The child may be visiting a household with no land line, where the supervising grown-ups have all switched to cell phones. My aunt has no land line, for example. Or the child might be on a long car trip, and the adult doesn't feel like pulling off the road into a parking lot to make a phone call.
So your aunt has a cell phone, if she's supervising, what's the problem? If the adult doesn't feel like pulling off the road to make a phone call then the call is probably not that important and IMO looses it's justification.
Twenty years ago, pay phones were more common because they had not yet been displaced by cell phones.
This is true, but that same ubiquity of cell phones makes it hard to claim that without a personal cell phone a child will have no way of contacting a parent. If that is truly the concern then there are cell phones that can only contact the parents and emergency numbers but those really aren't used much are they?
A blanket ban on knives in school discourages school lunch programs from offering healthy foods eaten with a knife and fork. Instead, school lunch programs serve overprocessed finger food or overprocessed slop that can be eaten with a spoon.
Yes yes a knife can be used for eating but that's not really the point here is it? First we're not talking about a table knife we're talking about a knife in a locker. Secondly, it's fine if you think knives should be allowed in school and it's a completely separate issue. Work to change that. But don't teach your kid that there aren't consequences for their behavior, including breaking rules whether you agree with them or not.
Once they use their smart phones, it's harder to prove their slacking off.
Once you have no metric for measuring productivity it's harder to prove their slacking off.:) I was listening to the radio and there was a segment about telecommuting. The number one complaint by management was that they wouldn't be able to know if their employees where working. The counter to that was that if you measure your employees work by how busy they 'look' then you really have no idea who's really working and who's not.
When I worked in tech support I would occasionally be asked into HR because I was too often seen wandering around the building instead of at my desk. I just had to remind them that I took 60-80 calls a day as opposed to the average of 30 and I maintained a better than average approval rating from our customers. I did my job much better than most and if they wanted me to take even more calls they could pay me more. Of course they also once complained that when I requested an RMA my average call time was only 10 minutes and that I should be spending more time diagnosing the problem. Once again I had to remind them that my defective rate for returned merchandise was 95%, much better than the average of 60%.
If managers would look at results instead of just trying to control their employees there wouldn't be a need for controlling internet access or any of the other arbitrary rules that companies make. This is very similar to laws against driving with a cell phone. There's no need for it. There's only a need to respond to the consequences of someone being negligent.
Under your framework, how is a child below a state's legal age to work supposed to call home and ask the parent to please pick the child up at x location?
Is the child at a location unknown to the parents? Or is it that the time period is undefined? Or is the child unsupervised and therefore not able to ask an adult to call? There is very little reason for a child to have a cell phone unless their parents are just letting them loose. Even then it is not a reason it is just an excuse. Children didn't need cell phones 20 years ago and there is nothing that has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years to justify it now. It's a privileged and as such should be earned.
The connection between behavior and consequences should be taught to children. It reminds me of a friend I had whose son was 10 years old. He was a menace. He never listened to his parents and his behavior was dangerous.It was very common to loose track of where he was only to find him doing something that he had been explicitly told not to do. Well, he wanted a knife and was told he wasn't old enough but when he turned 12 he could have one. IMHO it was a great opportunity to tell him he could have one when he showed he was responsible enough to have one and when he behaved. Instead they continued to teach their kid that there was no connection between behavior and consequences. I don't see them anymore and he is around 14 now. Last I heard he is suspended from school on a regular basis for violence. He even got in trouble for bringing his knife (that he got when he was 12) to school. I would bet my rent money that when he is an adult he will spend time in jail.
I certainly don't think games should be censored, but I think the assertion that it only affects a small percentage of people is naive. The human brain is highly malleable to the input it receives. I think there is an effect of desensitizing people. Does someone whose desensitized commit more acts of violence? That's really a separate issue. Is that effect better, worse, or the same as violent movies? Is the effect better, worse, or the same as a million other things? Do I think it's something to ban? No. Is it something I'm concerned about personally? No. Is it worth studying? Well, it's no worse or better than a study linking hand eye coordination to playing video games.
Yes, it is. But, I just don't see how someone, even a child, could believe that something so obviously fictional is reality
Not everything the brain does is conscious, including learning and behavior. I seem to remember reading somewhere the when the military switched from round targets to human shaped targets that the number of shots fired in the field by soldiers improved dramatically. The whole point was to desensitize soldiers so they wouldn't hesitate to take a life.
In the US, you have five choices on how you're going to be screwed with your cell phone. You can pick Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Apple.
One of those is not like the others. One of those is not a carrier. Also, AT&T bought T-mobile so that would leave 3 choices for the largest economy in the world.
The only reason they exists now is to hide the terms of the two year $500 loan people get to pay for their phone. It strikes me as crazy that someone who wouldn't pay $500 for their phone will gladly take a loan (with hidden terms/interest rate) for one.
The biggest block to separating carriers and phones is that the carriers each use different technology, different frequencies (sometimes required, sometimes not) and have different radio and protocol requirements.
Just because Windows and Mac use different technologies does not mean the only place you can get software for Windows and MacOS are Microsoft and Apple (there are only artificial barriers when it comes to the iPhone).
If cell providers could not take part in selling (on crazy payment plans that no one would agree to if they were separate) the phone they would have less incentive to make their systems so proprietary. At the very least your cell phone usage should be charged separately from your cell phone loan.
As much as I love Open Source I can see their point and I can't counter it.
That's because the marketplace for telecommunications is broken in this country. Phones and service should not be allowed to be tied together. Fix that fundamental problem and open source will be just fine on your phone. For that matter most other proprietary software would be better too as it would have to compete for the consumer's approval as opposed to the carrier's.
The only way to remain legal in the UK would be to move your music collection from your hard drive to the iPod, thus having only one copy.
I think in the case of iTunes->iPad music copying is allowed by the copyright holder. For instance, you can record yourself and copy the resulting file wherever you want because you own the rights to it. You can also prohibit, restrict and license the right to use and copy it by other people. The difference in the U.S. is that the copyright holder cannot reserve rights that prohibit 'fair use'. What exactly 'fair use' is and how it relates to DRM is another question altogether.
"Empty car" seems to me like it could easily be the first scenario to be routinely automated, on a small scale (very gradually, not "end result")
I meant an end result as far as cars driving through residential areas without a driver. The reason I think the interstates would make a better place to start are mainly due to pedestrians. City and residential streets that have a lot of pedestrians would be a bad place to put automated vehicles first. If only because any mistake there would create a backlash against these vehicles. I just think there will be resistance if you introduce automated vehicles anywhere near where a child might run in front of it. This is much less likely to happen on a freeway.
Lastly in this litigious society who will you sue if an empty car has an accident?
I find this the most interesting. Not the accident part but the empty car. Aside from trucks being able to drive 24 hours without an occupant (or wasted space for one) you could send your own car on errands. All a grocery store has to do is take your order online and put your items your car when it arrives.
Unfortunately I think that will be at the end of automated transportation/distribution. I don't think liability will be much of a problem. Technologically a self driving car could be capable of recording everything about the accident including it's own speed and that of the other car. Existing tools for analyzing a crash after the fact would confirm to some certainty the accuracy of those recordings (in addition to self diagnostics).
Other cars being driven by humans and pedestrians represent the real challenge. In some respects theory is a theory of mind problem. We can tell when another driver is not paying attention, when a random event is going to create a distraction for drivers (e.g. smoke from a fire in the distance, a car on the side of the road) and when we should be more cautious and maybe not pass that guy right now. We see a ball go flying across the road and we know a child may be right behind it.
Because of this I think self-driving cars will have to have their own roads for a while and I think the best way to initiate that would be with the interstate system. Either by delegating existing interstates to self-driving cars of by creating a new one in the same tradition that created the first one. Interstates and many highways have the advantages of consistent speeds, signage, and a lack of pedestrians. Enter a ramp and turn the car over to the computer, exit a ramp and release it back to the driver.
Once a system like this is in use and normal more and more areas near ramps can convert exclusively to automatic cars. As these areas advance, our confidence in the machines will grow until driving ourselves is rare and people getting hurt in car accidents is practically an urban legend.
While a contract can delegate the issue of trust to enforcement by a governing body they have another benefit as well. A contract clearly states what is expected of each party. Friends can often have falling outs when one does work or service for the other and things don't go as anticipated by either party. It's often not a matter of trust but of expectations.
For large corporations contracts and policies are implemented to control expectations. As a result expectations may be clear to the consumer as well (that's another topic). In smaller businesses trust is usually more important and implicit as expectations for every circumstance have not been formally defined.
When dealing with a small business and things go wrong (e.g. supply costs out side of the control of the business) you want to trust the business to do what they can to shoulder the increase. When dealing with a large corporation there is generally the expectation that anything outside of the control of the company will be passed on to you. A small business can better make the decision to take less in profits or even a loss to keep a customer that is loyal. In such a case the business may even need to trust the customer. It is very difficult for a large organization to have any trust built into its structure.
It may just be a matter of the semantic differences between 'trust' and 'broad complex explicit expectations enforceable by law'. How much money you are willing to exchange with another is not just a matter of trust. It becomes a matter of expectations and agreeing to every conceivable outcome before hand.
I originally posted because I 'felt' that there were reasons to trust small business more than large ones. As I've attempted to answer why I've come to the conclusion that it is based on the practicalities of business structure. A small business will tend to rely more on implicit expectations which in turn rely on trust. As a business grows expectations will become more explicit and as a result rely less on trust. In fact many large business explicitly state that they make no implicit agreement (i.e. no expectation of trust).
Is there a reason to trust the little guys any more than the big guys?
I think there is. While it is true that trust can be betrayed by anyone, there are differences between a small organization and a large one (small business vs large corporation). It is generally easier to get access to the owner of a small business as opposed to the CEO of a large corporation. In addition and also related, a large corporation will usually have more layers between the top and bottom strata of their workforce. This very often leaves (upper) management without any concept of a connection to the customer other than as a statistic. Company structure becomes more dependent on rules and less influenced by fairness and trust.
IMHO Big Banks, Big Business, Big Union, Big Government, Big Religion, all have very similar problems. Having too much trust is generally not one of them. They are like an evil patriarch that has hidden all of his wealth, lies on his death bed, and swears that if you don't do everything to keep him alive he will hurt your children.
One of the teams would have to be honest at all in order to be more honest than the other. I did say it sarcastically but I figured at worst it would just be true that they are on par.:) I still stand behind my sarcasm in the second half of my sentence that the actions of one party somehow excuse the actions of the other.
BTW I was looking around on the opensecrets site and found this page of oil and gas contributors. Since the top 100 contributors stop at around $1.5 million I was hoping to find a more complete list. On the page of top overall donors Koch Industries is listed as donating ~$2.8 million mostly to repubs, but on the Oil contributors page it says they gave ~$1.9 million.
I'm not trying to argue for either side here. The money involved in campaign finances is so dirty that it's hard to tell how much is really being passed around and by who. It gets even more complicated when you start to research organizations that have very liberal or conservative slants but don't contribute much directly to campaigns. I don't see the Quantum Endowment Fund or Soros Fund Management listed but I'm pretty sure George Soros's money finds it's way into Democratic hands. Media Matters isn't listed but they surely have financial influence on dems. Newscorp is also missing from the list but Rupert Murdoch's money arguably influences politics as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had to guess, it should have probably linked to this.
The child may be visiting a household with no land line, where the supervising grown-ups have all switched to cell phones. My aunt has no land line, for example. Or the child might be on a long car trip, and the adult doesn't feel like pulling off the road into a parking lot to make a phone call.
So your aunt has a cell phone, if she's supervising, what's the problem? If the adult doesn't feel like pulling off the road to make a phone call then the call is probably not that important and IMO looses it's justification.
Twenty years ago, pay phones were more common because they had not yet been displaced by cell phones.
This is true, but that same ubiquity of cell phones makes it hard to claim that without a personal cell phone a child will have no way of contacting a parent. If that is truly the concern then there are cell phones that can only contact the parents and emergency numbers but those really aren't used much are they?
A blanket ban on knives in school discourages school lunch programs from offering healthy foods eaten with a knife and fork. Instead, school lunch programs serve overprocessed finger food or overprocessed slop that can be eaten with a spoon.
Yes yes a knife can be used for eating but that's not really the point here is it? First we're not talking about a table knife we're talking about a knife in a locker. Secondly, it's fine if you think knives should be allowed in school and it's a completely separate issue. Work to change that. But don't teach your kid that there aren't consequences for their behavior, including breaking rules whether you agree with them or not.
Once they use their smart phones, it's harder to prove their slacking off.
Once you have no metric for measuring productivity it's harder to prove their slacking off. :) I was listening to the radio and there was a segment about telecommuting. The number one complaint by management was that they wouldn't be able to know if their employees where working. The counter to that was that if you measure your employees work by how busy they 'look' then you really have no idea who's really working and who's not.
When I worked in tech support I would occasionally be asked into HR because I was too often seen wandering around the building instead of at my desk. I just had to remind them that I took 60-80 calls a day as opposed to the average of 30 and I maintained a better than average approval rating from our customers. I did my job much better than most and if they wanted me to take even more calls they could pay me more. Of course they also once complained that when I requested an RMA my average call time was only 10 minutes and that I should be spending more time diagnosing the problem. Once again I had to remind them that my defective rate for returned merchandise was 95%, much better than the average of 60%.
If managers would look at results instead of just trying to control their employees there wouldn't be a need for controlling internet access or any of the other arbitrary rules that companies make. This is very similar to laws against driving with a cell phone. There's no need for it. There's only a need to respond to the consequences of someone being negligent.
Under your framework, how is a child below a state's legal age to work supposed to call home and ask the parent to please pick the child up at x location?
Is the child at a location unknown to the parents? Or is it that the time period is undefined? Or is the child unsupervised and therefore not able to ask an adult to call? There is very little reason for a child to have a cell phone unless their parents are just letting them loose. Even then it is not a reason it is just an excuse. Children didn't need cell phones 20 years ago and there is nothing that has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years to justify it now. It's a privileged and as such should be earned.
The connection between behavior and consequences should be taught to children. It reminds me of a friend I had whose son was 10 years old. He was a menace. He never listened to his parents and his behavior was dangerous.It was very common to loose track of where he was only to find him doing something that he had been explicitly told not to do. Well, he wanted a knife and was told he wasn't old enough but when he turned 12 he could have one. IMHO it was a great opportunity to tell him he could have one when he showed he was responsible enough to have one and when he behaved. Instead they continued to teach their kid that there was no connection between behavior and consequences. I don't see them anymore and he is around 14 now. Last I heard he is suspended from school on a regular basis for violence. He even got in trouble for bringing his knife (that he got when he was 12) to school. I would bet my rent money that when he is an adult he will spend time in jail.
OTOH, maybe your daughter will be a week willed girl who will go through life doing what ever a person holding a dollar tells her to do.
On the opposite end of the spectrum 'your' child may be a stubborn brat who feels entitled to money for nothing.
My daughter is now almost 21 and remarkably mature for her age, but if she were 16 and had acted that way I'd have smashed her phone.
Ok, that's kinda funny isn't it?
Prompted? Whatever happened to kicking him from the line and helping the next customer?
And get chewed out by the manager. Between the boss and the customer the worker is just a second class peasant.
I certainly don't think games should be censored, but I think the assertion that it only affects a small percentage of people is naive. The human brain is highly malleable to the input it receives. I think there is an effect of desensitizing people. Does someone whose desensitized commit more acts of violence? That's really a separate issue. Is that effect better, worse, or the same as violent movies? Is the effect better, worse, or the same as a million other things? Do I think it's something to ban? No. Is it something I'm concerned about personally? No. Is it worth studying? Well, it's no worse or better than a study linking hand eye coordination to playing video games.
Yes, it is. But, I just don't see how someone, even a child, could believe that something so obviously fictional is reality
Not everything the brain does is conscious, including learning and behavior. I seem to remember reading somewhere the when the military switched from round targets to human shaped targets that the number of shots fired in the field by soldiers improved dramatically. The whole point was to desensitize soldiers so they wouldn't hesitate to take a life.
In the US, you have five choices on how you're going to be screwed with your cell phone. You can pick Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Apple.
One of those is not like the others. One of those is not a carrier. Also, AT&T bought T-mobile so that would leave 3 choices for the largest economy in the world.
no multi-year contracts available.
The only reason they exists now is to hide the terms of the two year $500 loan people get to pay for their phone. It strikes me as crazy that someone who wouldn't pay $500 for their phone will gladly take a loan (with hidden terms/interest rate) for one.
The biggest block to separating carriers and phones is that the carriers each use different technology, different frequencies (sometimes required, sometimes not) and have different radio and protocol requirements.
Just because Windows and Mac use different technologies does not mean the only place you can get software for Windows and MacOS are Microsoft and Apple (there are only artificial barriers when it comes to the iPhone).
If cell providers could not take part in selling (on crazy payment plans that no one would agree to if they were separate) the phone they would have less incentive to make their systems so proprietary. At the very least your cell phone usage should be charged separately from your cell phone loan.
As much as I love Open Source I can see their point and I can't counter it.
That's because the marketplace for telecommunications is broken in this country. Phones and service should not be allowed to be tied together. Fix that fundamental problem and open source will be just fine on your phone. For that matter most other proprietary software would be better too as it would have to compete for the consumer's approval as opposed to the carrier's.
I always found this survey interesting.
I like to think of it as 8.83 billion nanometers.
Argh
'middle of the plane' = 'middle of the planet'
The typical spy satellite has a polar orbit...
...The X-37B, on the other hand, is orbiting around the fat middle of the plane...
...The orbit lends credence to the idea that the space plane is an orbiting spy.
Just sayin'
The only way to remain legal in the UK would be to move your music collection from your hard drive to the iPod, thus having only one copy.
I think in the case of iTunes->iPad music copying is allowed by the copyright holder. For instance, you can record yourself and copy the resulting file wherever you want because you own the rights to it. You can also prohibit, restrict and license the right to use and copy it by other people. The difference in the U.S. is that the copyright holder cannot reserve rights that prohibit 'fair use'. What exactly 'fair use' is and how it relates to DRM is another question altogether.
"Empty car" seems to me like it could easily be the first scenario to be routinely automated, on a small scale (very gradually, not "end result")
I meant an end result as far as cars driving through residential areas without a driver. The reason I think the interstates would make a better place to start are mainly due to pedestrians. City and residential streets that have a lot of pedestrians would be a bad place to put automated vehicles first. If only because any mistake there would create a backlash against these vehicles. I just think there will be resistance if you introduce automated vehicles anywhere near where a child might run in front of it. This is much less likely to happen on a freeway.
Lastly in this litigious society who will you sue if an empty car has an accident?
I find this the most interesting. Not the accident part but the empty car. Aside from trucks being able to drive 24 hours without an occupant (or wasted space for one) you could send your own car on errands. All a grocery store has to do is take your order online and put your items your car when it arrives.
Unfortunately I think that will be at the end of automated transportation/distribution. I don't think liability will be much of a problem. Technologically a self driving car could be capable of recording everything about the accident including it's own speed and that of the other car. Existing tools for analyzing a crash after the fact would confirm to some certainty the accuracy of those recordings (in addition to self diagnostics).
Other cars being driven by humans and pedestrians represent the real challenge. In some respects theory is a theory of mind problem. We can tell when another driver is not paying attention, when a random event is going to create a distraction for drivers (e.g. smoke from a fire in the distance, a car on the side of the road) and when we should be more cautious and maybe not pass that guy right now. We see a ball go flying across the road and we know a child may be right behind it.
Because of this I think self-driving cars will have to have their own roads for a while and I think the best way to initiate that would be with the interstate system. Either by delegating existing interstates to self-driving cars of by creating a new one in the same tradition that created the first one. Interstates and many highways have the advantages of consistent speeds, signage, and a lack of pedestrians. Enter a ramp and turn the car over to the computer, exit a ramp and release it back to the driver.
Once a system like this is in use and normal more and more areas near ramps can convert exclusively to automatic cars. As these areas advance, our confidence in the machines will grow until driving ourselves is rare and people getting hurt in car accidents is practically an urban legend.
While a contract can delegate the issue of trust to enforcement by a governing body they have another benefit as well. A contract clearly states what is expected of each party. Friends can often have falling outs when one does work or service for the other and things don't go as anticipated by either party. It's often not a matter of trust but of expectations.
For large corporations contracts and policies are implemented to control expectations. As a result expectations may be clear to the consumer as well (that's another topic). In smaller businesses trust is usually more important and implicit as expectations for every circumstance have not been formally defined.
When dealing with a small business and things go wrong (e.g. supply costs out side of the control of the business) you want to trust the business to do what they can to shoulder the increase. When dealing with a large corporation there is generally the expectation that anything outside of the control of the company will be passed on to you. A small business can better make the decision to take less in profits or even a loss to keep a customer that is loyal. In such a case the business may even need to trust the customer. It is very difficult for a large organization to have any trust built into its structure.
It may just be a matter of the semantic differences between 'trust' and 'broad complex explicit expectations enforceable by law'. How much money you are willing to exchange with another is not just a matter of trust. It becomes a matter of expectations and agreeing to every conceivable outcome before hand.
I originally posted because I 'felt' that there were reasons to trust small business more than large ones. As I've attempted to answer why I've come to the conclusion that it is based on the practicalities of business structure. A small business will tend to rely more on implicit expectations which in turn rely on trust. As a business grows expectations will become more explicit and as a result rely less on trust. In fact many large business explicitly state that they make no implicit agreement (i.e. no expectation of trust).
Is there a reason to trust the little guys any more than the big guys?
I think there is. While it is true that trust can be betrayed by anyone, there are differences between a small organization and a large one (small business vs large corporation). It is generally easier to get access to the owner of a small business as opposed to the CEO of a large corporation. In addition and also related, a large corporation will usually have more layers between the top and bottom strata of their workforce. This very often leaves (upper) management without any concept of a connection to the customer other than as a statistic. Company structure becomes more dependent on rules and less influenced by fairness and trust.
IMHO Big Banks, Big Business, Big Union, Big Government, Big Religion, all have very similar problems. Having too much trust is generally not one of them. They are like an evil patriarch that has hidden all of his wealth, lies on his death bed, and swears that if you don't do everything to keep him alive he will hurt your children.
One of the teams would have to be honest at all in order to be more honest than the other. I did say it sarcastically but I figured at worst it would just be true that they are on par. :) I still stand behind my sarcasm in the second half of my sentence that the actions of one party somehow excuse the actions of the other.
BTW I was looking around on the opensecrets site and found this page of oil and gas contributors. Since the top 100 contributors stop at around $1.5 million I was hoping to find a more complete list. On the page of top overall donors Koch Industries is listed as donating ~$2.8 million mostly to repubs, but on the Oil contributors page it says they gave ~$1.9 million.
I'm not trying to argue for either side here. The money involved in campaign finances is so dirty that it's hard to tell how much is really being passed around and by who. It gets even more complicated when you start to research organizations that have very liberal or conservative slants but don't contribute much directly to campaigns. I don't see the Quantum Endowment Fund or Soros Fund Management listed but I'm pretty sure George Soros's money finds it's way into Democratic hands. Media Matters isn't listed but they surely have financial influence on dems. Newscorp is also missing from the list but Rupert Murdoch's money arguably influences politics as well.
You're absolutely right, union spending is completely on par with corporate spending and completely excuses corporate manipulation.
$mount janis joplin
only root can do that