I'm pretty sure it checks the referred. I've been able to get to the same answer several times just by searching the title on Google and clicking through.
Even DNA checks are not good enough for this (as cases involving identical twins have shown), so the actual solution is very, very hard.
Just take a thumbprint with the signature. That's good enough to cover 99% of the cases. (If someone is rich enough that someone else will make a thumbcap to match, then you're getting into real cloak-and-dagger. But most crooks are dumb.) Inkpads are cheap. Even though the bank likely can't verify the thumbprint immediately, it will be invaluable to the police when the fraud is investigated.
Look, I believe in evolution, but it "explains" almost anything you can imagine, such as why humans have wings (to evade predators, of course).
Just to be pedantic, evolution isn't something to be believed in...Evolution is not a religion to be defended...
I agree completely. But I thought if I offered my comment without something like an affirmation of faith I would be assumed to be making a different point, which would be modded into oblivion and subsequently ignored.
Wow. I just want to print and laminate that or something.
And I'll put rocks in your pillow to control how much sleep you get... Why is the point always to control my speed? Why can't you instead make the point to optimize travel time?
That's all wonderful, but why is the point always to slow people down or reduce accidents? From my point of view, the goal is to get me there faster. I do NOT want to drive slower and watch the pedestrians walk around. I have computers to repair, parts to deliver, etc, and the freeway is wonderful. I hate trying to get through the inner cities.
In my (totally anecdotal) experience, people in the USA tend to drive a lot more than people in the UK; they'd happily commute a daily distance that no one in the UK would put up with and drive distances that most people that I know in the UK would walk.
I'm guessing that's because the USA has so much more land area.
This tidbit is far more interesting than the main article here. Can you cite some specific examples of this? I'd assume it's in robots.txt. This is an issue that could easily be rallied around:
-X agency blocks Google! We want freedom of information! -We need to ban blocking searching! -Not much to be partisan about. -Not expensive. -Not overly technical. -A short, specific bill could easily fix it permanently. -Congresscritters might like it, because it sounds good - "I forced the government to be transparent!" -It's the sort of issue talk show hosts would like, because it's sensational and easy to whip people up about.
Wait, I thought one of the "big scares" of government-run healthcare was the Death Panels that would decide when to stop paying for the elderly.
My great-grandma decided for herself. A death panel decides for you.
Some would say that expensive healthcare is a de-facto death panel between the people with savings and the people in debt. It may be. Remember, healthcare isn't a right in the USA. If you want it to be, you've got some major amending to do.
As a side note, why is the solution to every problem "throw in a profit motive!"? In many cases, it certainly can lead to a better product. In others, it necessarily effects a less efficient system by demanding extra resources to be reserved for profit.
A fundamental property of government is that organizations put their own power and existence as top priority. This is not because the people who work there are evil; it's just a property of bureaucracies. When you have a company after a profit, there is more than one way to increase your profits. There are three essential methods:
1. Raise prices. The supply/demand curve limits this method severely unless you have fixed demand, like people forced to buy healthcare (!). 2. Lower costs and overhead 3. Increase demand
A capitalist owner understands that the demand will be higher if he can adjust margins on his cost back end rather than on his customer front end, so he always prefers to combine 2 and 3. Health insurance does not work this way, because it isn't actually a capitalist market. It's a complex monster grown out of monopolies, government programs, and the murk that always results when end buyers do not see the real costs.
Maybe it could actually be Freenet on a wall wart. Toss out the rest of the idea. I'd like to have my very own chunk of a useful darknet. Market it to geeks, paranoid people, and political activists. Freenet needs a resource boost anyway.
here's the deal: the health care system in this country is broken. to fix it, you can pay some extra taxes to the federal government for the rest of your life, or you can pay hefty fees to the insurance companies for the rest of your life.
This here is what amazes me. We have the best healthcare system in the world. Nobody disputes that. That's why foreign heads of state usually get their procedures done here. Mayo Clinic, Salt Lake Children's Hospital, etc are some of the finest medical institutions in the world. What's broken is paying for healthcare, not the care itself.
Now, assuming that we've established that point, let's move on to why paying for it is so hard. I really don't know the answers here, but from personal conversations with medical personnel, I understand that their insurance is very expensive. Medical litigation is paid for by patients at large, not some magical fund the hospitals have squirreled away.
Another issue is that of advanced technologies and research. As medicine advances, it appear that the cost of research goes up exponentially, but on the other hand, we can keep people "alive" almost indefinitely. My great grandmother was a wealthy woman. She got stomach cancer and decided to simply die in peace rather than spend all her money and undergo all the turmoil of cancer treatment. We had all watched her daughter die slowly, painfully and expensively with cancer and chemo, but my great-grandmother wanted to give her many children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren an inheritance and live her last few years with her hair and without doctor hassles. I applaud her for that.
An idea that everyone seems to tout is forcing private companies to adjust their acceptance criteria to accept people with preexisting conditions. I think this is wrong, from a principled standpoint. America was founded on principles and rose to become the most desirable country on earth (that status seems shaky now). I for one am not about to trash our foundational principles just because of some emotional politics and sob stories. Again, do older people really need to have their life extended artificially forever? If they can pay for it that's certainly their privilege, but it's not one of the rights protected or granted by our founding documents. Therefore, the government should not attempt to grant it. Remember, if the government grants anything, it can take it away just as fast.
And last, but not least, there's the huge bureaucracy surrounding everything medical. Instead of making top-down regulations, why not try to incentivize someone like Google to build a standard system for health documentation?
I can name a few: 1. Speed. Vista is mind-numbingly slow. I cannot comprehend why it requires so much disk activity to do anything * 4. Windows 7 installs updates in a reasonable amount of time and doesn't blow up as easily. The pace at which Vista installs system updates borders on the incredible. Ever better - rolling back because it "failed" installing SP1 takes another hour on top of the one it took to get that far. And why does M$ take great pride in presenting me with a tool (SUR) to discover ahead of time if a Service Pack will actually install? Shouldn't the Service Pack do that itself before wasting two hours (that it absolutely must not be interrupted during)?
5. Name conventions. Vista had a lot of stupidness, from the power button that isn't to trying to find Add/Remove. Programs and Features my eye.
6. User resilience - in my professional experience XP and 7 are far easier to patch up after a user screws it up. (This may be a consequence of users not having as much time to stomp around in 7.) Ever had Vista claim that it's CBS is out of sync? It's 100% impossible to correct without a rebuild of some form. Best is when it has no service packs - you cannot perform an upgrade to 7 without SP1 installed, which cannot be installed with CBS being corrupt. You cannot repair the install because the client used Anytime Blowupgrade on an OEM image and has no relevant media of any sort.
7. The network center. Vista's networking UI was awful. With Windows XP and 7, I can mentally visualize with a customer on the phone what they are seeing and guide them through it. Not so with Vista - why does everything have stupid unguessable names? The customers still don't know what the names mean, so why can't you use terms a technician would expect? And what's with the oddball side links to access critical areas (7 retains some of this)? I still get warm fuzzies thinking about the friendly old Network Neighborhood that looked like it was designed on purpose, despite its many faults.
*A left a chunk empty here to emphasize the importance of #1.
And there's no other way to check private power other than with public power driven by large-scale civic participation. And we don't really do that anymore, or, if a lot of the recent anti-government populism is any indication, really believe at all in the idea of public power checking private power anymore.
So the lack of civic participation is the problem, and the recent spate of Tea Parties and similar movements aren't civic participation? This sounds like a weird sort of oxymoron.
Even if it does, we don't need the government to save us preemptively from expense (be it healthcare or energy). In both cases reducing red tape is 80% of the solution. I'm tired of being rescued. Just get out of the way.
(Please realize that this post is just a personal rant and has little do do with the parent. He just offered a nice jumping point.)
That's slightly unrelated to API compatibility, actually. Linux bundles a ton of drivers into the kernel and detects everything on startup. Windows tries to select just what you need when you first install it and make incremental changes from there. (But Ubuntu still boots faster than XP.)
Firefox is free. That's the beef. They CANNOT release a free browser with parts that cost royalties. That's the real issue here. MS can, because they have per-copy licensing fees for Windows that already include things like MP3 royalties. Mozilla is trying desperately to avoid this landmine, because it could actually kill Firefox.
I second BlueHost. I've been a customer for several years, and i've been pretty happy. They keep rehashing their advertised bandwidth and storage (they both now say unlimited, vs 300gb and 2tb when i first signed up iirc). The important things, though:
-Linux only -50 MySQL databases puts a realistic limit on the account -Servers are very beefy but slightly oversold -SSL costs $45 a year -SSH is available but requires some hoop jumping with faxing ID and whatnot
I've been a bit unhappy lately with page load times, but their CPanel setup and integration with Simple Scripts makes up for it. I figure for ~$100 a year I'm getting my money's worth.
The problem is that standardization stifles innovation in favor of safety. While safety is a very good thing, it would be nice to see some advances in transportation tech. The car hasn't changed much in quite a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the random bash on religion?
I'm pretty sure it checks the referred. I've been able to get to the same answer several times just by searching the title on Google and clicking through.
Even DNA checks are not good enough for this (as cases involving identical twins have shown), so the actual solution is very, very hard.
Just take a thumbprint with the signature. That's good enough to cover 99% of the cases. (If someone is rich enough that someone else will make a thumbcap to match, then you're getting into real cloak-and-dagger. But most crooks are dumb.) Inkpads are cheap. Even though the bank likely can't verify the thumbprint immediately, it will be invaluable to the police when the fraud is investigated.
Lastly he seems to be a clean cut Republican / Tea Party demagogue.
What? Is this random insult day or did I miss something?
The UN weapons inspectors didn't find anything in Iraq.
Keep in mind that the UN couldn't find a fire in a stove. Carry on...
Look, I believe in evolution, but it "explains" almost anything you can imagine, such as why humans have wings (to evade predators, of course).
Just to be pedantic, evolution isn't something to be believed in...Evolution is not a religion to be defended...
I agree completely. But I thought if I offered my comment without something like an affirmation of faith I would be assumed to be making a different point, which would be modded into oblivion and subsequently ignored.
Wow. I just want to print and laminate that or something.
You did it again...
And I'll put rocks in your pillow to control how much sleep you get...
Why is the point always to control my speed? Why can't you instead make the point to optimize travel time?
That's all wonderful, but why is the point always to slow people down or reduce accidents? From my point of view, the goal is to get me there faster. I do NOT want to drive slower and watch the pedestrians walk around. I have computers to repair, parts to deliver, etc, and the freeway is wonderful. I hate trying to get through the inner cities.
In my (totally anecdotal) experience, people in the USA tend to drive a lot more than people in the UK; they'd happily commute a daily distance that no one in the UK would put up with and drive distances that most people that I know in the UK would walk.
I'm guessing that's because the USA has so much more land area.
Newsflash: pedophiles are now classified as malware and will be quarantined. Gentleman, prepare your definitions!
I don't know, but my blog was down a while ago. Can I get coverage?
I made up the blog part.
This tidbit is far more interesting than the main article here. Can you cite some specific examples of this? I'd assume it's in robots.txt. This is an issue that could easily be rallied around:
-X agency blocks Google! We want freedom of information!
-We need to ban blocking searching!
-Not much to be partisan about.
-Not expensive.
-Not overly technical.
-A short, specific bill could easily fix it permanently.
-Congresscritters might like it, because it sounds good - "I forced the government to be transparent!"
-It's the sort of issue talk show hosts would like, because it's sensational and easy to whip people up about.
So, can we start finding which agencies do this?
Wait, I thought one of the "big scares" of government-run healthcare was the Death Panels that would decide when to stop paying for the elderly.
My great-grandma decided for herself. A death panel decides for you.
Some would say that expensive healthcare is a de-facto death panel between the people with savings and the people in debt. It may be. Remember, healthcare isn't a right in the USA. If you want it to be, you've got some major amending to do.
As a side note, why is the solution to every problem "throw in a profit motive!"? In many cases, it certainly can lead to a better product. In others, it necessarily effects a less efficient system by demanding extra resources to be reserved for profit.
A fundamental property of government is that organizations put their own power and existence as top priority. This is not because the people who work there are evil; it's just a property of bureaucracies. When you have a company after a profit, there is more than one way to increase your profits. There are three essential methods:
1. Raise prices. The supply/demand curve limits this method severely unless you have fixed demand, like people forced to buy healthcare (!).
2. Lower costs and overhead
3. Increase demand
A capitalist owner understands that the demand will be higher if he can adjust margins on his cost back end rather than on his customer front end, so he always prefers to combine 2 and 3. Health insurance does not work this way, because it isn't actually a capitalist market. It's a complex monster grown out of monopolies, government programs, and the murk that always results when end buyers do not see the real costs.
Maybe it could actually be Freenet on a wall wart. Toss out the rest of the idea. I'd like to have my very own chunk of a useful darknet. Market it to geeks, paranoid people, and political activists. Freenet needs a resource boost anyway.
here's the deal: the health care system in this country is broken. to fix it, you can pay some extra taxes to the federal government for the rest of your life, or you can pay hefty fees to the insurance companies for the rest of your life.
This here is what amazes me. We have the best healthcare system in the world. Nobody disputes that. That's why foreign heads of state usually get their procedures done here. Mayo Clinic, Salt Lake Children's Hospital, etc are some of the finest medical institutions in the world. What's broken is paying for healthcare, not the care itself.
Now, assuming that we've established that point, let's move on to why paying for it is so hard. I really don't know the answers here, but from personal conversations with medical personnel, I understand that their insurance is very expensive. Medical litigation is paid for by patients at large, not some magical fund the hospitals have squirreled away.
I also understand that unpaid medical bills create enormous overhead. St. Lukes, the largest hospital in my area, writes off sometime to the tune of $3 million a year according to http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:lzt_uU6lmigJ:www.saintlukeshospital.com/images/Camerons%2520columns/2007/052907New%2520Policy.doc . And that was back in 2007. I don't know what it is now. Furthermore, St. Lukes is a nonprofit, receives large donations annually, and runs fairly efficiently as hospitals go.
Another issue is that of advanced technologies and research. As medicine advances, it appear that the cost of research goes up exponentially, but on the other hand, we can keep people "alive" almost indefinitely. My great grandmother was a wealthy woman. She got stomach cancer and decided to simply die in peace rather than spend all her money and undergo all the turmoil of cancer treatment. We had all watched her daughter die slowly, painfully and expensively with cancer and chemo, but my great-grandmother wanted to give her many children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren an inheritance and live her last few years with her hair and without doctor hassles. I applaud her for that.
An idea that everyone seems to tout is forcing private companies to adjust their acceptance criteria to accept people with preexisting conditions. I think this is wrong, from a principled standpoint. America was founded on principles and rose to become the most desirable country on earth (that status seems shaky now). I for one am not about to trash our foundational principles just because of some emotional politics and sob stories. Again, do older people really need to have their life extended artificially forever? If they can pay for it that's certainly their privilege, but it's not one of the rights protected or granted by our founding documents. Therefore, the government should not attempt to grant it. Remember, if the government grants anything, it can take it away just as fast.
And last, but not least, there's the huge bureaucracy surrounding everything medical. Instead of making top-down regulations, why not try to incentivize someone like Google to build a standard system for health documentation?
Wait a minute, how does that work? Kids these days, going to the trouble to set up a straw man and running right past it...
I can name a few:
1. Speed. Vista is mind-numbingly slow. I cannot comprehend why it requires so much disk activity to do anything
*
4. Windows 7 installs updates in a reasonable amount of time and doesn't blow up as easily. The pace at which Vista installs system updates borders on the incredible. Ever better - rolling back because it "failed" installing SP1 takes another hour on top of the one it took to get that far. And why does M$ take great pride in presenting me with a tool (SUR) to discover ahead of time if a Service Pack will actually install? Shouldn't the Service Pack do that itself before wasting two hours (that it absolutely must not be interrupted during)?
5. Name conventions. Vista had a lot of stupidness, from the power button that isn't to trying to find Add/Remove. Programs and Features my eye.
6. User resilience - in my professional experience XP and 7 are far easier to patch up after a user screws it up. (This may be a consequence of users not having as much time to stomp around in 7.) Ever had Vista claim that it's CBS is out of sync? It's 100% impossible to correct without a rebuild of some form. Best is when it has no service packs - you cannot perform an upgrade to 7 without SP1 installed, which cannot be installed with CBS being corrupt. You cannot repair the install because the client used Anytime Blowupgrade on an OEM image and has no relevant media of any sort.
7. The network center. Vista's networking UI was awful. With Windows XP and 7, I can mentally visualize with a customer on the phone what they are seeing and guide them through it. Not so with Vista - why does everything have stupid unguessable names? The customers still don't know what the names mean, so why can't you use terms a technician would expect? And what's with the oddball side links to access critical areas (7 retains some of this)? I still get warm fuzzies thinking about the friendly old Network Neighborhood that looked like it was designed on purpose, despite its many faults.
*A left a chunk empty here to emphasize the importance of #1.
Your argument implies that complex problems require complex solutions. Can you defend that?
And there's no other way to check private power other than with public power driven by large-scale civic participation. And we don't really do that anymore, or, if a lot of the recent anti-government populism is any indication, really believe at all in the idea of public power checking private power anymore.
So the lack of civic participation is the problem, and the recent spate of Tea Parties and similar movements aren't civic participation? This sounds like a weird sort of oxymoron.
Even if it does, we don't need the government to save us preemptively from expense (be it healthcare or energy). In both cases reducing red tape is 80% of the solution. I'm tired of being rescued. Just get out of the way.
(Please realize that this post is just a personal rant and has little do do with the parent. He just offered a nice jumping point.)
That's slightly unrelated to API compatibility, actually. Linux bundles a ton of drivers into the kernel and detects everything on startup. Windows tries to select just what you need when you first install it and make incremental changes from there. (But Ubuntu still boots faster than XP.)
Firefox is free. That's the beef. They CANNOT release a free browser with parts that cost royalties. That's the real issue here. MS can, because they have per-copy licensing fees for Windows that already include things like MP3 royalties. Mozilla is trying desperately to avoid this landmine, because it could actually kill Firefox.
Same goes for Opera.
I second BlueHost. I've been a customer for several years, and i've been pretty happy. They keep rehashing their advertised bandwidth and storage (they both now say unlimited, vs 300gb and 2tb when i first signed up iirc). The important things, though:
-Linux only
-50 MySQL databases puts a realistic limit on the account
-Servers are very beefy but slightly oversold
-SSL costs $45 a year
-SSH is available but requires some hoop jumping with faxing ID and whatnot
I've been a bit unhappy lately with page load times, but their CPanel setup and integration with Simple Scripts makes up for it. I figure for ~$100 a year I'm getting my money's worth.
The problem is that standardization stifles innovation in favor of safety. While safety is a very good thing, it would be nice to see some advances in transportation tech. The car hasn't changed much in quite a while.