> Is really there someone who DONT want to have a health insurance?
Yes. I don't have health insurance and I don't want it. It's a simple matter of economics; insurance costs too much for no reason. If I were to buy a plan, it would cost me ~$6400/year (national average, probably higher here where I live). A doctor costs me about ~$100 per visit. ~$150 to see a specialist (I went to an ENT specialist to get my throat examined with a fiber optic probe). $300 for a course of brand name antibiotics; about $30 if I were to buy it from an online pharmacy in India. That one year with my throat problem I had paid maybe $1000 for the above plus a few tests. The next year I got a chest X-ray for $250. And that was the entirety of my medical expenditures in the last ten years. If I had insurance, I would have still have had to pay a smaller fee for each of the above, maybe 15%. So that's $1250 without insurance versus $64190 (that's SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS) with insurance.
Ok, you say, but maybe something really bad were to happen to me? I answer, like what? Of the really expensive treatments there is organ failure, heart attacks, cancer, and spinal injuries. Having an organ failure or a spinal injury is a very rare event, and I'm quite willing to put them in the same category of "death from a falling meteor". Yes, I could die, and so could you, and so shall we all in the end. If I can't afford it, I won't pay for it and I'll die. Tough cookies. Pretty much the same with cancer. First, I really don't have to worry about it until I hit 50. Second, barring breast and testicular cancer, the survival rate is pretty much zero anyway. Yes, you can extend your life for another five or ten years with chemo or radiotherapy, but it always comes back and kills you, except that you'll be a lot more miserable if you let the hospital "fight for your life" to the bitter end. Much better to just let nature take its course, take painkillers or whatever helps. I would much prefer a quicker death to five years of misery. And finally, as far as heart disease is concerned, the treatment is to lead a healthier lifestyle (quit smoking, maintain a normal weight, don't eat a diet consisting exclusively of Cheetos, etc). Surgical interventions usually do more harm than good. Oh, and when they happen, they are expensive, but not THAT expensive. You might pay something like $30000 to get a stent installed. Compare that with the $64000 for ten years of insurance. Or, considering that most people have their heart attacks after the late 40's, that's over $128000 for insurance.
Overall, people need to stop being so friggin' scared of dying. You'll all die anyway, and the less medical intervention you have, the less you will suffer.
Taking care of people is not wrong
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking care of fellow humans, with loving and cherising their lives as much as your own, and with giving them your money so they can live longer and healthier lives. Except that this bill is not about that. It's about forcing you to do these things at gunpoint (and yes, a gunpoint is somewhere in your future if you stop paying your taxes) by raising taxes (by 3.8%) and by forcing you to buy health insurance when you don't want to do so. This is the core problem of socialism: it's not that we should hate helping our fellow man, it's that we should hate being forced to do so. It's that we should hate not being able to choose whom to help with our efforts, and so to not be able to value the lives of the people we love more than the people we don't.
Slashdot is packed with the entitlement generation and you're asking if they approve of the government creating another entitlement? Might as well go to Hell and ask the Devil if sinning is bad.
Probability: The Logic Of Science by Jaynes. Although it is in part a rigorous text, you can skip the derivations and just read the examples. Most of the book is about how to think about probability, emphasizing the methods of correctly formulating the problem and explaining why most people fail at that (admittedly quite complex) task. Even if you don't understand a single equation in the book, you'll still benefit from reading it.
You have to explicitly enable function-level linking with gcc. Compile your source files with -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections, and then pass -gc-sections flag to ld (-Wl,-gc-sections if linking with gcc). This puts every function into its own.text.section and allows the linker to prune the ones that are not referenced. The remaining ones are coalesced into a single.text section.
People giving security advice often have no idea what the threat model is. For example, the typical home user's computer has no chance of being physically attacked. Nobody breaks into people's houses to install hardware keyloggers to steal their online banking passwords. And yet, some banks put up "security measures" like on-screen keyboards you have to type on with a mouse just to avoid keyloggers. Likewise, there's no real security reason to password protect your account on your home computer that nobody but you uses, and no security reason to not use autologin.
Seriously, there is only one kind of threat the home user faces, and that's software attacks, none of which are aimed specifically at him, and all of which are acquired either through his web browser or through infected executables given to him by his friends. If he runs NoScript, disables javascript in email, and gets executables only from reputable sources, there is simply no way he can get infected. If he's on Linux, he's safer than he's ever going to be already.
I finally got around to telling them about it today and they fixed it, so feel free to become a NearlyFreeSpeech customer. I may have griped about this one little problem (which they apparently didn't know about), but they really are the best host around.
You obviously never tried to convince a nontechnical person to use encryption. They just get that sour look on their faces, thinking "yeah, yet another stupid techie thing I don't care about but now have to learn". Naturally, you can't ask them to set up encryption themselves. Installing gpg and enigmail is a nontrivial task even for me. And you can't even set it up transparently, because gpg evidently decided that an empty passphrase is "insecure" and not to be allowed. Of course, they don't care that if the nontechnical user has to remember a passphrase and to enter it to email to you, well, they'll just not send you any mail.
Then there's the problem of most people using webmail. The desktop mail client is going extinct and all the regular users are moving to gmail, where, like on any other webmail, you can't have encryption without surrendering your private key to the provider.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, my mail forwarder (www.nearlyfreespeech.net) adds a ***UNCHECKED*** prefix to all encrypted mail it forwards. No, Mom, it really is safe to open my email. ***UNCHECKED*** just means the forwarder couldn't read it and verify that it has no viruses in it. What's a forwarder? Well, it's a...
Writing a check is the only way to transfer money for free. Online bill payment is basically writing a check that the bank prints and mails for you (I know because I had one returned to me once). A credit card is only good at a store, you can't pay to an individual, and it costs the store money to accept it (you don't know this because the store is required to eat the charge and not pass it on to you). Paypal requires your payee to have a paypal account, which is not always an option for nontechnical people, and there are small fees there too. A wire transfer is very expensive (~$25 paid by you to send, and the same amount charged to the receiver), so is not economical most of the time. Cash is bulky if you have to give a lot and you may get some attention from the FBI for "structuring withdrawals". A certified check is fast, but is also expensive, ~$20. That leaves checks, which are still free. Sure, the float sucks, but unless you want to pay, there is simply no way around it.
GPL is so troublesome because in most companies there is no way in hell anybody will let you release the source code to the product. Hence, no GPL code can be included, but many developers don't bother looking up the license for the code they use, which causes later trouble for the company. It's as simple as that.
Any UI design that forces me to use the mouse is automatically a failure. Any method of information display that uses only a small fraction of the available display space to display tiny windows and forces me to resize them or scroll them is also automatically a failure. A method that combines both, must then be a gigantic failure.
When you overclock, you always have to check system stability at each level you try. Most people run some CPU stress program and see if it crashes or gives the wrong results. If you get any faults, your CPU can't handle the overclock and you have to try a lower frequency. As long as you apply this procedure properly, you won't have any faults. You most certainly won't get any predictable amount of faults. Now, the researchers could do it because they only ran OpenSSL on their hardware. If you tried that on a normal machine, you'd just get a kernel panic (the kernel needs the CPU to work correctly too, you know). Any other software will also have trouble and cause data corruption. Considering that the attack requires you to repeatedly encrypt/sign/verify stuff with your private key during it, the attackers don't have a chance to not get noticed.
Next, the researchers did not actually run it on a real computer. If you RTFA, you'll find out that they implemented a copy of a Sparc processor on an FPGA and ran OpenSSL on that. You can't just vary the input voltage at the PSU, since the PSU will regulate it to the correct output for the CPU. If you drop the voltage below what the PSU can handle (~85V), it will shut down. You might succeed if you changed the voltage at the motherboard, but the board really ought to detect that. Also, Intel chips, like Nehalem, actually have voltage converters on the chip which change 12V and 5V inputs to the 1.5V or so that the CPU needs. So your Core i7 system is quite safe against this attack. (Yes, it overclocks. See above)
Finally, there's the obvious problem of physically attacking the computer while you're using it. The attackers would need to constantly control and monitor whatever hardware doohickey they installed on your motherboard, as well as needing a working login to be able to time how long it takes you to run the algorithm each time. It is much easier to just install a hardware keylogger and get the passphrase.
Let's make a study conclusively proving that football tends to increase the players' long term tendency toward aggressive and antisocial behavior (like stuffing classmates into lockers, for instance), decreases empathy, and correlates with lower lifetime income. Heck, you might not even have to fudge the data...
In my experience, Comcast's DNS servers go down all the time, and even when they work, they sometimes have unexplained "glitches" that render websites unusable. Every time I try using their servers, this happens, and I switch back to something more stable, like L3. I'd be surprized to find anybody but a total n00b still using Comcast's DNS.
The real problem here is the idea that a college degree is treated as a certification. The right thing to do is to get rid of that idea and treat college as a private matter, with the degree being awarded for completion, not competence. Any employer will grill you on an interview anyway, and will know if you know how to write code. Anyone who doesn't deserves the quality employees he will get.
I'm running 2.6.32 with the fabulous new scheduler and all those "low latency" settings painstakingly compiled in. Nevertheless, I'm currently making some DVD isos and while mkisofs is running, firefox has to think for five or six seconds before loading every page. Somehow I doubt that having two extra cores is going to help me here...
To get the iPhone, I would need to sign up for a VERY expensive and long term contract. There is no way I'm spending a thousand dollars a year for a friggin phone. To get the Nexus One I can buy a prepaid sim from T-mobile and pay $100/year, using WiFi for network connectivity. This price advantage alone is enough to give the Nexus One an enormously larger market than the iPhone.
> Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs > the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death.
Damn right it does! Force me to wear a helmet and I'd probably skip riding the bike in the first place. And the tone of your post just makes me mad. How dare you nanny state liberals dictate whether I choose to risk my head or not? If I crash my head into a pole, that's none of your goddamned business. My life is my own to live or to risk or to do away with, and nobody has a right to tell me how much risk is acceptable for me to take.
> Old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family!
Gee, I wonder why. Maybe having five children when he couldn't even afford to feed himself had something to do with that. The poor with a brood of children have no one to blame for their poverty except their penises.
Yeah, and where are those apps now? People hated dongles for a reason; they were inconvenient as hell. The same is true of all these ridiculous authenticator fobs; I'd ditch my bank in a second if they required one, and I certainly wouldn't have any qualms about ditching any game that requires one. But, of course, it's not like a large company like Blizzard cares about a few lost customers...
Slashdot Mirror
> Is really there someone who DONT want to have a health insurance?
Yes. I don't have health insurance and I don't want it. It's a simple matter of economics; insurance costs too much for no reason. If I were to buy a plan, it would cost me ~$6400/year (national average, probably higher here where I live). A doctor costs me about ~$100 per visit. ~$150 to see a specialist (I went to an ENT specialist to get my throat examined with a fiber optic probe). $300 for a course of brand name antibiotics; about $30 if I were to buy it from an online pharmacy in India. That one year with my throat problem I had paid maybe $1000 for the above plus a few tests. The next year I got a chest X-ray for $250. And that was the entirety of my medical expenditures in the last ten years. If I had insurance, I would have still have had to pay a smaller fee for each of the above, maybe 15%. So that's $1250 without insurance versus $64190 (that's SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS) with insurance.
Ok, you say, but maybe something really bad were to happen to me? I answer, like what? Of the really expensive treatments there is organ failure, heart attacks, cancer, and spinal injuries. Having an organ failure or a spinal injury is a very rare event, and I'm quite willing to put them in the same category of "death from a falling meteor". Yes, I could die, and so could you, and so shall we all in the end. If I can't afford it, I won't pay for it and I'll die. Tough cookies. Pretty much the same with cancer. First, I really don't have to worry about it until I hit 50. Second, barring breast and testicular cancer, the survival rate is pretty much zero anyway. Yes, you can extend your life for another five or ten years with chemo or radiotherapy, but it always comes back and kills you, except that you'll be a lot more miserable if you let the hospital "fight for your life" to the bitter end. Much better to just let nature take its course, take painkillers or whatever helps. I would much prefer a quicker death to five years of misery. And finally, as far as heart disease is concerned, the treatment is to lead a healthier lifestyle (quit smoking, maintain a normal weight, don't eat a diet consisting exclusively of Cheetos, etc). Surgical interventions usually do more harm than good. Oh, and when they happen, they are expensive, but not THAT expensive. You might pay something like $30000 to get a stent installed. Compare that with the $64000 for ten years of insurance. Or, considering that most people have their heart attacks after the late 40's, that's over $128000 for insurance.
Overall, people need to stop being so friggin' scared of dying. You'll all die anyway, and the less medical intervention you have, the less you will suffer.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking care of fellow humans, with loving and cherising their lives as much as your own, and with giving them your money so they can live longer and healthier lives. Except that this bill is not about that. It's about forcing you to do these things at gunpoint (and yes, a gunpoint is somewhere in your future if you stop paying your taxes) by raising taxes (by 3.8%) and by forcing you to buy health insurance when you don't want to do so. This is the core problem of socialism: it's not that we should hate helping our fellow man, it's that we should hate being forced to do so. It's that we should hate not being able to choose whom to help with our efforts, and so to not be able to value the lives of the people we love more than the people we don't.
Slashdot is packed with the entitlement generation and you're asking if they approve of the government creating another entitlement? Might as well go to Hell and ask the Devil if sinning is bad.
Probability: The Logic Of Science by Jaynes. Although it is in part a rigorous text, you can skip the derivations and just read the examples. Most of the book is about how to think about probability, emphasizing the methods of correctly formulating the problem and explaining why most people fail at that (admittedly quite complex) task. Even if you don't understand a single equation in the book, you'll still benefit from reading it.
You have to explicitly enable function-level linking with gcc. Compile your source files with -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections, and then pass -gc-sections flag to ld (-Wl,-gc-sections if linking with gcc). This puts every function into its own .text.section and allows the linker to prune the ones that are not referenced. The remaining ones are coalesced into a single .text section.
People giving security advice often have no idea what the threat model is. For example, the typical home user's computer has no chance of being physically attacked. Nobody breaks into people's houses to install hardware keyloggers to steal their online banking passwords. And yet, some banks put up "security measures" like on-screen keyboards you have to type on with a mouse just to avoid keyloggers. Likewise, there's no real security reason to password protect your account on your home computer that nobody but you uses, and no security reason to not use autologin.
Seriously, there is only one kind of threat the home user faces, and that's software attacks, none of which are aimed specifically at him, and all of which are acquired either through his web browser or through infected executables given to him by his friends. If he runs NoScript, disables javascript in email, and gets executables only from reputable sources, there is simply no way he can get infected. If he's on Linux, he's safer than he's ever going to be already.
I finally got around to telling them about it today and they fixed it, so feel free to become a NearlyFreeSpeech customer. I may have griped about this one little problem (which they apparently didn't know about), but they really are the best host around.
You obviously never tried to convince a nontechnical person to use encryption. They just get that sour look on their faces, thinking "yeah, yet another stupid techie thing I don't care about but now have to learn". Naturally, you can't ask them to set up encryption themselves. Installing gpg and enigmail is a nontrivial task even for me. And you can't even set it up transparently, because gpg evidently decided that an empty passphrase is "insecure" and not to be allowed. Of course, they don't care that if the nontechnical user has to remember a passphrase and to enter it to email to you, well, they'll just not send you any mail.
Then there's the problem of most people using webmail. The desktop mail client is going extinct and all the regular users are moving to gmail, where, like on any other webmail, you can't have encryption without surrendering your private key to the provider.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, my mail forwarder (www.nearlyfreespeech.net) adds a ***UNCHECKED*** prefix to all encrypted mail it forwards. No, Mom, it really is safe to open my email. ***UNCHECKED*** just means the forwarder couldn't read it and verify that it has no viruses in it. What's a forwarder? Well, it's a...
Writing a check is the only way to transfer money for free. Online bill payment is basically writing a check that the bank prints and mails for you (I know because I had one returned to me once). A credit card is only good at a store, you can't pay to an individual, and it costs the store money to accept it (you don't know this because the store is required to eat the charge and not pass it on to you). Paypal requires your payee to have a paypal account, which is not always an option for nontechnical people, and there are small fees there too. A wire transfer is very expensive (~$25 paid by you to send, and the same amount charged to the receiver), so is not economical most of the time. Cash is bulky if you have to give a lot and you may get some attention from the FBI for "structuring withdrawals". A certified check is fast, but is also expensive, ~$20. That leaves checks, which are still free. Sure, the float sucks, but unless you want to pay, there is simply no way around it.
GPL is so troublesome because in most companies there is no way in hell anybody will let you release the source code to the product. Hence, no GPL code can be included, but many developers don't bother looking up the license for the code they use, which causes later trouble for the company. It's as simple as that.
Any bird can teach you something about the birds and the bees, assuming of course, that you're not a bee.
Any UI design that forces me to use the mouse is automatically a failure. Any method of information display that uses only a small fraction of the available display space to display tiny windows and forces me to resize them or scroll them is also automatically a failure. A method that combines both, must then be a gigantic failure.
It's really easy to decide to spend more on health care when you are not the one paying the bill.
When you overclock, you always have to check system stability at each level you try. Most people run some CPU stress program and see if it crashes or gives the wrong results. If you get any faults, your CPU can't handle the overclock and you have to try a lower frequency. As long as you apply this procedure properly, you won't have any faults. You most certainly won't get any predictable amount of faults. Now, the researchers could do it because they only ran OpenSSL on their hardware. If you tried that on a normal machine, you'd just get a kernel panic (the kernel needs the CPU to work correctly too, you know). Any other software will also have trouble and cause data corruption. Considering that the attack requires you to repeatedly encrypt/sign/verify stuff with your private key during it, the attackers don't have a chance to not get noticed.
Next, the researchers did not actually run it on a real computer. If you RTFA, you'll find out that they implemented a copy of a Sparc processor on an FPGA and ran OpenSSL on that. You can't just vary the input voltage at the PSU, since the PSU will regulate it to the correct output for the CPU. If you drop the voltage below what the PSU can handle (~85V), it will shut down. You might succeed if you changed the voltage at the motherboard, but the board really ought to detect that. Also, Intel chips, like Nehalem, actually have voltage converters on the chip which change 12V and 5V inputs to the 1.5V or so that the CPU needs. So your Core i7 system is quite safe against this attack. (Yes, it overclocks. See above)
Finally, there's the obvious problem of physically attacking the computer while you're using it. The attackers would need to constantly control and monitor whatever hardware doohickey they installed on your motherboard, as well as needing a working login to be able to time how long it takes you to run the algorithm each time. It is much easier to just install a hardware keylogger and get the passphrase.
Let's make a study conclusively proving that football tends to increase the players' long term tendency toward aggressive and antisocial behavior (like stuffing classmates into lockers, for instance), decreases empathy, and correlates with lower lifetime income. Heck, you might not even have to fudge the data...
In my experience, Comcast's DNS servers go down all the time, and even when they work, they sometimes have unexplained "glitches" that render websites unusable. Every time I try using their servers, this happens, and I switch back to something more stable, like L3. I'd be surprized to find anybody but a total n00b still using Comcast's DNS.
The real problem here is the idea that a college degree is treated as a certification. The right thing to do is to get rid of that idea and treat college as a private matter, with the degree being awarded for completion, not competence. Any employer will grill you on an interview anyway, and will know if you know how to write code. Anyone who doesn't deserves the quality employees he will get.
See http://www.amazon.com/Killswitch-Cassandra-Kresnov-Joel-Shepherd/dp/1591027438
It just happens to be a novel about an attempt to engineer loyalty into a synthetic organism. Oh, and it's totally awesome.
I'm running 2.6.32 with the fabulous new scheduler and all those "low latency" settings painstakingly compiled in. Nevertheless, I'm currently making some DVD isos and while mkisofs is running, firefox has to think for five or six seconds before loading every page. Somehow I doubt that having two extra cores is going to help me here...
To get the iPhone, I would need to sign up for a VERY expensive and long term contract. There is no way I'm spending a thousand dollars a year for a friggin phone. To get the Nexus One I can buy a prepaid sim from T-mobile and pay $100/year, using WiFi for network connectivity. This price advantage alone is enough to give the Nexus One an enormously larger market than the iPhone.
> Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs
> the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death.
Damn right it does! Force me to wear a helmet and I'd probably skip riding the bike in the first place. And the tone of your post just makes me mad. How dare you nanny state liberals dictate whether I choose to risk my head or not? If I crash my head into a pole, that's none of your goddamned business. My life is my own to live or to risk or to do away with, and nobody has a right to tell me how much risk is acceptable for me to take.
> Old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family!
Gee, I wonder why. Maybe having five children when he couldn't even afford to feed himself had something to do with that. The poor with a brood of children have no one to blame for their poverty except their penises.
If they think it's unbreakable, all we have to do is find a four year old boy who will be happy to prove them wrong.
Yeah, and where are those apps now? People hated dongles for a reason; they were inconvenient as hell. The same is true of all these ridiculous authenticator fobs; I'd ditch my bank in a second if they required one, and I certainly wouldn't have any qualms about ditching any game that requires one. But, of course, it's not like a large company like Blizzard cares about a few lost customers...
I'm glad it works for you. Unfortunately, on my 64bit Arch it reliably crashes, unable to show even the simplest Flash app.