FTFY

I'm not implying that Apple is the be-all and end-all of computing, but just because you don't perceive value in what they do doesn't mean that the value isn't there.

Did any country yet starve because they were too busy playing to go to the supermarket, or go open the supermarket for that reason? No? Then why should we assume that any aliens would?

That's a good point. Thinking about it, the chances are that any members of a species too busy with video games and porn to remember to upkeep their civilization would probably be too busy to take care of their offspring, and thus would weed themselves out of the gene pool. And there would always be ones, especially in the early years of porn and video games, who would be more interested in taking care of themselves and their civilization. After enough time, presumably, only those not overly susceptible to distracting stimuli would remain, the rest having been to busy playing with their joysticks to successfully reproduce.

If we were "everyone else" we wouldn't be the ones people run to so we can explain to them which end of the USB cable is which.

Apple is successful in good part because "everyone else" is heartily sick of having to rely on people like you. It's hardly surprising they prefer computing devices they can use without needing the help of a techie.

If Apple products aren't for you, so what? Ignore Apple and just buy your stuff from other manufacturers.

When you tell me what "everyone else" wants, it doesn't exactly make me want to run out and buy it so I can be like "everyone else".

Yes, I hear that from a few people. They want to be special by not following the trend. But to not buy a product just because everyone else buys it is pretty much the same emotional behaviour buying something because everyone else has it. Fashion and anti-fashion.

I'm disinclined to agree here. Literacy tests for political participation have a very nasty history. Even if they could be administered fairly, they still disenfranchise people who need representation within the system.

Here's how I'd do it. Scrap the current system and replace it with an acyclical directed graph for each individual decision to come before the government.

Now, if I like, I can decide for myself whether my vote will be in the "yay" or "nay" column. Or, I can point my vote toward some other person or organization. If a million people want the ACLU to represent them in all their votes, they would effectively be a voting block unto themselves. If your neighbor decides to give you her vote because she doesn't care about politics, but thinks you can be trusted to represent her convictions, then she can.

You could elaborate the system by allowing multiple pointers based on the type of issue. I might assign my votes on copyright law to Cory Doctorow, who might assign his votes to the EFF. The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.

The system is much more flexible and responsive than the current American system, where all our votes are assigned to whoever won our congressional district, for a set period of 2 years. Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.

I haven't really thought about how legislation actually gets created, or how the decision is made to bring a particular bill to a vote at a particular time. But I'm imagining that bills could be created by anyone; you could put your vote(s) on the pile at any time, and a formal vote might be triggered whenever the yea votes reached some threshold (say, 40M votes).

You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues. Perhaps. But I think that knowing that you can put your decisions into effect immediately would make it more rewarding to be involved in the political process.

You could also argue that Glenn Beck would be swinging a million votes around. I have no answer to this argument, as it is absolutely devastating. Seriously, though, it's possible that some dangerous forms of populism would emerge. But I'm intrigued by the idea of letting coalitions emerge and dissipate.

Hmm... I haven't really given much thought to ballot secrecy either. That could really put a spanner in things.

The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.

The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.

If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.

By your definition, everyone has shitty insurance.

Heh. You said it, not me. I just thought it really loud. By definition, everyone on average has shitty insurance, as, on average, they have to be paying in more than they get from it. ;)

But, seriously. You want to assert that people who have medical bills totaling over $10,000 who pay them are a 'minority', find something that says that.

Well, strictly speaking, of course they are, as uninsured people themselves are a minority. As are people who have private insurance and people who have government insurance. None of those groups are over 50% of the population.

But I assert that uninsured people pay the amount of the medical bills in this country roughly equivalent to their use of medical care. (This is a default assumption of proportionality, so I don't need to prove that.)

And I'm not letting you get away with that $10,000. I'm talking about on average, the entire thing. Oh, and you don't get to insert 'on time' in there. You know who else doesn't pay on time? Insurance companies. Except they usually demand the right to not pay any penalties.

I suspect, statistically, that the uninsured are less likely to pay, but pay much more when they do, and it does balance out. If you've got some evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.

And good luck finding those statistics. For some public discussion-distorting reasons, almost all discussion about the cost of health care in this country pretends that paying for health insurance is somehow paying for health care, and no one actually calls up hospitals and say 'How much money did you collect from private individuals vs. insurance companies last year for how many patients?'

I may have been mistaken, but I thought that the AMA had oversight into the certification process for medical schools, and thus does have power over the number of new doctors.

I honestly don't know much about this, but checking, yes, the AMA does have half control over the LCME, who is in charge of accreditation of medical schools.

The rest of the control, however, is the hands of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which seems a much more logical group to blame for restricting openings into the medical field.

While doctors might vaguely benefit from not having as much competition in their field, at this point it's almost moot. They're still working the same amount and being paid the same amount...they're just seeing thrice as many patients, and nurses are doing the rest of the work.

It's hard to imagine they actually want this, or that a doctor's union would actually see 'providing almost no qualified people, so people have rig the system to use as much non-union workers as possible' as a good idea. (In fact, they clearly don't see it as a good idea, as the creation of PAs indicate.) At some point, 'union scarcity' turns into 'We're going to have to figure out how to do without those workers as much as possible'...and we hit that point around 1995. If it's the AMA doing it, it's mindbogglingly stupid.

Medical schools, OTOH, can keep upping their price if they don't have competitor schools. If there are 10,000 slots, and you have 1500 of them, you can charge a lot more than if there are 60,000 slots and you have 1500. Medical schools have no downsides, or at least not until they blow up the entire system.

So I have to blame the restrictions on medical schools.

But the reason I disagreed, I thought you were blaming them for restricting the number of doctors via their union, which didn't make any sense and is standard anti-union nonsense. But I was incorrect, you were asserting they are leaning on the accreditation committee, that makes more sense and is possible, although I'll keep blaming schools instead, or at least some combination of the two.

We both agree that the number of doctors is being kept criminally low by reducing the number of medical schools, and size of said schools. And, be it either the AMA or the AAMC doing it, it's not at the demand of the majority of doctors. (As the majority of doctors aren't even in the AMA.)

Of course, it's perfectly valid to bitch about the AMA inexplicably being in control of that accreditation at all. The AMA has six people on that board, it's hard to see why other unions shouldn't have some of those slots.

Or, for that matter, why a school needs LCME accreditation at all for people to take a license test, which I think you mentioned above in combination with foreign doctors. That's clearly a deliberate trick.

The announcement comes soon after announcing they won't fix a bug in their Virtual PC http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/16/1939227/MS-Virtual-PC-Flaw-Defeats-Windows-Defenses

Smells like someone is pushing the SP release ahead to hide the flaw fix, not owning up to up.

I see a lot of people claim things like this. The question I ask every one of them, especially if they run XP (an outdated OS missing a number of modern security features, like application sandboxing and ASLR), is whether they run as Administrator or not. 95% still say Yes (beats the approximately 99.9% otherwise, but... still too high). Running as Admin is a *terrible* idea - you might as well be running Windows ME, in terms of security - yet far too many people do so anyhow.

I'll grant you that running as a non-admin on XP or older is a pain - it was that pain which drove me to Linux in the first place. Now I dual-boot Win7 and Linux (Vista and Linux on my older machine) and things have worked out very well. I don't have any continuous monitoring AV running (I keep a copy of ClamAV for on-demand scans), I don't disable UAC or Protected Mode (in fact, I tweak the UAC settings and remove FlashPlayer's exemption regarding Protect Mode). A few UAC or sudo prompts a month is easily worth the extra protection that not running as Admin provides. Security is all about defense in depth, and relying solely on anti-intrusion methods is stupid.

Yes, there's still a lot of harm that can be done with standard user permissions. However, most malware authors, especially for Windows, assume that their code will run as Admin/root, and therefore it would fail on my system anyhow. Furthermore, without Admin, malware can't make itself un-removable. It might send spam or DDOS attempts, but it couldn't edit my firewall settings, hide itself from task manager, install kernel-mode code, or prevent me from deleting it.

I get so tired of hearing this nonsense go unchallenged. If, for a given task, there is a fastest known algorithm, it's almost always going to run much faster in a compiled language than an interpreted language, period

Uh... no shit.

However, having an easier to code language that runs slower will:

1. show more easily measured difference between various algorithms
2. thus more easily showing the correct algorithm
3. which can then have its hot spot(s) re-written in C or even assembler

Using a low level language on 90% of the code that is not performance sensitive is masochistic, bug-prone and largely un-necessary.