There was a report, repeated often on the news today, that there are now 44 million Americans without health insurance.

So what?

No, seriously. What exactly does that mean? Does it mean you can't get medical care? No. What it means is that if you need medical care that you are responsible for paying for it yourself.  In other words, there are 44 million Americans whose health care isn't pay for by someone else (i.e. such as their employer as part of their compensation package).

Until I was 23, I was one of those millions without medical insurance. I went to the doctor, got inoculations, got prescriptions when I was sick like everyone else. The difference is that my mom paid for it instead of some insurance company.

Don't get me wrong, not having health insurance means that you feel the expense of doctors ($150 for a visit sometimes). Ones prescriptions can be costly ($120 for pills). And of course if there was some catastrophic accident it would have certainly wiped us out financially.

But let's keep things in perspective, free medical care isn't a right. That's because it doesn't exist. Someone is paying for that medical care. It ain't free. But when you hear reports on the number of uninsured, the implication is clear -- that more people being uninsured is a bad thing and that the government should do something about it.

I agree it's better to have insurance than not to be insured. But why is it the government's job to pay for health insurance? What does the government paying for something actually mean? It means ones fellow citizens are paying for your medical care. I don't see that as very fair to the rest of society. Especially on a federal (national) level. 

My employer pays for my medical care. It's part of my compensation package. In other words, it's part of my salary. If my employer didn't pay for it, I would either have to pay for it myself, find a job that does pay for it, or choose to go without it.  Turning it into an entitlement, however, puts us further onto the slippery slope of where some distant group of people are deciding what is and isn't a necessity.  I'd say food and shelter rank above health insurance as a necessity. Are we going to start guaranteeing those things? That is, that all Americans are automatically provided the same food and shelter so that we can all have it?

The problem with equality is that it bumps into freedom pretty hard. I don't think it's the federal government's business to be deciding what is and isn't a basic material necessity. That goes for health care or anything else for that matter. We all make personal choices that lead to prosperity or ruin. I am in favor of some basic "safety net" to soften the results of poor life choices but we have to draw the line. Universal health care mandated by the government is where I draw the line.

 

A new version of DesktopX is out. We've been working like crazy to get out the little buglets and make it more useful in a very apparent way. The big thing in the gamma can be summed up in stability, performance meter support, system info support, and multi-monitor support.

1.99 GAMMA

• Worked on multimonitor support. Now IX works with multiworkarea so it can place icons on all monitors and behave correctly even when changing monitors dispositions, workarea, resolutions etc.
• Added back Undo movement (will eventually add Undo for more things). It is in tray menu or activable with Ctrl-Z with keyboard focus on DX objects.
• Fixed a nasty crash in Dgui. It crashed IX at startup and I bet other random things with text states in DX, mostly scripted stuff or text changed through plugins.
• Fixed other two crash bugs with deleting and editing objects.

If you experience problems, please send desktopx.dmp and/or zipped \currenttheme\.
 9/29/03  22:19         269,312  DirectGUI.dll
 9/29/03  22:20         136,704  IconX.dll
 9/29/03  22:20          36,352  dx0.dll
 9/29/03  22:21         586,240  DesktopX.exe

The DesktopX 2 public gamma is now available. This should be the final public release before DesktopX 2.0 is officially released.

DesktopX is a the ultimate desktop enhancement program. It lets usres completely customize the look, feel, and function of the actual desktop.

Features include:

• Enhanced Desktop Icons: Make your desktop icons any size you choose, put shadows under them, change the label font, have it zoom up when you put your mouse over it or anything else you may want to do to them.
• Scriptable objects (sometimes called "Widgets"): With VBScript or JAVAScript users can create desktop objects that check the weather, create calendars, move and change color, play games, and much more!
• System Performance Monitoring: Built in plugins allow users to display virtually any type of information not just on their machine but on PCs that are located on their network that they have access to using Microsoft's integrated performance monitoring APIs. The ultimate system meters can hence be created.
• Object Media: A light weight media player interface that DesktopX objects can interact with. Create the ultimate skinnable MP3 player that does so in a fraction of the memory and resources.
• Full Desktop Themes: Build your own desktop by grouping objects together and creating your own desktop user interface.
• Direct COM/ActiveX integration: Treat the hundreds of ActiveX controls installed on your system as objects. Create web browsers, spread sheet objects, Internet radios, Video windows, and more with just a few lines of VBScript.
• Desktop Security: Create a desktop that could be used as a kiosk or just a secure home desktop where Ctrl-Alt-Del and other functions are password protected.

From a visual stand point, what makes DesktopX stand out is its easy support for fully alpha blended animations. Just put together a .PNG file with multiple frames of animation, tell the object how many frames it has and voila, an animated object is created. Multimedia features include support for shadowing, transparency, sound effects, multiple user defined states, and much more.

And all of this is done with a relatively small memory foot print. See http://draginol.stardock.com/images/dx-ram.jpg for a screenshot of DesktopX running with a RAM meter, a clock, a Net In/Out monitor, shadowed folders, and a calendar all together using only 6 megabytes of memory.

Best of all, DesktopX is a free download. An enhanced registered version contains enhanced security and access to additional DesktopX object support but the free version is fully functional and does not time out.

The enhanced version is $19.95 or can be obtained as part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancements.

Think only the big game companies can make good games? Think again. The 2004 Independent Games Festival Entries are up.

110 entries so far with the average development budget of under $6,000.  Check it out!

Never Trust.

What is it?

You know that dialog that asks you to install something and you have the
option of eitehr saying "Yes" or "No" or "Always Trust"?

Well, this new component seamlessly adds in "Never Trust".

https://www.stardock.com/products/nevertrust/never-sept03.jpg

It has a config screen to manage the sites you've told to never trust.

Very simple but very useful. See the "Never trust" over on the right?

Never Trust will be part of Object Desktop. If you don't have Object Desktop you can get it by going to http://www.objectdesktop.com

So the 3 year old is crying.

He's been crying for awhile.

His big brother is outside playing and he's not. Why? Because he wouldn't eat his dinner. And by eat I mean, he wouldn't even eat a single bite. Salmon.

I remember when I was a kid objecting (but still eating) foods like spam. Is spam actually a food or are they using that now for insulation? So it's hard to take the 3 year old's crying very seriously for not taking a single bite of salmon.

But he looks at me like I'm torturing him.

Our friend Paul Thurrott has a report that PDC attendees won't be getting a copy of Aero. They will get a copy of the Longhorn alpha but the Aero technology will be removed from it.

Instead, they'll get a demo of it at the show. What is Aero? It's Microsoft's "next generation" concept of what the Windows GUI should be like. They have (ahem) concerns that others might "steal" their ideas (such as Apple).

Of course, as we've all seen, Mac users believe Apple's invented everything.  Alpha blended shadows? Mac first right (no, WindowFX first).  Zooming icons first? (no, DesktopX first).  And so on.  And now it appears that the new Expose tech in Jaguar came first from Microsoft.

But don't feel too sorry for Microsoft, I think they've been a net benefitter of borrowed ideas over the years.

Saw the first episode of Futurama again today. My wife noticed something very interesting that snuck passed me but given the attention to detail this show has, I wonder what it could mean..

During the show, they do two New Years Eve countdowns (10...9...8...etc.). The first one, taking place in 1999, goes to various parts of the World. They show the Eiffel tower and the people say 9 in French. Similarly, every other part of the world says their number in their native language.

However, in 2999 during the count down when they bring up the Eiffel tower they say their number in English. Every other part says their number in their native language again.

An interesting implication - in Futurama, the French speak English in 2999.

For around $2,500 you can build your own Segway-like creation from scratch. It's not as good as the real thing but it provides a pretty close proximity to the real thing.  Of course by "building your own" I mean someone who's already very technically and mechanically astute.

Michael Moore and I share two things in common. We're both from Michigan and we're both grew up in the midst of Big Three blue collar workers.  But that's where the similarities end and the different readings on what the "majority" of Americans think about things.

Michael Moore seems to have two basic beliefs:

(1) The majority of Americans have liberal opinions.

(2) Conservatives are all about "me me me me".

To extrapolate on that, he essentially feels that most Americans are good honest folks but that a small minority of greedy bastards (called Republicans) get a big advantage over the majority of Americans because they put themselves first and everyone else second.

Unfortunately for Moore, reality doesn't work out very well. As a crude characterure of American beliefs, you can see what he's getting at. But the reality, expressed in the policies and results of the Republican and Democratic parties do not work out so well.

The Republican view could generally be expressed as "Just keep the government out of my way so that me and my family can live out our lives without interference."  The Democratic view could generally be expressed as "We're all in this together!"  Certainly the latter slogan is more eloquent than the former.  And Moore latches on to that idealism without recognizing the actual result of policies.  Many people, myself included, believe the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  If good intentions determined the inherent value of a political ideal then sure, the liberals would be kicking butt.  It's easier to be a liberal than a conservative because liberals have a monopoly on warm fuzzy thoughts while us bastardly conservatives are stuck having to live and work in the real world.

In social policy, the conservative adage could be "Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime."  Self-determination, self-reliance are the go words of the conservative movement. Society is made up not of groups but of individuals and the best, strongest society is made up of healthy productive individuals.  Social policy by a government, if any at all, should focus on allowing individuals to be all that they can be.  It also recognizes that not all individuals are going to make the cut and is willing to the chips fall.

By contrast, liberal social policy, the other half of the adage "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day."  Policies like Affirmative-Action, Welfare, Unemployment benefits, High minimum wage, Free health care, and so forth all fall into this trap. They worry about the "today" without recognizing that they aren't helping empower individuals so that they can take care of themselves over time.  Their policies, given enough time, would turn us into a nation of dependents.

Conservatives recognize this and strongly oppose this. They also oppose this because it tends to be conservatives who foot the bill.  So it's a double whammy. Conservatives are forced to pay for a misguided social policy that robs their fellow citizens of the incentive and ability to fend for themselves.

And for this, Moore and his ilk deride conservatives as "greedy" or "selfish" or more to the point about "me me me me me".  But which group is really the selfish group? The one that objects to having money they earned confiscated so that it can wreck society with the slow poison of welfare or the one that demands that they get free money?"

Moore may indeed believe that most Americans have liberal views. But he's quite mistaken. It's understandable for him to believe that. He spent a lot of time in union towns. Unions exist (today) principally to extract more "Stuff" for Union members even if it has a long term cost (such as eventually causing manufacturing jobs overseas -- and then having the gall to blame the manufacturers for moving overseas when it was incessant union demands that made it a competitive necessity).  To me, union attitudes are quite "greedy". But not to Moore. To him, it's a lot easier to point to a few fat cats at the top living it up than to recognize the thousands of union workers around him who use pressure tactics to get artificially high compensation. They destroy their futures to live in the now in other words. This is quite in line with liberal policy.

When Moore began to hang out with other liberal minded people, the environment changed from union people to the more stereotypical "intellectual" liberal who evaluates the value of an individual based on his or her intentions rather than deeds. And over in hollywood, the left dominates.  And so, no doubt in Moore's world he can say "When I was with my poor friends in Flint Michigan, they had liberal views and when I hang out in Hollywood it's the same thing."

I'm working on a political strategy game called The Political Machine. It's based on actual census and polling data and I can assure Moore that the majority of Americans hold conservative social and political views. The only reason why elections are so close is that Republicans have failed to attract moderate or mildly conservative voters. Many Democrats ("Truman Democrats") are quite conservative in outlook but vote reliably for Democrats.

But Moore is right about one thing: The long term bodes well for Democrats. But only because he's dead wrong about which side is about "me me me me me".  Democratic policies tend to focus now on giving free stuff to individuals. And so people vote for the party that's going to provide them (me me me me) with free stuff.  Hence, even many conservative elderly voters now vote for Democrats.  It's not conservatives demanding free stuff, it's the liberals. Conservatives just want to be left the hell alone.