Still prevents anyone in the car from using your phone. And it still allows you to use someone else's phone while driving. This is stupid and too easily defeated.
Not to mention, you can get a copy of your car key (granted, it may cost $100 if it's got an embedded chip, but still). Keep the key in the sleeve, use the copy to drive the car.
Please cite some examples of situations where 911 is not appropriate but yet you must make a phone call while driving? A call so important (but not important enough for 911) that it will actually make you safer if you do it while you are still driving instead of pulling to the side of the road or waiting for a stoplight.
Easy: not everywhere has 911 service. Since it's a cell phone, you might normally have 911 available to you, but then leave the area without realizing it. Then, when someone's following you through a rural area with no safe place to pull in, you can't call 411 to get connected to the local Sheriff.
Or what if you're just lost? And, you happen to have gotten lost in Compton? You should pull over and turn off the car to call someone for directions?
Lots of folks have said good things already. I'll tell you what I find works for me in getting what I want out of programmers (including the one I'm married to;-): be specific.
When you have the project spec in hand, sit down with the development team, and have them all go over it. Then get ALL their questions, and get answers. Some may be things that are up to the discretion of the team, and some may be things that need to be answered from other quarters... but all those "Step 3. ??????????" parts need to be identified and filled in before any code gets written.
If they have input such as "Why are we doing this? This is stupid. It'd make more sense to do it THIS way, because..." take notes, give an answer if you have one, and otherwise, bring that to wherever the spec came from and present the case, but in business speak. "We can achieve better security and efficiency by altering the spec such that..." or whatever.
If something is intentionally left up to the developers' discretion, make THAT explicit.
When feedback comes in about beta versions, make sure that is very specific, too. "The second screen doesn't work" is not useful feedback. "When I click on the button marked XXXX after inputing "flibbertygibbet" in Y field, I get Z response and am expecting W" is useful feedback. Create feedback/bug report forms that require certain information if the folks responsible for testing aren't able to do this properly on their own.
If you have a really good spec that all the devs have weighed in on and you've got buy-in, you can mostly coast downhill from there. If problems arise, you've got a document to refer to, and if they bring up problems with it at THAT point, you can ask why they didn't bring this up to begin with. (Though you should also continually solicit feedback, so that as someone's getting into the code and realizes that it's not going to work that way, they tell you right away rather than just burying it until you ask.)
Except we want cops to catch people with illegal drugs etc.. Why restrain the cops from doing what we all need them to do? Whether its illegal aliens or a bundle of dope I prefer that 100% be detected and punished.
100% detection would require surveilling everyone, all the time, for activity that might indicate smuggling. You feel like giving the gov't the keys to your private life?
OTOH, I think that our immigration and drug laws are way f'ed up anyway, and current enforcement methods are an enormous waste of resources, so I don't even agree with the premise.
Look at the originators of the arguments, one is on moral ground and the other is trying to make money. Just makes me go hmmmm....
True true... though there's a third faction, those making informed decisions about health after doing research. Our current vaccination policies aren't set up for informed consent. You don't go into a pediatric appointment and hear from the doctor, "Vaccination X is recommended for children of your child's age. It has these benefits [list], and these risks [list]. Do you want to get this shot today?"
No, you hear "It's time for your X shot! Here, sign this [child's health record on the line for shot X]." Then, after the shot has been administered, "Here's a flyer about the shot." The flyer mentions that this shot has the following potential side effects which are minor... [list of stuff you might otherwise call the doctor about because it might be a serious illness]. It also in rare cases has THESE side effects, which you should call your doctor if they happen..." [list of stuff that gives parents nightmares.]
Vaccinations are like any other treatment. Patients (or their authorized representatives, i.e. parents) should be informed on the benefits and risks, and then give informed consent or refusal. Blanket refusing on principle is no better than blanket acceptance by default.
I still think you overstate the rational (a little), but you are at least attacking the group you really want to now. I happen to agree that girls should get the HPV immunization, they should also be getting it BEFORE they are sexually active. I know a lot of people who are not religious that think that they should wait until their daughter is sexually active before getting vaccinated.
I'm fortunate in that this is a hypothetical for us, as both our sons are boys... but for my part, I'm not getting my children a shot to prevent something that is really uncommon ANYWAY until it's been more thoroughly tested. There's no good longitudinal information about Gardasil, and there's waaaaaay too much money being spent by the vaccine manufacturers on taking the FDA out to lunch to make me feel like they're doing their conscientious duty in developing lifesaving medication.
However... I agree that "Oh noes it gives them permission to have SEX!" is a piss-poor reason for not getting the vaccine. They'll have sex with or without permission. The only "clinically-proven" way to delay the loss of virginity is with thorough and explicit sex education.
Holy smokes. Are we inadvertently introducing a weakness to all these other diseases?
That's one of the main considerations of families who opt to selectively vaccinate or not vaccinate at all. While many (but not ALL) of the vaccinations on the CDC schedule have proven effectiveness in combating disease, there is *no* clinical evidence that the existing schedule (starting at two months of age with four shots, which carry a combined punch of 13 different disease strains) has any benefit over a schedule which starts later or goes slower.
To run with varicella as one example, scientists have already speculated that the recent surge in shingles diagnoses is related to the varicella vaccination. The speculation is that our immune systems get a "refresher course" in supressing the varicella virus each time we come in contact with it... but now that most kids are vaccinated, it's really rare to come in contact with it, so it's easier for the virus to reappear as shingles in adults who had chicken pox as children.
There's also not much known about what's going to happen throughout adulthood to kids who are vaccinated from it. The vaccine loses effectiveness after 10-12 years in most people, which means that kids become susceptible again at the beginning of the teen years... when the virus switches from "annoying as heck" to "possibly causing permanent damage to fertility."
Wow, that's a really interesting list. Partly because many of those items are *also* linked to autoimmune responses to gluten in the human diet. In particular, diabetes (Types I and II), Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Rheumatoid arthritis, and colon cancer have been clinically confirmed to my knowledge; I also know of people with MS and Crohn's who find that going gluten-free improved their condition a great deal.
As you know, GameStop makes a tidy sum reselling used games, and the game developers don't see a penny of it. This has not a few people in the the games industry pissed off beyond the capacity for rational thought. No matter how much irrefutable logic or facts you throw at them, they're absolutely convinced they're "losing money" to this, and want to re-structure the market to prevent it.
They have restructured the market to prevent it: it's called an MMO(RP)G.
While I completely agree that their methods are abhorrent, I'm left wondering what legal means the RIAA had of pursuing their case. The fact is that wanton copyright infringement is occurring. As copyright holders, the RIAA does in fact have the right to go after the infringers. Their methods under the guise of Media Sentry are obviously less than ideal (both morally and legally), so what *should* they have done?
I'm just wondering if there's any course of action they could taken whereby their IP was protected and they weren't demonized by all of us.
Well, no. I think the upshot of much of the copyright discussion in the geek world for the past several years has been, there is NO way to enforce copyrights to the RIAA's satisfaction in the 21st century.
But part of the problem is, there's also no *reason* to. What the RIAA has failed to realize is that their problem is DEMAND. People *want* their product, in a given form. If it was easier to get for pay than for free, heck yeah people would do it, and DO do it.
If it was easier to put $20 on an account with RIAA's website, and then download songs from their catalog as the mood strikes you, in an unfettered format, they'd rake it in. Soooo many people would be far more willing to do that than to install a program, search for the song, hope it's REALLY the song and not some malware... yadda yadda.
Many of the songs that people are trading aren't even for sale, anywhere. What's ridiculous is that there *is* a demand for them, and it would be dead easy to supply it.
Once upon a time, recording equipment was awesomely expensive, media was delicate, and reproduction was a professional job. That made the business model easy. That has all changed, and this scares the crap out of the RIAA, but it shouldn't... it's made their job easier. However, it's also made it easier for someone else to do it. And that's exactly what's happening... as iTunes etc. take over the music market.
I don't like "automatic" because it's easy to set up, but difficult to stop.
The procedure to stop an automatic recurring payment in my bank's bill pay system goes like this:
* Log on with username/password; choose Bill Pay (You can do this all on the first page) * Look at your upcoming payments, click on the one you want to change * Click "Cancel this payment" * Get a prompt that tells you this is part of a recurring series of payments. Do you want to cancel just *this* one, or the whole series? * Choose as necessary * Log out.
It's not like your Bally's membership being auto-deducted from your bank account. It's easy-peasy.
The potential security benefits don't hurt, as anyone screwing around with mailed bills faces the wrath of the United States Postal Inspection Service. Unlike most online fraud, fucking with the mails will actually get you in trouble, and USPIS doesn't blow you off if you haven't suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
We pay practically everything, even stuff to individuals, online... and 99% of it goes through the mail. There are a couple of our utilities that have something set up with our bank that lets the bank send the transaction electronically, but otherwise, we pay $7/month for them to print the check, stamp it, and mail it for us. So if we use it, what, 17 times a month (and I think we do, easily) we save money on postage right there.
Others have pointed out that you can have any and all transactions manually generated through online bill pay systems, as well. I found that when I started using online bill pay, I paid my bills on time and didn't overdraw my account, because I was no longer reliant on doing manual math in a check register, and didn't have to assemble the envelopes, statements, stamps, etc. to get a bill paid.
This is as distinct from services offered by certain billers, that let you log onto THEIR site and set up an automatic payment. We don't do those. EVER. No one else gets permission to take money out of my bank account.
I'm suspicious of research that "confirms the obvious." When we know the conclusion we expect to find, we often find it.
There has been a lot of research, and I've looked at it. There has NOT yet been a study that looks at the effect of cell phone use on driving safety. There are studies that look at proxy measures of reaction time when using things like cell phones; there are studies that attempt to determine whether someone who had an accident was talking on a cell phone; there are closed-course driving behavior scenarios which simulate cell phone use... but these are all totally unnecessary and unresponsive to the question: does cell phone use while driving present a hazard?
I thought I could predict whether someone was talking on a cell phone by driving behavior, too. So for a day, when I was doing a lot of highway and street driving, I tested this. Every time I observed a driver who was having difficulty keeping lane position, or negotiating turns, or was failing to signal their intention, or was driving faster or slower than conditions indicated, etc., I attempted to safely get a look at the driver's seat. In about 10 attempts, I found *one* person talking on the phone.
My own intuition says that there are people who get distracted on the road. They will be distracted whether they are talking on the phone, eating their lunch, or window shopping. The phone is not the problem in those cases, but driver behavior is. Laws prohibiting cell phone use don't address the underlying concern.
While I am inclined to accept the premise that there is a difference between talking to a passenger who is aware of the current conditions, and someone on a phone, I do not think it is reasonable to jump to the conclusion that this translates into an increased hazard. I'm especially disinclined to jump to this conclusion when it's totally feasible to look at the actual impact of cell phone use on road safety.
Anyone ever used a driving simulator? It isn't the same thing as driving a car. I don't have a subscription the Journal that the original study is in, but like every other study that's used some proxy measure of driving behavior, I doubt they normalized it against actual behind-the-wheel behavior.
And what I really don't get is why doesn't someone actually just find out if cell phone use has an effect on driving safety? It's really not that difficult, it just takes some time in SPSS and some cooperation from local law enforcement, state DMVs, and the cell phone companies... all of whom have an interest in ensuring that the laws put in place are the least restrictive that have a beneficial effect.
Here's how you do it: you collect accident data and cell phone market penetration data from the last 15-20 years for a handful of markets, probably larger urban markets with earlier adoption of cellular technology and large populations of drivers, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, etc. You run a multiple regression analysis, with accidents as the dependent variable, cell phone market penetration as an independent variable, and a lot of other independent variables such as population, VMT (vehicle miles traveled) per capita, a couple dummy variables for proportion of driving population over 55 or under 25, etc. etc.... everything we have reason to believe has some effect on accident rates.
When the computer is done thrashing, what it spits out is an approximate percentage of the change in accident rates that is attributable to cell phone use. Then we know not just that they make driving more risky, but how much more. We may even find that they make accidents LESS likely... perhaps other factors that increase accident risk are mitigated by cell phone use, such as running late (since you can call ahead and tell people you're late) or getting lost (calling for directions).
Yes, not everyone uses cell phones while they drive... but increased adoption of cell phone use overall has probably maintained a fairly consistent relationship with cell phone use while driving. With a bit of additional funding (so far, the study is dirt cheap... way cheaper than human subjects protocols and running simulators, it's just a geek and a computer being fed data that's already on a hard disk somewhere), you could conduct surveys in the various markets, looking at the rate of cell phone use while driving as a percentage of total use, and thereby compare the influence in different markets. In Los Angeles, maybe people are twice as likely to talk on the phone while driving as they are in Boston, and we may find that oh, gee, cell phone market penetration has twice as great an effect on accident rates in Los Angeles as in Boston... so, bingo.
Meanwhile, enacting laws because of what people do when playing a souped-up video game is a waste of everyone's time and energy, and it makes me cranky.
Glad to help you feel heard. Maybe that's the most important thing that geeks etc. can do... get on the ground in these schools and find out what it's really like. With that knowledge, we're far more likely to come up with ideas that will help.
Having access to the technology is a pretty important thing, IMO. This isn't 1980 when personal computers were a rarity. Being computer illiterate is almost as bad as being actually illiterate.
This.
I haven't read the whole thread yet, but I'm halfway down the page and this is the FIRST reply that even begins to understand the issue. We're not talking about suburban schools where Mom and Dad are going to show up on Parent's Night and oooh and aaaah over the Powerpoint presentations and berate the teacher for marking down for not showing work. We're talking about "inner-city" schools, which is a euphemism for places where nearly EVERY child is left behind.
Do you know why we have a free lunch program in our schools? Because when we started recruiting for WWII, about a THIRD of the candidates were 4-F classification due to childhood malnutrition. One good meal a day is better than nothing. You're talking about kids who walk into school hungry. Who get themselves out of bed and dressed and walk to school alone, because their parent (often only one) has left for work before the sun came up. That's to get to their *first* job; they're still at their second job while their child is doing homework and eating dinner (if there's such a thing). As much as these parents might *want* to be involved in their child's education, they haven't the first clue how to get involved (often being undereducated themselves) nor do they have the temporal resources to do it.
Putting a computer in the classroom isn't about using it to teach what is already being taught. Yes, the kids can learn math with a pencil and paper, and may learn it better that way than any other. But what the computer can do is put the world in context for them, and give them exposure to a tool that is going to be essential to breaking the cycle of poverty in the 21st century.
Here's an example: look up "cognitive maps" on Google. What researchers found was that kids from poor neighborhoods had a much smaller and sketchier concept of where they lived than their more affluent peers. My mom, who taught night school for adults attempting to get high school diplomas, remembers helping one of her students with a geography lesson. The student had to find her home city on a globe of the world. She was stumped, so my mom said, "Ok, what's nearby? Do we live near an ocean?" she didn't know. She'd lived in Los Angeles all her life, and had never seen the ocean.
Can you imagine what access to Google Maps might do to someone's understanding of, simply put, where they *are*? If you can locate UCLA and get transit directions from "here" to there, all of a sudden, the idea of going to college isn't so remote.
It's not about how computers can be used to enhance education. It's a whole other aspect of education. Just as people used to have to learn to use slide rules to have a hope of surviving college math classes, the computer is the new tool that EVERYONE has to learn to use or get left behind. For many students, the classroom is the only place that's going to happen.
I'm not sure I answered the OP's question.;-) I do believe that simply putting the computers there, and showing interested students how to use them, is a useful thing and I'm glad he did it. He might want to point his fiancee toward donorschoose.org, where her school might find funding for an expanded program to bring computers and instruction into the classrooms. But it's a much, much bigger problem than what OS or how to firewall.
The problem is none of the systems are smart enough to have a check to them (and at this point, I'm not sure what kind of an automated check could have stopped this).
It seems to me that Google can stop this from ever happening again by simply coding the NewsBot to ignore all stories with no dateline.
That would cause their available stories to drop, of course... until about a week later when all the itty-bitty newspapers who get an overwhelming number of their referrals from Google would FINALLY put datelines on all their stories.
It won't be ruined. I think it's a bit of a myth that the feeling of suspense really has anything to do with not knowing a few small facts that are revealed at the end. I can't give a definition of suspense, but I know from experience that it's something you feel in pretty much the same way whether or not you've seen some spoilers, and even when you've read a book before.
Having something "spoiled" is not simply a matter of having the suspense taken away. Yes, you can still enjoy the story if you know how certain things are going to be... but you don't enjoy it *as much* as if you're figuring out things as you go along. Ever watch a movie or read a book a second time? Ever notice things you didn't notice before... certain foreshadowings, links, etc.? It's a different experience when you know what happens than when you don't.
I accidentally got the books out of order in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy; read 2/3rds of the way through Blue Mars before I read Green Mars. Then, realizing the mistake, stopped Blue and read Green. It wasn't nearly as much fun, knowing how the war would turn out and who would die and who would get captured and have a personality transplant and whatnot. (It's not nearly as interesting as it sounds; I wish I had those dozens of hours I spent slogging through the series back.) Reading the remainder of Blue Mars was much more diverting (the first 2/3rds was sort of confusing, for obvious reasons).
In fact, my husband and I have started avoiding trailers for much-anticipated movies, because even that spoils our enjoyment some. There are some movies or books that are better if you "know what to expect," but most of my favorite media experiences have been when I went in cold, knowing nothing about what to expect or what would happen.
Someone who telecommutes, regardless of the reason, sends the message that while they care about the paycheck, they put where they live ahead of the company.
Most people actually put where they live ahead of the company. Proximity to work location ranks no higher than ninth when surveying people on how they choose a residence location. They care way, way more about local traffic, schools, local businesses, and so on. (Sorry I don't have a link on this; this data was presented in a class lecture for Urban Planning 215: Transportation Planning in Winter 2004 at UCLA.) Telecommuters are just maybe a bit more honest about it.;-)
This article says that, while most people would like to telecommute at least some of the time, and companies don't perceive telecommuters as less productive than in-office employees, executives are still less likely to promote telecommuters than people in the office every day. But, why? People are talking about "face-time" and "company culture," but should decisions about promotions really be based on such incredibly subjective characteristics? It sounds like the problem that these executives have is that they haven't had time to become buddy-buddy with the telecommuters, and so they're reluctant to advance them in their careers. This is important information... because it tells us we need to change something about how executives view telecommuting, and in a larger view, career advancement.
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Dirtside, is that you?
If it's not, then it's your fault I have to slap him when I get home.
Still prevents anyone in the car from using your phone. And it still allows you to use someone else's phone while driving. This is stupid and too easily defeated.
Not to mention, you can get a copy of your car key (granted, it may cost $100 if it's got an embedded chip, but still). Keep the key in the sleeve, use the copy to drive the car.
Please cite some examples of situations where 911 is not appropriate but yet you must make a phone call while driving? A call so important (but not important enough for 911) that it will actually make you safer if you do it while you are still driving instead of pulling to the side of the road or waiting for a stoplight.
Easy: not everywhere has 911 service. Since it's a cell phone, you might normally have 911 available to you, but then leave the area without realizing it. Then, when someone's following you through a rural area with no safe place to pull in, you can't call 411 to get connected to the local Sheriff.
Or what if you're just lost? And, you happen to have gotten lost in Compton? You should pull over and turn off the car to call someone for directions?
Teens are a group of people who have a very high rate of accidents compared to the general population.
In other news, toddlers have a very high rate of falling down while running.
Lots of folks have said good things already. I'll tell you what I find works for me in getting what I want out of programmers (including the one I'm married to ;-): be specific.
When you have the project spec in hand, sit down with the development team, and have them all go over it. Then get ALL their questions, and get answers. Some may be things that are up to the discretion of the team, and some may be things that need to be answered from other quarters... but all those "Step 3. ??????????" parts need to be identified and filled in before any code gets written.
If they have input such as "Why are we doing this? This is stupid. It'd make more sense to do it THIS way, because..." take notes, give an answer if you have one, and otherwise, bring that to wherever the spec came from and present the case, but in business speak. "We can achieve better security and efficiency by altering the spec such that..." or whatever.
If something is intentionally left up to the developers' discretion, make THAT explicit.
When feedback comes in about beta versions, make sure that is very specific, too. "The second screen doesn't work" is not useful feedback. "When I click on the button marked XXXX after inputing "flibbertygibbet" in Y field, I get Z response and am expecting W" is useful feedback. Create feedback/bug report forms that require certain information if the folks responsible for testing aren't able to do this properly on their own.
If you have a really good spec that all the devs have weighed in on and you've got buy-in, you can mostly coast downhill from there. If problems arise, you've got a document to refer to, and if they bring up problems with it at THAT point, you can ask why they didn't bring this up to begin with. (Though you should also continually solicit feedback, so that as someone's getting into the code and realizes that it's not going to work that way, they tell you right away rather than just burying it until you ask.)
Except we want cops to catch people with illegal drugs etc.. Why restrain the cops from doing what we all need them to do? Whether its illegal aliens or a bundle of dope I prefer that 100% be detected and punished.
100% detection would require surveilling everyone, all the time, for activity that might indicate smuggling. You feel like giving the gov't the keys to your private life?
OTOH, I think that our immigration and drug laws are way f'ed up anyway, and current enforcement methods are an enormous waste of resources, so I don't even agree with the premise.
Look at the originators of the arguments, one is on moral ground and the other is trying to make money. Just makes me go hmmmm....
True true... though there's a third faction, those making informed decisions about health after doing research. Our current vaccination policies aren't set up for informed consent. You don't go into a pediatric appointment and hear from the doctor, "Vaccination X is recommended for children of your child's age. It has these benefits [list], and these risks [list]. Do you want to get this shot today?"
No, you hear "It's time for your X shot! Here, sign this [child's health record on the line for shot X]." Then, after the shot has been administered, "Here's a flyer about the shot." The flyer mentions that this shot has the following potential side effects which are minor... [list of stuff you might otherwise call the doctor about because it might be a serious illness]. It also in rare cases has THESE side effects, which you should call your doctor if they happen..." [list of stuff that gives parents nightmares.]
Vaccinations are like any other treatment. Patients (or their authorized representatives, i.e. parents) should be informed on the benefits and risks, and then give informed consent or refusal. Blanket refusing on principle is no better than blanket acceptance by default.
I still think you overstate the rational (a little), but you are at least attacking the group you really want to now. I happen to agree that girls should get the HPV immunization, they should also be getting it BEFORE they are sexually active. I know a lot of people who are not religious that think that they should wait until their daughter is sexually active before getting vaccinated.
I'm fortunate in that this is a hypothetical for us, as both our sons are boys... but for my part, I'm not getting my children a shot to prevent something that is really uncommon ANYWAY until it's been more thoroughly tested. There's no good longitudinal information about Gardasil, and there's waaaaaay too much money being spent by the vaccine manufacturers on taking the FDA out to lunch to make me feel like they're doing their conscientious duty in developing lifesaving medication.
However... I agree that "Oh noes it gives them permission to have SEX!" is a piss-poor reason for not getting the vaccine. They'll have sex with or without permission. The only "clinically-proven" way to delay the loss of virginity is with thorough and explicit sex education.
Holy smokes. Are we inadvertently introducing a weakness to all these other diseases?
That's one of the main considerations of families who opt to selectively vaccinate or not vaccinate at all. While many (but not ALL) of the vaccinations on the CDC schedule have proven effectiveness in combating disease, there is *no* clinical evidence that the existing schedule (starting at two months of age with four shots, which carry a combined punch of 13 different disease strains) has any benefit over a schedule which starts later or goes slower.
To run with varicella as one example, scientists have already speculated that the recent surge in shingles diagnoses is related to the varicella vaccination. The speculation is that our immune systems get a "refresher course" in supressing the varicella virus each time we come in contact with it... but now that most kids are vaccinated, it's really rare to come in contact with it, so it's easier for the virus to reappear as shingles in adults who had chicken pox as children.
There's also not much known about what's going to happen throughout adulthood to kids who are vaccinated from it. The vaccine loses effectiveness after 10-12 years in most people, which means that kids become susceptible again at the beginning of the teen years... when the virus switches from "annoying as heck" to "possibly causing permanent damage to fertility."
Wow, that's a really interesting list. Partly because many of those items are *also* linked to autoimmune responses to gluten in the human diet. In particular, diabetes (Types I and II), Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Rheumatoid arthritis, and colon cancer have been clinically confirmed to my knowledge; I also know of people with MS and Crohn's who find that going gluten-free improved their condition a great deal.
As you know, GameStop makes a tidy sum reselling used games, and the game developers don't see a penny of it. This has not a few people in the the games industry pissed off beyond the capacity for rational thought. No matter how much irrefutable logic or facts you throw at them, they're absolutely convinced they're "losing money" to this, and want to re-structure the market to prevent it.
They have restructured the market to prevent it: it's called an MMO(RP)G.
While I completely agree that their methods are abhorrent, I'm left wondering what legal means the RIAA had of pursuing their case. The fact is that wanton copyright infringement is occurring. As copyright holders, the RIAA does in fact have the right to go after the infringers. Their methods under the guise of Media Sentry are obviously less than ideal (both morally and legally), so what *should* they have done?
I'm just wondering if there's any course of action they could taken whereby their IP was protected and they weren't demonized by all of us.
Well, no. I think the upshot of much of the copyright discussion in the geek world for the past several years has been, there is NO way to enforce copyrights to the RIAA's satisfaction in the 21st century.
But part of the problem is, there's also no *reason* to. What the RIAA has failed to realize is that their problem is DEMAND. People *want* their product, in a given form. If it was easier to get for pay than for free, heck yeah people would do it, and DO do it.
If it was easier to put $20 on an account with RIAA's website, and then download songs from their catalog as the mood strikes you, in an unfettered format, they'd rake it in. Soooo many people would be far more willing to do that than to install a program, search for the song, hope it's REALLY the song and not some malware... yadda yadda.
Many of the songs that people are trading aren't even for sale, anywhere. What's ridiculous is that there *is* a demand for them, and it would be dead easy to supply it.
Once upon a time, recording equipment was awesomely expensive, media was delicate, and reproduction was a professional job. That made the business model easy. That has all changed, and this scares the crap out of the RIAA, but it shouldn't... it's made their job easier. However, it's also made it easier for someone else to do it. And that's exactly what's happening... as iTunes etc. take over the music market.
I don't like "automatic" because it's easy to set up, but difficult to stop.
The procedure to stop an automatic recurring payment in my bank's bill pay system goes like this:
* Log on with username/password; choose Bill Pay (You can do this all on the first page)
* Look at your upcoming payments, click on the one you want to change
* Click "Cancel this payment"
* Get a prompt that tells you this is part of a recurring series of payments. Do you want to cancel just *this* one, or the whole series?
* Choose as necessary
* Log out.
It's not like your Bally's membership being auto-deducted from your bank account. It's easy-peasy.
The potential security benefits don't hurt, as anyone screwing around with mailed bills faces the wrath of the United States Postal Inspection Service. Unlike most online fraud, fucking with the mails will actually get you in trouble, and USPIS doesn't blow you off if you haven't suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
We pay practically everything, even stuff to individuals, online... and 99% of it goes through the mail. There are a couple of our utilities that have something set up with our bank that lets the bank send the transaction electronically, but otherwise, we pay $7/month for them to print the check, stamp it, and mail it for us. So if we use it, what, 17 times a month (and I think we do, easily) we save money on postage right there.
Others have pointed out that you can have any and all transactions manually generated through online bill pay systems, as well. I found that when I started using online bill pay, I paid my bills on time and didn't overdraw my account, because I was no longer reliant on doing manual math in a check register, and didn't have to assemble the envelopes, statements, stamps, etc. to get a bill paid.
This is as distinct from services offered by certain billers, that let you log onto THEIR site and set up an automatic payment. We don't do those. EVER. No one else gets permission to take money out of my bank account.
I'm suspicious of research that "confirms the obvious." When we know the conclusion we expect to find, we often find it.
There has been a lot of research, and I've looked at it. There has NOT yet been a study that looks at the effect of cell phone use on driving safety. There are studies that look at proxy measures of reaction time when using things like cell phones; there are studies that attempt to determine whether someone who had an accident was talking on a cell phone; there are closed-course driving behavior scenarios which simulate cell phone use... but these are all totally unnecessary and unresponsive to the question: does cell phone use while driving present a hazard?
I thought I could predict whether someone was talking on a cell phone by driving behavior, too. So for a day, when I was doing a lot of highway and street driving, I tested this. Every time I observed a driver who was having difficulty keeping lane position, or negotiating turns, or was failing to signal their intention, or was driving faster or slower than conditions indicated, etc., I attempted to safely get a look at the driver's seat. In about 10 attempts, I found *one* person talking on the phone.
My own intuition says that there are people who get distracted on the road. They will be distracted whether they are talking on the phone, eating their lunch, or window shopping. The phone is not the problem in those cases, but driver behavior is. Laws prohibiting cell phone use don't address the underlying concern.
While I am inclined to accept the premise that there is a difference between talking to a passenger who is aware of the current conditions, and someone on a phone, I do not think it is reasonable to jump to the conclusion that this translates into an increased hazard. I'm especially disinclined to jump to this conclusion when it's totally feasible to look at the actual impact of cell phone use on road safety.
Anyone ever used a driving simulator? It isn't the same thing as driving a car. I don't have a subscription the Journal that the original study is in, but like every other study that's used some proxy measure of driving behavior, I doubt they normalized it against actual behind-the-wheel behavior.
And what I really don't get is why doesn't someone actually just find out if cell phone use has an effect on driving safety? It's really not that difficult, it just takes some time in SPSS and some cooperation from local law enforcement, state DMVs, and the cell phone companies... all of whom have an interest in ensuring that the laws put in place are the least restrictive that have a beneficial effect.
Here's how you do it: you collect accident data and cell phone market penetration data from the last 15-20 years for a handful of markets, probably larger urban markets with earlier adoption of cellular technology and large populations of drivers, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, etc. You run a multiple regression analysis, with accidents as the dependent variable, cell phone market penetration as an independent variable, and a lot of other independent variables such as population, VMT (vehicle miles traveled) per capita, a couple dummy variables for proportion of driving population over 55 or under 25, etc. etc.... everything we have reason to believe has some effect on accident rates.
When the computer is done thrashing, what it spits out is an approximate percentage of the change in accident rates that is attributable to cell phone use. Then we know not just that they make driving more risky, but how much more. We may even find that they make accidents LESS likely... perhaps other factors that increase accident risk are mitigated by cell phone use, such as running late (since you can call ahead and tell people you're late) or getting lost (calling for directions).
Yes, not everyone uses cell phones while they drive... but increased adoption of cell phone use overall has probably maintained a fairly consistent relationship with cell phone use while driving. With a bit of additional funding (so far, the study is dirt cheap... way cheaper than human subjects protocols and running simulators, it's just a geek and a computer being fed data that's already on a hard disk somewhere), you could conduct surveys in the various markets, looking at the rate of cell phone use while driving as a percentage of total use, and thereby compare the influence in different markets. In Los Angeles, maybe people are twice as likely to talk on the phone while driving as they are in Boston, and we may find that oh, gee, cell phone market penetration has twice as great an effect on accident rates in Los Angeles as in Boston... so, bingo.
Meanwhile, enacting laws because of what people do when playing a souped-up video game is a waste of everyone's time and energy, and it makes me cranky.
Glad to help you feel heard. Maybe that's the most important thing that geeks etc. can do... get on the ground in these schools and find out what it's really like. With that knowledge, we're far more likely to come up with ideas that will help.
Good point... and it makes me wonder why he doesn't use the file command to identify executables, rather than relying on the extension.
That explains the manila flooring in your living room.
Having access to the technology is a pretty important thing, IMO. This isn't 1980 when personal computers were a rarity. Being computer illiterate is almost as bad as being actually illiterate.
This.
I haven't read the whole thread yet, but I'm halfway down the page and this is the FIRST reply that even begins to understand the issue. We're not talking about suburban schools where Mom and Dad are going to show up on Parent's Night and oooh and aaaah over the Powerpoint presentations and berate the teacher for marking down for not showing work. We're talking about "inner-city" schools, which is a euphemism for places where nearly EVERY child is left behind.
Do you know why we have a free lunch program in our schools? Because when we started recruiting for WWII, about a THIRD of the candidates were 4-F classification due to childhood malnutrition. One good meal a day is better than nothing. You're talking about kids who walk into school hungry. Who get themselves out of bed and dressed and walk to school alone, because their parent (often only one) has left for work before the sun came up. That's to get to their *first* job; they're still at their second job while their child is doing homework and eating dinner (if there's such a thing). As much as these parents might *want* to be involved in their child's education, they haven't the first clue how to get involved (often being undereducated themselves) nor do they have the temporal resources to do it.
Putting a computer in the classroom isn't about using it to teach what is already being taught. Yes, the kids can learn math with a pencil and paper, and may learn it better that way than any other. But what the computer can do is put the world in context for them, and give them exposure to a tool that is going to be essential to breaking the cycle of poverty in the 21st century.
Here's an example: look up "cognitive maps" on Google. What researchers found was that kids from poor neighborhoods had a much smaller and sketchier concept of where they lived than their more affluent peers. My mom, who taught night school for adults attempting to get high school diplomas, remembers helping one of her students with a geography lesson. The student had to find her home city on a globe of the world. She was stumped, so my mom said, "Ok, what's nearby? Do we live near an ocean?" she didn't know. She'd lived in Los Angeles all her life, and had never seen the ocean.
Can you imagine what access to Google Maps might do to someone's understanding of, simply put, where they *are*? If you can locate UCLA and get transit directions from "here" to there, all of a sudden, the idea of going to college isn't so remote.
It's not about how computers can be used to enhance education. It's a whole other aspect of education. Just as people used to have to learn to use slide rules to have a hope of surviving college math classes, the computer is the new tool that EVERYONE has to learn to use or get left behind. For many students, the classroom is the only place that's going to happen.
I'm not sure I answered the OP's question. ;-) I do believe that simply putting the computers there, and showing interested students how to use them, is a useful thing and I'm glad he did it. He might want to point his fiancee toward donorschoose.org, where her school might find funding for an expanded program to bring computers and instruction into the classrooms. But it's a much, much bigger problem than what OS or how to firewall.
The problem is none of the systems are smart enough to have a check to them (and at this point, I'm not sure what kind of an automated check could have stopped this).
It seems to me that Google can stop this from ever happening again by simply coding the NewsBot to ignore all stories with no dateline.
That would cause their available stories to drop, of course... until about a week later when all the itty-bitty newspapers who get an overwhelming number of their referrals from Google would FINALLY put datelines on all their stories.
Having something "spoiled" is not simply a matter of having the suspense taken away. Yes, you can still enjoy the story if you know how certain things are going to be... but you don't enjoy it *as much* as if you're figuring out things as you go along. Ever watch a movie or read a book a second time? Ever notice things you didn't notice before... certain foreshadowings, links, etc.? It's a different experience when you know what happens than when you don't.
I accidentally got the books out of order in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy; read 2/3rds of the way through Blue Mars before I read Green Mars. Then, realizing the mistake, stopped Blue and read Green. It wasn't nearly as much fun, knowing how the war would turn out and who would die and who would get captured and have a personality transplant and whatnot. (It's not nearly as interesting as it sounds; I wish I had those dozens of hours I spent slogging through the series back.) Reading the remainder of Blue Mars was much more diverting (the first 2/3rds was sort of confusing, for obvious reasons).
In fact, my husband and I have started avoiding trailers for much-anticipated movies, because even that spoils our enjoyment some. There are some movies or books that are better if you "know what to expect," but most of my favorite media experiences have been when I went in cold, knowing nothing about what to expect or what would happen.
It comes as no surprise at all to me that women don't want to have serious conversations with you, though.
This article says that, while most people would like to telecommute at least some of the time, and companies don't perceive telecommuters as less productive than in-office employees, executives are still less likely to promote telecommuters than people in the office every day. But, why? People are talking about "face-time" and "company culture," but should decisions about promotions really be based on such incredibly subjective characteristics? It sounds like the problem that these executives have is that they haven't had time to become buddy-buddy with the telecommuters, and so they're reluctant to advance them in their careers. This is important information... because it tells us we need to change something about how executives view telecommuting, and in a larger view, career advancement.