I prefer to think that most people will find a balance between distractions, family, friends, religion, and providing for necessities in the ways that humans have historically managed to do so. It won't look like today's balance, but who is to say we are doing it so well now?
I am having a lot of fun with pythonista for iOS. It sounds close to what you are talking about - it allows you to write scripts in python but it has its own libraries for the iPhone's display, input, etc. Sadly I don't know of any way to add additional non-standard libraries, but for what it is it's pretty cool.
Chome OS is competition to Windows in the same way a bicycle is competition to an automobile.
What you say is true, but maybe it doesn't make the point that you want it to make. They are both valid means of transportation, so they are in competition. Perhaps you mean to say is that because an automobile is so much faster and can carry more passengers and stuff than a bicycle, that the automobile will win any competition between the two methods of transportation. But different people have different needs at different times. For example, while I use my automobile to go to the supermarket, I take my bike to the train station because there is no place to park.
And I would never let my 11 year old daughter drive a car to school (even if it were legal), but a bike is perfectly fine.
The nature of corporations and that they are the primary benefactors of a bad law is always relevant when you're talking about the law.
The kind of firms that engage in HFT could easily be (and often are) set up as partnerships. The firms that are hurt generally have to be set up as corporations. So a law restricting HFT would be a net help to corporations.
Of course I read that part. However, I have read elsewhere there are problems with the potency of even the current versions of golden rice. So even though I do not believe what is in Wikipedia, I left in the last sentence because I felt that that would be potentially misleading, and not what the wikipedia writer would have wanted someone to quote.
So should I have taken that part out, and been accused of selective editing, or leave it in, and be accused of hypocrisy (or of not reading my own post)? I chose the latter. YMMV
Actually it's not a slam dunk. The concentration of vitamin A in golden rice is not high enough in and of itself to solve vitamin A deficiency. From Wikipedia:
The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[18] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[19] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk. Vitamin A is supplemented orally and by injection in areas where the diet is deficient in vitamin A. As of 1999, there were 43 countries that had vitamin A supplementation programs for children under 5; in 10 of these countries, two high dose supplements are available per year, which, according to UNICEF, could effectively eliminate VAD.[20] However, UNICEF and a number of NGOs involved in supplementation note more frequent low-dose supplementation should be a goal where feasible.[21] Because many children in countries where there is a dietary deficiency in vitamin A rely on rice as a staple food, the genetic modification to make rice produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene is seen as a simple and less expensive alternative to vitamin supplements or an increase in the consumption of green vegetables or animal products. It can be considered as the genetically engineered equivalent of fluoridated water or iodized salt in that it helps to prevent disease, with the exception that fluoride is not an essential nutrient for survival.[22] Initial analyses of the potential nutritional benefits of golden rice suggested consumption of golden rice would not eliminate the problems of vitamin A deficiency, but should be seen as a complement to other methods of vitamin A supplementation.[23][24] Since then, improved strains of golden rice have been developed containing sufficient provitamin A to provide the entire dietary requirement of this nutrient to people who eat about 75g of golden rice per day.[4]
Screw you and your cross marketing opportunities.
Well what do you expect with an operating system in the hands of an advertising company? Next up..."Alert: Doctor's appointment at 2:00. This reminder brought to you by Johnson and Johnson"
Education in the most populous state is the 2nd worse of all 51 states.
Usually I can tell the difference between ignorance and sarcasm (or even meta-sarcasm), but I must admit, you have me stumped here. Well played.
You are correct, I don't run a 501c3. But in another life I worked on the calculation of tax deductibility for (among other entities) several 501c9's so I have a pretty good idea about how complex tax rules for nfp's can be, and how someone whose business is something other than filling out IRS paperwork can fail to have the information necessary to fill out a 990. The "Oh crap, can you help us recreate the last 3 year's books?" scenario, while rare, does occasionally happen.
I'll drop the tinfoil hat when the government stops spying on me (oops, I mean collecting my metadata) and IRS employees enforce the rules evenhandedly to all types of organizations. 2 years ago I would have thought this position was crazy too, but given all of the stuff that has come out recently, I think that the a priori assumption should be that the government is abusing its power and it should have to show that it is not. For example, if the IRS came out with a statement that said "We looked at a sample of 10,000 registered 501c3's, and found that 53 of them had not filed a return in the last 2 years. We revoked the 501c3 status on 51 of them, and are looking into assertions by 2 of them that they did file and we [the IRS] must have lost them." I'd look upon this action a lot more favorably.
The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex. It's easy to say that they should have just followed the rules, but IRS rules are a serious PITA to satisfy. It is quite likely that no matter what Xorg had done, the IRS could have found some error in their compliance that would enable them to revoke 501c3 status.
So the real issue is that by making it so hard to comply with the rules, regulations, and laws, it raises the question of whether the government is using "selective enforcement" to punish people, organizations, and views that they don't like. Did this happen because of a general review of nonprofits, in which case this was a simple case of good enforcement, or are "hackers" being targeted by the government (for lots of reasons, e.g. resistance to NSA monitoring), and any one of a number of technical violations would have led to the IRS' actions? In that way it is similar to the Aaron Schwartz case, and is something that should be noted, if not actively resisted.
this isn't the grossest perversion of the language that I've seen.
The worst I know of is the fact that the prefix 'in-' means "not" or "the opposite of" and "flammable" means easily set on fire. So therefore, "inflammable" must mean "not easily set on fire." As in, "Don't worry about accidentally burning the house down, I coated the walls of the fireplace with inflammable material"
However, the "literally" thing is probably the most annoying perversion of the language.
but since they weren't there when it was written nobody would prosecute them for it
...but if they authorize the re-write, they could be held responsible for getting it right (especially if they don't use HIPAA-compliant encryption TM). Kind of the epilogue to an "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" strategy. As you point out, the main position of the typical middle manager is CYA, whether warranted or not.
Having software enforce unknown business rules is a recipe for failure.
This is the biggest problem with highly regulated businesses like insurance. Lots of business rules in that industry are ultimately derived from legal requirements, and the people who wrote the regulations generally don't care to make them clear and concise, or sometimes, consistent. So it is easy to say that all we have to do is tear it down, write the specs, and start from scratch, but are you 100% certain that you know how many hospital days North Dakota requires to be covered after a live birth? What about after a Cesarian? What does Ohio require for IVF treatment? How does Florida's motor vehicle insurance coordinate benefits for a hospital stay after an accident where the patient was not at fault? There are a million of these questions that somebody had to get the right answer to at some point in the past, and recreating it would be exceptionally difficult.
These rules were written by politicians and regulators to be read by and used by lawyers, not developers. And big companies actually like it that way because it prevents new entrants from coming in. I cannot wait for the day when all regulations need to be written in implementable code, such that companies just use that code and know that they will be in compliance.
Having said that, every insurance company can handle OOP maxes in their system. The issue that they claim is a problem is that you have one company manage hospitals and doctors visits, and another that does pharmaceuticals (PBMs). Why not just "reinterpret" the rule as 2 separate OOP maxes, one for the major medical, and another for the drugs? Regulators make that kind of regulatory interpretation all the time so postponing the whole thing seems much more political than operational
This. I make my living doing statistics on a beefy RHEL box. There is something to be said for a system that grinds through anything I throw at it, administered by a systems idiot (me), and has only been shut down once in the last 2 years (for a memory upgrade). Even my "just works" iMac, MacBook Pro, and various other iDevices need more care and attention. Hmmm why am I not running CentOS at home???
"Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet." -- "Visionaries" cartoon
