According to the article, a paltry 2% of your net revenue goes to uncompensated care (that's the California average).
"Though hospitals’ nonprofit status allows them to reap tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits, California Pacific Medical Center’s main campuses spent 1.27 percent of their more than $1.1 billion in net patient revenues in 2011 on free care for indigent or uninsured patients, lower than the state average of 2.07 percent, according to statistics compiled by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The far smaller St. Luke’s branch spent 5.32 percent that year."
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-09-un... 49 billion in 2011. Yes and that's a far off estimate. Just go to the billing dept. in any major hospital in the Southwest. The gov needs to pay its bills. Yes, and hospital costs are out of control and need to come down.
The latter two do keep track of fractional charges. They deduct $0.01 from prepaid credits once that much is owed. Since you accept multiple currencies, this becomes a bit more complex but still doable. For example, let the user choose the currency to display, or pick a single standard currency (euros?) and use it as your units.
Tarsnap and NFSn choose to refund your prepaid credits if and only if you close your account with them. Not every prepaid system lets you get your prepayments back at all. I am fine with this: I am willing to pay a bit more (prepayment without refund) in order to limit my liability to the amount I intend to pay.
For me, the trivial C program appears to run faster than the empty file:
$ touch empty
$ chmod +x empty
$ time ./empty
real 0m0.002s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
$ echo "int main(){return 0;}" > trivial.c
$ gcc trivial.c -o trivial
$ time ./trivial
real 0m0.001s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
Timing results are consistent over several repetitions (provided everything's in cache from disk). Linux x86_64. `mov` takes ten thousand to a million times less than a millisecond ( https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 ), so I can't find out this way whether removing 'return 0' changes anything.
(If I use my default zsh shell to execute ./empty, it gives me
zsh: exec format error: ./empty
./empty 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.008 total
So here's what happens with empty. If you run it from the shell, first the shell will fork, then try to exec empty. But the exec fails, since empty doesn't begin with a magic value. Therefore the exec call returns an error. Now the shell picks up this error, and then tries to run the program again, this time as an argument to an invocation of the shell (i.e., it does an exec of /bin/bash, passing it "empty" as a parameter). This is why empty ends up taking longer to run.
This is the normal pattern, just in case you forget to put "#!/bin/bash" at the top of the script, so that the script can be run anyway. This is also a source of confusion for some sysadmins, when a script works from the command line but not from something like a cron script.
Before the system can execute any one of these programs, it has fork the bash process, call exec to load the new binary in the process memory, load the standard library and map it to the adress space, open stdin / stdout, run the program, close stdin / stdout, wait for the process termination ...
Comparing to all this, a move instruction in userland won't really make a difference.
Edit: List on system calls required to execute trivial.c (on my Linux):
I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via USB2 anyway).
A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time).
Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).
Is the warning "This is a community contributed installation path. The only ‘official’ installation is using the Ubuntu installation path. This version may be out of date because it depends on some binaries to be updated and published." still true? Fedora also has this warning (and no instructions). The "Look for your favorite distro in our installation docs!" link does not give me up-to-date instructions for any of my favorite Linux distros. I can't even see where in that installation documentation it says how to install from source code on generic Linux. What am I missing? (Of course I can get the source code and build it, but I want the documentation to be great :-D)
I imagine it's sketchy enough to be illegal, but what specific laws were they accused of violating? I read the consent judgment to find out:
"3. Defendants' conduct constitutes deceptive and unconscionable commercial practices pursuant to the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, N.J.S.A. 56:8-1 et seq. ("CFA") and unauthorized access pursuant to the New Jersey Computer Related Offenses Act, N.J.S.A. 2A:38A-1 et seq. ("CROA"). The Attorney General and Director (collectively, "Plaintiffs") submit this Complaint seeking equitable relief, to prevent any more consumers from being victimized by Defendants' practices, as well as penalties, restitution, investigative costs, and attorneys' fees."
- p.2 http://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases13/E-Sports_Complaint_Consent-...
p.9 (item 38) lists the alleged "unconscionable business practices and deceptions".
Also: ESEA is a New York company (p.3 / item 6). The laws are New Jersey laws. "Venue is proper in Essex County [, New Jersey], pursuant to R. 4:3-2, because it is a county in which defendants have otherwise conducted business." (p.3 / item 5)
That works for technical reasons but not legal reasons. You can't "virtually" agree to the terms&conditions and then delete your agree-ment along with the VM. (Unless the terms or the law let you do so. Sometimes they do.)
What are the terms of the Flash EULA that you might violate while spinning up a VM to read something? You're not planning to copy it, publish it, etc, and since you're destroying the VM later you don't care about stability/etc -- outside of the reading event, you are not doing any actions with the product.
I'm genuinely curious. I can understand an argument from principle like RMS might use, but I am unsure what the difference is between agreeing on a VM and agreeing not-on-a-VM.
I'm really trying to see an edge case where doing it on a VM that you destroy later is in any way worse (or even different) than doing it on a laptop that you buy, use, and then later incinerate.
My point applies in the same way to a laptop you buy, use, then incinerate. Even after you incinerate it, you are still bound by the terms you agreed to (to the debatable extent to which [1] is enforcable at all, anyway).
[1] The download page states "By clicking the "Download now" button, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to the Adobe Software Licensing Agreement.". That statement is hundreds of pixels away from the actual download button.
Now I'm curious what part of the T&C makes it problematic to use Flash on a VM. What exactly is it that you're afraid would persist beyond a VM deletion?
Heh, it might be forbidden to spin it up in cloud VMs, though local VMs are okay as long as you don't run nginx on your laptop? "3.2 Server Use. This agreement does not permit you to install or Use the Software on a computer file
server." "4.1 Adobe Runtime Restrictions. You will not Use any Adobe Runtime on any non-PC device or with any
embedded or device version of any operating system" ...
This provision is really broad: "9.5 Indemnity. You agree to hold Adobe and any applicable Certification Authority (except as expressly provided in its terms and conditions) harmless from any and all liabilities, losses, actions, damages, or claims (including all reasonable expenses, costs, and attorneys fees) arising out of or relating to any use of, or reliance on, by you or any third party that receives a document from you with a digital certificate,
any service of such authority ..."
If you are acting on behalf of a business, you might not want to authorize Adobe to occupy your business's time telling them your business secrets: "15. Compliance with Licenses.
If you are a business or organization, you agree that upon request from Adobe or Adobe’s authorized representative, you will, within thirty (30) days, fully document and certify that use of any and all Software at the time of the request is in conformity with your valid licenses from Adobe."
I'm not sure whether this persists: "4.5 No Modification or Reverse Engineering. You shall not modify, adapt, translate, or create derivative works based upon the Software. You shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software.", where "“Software” means (a) all of the contents of the files (delivered electronically or on physical media), or disk(s) or other media with which this agreement is provided". I'm not sure whether "Software" includes bit-for-bit identical copies of the software obtained by other means at other times (see http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 ).
> It used to be that Flash's terms forbade you from ever working on a competing Flash implementation.
...how have I never heard of that? That seems like a really easy thing to get thrown out in court. Wikipedia gives me something that sounds more reasonable:
> The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format. The license forbids the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files.
Which is not an issue of accepting the EULA and running Flash, but of getting specs for Flash and, well, developing a competing product. Asinine, but less insane. That's more in the realm of "IP law, and attitude towards IP, sucks" than "accepting Flash EULA is wrongbad".
The intent of 3.2 sounds like it's to prevent stuff like internal company file servers from keeping a copy of Flash around. I could see it being bent to make the VM spin-up illegal, but that's it.
I could see 4.1 being an issue, since it seems to be a deliberate way to keep Flash from being run on VMs, but I've run Flash on development VMs for the purposes of debugging embeds before and it never came up. My instinct, despite IANAL, is that I'm interpreting it wrong and it has nothing to do with VMs and so is inapplicable.
9.5 isn't relevant unless watching a Livestream over Flash on a VM causes you harm...
15 isn't relevant unless you're a "business or organization", and I strongly doubt that a court would allow that to extend to an individual proprietor of any kind.
4.5 would be a good reason not to do it if you had any intention of ever reverse-engineering Flash. I can see that persisting, but I also have my doubts as to whether that's sneak's reasoning.
So, in short... I am guessing that there's no established precedence to prevent you from accepting a EULA on a VM that disallows running said software on said VM. That would be a fun court case to watch. Thus, the main legal hurdle is the possibility of reverse-engineering Flash.
(And yeah, I'm too lazy to read the T&C myself. Sorry.)
The interface is simple and clean, their mobile site is lightweight and they seem committed to continued improvements. I'd highly recommend switching to FastMail.
I just did today. I closed my google account in its entirety. I got my mom a fastmail account too. I'm just not sure she will end up using it. She is 70 and pretty savvy for her age and even she sent me a email from her fastmail account that simply said "fuck google". She has been bitching about the Google+ nagging for a few weeks and seems pretty eager to get off the google teat.
Oh that's cool - might be some way of integrating that into my site in the future.
One of the core differences though is that TransitFeeds is primarily for browsing and discovering new feeds to interact directly.
The API is more of a value-add so devs can automate their own build processes, or in the case of something like GTFS-RealTime, making the data into a mobile-friendly format (a single GTFS-RealTime snapshot could be say, 2 MB big and contain information for thousands of vehicles).
"Though hospitals’ nonprofit status allows them to reap tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits, California Pacific Medical Center’s main campuses spent 1.27 percent of their more than $1.1 billion in net patient revenues in 2011 on free care for indigent or uninsured patients, lower than the state average of 2.07 percent, according to statistics compiled by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The far smaller St. Luke’s branch spent 5.32 percent that year."