Believe it or not UCF is actually a "better than average" university. I can only really speak to their engineering schools which are largely considered 2nd tier (under MIT, GA Tech, etc.). I don't understand how reading published materials could be considered cheating. It's entirely possible that many students got the test bank as one reference amongst others (the book, lecture, notes, etc.) It was poor form of the Professor to not create his own tests. *shrug*
First of all, he was totally bluffing. They might be able to have a REALLY GOOD IDEA of who cheated, but it would never stand up in court. And if you're kicking a bunch of people out of a University, expect at least some of them to take it to court. Fortunately for the professor people would start talking and eventually most if not all of the names of the cheaters would be known merely from confessions.
More importantly, I can't imagine why any professor would think any previously published materials would not be available for study by the students, be it "test banks" published by the book publishers, previous years' exams, etc. Unless the student(s) literally broke into his office and stole the test bank they didn't do anything immoral imho.
Linux is a server OS that has been migrated to desktops, cell phones, set-top boxes, and tons of other devices. Frankly I don't think there's anything wrong with Android. The primary issue is that most manufacturers can't put together a decent hardware/UI package. I had an opportunity to play with a soon-to-be released Android tablet device and I was taken aback at how atrocious the feedback was on the touchscreen. I thought the iPad was horrible with being responsive to touch/slides but wow. Is that Google/Android's fault? No, it's the touchscreen manufacturer's fault.
Incidentally, many of the early settlers were criminals of some sort. They couldn't convince other people to get on those ships. For the first few hundred people though I'm sure there's enough upstanding Ph.D.s and such who would be interested in going.
Interestingly, if you'd purchased AAPL stock in 1980 (earliest I could find a quote) with that money you'd have over $60k. Looks like buying the PC was a better investment.
I think I work with the engineer you mentioned. Just last month he was telling me about the joys of writing his own socket code and XML parsing code to talk to that new-fangled web service thing over there. It was silly that it used such a verbose messaging protocol but whatever.
If it helps, I use Adblock and Flashblock extensions in Chrome and almost never see any ads at all. I used to use noscript on FF but haven't (yet) found the need to disable javascript on Chrome.
I'm honestly curious what you mean by this. What kind of spam are you experiencing? I pretty much only use Chrome these days and haven't noticed anything.
If only there were some sort of encryption standard that individual websites could implement which would cause the browser and server to encrypt the data between them. Some sort of socket layer which is secured via encryption. That would readily solve these problems. Oh computer gods, why hast thou forsaken us?
I also recall them announcing a while back that you could get preferred pricing if you were willing to let your compute cycles occur during off-hours. Sounds like a win-win.
In the case of GAE "the server" is thousands upon thousands of small servers, not a giant mainframe that rests in a single physical location. Also, GAE isn't THAT inflexible except in the persistence portion. It's not the end all be all solution for everything. I would go for a more "conventional" solution for my random small business home page/online store. If I wanted to run weather simulations, perhaps even serious number crunching on my Facebook data, etc. etc. I might rent space out of the cloud instead of provisioning physical servers in my network. If you're doing anything at the scale at which the cloud computing stuff is really beneficial you're doing a LOT of custom code anyways so the uniqueness of GAE isn't a big deal.
Yeah, you're probably right. But it doesn't make sense when joined with the comment about us paying twice what they pay in universal coverage countries. Because the people that are actually paying that "twice the cost" do not, generally, have the "worse outcome" being mentioned.
Also.. if the health care costs are built into the tax system there's a CHANCE said idiot will have paid at least for a portion of the cost of him going to the emergency room for his headache. In the current system there's zero chance of said idiot with no coverage having paid for it.
So you contend that me paying for an idiot to go to a regular doctor will somehow deter that idiot from going to an emergency room with a headache? Citation needed.
I say that raising the price of the emergency room visit will deter the idiot from going to the emergency room. And you already provided the evidence: They aren't going to regular doctors, why? Because regular doctors cost money, emergency rooms don't.
How exactly will raising the cost of the emergency room (which is paid for by non-idiots like you and me) going to deter the guy who walks in and gets free coverage because he doesn't have any money?
You think if he could go to a regular doctor visit for free he wouldn't choose that over sitting in line behind a bunch of people with open wounds for hours on end at an emergency room?
His coverage is better, our costs go down. Sounds like a win-win to me. If you think getting him to actually pay for it is possible I've got some beach from property in Arizona I'd like to sell you.
Other than the fact that every single western nation with socialized health care pays about half what we currently pay for premiums + copays... no, I don't have anything to base that claim on. It's entirely possible that someone could dream up a socialized health plan that is more than twice the cost of every other modern socialized plan. I'll grant you that.
I agree 100% with your statement. There's one glaring thing missing in your list though, and that's politically viable. There aren't, IMHO, other, better, politically viable, ways to do it.
It's not about small business owners offering health benefits (or not). It's about not wanting to give up the health benefits you have at your current employer because when you're starting up your small business you will either not have coverage or you'll be dishing out huge amounts of money to pay for individual plans.
Why would anyone want an overbearing intrusive for-profit corporation controlling their healthcare?
I know, sometimes it's hard to think of people who exist outside of the two simplified political buckets described to you by your friends in the mass media, but if you try real hard one day you might get it.
I fail to see how paying for any idiot to walk into an emergency room because they have a headache is going to spur entrepreneurship!
What you actually fail to see is that you're already paying for that idiot. The (realistic in modern society) alternative is to acknowledge that you're doing this and offer to pay for that person to go to a regular doctor where the cost is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Those things are a drop in the bucket. If you wanted to really go to the end of the spectrum of minimizing government intervention you'd have to do other things. The real costs are tied up in the medical associations that control (read: limit) certification and college programs. They openly admit to controlling supply of doctors, dietitians, physical therapists, etc. in order to maintain salary of those positions. You could even go so far as to remove the whole concept of prescriptions. Why pay $150 (copay + premiums) to go to a doctor when I have the sniffles when all I want is the $15 antibiotic?
I posted it to another person but I'll repeat it for you. I have a hard time believing that the increase in taxes wouldn't be close to parity with most peoples' insurance premiums + copays.
You act as if the higher taxes will come from peoples current disposable income. It won't, it should be pretty close to parity with what they're spending now on health care between insurance and copays. The average person/corporation should see very little change in their costs. Sure, as with any change, some people will do better than others in the transition, but it shouldn't be more than a few percentage points off one way or the other.
What is the functional difference to you as an individual between a fine and a tax? You would normally pay a tax for generating income. Unless of course you buy an AC, in which case you'd get a credit against some or all of those taxes. If you've earned enough money to purchase health care but don't you'll have a tax/fine if you don't purchase health care. People who can't afford it will be (and already are) given it for free. The mandate is just an awkwardly worded flat income tax.
It always makes me laugh when people who are clearly conservatives complain about Obama not delivering on his promises of (as you so aptly put it) "radical change." Shouldn't that mean you're ecstatic with his performance? I personally didn't support him or McCain so I don't have any skin in the game wrt "my guy" winning or losing. Just think the broken record rhetoric is silly.
Because we live in a Republic, not a Democracy. The Electoral College doesn't exist to give you personally a voice, it exists to give smaller states (and the people in them) a voice at all.
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Believe it or not UCF is actually a "better than average" university. I can only really speak to their engineering schools which are largely considered 2nd tier (under MIT, GA Tech, etc.). I don't understand how reading published materials could be considered cheating. It's entirely possible that many students got the test bank as one reference amongst others (the book, lecture, notes, etc.) It was poor form of the Professor to not create his own tests. *shrug*
First of all, he was totally bluffing. They might be able to have a REALLY GOOD IDEA of who cheated, but it would never stand up in court. And if you're kicking a bunch of people out of a University, expect at least some of them to take it to court. Fortunately for the professor people would start talking and eventually most if not all of the names of the cheaters would be known merely from confessions.
More importantly, I can't imagine why any professor would think any previously published materials would not be available for study by the students, be it "test banks" published by the book publishers, previous years' exams, etc. Unless the student(s) literally broke into his office and stole the test bank they didn't do anything immoral imho.
Linux is a server OS that has been migrated to desktops, cell phones, set-top boxes, and tons of other devices. Frankly I don't think there's anything wrong with Android. The primary issue is that most manufacturers can't put together a decent hardware/UI package. I had an opportunity to play with a soon-to-be released Android tablet device and I was taken aback at how atrocious the feedback was on the touchscreen. I thought the iPad was horrible with being responsive to touch/slides but wow. Is that Google/Android's fault? No, it's the touchscreen manufacturer's fault.
Incidentally, many of the early settlers were criminals of some sort. They couldn't convince other people to get on those ships. For the first few hundred people though I'm sure there's enough upstanding Ph.D.s and such who would be interested in going.
Interestingly, if you'd purchased AAPL stock in 1980 (earliest I could find a quote) with that money you'd have over $60k. Looks like buying the PC was a better investment.
I think I work with the engineer you mentioned. Just last month he was telling me about the joys of writing his own socket code and XML parsing code to talk to that new-fangled web service thing over there. It was silly that it used such a verbose messaging protocol but whatever.
If it helps, I use Adblock and Flashblock extensions in Chrome and almost never see any ads at all. I used to use noscript on FF but haven't (yet) found the need to disable javascript on Chrome.
I'm honestly curious what you mean by this. What kind of spam are you experiencing? I pretty much only use Chrome these days and haven't noticed anything.
If only there were some sort of encryption standard that individual websites could implement which would cause the browser and server to encrypt the data between them. Some sort of socket layer which is secured via encryption. That would readily solve these problems. Oh computer gods, why hast thou forsaken us?
I also recall them announcing a while back that you could get preferred pricing if you were willing to let your compute cycles occur during off-hours. Sounds like a win-win.
In the case of GAE "the server" is thousands upon thousands of small servers, not a giant mainframe that rests in a single physical location. Also, GAE isn't THAT inflexible except in the persistence portion. It's not the end all be all solution for everything. I would go for a more "conventional" solution for my random small business home page/online store. If I wanted to run weather simulations, perhaps even serious number crunching on my Facebook data, etc. etc. I might rent space out of the cloud instead of provisioning physical servers in my network. If you're doing anything at the scale at which the cloud computing stuff is really beneficial you're doing a LOT of custom code anyways so the uniqueness of GAE isn't a big deal.
Yeah, you're probably right. But it doesn't make sense when joined with the comment about us paying twice what they pay in universal coverage countries. Because the people that are actually paying that "twice the cost" do not, generally, have the "worse outcome" being mentioned.
Also.. if the health care costs are built into the tax system there's a CHANCE said idiot will have paid at least for a portion of the cost of him going to the emergency room for his headache. In the current system there's zero chance of said idiot with no coverage having paid for it.
So you contend that me paying for an idiot to go to a regular doctor will somehow deter that idiot from going to an emergency room with a headache? Citation needed.
I say that raising the price of the emergency room visit will deter the idiot from going to the emergency room. And you already provided the evidence: They aren't going to regular doctors, why? Because regular doctors cost money, emergency rooms don't.
How exactly will raising the cost of the emergency room (which is paid for by non-idiots like you and me) going to deter the guy who walks in and gets free coverage because he doesn't have any money? You think if he could go to a regular doctor visit for free he wouldn't choose that over sitting in line behind a bunch of people with open wounds for hours on end at an emergency room? His coverage is better, our costs go down. Sounds like a win-win to me. If you think getting him to actually pay for it is possible I've got some beach from property in Arizona I'd like to sell you.
Other than the fact that every single western nation with socialized health care pays about half what we currently pay for premiums + copays... no, I don't have anything to base that claim on. It's entirely possible that someone could dream up a socialized health plan that is more than twice the cost of every other modern socialized plan. I'll grant you that.
I agree 100% with your statement. There's one glaring thing missing in your list though, and that's politically viable. There aren't, IMHO, other, better, politically viable, ways to do it.
It's not about small business owners offering health benefits (or not). It's about not wanting to give up the health benefits you have at your current employer because when you're starting up your small business you will either not have coverage or you'll be dishing out huge amounts of money to pay for individual plans. Why would anyone want an overbearing intrusive for-profit corporation controlling their healthcare? I know, sometimes it's hard to think of people who exist outside of the two simplified political buckets described to you by your friends in the mass media, but if you try real hard one day you might get it.
I fail to see how paying for any idiot to walk into an emergency room because they have a headache is going to spur entrepreneurship!
What you actually fail to see is that you're already paying for that idiot. The (realistic in modern society) alternative is to acknowledge that you're doing this and offer to pay for that person to go to a regular doctor where the cost is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Those things are a drop in the bucket. If you wanted to really go to the end of the spectrum of minimizing government intervention you'd have to do other things. The real costs are tied up in the medical associations that control (read: limit) certification and college programs. They openly admit to controlling supply of doctors, dietitians, physical therapists, etc. in order to maintain salary of those positions. You could even go so far as to remove the whole concept of prescriptions. Why pay $150 (copay + premiums) to go to a doctor when I have the sniffles when all I want is the $15 antibiotic?
I posted it to another person but I'll repeat it for you. I have a hard time believing that the increase in taxes wouldn't be close to parity with most peoples' insurance premiums + copays.
I don't support federal education programs. I'm a huge supporter of public education provided by the state.
You act as if the higher taxes will come from peoples current disposable income. It won't, it should be pretty close to parity with what they're spending now on health care between insurance and copays. The average person/corporation should see very little change in their costs. Sure, as with any change, some people will do better than others in the transition, but it shouldn't be more than a few percentage points off one way or the other.
What is the functional difference to you as an individual between a fine and a tax? You would normally pay a tax for generating income. Unless of course you buy an AC, in which case you'd get a credit against some or all of those taxes. If you've earned enough money to purchase health care but don't you'll have a tax/fine if you don't purchase health care. People who can't afford it will be (and already are) given it for free. The mandate is just an awkwardly worded flat income tax.
It always makes me laugh when people who are clearly conservatives complain about Obama not delivering on his promises of (as you so aptly put it) "radical change." Shouldn't that mean you're ecstatic with his performance? I personally didn't support him or McCain so I don't have any skin in the game wrt "my guy" winning or losing. Just think the broken record rhetoric is silly.
Because we live in a Republic, not a Democracy. The Electoral College doesn't exist to give you personally a voice, it exists to give smaller states (and the people in them) a voice at all.