If there's a singular world government, 150 million Republicans and a 150 million Democrats are going to find their power reduced significantly by the 300 million+ Social Democrat-esque types in Europe and the 1 billion Communists in China. So, no, it's not going to increase their power one whit - hence why none of them are particularly fond of paying the US' UN dues.
I'm also suffering from a cash-flow process. My creditors don't see it that way, though. Unlike GM, though, my creditors can't buy me. Then again, since GM is itself a creditor, via GMAC, this could get kind of interesting.
Ah - you must be in the Midwest. On the coasts, $40k/year is plenty for a small apartment and used Geo Metro, having plenty of money to spend on the latest used gadgets at the MetroPawn, and investing a chunk of McDonalds into your belly. $90k/year is plenty to bury yourself into debt on a small house, a few rusted '85 Supras, and a massive 20" CRT TV in every room. At $120k/year, you could work 30 years and then finally finish paying off your house.
This isn't a bad direction to go, but the simple truth remains that some people will never be able to afford all of their medical care. This especially holds true for the mentally ill or for anyone chronically ill enough (think cerebral palsy or something similar) to be unproductive in the workplace. Most people would still want a system that at least has a fighting chance of covering them.
What might work, practically speaking, is to kind of mix things up - put together tax incentives and the like that encourage medical 401k-style accounts for retirement (perhaps an extension to IRA or something similar), allow people to tap it for medical costs at any point in their life (and only medical costs, at least without a penalty), and still keep insurance around as a market option for "worst case" scenarios (i.e. precisely the kind of stuff that insurance was designed for). This would get the insurance companies out of the day-to-day health care side of things and allow people to pay "out of pocket" to doctors and encourage a medical relationship that way. For those that have no way of affording their care, we could keep Medicare/Medicaid around.
The one catch in all of this, of course, is that insurance companies get much better rates than individuals. Until doctors can afford to charge cash rates that are semi-competitive with big insurance rates, medical savings plans probably won't be cost-effective for most people. Co-ops might help with this. Of course, most of the higher rates are due to the relative flakiness of "cash" medical customers; more often than not, those paying "cash" are those that are simply incapable or unwilling to pay for their care, so the medical establishment just increases the cash rates high enough where they get paid enough of the time to make up for the difference.
There's a big leap between "I do X, should that lead to Y" and "My ancestry is X, should that lead to Y". That said, up until the last sentence, you were making a pretty good point: If we accept that engaging in risky behavior should mean higher insurance premiums for that person, how much knowledge of a person's behavior should we provide to insurance companies? In order for me to have lower insurance premiums, should I encourage my government to abandon privacy rights so my insurance provider can identify who's engaging in risky behavior?
People need to realize that, from an insurance company's standpoint, the ideal for them would be to have the ability to track completely what their customers are doing so they can fine-tune insurance premiums for that person and extract greater profit for "risky" behavior. Imagine insurance companies keeping track of your sexual behavior so they can tabulate what kind of risks for STDs and pregnancy you might have. Imagine insurance companies keeping track of when you wake up, where you shop for food, what kind of food you buy, and what activities you perform in your spare time. If we give them ability to do so, they will take it. Whether they should have that knowledge or not, though, is up to us - we need to decide whether it's more important for a few risk-averse individuals to have slightly lower premiums or for people to have a right to privacy, to have the right to not report every single activity they engage in to some company somewhere.
So, what you're saying here is the entire point of an insurance company is to make money by taking in more for the insurance than they pay out, and that, if they're paying out more from insurance claims than normal, they'll raise their rates? No way!
This is why having insurance companies in charge of our health care industry is a mistake. Unfortunately, a lot of government programs aren't much better - then you're just moving the profit incentive from insurance agents to bureaucrats. The ideal path would be direct payment between patient and doctor - the doctor receives the profit incentive and thus would want to provide care that maximizes that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of entrenched interests that will make sure that never happens.
To think, a lot of this probably wouldn't have happened if wage freezes during World War 2 didn't cause employers to get more creative with compensation of their employees...
Or because all of the low hanging fruit has already been taken. Besides, you can play that game with any of the 19th century discoveries, too. Railroads are the byproduct of advances in metallurgy, which dates back to the start of the Bronze Age. The telegraph is based on research on electricity that dates back to the 18th century.
Besides, even your hypothetical "inventions" are still based on previous research. Light-based computing? Based on lasers, which, in turn, are based on discoveries that go back as far as Sir Isaac Newton. Besides, electricity travels at the same speed as light, so what's the point? Quantum computing is where it's at, and that's already in the pipeline.
The reason it feels like we're not advancing as fast as we were in the 19th century is kind of because of a mental form of relativity - the faster your civilization advances, the slower it feels like it's going. The difference between technology and science between 1800 and 1850 is far, far less than the difference between 1900 and 1950, which, in turn, is far less than the difference between 1950 and 2000.
No we're not. They're just so commonplace now that we take them for granted.
In the 19th century, we got the internal combustion engine, radio, telephone, railroads, and cars, among other things. In the past 30 years alone, we've sequenced the entire human genome, can make computers pretty much any size you want, can predict weather accurately just about anywhere on the planet up to a week... the list kind of goes on like this. None of that would be possible without some serious inventiveness.
Keep in mind that there was so little that anybody knew about our world and the universe in 1800 that it really didn't take much to come up with inventions that took advantage of the new knowledge of the time, like electricity and radio waves. Nowadays, new knowledge involves quantum physics or genetic manipulation. I'm sure that, 100 years from now, anything we come up with will seem almost trivial, but keep in mind that it took over 50 years for someone to figure out how a battery worked and what to use one with. Turnaround time on using new discoveries is, for the most part, a little faster these days.
Ah... I loved SunDog when I was a kid! I never really reached a point where I was legitimately poor enough to need to use shunts, though - regular parts for the ship were cheap enough where it was fairly trivial to buy parts for it.
Hmm... could be BYU. I could see them trying to get the CS department to throw something together on the cheap for them and failing miserably... not saying that BYU is a bad CS school, mind you, just that using undergrad CS students to crank out a production system may not be the smartest idea in the world.
No competing forks? You mean, other than the Pontiac Vibe, Scion xB, Toyota Matrix, Toyota RAV4, and whatever else Toyota and friends are putting on that chassis?
I do get your point - all I'm getting at is that there are, indeed, competing "forks" of the Toyota Corolla, each designed to exploit a different market niche, in much the same way other "forks" of other projects exploit different needs.
Personally, I'm happy to see "embrace and extend" applied against Microsoft. Microsoft overturned industry-established standards by embracing them (adopting them, providing interoperability with them, etc.), then creating Microsoft-only extensions that locked people into their products. Now, Novell is giving Microsoft a little taste of their own medicine, embracing.NET and turning it into Mono, among other things.
The only way we're going to get back to truly open standards for everyone is if we accept the reality that, at the current time, a lot of standards are Microsoft-only, and only by providing a clean interoperability path with existing tech will we ever be able to migrate to something better.
Free coffee? My work won't even give me chicory root to satisfy my stimulant needs. Fortunately, ephedra-rich Mormon Tea grows natively here, so, if I ever pick some weeds out of my yard, I can run off that...
0 installation costs only work if your time is worthless as far as the company is concerned - hence why machines have OSes pre-installed these days. 0 additional hardware costs only work if you assume the hardware will never die, which isn't even remotely accurate. Dedicated support? Uh... isn't that your job? Also, don't forget that WiFi "just works" if you have just the right chipset (i.e. avoid Broadcom and Realtek unless you want to play with Ndiswrapper or have your OS do it for you).
Look, I'm typing this from a laptop running Linux - it works great. I'm happy with it. However, if you try to sell it as some sort of pie-in-the-sky utopian vision of "no cost", nobody's going to, pardon the expression, buy it. It just sounds (and, much of the time, is) too good to be true. That's not to say Linux won't eventually make some serious traction against Microsoft on the desktop - there's something to be said for running the ultimate definition of a "commodity" OS on commodity hardware - but it's going to take a long, long while to get there, and, by Linux's very nature, it's going to have to trickle down from the server room.
Yep - when you have a market driven product, this is what happens. You don't just get to develop your kernel in a vacuum; you also have to check with your hardware vendors, make sure they'll support it, check with your software vendors, make sure they'll support it, and, assuming everything lines up, you might be able to release an update. Of course, you don't want to give the hardware and software people complete control of what they do - sometimes, kernel updates are necessary - but you definitely want to keep them in the loop. Microsoft learned all this the hard way with Vista.
For Linux to get into the Desktop Market it needs to be more then just OnPar with windows or mac. It needs to be Better in almost every aspect. Otherwise just being free isn't worth it to switch.
Bingo, and this isn't a knock on Linux. In order for someone to switch, well, anything (toothpaste, brand of car, where they shop), there has to be a compelling reason to do so. For the moment, there isn't a compelling reason to do so on the desktop side - Windows is a built-in cost on most computers that people would buy, all the apps are for Windows, and most of their friends are running Windows.
The only reason Apple is getting any traction at all right now is because they figured out that style matters to some people, and the kind of people style matters to are the kind of people that influence other people's buying decisions. For better or worse, Linux is probably never going to be stylish - it's even more commodity-driven than Windows (it's free!). Where Linux might gain some traction is in the enterprise - if more IT people find ways to work Linux on to their coworkers' desktops and either increase productivity or decrease costs with it, we can get some traction. After all, that's how Windows got into the home in the first place - it's what people were using at work, so they had to use it at home.
Time after time, I see people complain that Windows is a bloated, nasty, slow mess. Yet, time after time, I see people (including the linked Gartner article) saying that Microsoft should just build their operating system on little virtual machines. What I'm trying to wrap my mind around is this: How does throwing a virtual machine (or virtual machines) between the OS and the hardware reduce bloat and complexity in a way that would actually improve speed? Wouldn't a hypervisor/virtual machine/whatever just be one more thing that could go wrong?
Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems to me that "hypervisor" and "modular" are becoming another set of buzzwords that promise much but mean little.
All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
---
How binding an international agreement is depends entirely on how the party country views international agreements. In the US, it's legally possible to sue the United States in its own courts for failing to uphold treaties that it's signed.
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If there's a singular world government, 150 million Republicans and a 150 million Democrats are going to find their power reduced significantly by the 300 million+ Social Democrat-esque types in Europe and the 1 billion Communists in China. So, no, it's not going to increase their power one whit - hence why none of them are particularly fond of paying the US' UN dues.
I'm also suffering from a cash-flow process. My creditors don't see it that way, though. Unlike GM, though, my creditors can't buy me. Then again, since GM is itself a creditor, via GMAC, this could get kind of interesting.
Yep, and take that infernal computing contraption away from him, too! It's masking his frailty in calculating floating point operations!
It would seem he was successful, then, now wouldn't it?
Ah - you must be in the Midwest. On the coasts, $40k/year is plenty for a small apartment and used Geo Metro, having plenty of money to spend on the latest used gadgets at the MetroPawn, and investing a chunk of McDonalds into your belly. $90k/year is plenty to bury yourself into debt on a small house, a few rusted '85 Supras, and a massive 20" CRT TV in every room. At $120k/year, you could work 30 years and then finally finish paying off your house.
This isn't a bad direction to go, but the simple truth remains that some people will never be able to afford all of their medical care. This especially holds true for the mentally ill or for anyone chronically ill enough (think cerebral palsy or something similar) to be unproductive in the workplace. Most people would still want a system that at least has a fighting chance of covering them.
What might work, practically speaking, is to kind of mix things up - put together tax incentives and the like that encourage medical 401k-style accounts for retirement (perhaps an extension to IRA or something similar), allow people to tap it for medical costs at any point in their life (and only medical costs, at least without a penalty), and still keep insurance around as a market option for "worst case" scenarios (i.e. precisely the kind of stuff that insurance was designed for). This would get the insurance companies out of the day-to-day health care side of things and allow people to pay "out of pocket" to doctors and encourage a medical relationship that way. For those that have no way of affording their care, we could keep Medicare/Medicaid around.
The one catch in all of this, of course, is that insurance companies get much better rates than individuals. Until doctors can afford to charge cash rates that are semi-competitive with big insurance rates, medical savings plans probably won't be cost-effective for most people. Co-ops might help with this. Of course, most of the higher rates are due to the relative flakiness of "cash" medical customers; more often than not, those paying "cash" are those that are simply incapable or unwilling to pay for their care, so the medical establishment just increases the cash rates high enough where they get paid enough of the time to make up for the difference.
There's a big leap between "I do X, should that lead to Y" and "My ancestry is X, should that lead to Y". That said, up until the last sentence, you were making a pretty good point: If we accept that engaging in risky behavior should mean higher insurance premiums for that person, how much knowledge of a person's behavior should we provide to insurance companies? In order for me to have lower insurance premiums, should I encourage my government to abandon privacy rights so my insurance provider can identify who's engaging in risky behavior?
People need to realize that, from an insurance company's standpoint, the ideal for them would be to have the ability to track completely what their customers are doing so they can fine-tune insurance premiums for that person and extract greater profit for "risky" behavior. Imagine insurance companies keeping track of your sexual behavior so they can tabulate what kind of risks for STDs and pregnancy you might have. Imagine insurance companies keeping track of when you wake up, where you shop for food, what kind of food you buy, and what activities you perform in your spare time. If we give them ability to do so, they will take it. Whether they should have that knowledge or not, though, is up to us - we need to decide whether it's more important for a few risk-averse individuals to have slightly lower premiums or for people to have a right to privacy, to have the right to not report every single activity they engage in to some company somewhere.
So, what you're saying here is the entire point of an insurance company is to make money by taking in more for the insurance than they pay out, and that, if they're paying out more from insurance claims than normal, they'll raise their rates? No way!
This is why having insurance companies in charge of our health care industry is a mistake. Unfortunately, a lot of government programs aren't much better - then you're just moving the profit incentive from insurance agents to bureaucrats. The ideal path would be direct payment between patient and doctor - the doctor receives the profit incentive and thus would want to provide care that maximizes that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of entrenched interests that will make sure that never happens.
To think, a lot of this probably wouldn't have happened if wage freezes during World War 2 didn't cause employers to get more creative with compensation of their employees...
Or because all of the low hanging fruit has already been taken. Besides, you can play that game with any of the 19th century discoveries, too. Railroads are the byproduct of advances in metallurgy, which dates back to the start of the Bronze Age. The telegraph is based on research on electricity that dates back to the 18th century.
Besides, even your hypothetical "inventions" are still based on previous research. Light-based computing? Based on lasers, which, in turn, are based on discoveries that go back as far as Sir Isaac Newton. Besides, electricity travels at the same speed as light, so what's the point? Quantum computing is where it's at, and that's already in the pipeline.
The reason it feels like we're not advancing as fast as we were in the 19th century is kind of because of a mental form of relativity - the faster your civilization advances, the slower it feels like it's going. The difference between technology and science between 1800 and 1850 is far, far less than the difference between 1900 and 1950, which, in turn, is far less than the difference between 1950 and 2000.
No we're not. They're just so commonplace now that we take them for granted.
In the 19th century, we got the internal combustion engine, radio, telephone, railroads, and cars, among other things. In the past 30 years alone, we've sequenced the entire human genome, can make computers pretty much any size you want, can predict weather accurately just about anywhere on the planet up to a week... the list kind of goes on like this. None of that would be possible without some serious inventiveness.
Keep in mind that there was so little that anybody knew about our world and the universe in 1800 that it really didn't take much to come up with inventions that took advantage of the new knowledge of the time, like electricity and radio waves. Nowadays, new knowledge involves quantum physics or genetic manipulation. I'm sure that, 100 years from now, anything we come up with will seem almost trivial, but keep in mind that it took over 50 years for someone to figure out how a battery worked and what to use one with. Turnaround time on using new discoveries is, for the most part, a little faster these days.
Ah... I loved SunDog when I was a kid! I never really reached a point where I was legitimately poor enough to need to use shunts, though - regular parts for the ship were cheap enough where it was fairly trivial to buy parts for it.
Hmm... could be BYU. I could see them trying to get the CS department to throw something together on the cheap for them and failing miserably... not saying that BYU is a bad CS school, mind you, just that using undergrad CS students to crank out a production system may not be the smartest idea in the world.
No competing forks? You mean, other than the Pontiac Vibe, Scion xB, Toyota Matrix, Toyota RAV4, and whatever else Toyota and friends are putting on that chassis?
I do get your point - all I'm getting at is that there are, indeed, competing "forks" of the Toyota Corolla, each designed to exploit a different market niche, in much the same way other "forks" of other projects exploit different needs.
Personally, I'm happy to see "embrace and extend" applied against Microsoft. Microsoft overturned industry-established standards by embracing them (adopting them, providing interoperability with them, etc.), then creating Microsoft-only extensions that locked people into their products. Now, Novell is giving Microsoft a little taste of their own medicine, embracing .NET and turning it into Mono, among other things.
The only way we're going to get back to truly open standards for everyone is if we accept the reality that, at the current time, a lot of standards are Microsoft-only, and only by providing a clean interoperability path with existing tech will we ever be able to migrate to something better.
Free coffee? My work won't even give me chicory root to satisfy my stimulant needs. Fortunately, ephedra-rich Mormon Tea grows natively here, so, if I ever pick some weeds out of my yard, I can run off that...
0 installation costs only work if your time is worthless as far as the company is concerned - hence why machines have OSes pre-installed these days. 0 additional hardware costs only work if you assume the hardware will never die, which isn't even remotely accurate. Dedicated support? Uh... isn't that your job? Also, don't forget that WiFi "just works" if you have just the right chipset (i.e. avoid Broadcom and Realtek unless you want to play with Ndiswrapper or have your OS do it for you).
Look, I'm typing this from a laptop running Linux - it works great. I'm happy with it. However, if you try to sell it as some sort of pie-in-the-sky utopian vision of "no cost", nobody's going to, pardon the expression, buy it. It just sounds (and, much of the time, is) too good to be true. That's not to say Linux won't eventually make some serious traction against Microsoft on the desktop - there's something to be said for running the ultimate definition of a "commodity" OS on commodity hardware - but it's going to take a long, long while to get there, and, by Linux's very nature, it's going to have to trickle down from the server room.
Alas, we don't always live in a world of "should" - half the time, you just get to write off your home machine on your taxes.
Yep - when you have a market driven product, this is what happens. You don't just get to develop your kernel in a vacuum; you also have to check with your hardware vendors, make sure they'll support it, check with your software vendors, make sure they'll support it, and, assuming everything lines up, you might be able to release an update. Of course, you don't want to give the hardware and software people complete control of what they do - sometimes, kernel updates are necessary - but you definitely want to keep them in the loop. Microsoft learned all this the hard way with Vista.
Isn't Dell still selling machines with Ubuntu pre-installed?
The only reason Apple is getting any traction at all right now is because they figured out that style matters to some people, and the kind of people style matters to are the kind of people that influence other people's buying decisions. For better or worse, Linux is probably never going to be stylish - it's even more commodity-driven than Windows (it's free!). Where Linux might gain some traction is in the enterprise - if more IT people find ways to work Linux on to their coworkers' desktops and either increase productivity or decrease costs with it, we can get some traction. After all, that's how Windows got into the home in the first place - it's what people were using at work, so they had to use it at home.
Stupid question:
Time after time, I see people complain that Windows is a bloated, nasty, slow mess. Yet, time after time, I see people (including the linked Gartner article) saying that Microsoft should just build their operating system on little virtual machines. What I'm trying to wrap my mind around is this: How does throwing a virtual machine (or virtual machines) between the OS and the hardware reduce bloat and complexity in a way that would actually improve speed? Wouldn't a hypervisor/virtual machine/whatever just be one more thing that could go wrong?
Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems to me that "hypervisor" and "modular" are becoming another set of buzzwords that promise much but mean little.
US Consitution, Article VI:
All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
---
How binding an international agreement is depends entirely on how the party country views international agreements. In the US, it's legally possible to sue the United States in its own courts for failing to uphold treaties that it's signed.
You kidding? I break things all the time!
You're right - ridiculous oversight on my part.
It's been my experience that silicone scales exquisitely.
If you want a picture of the starships, just go here.