Wood burning is only banned under certain conditions, on certain days, in a limited geographic area.
That's why I gave you the link, so that you could learn how this law works. The geographic area is huge. And note that the law only applies to grandfathered fireplaces; new construction does not permit wood-burning anything, by the building code.
But you originally claimed that poor people in Africa would be prohibited from burning wood. When it is mentioned that they aren't, you change your argument?
Initially Africa was mentioned as a poor continent. Then someone said that they won't be bothered for a while. Then I said that I have an example of such a thing right here, where I live. I know how rich (or poor) most African countries are, but I have never been there and can't give you any real examples. The example that I gave is real. As I said, it doesn't matter how rich or poor you are, the government is always ready to mess with you. The only difference is that African governments are too weak and too corrupt to do such a thing. But western governments are strong enough, and all-righteous, to do it.
Other forms of energy are abundant and cheap, so it really makes no difference to a Californian.
I provided you with dollar figures to prove that it does matter. Natural gas and electric power are not cheap here; free wood is. Besides, you are probably the only person in the world (or maybe you are from the future?) to claim that other forms of energy are abundant and cheap. Most of our problems are caused by lack of energy; wars are fought over it, in case you haven't noticed:-)
And who is proposing that they stop heating their homes with wood? Artie McStrawman?
It's not a proposal, it's the law. Read about it here. The only exception is made for houses that have no gas heaters at all; my house has it, so I'm out of luck, even though running the heater will send my bills through the roof.
This is just an example of such restrictions, doesn't matter where in the world you are being oppressed.
I must have missed all the starving Californians who relied on burning wood to cook their meals last time I was there.
If instead of staying in San Francisco you get into a car and drive a few hundred miles in any direction (except West:-) you will find thousands of farms and ranches that depend on wood fireplaces and stoves to heat houses. LNG will cost you $1,500 per tank; wood may cost you $200 per cord but is often free if you own land. Cooking on wood stoves is just not very convenient, but heating with wood is.
Fossile fuels are getting scarce!... nuclear power is not an option in the long run
Then I'm confused, what do you propose? Green technologies depend on power far more than old ones. You can build a 1970s car just for the cost of computers in a Prius. Windmills kill birds. River dams kill fish. Geothermal is not available everywhere. Solar is an option only for well-lit areas (goodbye, Norway and Finland.) Fusion is 20 years away, as usual. Should we, perhaps, commit a collective suicide, or live like Amish do?
A big number. However if each sheet is 4 mil thick, a single stack of those 18,000 sheets will be only 72" (6 feet, or 1.8 meters) tall. You only need a small part of one broom closet to store those. Hardly a challenge; businesses routinely manage far more. Nowadays schools compete in size with megachurches, so I see no reason why a teacher can't be given enough storage space for his materials.
For a school, this might make sense. I generally found 80% or so of the pages I handed out reusable. The issues come, as others have noted, with being able to issue some sort of writing instrument which can write on this shit, while allowing it to be reused.
I hope that the pens won't be very expensive, you will have to distribute and collect them back. On the other hand, how can you motivate students to write on that paper if they must surrender it by the end of the class?
It's obvious that my school days are too far in the past, and I have no idea how modern classes are taught. But back then we weren't given any paper materials; we used things called "books", and those were reusable (for several years.) Of course we had to be literate to read those:-)
a great deal of the green tech is just common sense - energy efficient homes and vehicles.
And I do my part; my car is very fuel efficient (about 50 mpg - you can eaily guess what make it is) and my electric bill is about $25-30 per month.
But I can do that only because my needs are few. All frequently used lights in the house are CFLs, and instead of LNG or electric heating I have fireplace, and I got used to indoor temperature about +50F (+10C). I think normal people, though, will reject those spartan conditions. And note that I live at latitude 37 degrees North; those who live at 60 degrees won't be very receptive to the talk about solar power in winter.
Many people say that they need powerful cars for towing. I don't know how true that is. Myself, I need a 4x4 vehicle now and then; but I don't have any.
You mention the cost of solar heaters. That's where the rub lies. Houses are already expensive; you can legislate them to be even more expensive (and trust me, California is busy on that!) but all you get is fewer homeowners. So you need to decide what you want more - stable population or green homes. Because you can't have both - there isn't enough money in the collective pocket.
There's no real need for higher taxes on small businesses
Sure there is no need. However when the USA starts paying its share of those $67B to Africa, where will the money come from? Politicians are quick to saddle the working people with new taxes, and this climate change thing is an ideal vehicle for that. Considering the US debt, they don't have much choice anyway.
lets avoid making panic decisions, such as banning oil and coal, but we should be working towards that goal sooner than later regardless of how bad global warming is.
This is reasonable; but rare a green proponent goes that far. At the last AGW conference, for example, African countries just requested $67B "to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent", as they put it. That money will be paid by working people because only working people produce wealth. And this is just one example.
When there is smell of money in the air you'll be amazed how many con artists crawl out of the woodwork. Sure there are a few honest people who talk about valid issues, but their voices are not heard, drowned in the drumbeat. On every even week IPCC releases another dire prediction, and on every odd week this prediction is shown to be a fraud. At some point, perhaps, IPCC needs to either institute some quality control or to classify themselves as comedy performers.
No one is stopping those countries from burning wood to keep warm or cook their food.
Lucky you, not living in California. Here the government stops people from burning wood. New fireplaces and stoves are banned outright, and existing installations are prohibited from burning several days per winter. They justify this by wood smoke; I'd believe that if the restrictions only existed in cities; but no, they cover many counties, where you need a telescope to see a neighbor!
If we put more money into research we'll get answers sooner.
I agree about wars, they are a waste. However money does not guarantee a scientific breakthrough. Even if we somehow get to 100% efficiency of panels, it's only 1.3 kW/m2. It's not that much, considering night, winter, clouds. There are other problems too; on a large scale the panels will absorb more sunlight than before and will result in Earth getting warmer (this time for real.) In general, though, I believe solar energy will be successful - there are many lands that will benefit from the shadow (like deserts, for one.)
Nuclear plants in the USA were a bad word for decades. Fusion research gets plenty of money, but even if you shower the scientists with cash they won't think faster. Everything takes time; and if we look back, our science is expanding at amazing rate now.
How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation?
The civilization is already living on a narrow margin. Most of the people on the planet are poor; some are very poor (like in most of Africa.) Imagine that they will be forbidden to burn wood, and instead need to install solar heaters - that would kill whole countries (where they need heating or cooling.) In developed world higher taxes on businesses will result in fewer businesses still operating, rampant unemployment, crime and proliferation of ghettos. Also many of modern "green" initiatives are poorly thought of, and are inefficient (like biofuels.)
Their profits will likely go down, but there's nothing to stop them investing in new tech
You say it as if those companies are just lazy to invent "new tech." Fact is, we aren't aware of better energy source than oil. Fusion is, of course, much better - but the technology is not self-sustaining yet, not from lack of trying. Solar panels are also pretty much limited by our technology and knowledge; they also require some rare earth metals to manufacture, and the production releases plenty of poisonous waste. So what other "tech" is out there to invest into?
Hell, if we swapped out every single coal plant for a nuclear one right now we would cut the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere by a gigantic amount, and the amount of CO2. Two birds with one stone.
I'm all for it. What I'm against is panic decisions made under pressure from alarmist groups. Those rarely work well.
This won't help much because the original data was destroyed by CMU years ago. All you have is the data that had been normalized and re-normalized, and you can't use that. And it will take a long time to re-gather the data and to repeat all the processing. But I guess if climate scientists want to get somewhere they'd better start on that.
Luckily, climate scientists disagree with you and (unlike astrologers) actually want to put their predictions on record because they have confidence in them. I say we let them.
Sure, why not - let them put their predictions on record. After all, Nostradamus did the same.
But acting on those predictions by ruining the civilization - well, that's something I'd like to think for a moment or two. Perhaps I will even go as far as to ask for a second opinion.
You are giving a child several sheets of paper, each worth TWO ice cream sandwiches, and you expect them to not "lose" any of them?
That depends on availability of people who buy these sheets but, given the ingenuity of children and greed of adults and existence of eBay, this is guaranteed.
If you only have a single notice board your probably better off just getting a flat screen monitor that displays the notices (probably cheaper given the cost).
You are ignoring the cost of energy for that flat screen monitor. Even if you nail a Kindle to the wall, it still is far more expensive than a sheet of paper.
If you are in saving mode, the best way to maintain a notice board is through some sort of a Web page on your LAN. That is truly free. However a good deal of government papers must be "prominently displayed" in their paper form.
the vast, vast majority of people don't have abusive ex-husbands, and don't have people stalking them and in general have nothing they want or need to hide from anyone.
People without enemies are either very young or very cowardly.
I think you fail in comprehending the meaning of the word "public".
There is a world of difference between:
a) the public profile - a static Web page that shows text that you personally put there (or allowed to be put there.)
b) the privilege of seeing contacts and comments made by that person, now and forever.
For example, all I know about daveime from your public profile on/. is what comments you made here. Imagine if suddenly I get access to your email contacts and, through search or social engineering find out who you really are? You have your real email hidden for a perfectly good reason.
All I see here is that a bunch of Mac specialists got moved to Windows and they lost productivity. That will happen during any migration.
It may be that their better option was to stick to Macs, since the workers were already trained. I can't compare numerically, but a Windows infrastructure is hardly something unique.
And another thing. It looks like they understood at some point that cooperatively managed environment, with power users volunteering time to help others, was simply no longer practical. Maybe those "power users" are too expensive to use as IT. And as soon as you hire an admin you get centralized control and everything that you describe.
I'm still not in control of my own destiny
If you are talking about your personal computer, then I don't understand you. If you are talking about your work computer, I also don't understand you. If you have nostalgia about good old times when five of you were working together, and now 500 of you slave away at a cube farm... things change. You still can control your destiny, but the only way you can do it is by buying the company and setting the rules.
but if you aren't willing to leave your comfy turf, well...
At home Vista takes more resources than XP and requires custom configuration to disable superfetch and tons of other garbage services that they threw in. In business environment Vista doesn't run expensive (and no longer supported) legacy software. Why again is it a better OS?
The files they are updating are in their charge so no one else should be updating them.
As you say, there can be a conflict with their own, earlier patches. A file can be patched several times, by different KBs. If some are skipped, a patch will be applied to a wrong file.
How is it that a plethora of folks take this parent seriously?
I'm sure most of the serious, insightful replies are not for the person who "lost their dissertation" but for other people, who lost access to their box but haven't posted on/. about it.
However these two parts: "Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your
users' computers." and "Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes." are kind of hard to follow if your users are shift workers, have no computers, and when they need a pad they take the next one from the shelf.
I believe Apple just doesn't understand how computers are used at a business. They are still locked into the "home user" model.
To be successful in an enterprise, the pad must be remotely managed. See ManageSoft, for example (though it is not the best here.) You cannot depend on a dock worker to upgrade software on his pad - his union contract doesn't list that. The upgrade must be done whenever the pad is on, automatically and invisibly to the operator. And most certainly that dock worker doesn't have a separate computer to talk to that one pad. And even if by some miracle every worker also has a PC, the pads would be all swapped around a million times, and you can't match the pad to a PC. If the pad doesn't match, the worker will just call IT and will be sitting on his $naturally_provided_cushion until the IT guy runs in, panting like a dog, and clicks something to move the problem onto someone else.
In Linux, of course, this whole rigamarole can be neatly avoided in a few lines of a bash script. Fetch the MD5 checksum from the server, compare to the one you have locally, replace the file if they don't match, then run the app. Do that whenever the pad is started.
To summarize: Apple needs to think a bit more about the enterprise - if, of course, Apple is serious about that. An enterprise computing platform has some unique requirements; mainly it should be completely "hands off", so that the operator is never required to do maintenance on it. I'm afraid, however, that this requires opening the system up, and Apple's business model depends on just the opposite. Probably Apple will not want to play in the enterprise computing market - there is some serious competition already, with large companies producing industrial grade tablets for UPS, Fedex, stores and other places. I was sitting on one meeting and learned that in summer the temperature within the UPS truck can be very high - and the pad must stay operational! I bet Apple never even considered that the iPad may be used in hostile environments - dusty, hot, humid, under vibration. Even in a business as clean as a hospital the pad must be spill-proof and likely must be intrinsically safe, due to presence of oxygen, alcohol vapors and possibly other volatile atmospheres. Also all businesses will insist on some level of ruggedness; some business require survival after 10' drop onto concrete. In a hospital that isn't needed, of course - but the pad should take a fall from a table; sadly, many floors in hospitals are super-hard. A requirement for some sort of machine vision (a barcode scanner or a camera) is also very common, with barcodes being essential to tracking of items.
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Wood burning is only banned under certain conditions, on certain days, in a limited geographic area.
That's why I gave you the link, so that you could learn how this law works. The geographic area is huge. And note that the law only applies to grandfathered fireplaces; new construction does not permit wood-burning anything, by the building code.
But you originally claimed that poor people in Africa would be prohibited from burning wood. When it is mentioned that they aren't, you change your argument?
Initially Africa was mentioned as a poor continent. Then someone said that they won't be bothered for a while. Then I said that I have an example of such a thing right here, where I live. I know how rich (or poor) most African countries are, but I have never been there and can't give you any real examples. The example that I gave is real. As I said, it doesn't matter how rich or poor you are, the government is always ready to mess with you. The only difference is that African governments are too weak and too corrupt to do such a thing. But western governments are strong enough, and all-righteous, to do it.
Other forms of energy are abundant and cheap, so it really makes no difference to a Californian.
I provided you with dollar figures to prove that it does matter. Natural gas and electric power are not cheap here; free wood is. Besides, you are probably the only person in the world (or maybe you are from the future?) to claim that other forms of energy are abundant and cheap. Most of our problems are caused by lack of energy; wars are fought over it, in case you haven't noticed :-)
And who is proposing that they stop heating their homes with wood? Artie McStrawman?
It's not a proposal, it's the law. Read about it here. The only exception is made for houses that have no gas heaters at all; my house has it, so I'm out of luck, even though running the heater will send my bills through the roof.
Since when was California in Africa?
This is just an example of such restrictions, doesn't matter where in the world you are being oppressed.
I must have missed all the starving Californians who relied on burning wood to cook their meals last time I was there.
If instead of staying in San Francisco you get into a car and drive a few hundred miles in any direction (except West :-) you will find thousands of farms and ranches that depend on wood fireplaces and stoves to heat houses. LNG will cost you $1,500 per tank; wood may cost you $200 per cord but is often free if you own land. Cooking on wood stoves is just not very convenient, but heating with wood is.
Fossile fuels are getting scarce! ... nuclear power is not an option in the long run
Then I'm confused, what do you propose? Green technologies depend on power far more than old ones. You can build a 1970s car just for the cost of computers in a Prius. Windmills kill birds. River dams kill fish. Geothermal is not available everywhere. Solar is an option only for well-lit areas (goodbye, Norway and Finland.) Fusion is 20 years away, as usual. Should we, perhaps, commit a collective suicide, or live like Amish do?
That's 18,000 sheets of paper to keep around.
A big number. However if each sheet is 4 mil thick, a single stack of those 18,000 sheets will be only 72" (6 feet, or 1.8 meters) tall. You only need a small part of one broom closet to store those. Hardly a challenge; businesses routinely manage far more. Nowadays schools compete in size with megachurches, so I see no reason why a teacher can't be given enough storage space for his materials.
For a school, this might make sense. I generally found 80% or so of the pages I handed out reusable. The issues come, as others have noted, with being able to issue some sort of writing instrument which can write on this shit, while allowing it to be reused.
I hope that the pens won't be very expensive, you will have to distribute and collect them back. On the other hand, how can you motivate students to write on that paper if they must surrender it by the end of the class?
It's obvious that my school days are too far in the past, and I have no idea how modern classes are taught. But back then we weren't given any paper materials; we used things called "books", and those were reusable (for several years.) Of course we had to be literate to read those :-)
a great deal of the green tech is just common sense - energy efficient homes and vehicles.
And I do my part; my car is very fuel efficient (about 50 mpg - you can eaily guess what make it is) and my electric bill is about $25-30 per month.
But I can do that only because my needs are few. All frequently used lights in the house are CFLs, and instead of LNG or electric heating I have fireplace, and I got used to indoor temperature about +50F (+10C). I think normal people, though, will reject those spartan conditions. And note that I live at latitude 37 degrees North; those who live at 60 degrees won't be very receptive to the talk about solar power in winter.
Many people say that they need powerful cars for towing. I don't know how true that is. Myself, I need a 4x4 vehicle now and then; but I don't have any.
You mention the cost of solar heaters. That's where the rub lies. Houses are already expensive; you can legislate them to be even more expensive (and trust me, California is busy on that!) but all you get is fewer homeowners. So you need to decide what you want more - stable population or green homes. Because you can't have both - there isn't enough money in the collective pocket.
There's no real need for higher taxes on small businesses
Sure there is no need. However when the USA starts paying its share of those $67B to Africa, where will the money come from? Politicians are quick to saddle the working people with new taxes, and this climate change thing is an ideal vehicle for that. Considering the US debt, they don't have much choice anyway.
lets avoid making panic decisions, such as banning oil and coal, but we should be working towards that goal sooner than later regardless of how bad global warming is.
This is reasonable; but rare a green proponent goes that far. At the last AGW conference, for example, African countries just requested $67B "to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent", as they put it. That money will be paid by working people because only working people produce wealth. And this is just one example.
When there is smell of money in the air you'll be amazed how many con artists crawl out of the woodwork. Sure there are a few honest people who talk about valid issues, but their voices are not heard, drowned in the drumbeat. On every even week IPCC releases another dire prediction, and on every odd week this prediction is shown to be a fraud. At some point, perhaps, IPCC needs to either institute some quality control or to classify themselves as comedy performers.
No one is stopping those countries from burning wood to keep warm or cook their food.
Lucky you, not living in California. Here the government stops people from burning wood. New fireplaces and stoves are banned outright, and existing installations are prohibited from burning several days per winter. They justify this by wood smoke; I'd believe that if the restrictions only existed in cities; but no, they cover many counties, where you need a telescope to see a neighbor!
If we put more money into research we'll get answers sooner.
I agree about wars, they are a waste. However money does not guarantee a scientific breakthrough. Even if we somehow get to 100% efficiency of panels, it's only 1.3 kW/m2. It's not that much, considering night, winter, clouds. There are other problems too; on a large scale the panels will absorb more sunlight than before and will result in Earth getting warmer (this time for real.) In general, though, I believe solar energy will be successful - there are many lands that will benefit from the shadow (like deserts, for one.)
Nuclear plants in the USA were a bad word for decades. Fusion research gets plenty of money, but even if you shower the scientists with cash they won't think faster. Everything takes time; and if we look back, our science is expanding at amazing rate now.
How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation?
The civilization is already living on a narrow margin. Most of the people on the planet are poor; some are very poor (like in most of Africa.) Imagine that they will be forbidden to burn wood, and instead need to install solar heaters - that would kill whole countries (where they need heating or cooling.) In developed world higher taxes on businesses will result in fewer businesses still operating, rampant unemployment, crime and proliferation of ghettos. Also many of modern "green" initiatives are poorly thought of, and are inefficient (like biofuels.)
Their profits will likely go down, but there's nothing to stop them investing in new tech
You say it as if those companies are just lazy to invent "new tech." Fact is, we aren't aware of better energy source than oil. Fusion is, of course, much better - but the technology is not self-sustaining yet, not from lack of trying. Solar panels are also pretty much limited by our technology and knowledge; they also require some rare earth metals to manufacture, and the production releases plenty of poisonous waste. So what other "tech" is out there to invest into?
Hell, if we swapped out every single coal plant for a nuclear one right now we would cut the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere by a gigantic amount, and the amount of CO2. Two birds with one stone.
I'm all for it. What I'm against is panic decisions made under pressure from alarmist groups. Those rarely work well.
Release the source code of your data models
This won't help much because the original data was destroyed by CMU years ago. All you have is the data that had been normalized and re-normalized, and you can't use that. And it will take a long time to re-gather the data and to repeat all the processing. But I guess if climate scientists want to get somewhere they'd better start on that.
Luckily, climate scientists disagree with you and (unlike astrologers) actually want to put their predictions on record because they have confidence in them. I say we let them.
Sure, why not - let them put their predictions on record. After all, Nostradamus did the same.
But acting on those predictions by ruining the civilization - well, that's something I'd like to think for a moment or two. Perhaps I will even go as far as to ask for a second opinion.
Also do scanned and e-mailed signed documents carry the same legal weight as signed documents that were faxed?
As far as I know, they do. Scanned images are much clearer and have better resolution, and the PDF with the scan can be digitally signed too.
In fact your comment exposed another hole in this "reusable paper" plan - many papers are printed so that someone can sign them, stamp them, or both.
Let me rephrase it a bit:
You are giving a child several sheets of paper, each worth TWO ice cream sandwiches, and you expect them to not "lose" any of them?
That depends on availability of people who buy these sheets but, given the ingenuity of children and greed of adults and existence of eBay, this is guaranteed.
If you only have a single notice board your probably better off just getting a flat screen monitor that displays the notices (probably cheaper given the cost).
You are ignoring the cost of energy for that flat screen monitor. Even if you nail a Kindle to the wall, it still is far more expensive than a sheet of paper.
If you are in saving mode, the best way to maintain a notice board is through some sort of a Web page on your LAN. That is truly free. However a good deal of government papers must be "prominently displayed" in their paper form.
As a teacher I make hundreds of copies each day. This could save school districts MILLIONS of dollars.
What is the condition of sheets that you collect after the class? How many can be reused?
And while on the subject, why don't you reuse the paper copies that you make?
the vast, vast majority of people don't have abusive ex-husbands, and don't have people stalking them and in general have nothing they want or need to hide from anyone.
People without enemies are either very young or very cowardly.
I think you fail in comprehending the meaning of the word "public".
There is a world of difference between:
a) the public profile - a static Web page that shows text that you personally put there (or allowed to be put there.)
b) the privilege of seeing contacts and comments made by that person, now and forever.
For example, all I know about daveime from your public profile on /. is what comments you made here. Imagine if suddenly I get access to your email contacts and, through search or social engineering find out who you really are? You have your real email hidden for a perfectly good reason.
All I see here is that a bunch of Mac specialists got moved to Windows and they lost productivity. That will happen during any migration.
It may be that their better option was to stick to Macs, since the workers were already trained. I can't compare numerically, but a Windows infrastructure is hardly something unique.
And another thing. It looks like they understood at some point that cooperatively managed environment, with power users volunteering time to help others, was simply no longer practical. Maybe those "power users" are too expensive to use as IT. And as soon as you hire an admin you get centralized control and everything that you describe.
I'm still not in control of my own destiny
If you are talking about your personal computer, then I don't understand you. If you are talking about your work computer, I also don't understand you. If you have nostalgia about good old times when five of you were working together, and now 500 of you slave away at a cube farm ... things change. You still can control your destiny, but the only way you can do it is by buying the company and setting the rules.
If you are hiring an admin, sure, go with Windows, but its easy to hire a one-time team to set up a system of Macs and it to work well
So what is your growth plan then - to dump all Macs at some point (10, 50, 100 employees?) or to lock itself into an Apple world forever?
He even published some religious writings along with his scientific work.
Let me rephrase it. Newton's scientific work included religion, since it was an integral part of the world at his time.
but if you aren't willing to leave your comfy turf, well...
At home Vista takes more resources than XP and requires custom configuration to disable superfetch and tons of other garbage services that they threw in. In business environment Vista doesn't run expensive (and no longer supported) legacy software. Why again is it a better OS?
The files they are updating are in their charge so no one else should be updating them.
As you say, there can be a conflict with their own, earlier patches. A file can be patched several times, by different KBs. If some are skipped, a patch will be applied to a wrong file.
How is it that a plethora of folks take this parent seriously?
I'm sure most of the serious, insightful replies are not for the person who "lost their dissertation" but for other people, who lost access to their box but haven't posted on /. about it.
Thanks for the informative reply!
However these two parts: "Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users' computers." and "Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes." are kind of hard to follow if your users are shift workers, have no computers, and when they need a pad they take the next one from the shelf.
I believe Apple just doesn't understand how computers are used at a business. They are still locked into the "home user" model.
To be successful in an enterprise, the pad must be remotely managed. See ManageSoft, for example (though it is not the best here.) You cannot depend on a dock worker to upgrade software on his pad - his union contract doesn't list that. The upgrade must be done whenever the pad is on, automatically and invisibly to the operator. And most certainly that dock worker doesn't have a separate computer to talk to that one pad. And even if by some miracle every worker also has a PC, the pads would be all swapped around a million times, and you can't match the pad to a PC. If the pad doesn't match, the worker will just call IT and will be sitting on his $naturally_provided_cushion until the IT guy runs in, panting like a dog, and clicks something to move the problem onto someone else.
In Linux, of course, this whole rigamarole can be neatly avoided in a few lines of a bash script. Fetch the MD5 checksum from the server, compare to the one you have locally, replace the file if they don't match, then run the app. Do that whenever the pad is started.
To summarize: Apple needs to think a bit more about the enterprise - if, of course, Apple is serious about that. An enterprise computing platform has some unique requirements; mainly it should be completely "hands off", so that the operator is never required to do maintenance on it. I'm afraid, however, that this requires opening the system up, and Apple's business model depends on just the opposite. Probably Apple will not want to play in the enterprise computing market - there is some serious competition already, with large companies producing industrial grade tablets for UPS, Fedex, stores and other places. I was sitting on one meeting and learned that in summer the temperature within the UPS truck can be very high - and the pad must stay operational! I bet Apple never even considered that the iPad may be used in hostile environments - dusty, hot, humid, under vibration. Even in a business as clean as a hospital the pad must be spill-proof and likely must be intrinsically safe, due to presence of oxygen, alcohol vapors and possibly other volatile atmospheres. Also all businesses will insist on some level of ruggedness; some business require survival after 10' drop onto concrete. In a hospital that isn't needed, of course - but the pad should take a fall from a table; sadly, many floors in hospitals are super-hard. A requirement for some sort of machine vision (a barcode scanner or a camera) is also very common, with barcodes being essential to tracking of items.
overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means;
Force or violence or other unlawful means are obviously (or by definition) unlawful. So does this law require you to be a witness against yourself?
you need some sort of commitment to be happy
That is not true. There are plenty of unmarried people out there. If they weren't happy they are free to marry. They don't. Therefore they are happy.
that commitment leaves you vulnerable
Very true.