He's dead and gone. Really. What he helped create for us isn't, though, and that is certainly grounds for considerable cheer.

When *YOU* take an action *YOU* better be ready for the reaction. Anything less makes you a victim only to yourself.

It is very well documented that the reaction people were told they would have, which was a good one, by those who should have (and did) know otherwise, is not the reaction they actually got, which was deadly.

So while I agree absolutely that we are responsible for the outcomes of choices we make for which we understand the eventual and potential outcome(s), I deny just as absolutely that we are responsible for the outcomes of choices we make when we have been deceived.

I would have no problem whatsoever voting to convict a tobacco company executive of the previous century of premeditated manslaughter by poisoning. However, at this point, we know, or we should know, how utterly stupid smoking tobacco is in the context of our health, and yes, any individual capable of informed consent who is still (or begins) smoking today can't reasonably blame that on anyone other than themselves. And as long as they don't, and don't make non-consenting persons and animals inhale the carcinogenic pollution that results, I'm all for them smoking all they want.

I would want a policy that only covers major issues with a high deductible.

I'm interested to learn that you think you can tell the future. However, since I know you can't, I will simply point out that you don't understand the actual reason for insurance, a not uncommon failing among the young who have little relevant experience with disaster. This isn't betting, where you "win" if you can guess your disease. It's not supposed to be like a slot machine. This is about risk amelioration.

...if all the young healthy families did that...

... then there would be a lot of really nasty surprises for those "young and healthy families."

See, insurance isn't about what your condition is now. Insurance is about what your condition may become. So, when kid #2 develops a lymphatic tumor under their arm, instead of "parents tried to cheap out because they had a young and healthy family and now kid #2 can't get medical care", it is "off to a cancer specialist you go, #2, because we cared enough to see to it your risks were addressed."

Funny how those who got services/money/product from the ACA legislation are happy about??

Yes, it's really strange that those who needed healthcare are glad they were finally able to get it, isn't it? Weird! Gosh! Huh! How in the world??? (cough)

And the huge fucking mountain of folks that now enjoy $5k deductibles or insurance they did not need or want are not happy about it?

There are various deductibles. You choose the one you want. If you choose a 5k deductible, you're responsible for that choice. As far as insurance that's "not needed" goes, we don't know what we need because we have no way to tell what the future brings. The only way to determine what we probably or may need is via statistics. I trust the actuaries more than I trust my own judgement. Because I'm just that smart.

Are YOU getting other peoples money?

To directly answer your question, no, thus far and at the moment, I have not and am not. I've eroded my deductible a bit, probably won't work my way through it by the end of the year, barring unseen problems. Didn't last year, either. But of course I might very much benefit from "other people's money" at some point in the future.

That said, everyone in any insurance pool anywhere, ever, who makes a claim, is "getting other people's money." That's how insurance works. Similar for taxes. We all pay in, and in the case of the ACA, those who get the subsidies get the advantage of the payout. We do that when the loads are too great and/or too random for individuals to bear: infrastructure, military, healthcare (finally!), fire services, etc.

Why the fucking hell should my doctors have to be in some "POOL" anyway?

Well, for that, you want to look to your insurance company -- not the ACA. You can get plans where the doctor doesn't have to be in a network. The ones where they do use in-network doctors are generally less expensive though, so that may effectively be your answer. But it isn't the ACA that mandates pools. It's the insurance companies, and it's always been the insurance companies.

If you prefer to pay for other peoples medical care, great. Can you help me pay for mine?

If you're in my pool, then yes, I can and do help pay for yours. Again: That's how insurance works. If I'm not paying for you in the pool (different state, or different pool) even so I'm paying for other people's there -- and I have no problem with that. Likewise, in your state, in your pool, other people are paying for you. To the extent that my federal taxes (quite significant) are paying for your subsidy, I'm happy to do that as well. It's sure oodles better than thinking about what I'm paying for WRT various other government programs.

$1400/month with a $1500 yearly deductible for each family member.

The ACA requires that insurance costs are specifically limited for low-income individuals and families and there are tax credits. If you want me on your side here, you'd have to demonstrate that your income was low and your insurance costs were high and that the ACA didn't arrange for a circumstance to reasonably ameliorate your costs. Can you do that? I'd be very interested to learn the details, short of personally identifying data.

So yeah, you are happy about getting my money, and I am an asshole for providing it to you. thanks man.

Insurance is the way that congress decided this was going to operate. Given that, yeah, I'm happy to put the related money into insurance and into taxes as it lets me know that you and yours will be covered if that's needed. I'm sorry you don't feel the same way. I am pleased, however, that your feelings, as you expressed above, do not get to determine if other people get adequate healthcare.

You're assuming that the government is better at deciding what coverage you need than you are.

They didn't do all that badly. Not surprising, as it wasn't "the government", it was a group of medical and insurance professionals using statistics to determine what the needs generally encompass which congress (not Obama) incorporated into the final law. But you keep rolling with those "the government" and "Obama lied!" memes, they still sound good to the information-poor. And of course they fixed some of the other problems, like making care for pre-existing conditions practical, limiting insurance company profits, and seeing to it that family coverage was a bit more about family and a bit less about "how soon can we shuck the kids off the policies." Single payer would, of course, have been much, much better. That's what Obama wanted, btw -- the ACA is wholly a product of congress. The only sense that it is "Obama's" is in that he wanted to see people get medical care, and congress managed to get some care, to some people, and he accepted the compromise rather than walk away with nothing.

When you want to rant about "your decisions", you should really consider the reality, which was the insurance company deciding for you what would be covered. Oh, you had a migrane headache? Then we'll just slap a rider on your policy that we won't cover anything to do with your neurological system or your circulatory system, how's that for "making your own decisions"? You don't want "the government" making decisions for you, but you're perfectly ok with the for-profit insurance company limiting your care. That doesn't make you a smart insurance consumer. That makes you a tin-plated idiot.

The honest way of saying it is that many people couldn't keep their desired coverage because the government decided it wasn't good enough for them.

The honest way of saying it is if you weren't covered to the ACA minimums, your insurance sucked. There's no putting lipstick on that pig, pal. Now, as to why your insurance sucked, that could be any number of reasons -- but it still boils down to one thing: you needed better coverage. You may not admit it, you may want to gamble with your health and the health of others, but that's why we mandate some things, because people often make really bad choices for themselves, and in this case, as your health impacts others, just as your education does, a minimum has been set. Don't like it? Tough. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Just means you don't like it. Wanna change it? Go to congress -- the people who are responsible for it.

Uhh, no, if they aren't in the group of providers that your new insurance company accepts, you don't get to see him anymore. Well, you can, but you pay out of pocket full price.

No, it doesn't mean that at all. First of all, your doctor can apply to the insurance company. Second of all, you can determine which doctors are already in which groups two ways: One, by looking on the insurance company lists, two, by simply asking your doctor (or the office staff, more likely.) You can certainly end up in a situation you don't want by failing to approach this in a reasonable manner, but it's almost certainly to be on you, not the system. I ran into this specific problem -- doctor not in the specific insurance pool I wanted to use -- and it took all of two weeks to fix that, something I sussed out and took care of before I committed to the group. You can probably still fix it, for that matter.

Further, even if you did get to keep your doctor, your waiting time to see him is undoubtedly going to be much longer.

Oh, stuff and nonsense. Out of 310 million citizens, there were about 50 million uninsured. The ACA added about 10 million to the 260 million insured, thereby increasing the load on the system by a "whopping" 3.8%. This did not result in a 33% increase in your appointment times. Something else may well have, but it sure as heck wasn't the load presented by the ACA's action. Now, if we talk about the fuckery the republicans have caused by rejecting the medicare expansion, now that has screwed things up so badly that a number of hospitals have had to close, and so the republicans may have been responsible for a big increase, depending on your area (some states didn't let the republicans screw them in this particular manner.)

My doctor doesn't decide what providers are authorized under my insurance, the insurance company does. It takes a lot more than a doctor asking "pretty please make my practice part of your plan" to get it done.

No. It doesn't. It's butt-simple paperwork. I was in the same situation, and I am well aware of what it takes. And of course it's very likely you could have found out what pools your doctor was already in first and gone with one of those. Assuming they were in some pool, which, if you were already using them with some kind of insurance, they were.

to ignore the large number of people who it didn't work out for and claim that the system is working is pretty selfish. To use your personal situation as proof that Obama didn't lie about ACA issues is just ridiculous.

The thing is, that's all straw man nonsense. I've done neither. I've simply pointed out how the system works, and mentioned my experience -- I pointed to the process, not my experience, to assert that the system isn't nearly as dysfunctional as the right wingers want to paint it. You, in turn, have recited a case of failure (one which almost certainly is entirely your own fault.) They said you can keep your doctor. You say you didn't keep your doctor. That does not, in ANY way, prove that you could not have kept your doctor. I faced exactly the same situation as you did: the insurance I wanted did not have my doctor in the pool. I spoke up, prodded her office manager a couple times, and that was all it took on my part -- now she's with the program. Failing that, I could have simply gone with the insurance that already had her listed, which wouldn't have been the end of the world either. Bottom line, you want to keep your doctor, ask them what insurance they take and get on that insurance, or get them to join the specific pool you want. It's not difficult. Anyone who says it is is simply spreading FUD.

Back to the "Obama lied" bullshit meme: Obama wanted single payer. Congress -- basically the republicans -- turned the whole thing into a payday for the insurance companies. Once that was done, things got a lot more complicated. To turn around and say that Obama is responsible for the complications is a load of right wing horseshit -- agitprop and no more than that. He signed what congress presented him with, and he tried hard to be a spokesperson for what resulted. The intent was good, and yeah, actually, the results haven't been too bad, other than the republicans -- not Obama -- hammering those who would have been covered by the medicare expansion.

For the tiny fraction of people who rant about (and for whom you are ranting) who "lost their insurance", the ACA makes it an absolute certainty that they can get NEW insurance, because they cannot (any longer) be denied (as they could have been previously for any number of reasons. And what about those people before the ACA, who couldn't get insurance at all? What about them? Why aren't you ranting on their behalf? They don't matter? That would be you ranting that my lady, who had the AUDACITY to have breast cancer, should just be kicked to the curb and left uninsurable for any future cancer, in fact for just about anything.

Now, the whole "My premium went up (some huge amount) and I'm PLUMB RUINT!" thing: The ACA mandates that your insurance premium cannot exceed a fairly low percentage of your income unless you intentionally opt for a higher than required coverage plan. That's what the subsidies are for. It also makes sure you can get a plan. If you are so ideologically opposed that you can't, or won't, get a plan, then there are tax penalties, which (a) are pretty light, and (b) 90% of the "I don't have a plan" people don't have to pay at all because of the numerous reasonable exemptions, and (c) aren't actually required to be directly paid anyway, instead, they're taken out of future tax refunds, and (d) nothing else happens at all except, as per usual, you can go to the ER and they'll (probably) stabilize you and refer you to a doctor or a clinic, which you, bless your objectionable little heart, will then almost certainly have to pay for.

Fact: The 900+ page ACA is not the product of an executive order: It's a product of congress. If you have problems with the parts where you might have to be proactive and lift your own little finger, call your congressperson, don't rant about Obama. If you are ineligible because your income is low and your state refused the medicare expansion, call out your state representatives. Not Obama, and for that matter, not congress. (You might want to say a few choice words about SCOTUS, though.) If you don't like the minimum limits set for your insurance, again, that was congress, don't point the finger at Obama.

Between not understanding how the ACA works, not understanding how lawmaking works, and a goodly dose of "I hate that Obama guy because black | democrat | funnyname | iamabirther | whatever", it's a 100% safe bet that anyone ranting about Obama in relation to the ACA has no idea what the heck they are talking about.

Is the ACA perfect? Hell no. Did anyone say it was perfect? Hell no! Is the way to make it better to rant about Obama? HELL NO! Aim your vitriol at congress. Even if it's as misinformed as your post, at least you'd have the right target for once: Congress.

I will never forget him, in his iconic white and gold uniform.

Seriously, though, terrible day. I feel like I knew him.

I grew up as the only conservative in a family of upper middle class liberals. It always infuriated me that poor people were constantly getting free stuff, and I bought in to the whole poor people are lazy mentality.

Similar conservative here. I never really bought into the "poor people are lazy" meme. The hardest worker I've ever met was a poor Mexican who turned out to be an illegal alien. This guy was so dedicated to doing a good job I would've endorsed him for citizenship in an instant. (Likewise I haven't found the lazy, rich fat cat meme to be true either. The vast majority of rich people I know are some of the hardest working people I've met, frequently sleeping only 4-6 hours a night because they're working the other 18-20 hours. It's like they're always firing on all cylinders and don't know how to let up. Even when on vacation, they'll try to sneak off to get some work done.)

What I have noticed though is that poor people tend to make much worse financial decisions, moreso than not-poor people. e.g. A poor friend asked me for help buying a laptop. I knew he didn't have much money, he knew I knew, so I worked my butt off finding him a great deal. I eventually found him a refurb i3 laptop for $235 (when he sold it 2 years later, it was selling on eBay for $265). I felt satisfied that I'd done a good deed to help a poor person. Then the next week I learned that he'd bought a 64GB iPad for $800 (the extra $100 was to have his name engraved on it). ...

They don't need money. What they need is a systematic, comprehensive, plan for how to get them off the bottom. The single biggest factor keeping poor people poor, is the responsibility for children. As noted, often times, a parent finds themselves as the sole caregiver for children, and they are consequently trapped, as the responsibilities of childrearing often conflict with the responsibilities that employers would place upon employees (such as reliable attendance, and schedule flexibility). The simplest solution to the problem would be to do away with welfare and unemployment benefits entirely and replace them with guaranteed services for their dependents such as 50 hours of weekly daycare

That was exactly my conclusion too after managing a hotel with a lot of low-income employees. So many of them were single parents or were in families where both parents worked, that a good chunk of their income went to babysitting or daycare. Since the hotel usually had empty rooms that could be used for babysitting, I looked into what it would take to start up daycare services for our employees.

OMG. The legal liability and insurance requirements were crippling. Apparently parents are a sue-happy bunch when it comes to the tiniest scratch on their little darlings. Later I talked about it with a friend who ran a daycare center and he pretty much confirmed what I'd found. Liability insurance was his biggest expense, and he was always one lawsuit away from being put out of business. Eventually we just made it a policy where we would comp workers an empty room for a day for emergencies. What they did with the room was their business. If they couldn't find a babysitter and wanted to dump their kids in said room in front of a TV while they worked, and they and co-workers would check in on them every 10-15 minutes, we (management) would look the other way.

It's pretty sad to hear people suggest that sole purpose of a persons time on earth is to work hard and be productive.

Economic activity = sum of (productivity)

Productivity is the fundamental measure of economic output. The more productive the average individual is, the higher the standard of living is (everything produced is also everything consumed). If you're suggesting a person not be as productive as they can, you're advocating that the standard of living be lowered. That's really what all the economic development since the industrial revolution has been about. Leveraging machines and alternate energy sources (i.e. other than human and animal muscle power) to radically increase per-person productivity, which has proportionately increased the standard of living.

If you want to take a break and relax, that's fine. But you'd better be damned sure that your productivity while working is enough to "pay" for that relaxation time. The Germans are great at this (I've worked with them). They work super-hard when they are working and so are very productive. But once they're off work or if they're on vacation, they relax more than most people I've seen. It's ok though because their high productivity while working is more than enough to pay for it.

Money is actually just a (poor) representation of productivity, one whose value in terms of productivity isn't even constant. So thinking about economics in terms of money can result in very misleading conclusions. e.g. If you double everyone's pay, everyone becomes 2x as wealthy, right? Nope. If you double everyone's pay, then prices also double (prices of goods and services are what bring in revenue used to pay people). So in terms of income, it's a wash. Productivity hasn't changed, so fudging with the value of money doesn't change income or expenses. What does change is savings. The doubling of income and prices means the value of anything saved as money is halved. So anyone holding their savings as money (like poor and middle-class people do, instead of in non-monetary assets like real estate or stocks like rich people do) will find their wealth has been halved. Precisely the opposite of what you thought would happen when you doubled wages.

Well there must be a balance between code reuse and custom solutions. To use the trusty car analogy: a car manufacturer doesn't create a new battery for every vehicle (or, indeed, make batteries at all). Unless it's top end, they don't create a different engine for every car, or a different transmission.

If you're making top-end software, then sure, spare no expense. But most projects will suffice just fine using existing libraries. Knowing when to go third party and when to stay in-house is a skillset that a good lead will have.

"On the flip side we have so-called "agile" development teams who simply define a deliverable as whatever they've completed on delivery day. These developers rarely tell management until the 11th hour that what they're going to deliver is below spec. Agile development has its strengths, but this aspect is a giant weakness. The solution is not to eliminate schedules. It's to adapt them to changing conditions and be proactive about slippages."

The PO is supposed to be aware of this at least on the sprint level, and if necessary communicate with the client. Furthermore one of the tenet is that the team is responsible,m and responsibility is to warn that the spring goal may not be reached and draw consequence on it for next sprint goal (make them less big etc...). Which also means since you are delivering on the atomar level of a sprint, that it is known sprint after sprint how the evolution of the project is by the client. Now if you are speaking of telling on the 11th hour on a SPRINT level, well Yupi-doo. Compared to most project which tell goal will not be met at the 11th hour before delivery of the FULL project ?

This is utter bullshit. Most people which seek suicide do not "do it without telling it". In fact many have along phase where you can detect symptoms (unfortunately most often hindsight) and call for help. This is not "i want to suicide" this is for example "life is so hard sometimes I want to end it all" or similar turn of phrases. And those persons use the communication way they most often use in their flife. It was letters a long time ago, sms, and whatnot, then facebook, suicide hotlines and maybe now twitter and others. The point is that it is relatively rare that somebody is 100% happy and then poof they suicide without warning (that happens, but usually it is more in the line of a illness diagnose without hope of cure or pain relief). The problem is that those warning can be very easily overlooked. That OP has no fucking clue whatsoever and should not be let near a suicide hotline ("attention seeker a bunch i tell you") or any other suicide prevention programs.

Because "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."

Not just managers. Even working for yourself won't save you. Customers as well.

Brings to mind the Maxell ad where the guy is sitting in the chair, hair blown back by the JBL-L100 in front of him.

Imagine the paper tapes instead of the L100. Except no hair would be blowing back, and I suspect the fellow would be asleep. Other than that, exactly the same.

To answer your question about connectivity, the device has 10/100 Ethernet with the Linux networking stack built in.

That's excellent. Did you build your own protocol, or did you use the mechanism RFSPACE, Andrus, AFEDRI and the various USB-to-Ethernet servers have established?

I try -- hard -- to support all ethernet based SDRs for which I can obtain protocol information.

It also has USB-OTG, and I already know WiFi and USB Sound Cards work with no additional work.

Sound card I/Q is no problem for SdrDx -- that gets the RF in, and of course I support that. The problem with the rest is controlling the SDR's settings: center frequency, attenuator, sample rate, and so on. This is because of the radical differences in USB interfacing from platform to platform.

Having said that, if you've got a working command line utility that talks to the control systems on your SDR, then SdrDx emits information via TCP that can be used to drive the command line client from a script. We've pulled this off with the Peabody and Softrock SDRs pretty well. Again, though, we run into the issue of which platform(s) the utility is available for, seeing as how they'd have to be radically different from one another.

No, it's not obvious. These days the video card takes care of all that. And whether the alpha channel is 0 or 255 the value is going to be read anyway. The performance hit is nil.

Clarification: Most video cards run at 32-bits (4 bytes) per pixel. Because that's a nice round 2^n number which is actually easier for computers to process than the old 24-bits (3 bytes) per pixel.

32-bpp graphics has 256 values (1 byte) for R, G, and B just like 24-bpp graphics. The extra byte in 32-bpp is used to store the alpha channel (transparency). So you're getting it for free anyway, and the video card is using it even with these new "modern" icons (it allows the background to bleed through on parts that are covered by the icon's 32x32 pixel rectangle, but aren't covered by the icon's artwork). Since it's being used anyway, you might as well use it to enhance visibility of borders, edges, and control surfaces.