How many date rapists are high profile and hide out in embassies openly defying the law? Date rape is something that the take fairly seriously in Britain. It's a violent crime from someone accused of two different sexual assaults that refuses to face justice. They certainly aren't spending the money to keep him/in/ the embassy, as they would far rather he come out so that he could answer for the crimes he has been accused of.
As for your 1 in 4 figure, you might want to find a figure that wasn't an urban legend propagated by the NOW.
Because netbooks became uncool, but the market for them didn't go away.
Agreed, and an Android based notebook can be made for netbook based prices. Chromebooks are certainly popular on Amazon, but overall they have only sold about 500,000 units so far. That's actually a pretty small fraction of the market and it doesn't change my argument.
There's still a substantial market for a small, cheap, light laptop that boots fast and lets you browse the web and type the occasional document
I couldn't agree with you more, and I think the market could be better served by letting people use Android and the legacy Market. Right now the market is too fragmented and people are reluctant to dive in as who knows what will be the next on the chopping block.
Think about it, both Palm and Blackberry just died in the market recently and now you have Firefox trying to make an OS as well. If your an average person, do you want to go with the small thing, or the big thing you know works because your phone runs on it?
Why bother making Chromebooks, the market doesn't much seem to care for them. Instead they should be putting Android onto laptops since the market is already very familiar with Android and the marketplace is already well stocked with apps.
The transition from a phone or tablet that runs Android to a laptop that runs Android would be quite minimal. You would be able to continue using very cheap hardware and people wouldn't have to worry about adopting an entire additional OS in their lives. Office applications exist for Android as well as many common applications for any number of purposes.
Google's support for Chrome is puzzling when Android is incredibly entrenched in the market and public conscious. It would also allow Google to concentrate the resource on one Operating System instead of two. When you consider that people are already being forced to learn a new interface with Microsoft's Metro stunt, now is the time to step up to the plate and make Android that interface.
In 1978, Congress amended the Small Business Act to require federal agencies to, among other things, negotiate annually in good faith with the Small Business Administration (SBA) to establish prime and subcontracting goals for these businesses, which include businesses owned and controlled by various minority groups
Small disadvantaged businesses must be owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals--such as African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, Subcontinent Asian Americans, or Native Americans--or by an economically disadvantaged Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization," GAO explained
Accordiong to the GAO, federal law requires that all federal agencies that do contracting must have a special office to reach out to disadvantaged businesses
I wasn't talking about workers, I was referencing the owners of the businesses. That being said the workers are also an issue for anything that deals with the Federal Government. Do you recall on the TSA project, how many of the sites had to stay open for weeks or even months until the quotas were filled?
Frankly I don't quite understand the appeal of the chrome notebook and I've played with a few. Sure, it's different, but so are a hundred different flavors of Linux. Now an Android laptop is something that I think makes a lot of sense as there is an incredible marketplace already in existence for their software.
It would be very easy to transition from an Android phone to an Android laptop for the large number of people that already have Android phones. When you consider the jarring UI change that is being forced by the Metro interface to begin with, why not just go with the much better design of the Android UI?
He's being portrayed in a way he doesn't like by somebody that has an agenda that involves gain on their part by making others look bad. This is happening by using information provided by others and the whole thing is outside of his control. The media is then being involved to make sure that the exploitation is maximized for greatest impact. The bully gets his due and doesn't like the taste of his own medicine and is off to cry to his mommy about how others are treating him.
This couldn't have happened to a more deserving person if they tried. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
In a nutshell at least 5% of a contract must be awarded by quota. It is certainly out in the open, there are entire government programs devoted to helping make sure this happens.
Issues like the serial numbers, tracking and audit requirements are certainly there and add quite a bit to costs.
However you can't discount the requirements for meeting quotas based on racism and sexism as a simple.1% cost increase. Remember the law requires that a certain portion of the work come from companies owned accordingly and requires their selection even if they cost substantially more.
I've worked for companies that fit this category and they gladly exploited their status to charge significantly above the market rate. Some of these companies only do work with government agencies as the contracts are highly profitable and they can't match the profits anywhere else.
This is pure bureaucratic inefficiency work at it's finest. Some examples if this is like a typical Federal contract would include things like:
Changing specs on what your asking for multiple times throughout. You start building to one spec and part way through things change to another spec requiring expensive redesigns. Case studies have been written and college courses taught about the sheer number of design changes on why certain federal programs that have run billions of dollars over.
Too many chiefs calling the shots which requires too many chiefs answering for the shots being called. For political purposes you can have people from any number of agencies and or divisions within an agency all trying to design the thing. Almost none of them have a clue what their doing, but they'll pretend to be a designer just because they can. The resulting quagmire can cause committee upon committee just to get things approved at any given level and in case you missed someone that feels overlooked they can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt just to remind everyone not to overlook their office.
If your the Federal Government your allowed, in fact your - required - to use racism and sexism when bidding things out. Anyone that is involved with government contracts is well aware of this and as a result contractors that meet the discrimination guidelines get selected over those that don't even when they cost significantly more. When your guaranteed to get a job even when your charging more money, do you think someone is going charge the market rate or their chosen rate?
Politics, don't forget about politics as the new administration gets in and typically wants to kills anything that was a signature of the old. If you think life is difficult with inter office politics, imagine having powerful senators and governors doing everything they can to run interference on your project.
This is only a small smidgen of reasons why these things run costs that are sky high as they are and part of the reasons why you see Republicans want to cut government spending. They look at something like this and say, the private sector would do this in a fourth the time for a fourth the cost (not taking sides, just explaining their logic).
I don't understand the logic of people that are surprised by this. The issue is not whether or not it should be legal. If you want to get drug dealing legalized there are legislative processes to do that. People have done exactly this in any number of places with pot in particular. That being said, the fact of the matter is that dealing drugs is illegal and people are acting shocked, surprised and offended that silk road drug dealers are being prosecuted.
If a given thing is illegal offline, why on earth would people think it would somehow become legal because they are doing it online? Are people really so stupid as to think that just because they tried to conceal their crimes that it somehow became legal? Why on earth should anyone be surprised that arrests are being made in countries all over the planet?
Step 1. Make a simple web site where I build the car that I want to buy and tell me what the MSRP should be. If I want the purchase agreement can be signed digitally on the Internet and I all I have to do is go pick it up.
Step 2. Allow me to have dealers in a range I am willing to travel bid on selling me the car I spec out in step 1. Any participating dealer can submit a bid for what they will sell the car for. Once the bid is accepted I sign digitally on the Internet and all I have to do is go pick it up.
The entire point is to allow people to purchase a car and sign the contract without ever interact with a dealer. Importantly by signing the contract over the Internet with GM you don't have to worry about the dealership pulling something once you show up or backing out.
The dealership experience is so bad that most people would rather get a root canal than deal with a salesperson. Allow people to buy a car without worrying about getting ripped off because they are female, black, immigrants or whatever else.
This idea has great merit! You will quickly learn to get your punctuation correct, your grammar will become textbook perfect and sloppy math errors will become a thing of the past. The dog will never again eat your homework, you don't have to worry about the computer crashing before you clicked save and it's going to be really hard for someone to copy your answers in class. Brilliant!
Why are we giving teenagers tablets in school? Unless were replacing all of their textbooks (were not) this is nothing but a feel good program that is going to waste a bunch of money. I say this as someone that has worked at an educational software company and worked at a very large University.
Tablets are nothing more than content consumption devices for 99% of the people that have them (the keyboard was the one thing MS got right with the Surface). They tend to have piss poor enterprise support tools and they can pretty much all be bypassed by doing a factory reset. They are also easy to steal, portable and a financial burden to the staff that must work with them.
Show me a school that can replace all of their textbooks with tablets, saving the absurd costs of textbooks and I will reconsider my opinion. For everyone else they are nothing more than a feel good waste of money. Remember, the point of school is not merely to consume what you are taught, but to create content showing said consumption was successful. Once upon a time we had a special name for this concept - homework.
Well you'd have to start by having the game play heavily edited for political smear purposes if you want it to resemble the collateral murder video. After having your game play taken out of context and having your name smeared on the international news than you'd get to spend the rest of your life defending yourself from people who thought you slaughtered innocent civilians. You do want your game play resembling reality, right?
Citing Wikipedia is never a good idea. Using it for a quick check, okay, relying on it, not so much. The specification was very much developed hand in hand with the content industry as the presentation I linked to shows. Research the history of the working groups and the development of the specification standards and you will find that the content industry has been part of the process from the very beginning. Following the development of DRM is something that I have watched for a couple of decades now and I watched this unfold, it's how I knew the history.
If you read their own slide from their own presentation I linked too you will note references such as "HDCP prevents future recording" "Has support of content providers" "Allows delivery of secure content" as well as logos from major studios. The slide was from the original 0.9 spec of HDMI which was a pre-production version of the specification. The cited presentation was from the very group that created the HDMI standard. There are any number of other citations available on the Internet, I don't know how this can be any more clear.
It was designed by the copyright industry so that they can control everything. It has an encrypted signal.
It really is that simple. The people that would be offering the content designed the spec for the cable and port for the express purpose of restricting and preventing you from freely using it. Instead of bitching about something, research it and look it up. Your hypothesizing if something that was designed by the media cartels and the tech companies for the express purpose of preventing fair use might have been designed for this purpose!
You haven't read the links carefully if you didn't see what I wrote. Take the video for example, in the follow up the woman is very careful to explain that she was beaten for turning down a man instead of being a snitch. The presumption was that anyone being attacked like that must have been a snitch. Luckily the neighborhoods like Oakland are very much the exception, and the vast majority of America is statistically safer than Europe. A few more examples for you to think on:
Seeing a shrink isn't going to help with a cultural issue. The culture that rules these types of neighborhoods celebrates violence, (this is where most US murders come from) and ruthlessly kills anyone that speaks up about a crime they witness. To quote the SFgate article:
Witnesses are cowed into silence because snitches have been known to disappear. Nearly half of all murders in Oakland go uncharged for lack of a willing witness, so a shooter knows he has about a 50-50 chance of getting away with it.
Does someone really think they are going to take a shipping containers worth of terrorist bad stuff and move it to a multimillion dollar turntable to scan it? To quote the original article
"It works as follows: First, the object to be examined is hoisted onto a giant turntable."
Is the technology neat - sure. Is this useful for looking at all kinds of things and showing us engineering data that we other like - sure. Is this really useful to help against smuggling of everything from drugs to humans - sure. However the idea that this going to somehow be trotted out for a terrorism scare is just plain absurd.
Unless your already at the dock this isn't going to do you a lot of good. Any scanner big enough to hoist a shipping container onto it's turntable isn't likely going to be thought of as "portable". This technology would probably pay for itself in terms of man hours saved for custom officials as well as shippers and is probably well worth buying for that reason alone. All that being said, let's stay grounded and keep things firmly rooted in reality, okay?
This is far beyond smoking pot and speeding. This is a culture that actively celebrates murder and beats or kills those that cooperate with the police. You can't fix this by hiring new cops that ignore people smoking pot and breaking the speeding limit. Until you fix the culture Oakland will continue to be a hell hole for the residents that live there.
You have got to work as a Notes admin for a living, know someone that is or have a vapid hatred of every other like kind product. There is no other explanation that I can possibly think of for your calling Lotus Notes "elegant".
As someone that has had to use Lotus Notes off and on for close to two decades I have never heard anyone call it "elegant". For that matter the kindest comment I have ever heard spoken about it that is doesn't spread viruses and I'm including the time I spent working at IBM!
What's the point of this? The local culture isn't going to be changed, and your going to have the same culture clash with the new police department as the old. Cops enforce the law? Residents get pissed about getting arrested. Cops don't enforce the law? Residents get pissed about crime.
This says nothing of the fact that the "new" police would have to work with the "old" police on a daily basis. This is a neighborhood where snitches are murdered and the murder is celebrated. How on earth is a new police department going to fix this?
Your government, your senior management, traffic authority or other institution of choice may all trust IBM, but the average user simply wont. Try to think of a single space in the last decade where IBM has been successful with end users within 10 seconds, can you do it?
This can never compete with Google because the average user is never going to trust IBM. When the average non technical person thinks of IBM the first words that come to mind are probably "outsourcing", "India", "layoff's", "big brother", "big business", "government services" and perhaps desktop and laptops - which they no longer make.
No one is going to trust a company that they associate with mass job loss, traffic tickets and outsourcing of jobs to other countries. The bottom line is that IBM is a brand that is poisonous for marketing to anything other than business or government. If you think people have problems trusting Microsoft or Google, you can only imagine the trust problems that IBM would have with the public at large. People don't trust IBM, they fear IBM.
IBM knows this and IBM is okay with this, because it solidifies their image for business and government sales. IBM won't be bothered in the least by this though, because they will simply license the technology to others or use it in a trade for other patents they need to license. The idea that IBM would start offering these services to the public at large is the most ludicrous idea in tech that I have read about in a very long time.
The thing is they are both right. MIT pursued this entire thing when there was much ado about nothing and they should have asked that the whole thing be dropped. Certainly the prosecutor abused their discretion in pursuing the case as if it was round up of the local mafia.
Should the prosecutor have been fired - certainly. Did MIT Pursue this when they should have let it go - certainly. However, that doesn't change the fact that Swartz was dangerously naive, and I don't think anyone with a clue can honestly dispute that.
This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with spending money. This is a very important distinction as there is an old law that strictly prohibits spending money during a shutdown. If you spend money on something that isn't a critical you risk serious legal consequences. I am not defending the shutdown or either party.
That being said shutdowns do end up costing more money than they save by the time they ramp things back up. Minnesota had a shutdown a while back where the government shut down over a similar stubborn argument. The shutdown ended up costing millions of dollars more than it saved because it caused massive delays in road construction projects and the like. The construction companies (and others) sued for costing them money and the state paid out a hell of a lot of money.
Living in tornado alley I must protest that one does not make a tornado "proof" home, one makes a tornado resistant home. The idea that you can make a home tornado "proof" is greatly misleading and like saying you can make an armored vehicle bomb "proof". You can only make things resistant to a given degree - this in important technicality on a tech site.
Tornadoes are these machinations of nature that are perfectly capable of lifting the foundations of a freeway out of a ground and flinging semi trucks through the air. When the news covers an area that was hit the word used to describe the people that lived is always "survived". Bad headline, bad headline.
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How many date rapists are high profile and hide out in embassies openly defying the law? Date rape is something that the take fairly seriously in Britain. It's a violent crime from someone accused of two different sexual assaults that refuses to face justice. They certainly aren't spending the money to keep him /in/ the embassy, as they would far rather he come out so that he could answer for the crimes he has been accused of.
As for your 1 in 4 figure, you might want to find a figure that wasn't an urban legend propagated by the NOW.
Agreed, and an Android based notebook can be made for netbook based prices. Chromebooks are certainly popular on Amazon, but overall they have only sold about 500,000 units so far. That's actually a pretty small fraction of the market and it doesn't change my argument.
I couldn't agree with you more, and I think the market could be better served by letting people use Android and the legacy Market. Right now the market is too fragmented and people are reluctant to dive in as who knows what will be the next on the chopping block.
Think about it, both Palm and Blackberry just died in the market recently and now you have Firefox trying to make an OS as well. If your an average person, do you want to go with the small thing, or the big thing you know works because your phone runs on it?
Why bother making Chromebooks, the market doesn't much seem to care for them. Instead they should be putting Android onto laptops since the market is already very familiar with Android and the marketplace is already well stocked with apps.
The transition from a phone or tablet that runs Android to a laptop that runs Android would be quite minimal. You would be able to continue using very cheap hardware and people wouldn't have to worry about adopting an entire additional OS in their lives. Office applications exist for Android as well as many common applications for any number of purposes.
Google's support for Chrome is puzzling when Android is incredibly entrenched in the market and public conscious. It would also allow Google to concentrate the resource on one Operating System instead of two. When you consider that people are already being forced to learn a new interface with Microsoft's Metro stunt, now is the time to step up to the plate and make Android that interface.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/audit-35-federal-small-business-contract-dollars-went-minority-owned-firms
I wasn't talking about workers, I was referencing the owners of the businesses. That being said the workers are also an issue for anything that deals with the Federal Government. Do you recall on the TSA project, how many of the sites had to stay open for weeks or even months until the quotas were filled?
Frankly I don't quite understand the appeal of the chrome notebook and I've played with a few. Sure, it's different, but so are a hundred different flavors of Linux. Now an Android laptop is something that I think makes a lot of sense as there is an incredible marketplace already in existence for their software.
It would be very easy to transition from an Android phone to an Android laptop for the large number of people that already have Android phones. When you consider the jarring UI change that is being forced by the Metro interface to begin with, why not just go with the much better design of the Android UI?
He's being portrayed in a way he doesn't like by somebody that has an agenda that involves gain on their part by making others look bad. This is happening by using information provided by others and the whole thing is outside of his control. The media is then being involved to make sure that the exploitation is maximized for greatest impact. The bully gets his due and doesn't like the taste of his own medicine and is off to cry to his mommy about how others are treating him.
This couldn't have happened to a more deserving person if they tried. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/13123-gao-35-of-federal-contract-dollars-went-to-minority-owned-businesses
http://www.fedmarket.com/contractors/Minority%252dOwned-Business-Contracting
http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/186661
In a nutshell at least 5% of a contract must be awarded by quota. It is certainly out in the open, there are entire government programs devoted to helping make sure this happens.
Issues like the serial numbers, tracking and audit requirements are certainly there and add quite a bit to costs.
However you can't discount the requirements for meeting quotas based on racism and sexism as a simple .1% cost increase. Remember the law requires that a certain portion of the work come from companies owned accordingly and requires their selection even if they cost substantially more.
I've worked for companies that fit this category and they gladly exploited their status to charge significantly above the market rate. Some of these companies only do work with government agencies as the contracts are highly profitable and they can't match the profits anywhere else.
This is pure bureaucratic inefficiency work at it's finest. Some examples if this is like a typical Federal contract would include things like:
Changing specs on what your asking for multiple times throughout. You start building to one spec and part way through things change to another spec requiring expensive redesigns. Case studies have been written and college courses taught about the sheer number of design changes on why certain federal programs that have run billions of dollars over.
Too many chiefs calling the shots which requires too many chiefs answering for the shots being called. For political purposes you can have people from any number of agencies and or divisions within an agency all trying to design the thing. Almost none of them have a clue what their doing, but they'll pretend to be a designer just because they can. The resulting quagmire can cause committee upon committee just to get things approved at any given level and in case you missed someone that feels overlooked they can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt just to remind everyone not to overlook their office.
If your the Federal Government your allowed, in fact your - required - to use racism and sexism when bidding things out. Anyone that is involved with government contracts is well aware of this and as a result contractors that meet the discrimination guidelines get selected over those that don't even when they cost significantly more. When your guaranteed to get a job even when your charging more money, do you think someone is going charge the market rate or their chosen rate?
Politics, don't forget about politics as the new administration gets in and typically wants to kills anything that was a signature of the old. If you think life is difficult with inter office politics, imagine having powerful senators and governors doing everything they can to run interference on your project.
This is only a small smidgen of reasons why these things run costs that are sky high as they are and part of the reasons why you see Republicans want to cut government spending. They look at something like this and say, the private sector would do this in a fourth the time for a fourth the cost (not taking sides, just explaining their logic).
I don't understand the logic of people that are surprised by this. The issue is not whether or not it should be legal. If you want to get drug dealing legalized there are legislative processes to do that. People have done exactly this in any number of places with pot in particular. That being said, the fact of the matter is that dealing drugs is illegal and people are acting shocked, surprised and offended that silk road drug dealers are being prosecuted.
If a given thing is illegal offline, why on earth would people think it would somehow become legal because they are doing it online? Are people really so stupid as to think that just because they tried to conceal their crimes that it somehow became legal? Why on earth should anyone be surprised that arrests are being made in countries all over the planet?
Step 1.
Make a simple web site where I build the car that I want to buy and tell me what the MSRP should be. If I want the purchase agreement can be signed digitally on the Internet and I all I have to do is go pick it up.
Step 2.
Allow me to have dealers in a range I am willing to travel bid on selling me the car I spec out in step 1. Any participating dealer can submit a bid for what they will sell the car for. Once the bid is accepted I sign digitally on the Internet and all I have to do is go pick it up.
The entire point is to allow people to purchase a car and sign the contract without ever interact with a dealer. Importantly by signing the contract over the Internet with GM you don't have to worry about the dealership pulling something once you show up or backing out.
The dealership experience is so bad that most people would rather get a root canal than deal with a salesperson. Allow people to buy a car without worrying about getting ripped off because they are female, black, immigrants or whatever else.
This idea has great merit! You will quickly learn to get your punctuation correct, your grammar will become textbook perfect and sloppy math errors will become a thing of the past. The dog will never again eat your homework, you don't have to worry about the computer crashing before you clicked save and it's going to be really hard for someone to copy your answers in class. Brilliant!
Why are we giving teenagers tablets in school? Unless were replacing all of their textbooks (were not) this is nothing but a feel good program that is going to waste a bunch of money. I say this as someone that has worked at an educational software company and worked at a very large University.
Tablets are nothing more than content consumption devices for 99% of the people that have them (the keyboard was the one thing MS got right with the Surface). They tend to have piss poor enterprise support tools and they can pretty much all be bypassed by doing a factory reset. They are also easy to steal, portable and a financial burden to the staff that must work with them.
Show me a school that can replace all of their textbooks with tablets, saving the absurd costs of textbooks and I will reconsider my opinion. For everyone else they are nothing more than a feel good waste of money. Remember, the point of school is not merely to consume what you are taught, but to create content showing said consumption was successful. Once upon a time we had a special name for this concept - homework.
Well you'd have to start by having the game play heavily edited for political smear purposes if you want it to resemble the collateral murder video. After having your game play taken out of context and having your name smeared on the international news than you'd get to spend the rest of your life defending yourself from people who thought you slaughtered innocent civilians. You do want your game play resembling reality, right?
Citing Wikipedia is never a good idea. Using it for a quick check, okay, relying on it, not so much. The specification was very much developed hand in hand with the content industry as the presentation I linked to shows. Research the history of the working groups and the development of the specification standards and you will find that the content industry has been part of the process from the very beginning. Following the development of DRM is something that I have watched for a couple of decades now and I watched this unfold, it's how I knew the history.
If you read their own slide from their own presentation I linked too you will note references such as "HDCP prevents future recording" "Has support of content providers" "Allows delivery of secure content" as well as logos from major studios. The slide was from the original 0.9 spec of HDMI which was a pre-production version of the specification. The cited presentation was from the very group that created the HDMI standard. There are any number of other citations available on the Internet, I don't know how this can be any more clear.
Let's correct what you wrote -
It was designed by the copyright industry so that they can control everything. It has an encrypted signal.
It really is that simple. The people that would be offering the content designed the spec for the cable and port for the express purpose of restricting and preventing you from freely using it. Instead of bitching about something, research it and look it up. Your hypothesizing if something that was designed by the media cartels and the tech companies for the express purpose of preventing fair use might have been designed for this purpose!
You haven't read the links carefully if you didn't see what I wrote. Take the video for example, in the follow up the woman is very careful to explain that she was beaten for turning down a man instead of being a snitch. The presumption was that anyone being attacked like that must have been a snitch. Luckily the neighborhoods like Oakland are very much the exception, and the vast majority of America is statistically safer than Europe. A few more examples for you to think on:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fuck-the-police
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Many-young-black-men-in-Oakland-are-killing-and-3299781.php
Seeing a shrink isn't going to help with a cultural issue. The culture that rules these types of neighborhoods celebrates violence, (this is where most US murders come from) and ruthlessly kills anyone that speaks up about a crime they witness. To quote the SFgate article:
Does someone really think they are going to take a shipping containers worth of terrorist bad stuff and move it to a multimillion dollar turntable to scan it? To quote the original article
"It works as follows: First, the object to be examined is hoisted onto a giant turntable."
Is the technology neat - sure. Is this useful for looking at all kinds of things and showing us engineering data that we other like - sure. Is this really useful to help against smuggling of everything from drugs to humans - sure. However the idea that this going to somehow be trotted out for a terrorism scare is just plain absurd.
Unless your already at the dock this isn't going to do you a lot of good. Any scanner big enough to hoist a shipping container onto it's turntable isn't likely going to be thought of as "portable". This technology would probably pay for itself in terms of man hours saved for custom officials as well as shippers and is probably well worth buying for that reason alone. All that being said, let's stay grounded and keep things firmly rooted in reality, okay?
Donuts and a radar gun? Have you ever been to Oakland? Fix this:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_22622926/an-oakland-murder-trial-against-teenager-that-sadly
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_23890186/oakland-12-people-shot-less-than-24-hours
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d6b_1364321154&comments=1
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0708a/copyright/snitch.html
http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Oakland-snitch-killing-brings-65-to-life-term-2414713.php
This is far beyond smoking pot and speeding. This is a culture that actively celebrates murder and beats or kills those that cooperate with the police. You can't fix this by hiring new cops that ignore people smoking pot and breaking the speeding limit. Until you fix the culture Oakland will continue to be a hell hole for the residents that live there.
You have got to work as a Notes admin for a living, know someone that is or have a vapid hatred of every other like kind product. There is no other explanation that I can possibly think of for your calling Lotus Notes "elegant".
As someone that has had to use Lotus Notes off and on for close to two decades I have never heard anyone call it "elegant". For that matter the kindest comment I have ever heard spoken about it that is doesn't spread viruses and I'm including the time I spent working at IBM!
What's the point of this? The local culture isn't going to be changed, and your going to have the same culture clash with the new police department as the old. Cops enforce the law? Residents get pissed about getting arrested. Cops don't enforce the law? Residents get pissed about crime.
This says nothing of the fact that the "new" police would have to work with the "old" police on a daily basis. This is a neighborhood where snitches are murdered and the murder is celebrated. How on earth is a new police department going to fix this?
Your government, your senior management, traffic authority or other institution of choice may all trust IBM, but the average user simply wont. Try to think of a single space in the last decade where IBM has been successful with end users within 10 seconds, can you do it?
This can never compete with Google because the average user is never going to trust IBM. When the average non technical person thinks of IBM the first words that come to mind are probably "outsourcing", "India", "layoff's", "big brother", "big business", "government services" and perhaps desktop and laptops - which they no longer make.
No one is going to trust a company that they associate with mass job loss, traffic tickets and outsourcing of jobs to other countries. The bottom line is that IBM is a brand that is poisonous for marketing to anything other than business or government. If you think people have problems trusting Microsoft or Google, you can only imagine the trust problems that IBM would have with the public at large. People don't trust IBM, they fear IBM.
IBM knows this and IBM is okay with this, because it solidifies their image for business and government sales. IBM won't be bothered in the least by this though, because they will simply license the technology to others or use it in a trade for other patents they need to license. The idea that IBM would start offering these services to the public at large is the most ludicrous idea in tech that I have read about in a very long time.
The thing is they are both right. MIT pursued this entire thing when there was much ado about nothing and they should have asked that the whole thing be dropped. Certainly the prosecutor abused their discretion in pursuing the case as if it was round up of the local mafia.
Should the prosecutor have been fired - certainly. Did MIT Pursue this when they should have let it go - certainly. However, that doesn't change the fact that Swartz was dangerously naive, and I don't think anyone with a clue can honestly dispute that.
This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with spending money. This is a very important distinction as there is an old law that strictly prohibits spending money during a shutdown. If you spend money on something that isn't a critical you risk serious legal consequences. I am not defending the shutdown or either party.
That being said shutdowns do end up costing more money than they save by the time they ramp things back up. Minnesota had a shutdown a while back where the government shut down over a similar stubborn argument. The shutdown ended up costing millions of dollars more than it saved because it caused massive delays in road construction projects and the like. The construction companies (and others) sued for costing them money and the state paid out a hell of a lot of money.
Living in tornado alley I must protest that one does not make a tornado "proof" home, one makes a tornado resistant home. The idea that you can make a home tornado "proof" is greatly misleading and like saying you can make an armored vehicle bomb "proof". You can only make things resistant to a given degree - this in important technicality on a tech site.
Tornadoes are these machinations of nature that are perfectly capable of lifting the foundations of a freeway out of a ground and flinging semi trucks through the air. When the news covers an area that was hit the word used to describe the people that lived is always "survived". Bad headline, bad headline.