You lock up the cabinets where you keep household cleansers, right? How is a box of these magnets any different than a bottle of bleach? Both are harmless when used correctly, yet both can kill a small child if ingested.
You're going to educate doctors about what to do when a kid swallows these things? Doctors know more about this than you do, because they have to deal with the consequences, and that's why they wanted the CPSC to ban them.
Doctors collectively, sure, but not necessarily every doctor. It only takes one person not knowing about the seriousness of the situation to make the problem worse by not scheduling surgery immediately.
What are you going to do when a 6-year-old swallows one of these
Nothing. They're only dangerous if you swallow two or more.
Even if they're used as directed, you're giving them to 14-year-olds. You have to depend on 14-year-olds to be responsible enough not to let younger kids get at them. The results from the emergency rooms is that younger kids are getting them from older kids.
And still, this is not an education problem why? If a young child gets the car keys from a 14-year-old and manages to put the thing in neutral and roll it down a hill onto a freeway, most rational people would blame the 14-year-old. How is it that you're still blaming the car?
My guess is that (if Gatekeeper is enabled) every binary loaded by the system must be signed by Apple or else it wont load.
Your guess is completely wrong.
First, the way Gatekeeper works is by interposing the mechanism used for quarantining downloads. A binary compiled on your computer was never downloaded, so code you build yourself should be unaffected by Gatekeeper unless you upload and re-download it or manually set the quarantine flags for testing purposes.
Second, because Gatekeeper is tied into the quarantine system, the check occurs only the first time that you launch an application. Any application that you installed under previous releases of the OS continues to work as it always did because again, it was not just downloaded.
When a Gatekeeper check does occur, however, the behavior depends on which mode Gatekeeper is in (set in System Preferences). There are three modes: "Mac App Store" (the default), in which only apps downloaded from the Mac App Store are allowed to launch, "App Store and identified developers", in which apps downloaded from the Mac App Store or from other sites are allowed, but only if signed by a cert obtained from Apple's developer program, or "Anywhere" (essentially turning Gatekeeper off).
In that middle mode, the app is not signed by Apple at all, but by a third-party developer. That third-party developer's cert is signed by Apple, of course, but the app itself isn't.
And in all cases, you can override Gatekeeper's behavior by control-clicking the app and choosing "Open" instead of double-clicking it. This will give you the traditional set of prompts from previous OS releases in which it asks you if you want to launch this app that you've never launched before. Alternatively, you can turn Gatekeeper into "Anywhere" mode, launch the app, then change it back. Either way, once you have launched and un-quarantined a given app, Gatekeeper should never bother you again.
I couldn't disagree more. Buckyballs are not toys for kids. They're toys intended for adults, marketed for adults. Arguing that they should be banned because kids play with them and get hurt is just as nonsensical as arguing that the Ferrari should be banned because parents can give their five-year-olds the car keys and those kids can drive the car off a cliff. There is zero difference. Both are toys designed for adults, and clearly labeled as such.
These products already have prominent warning labels on their packages saying that these are dangerous when swallowed, and that they are not intended for children under 13 years of age. Most kids stop swallowing random objects by about age three, so that's a solid ten year safety margin. To the extent that some of them might have been sold prior to when that warning label was added, they should be held liable for any injuries resulting from those early sales. However, it is not the CPSC's responsibility to protect parents who are so clueless that they buy a product that is clearly marked for ages 13+ and give it to a two-year-old. The only way to achieve such a standard would be to ban all toys designed for children over three years of age. No sane person would say that this is a good idea.
As for younger kids getting their hands on them accidentally, it is the parents' responsibility to watch their kids, and to ensure that anything potentially dangerous is kept out of reach. You don't see people trying to ban household cleansers because kids can be killed by drinking them. You don't see people trying to ban all medications because kids can climb into the medicine cabinet and OD. And yet all of these are things that children of the very same age do. There really is absolutely no difference here. The products are properly labeled, so to the extent that there is a problem, in much the same way as we have poison control ads, the right solution is public service announcements to educate the public about the risks of kids swallowing magnets, not a ban on the products.
Oh, and more importantly, educate doctors, nurses, and poison control centers so that when you ask them if you should worry after a kid swallows one of these things, they immediately tell you to go count them and make damn sure the kid swallowed only one.
People trying to get products banned because of egregious misuse and abuse are what drives us rapidly towards being a nanny state in which anything interesting, useful, or fun is outlawed to protect us from our own stupidity. That isn't a world I want to live in.
99.9% of teachers couldn't hack the 1st semester of a Pharm.D program.
What you're missing is that with the exception of the precious few who are truly motivated to shape the future of our society, the best and the brightest generally avoid teaching because the pay sucks. We don't pay teachers poorly because a lot of them can't teach. We get a lot of teachers who can't teach because we pay teachers so poorly that almost everyone who can do something else chooses to do something else. You have the cause and effect backwards.
As a rule, industries that pay poorly almost invariably suffer from a deteriorating workforce. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started paying pharmacists half as much, within twenty years, you would have Pharm.D graduates who would wash out if they entered that program today. Or, if the Pharm.D graduation standards didn't fall to match the pool of applicants, you would eventually be forced to pay more money to steal employees from other stores, because the alternative would be to close your own pharmacies for lack of employees. By contrast, you can continue to cram more students per classroom almost indefinitely, with lower and lower quality of education.
Of course, this spotlights one big difference between education and private industry. Educators are not particularly mobile. You might have a dozen pharmacies in a small city, but you'll only have one school district. To the extent that private schools compete for teachers, there is some competition to drive wages up, but that only goes so far. The larger the school districts become, the bigger the problem gets.
Other way around, IMO. Steve Jobs was a great salesman with great mystique, but a fair amount of that mystique came from fear, replete with famous anecdotes about people meeting him in an elevator, being asked what they do, failing to respond quickly enough, and getting fired on the spot. Tim Cook, by contrast, seems like a straight shooter who is genuinely trying to make Apple a better, more responsible company that people will be proud to work for. He is very good at inspiring the troops, IMO.
I'm going to let my inner cynic out for just a few minutes. I think you're missing the point of stock analysts. Their purpose is not to help others make good decisions. Their purpose is to encourage people to make bad decisions that the big hedge funds can profit from. If you want to make money from the stock market, watch what the analysts say, then do the opposite. If they're saying that a company is going to have a really strong earnings report, sell the day before the earnings report, buy again the day after.
OS-level support for smart-card-like devices that can exchange simple tokens using Diffie-Hellman over a very simple serial protocol. The DH exchange establishes a shared secret with a website that can later be used to generate one-time-use tokens a la CryptoCard, which are generated when the user presses a button. The user could then either type in that token or the device could send it to the computer over what would again be a very simple serial protocol.
Next, for a secure site (e.g. banking), make the authentication be valid for only a single browser session (while a single window/tab is open), and move to a stateful communication protocol instead of HTTP. If done correctly, the token would be very difficult for an attacker to use, because any activity by the attacker would change the session's state from the server's perspective, which would in turn result in the user seeing the wrong screen (or, in all likelihood, an error message) when the user tried to use a stale state object.
Even with that scheme, there would still be some risk of a man-in-the-middle attack the very first time you associate such a smart card with a website, but I'm not sure that problem is readily solvable. And there would still be the possibility of a skilled attacker forging a logout screen when the user terminates the session. Still, the above scheme should be far more secure than any bank website I've encountered so far, and would require an attack that was specific to a particular website (as opposed to a keylogger that can provide information that might be used across multiple sites). Heck, even without all the session statefulness, it would still be much, much better than a simple password.
First and foremost, I find it unlikely that supervisors at ford are clearing $100k, and even if they are, manufacturing jobs are hard damn work.
First, median teacher salary is only $40k, not 50k. Second, median production supervisor salary is just shy of $80k. Source: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Ford-Motor-Production-Supervisor-Salaries-E263_D_KO11,32.htm. As for your comment that manufacturing is hard work, sure it is. Digging ditches is also hard work. Does that mean we should pay people more to dig ditches than to educate our children? That's just plain nuts.
First, make kids go to school year round.
That's actually a terrible idea. Kids need time to be kids, too. Most of them don't get that time while school is in session. You'll end up with kids that are very well educated, sure, but they won't be well-adjusted. Further, studies show no benefits to year-round schooling.
Also, the argument that you would reduce seasonal variation in the economy by switching to year-round schooling is disingenuous at best. The reason people take vacations during the summer is that unless you're traveling to the southern hemisphere, this is the best time to enjoy yourself outdoors. That will not change. What will change is that parents will take their kids out of school more often, which is disruptive to the education process. And to the extent that people take fewer vacations during the summer because of year-round schooling, they are unlikely to take additional vacations during the winter because the weather sucks anywhere that ordinary Americans can realistically afford to go. In short, it will reduce the seasonal variation in the economy by decreasing the number of people taking vacations during the summer, which will result in fewer seasonal jobs, but will result in no additional year-round jobs.
Worse, parents whose kids go to different schools may find that their kids' vacations are not at the same time. Those parents will have no choice but to take one or more kids out of school when they should be in class. Think of it as taking the problems caused by staggered spring breaks and multiplying them across every vacation your family takes.
No, there is nothing good about year-round schooling.
Using a SMS message to a cellphone is better than nothing. Generally if a remote cracker gets access to passwords, they generally won't have the ability to intercept those.
If you get enough remote access to intercept passwords typed on a touchscreen, you've completely 0wn3d the device. Those SMS messages are stored on disk/flash somewhere, and if you know where they are, they're yours. Any device that is capable of being networked is fundamentally unsuitable as a second factor, period.
What is the user doing on your site? Does he need no other tool for completing the task?
If the user does need other tools, odds are good that the buying decision will be guided primarily by experts on the site, not by ads on the site. After all, if the user is serious enough to be reading a site on a particular subject, then the user probably cares about choosing the right products and is unlikely to be swayed significantly by a pretty advertisement that says "Brand X gear is awesome" right above an actual discussion entitled "Brand X gear will leave you permanently disfigured".
There's the rub; for a site on almost any topic, there are usually discussions about that product within easy reach. So the product is either good enough to succeed on its own merits or it isn't, and in either case, it is the quality of the product and the opinions of the experts on the site that drove your sales; every penny spent running ads on those sites is a penny wasted.
On the flip side, money spent getting your product into the hands of respected experts is advertising money well spent. Unfortunately, that sort of ad money doesn't help pay the site's bills. To the extent that those sites help your sales, donating money to those sites is money well spent, but odds are you will get minimal benefit from asking them to show your ads in exchange for those donations.:)
I seriously doubt it, too, but not because of piracy. Android is an OS for limited-function devices. Thus, most apps are also limited in their functionality. Unfortunately, low-end apps are a dime a dozen. You can't really manage high margins if any random developer can make a knock-off in a few months, undercut you by 50%, and kill your sales faster than you can say, "Oops, I guess I overpriced my product". So unless your app is just freaking brilliant, you pretty much have to hope for high volume, which is a lot harder to achieve.
Not when you factor in the fact that they have to spend significant parts of those summers preparing updated curricula based on new test criteria, new versions of the books, etc. Not when you realize that they need to rework their tests over the summer, or else the students cheat. And so on.
Besides, $25 per hour is not being "paid pretty well". It's three times minimum wage, but a pharmacist makes double that with only about two more years of education. A tech sector employee makes double that on a bachelor's degree. Supervisors in Ford factories make double that, often with no degree at all. And for this, the teachers attended four years of college, plus at least a couple of years to get their teaching credentials, plus additional classes (CPE/CPD) every few years to maintain those credentials.
Teachers have what is, without a doubt, one of the most important jobs in the world. Without education, society would not move forward. Yet somehow we as a society feel that they deserve no more pay (on average) than a 7-11 store manager or a construction worker. And those same people wonder why our education system has problems. Please tell me you don't seriously consider such low salaries to be reasonable.
... that hasn't stopped so many other terrible ideas from becoming wildly popular.
Like passwords. I mean, the entire notion of securing access to an account using something that can trivially be sniffed, forged, etc. is utterly insane.
Or those fake software-based "second factor" authentication systems where your cell phone (or some other remotely crackable device) is the second factor.
The fact is that nobody is willing to do security right, because doing security right is hard as hell, and damned inconvenient. So instead, everybody adds hack on top of hack to try to maintain the illusion that these fundamentally flawed authentication mechanisms are somehow useful or robust. Single sign-on just eliminates the illusion of security.:-)
Even an hour away, the median home price is $650,000. You pretty much have to go two hours away or live in the worst parts of the Bay Area to get median housing prices down in the $200-300k range. If you're living two hours away, you'll probably want to find work somewhere closer than San Francisco, and if you're living in a bad neighborhood... well, you're braver than I am.
The choice of San Francisco versus other parts of the Bay Area basically boil down to whether you want a standalone house with a lawn or a glorified apartment. If you pick the lower-density area, you'll have to drive. If you pick the higher-density area, you might be able to walk to some form of public transit, but you pretty much won't be able to drive (usefully) because driving in San Francisco is just plain unholy. The average travel times end up being comparable, as does the monthly cost; you just have closer neighbors and lower square footage in the city.
These sorts of ads have become much more popular recently and I can only conclude it's because they work.
They sure don't work for me. 99% of the full-screen ads I've seen have been flash ads, and from my perspective, they just look like a click-to-flash unloaded plug-in icon.
The problem with those sorts of ads is that the only time I ever see them is when I'm going to a random website from a link off of Slashdot or some other news site. I wouldn't even consider visiting any website with such ads on a regular basis. If a site I frequent started showing such ads, I would simply find a different site to visit. And this is why advertising on the Internet can never be effective. When you have a million choices instead of ten or twenty, there is no longer any reason to put up with the ads. Thus, any ad that is intrusive enough to have an effect on the viewer also discourages their use of the site.
Only a handful of Internet sites—Hulu, YouTube, etc.—are still potential candidates for traditional advertising. Those sites behave like television, in that the user spends most of his or her visit as a passive consumer, watching something over an extended period of time. Most websites, however, are not intended for passive consumption. The user is there to do something, to find something, to read a specific article, to discuss a specific subject, etc. Any advertisement under those circumstances is almost guaranteed to A. garner little or no attention and B. annoy the heck out of the user if it does.
As a result, what most folks think of as advertising is basically dead. The more modern and educated society becomes, the more companies will have to compete on the quality of their products and services. As this transition happens, there is a growing need for services like Google's product search, only done right—none of this stupid screen scraping crap. We need to have a handful of search systems that allow any company to submit their product prices and descriptions through a well-defined API, so that the prices are all legitimate instead of saying that a $2,000 printer costs $3 because there's a $3 accessory on the same page.
Once you have something like that, combine it with Amazon-like "people who bought X also bought Y". In other words, show targeted advertisements for things that you think the individual might like based on their buying or searching history. Most importantly, though, don't try to show people ads when they aren't looking to buy something. Doing so really isn't useful except for encouraging consumption of stuff that you have lying around the house. Candy bar ads result in increased sales of candy bars. That's about it.
Which in practice never actually happens. Sure, if you've just gotten laid off, continuing ed classes might be a way to become employable again, but for the most part, while you're working, you're working. You aren't going back to school constantly, and apart from the things you have to learn to keep your job, you're probably not taking classes on the side to make yourself a better candidate for a position at another company. This means that you're less mobile, and therefore are likely to get paid less for working longer hours, because they know they don't have to pay you more money to retain you as an employee.
Almost by definition, the left wing is more tolerant. Therefore, if you aren't on the brink of civil war, the people who are more likely to be dangerous are the right-wing nutters. They want everyone to think like they do, and are willing to resort to violence to force the issue.
By contrast, the left-wing nutters are the ones who started the uprising against the Syrian regime. When the left wing starts bringing out the guns, it is because the government has become so abusive to the common man that it simply can no longer be tolerated. Once that happens, odds are good that the vast majority of the people are ready to rebel but are not quite crazy enough to be the person who lights the match. Thus, when the liberals get out their guns, it is safe to assume that you have at best a few months before the government falls entirely.
So to recap, right-wing nutters tend to cause terrorist incidents, while left-wing nutters tend to cause successful revolutionary wars. As we are presumably not on the brink of a revolutionary war (yet), odds are in favor of this guy being a right-wing nutter if he is a wingnut at all.
I don't care whether I'm armed or not, because I know I wouldn't be stupid enough to try to shoot under those circumstances. That said, I'd rather everyone else be unarmed. If everyone were armed and no one could see who the shooter was, the odds of me getting hit by somebody trying to shoot the shooter are far higher than me getting hit by the shooter him/herself.
The only thing that arming the population could do would be to serve as a deterrent. However, given the way the attacker did this (blinding everyone, and being the sole shooter), it is unlikely that it would be a significant deterrent even if every person in the theater were visibly wearing a holster.
Slashdot Mirror
You lock up the cabinets where you keep household cleansers, right? How is a box of these magnets any different than a bottle of bleach? Both are harmless when used correctly, yet both can kill a small child if ingested.
Doctors collectively, sure, but not necessarily every doctor. It only takes one person not knowing about the seriousness of the situation to make the problem worse by not scheduling surgery immediately.
Nothing. They're only dangerous if you swallow two or more.
And still, this is not an education problem why? If a young child gets the car keys from a 14-year-old and manages to put the thing in neutral and roll it down a hill onto a freeway, most rational people would blame the 14-year-old. How is it that you're still blaming the car?
That's what it sounds like. On the plus side, those folks will be able to hit their cap in two hours, 17 minutes.
No, wait....
Allow me to be the first to say, "Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!"
Your guess is completely wrong.
First, the way Gatekeeper works is by interposing the mechanism used for quarantining downloads. A binary compiled on your computer was never downloaded, so code you build yourself should be unaffected by Gatekeeper unless you upload and re-download it or manually set the quarantine flags for testing purposes.
Second, because Gatekeeper is tied into the quarantine system, the check occurs only the first time that you launch an application. Any application that you installed under previous releases of the OS continues to work as it always did because again, it was not just downloaded.
When a Gatekeeper check does occur, however, the behavior depends on which mode Gatekeeper is in (set in System Preferences). There are three modes: "Mac App Store" (the default), in which only apps downloaded from the Mac App Store are allowed to launch, "App Store and identified developers", in which apps downloaded from the Mac App Store or from other sites are allowed, but only if signed by a cert obtained from Apple's developer program, or "Anywhere" (essentially turning Gatekeeper off).
In that middle mode, the app is not signed by Apple at all, but by a third-party developer. That third-party developer's cert is signed by Apple, of course, but the app itself isn't.
And in all cases, you can override Gatekeeper's behavior by control-clicking the app and choosing "Open" instead of double-clicking it. This will give you the traditional set of prompts from previous OS releases in which it asks you if you want to launch this app that you've never launched before. Alternatively, you can turn Gatekeeper into "Anywhere" mode, launch the app, then change it back. Either way, once you have launched and un-quarantined a given app, Gatekeeper should never bother you again.
I couldn't disagree more. Buckyballs are not toys for kids. They're toys intended for adults, marketed for adults. Arguing that they should be banned because kids play with them and get hurt is just as nonsensical as arguing that the Ferrari should be banned because parents can give their five-year-olds the car keys and those kids can drive the car off a cliff. There is zero difference. Both are toys designed for adults, and clearly labeled as such.
These products already have prominent warning labels on their packages saying that these are dangerous when swallowed, and that they are not intended for children under 13 years of age. Most kids stop swallowing random objects by about age three, so that's a solid ten year safety margin. To the extent that some of them might have been sold prior to when that warning label was added, they should be held liable for any injuries resulting from those early sales. However, it is not the CPSC's responsibility to protect parents who are so clueless that they buy a product that is clearly marked for ages 13+ and give it to a two-year-old. The only way to achieve such a standard would be to ban all toys designed for children over three years of age. No sane person would say that this is a good idea.
As for younger kids getting their hands on them accidentally, it is the parents' responsibility to watch their kids, and to ensure that anything potentially dangerous is kept out of reach. You don't see people trying to ban household cleansers because kids can be killed by drinking them. You don't see people trying to ban all medications because kids can climb into the medicine cabinet and OD. And yet all of these are things that children of the very same age do. There really is absolutely no difference here. The products are properly labeled, so to the extent that there is a problem, in much the same way as we have poison control ads, the right solution is public service announcements to educate the public about the risks of kids swallowing magnets, not a ban on the products.
Oh, and more importantly, educate doctors, nurses, and poison control centers so that when you ask them if you should worry after a kid swallows one of these things, they immediately tell you to go count them and make damn sure the kid swallowed only one.
People trying to get products banned because of egregious misuse and abuse are what drives us rapidly towards being a nanny state in which anything interesting, useful, or fun is outlawed to protect us from our own stupidity. That isn't a world I want to live in.
What you're missing is that with the exception of the precious few who are truly motivated to shape the future of our society, the best and the brightest generally avoid teaching because the pay sucks. We don't pay teachers poorly because a lot of them can't teach. We get a lot of teachers who can't teach because we pay teachers so poorly that almost everyone who can do something else chooses to do something else. You have the cause and effect backwards.
As a rule, industries that pay poorly almost invariably suffer from a deteriorating workforce. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started paying pharmacists half as much, within twenty years, you would have Pharm.D graduates who would wash out if they entered that program today. Or, if the Pharm.D graduation standards didn't fall to match the pool of applicants, you would eventually be forced to pay more money to steal employees from other stores, because the alternative would be to close your own pharmacies for lack of employees. By contrast, you can continue to cram more students per classroom almost indefinitely, with lower and lower quality of education.
Of course, this spotlights one big difference between education and private industry. Educators are not particularly mobile. You might have a dozen pharmacies in a small city, but you'll only have one school district. To the extent that private schools compete for teachers, there is some competition to drive wages up, but that only goes so far. The larger the school districts become, the bigger the problem gets.
Other way around, IMO. Steve Jobs was a great salesman with great mystique, but a fair amount of that mystique came from fear, replete with famous anecdotes about people meeting him in an elevator, being asked what they do, failing to respond quickly enough, and getting fired on the spot. Tim Cook, by contrast, seems like a straight shooter who is genuinely trying to make Apple a better, more responsible company that people will be proud to work for. He is very good at inspiring the troops, IMO.
I'm going to let my inner cynic out for just a few minutes. I think you're missing the point of stock analysts. Their purpose is not to help others make good decisions. Their purpose is to encourage people to make bad decisions that the big hedge funds can profit from. If you want to make money from the stock market, watch what the analysts say, then do the opposite. If they're saying that a company is going to have a really strong earnings report, sell the day before the earnings report, buy again the day after.
OS-level support for smart-card-like devices that can exchange simple tokens using Diffie-Hellman over a very simple serial protocol. The DH exchange establishes a shared secret with a website that can later be used to generate one-time-use tokens a la CryptoCard, which are generated when the user presses a button. The user could then either type in that token or the device could send it to the computer over what would again be a very simple serial protocol.
Next, for a secure site (e.g. banking), make the authentication be valid for only a single browser session (while a single window/tab is open), and move to a stateful communication protocol instead of HTTP. If done correctly, the token would be very difficult for an attacker to use, because any activity by the attacker would change the session's state from the server's perspective, which would in turn result in the user seeing the wrong screen (or, in all likelihood, an error message) when the user tried to use a stale state object.
Even with that scheme, there would still be some risk of a man-in-the-middle attack the very first time you associate such a smart card with a website, but I'm not sure that problem is readily solvable. And there would still be the possibility of a skilled attacker forging a logout screen when the user terminates the session. Still, the above scheme should be far more secure than any bank website I've encountered so far, and would require an attack that was specific to a particular website (as opposed to a keylogger that can provide information that might be used across multiple sites). Heck, even without all the session statefulness, it would still be much, much better than a simple password.
Devices with small screens. I'm not saying it can't be used for other things, but that's the market it is currently filling.
First, median teacher salary is only $40k, not 50k. Second, median production supervisor salary is just shy of $80k. Source: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Ford-Motor-Production-Supervisor-Salaries-E263_D_KO11,32.htm. As for your comment that manufacturing is hard work, sure it is. Digging ditches is also hard work. Does that mean we should pay people more to dig ditches than to educate our children? That's just plain nuts.
That's actually a terrible idea. Kids need time to be kids, too. Most of them don't get that time while school is in session. You'll end up with kids that are very well educated, sure, but they won't be well-adjusted. Further, studies show no benefits to year-round schooling.
Also, the argument that you would reduce seasonal variation in the economy by switching to year-round schooling is disingenuous at best. The reason people take vacations during the summer is that unless you're traveling to the southern hemisphere, this is the best time to enjoy yourself outdoors. That will not change. What will change is that parents will take their kids out of school more often, which is disruptive to the education process. And to the extent that people take fewer vacations during the summer because of year-round schooling, they are unlikely to take additional vacations during the winter because the weather sucks anywhere that ordinary Americans can realistically afford to go. In short, it will reduce the seasonal variation in the economy by decreasing the number of people taking vacations during the summer, which will result in fewer seasonal jobs, but will result in no additional year-round jobs.
Worse, parents whose kids go to different schools may find that their kids' vacations are not at the same time. Those parents will have no choice but to take one or more kids out of school when they should be in class. Think of it as taking the problems caused by staggered spring breaks and multiplying them across every vacation your family takes.
No, there is nothing good about year-round schooling.
If you get enough remote access to intercept passwords typed on a touchscreen, you've completely 0wn3d the device. Those SMS messages are stored on disk/flash somewhere, and if you know where they are, they're yours. Any device that is capable of being networked is fundamentally unsuitable as a second factor, period.
If the user does need other tools, odds are good that the buying decision will be guided primarily by experts on the site, not by ads on the site. After all, if the user is serious enough to be reading a site on a particular subject, then the user probably cares about choosing the right products and is unlikely to be swayed significantly by a pretty advertisement that says "Brand X gear is awesome" right above an actual discussion entitled "Brand X gear will leave you permanently disfigured".
There's the rub; for a site on almost any topic, there are usually discussions about that product within easy reach. So the product is either good enough to succeed on its own merits or it isn't, and in either case, it is the quality of the product and the opinions of the experts on the site that drove your sales; every penny spent running ads on those sites is a penny wasted.
On the flip side, money spent getting your product into the hands of respected experts is advertising money well spent. Unfortunately, that sort of ad money doesn't help pay the site's bills. To the extent that those sites help your sales, donating money to those sites is money well spent, but odds are you will get minimal benefit from asking them to show your ads in exchange for those donations. :)
I seriously doubt it, too, but not because of piracy. Android is an OS for limited-function devices. Thus, most apps are also limited in their functionality. Unfortunately, low-end apps are a dime a dozen. You can't really manage high margins if any random developer can make a knock-off in a few months, undercut you by 50%, and kill your sales faster than you can say, "Oops, I guess I overpriced my product". So unless your app is just freaking brilliant, you pretty much have to hope for high volume, which is a lot harder to achieve.
Not when you factor in the fact that they have to spend significant parts of those summers preparing updated curricula based on new test criteria, new versions of the books, etc. Not when you realize that they need to rework their tests over the summer, or else the students cheat. And so on.
Besides, $25 per hour is not being "paid pretty well". It's three times minimum wage, but a pharmacist makes double that with only about two more years of education. A tech sector employee makes double that on a bachelor's degree. Supervisors in Ford factories make double that, often with no degree at all. And for this, the teachers attended four years of college, plus at least a couple of years to get their teaching credentials, plus additional classes (CPE/CPD) every few years to maintain those credentials.
Teachers have what is, without a doubt, one of the most important jobs in the world. Without education, society would not move forward. Yet somehow we as a society feel that they deserve no more pay (on average) than a 7-11 store manager or a construction worker. And those same people wonder why our education system has problems. Please tell me you don't seriously consider such low salaries to be reasonable.
Like passwords. I mean, the entire notion of securing access to an account using something that can trivially be sniffed, forged, etc. is utterly insane.
Or those fake software-based "second factor" authentication systems where your cell phone (or some other remotely crackable device) is the second factor.
The fact is that nobody is willing to do security right, because doing security right is hard as hell, and damned inconvenient. So instead, everybody adds hack on top of hack to try to maintain the illusion that these fundamentally flawed authentication mechanisms are somehow useful or robust. Single sign-on just eliminates the illusion of security. :-)
Even an hour away, the median home price is $650,000. You pretty much have to go two hours away or live in the worst parts of the Bay Area to get median housing prices down in the $200-300k range. If you're living two hours away, you'll probably want to find work somewhere closer than San Francisco, and if you're living in a bad neighborhood... well, you're braver than I am.
The choice of San Francisco versus other parts of the Bay Area basically boil down to whether you want a standalone house with a lawn or a glorified apartment. If you pick the lower-density area, you'll have to drive. If you pick the higher-density area, you might be able to walk to some form of public transit, but you pretty much won't be able to drive (usefully) because driving in San Francisco is just plain unholy. The average travel times end up being comparable, as does the monthly cost; you just have closer neighbors and lower square footage in the city.
They sure don't work for me. 99% of the full-screen ads I've seen have been flash ads, and from my perspective, they just look like a click-to-flash unloaded plug-in icon.
The problem with those sorts of ads is that the only time I ever see them is when I'm going to a random website from a link off of Slashdot or some other news site. I wouldn't even consider visiting any website with such ads on a regular basis. If a site I frequent started showing such ads, I would simply find a different site to visit. And this is why advertising on the Internet can never be effective. When you have a million choices instead of ten or twenty, there is no longer any reason to put up with the ads. Thus, any ad that is intrusive enough to have an effect on the viewer also discourages their use of the site.
Only a handful of Internet sites—Hulu, YouTube, etc.—are still potential candidates for traditional advertising. Those sites behave like television, in that the user spends most of his or her visit as a passive consumer, watching something over an extended period of time. Most websites, however, are not intended for passive consumption. The user is there to do something, to find something, to read a specific article, to discuss a specific subject, etc. Any advertisement under those circumstances is almost guaranteed to A. garner little or no attention and B. annoy the heck out of the user if it does.
As a result, what most folks think of as advertising is basically dead. The more modern and educated society becomes, the more companies will have to compete on the quality of their products and services. As this transition happens, there is a growing need for services like Google's product search, only done right—none of this stupid screen scraping crap. We need to have a handful of search systems that allow any company to submit their product prices and descriptions through a well-defined API, so that the prices are all legitimate instead of saying that a $2,000 printer costs $3 because there's a $3 accessory on the same page.
Once you have something like that, combine it with Amazon-like "people who bought X also bought Y". In other words, show targeted advertisements for things that you think the individual might like based on their buying or searching history. Most importantly, though, don't try to show people ads when they aren't looking to buy something. Doing so really isn't useful except for encouraging consumption of stuff that you have lying around the house. Candy bar ads result in increased sales of candy bars. That's about it.
You do realize that my post was entirely in jest, right?
You can take away their rights, and you can take away their money, but take away their porn, and the people will revolt. :-D
Run!
Which in practice never actually happens. Sure, if you've just gotten laid off, continuing ed classes might be a way to become employable again, but for the most part, while you're working, you're working. You aren't going back to school constantly, and apart from the things you have to learn to keep your job, you're probably not taking classes on the side to make yourself a better candidate for a position at another company. This means that you're less mobile, and therefore are likely to get paid less for working longer hours, because they know they don't have to pay you more money to retain you as an employee.
Almost by definition, the left wing is more tolerant. Therefore, if you aren't on the brink of civil war, the people who are more likely to be dangerous are the right-wing nutters. They want everyone to think like they do, and are willing to resort to violence to force the issue.
By contrast, the left-wing nutters are the ones who started the uprising against the Syrian regime. When the left wing starts bringing out the guns, it is because the government has become so abusive to the common man that it simply can no longer be tolerated. Once that happens, odds are good that the vast majority of the people are ready to rebel but are not quite crazy enough to be the person who lights the match. Thus, when the liberals get out their guns, it is safe to assume that you have at best a few months before the government falls entirely.
So to recap, right-wing nutters tend to cause terrorist incidents, while left-wing nutters tend to cause successful revolutionary wars. As we are presumably not on the brink of a revolutionary war (yet), odds are in favor of this guy being a right-wing nutter if he is a wingnut at all.
I don't care whether I'm armed or not, because I know I wouldn't be stupid enough to try to shoot under those circumstances. That said, I'd rather everyone else be unarmed. If everyone were armed and no one could see who the shooter was, the odds of me getting hit by somebody trying to shoot the shooter are far higher than me getting hit by the shooter him/herself.
The only thing that arming the population could do would be to serve as a deterrent. However, given the way the attacker did this (blinding everyone, and being the sole shooter), it is unlikely that it would be a significant deterrent even if every person in the theater were visibly wearing a holster.