You argue for "competition", but you're listing a lot of options that are expensive as hell, while people in more civilized countries (Korea, Japan, European countries) have far, far cheaper broadband (and mobile phone) rates than we do, even with all their "evil" government regulation.
The cost of living in the US, plus paying top dollar for its sub-standard broadband, is still very competitive with all of the places you mention. Which is amazing since we subsidize all of those nations military security with the worlds largest "defense" budget.
Communication is vital to a democracy, and an expected service in this day an age
One reason why the USA is not a democracy is because peddling to what people want others to give them is toxic to a society.
expecting people to pay top dollar for it when it's easily possible to deliver it for extremely cheap prices is nothing but corporate fascism
Why aren't you providing this cheap fast broadband to people then?
In my small town (Fargo, ND), _at my house_, I have the following internet options available to me:
1) cable modem form local cable monopoly 2) qwest dsl, with qwest as the ISP 3) qwest DSL, with a competing ISP 4) qwest POTS, with any number of local or national dial-ISPs to serve me 5) I29 metro-area wireless 6) DirecWay Satellite internet service 7) Verizon's wireless data technology (is this EVDO? or something else now?) 8) GSM/GPRS 9) pringles can to a friend 10) HFLink / AX.25
I left out avian carriers. And in your metro area, you have options available to you that I don't list (WiMax/Clearwire, LTE, FIOS, various municipal broadband initiatives, etc). Heck, in different parts of town, the options change (DSL through a CLEC becomes available, for instance)
Of all of the possible "utilities", IP transit has more competeting providers available to me _at my house_ than most states or whole regions have for something like electricity. And the technololg behind most of the things I list didn't exist 25 years ago. IP transit to the home is one of the last places i want regulation, zillions of random taxes, and the innovation impediments that usually come with quasi-monopoly status.
The myth of the "last mile monopoly" is that -- a myth, at least for IP transit. There _are_ options. But few of them are "full speed, full freedom, cheapeast price". I think that is the basic complaint here, and it comes off as whining.
I've settled with a "less speed, more freedom, competitive price" option myself. Maybe your priorities are different? In almost everywhere in the US -- you can choose something else.
(I live 12 blocks from Qwest's CO for the town. There's a chance I could get a DS3 or metro ethernet or something to my house if i was rich enough...)
If the people don't beleive in justice, if there are no fair juries to be had, if we truly live in the mob rule of pure democracy, then I won't shed a tear over dispensing with monsters.
Union initiated violence by far has the worse record in this country.
While other poster(s) indicate that you are wrong, that's irrelevant. The employer absolutely ought to be able to do such a thing.
The NLRB and federally guaranteed union powers in the USA are really disgusting. I think unions are a fine thing and every employee ought to have the right to join a union -- and every employer ought to have the right to say "fuck off, you're fired immediately and forever, we will NEVER allow union labor here"
How many counterpoints does it take to repudiate this way of thinking?
My grandfather grew up in a tiny town in Kansas, uttelry poor. He was deeply affected by the personal irresponsibility and subsequent failure of his own fathers farm. He went on to serve in WW2, then work at Dow chemical, developed multiple patents, and "retired" as an organic chemistry teacher at a small college in a small midwestern town. He attended the University of Nebraska.
My dad was born into this situation -- small midwestern town, modest teacher's salary. My dad showed an outrageous aptitude for mathematics at an early age. He also attended the University of Nebraska, and exited with a BS Math in 3 years, and was the youngest american in history (at that time) to pass all the actuarial exams and become an FSA. He was one of the early integrators of software into actuarial work and about 10 years ago developed a derivatives-backed hedging software that manages an atrocious amount of money.
He is atrociously wealthy and lives quite modestly. He raised me as a single parent.
And then we get to me. Lest you think I am the product of priviledge and connection, I went to exclusively public schools and ate school lunch. I rode the bus and wore sweatpants and velcro shoes -- because they weren't a hassle for my dad to help me shop for.
Certainly I had advantages that other kids didn't have -- my dad was exceptionally fair and honest, instead of some kind of shithead alcohoilc, and if it was related to educational excellence, he spared no expense. And so we always had computers in the house, and I was able to attend summer camps for academically meritous kids (although those programs all have scholarship options, which my dad also contributed to to help other kids get the same leg-up).
And so when it came time to consider university, I had already been working in the ISP business as a highschooler, and we made some calls to industry recruiting departments asking about the impact of school name on hiring undergraduates.. and found that for CS, there really wasn't much impact.
And so I went to the University of Nebraska -- like dad, like grandpa, on a full scholarship, and now have an engineering position at Mirosoft, where I work with many other people who went to better (and worse) universities, and came from richer (and poorer) backgrounds.
So here is my dissent: People who are bright and work hard get ahead in this country -- and they do so more often, and get farther ahead, than any other country anywhere else (except perhaps in such countries where the bright are recruited for government, and where government is more obviously omnipotent than it is here).
There is certainly a near-closed group of wealthy families with wealthy kids and their wealthy colleges. But those people are irrelevant to me, and in the real world. The only time they _Become_ relevant is when they get government jobs... which is why I'm somewhere between libertarianism and anarchism... to nullify the harmful coercion of the wealthy back-patters _completely_.
Yelling sour grapes in this country about how you are born into a caste is bullshit. Especially in the software industry! How many garage-millionaires has this industry created?
If you have time to complain about class and caste, work harder. People who _have_ wealth do not keep it unless they are successful at identifying the new generation of hard working talented people can help them build the next big thing. There is no such thing as the myth of the "rich person who buries money in the ground". They have to put that money to work to keep or grow it, and that's where you come in.
Well, he works in the federal government. And that's where most of the trouble is.
One of Jefferson's ideas was that each of the states would be its own experiment in democracy; with different laws and customs and implementations of governance.
I don't know where Paul stands on various BOR amendment incorporations into/upon the several states. It will be a wonderful time in American politics when all of the other problems of federal overreach are solved and we are arguing about if the feds have the power to force 2A incorporation, for instance.
Congress is going to spend the money one way or another. He often votes against spending bills that he has allocated earmarks into, becuase he'd prefer if the spending didn't happen. But since he always loses that argument, and the money is getting spent anyway, he's sending it back to his district, since it is THIER money.
I'd put his record of financial stewardship of the people's money up against anybody. ANYBODY.
We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases.
So what are they so mad about?
Being made to look like spoiled children, that's what. Being shown to be backstabbing hypocrites. This is the political equivalent of being pantsed on the world stage.
There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul. The strong support for Wikileaks is just another example.
Certainly the mental skills are probably more important.. but your post seems to discount physical development. It shouldn't. The drivers of Formula 1 cars are some of the most physically perfect specimens in the sporting world. I'm not aware of another sport where the atheletes heartrate is sustained at the 180-200bpm level for 90+ minutes _continuously_. Many F1 drivers will lose several kg of water during a race. The neck muscles will be subjected to 5x the normal weight of head+helmet, and they will have this done to them in all axes (side to side, front to back) once every few seconds, again, for 90 or more minutes.
There may be fat baseball players and NASCAR drivers. There are no fat F1 drivers.
NASA and the US Air force don't give a shit about copyright violations. Neither does Russia nor China.
Those are the only people who can do anything about a rogue satellite. Yes, this is beyond *physical reach* of entities that would care. That's my entire point.
Incidentally, piracy in the south pacific is more prevalent than it is off the coast of Somalia.
In practice, this means that spacecraft are no more outside of national laws than seagoing ships are.
Funny you'd use that analogy, since we're talking about the Pirate Party.
Pirate ships are still operating in 2010, even though we can know the location of every surface vessel anywhere in the world on a 24/7 basis. Sea piracy is just as illegal as ever, but it still happens.
Knowing that a crime is taking place is different than having the desire/willpower/money/time/etc to do anything about it.
A satellite is beyond the jurisdiction of anyone who would normally care about copyright violation.
You know, I was hoping that would be the case about 7 years ago, when I was trying to relocate from Seattle to Minneapolis, for family reasons.
But with my 3 year Microsoft career under my belt, guess how many callbacks I got from Minneapolis companies?
Zero.
I had an internship with McDonnel Douglas, and all my pre-MS experience very hardcore unix stuff. I figured I would _at least_ get an intrview with the defense-contractor type places I was asking in Minneapolis.
Nothing.
So, I ended up staying at MS, but moved to their Fargo campus.
You should tell them that in all of your years of using linux and F/OSS software, you have never once gotten the sense that the people working on linux are trying to fuck you over.
I'm looking at the printers and scanners I have that don't work on modern 64 bit windows machines and that work just peachy on modern 64 bit linux machines.
When I come across something in Linux that doesn't work, I have the optimism that, eventually, it will get better. I've been using linux off and on for various things since kernel 0.98, and I've certainly had my waning periods of hate, but I always come back for some task or problem and things are always a bit different but always moving forward.
I don't think this is something you can say with commercial software vendors. Pick any commercial application or operating system and you'll find somebody who says "they broke that because they are assholes", and they'll more or less be correct.
I'm irate that my ubuntu machine doesn't know WTF to do with my clip-on ipod shuffle. But not so irate that I'll actually infest a machine with iTunes. iTunes actively tries to fuck me and work against my preferences. So in this case, I'll settle for software that doesn't or hardly works because it isn't done yet, over software that tries to condition me to some far away master's desires.
This notion that linux will "never" acheive $goal is silly. I used linux as my main desktop back in the 486 days, when it was much less mature, much less user friendly, and much less straightforward and compatible than it is now. I've been using windows for the last 8 years, and not because linux has gotten worse, but because windows finally got good enough, and for a home email/web machine the tradeoffs for my usage profile favor windows, for now.
The idea that linux hasn't "arrived" until it displaces Mac OS or Windows on "the desktop" is dumb. Linux is a credible alternative to just about any other operating system out there for nearly any computing domain. That's astounding.
At some point in everyones life, they have a moment of "I wish I could tell the assholes that made this how much I hate their decision". That is when people will understand the value of linux and other f/oss software. I'm sure you can find a 5:1 ratio of posts where i criticize RMS to where i extoll his virtues, but software freedom is a real issue, and RMS got it _Exactly Right_, and when that understanding awakens in a person, Linux will be there waiting, better than the last time they tried it, more readily adapted to what they want to do.
I don't give a shit if you or your friends or your mom think linux is ready for making their breakfast. I care that it can solve problems for me, today, and that it will be solving more problems for me tomorrow.
Well, I'm a MS employee, and on my machines joined to the relevant company domains, they _do_ have NAP and it does wreck your day if your machine isn't compliant. Maybe there's a way around it. Maybe there isn't. I've never bothered to look because I just want to get my job done.
As part of the "security push that never ended", that led to XPSP2 and all of the "we thought a little about security for a change" work that MS has done since, there was finally a shift in opinion internally.
The people at MS who _had_ been thinking about security usually stuck to the immutable laws, and were continuing to think about things in absolute terms, i.e. "well, they can get root, so all bets are off"
But what changed was that someone got practical instead of ideological and said, "look, the 80 hojillion windows PCs out there don't need absolute protection against a supreme attacker with infinite time. If they could get _basic_ protection against what's getting them 80% of the time, that's progress"
And so I think you need to think about NAP and most future MS security efforts in the same way. There may not be a way to keep the most brilliant / lucky / dedicated attacker from succeeding once. But there is almost always a way to keep inelegant attacks from being successful widely and repeatably. And the #1 problem on the public internet right now is NOT all of the high profile deep penetrations against single well researched targets, it's the legions of automated remote-compromises that turn Grandma's PC into a botslave.
A network protection scheme doesn't have to verify that Macs, ubuntus etc etc are "compliant", because those are noise in the signal as a percentage of customer endpoint equipment. A network protection scheme has to keep people who want to continue running MS stuff up to date and patched. It doesnt' ahve to keep windows power users from getting on the internet if they can read about registry hacks or whatever, it has to point windows neophytes at a black-holed page that has all the patches and scanners and removal tools they need to get healthy before they go out to play for the day.
In summary: the point isn't to create Sauron's eye. The point is to tell people to put on their seat belt.
The point is that infant prematurity doesn't explain the entire difference. Nor does the different means of measurement. My claim is that the US demographic differences need to be considered as a point of difference as well. That's all.
Beacuse it is hard for me to reconcile two apparent contradictions: - this is an accurate portrayal of medicine in the UK - people in the US would want this level of care for themselves.
Here the specific things i find problematic: - the survivability rate for 26 week babies in the USA is much higher than what this article claims - the doctor(s) in question, unless they are operating in Sherwood Forest, should have familiarity with babies of that gestational age - i'm not even sure what they are using the plastic bag _for_. They were respirating the baby already; the two key issues with premies of this age are warmth and moisture retention. For the latter, my children simply had a burn ointment rubbed all over their body which supplemented the immature skins moisture barrier effectiveness. I suppose you could use a plastic bag for same, as if often done when curing concrete, but the bag didn't even appear to cover the child. Was there really no burn cream available?
For warmth, skin to skin contact with the mother is more than sufficient, even in incredibly small babies. - they couldn't relocate the child for _3 days_ ? Why not?
I just find it hard to beleive that this passes for modern medicine in a developed country. Yes, kudos to the doctors for being quick witted, and most importantly, it appears the baby is in good health.
Oh - I don't necessarily disagree with you. I bring it up because there is a tremendous degree of diversity: racially, economically, culturally, etc that most european nations simply do not have to contend with.
Right. So in the US there are levels of NICU facilities (there are 3, i believe), and it works similarly in that a level foo facilitity cannot really support a child born earlier than a certain gestational age, or with certain difficulties.
The place our children stayed was a "we can do anything" level facility, and one of the reasons it had a helipad is that they went and picked up babies from all over the state that couldn't be handled in the facilities they were in. Many of the nurses that worked on my kids had special "FLIGHT NURSE" badges that basically meant they were trained to keep 20-something week infants alive in a bumpy helicopter.
There was also a special flight-rated isolette unit (incubator + semi-sealed environment with respiration support) parked in the lobby of the NICU area.
So how it would work is that the chopper from my town was usually en-route as the mom was going through pre-delivery, and the staff would pick mom and baby up and bring them back.
Regarding the demographic issue.. i saw lots of families come in (and out) of the NICU that didn't appear, from my prejudicial eyes, to be in a position to pay the bill. Their children were treated the same way by the same people.
Part of the issue is that pre-devliery care breaks down across economic strata, and in the US, there is a high correlation to racial demographics. If you look at the CDC report, you see that aggregately, african american babies have worse outcomes than white babies in the USA, who are marginally worse than hispanic babies. Part of that is socio-economic, and part of it appears to be genetics. The NICU nurses are very aware of which genders and which races seem to, correcting for other factors, appear to mature and survive at which rates. Premature Girls, as a rule, mature faster than boys, and our boy-girl twins, our daughter was much stronger and healthier from the get go than our son.
None of this explains why the doctors would claim they had never seen a 1lb 26 week baby "survive". 26 weekers regularly survive. It may have been a mischaracterization of what was said by the patient.
I appreciate your use of sarcasm to give me a good skewering, but correct me if I am wrong, but the UK isn't highly segmented by race into socio-economic strata, at least not to the same extent the USA is.
You've got to ask yourself, when you do a cost/benefit analysis is spending tons of money keeping preemies alive really worth it? There's a point at which it's not cost effective to save them
Well, as long as I am paying the costs, I'd prefer to make that decision.
I don't authorize you to decide for me, and I don't ask you to bear the costs.
The main reason that I reject any government intrusion into my medical care is precisely this point of view. When society pays, society decides what to pay for. That is fair and reasonable, but it's not what I want.
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The cost of living in the US, plus paying top dollar for its sub-standard broadband, is still very competitive with all of the places you mention. Which is amazing since we subsidize all of those nations military security with the worlds largest "defense" budget.
One reason why the USA is not a democracy is because peddling to what people want others to give them is toxic to a society.
Why aren't you providing this cheap fast broadband to people then?
In my small town (Fargo, ND), _at my house_, I have the following internet options available to me:
1) cable modem form local cable monopoly
2) qwest dsl, with qwest as the ISP
3) qwest DSL, with a competing ISP
4) qwest POTS, with any number of local or national dial-ISPs to serve me
5) I29 metro-area wireless
6) DirecWay Satellite internet service
7) Verizon's wireless data technology (is this EVDO? or something else now?)
8) GSM/GPRS
9) pringles can to a friend
10) HFLink / AX.25
I left out avian carriers. And in your metro area, you have options available to you that I don't list (WiMax/Clearwire, LTE, FIOS, various municipal broadband initiatives, etc). Heck, in different parts of town, the options change (DSL through a CLEC becomes available, for instance)
Of all of the possible "utilities", IP transit has more competeting providers available to me _at my house_ than most states or whole regions have for something like electricity. And the technololg behind most of the things I list didn't exist 25 years ago. IP transit to the home is one of the last places i want regulation, zillions of random taxes, and the innovation impediments that usually come with quasi-monopoly status.
The myth of the "last mile monopoly" is that -- a myth, at least for IP transit. There _are_ options. But few of them are "full speed, full freedom, cheapeast price". I think that is the basic complaint here, and it comes off as whining.
I've settled with a "less speed, more freedom, competitive price" option myself. Maybe your priorities are different? In almost everywhere in the US -- you can choose something else.
(I live 12 blocks from Qwest's CO for the town. There's a chance I could get a DS3 or metro ethernet or something to my house if i was rich enough...)
At step 2 I would have started shooting.
If the people don't beleive in justice, if there are no fair juries to be had, if we truly live in the mob rule of pure democracy, then I won't shed a tear over dispensing with monsters.
Union initiated violence by far has the worse record in this country.
While other poster(s) indicate that you are wrong, that's irrelevant. The employer absolutely ought to be able to do such a thing.
The NLRB and federally guaranteed union powers in the USA are really disgusting. I think unions are a fine thing and every employee ought to have the right to join a union -- and every employer ought to have the right to say "fuck off, you're fired immediately and forever, we will NEVER allow union labor here"
All privately employed people, be they doctors or nuclear plant employees or anything else, should have the right to withhold their labor.
Otherwise, you have a situation known as "slavery".
Now, these guys may very well be in breach of contractual obligations to show up for work.
How many counterpoints does it take to repudiate this way of thinking?
My grandfather grew up in a tiny town in Kansas, uttelry poor. He was deeply affected by the personal irresponsibility and subsequent failure of his own fathers farm. He went on to serve in WW2, then work at Dow chemical, developed multiple patents, and "retired" as an organic chemistry teacher at a small college in a small midwestern town. He attended the University of Nebraska.
My dad was born into this situation -- small midwestern town, modest teacher's salary. My dad showed an outrageous aptitude for mathematics at an early age. He also attended the University of Nebraska, and exited with a BS Math in 3 years, and was the youngest american in history (at that time) to pass all the actuarial exams and become an FSA. He was one of the early integrators of software into actuarial work and about 10 years ago developed a derivatives-backed hedging software that manages an atrocious amount of money.
He is atrociously wealthy and lives quite modestly. He raised me as a single parent.
And then we get to me. Lest you think I am the product of priviledge and connection, I went to exclusively public schools and ate school lunch. I rode the bus and wore sweatpants and velcro shoes -- because they weren't a hassle for my dad to help me shop for.
Certainly I had advantages that other kids didn't have -- my dad was exceptionally fair and honest, instead of some kind of shithead alcohoilc, and if it was related to educational excellence, he spared no expense. And so we always had computers in the house, and I was able to attend summer camps for academically meritous kids (although those programs all have scholarship options, which my dad also contributed to to help other kids get the same leg-up).
And so when it came time to consider university, I had already been working in the ISP business as a highschooler, and we made some calls to industry recruiting departments asking about the impact of school name on hiring undergraduates.. and found that for CS, there really wasn't much impact.
And so I went to the University of Nebraska -- like dad, like grandpa, on a full scholarship, and now have an engineering position at Mirosoft, where I work with many other people who went to better (and worse) universities, and came from richer (and poorer) backgrounds.
So here is my dissent: People who are bright and work hard get ahead in this country -- and they do so more often, and get farther ahead, than any other country anywhere else (except perhaps in such countries where the bright are recruited for government, and where government is more obviously omnipotent than it is here).
There is certainly a near-closed group of wealthy families with wealthy kids and their wealthy colleges. But those people are irrelevant to me, and in the real world. The only time they _Become_ relevant is when they get government jobs... which is why I'm somewhere between libertarianism and anarchism... to nullify the harmful coercion of the wealthy back-patters _completely_.
Yelling sour grapes in this country about how you are born into a caste is bullshit. Especially in the software industry! How many garage-millionaires has this industry created?
If you have time to complain about class and caste, work harder. People who _have_ wealth do not keep it unless they are successful at identifying the new generation of hard working talented people can help them build the next big thing. There is no such thing as the myth of the "rich person who buries money in the ground". They have to put that money to work to keep or grow it, and that's where you come in.
My team at Microsoft is hiring. check http://www.microsoft.com/careers/
No, I can't make you CEO. But you'll get to do hard work and you'll be very well paid.
Well, he works in the federal government. And that's where most of the trouble is.
One of Jefferson's ideas was that each of the states would be its own experiment in democracy; with different laws and customs and implementations of governance.
I don't know where Paul stands on various BOR amendment incorporations into/upon the several states. It will be a wonderful time in American politics when all of the other problems of federal overreach are solved and we are arguing about if the feds have the power to force 2A incorporation, for instance.
Congress is going to spend the money one way or another. He often votes against spending bills that he has allocated earmarks into, becuase he'd prefer if the spending didn't happen. But since he always loses that argument, and the money is getting spent anyway, he's sending it back to his district, since it is THIER money.
I'd put his record of financial stewardship of the people's money up against anybody. ANYBODY.
Sorry, I don't think so.
It's nice to have someone _as good as_ Feingold from a shitty place like Wisconsin, but he's no Ron Paul.
For example:
http://ontheissues.org/Senate/Russell_Feingold.htm#Gun_Control
We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases.
So what are they so mad about?
Being made to look like spoiled children, that's what. Being shown to be backstabbing hypocrites. This is the political equivalent of being pantsed on the world stage.
There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul. The strong support for Wikileaks is just another example.
Certainly the mental skills are probably more important.. but your post seems to discount physical development. It shouldn't. The drivers of Formula 1 cars are some of the most physically perfect specimens in the sporting world. I'm not aware of another sport where the atheletes heartrate is sustained at the 180-200bpm level for 90+ minutes _continuously_. Many F1 drivers will lose several kg of water during a race. The neck muscles will be subjected to 5x the normal weight of head+helmet, and they will have this done to them in all axes (side to side, front to back) once every few seconds, again, for 90 or more minutes.
There may be fat baseball players and NASCAR drivers. There are no fat F1 drivers.
All CS courses _could_ be taught on pen and paper.
Now, should "software engineering" courses deal with version control, bug repository management, bug triage, release management, and so on?
Yes. Absolutely, positively, yes.
NASA and the US Air force don't give a shit about copyright violations. Neither does Russia nor China.
Those are the only people who can do anything about a rogue satellite. Yes, this is beyond *physical reach* of entities that would care. That's my entire point.
Incidentally, piracy in the south pacific is more prevalent than it is off the coast of Somalia.
Funny you'd use that analogy, since we're talking about the Pirate Party.
Pirate ships are still operating in 2010, even though we can know the location of every surface vessel anywhere in the world on a 24/7 basis. Sea piracy is just as illegal as ever, but it still happens.
Knowing that a crime is taking place is different than having the desire/willpower/money/time/etc to do anything about it.
A satellite is beyond the jurisdiction of anyone who would normally care about copyright violation.
The UN should only have one policy on space: getting humans off planet Earth.
The only thing (most) humans can agree on is that humans should outlive their home planet.
I hope the US/NASA reaction to any possible UN resolution on this subject is the typical "it's nice that you think so".
You know, I was hoping that would be the case about 7 years ago, when I was trying to relocate from Seattle to Minneapolis, for family reasons.
But with my 3 year Microsoft career under my belt, guess how many callbacks I got from Minneapolis companies?
Zero.
I had an internship with McDonnel Douglas, and all my pre-MS experience very hardcore unix stuff. I figured I would _at least_ get an intrview with the defense-contractor type places I was asking in Minneapolis.
Nothing.
So, I ended up staying at MS, but moved to their Fargo campus.
You should tell them that in all of your years of using linux and F/OSS software, you have never once gotten the sense that the people working on linux are trying to fuck you over.
I'm looking at the printers and scanners I have that don't work on modern 64 bit windows machines and that work just peachy on modern 64 bit linux machines.
When I come across something in Linux that doesn't work, I have the optimism that, eventually, it will get better. I've been using linux off and on for various things since kernel 0.98, and I've certainly had my waning periods of hate, but I always come back for some task or problem and things are always a bit different but always moving forward.
I don't think this is something you can say with commercial software vendors. Pick any commercial application or operating system and you'll find somebody who says "they broke that because they are assholes", and they'll more or less be correct.
I'm irate that my ubuntu machine doesn't know WTF to do with my clip-on ipod shuffle. But not so irate that I'll actually infest a machine with iTunes. iTunes actively tries to fuck me and work against my preferences. So in this case, I'll settle for software that doesn't or hardly works because it isn't done yet, over software that tries to condition me to some far away master's desires.
This notion that linux will "never" acheive $goal is silly. I used linux as my main desktop back in the 486 days, when it was much less mature, much less user friendly, and much less straightforward and compatible than it is now. I've been using windows for the last 8 years, and not because linux has gotten worse, but because windows finally got good enough, and for a home email/web machine the tradeoffs for my usage profile favor windows, for now.
The idea that linux hasn't "arrived" until it displaces Mac OS or Windows on "the desktop" is dumb. Linux is a credible alternative to just about any other operating system out there for nearly any computing domain. That's astounding.
At some point in everyones life, they have a moment of "I wish I could tell the assholes that made this how much I hate their decision". That is when people will understand the value of linux and other f/oss software. I'm sure you can find a 5:1 ratio of posts where i criticize RMS to where i extoll his virtues, but software freedom is a real issue, and RMS got it _Exactly Right_, and when that understanding awakens in a person, Linux will be there waiting, better than the last time they tried it, more readily adapted to what they want to do.
I don't give a shit if you or your friends or your mom think linux is ready for making their breakfast. I care that it can solve problems for me, today, and that it will be solving more problems for me tomorrow.
Well, I'm a MS employee, and on my machines joined to the relevant company domains, they _do_ have NAP and it does wreck your day if your machine isn't compliant. Maybe there's a way around it. Maybe there isn't. I've never bothered to look because I just want to get my job done.
As part of the "security push that never ended", that led to XPSP2 and all of the "we thought a little about security for a change" work that MS has done since, there was finally a shift in opinion internally.
The people at MS who _had_ been thinking about security usually stuck to the immutable laws, and were continuing to think about things in absolute terms, i.e. "well, they can get root, so all bets are off"
But what changed was that someone got practical instead of ideological and said, "look, the 80 hojillion windows PCs out there don't need absolute protection against a supreme attacker with infinite time. If they could get _basic_ protection against what's getting them 80% of the time, that's progress"
And so I think you need to think about NAP and most future MS security efforts in the same way. There may not be a way to keep the most brilliant / lucky / dedicated attacker from succeeding once. But there is almost always a way to keep inelegant attacks from being successful widely and repeatably. And the #1 problem on the public internet right now is NOT all of the high profile deep penetrations against single well researched targets, it's the legions of automated remote-compromises that turn Grandma's PC into a botslave.
A network protection scheme doesn't have to verify that Macs, ubuntus etc etc are "compliant", because those are noise in the signal as a percentage of customer endpoint equipment. A network protection scheme has to keep people who want to continue running MS stuff up to date and patched. It doesnt' ahve to keep windows power users from getting on the internet if they can read about registry hacks or whatever, it has to point windows neophytes at a black-holed page that has all the patches and scanners and removal tools they need to get healthy before they go out to play for the day.
In summary: the point isn't to create Sauron's eye. The point is to tell people to put on their seat belt.
The point is that infant prematurity doesn't explain the entire difference. Nor does the different means of measurement. My claim is that the US demographic differences need to be considered as a point of difference as well. That's all.
Beacuse it is hard for me to reconcile two apparent contradictions:
- this is an accurate portrayal of medicine in the UK
- people in the US would want this level of care for themselves.
Here the specific things i find problematic:
- the survivability rate for 26 week babies in the USA is much higher than what this article claims
- the doctor(s) in question, unless they are operating in Sherwood Forest, should have familiarity with babies of that gestational age
- i'm not even sure what they are using the plastic bag _for_. They were respirating the baby already; the two key issues with premies of this age are warmth and moisture retention. For the latter, my children simply had a burn ointment rubbed all over their body which supplemented the immature skins moisture barrier effectiveness. I suppose you could use a plastic bag for same, as if often done when curing concrete, but the bag didn't even appear to cover the child. Was there really no burn cream available?
For warmth, skin to skin contact with the mother is more than sufficient, even in incredibly small babies.
- they couldn't relocate the child for _3 days_ ? Why not?
I just find it hard to beleive that this passes for modern medicine in a developed country. Yes, kudos to the doctors for being quick witted, and most importantly, it appears the baby is in good health.
Oh - I don't necessarily disagree with you. I bring it up because there is a tremendous degree of diversity: racially, economically, culturally, etc that most european nations simply do not have to contend with.
Right. So in the US there are levels of NICU facilities (there are 3, i believe), and it works similarly in that a level foo facilitity cannot really support a child born earlier than a certain gestational age, or with certain difficulties.
The place our children stayed was a "we can do anything" level facility, and one of the reasons it had a helipad is that they went and picked up babies from all over the state that couldn't be handled in the facilities they were in. Many of the nurses that worked on my kids had special "FLIGHT NURSE" badges that basically meant they were trained to keep 20-something week infants alive in a bumpy helicopter.
There was also a special flight-rated isolette unit (incubator + semi-sealed environment with respiration support) parked in the lobby of the NICU area.
So how it would work is that the chopper from my town was usually en-route as the mom was going through pre-delivery, and the staff would pick mom and baby up and bring them back.
Regarding the demographic issue.. i saw lots of families come in (and out) of the NICU that didn't appear, from my prejudicial eyes, to be in a position to pay the bill. Their children were treated the same way by the same people.
Part of the issue is that pre-devliery care breaks down across economic strata, and in the US, there is a high correlation to racial demographics. If you look at the CDC report, you see that aggregately, african american babies have worse outcomes than white babies in the USA, who are marginally worse than hispanic babies. Part of that is socio-economic, and part of it appears to be genetics. The NICU nurses are very aware of which genders and which races seem to, correcting for other factors, appear to mature and survive at which rates. Premature Girls, as a rule, mature faster than boys, and our boy-girl twins, our daughter was much stronger and healthier from the get go than our son.
None of this explains why the doctors would claim they had never seen a 1lb 26 week baby "survive". 26 weekers regularly survive. It may have been a mischaracterization of what was said by the patient.
I am afraid I don't understand the relevance of your response.
I appreciate your use of sarcasm to give me a good skewering, but correct me if I am wrong, but the UK isn't highly segmented by race into socio-economic strata, at least not to the same extent the USA is.
here are some links you might find interesting
http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2008/r081015.htm?s_cid=mediarel_r081015
http://www.birthactivist.com/2009/11/cdc-releases-new-report-comparing-us-and-european-infant-mortality-rates/
(you'll note, btw, that premature infant mortality is lower in the US than the UK for all gestational age ranges up to 37 weeks)
Well, as long as I am paying the costs, I'd prefer to make that decision.
I don't authorize you to decide for me, and I don't ask you to bear the costs.
The main reason that I reject any government intrusion into my medical care is precisely this point of view. When society pays, society decides what to pay for. That is fair and reasonable, but it's not what I want.