All that oversight is sure doing great things for your health care. Not only do you pay much more than we do for it, but you're not eve n getting the service you paid for - denial of care rates are sky high, and it looks like health insurance providers will find any excuse under the sun to not give you the care you paid for.
I mean, the only solution to this problem is... *gasp* government regulation! After all, what other way is there to force companies to act counter to their own interests? (failure to provide care, or providing shoddy cheap care, is more profitable)
And once you realize how tightly the system must be regulated to remain reasonable, you come to the inevitable conclusion that things would be cheaper and better off if it were unified. After all, the cost of the regulators and other such systems can be better put to use hiring doctors and nurses! Not to mention that the government has an obligation to transparency, and any member of the public is free to obtain a copy of the health care budget and complain when spending gets wasteful.
Federal businesses already do. I suppose there can be a policy that will force companies that do a significant part of their business in another province to incorporate there also, either as a second company or as a federal one?
Many of us don't want to support those things, though.
Then get out there and vote. If there's no candidate out there who will support your views, then consider becoming one. If there is TRULY nobody (or very few people out there) that will support your views, then perhaps that says something.
I dislike paying them to support your favorite pet causes.
I suppose an education system is also a pet cause? What about road repairs paid for by tax dollars? Is that a pet cause too?
...or for healthcare for people too lazy to take care of their own bodies
Ahhhh, out comes the massive superiority complex. Look buddy, not everyone who gets sick does so out of their own ignorance. Not everyone who gets into a car wreck is a bad driver, etc etc. Get of your high horse there and stop assuming bullshit.
I find it outright offensive that the bulk of my tax dollars go to causes that I absolutely oppose on both moral and practical grounds.
Then vote, or run for office, or get out of my country, whichever suits your taste the best.
If you want to support a failing school system, you pay for it. If you want healthcare, buy insurance for yourself. If you want to help bail out Buggy-Whips-R-Us, you can send them a donation. See the pattern there?
Yes, the good old "every man for himself" mentality. Want chicken for dinner? RAISE IT YOURSELF. See? There's absolutely NO BENEFIT to society if people act together in their common interests!
If sacrificing a few dollars of my hard-earned income will reduce crime in the streets, enable the poor to pull themselves out of poverty, and give opportunity to those who have none, then by all means I will support it. After all, a prosperous, safe, and productive country is good for all Canadians.
See, the thing you're not getting about public health care is that... nobody's saying "the gov't must pay for it because the citizens are too broke", because 100% of our health care dollars come out of taxes in the first place. The population *is* paying for this, the money isn't falling out of some money tree somewhere, and overwhelmingly our public health care (designed for everyone) costs far less than the American equivalent (which doesn't even serve most of the population, only the poor), and on the whole has far better care.
I am willing to bet, strongly, that if you calculate the average lifetime investment by a Canadian into health care (in the form of taxes paid), it will cost far less than what the average American pays for his health care, and on the whole it will be on-par, if not better, than the care Americans receive. After all, 40% of your health insurance premiums go into "administration", whereas this number is closer to 4-5% in Canada, IIRC. Ceteris paribus, on that fact alone our health care will cost some 30% less.
It's funny how you claim that public health care will bankrupt your country. We've had this system for decades, and the Canadian government has been well into the black for the past few years, and we're running a trade surplus. Our currency is appreciating (for better or for worse), and we're well on the way to paying off all that debt we accumulated during the boondoggle of the 90s. Compared with your nation, who is dangerously in debt (per capita-wise higher than ANY debt Canada had ever run, and I thought we had it bad in the 90s), currency is falling against ALL other major world currencies... It seems like you guys are the ones on the road to bankruptcy, and you're not even getting free health care out of it!
I dont' get the classic American aversion to nationalized health care - I suspect it's a holdover from the "oh no, socialism/communism is EEEEEVIL!" conditioning of past years, but seriously, you people are ALREADY paying for your health care system, paying a MASSIVE overhead on top of the actual cost of health care to the insurance companies... A nationalized system won't be perfect, and obviously government bureaucracy is not the most efficient spending mechanism in the world, but it's a heck of a lot better than what you've got now. We Canadians can keep our overhead to 4-5%, there's no reason why you Americans can't do the same, and pocket the other 35% to improve the prosperity of your people.
Sorry, I guess I'm still half-asleep. What I meant to say was that provincial businesses do not have to charge Ontario PST to customers purchasing from ON.
Why shouldn't law enforcement be allowed to request the true identities of people who are discussing clearly illegal acts online? If I claim loudly in an online forum that I'm going to blow up such-and-such a place, I fully expect it's within the police's duties to investigate the veracity of my claims, up to and including finding out my real name/address/whatever.
Does it matter? Straightforward or hidden, complicated or simple, you end up paying the same amount in the end. If you want to support public healthcare, education, etc etc, you better be prepared to pay up.
I dislike how most people equate taxes to Bad Thing(tm). You really want to pay for healthcare yourself? Say you're rich and make 6-7 figures, you want to deal with the ensuing crime problems when poor people can't afford to? You want 40% of your health care costs to line the pockets of execs, or do you actually want medical care for that money? There are places where socialization is appropriate, and there are places it is not. For the most part IMHO the Canadian gov't does a good job at most things, and I'm happy to pay my taxes, because I know I will suffer if the gov't suddenly stopped taxing us, either directly or indirectly.
Having helped my folks set up their own small home business, I learned a few things about tax law. There are two types of corporation - provincial corporations and federal corporations. As a provincial corporation, you only need to charge your customers GST, not the local PST.
This sort of, kind of bugs me. The law behind this was written in a day and age where it's rare for provincial businesses to trade outside their borders, and even if they do it's a minor part of their income, a drop in the proverbial bucket. But huge businesses like NCIX are still registered in BC, even though they make millions in sales to other provinces (especially Ontario) - and that's a MASSIVE chunk of PST missing, not to mention that it creates an unfair playing field for local businesses. I know many Ontarians who go to NCIX just to skip out on the PST, and it's arguably stealing business from local, er, businesses.
IMHO if the majority of your operations are not in your home province you ought to be forced to incorporate federally and be forced to follow the local tax laws wherever you operate (in Canada at least!).
You mean the service where everybody leeches, resulting in complete lack of bandwidth available to downloaders unless you're in an exclusive, ratio-metered club?
Or the one that really only works for popular albums, as anything old or otherwise unpopular and non-mainstream will have no seeders?
Even accounting for the $0 price tag, Bittorrent has a LONG way to go to rival ANY paid music store.
If only your parents taught you how to stand up for yourself you could've saved everyone a ton of trouble by not moving schools so many times.
Yes, because the bullying he suffered through was clearly *nobody's fault* except his own. Get a clue. Instead of blaming the victims, why don't you punish the guilty?
Typical Slashdot. In the end the vast majority of people who use Firefox aren't even coders. You seriously want them to grab the fix from CVS and backport it to their own copy? My God man, these people don't even know what make does, and what are you suggesting?
There's nothing for open source apologists to gloat about when it comes to software fixes. As far as any normal user is concerned, bug fixes take just as long to come down the pipe as proprietary software. Nobody gives a hoot if it's fixed in CVS, if it's not fixed on their machine it's not fixed at all.
Except in this case it appears all they did was flip a setting within the the firmware's flash... I can understand the argument if we're talking about actual custom code running on the modem - but this doesn't appear to be the case. If I hack an executable with a hex editor and enable a bool switch that you disabled... it's still running YOUR code...
I *do* report bugs to the Firefox bug DB, and you know what? Every single one has been responded with "ok, fixed for FF3". What, the world somehow lost the ability to do point updates for large, annoying bugs? Why is it that we have to wait for FF3 (or worse, run the unstable CVS copy) just to have some critical fixes?
To the end user, the Firefox bug fix rate is the same as MS. While Firefox may get the fix committed to CVS earlier, the result for the end user is still a ridiculous wait to get a basic, critical bug fixed in a public release. Instead of touting how quickly a fix makes it into CVS, let's do a survey on average time for a bug to go from reported to *fixed on the end user machine*?
Except, AFAIK, the burden of proof is upon Apple to show that the SIM unlock process being employed by the customer is bricking the phone. I have an unlocked iPhone, and as far as I can tell the only tricky part about the unlock process is the buffer overflow to get into the phone in the first place - certainly not something that will damage hardware. The firmware modifications are not real modifications, so much as it appears to be flipping a switch - literally a setting that Apple had placed in there in the first place. The phone supports unlocked mode, and no custom firmware code is being written, just settings, AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
How about no? Besides the obvious issue of vigilante "justice", do you really want the copyleft movement to be known as a bunch of gangsters? Shame on you.
Do you really want that to happen? The main problem with music companies now is that they own all of the distribution channels. As brick and mortar record stores decrease in importance, do you really want yet another monopoly waiting to take over? Granted, they would be all about the brushed aluminum and everything will be shiny and chromed... but still:P
I suppose you're one of the people that expected XP to run on your 386... Like other posters have brought up - Leopard will run on machines made up to *FIVE YEARS* ago. Not to mention that companies will not start dropping Tiger support until well after Leopard has been released, so you can expect another good year or two of compatibility with a Tiger machine until new versions leave you behind. 6-7 years of support for a machine? That sounds pretty good to me.
Re:Online Co-op not a factor?
on
Halo 3 Review
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The official word is as such:
- Up to 2 players can play splitscreen on the same box.
- Up to 4 players can play over Xbox Live or System Link (LAN)
- The above can be combined in any way (e.g. 2 people on one box + 2 players over Xbox Live)
The third one is the one that has the features the other 2 really should have
Sequel Improves On Predecessor: Video at 11!
How long will Halo 3 hang on until the next fps title eclipses it (but with way crappier features, like from Quake 3 -> Halo 1)? Just a thought.
You know both Doom and Quake franchises are still around? Not to mention Half-Life that came before Halo, and... oh forget it.
I don't even get how Q3A and Halo 1 are comparable. One is a game that focuses on singleplay, with a smattering of multiplay maps based around vehicle combat. The other is a multiplay-only game with a focus on frenetic close-quarters fighting...
I was talking about KZ2. Though you're right, given how crappy KZ1 was, I'm surprised anyone is holding their breath for this one. The reports from various shows where KZ2 was shown playable have revealed a bland game whose gameplay is about equivalent to its predecessor.
I really don't understand the hubbub about binary lump drivers... If NVidia or AMD want to open up their specs, great, power to them. If they don't, as long as they're providing solid drivers for Linux who gives a hoot if they're open source?
Slashdot Mirror
All that oversight is sure doing great things for your health care. Not only do you pay much more than we do for it, but you're not eve n getting the service you paid for - denial of care rates are sky high, and it looks like health insurance providers will find any excuse under the sun to not give you the care you paid for.
I mean, the only solution to this problem is... *gasp* government regulation! After all, what other way is there to force companies to act counter to their own interests? (failure to provide care, or providing shoddy cheap care, is more profitable)
And once you realize how tightly the system must be regulated to remain reasonable, you come to the inevitable conclusion that things would be cheaper and better off if it were unified. After all, the cost of the regulators and other such systems can be better put to use hiring doctors and nurses! Not to mention that the government has an obligation to transparency, and any member of the public is free to obtain a copy of the health care budget and complain when spending gets wasteful.
Federal businesses already do. I suppose there can be a policy that will force companies that do a significant part of their business in another province to incorporate there also, either as a second company or as a federal one?
Then get out there and vote. If there's no candidate out there who will support your views, then consider becoming one. If there is TRULY nobody (or very few people out there) that will support your views, then perhaps that says something.
I dislike paying them to support your favorite pet causes.I suppose an education system is also a pet cause? What about road repairs paid for by tax dollars? Is that a pet cause too?
...or for healthcare for people too lazy to take care of their own bodiesAhhhh, out comes the massive superiority complex. Look buddy, not everyone who gets sick does so out of their own ignorance. Not everyone who gets into a car wreck is a bad driver, etc etc. Get of your high horse there and stop assuming bullshit.
I find it outright offensive that the bulk of my tax dollars go to causes that I absolutely oppose on both moral and practical grounds.Then vote, or run for office, or get out of my country, whichever suits your taste the best.
If you want to support a failing school system, you pay for it. If you want healthcare, buy insurance for yourself. If you want to help bail out Buggy-Whips-R-Us, you can send them a donation. See the pattern there?Yes, the good old "every man for himself" mentality. Want chicken for dinner? RAISE IT YOURSELF. See? There's absolutely NO BENEFIT to society if people act together in their common interests!
If sacrificing a few dollars of my hard-earned income will reduce crime in the streets, enable the poor to pull themselves out of poverty, and give opportunity to those who have none, then by all means I will support it. After all, a prosperous, safe, and productive country is good for all Canadians.
See, the thing you're not getting about public health care is that... nobody's saying "the gov't must pay for it because the citizens are too broke", because 100% of our health care dollars come out of taxes in the first place. The population *is* paying for this, the money isn't falling out of some money tree somewhere, and overwhelmingly our public health care (designed for everyone) costs far less than the American equivalent (which doesn't even serve most of the population, only the poor), and on the whole has far better care.
I am willing to bet, strongly, that if you calculate the average lifetime investment by a Canadian into health care (in the form of taxes paid), it will cost far less than what the average American pays for his health care, and on the whole it will be on-par, if not better, than the care Americans receive. After all, 40% of your health insurance premiums go into "administration", whereas this number is closer to 4-5% in Canada, IIRC. Ceteris paribus, on that fact alone our health care will cost some 30% less.
It's funny how you claim that public health care will bankrupt your country. We've had this system for decades, and the Canadian government has been well into the black for the past few years, and we're running a trade surplus. Our currency is appreciating (for better or for worse), and we're well on the way to paying off all that debt we accumulated during the boondoggle of the 90s. Compared with your nation, who is dangerously in debt (per capita-wise higher than ANY debt Canada had ever run, and I thought we had it bad in the 90s), currency is falling against ALL other major world currencies... It seems like you guys are the ones on the road to bankruptcy, and you're not even getting free health care out of it!
I dont' get the classic American aversion to nationalized health care - I suspect it's a holdover from the "oh no, socialism/communism is EEEEEVIL!" conditioning of past years, but seriously, you people are ALREADY paying for your health care system, paying a MASSIVE overhead on top of the actual cost of health care to the insurance companies... A nationalized system won't be perfect, and obviously government bureaucracy is not the most efficient spending mechanism in the world, but it's a heck of a lot better than what you've got now. We Canadians can keep our overhead to 4-5%, there's no reason why you Americans can't do the same, and pocket the other 35% to improve the prosperity of your people.
Sorry, I guess I'm still half-asleep. What I meant to say was that provincial businesses do not have to charge Ontario PST to customers purchasing from ON.
Why shouldn't law enforcement be allowed to request the true identities of people who are discussing clearly illegal acts online? If I claim loudly in an online forum that I'm going to blow up such-and-such a place, I fully expect it's within the police's duties to investigate the veracity of my claims, up to and including finding out my real name/address/whatever.
Does it matter? Straightforward or hidden, complicated or simple, you end up paying the same amount in the end. If you want to support public healthcare, education, etc etc, you better be prepared to pay up.
I dislike how most people equate taxes to Bad Thing(tm). You really want to pay for healthcare yourself? Say you're rich and make 6-7 figures, you want to deal with the ensuing crime problems when poor people can't afford to? You want 40% of your health care costs to line the pockets of execs, or do you actually want medical care for that money? There are places where socialization is appropriate, and there are places it is not. For the most part IMHO the Canadian gov't does a good job at most things, and I'm happy to pay my taxes, because I know I will suffer if the gov't suddenly stopped taxing us, either directly or indirectly.
Having helped my folks set up their own small home business, I learned a few things about tax law. There are two types of corporation - provincial corporations and federal corporations. As a provincial corporation, you only need to charge your customers GST, not the local PST.
This sort of, kind of bugs me. The law behind this was written in a day and age where it's rare for provincial businesses to trade outside their borders, and even if they do it's a minor part of their income, a drop in the proverbial bucket. But huge businesses like NCIX are still registered in BC, even though they make millions in sales to other provinces (especially Ontario) - and that's a MASSIVE chunk of PST missing, not to mention that it creates an unfair playing field for local businesses. I know many Ontarians who go to NCIX just to skip out on the PST, and it's arguably stealing business from local, er, businesses.
IMHO if the majority of your operations are not in your home province you ought to be forced to incorporate federally and be forced to follow the local tax laws wherever you operate (in Canada at least!).
You mean the service where everybody leeches, resulting in complete lack of bandwidth available to downloaders unless you're in an exclusive, ratio-metered club?
Or the one that really only works for popular albums, as anything old or otherwise unpopular and non-mainstream will have no seeders?
Even accounting for the $0 price tag, Bittorrent has a LONG way to go to rival ANY paid music store.
Always put your CD in a sleeve? :P
It's "beaucoup"... *cue More You Know rainbow*
Yes, because the bullying he suffered through was clearly *nobody's fault* except his own. Get a clue. Instead of blaming the victims, why don't you punish the guilty?
Typical Slashdot. In the end the vast majority of people who use Firefox aren't even coders. You seriously want them to grab the fix from CVS and backport it to their own copy? My God man, these people don't even know what make does, and what are you suggesting?
There's nothing for open source apologists to gloat about when it comes to software fixes. As far as any normal user is concerned, bug fixes take just as long to come down the pipe as proprietary software. Nobody gives a hoot if it's fixed in CVS, if it's not fixed on their machine it's not fixed at all.
Except in this case it appears all they did was flip a setting within the the firmware's flash... I can understand the argument if we're talking about actual custom code running on the modem - but this doesn't appear to be the case. If I hack an executable with a hex editor and enable a bool switch that you disabled... it's still running YOUR code...
I *do* report bugs to the Firefox bug DB, and you know what? Every single one has been responded with "ok, fixed for FF3". What, the world somehow lost the ability to do point updates for large, annoying bugs? Why is it that we have to wait for FF3 (or worse, run the unstable CVS copy) just to have some critical fixes?
To the end user, the Firefox bug fix rate is the same as MS. While Firefox may get the fix committed to CVS earlier, the result for the end user is still a ridiculous wait to get a basic, critical bug fixed in a public release. Instead of touting how quickly a fix makes it into CVS, let's do a survey on average time for a bug to go from reported to *fixed on the end user machine*?
Except, AFAIK, the burden of proof is upon Apple to show that the SIM unlock process being employed by the customer is bricking the phone. I have an unlocked iPhone, and as far as I can tell the only tricky part about the unlock process is the buffer overflow to get into the phone in the first place - certainly not something that will damage hardware. The firmware modifications are not real modifications, so much as it appears to be flipping a switch - literally a setting that Apple had placed in there in the first place. The phone supports unlocked mode, and no custom firmware code is being written, just settings, AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
How about no? Besides the obvious issue of vigilante "justice", do you really want the copyleft movement to be known as a bunch of gangsters? Shame on you.
Do you really want that to happen? The main problem with music companies now is that they own all of the distribution channels. As brick and mortar record stores decrease in importance, do you really want yet another monopoly waiting to take over? Granted, they would be all about the brushed aluminum and everything will be shiny and chromed... but still :P
What a dumb question, don't you know how much it costs to be sultans of swing?
I suppose you're one of the people that expected XP to run on your 386... Like other posters have brought up - Leopard will run on machines made up to *FIVE YEARS* ago. Not to mention that companies will not start dropping Tiger support until well after Leopard has been released, so you can expect another good year or two of compatibility with a Tiger machine until new versions leave you behind. 6-7 years of support for a machine? That sounds pretty good to me.
The official word is as such:
- Up to 2 players can play splitscreen on the same box.
- Up to 4 players can play over Xbox Live or System Link (LAN)
- The above can be combined in any way (e.g. 2 people on one box + 2 players over Xbox Live)
Sequel Improves On Predecessor: Video at 11!
How long will Halo 3 hang on until the next fps title eclipses it (but with way crappier features, like from Quake 3 -> Halo 1)? Just a thought.You know both Doom and Quake franchises are still around? Not to mention Half-Life that came before Halo, and... oh forget it.
I don't even get how Q3A and Halo 1 are comparable. One is a game that focuses on singleplay, with a smattering of multiplay maps based around vehicle combat. The other is a multiplay-only game with a focus on frenetic close-quarters fighting...
With the unstoppable might of MSFT's legal dept... maybe we can get this guy disbarred finally.
I was talking about KZ2. Though you're right, given how crappy KZ1 was, I'm surprised anyone is holding their breath for this one. The reports from various shows where KZ2 was shown playable have revealed a bland game whose gameplay is about equivalent to its predecessor.
I really don't understand the hubbub about binary lump drivers... If NVidia or AMD want to open up their specs, great, power to them. If they don't, as long as they're providing solid drivers for Linux who gives a hoot if they're open source?