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Comment Re:Harry Shearer wanted more money (Score 1) 100

Perhaps you could explain how such a salary is justified? Without resorting to "well the Market says..."?

Becuse he's earning his employers shittons more than $6M per year by doing that work? Would the morally correct outcome be for him to cut his salary by, say, $3M so the owners of the company can pocket $3M more?

Comment Re:The cost of doing business (Score 1) 215

Monopoly or not, companies set their prices at the spot that they think maximizes their profits. They can't "pass on" 100% of a new cost by changing the price because that knocks them off of the spot they optimized for. They do lose something in the process. If all it took for them to grab an extra $229K in profits was to raise their prices, they'd have done it already.

Comment Software Engineering Philosophy (Score 1) 203

The very first public wiki: it goes by the aliases "Wiki Wiki Web", "C2 wiki", and "Portland Pattern Repository".

It's a combination wiki, blog, and discussions on the philosophies of software design. It's messy, but often messy in a good way.

There is a tension between what may be called "practitioners" and "academics" that I find fascinating (and have helped fuel, I must say). The practitioner stance is that human (coder) nature/perception and economics (bottom line) are the key factors, while the academics tend to argue that symbolic parsimony and mathematical provability/analyzability are the keys.

You will generally NOT find definitive/consensus answers, but you will find interesting questions and a wide variety of opinions on various software design and IT topics. It's fuel for thought in the sense of "Why is technique X better than technique Y?", or "can you objectively prove that technique X is better than Y, and if not, what's holding you back?"

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Welcome...

However, lately it's only in read-only mode, and being redone into a "distributive" wiki, in part driven by vandals and spammers. The future direction is unknown.

It's like a junkyard for idea-tinkerers.

Comment Re:Coincidentally... (Score 2) 191

I am a medical doctor, and work in a government owned hospital. That makes me kind of a civil servant. I get paid per month, not per patient/treatment.

I completely recognize my colleagues and myself in this report. One doesn't call in sick, unless one has 39,5C fever or isn't capable of driving the car to work.

Financial interest has nothing to with this, your remark reflects your utter ignorance for the matter and lacks any form of humour.

Are you claiming there are no doctors who get paid per visit or per service offered? Because unless that is the case, your remarks reflect your utter ignorance for the matter.

Even for you and your colleague who never calls in sick, I doubt there are no financial interests at play. Do you have a limited number of sick days? Do you have to take vacation days after those sick days are exhausted? Are you compensated at the year's end for unused sick days? Are your sick days and vacation days all combined into a single PTO group? Does your hospital not keep enough staff on hand to cover for sick doctors? If you said "Yes" to any of these questions then there are financial interests at play.

These issues are either caused by financial interests, ignorant doctors, or doctors who don't care about their patients' health. I am betting on the first, and would be very sad if you think it is one of the two latter explanations.

Comment Re:Fuck That! (Score 2) 227

A good, a Star Trek-Star Wars mashup. I like the scene where Riker and Han get in a fight over a scantily clad Troi, as Jabba's band plays Born To Be Wild. Admiral Kirk finally wins the day by forcing Jabba's protocol droid into a logic loop that causes its head to explode, bringing down Jabba's palace.

Comment Re:kessel run (Score 1) 227

Oh god. The whole romance angle in the second prequel was a masterstroke of hackneyed, butchered, gawdawful and outright flat dialog. The first time around I was just too overawed by the awfulness to know what was hitting me, but the second watching was where the full extent of Lucas's incapability of writing decent dialogue.

Even better was Padme's death scene in the final prequel:

MEDICAL DROID: Medically, she is completely healthy. For reasons we can't explain, we are losing her.

OBI-WAN: She's dying?

MEDICAL DROID: We don't know why. She has lost the will to live. We need to operate quickly if we are to save the babies.

Comment Re:GRR (Score 4, Insightful) 227

Every time I watch them, I come up with another reason to loathe them. Mind you, it's been about five years since the last viewing of any Star Wars film, so I'll probably have forgotten half the reasons the prequels stunk so very very badly.

I remember clearly watching The Phantom Menace and realizing the extent of the suckage when C3PO turns out to be Darth Vader's droid. I was still reeling from the midichlorians nonsense, and then that. Of course, by the time pod-racer video game advertisement had taken up most of the second act, I realized that George Lucas wasn't just a greedy bastard, but well and truly had no fucking idea how to make an at least enjoyable film anymore. Two more prequels and the last Indiana Jones movie convinced me that Lucas was done even as an action-adventure director (the latter demonstrated that he had lost even the basic concept of pacing).

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