It doesn't take a hell of a lot for there to be consideration (think of the $1 contracts that are upheld). The money you pay is your consideration. The software (or access rights thereto) they provide is theirs. All it means is giving up something (ANYTHING!) you din't have to give up.
"Consideration" does not mean "carefully considered all the ramifications" which might be what you be getting at. I.e. a policy consideration that the parties to a EULA are so unequal in bargaining power that enforcnig the contract "offends the conscience".
Wow. They must have a HUGE basement.
The best reason to use electornic voting machines is that they allow many people with disabilities (especially the visually impaired) vote in private w/o assistance of the 97 year olds working the election. This is not a good reason to use shitty electronic voting machines however.
Racism isn't funny and, yes, this is racist.
I want "Jurassic Park"-style cloning and futuristic intelligence enhancement for the SOLE PURPOSE of creating an army of Tyranosaurs that will repeatedly rape W and anyone that voted for him in 2004. But even I acknowledge that this was a joke that he INTENDED to tell. This is too stupid even for Slashdot. That's what Fark is for.
That's just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-capitalistic garbage. I'll have you know that outgoing Exxon CEO, to whom you obliquely refer, was earning a mere $26,384.62/hour. ($686 million over 13 years, assuming 2000 working hours a year.) And I bet you pretend you'd be willing to handle the demanding tasks of a planet-raping CEO for half that. As if! It'll be a sad day for America when our CEOs are outsourced to India. Won't someone think of the billionaires?
Yeah, nobody, not AMD, not Intel, NOBODY would want to repeat the s/360 debacle. Domintaing an industry for decades, tens of billions in sales. Really. Who wants that?
I loved that bit in "Hearts of Darkness". The coke came right out my nose.
What about edlin?
My all time favorite magazine cover is the Spetember 10-16, 1994 Economist which bears the headline "The Trouble with Mergers" which features two camels humping and the female looks decidedly unhappy. And yes, I used humping deliberately.
I was forced to conclude that Peter Jackson hates the audience. Now, it is true that just before viewing LOTR:FOTR I drank a washtub-sized coke at the piza joint. But *man* that's a long movie. And I'm holding out, crossing my legs, trying to concentrate on the action instead of my bladder. And then there's a fuckin' WATERFALL. Oh man I gotta go. And then he does it AGAIN with the flood during the ent attack in Two Towers. Fortunately I was prepared that time. I saved my cup from the pizza joint.
I recently moved to Cumbria in the UK and signed up for DSL. I went to the library for some slightly overpriced (2 quid per hour) net access and checked that my exchange was supported by BT for DSL. It was. I went to virgin.net and signed up because, although not the cheapest, they were reasonable and have no minimum contract. They provided a free modem that came about 5 days after I placed the order and two days before it was scheduled to be turned on. Morning of, I hooked it up and it worked. I'm paying for 512K but (for now anyway) getting 2Mb. I had a technical glitch with a Win2K installation, I sent them an email, and they sent me an accurate helpful answer in 4 hours.
In short, while there may barely be indoor plumbing in Cumbria, broadband is no big deal. OTOH, getting a bank account was a pain in the ass.