There are more sophisticated variations(assorted microdots and customized taggant DNA sequences and other such stuff); but the DIY suggestion is to pick up some of the 'glitter' nail polish with little shiny bits floating in it.
Apply a glob of that to whatever you want to be tamper evident, photograph from several angles(ideally with and without flash/direct illumination). Trivial enough to break through; but duplicating the distribution and orientation of little flakes of glitter suspended in transparent lacquer is...less than entirely trivial...and you have to get it right or the pattern of reflective and non-reflective areas at various angles will be notably different.
Given that the TSA could probably open your bag and defecate in it and you'd get nothing but, possibly, a form-letter apology after six months of wrangling it isn't clear that it's worth the trouble; but you'd have to annoy some moderately serious spooks for such a mechanism to be cloned after opening your luggage.
This is obviously overkill for most purposes; but they make neat serialized and tamper-evident zip ties for this purpose that are designed to be both difficult to remove without obvious damage and impossible to replace with off-the-shelf equivalents.
It's no surprise that the TSA's physical security is utter shit(gee, hire a bunch of the cheapest flunkies who can pass a perfunctory background check to do thankless shit work for not much money; sounds like the recipe for ironclad loyalty to me!); but I'd actually be curious to know, if anyone here understands keys and bitting codes more deeply than I do:
The TSA joke-locks are sold openly to the public, so you can obtain as many samples of individual key/lock pairs as you wish(limited by cost, of course). We know that the locks can all be opened by the TSA's master key(or keys, though probably a fairly limited number or lookup times would be prohibitive).
In principle, how resistant can such a system be to inferential attacks based entirely on purchased key/lock pairs? Naively, I'd expect that (at least for cheap tumbler locks, the requirement for mass production at an attractive price point prevents us from getting too fancy) an inferential attack mounted purely from legitimately purchased keys and locks would be more or less impossible to resist even with a modest number of samples in the hands of an attacker.
Is this in fact the case, or are there practical master-keyed systems that are largely resilient to attacks that make use of samples of locks and non-master keys?
This seems like the sort of trick that would be much more tractable(if easy to screw up in subtle ways) with crypto, where you can add intricate wheels within wheels for the cost of just a little extra math, rather than a lot of additional fine tolerance machining; but I'm no locksmith.
That was a GNU/Richard Stallman reference. Allegedly, being dicked around by the vendor of the fancy new laser printer with the magic binary driver that he wasn't allowed to fix helped inspire him to recognize the importance of software freedom.
Unfortunately, these days it'd be a fancy new laser printer with a binary driver, a EULA forbidding everything including running 'strings' against it, and a vendor hellbent on asserting that copyright, patent, or both, rights allow them eternal control over what consumables the device will deign to interact with(*cough* Lexmark *cough*). I don't know if that origin story is true or not; but it is practically edenic by comparison to the current situation.
The one thing saving the TV/monitor aftermarket is all the klutzes who manage to do something visibly terminal to the display panel while leaving the assorted support boards intact.
If you have to depend on the aftermarket, it pays to have a different failure than the majority of owners.
I'm a trifle surprised that(at least to my knowledge) the demand from restrictive workplaces and paranoids unwilling to give up their toys hasn't spawned an aftermarket in adding nice, tactile, physical hard-off switches to phones with integrated batteries, perhaps also with the option of drilling just far enough in to defang the camera without terminating the motherboard.
Both modifications are conceptually trivial; but the sort of thing that would look like a mess of dremel hackwork and uneven epoxy work without a bit of practice and some care.
What always amazes me is the simultaneous existence(sometimes in the same person) of a paranoid fear of low-intensity non ionizing radiation, especially if emitted by devices with blinky lights; and a conviction that giving yourself radiation burns until the skin initiates a crash program of defensive melanization is 'healthy'.
Pre-'smartphone' the US market was dominated by whatever cheap crap the carriers could get stamped out for them at lowest possible cost, typically with their specially en-worsened firmware flashed onto it. They wanted something that could be sold as 'free with contract' at lowest possible cost, and there just wasn't much incentive to attempt to use handsets as a differentiatior because all the carriers had access to basically the same OEMs, and consumer expectations were low.
Once smartphones hit, with Apple's AT&T exclusive showing the value of a proper 'flagship' device, and the prospect of getting a customer onto a data plan being very, very, compelling; the enthusiasm of carriers for dumbphones dropped substantially; but they still had exactly the same 'we need an endurable handset as cheap as possible for customers who don't otherwise care' incentive. Since they really want you to walk out with a data plan, they've shifted focus to the low-end Androids and iPhone 5c(if the customer insists), rather than the developing-world-special $20 phones; but they still want to pay as little as possible for those basic shelf-stuffer phones.
Plus, as with computers, the usability of the cheap seats has gotten surprisingly adequate. Still not as good as the ones that cost 2-6 times as much; but it is certainly no longer the case than anything under $200 refutes a loving god if you try to use it.
I don't mean to suggest that "anything goes" will become the motto of software testing(at least not more than it is today); but unless all the neural networks deliver extraordinarily erratic behavior despite all effort to the contrary, I agree that it will be a difference of degree(we will test them a lot more rigorously than humans); but not of kind(humans also experience 'edge case' behavior, whether it be an aneurysm hitting them at the hardware level, a psychotic break, a murder-suicide, some ill-conceived plan that involves plowing into a group of pedestrians, whatever).
We have less historical familiarity with these hypothetical computer systems, so we'll want to test them more carefully; but unless something makes them fundamentally more unknowable and unpredictable than people, my suspicion is that we'll decide to put up with some uncertainty if the alternative is not getting to use the new toys. We don't(and rightly so) put up with uncertainty in life critical systems merely because we want to save a few bucks or shave a few months off development; but if the only entrants are big, hairy, not-really-comprehensible designs that isn't the choice. It will be "you can have this now, or you can hope that we actually understand the problem at a much deeper level within not more than a few generations." There will be grumbling; but unless a real breakthrough allows us to have our toys and understand them, we'll opt for the toys.
Presumably depends on the location: major population centers or noted transplant hospitals can probably get the runner-up in pretty quickly(if they aren't already hospitalized because of the effects of needing a lung, there's nothing like the prospect of horrible death to get somebody moving); and presumably the ethics of not providing the original first-in-line with an organ that will kill him and giving it to #2 instead are pretty straightforward.
If the donor hits a tree and suffers massive head trauma out in some rural area, logistics may become considerably more challenging. Even for effectively unlimited money you can only get transport lined up so fast.
My (layman's) understanding is that viability is a factor of interaction between the recipient and the donor organ, not merely a function of the donor, so would be tricky to label ahead of time.
For grafts where they have the luxury of (relatively) large amounts of time, and a non-fatal donation process(like bone marrow), they will screen for recipient/donor suitability ahead of time; but for donor organs where the donor is supposed to die first, time is very, very, limited and supplies are extremely tight. Much harder to preemptively do any substantial testing and a much greater incentive to shovel the organs into someone before they expire, since odds are good that that person won't get a second chance.
That's why this high speed method is so valuable: since the organs are so scarce, you don't want to waste one if it will just kill the patient anyway; but the clock is ticking from the time the organ becomes available until it becomes nothing but meaty medical waste.
For security purposes, it's not unreasonable to suggest that Mr. Big Picture Strategy Guy not be given read/write access to everything he is expected to be planning; that makes his credentials unbelievably valuable to an attacker and if he is in the position of needing to twiddle individual configurations all the time the organization hasn't actually made him the Big Picture Strategy Guy; but widespread read access would be a much harder request to reasonably deny: Anyone who is supposed to be strategizing needs to be able to see the world; and forcing him to wait 48 hours and work from a secondhand report compiled by minions every time he has a question about what the world looks like now is going to waste a lot of everybody's time.
Unless his mandate is strictly "Design us a new system so we can forklift upgrade this whole goddamn place!"(which would be deeply satisfying; but legacy infrastructure never dies that easily); expecting him to work in a black box is unrealistic; but he doesn't necessarily need(or even want to be stuck with) the ability to actually commit his proposed changes to every last widget out there.
Well, I think that the standards for driving tests could use some modification; but I was actually aiming at exactly the opposite point: There isn't any particular reason to believe that we need to, or will, demand that machines that control vehicles be submitted to some sort of profound understanding and formal verification, given that we accept black-box testing(and pretty shoddy testing at that) for human operators.
The initial,lobbying might be a fairly ghastly pain; but I see no reason why there would be any long-term resistance to complex systems(neural network or otherwise) that are effectively beyond human understanding; so long as they pass black box tests of their abilities. I say this both because that's what we do when dealing with people; and because, in practice, even today's tech is complex enough that effectively nobody outside of very specialized software dev and test outfits knows what the hell is going on; and people basically accept that, because the alternative involves being restricted to radically simpler technology or radically more expensive tech support.
I certainly wouldn't want to be the one leading the charge to get this approved; but we currently let neural networks drive cars after a relatively pitiful 'black box' verification where we subject them to maybe 30 minutes, 45 at most, of approximately real-world stimuli and then evaluate their responses.
This arrangement does end up with ~30,000 fatalities a year; but seems to enjoy broad support.
Aside from the question(which is important; but not directly relevant to this post) of whether or not the pre-feminist situation was ethically tenable; I think that there are some complications that your description of the economic situation doesn't include.
Female labor force participation has never actually been particularly minimal: women(and children) were a staple of factor workforces from the start of the industrial revolution; and the 'piecework' and 'putting-out' distributed domestic production of various goods were also heavily dependent on women and children. Plus the effect of domestic labor that isn't counted as labor market participation; but which effectively replaces demand for some goods and services that would otherwise be produced by people in the labor market(if mom is cooking and mending at home, your consumption of new clothes and restaurant-prepared food is going to be more limited, as likely will be your demand for housecleaning services and the like).
It is true that women's labor market participation was often more tenuous and less protected('maternity leave' tended to be you getting fired); but between young women newly entering the labor market and mothers of older children re-entering it(sometimes with those children) it was still quite substantial. The single-income household(especially as a blue-collar phenomenon) was only ever on the table because of the period of relative strength enjoyed by organized labor(which was instrumental in raising the earning potential of male blue collar workers) and 'Progressive' reformers pushing against child labor, for mandatory universal education, and against the neglect of children whose parents had to go back to work while they were still very young.
Absent those changes, factory work would likely still be a family affair, as it definitely was earlier in its development; and single-income households would really only be even an option for the relatively wealthy and skilled and/or educated.
As for the annihilation of the blue-collar sole breadwinner; it is undeniable that it has occurred. However, it's worth looking at whether those jobs/wage levels were lost because of increased availability of female workers; or whether the causes were elsewhere and the increased female workforce participation was a compensatory measure to attempt to salvage overall household income: I'm open to discussion on the matter; but I'm inclined to go with the latter. Think of the sectors where the relatively high paying, largely male, blue collar work used to be. Did those sectors see a pattern of increased hiring of women and wages sliding with increased supply; or did they mostly just disappear with offshoring and outsourcing, or face substantial declines in real wage as the power of labor unions has withered?
Among poor and unskilled workers, the big shift hasn't been Rosie the riveter stealing your factory job, it has been the fact that (mostly lousy) 'pink collar' retail and service industry jobs can't really be offshored, while historically desirable blue-collar sectors have just been gutted. It's actually among the comparatively wealthy and well educated where women's employment gains have occurred through actually getting jobs in historically male fields; and those are the people who are more likely to see marriage and family formation as desirable(though likely to defer it because getting 'a good education' is a process that sure isn't getting any shorter).
It is one of the possible solvents for the serial dilution and 'succussion' thing that homeopaths do to produce their quack juice. Not as common as water; but it is an option that counts as 'homeopathic' if prepared according to the rest of the procedures.
Solubility doesn't matter much by the time you get to the end product, since basically anything is soluble enough in anything for concentrations in the 'modest probability that a single atom is present' range; but for the original solution and the first few dilutions, some materials just don't dissolve in water very well; but do nicely in alcohol.
Unless the sensor can only be fabricated in flat sheets, they could really have a winner for bringing high resolution pressure sensitivity to the teledildonics market. Not that they'd necessarily trumpet that fact on their main page.
This could have just been device immaturity; but I played with one of those 'laser keyboard' gizmos back when they came out and, while this sensor would presumably help solve the fact that keypress registration was iffy and tactile feedback was utterly hopeless; it isn't in a position to deal with the fact that the laser overlay effect itself was(once you got past the OMG I Live In The Sci-Fi Future Now! effect) kind of lousy. Your hands cast shadows during use, and the keys being shadowed were projected distractingly all over your fingers, while the laser lines were a bit dim for bright light; but somewhat uncomfortable to look at in dim conditions, and you did a fair amount of looking because touch typing was not happening.
The cool factor was high; but the experience was fairly unpleasant.
I agree(from my Model M) that you should never send some 'touch' nonsense to do a proper buckling spring keyswitch's job; but the technology behind this product actually sounds extraordinarily impressive, just not suited for beating keyswitches at what keyswitches do best.
Resistive sensors are not new; but have traditionally suffered from tepid pressure-level sensitivity, a very limited number of simultaneous touch points(the basic 'grid layout' ones often just register two touches as a single touch somewhere between those two points); and the ones that are actually good have been comparatively expensive and large enough to be packaged as discrete parts.
These guys claim that they can get 20,000 pressure sensors of adequate quality crammed into a small enough surface to provide comprehensive coverage, and cheaply enough that you'll be able to get one for $200. If that is so, they have a very, very, interesting entrant into the existing market for strain gauges, force sensitive resistors, and the like; with markedly higher resolution and comparatively low cost. Robotics will be all over this one.
I'd be fascinated to know, though I admit that I'm not sure how you would disentangle this, how much of the success of this approach has to do with any particular twist on how the education is done(the introduction of the college classes option earlier in HS, curriculum restructuring and shuffling, etc.); vs. how much has to do with the fact that the corporate sponsor is(through the internships and preferential hiring) making the connection between achievement in school and tangible payoff particularly strong and evident.
I'd certainly be the first to agree that many kids are dumb, impulsive, and shortsighted(some grow out of it, some turn into adults with the same traits); and that some schools are just atrocious. However, while slavishly adhering to the 'rational actor' model can lead to absurd excesses best left to economists; it can sometimes be helpful to imagine, at least as test, that people might actually be behaving "rationally", at least in a local sense.
Thinking back on my own education, some of it was undeniably useful for basically anyone(literacy and basic mathematics), some of it was of no direct use but almost certainly good for the mind in ways that are broadly applicable(writing essays about works of literature or classical greek political events isn't terribly relevant; but knowing your way around a coherent thesis backed by a reasonably competent body of argument and evidence sure is handy); and some of it was probably included for reasons little better than 'because tradition'. However, my surroundings always made it abundantly clear that (in addition to being a social expectation) education had rewards. My parents had degrees and jobs that were only possible because of their education; our neighbors and family friends were almost entirely the same way, we watched older kids head off to college, to internships, to various jobs; even if some dickhead still asked "When are we ever going to need this?" during some aspect of calculus that annoyed him, nobody was in any serious doubt that, even if you thought that some of it was just hoop-jumping, education was obviously valuable.
Had I grown up in a worse environment, gone to lousier schools, I would have likely enjoyed worse teachers and facilities; but I also would have been substantially ignorant of, or unbelieving of, the value of education: both because a diploma from the local high school probably isn't all that valuable; and because I'd have relatively few references for people who had done the work and gone on to some sort of professional career thanks to that. Maybe my sheer virtuous love of learning or whatever would have seen me through; but I certainly wouldn't put too much faith in the possibility.
In this case, IBM is making it quite clear that "Do this schoolwork for 4-6 years, depending, and you will see internships and quite possibly a job offer". That's relatively concrete, relatively short-term, easy to understand. To the degree that students are rational actors, that would seem to be a pretty big difference between this program and a school where the payoff is less visible or simply not there.
While moral perceptions have (some) influence on people's behavior, it's important to remember that stable family formation has economic and social requirements; as well as behavioral/moral ones.
You can certainly run a relationship into the rocks, or never form one, for moral/behavioral reasons; but in order to have a successful family unit, especially over a time frame long enough to be relevant to childrearing outcomes, you usually have to meet some other requirements:
The labor market is a major factor: even among all the middle class professionals in the suburbs who expect their kids to go off to college as a matter of routine and presume that they will get married, we saw at least a delay(if not ultimately a disruption) of family formation during our recent economic downturn as all those un or underemployed kids came home because they couldn't find a job and afford a house or apartment. There are societies where multigenerational extended families have routinely lived in the same house; but ours isn't really one of them, so people who still live with mom and dad are less likely to be getting married or raising children, regardless of whether their moral preferences push them toward a steady monogamous relationship or a wild series of dubiously advised drunken hookups.
You also need spousal availability: If (as is the case among the poor, particularly the poor and black) you have a high incarceration rate; you have a substantial shortage of potential husbands. They are either actually in jail and unavailable, or carry the stigma, reduced earning potential, and logistical complications of a criminal record and possibly a set of parole conditions they have to adhere to. Even among those on the legal straight-and-narrow, the supply of blue-collar breadwinners has been pretty brutalized by the decline in manufacturing. If you are a traditionalist, that makes these men fairly poor 'man of the house' material. Even if you are not, somebody needs to pay the bills, and low-skill women may have more options in 'pink collar' and service sector jobs; but generally not ones that pay well enough to support a family without equal or greater income on the spouse's side as well.
Among the middle class and above, this has caused substantial delays in family formation(people basically don't start until they've both graduated from college and landed some sort of job); but in populations where earning potential starts lousy and stays lousy even deferral is less likely.
Then there is the possibility of 'feedback' effects on 'moral' or social norms: The acceptability of premarital sex, say, is a 'social'/'moral' question; but it is going to reflect the (economically determined) gap between age of something resembling sexual maturity and age of achieving the means necessary for household formation. If you can get a job out of high school that makes having a family a realistic option, a 'no sex before marriage' rule is (relatively) easy to maintain; little more than 'please try not to do anything too stupid in your early teens...' If you either cannot expect to ever afford family formation; or will need to finish your master's degree before you do so; that's a whole different demand. Moralists can moralize; but expecting people who can afford family formation at 25-30 to be as abstemious as those who can afford family formation at 16-20...just not realistic.
I'm certainly not one to ignore the influence of culture; but you can't ever take your eyes off the economic situation, especially when the moral questions you are considering involve some fairly expensive life choices(it may be a net benefit; but family formation is not cheap).
Your point is an important one: in law, public schools are required to do whatever is necessary; but that certainly doesn't stop them from imposing a variety of procedural hurdles, attempting to pass off inadequate measures as being suitable, or just plain stalling. This is theoretically legally risky; but it's not as though there are any regulatory bodies with the time and interest to proactively hunt misconduct, so it's pretty much a question of how forceful the parents are. The ability of the district to demand some level of evidence is hardly unreasonable; but there are certainly ways to...creatively extend...the IEP process that are just plain cold-blooded.
Some school districts are definitely better than others, and some people within a given school district are more sympathetic than others; but especially if the accommodation required is an expensive one, there is an institutional incentive to try to avoid it.
My focus was purely on the difference in legal obligation between a private institution that is merely required to not violate any specific laws about discrimination; and a public one which is required to accommodate all in-district students; so I did not mention how it plays out in practice; but what you say is true. There is a difference, and sometimes a large and appallingly bad-faith one, between having a legal obligation and upholding it.
This case is pretty unsympathetic, given its severely dubious medical basis and the large impact it would have on other students(though I do feel bad for the kid; his problem is unlikely to be RF related; but it probably isn't nonexistent, whatever it is); but that doesn't in any way imply that much stronger cases necessarily receive fair treatment.
It's the harsh, unnatural, digital modulation that causes the trouble. Good old analog transmitters, carrying Human voices, are naturally in sympathetic harmony with the body's own vital energy; and promote wellness.
Once arrogant technocrats imposed a 'binary' worldview that rejects the wholistic wisdom of the body, the transmissions became intensely disruptive to our health, and corrosive to the spirit.
Sorry kid, 'remove the stupid people' is not a 'reasonable accommodation'; and would definitely impose undue hardship on us. No ADA-mandated action for you.
About the nicest thing you can say is that cancer patients probably should drink water; and have good reasons to drink alcohol, so some homeopathic 'remedies' may accidentally be useful...
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There are more sophisticated variations(assorted microdots and customized taggant DNA sequences and other such stuff); but the DIY suggestion is to pick up some of the 'glitter' nail polish with little shiny bits floating in it.
Apply a glob of that to whatever you want to be tamper evident, photograph from several angles(ideally with and without flash/direct illumination). Trivial enough to break through; but duplicating the distribution and orientation of little flakes of glitter suspended in transparent lacquer is...less than entirely trivial...and you have to get it right or the pattern of reflective and non-reflective areas at various angles will be notably different.
Given that the TSA could probably open your bag and defecate in it and you'd get nothing but, possibly, a form-letter apology after six months of wrangling it isn't clear that it's worth the trouble; but you'd have to annoy some moderately serious spooks for such a mechanism to be cloned after opening your luggage.
This is obviously overkill for most purposes; but they make neat serialized and tamper-evident zip ties for this purpose that are designed to be both difficult to remove without obvious damage and impossible to replace with off-the-shelf equivalents.
It's no surprise that the TSA's physical security is utter shit(gee, hire a bunch of the cheapest flunkies who can pass a perfunctory background check to do thankless shit work for not much money; sounds like the recipe for ironclad loyalty to me!); but I'd actually be curious to know, if anyone here understands keys and bitting codes more deeply than I do:
The TSA joke-locks are sold openly to the public, so you can obtain as many samples of individual key/lock pairs as you wish(limited by cost, of course). We know that the locks can all be opened by the TSA's master key(or keys, though probably a fairly limited number or lookup times would be prohibitive).
In principle, how resistant can such a system be to inferential attacks based entirely on purchased key/lock pairs? Naively, I'd expect that (at least for cheap tumbler locks, the requirement for mass production at an attractive price point prevents us from getting too fancy) an inferential attack mounted purely from legitimately purchased keys and locks would be more or less impossible to resist even with a modest number of samples in the hands of an attacker.
Is this in fact the case, or are there practical master-keyed systems that are largely resilient to attacks that make use of samples of locks and non-master keys?
This seems like the sort of trick that would be much more tractable(if easy to screw up in subtle ways) with crypto, where you can add intricate wheels within wheels for the cost of just a little extra math, rather than a lot of additional fine tolerance machining; but I'm no locksmith.
That was a GNU/Richard Stallman reference. Allegedly, being dicked around by the vendor of the fancy new laser printer with the magic binary driver that he wasn't allowed to fix helped inspire him to recognize the importance of software freedom.
Unfortunately, these days it'd be a fancy new laser printer with a binary driver, a EULA forbidding everything including running 'strings' against it, and a vendor hellbent on asserting that copyright, patent, or both, rights allow them eternal control over what consumables the device will deign to interact with(*cough* Lexmark *cough*). I don't know if that origin story is true or not; but it is practically edenic by comparison to the current situation.
The one thing saving the TV/monitor aftermarket is all the klutzes who manage to do something visibly terminal to the display panel while leaving the assorted support boards intact.
If you have to depend on the aftermarket, it pays to have a different failure than the majority of owners.
I'm a trifle surprised that(at least to my knowledge) the demand from restrictive workplaces and paranoids unwilling to give up their toys hasn't spawned an aftermarket in adding nice, tactile, physical hard-off switches to phones with integrated batteries, perhaps also with the option of drilling just far enough in to defang the camera without terminating the motherboard.
Both modifications are conceptually trivial; but the sort of thing that would look like a mess of dremel hackwork and uneven epoxy work without a bit of practice and some care.
What always amazes me is the simultaneous existence(sometimes in the same person) of a paranoid fear of low-intensity non ionizing radiation, especially if emitted by devices with blinky lights; and a conviction that giving yourself radiation burns until the skin initiates a crash program of defensive melanization is 'healthy'.
Pre-'smartphone' the US market was dominated by whatever cheap crap the carriers could get stamped out for them at lowest possible cost, typically with their specially en-worsened firmware flashed onto it. They wanted something that could be sold as 'free with contract' at lowest possible cost, and there just wasn't much incentive to attempt to use handsets as a differentiatior because all the carriers had access to basically the same OEMs, and consumer expectations were low.
Once smartphones hit, with Apple's AT&T exclusive showing the value of a proper 'flagship' device, and the prospect of getting a customer onto a data plan being very, very, compelling; the enthusiasm of carriers for dumbphones dropped substantially; but they still had exactly the same 'we need an endurable handset as cheap as possible for customers who don't otherwise care' incentive. Since they really want you to walk out with a data plan, they've shifted focus to the low-end Androids and iPhone 5c(if the customer insists), rather than the developing-world-special $20 phones; but they still want to pay as little as possible for those basic shelf-stuffer phones.
Plus, as with computers, the usability of the cheap seats has gotten surprisingly adequate. Still not as good as the ones that cost 2-6 times as much; but it is certainly no longer the case than anything under $200 refutes a loving god if you try to use it.
I don't mean to suggest that "anything goes" will become the motto of software testing(at least not more than it is today); but unless all the neural networks deliver extraordinarily erratic behavior despite all effort to the contrary, I agree that it will be a difference of degree(we will test them a lot more rigorously than humans); but not of kind(humans also experience 'edge case' behavior, whether it be an aneurysm hitting them at the hardware level, a psychotic break, a murder-suicide, some ill-conceived plan that involves plowing into a group of pedestrians, whatever).
We have less historical familiarity with these hypothetical computer systems, so we'll want to test them more carefully; but unless something makes them fundamentally more unknowable and unpredictable than people, my suspicion is that we'll decide to put up with some uncertainty if the alternative is not getting to use the new toys. We don't(and rightly so) put up with uncertainty in life critical systems merely because we want to save a few bucks or shave a few months off development; but if the only entrants are big, hairy, not-really-comprehensible designs that isn't the choice. It will be "you can have this now, or you can hope that we actually understand the problem at a much deeper level within not more than a few generations." There will be grumbling; but unless a real breakthrough allows us to have our toys and understand them, we'll opt for the toys.
Presumably depends on the location: major population centers or noted transplant hospitals can probably get the runner-up in pretty quickly(if they aren't already hospitalized because of the effects of needing a lung, there's nothing like the prospect of horrible death to get somebody moving); and presumably the ethics of not providing the original first-in-line with an organ that will kill him and giving it to #2 instead are pretty straightforward.
If the donor hits a tree and suffers massive head trauma out in some rural area, logistics may become considerably more challenging. Even for effectively unlimited money you can only get transport lined up so fast.
My (layman's) understanding is that viability is a factor of interaction between the recipient and the donor organ, not merely a function of the donor, so would be tricky to label ahead of time.
For grafts where they have the luxury of (relatively) large amounts of time, and a non-fatal donation process(like bone marrow), they will screen for recipient/donor suitability ahead of time; but for donor organs where the donor is supposed to die first, time is very, very, limited and supplies are extremely tight. Much harder to preemptively do any substantial testing and a much greater incentive to shovel the organs into someone before they expire, since odds are good that that person won't get a second chance.
That's why this high speed method is so valuable: since the organs are so scarce, you don't want to waste one if it will just kill the patient anyway; but the clock is ticking from the time the organ becomes available until it becomes nothing but meaty medical waste.
For security purposes, it's not unreasonable to suggest that Mr. Big Picture Strategy Guy not be given read/write access to everything he is expected to be planning; that makes his credentials unbelievably valuable to an attacker and if he is in the position of needing to twiddle individual configurations all the time the organization hasn't actually made him the Big Picture Strategy Guy; but widespread read access would be a much harder request to reasonably deny: Anyone who is supposed to be strategizing needs to be able to see the world; and forcing him to wait 48 hours and work from a secondhand report compiled by minions every time he has a question about what the world looks like now is going to waste a lot of everybody's time.
Unless his mandate is strictly "Design us a new system so we can forklift upgrade this whole goddamn place!"(which would be deeply satisfying; but legacy infrastructure never dies that easily); expecting him to work in a black box is unrealistic; but he doesn't necessarily need(or even want to be stuck with) the ability to actually commit his proposed changes to every last widget out there.
Well, I think that the standards for driving tests could use some modification; but I was actually aiming at exactly the opposite point: There isn't any particular reason to believe that we need to, or will, demand that machines that control vehicles be submitted to some sort of profound understanding and formal verification, given that we accept black-box testing(and pretty shoddy testing at that) for human operators.
,lobbying might be a fairly ghastly pain; but I see no reason why there would be any long-term resistance to complex systems(neural network or otherwise) that are effectively beyond human understanding; so long as they pass black box tests of their abilities. I say this both because that's what we do when dealing with people; and because, in practice, even today's tech is complex enough that effectively nobody outside of very specialized software dev and test outfits knows what the hell is going on; and people basically accept that, because the alternative involves being restricted to radically simpler technology or radically more expensive tech support.
The initial
I certainly wouldn't want to be the one leading the charge to get this approved; but we currently let neural networks drive cars after a relatively pitiful 'black box' verification where we subject them to maybe 30 minutes, 45 at most, of approximately real-world stimuli and then evaluate their responses.
This arrangement does end up with ~30,000 fatalities a year; but seems to enjoy broad support.
Aside from the question(which is important; but not directly relevant to this post) of whether or not the pre-feminist situation was ethically tenable; I think that there are some complications that your description of the economic situation doesn't include.
Female labor force participation has never actually been particularly minimal: women(and children) were a staple of factor workforces from the start of the industrial revolution; and the 'piecework' and 'putting-out' distributed domestic production of various goods were also heavily dependent on women and children. Plus the effect of domestic labor that isn't counted as labor market participation; but which effectively replaces demand for some goods and services that would otherwise be produced by people in the labor market(if mom is cooking and mending at home, your consumption of new clothes and restaurant-prepared food is going to be more limited, as likely will be your demand for housecleaning services and the like).
It is true that women's labor market participation was often more tenuous and less protected('maternity leave' tended to be you getting fired); but between young women newly entering the labor market and mothers of older children re-entering it(sometimes with those children) it was still quite substantial. The single-income household(especially as a blue-collar phenomenon) was only ever on the table because of the period of relative strength enjoyed by organized labor(which was instrumental in raising the earning potential of male blue collar workers) and 'Progressive' reformers pushing against child labor, for mandatory universal education, and against the neglect of children whose parents had to go back to work while they were still very young.
Absent those changes, factory work would likely still be a family affair, as it definitely was earlier in its development; and single-income households would really only be even an option for the relatively wealthy and skilled and/or educated.
As for the annihilation of the blue-collar sole breadwinner; it is undeniable that it has occurred. However, it's worth looking at whether those jobs/wage levels were lost because of increased availability of female workers; or whether the causes were elsewhere and the increased female workforce participation was a compensatory measure to attempt to salvage overall household income: I'm open to discussion on the matter; but I'm inclined to go with the latter. Think of the sectors where the relatively high paying, largely male, blue collar work used to be. Did those sectors see a pattern of increased hiring of women and wages sliding with increased supply; or did they mostly just disappear with offshoring and outsourcing, or face substantial declines in real wage as the power of labor unions has withered?
Among poor and unskilled workers, the big shift hasn't been Rosie the riveter stealing your factory job, it has been the fact that (mostly lousy) 'pink collar' retail and service industry jobs can't really be offshored, while historically desirable blue-collar sectors have just been gutted. It's actually among the comparatively wealthy and well educated where women's employment gains have occurred through actually getting jobs in historically male fields; and those are the people who are more likely to see marriage and family formation as desirable(though likely to defer it because getting 'a good education' is a process that sure isn't getting any shorter).
It is one of the possible solvents for the serial dilution and 'succussion' thing that homeopaths do to produce their quack juice. Not as common as water; but it is an option that counts as 'homeopathic' if prepared according to the rest of the procedures.
Solubility doesn't matter much by the time you get to the end product, since basically anything is soluble enough in anything for concentrations in the 'modest probability that a single atom is present' range; but for the original solution and the first few dilutions, some materials just don't dissolve in water very well; but do nicely in alcohol.
Unless the sensor can only be fabricated in flat sheets, they could really have a winner for bringing high resolution pressure sensitivity to the teledildonics market. Not that they'd necessarily trumpet that fact on their main page.
This could have just been device immaturity; but I played with one of those 'laser keyboard' gizmos back when they came out and, while this sensor would presumably help solve the fact that keypress registration was iffy and tactile feedback was utterly hopeless; it isn't in a position to deal with the fact that the laser overlay effect itself was(once you got past the OMG I Live In The Sci-Fi Future Now! effect) kind of lousy. Your hands cast shadows during use, and the keys being shadowed were projected distractingly all over your fingers, while the laser lines were a bit dim for bright light; but somewhat uncomfortable to look at in dim conditions, and you did a fair amount of looking because touch typing was not happening.
The cool factor was high; but the experience was fairly unpleasant.
I agree(from my Model M) that you should never send some 'touch' nonsense to do a proper buckling spring keyswitch's job; but the technology behind this product actually sounds extraordinarily impressive, just not suited for beating keyswitches at what keyswitches do best.
Resistive sensors are not new; but have traditionally suffered from tepid pressure-level sensitivity, a very limited number of simultaneous touch points(the basic 'grid layout' ones often just register two touches as a single touch somewhere between those two points); and the ones that are actually good have been comparatively expensive and large enough to be packaged as discrete parts.
These guys claim that they can get 20,000 pressure sensors of adequate quality crammed into a small enough surface to provide comprehensive coverage, and cheaply enough that you'll be able to get one for $200. If that is so, they have a very, very, interesting entrant into the existing market for strain gauges, force sensitive resistors, and the like; with markedly higher resolution and comparatively low cost. Robotics will be all over this one.
I'd be fascinated to know, though I admit that I'm not sure how you would disentangle this, how much of the success of this approach has to do with any particular twist on how the education is done(the introduction of the college classes option earlier in HS, curriculum restructuring and shuffling, etc.); vs. how much has to do with the fact that the corporate sponsor is(through the internships and preferential hiring) making the connection between achievement in school and tangible payoff particularly strong and evident.
I'd certainly be the first to agree that many kids are dumb, impulsive, and shortsighted(some grow out of it, some turn into adults with the same traits); and that some schools are just atrocious. However, while slavishly adhering to the 'rational actor' model can lead to absurd excesses best left to economists; it can sometimes be helpful to imagine, at least as test, that people might actually be behaving "rationally", at least in a local sense.
Thinking back on my own education, some of it was undeniably useful for basically anyone(literacy and basic mathematics), some of it was of no direct use but almost certainly good for the mind in ways that are broadly applicable(writing essays about works of literature or classical greek political events isn't terribly relevant; but knowing your way around a coherent thesis backed by a reasonably competent body of argument and evidence sure is handy); and some of it was probably included for reasons little better than 'because tradition'. However, my surroundings always made it abundantly clear that (in addition to being a social expectation) education had rewards. My parents had degrees and jobs that were only possible because of their education; our neighbors and family friends were almost entirely the same way, we watched older kids head off to college, to internships, to various jobs; even if some dickhead still asked "When are we ever going to need this?" during some aspect of calculus that annoyed him, nobody was in any serious doubt that, even if you thought that some of it was just hoop-jumping, education was obviously valuable.
Had I grown up in a worse environment, gone to lousier schools, I would have likely enjoyed worse teachers and facilities; but I also would have been substantially ignorant of, or unbelieving of, the value of education: both because a diploma from the local high school probably isn't all that valuable; and because I'd have relatively few references for people who had done the work and gone on to some sort of professional career thanks to that. Maybe my sheer virtuous love of learning or whatever would have seen me through; but I certainly wouldn't put too much faith in the possibility.
In this case, IBM is making it quite clear that "Do this schoolwork for 4-6 years, depending, and you will see internships and quite possibly a job offer". That's relatively concrete, relatively short-term, easy to understand. To the degree that students are rational actors, that would seem to be a pretty big difference between this program and a school where the payoff is less visible or simply not there.
While moral perceptions have (some) influence on people's behavior, it's important to remember that stable family formation has economic and social requirements; as well as behavioral/moral ones.
You can certainly run a relationship into the rocks, or never form one, for moral/behavioral reasons; but in order to have a successful family unit, especially over a time frame long enough to be relevant to childrearing outcomes, you usually have to meet some other requirements:
The labor market is a major factor: even among all the middle class professionals in the suburbs who expect their kids to go off to college as a matter of routine and presume that they will get married, we saw at least a delay(if not ultimately a disruption) of family formation during our recent economic downturn as all those un or underemployed kids came home because they couldn't find a job and afford a house or apartment. There are societies where multigenerational extended families have routinely lived in the same house; but ours isn't really one of them, so people who still live with mom and dad are less likely to be getting married or raising children, regardless of whether their moral preferences push them toward a steady monogamous relationship or a wild series of dubiously advised drunken hookups.
You also need spousal availability: If (as is the case among the poor, particularly the poor and black) you have a high incarceration rate; you have a substantial shortage of potential husbands. They are either actually in jail and unavailable, or carry the stigma, reduced earning potential, and logistical complications of a criminal record and possibly a set of parole conditions they have to adhere to. Even among those on the legal straight-and-narrow, the supply of blue-collar breadwinners has been pretty brutalized by the decline in manufacturing. If you are a traditionalist, that makes these men fairly poor 'man of the house' material. Even if you are not, somebody needs to pay the bills, and low-skill women may have more options in 'pink collar' and service sector jobs; but generally not ones that pay well enough to support a family without equal or greater income on the spouse's side as well.
Among the middle class and above, this has caused substantial delays in family formation(people basically don't start until they've both graduated from college and landed some sort of job); but in populations where earning potential starts lousy and stays lousy even deferral is less likely.
Then there is the possibility of 'feedback' effects on 'moral' or social norms: The acceptability of premarital sex, say, is a 'social'/'moral' question; but it is going to reflect the (economically determined) gap between age of something resembling sexual maturity and age of achieving the means necessary for household formation. If you can get a job out of high school that makes having a family a realistic option, a 'no sex before marriage' rule is (relatively) easy to maintain; little more than 'please try not to do anything too stupid in your early teens...' If you either cannot expect to ever afford family formation; or will need to finish your master's degree before you do so; that's a whole different demand. Moralists can moralize; but expecting people who can afford family formation at 25-30 to be as abstemious as those who can afford family formation at 16-20...just not realistic.
I'm certainly not one to ignore the influence of culture; but you can't ever take your eyes off the economic situation, especially when the moral questions you are considering involve some fairly expensive life choices(it may be a net benefit; but family formation is not cheap).
Your point is an important one: in law, public schools are required to do whatever is necessary; but that certainly doesn't stop them from imposing a variety of procedural hurdles, attempting to pass off inadequate measures as being suitable, or just plain stalling. This is theoretically legally risky; but it's not as though there are any regulatory bodies with the time and interest to proactively hunt misconduct, so it's pretty much a question of how forceful the parents are. The ability of the district to demand some level of evidence is hardly unreasonable; but there are certainly ways to...creatively extend...the IEP process that are just plain cold-blooded. Some school districts are definitely better than others, and some people within a given school district are more sympathetic than others; but especially if the accommodation required is an expensive one, there is an institutional incentive to try to avoid it.
My focus was purely on the difference in legal obligation between a private institution that is merely required to not violate any specific laws about discrimination; and a public one which is required to accommodate all in-district students; so I did not mention how it plays out in practice; but what you say is true. There is a difference, and sometimes a large and appallingly bad-faith one, between having a legal obligation and upholding it.
This case is pretty unsympathetic, given its severely dubious medical basis and the large impact it would have on other students(though I do feel bad for the kid; his problem is unlikely to be RF related; but it probably isn't nonexistent, whatever it is); but that doesn't in any way imply that much stronger cases necessarily receive fair treatment.
It's the harsh, unnatural, digital modulation that causes the trouble. Good old analog transmitters, carrying Human voices, are naturally in sympathetic harmony with the body's own vital energy; and promote wellness.
Once arrogant technocrats imposed a 'binary' worldview that rejects the wholistic wisdom of the body, the transmissions became intensely disruptive to our health, and corrosive to the spirit.
Isn't it obvious?
Sorry kid, 'remove the stupid people' is not a 'reasonable accommodation'; and would definitely impose undue hardship on us. No ADA-mandated action for you.
About the nicest thing you can say is that cancer patients probably should drink water; and have good reasons to drink alcohol, so some homeopathic 'remedies' may accidentally be useful...