You know that your students are going to have difficulty getting a computer (and several of your cheaper suggestions ignore the need for a monitor and keyboard and mouse, so that laptop is likely the bottom end for someone starting from scratch). But you're requiring all your assignments to be typed and emailed.
So, my hopefully armor-piercing question to you is - are you teaching English or Computer Studies? If the latter, then the 10-15% are just SOL. If the former, you should be making an allowance for hard copy submissions (for folks without email, or who perhaps have an old typewriter they can use - don't laugh, they still exist!), or for handwritten submissions. It wasn't that many years ago when you weren't allowed to type up your essays, after all - made it too easy to use the computer spellcheck instead of learning to spell yourself.
Simple and silly example: HR brings in a game console for the lunch room, encouraging people to play on their breaks.
Every single person who used it for any length of time ended up getting talked to by their boss because they were "getting a reputation for slacking off". Basically, taking HR up on their "perk" was taken as a signal that you were a bad worker.
At the same time, even though "lack of communication between departments" is perennially at the top of the feedback from employees, and management insists that they want to "break down silos", heaven forbid you actually spend time talking to other departments - that's time you could be working!
We rely on our server uptime because of someone else's electricity (we should just generate our own)
I'm not even in a tech company, and we rely on business uptime by ensuring that we *can* generate our own electricity if need be. (UPSs to guarantee the critical machines don't die, which includes certain workstations), and then a generator on-site to power the building until the utility company sorts their problems out and switch back over.
The difference you're making is "are you trusting your core business to an outsider who won't suffer as much as you if they fail"?
That only works if he doesn't know that he's sitting in a Faraday cage. Otherwise the kid would simply subconsciously - or consciously - fake symptoms just to fulfill the prophesy declared by his parents. He can't know the Faraday cage is there, else you'd never be able to rule out WiFi RF and narrow it to "something [else] environmental".
So, tell his parents to buy him a Faraday suit to handle his disability. Schools don't have to supply wheelchairs or white canes. If they're concerned that their kid has the WiFi heebie-jeebies, then they should protect their kid.
Of course, I would love to hear their explanation for why TV and radio signals don't affect him. Or cell phones. Or cordless phones, microwaves, police scanners, or light bulbs in general.
And ignoring the GamerGate angle, I wouldn't be surprised if some voters looked at a guy who openly attempted to rig voting so that his publishing house was "guaranteed" a Hugo and decided "yeah, let's not".
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
And how much of that is because how welfare is set up? I've known someone in the position you're describing, and it's nothing to do with "comfort zone". It's the strict financials of doing the math and realizing that taking any job below $X actually *costs* you money, because you automatically lose your healthcare and other benefits. And depending on how assholean your local system is, taking even a part time job (you know, something to let you exercise your skills, build your resume) triggers the loss. And I would say there is a special place in hell for whoever came up with the idea of clawing back benefits *faster* than you're earning the money.
But to sum up - there are certainly people who are falling into depression, but it's because they've found themselves in a place where it sucks, but they'll be punished for trying to do something about it - so they spend their days knowing they'll never be able to get out.
The tactics may be reprehensible but the fact that they are trying to contain labor costs should surprise no one.
And let's not deceive ourselves here - this isn't a case of paying the cashiers a buck less an hour and Passing The Savings On To You!(tm). This is taking that forty bucks a week per person and plowing it right into executive bonuses. Throw a part of that to middle management for "controlling costs", and you end up with places where no-one knows how to make a hamburger anymore.
the justifications for such action - delivered by the character played by robert redford - sound so completely sane and rational that it's genuinely hard - rationally - to come up with a counter-argument. questions are asked such as "what if we could stop terrorists before they act?" and to be absolutely honest, the responses by the actors were really not that convincing, as they sounded lame in their "emotive" and "moral conscience" justification.
That's because the plot demands it - the counterargument is simple: until you do something, you're not guilty of *anything*. Thinking about something is not a crime. And police prevent crime not by stopping it before it happens, but by stopping it often enough *after* it happens that people think twice about doing it in the first place.
They had 3 last year. The last six years is 2,3,5,9,3,2.
So while it's technically true that this was a good year, trying to claim that this is proof of *anything* other than being a very-slightly lower year is marketing BS at it's worst.
That list includes journalists who embarrassed the government, a few actors, some folks who had similar names to dangerous people, etc. This would have never become an issue if the government actually took people off the list when there was a mistake, but they didn't until forced by judicial sanction. For the longest time they refused to acknowledge that such a list existed at all, and refused to verify if anyone had ever been placed on it. How do you resolve mistakes in a list that's top secret? That was the whole problem; excessive secrecy led directly to the abuse they promised wouldn't happen. If they had acted responsibly we wouldn't be here now.
From the government's POV, there is absolutely no benefit currently to take a name off the list.
The list is secret and they don't have to defend it, so adding names costs them little besides the occasional lawsuit. But if they take names off the list, eventually someone who was on the list and came off will do something, and then it'll be sixteen shades of shit while everyone has to explain why the system failed.
2. But more importantly, when a department is downsized or moved - its employees are NOT fired. They are given freedom to shop around for a team to join.
How does this work in practical terms? Do they add headcount in those new teams to accommodate, or is this just a pretty way of saying "sure, you can apply for any future openings we may have"?
It's hard to jam every frequency, short of EMP weapons, which only affect stuff for a limited time, and your own fighters.
But drones may require more autonomous fighting when bandwidth is limited by jamming. In other words, AI. Sky Net:-)
Why would you bother to jam them in the first place? In order to send data back to the operator, the drone is constantly broadcasting, which means it should be a sitting duck for any number of homing ordinances. (Not like you can tell the drone to go silent, because then the operator is blind)
Well, if you're concerned about a camera (and assuming that it's watching you), you *can* gesture to the camera - and thus the operator - to indicate you want it gone. Or, while you wait for the police to arrive to deal with your trespasser, you could GO INSIDE THE HOUSE if you're worried about tiny terrorists infiltrating your pool. Or, as others had mentioned, if it's really so close that it's trespassing, you could hit it with a water hose or a baseball. But no, he decided to discharge a firearm, into the air, in a residential neighborhood.
And you're ignoring the key point - his FIRST choice was to pull out a lethal weapon and destroy it. So now, as his neighbor, the data point I have to work with is that this guy can, will, and HAS fired a shotgun in a residential neighorhood, and then threatened lethal force when the owner came to retrieve his property. And then refused to relinguish said property until the police came and made him give it back. These are not the habits of a reasonable person.
So, to answer your point, I'm sure he knows the difference between a toy and a kid. But given he had no problems threatening four people that same day, I don't think he cares about the difference.
First, what if he'd taken it down with a garden hose pressure washer? Or a butterfly net? Or a toy bow and arrow with rubber suction cup arrow heads? Or he threw a rock at it? Or he knocked it out with a stunt kite... or just got it tangled in a kite line. Or he forced it down with another drone.
I would suspect he would get a lot more leeway, if he can at least claim with a straight face that he got it off his property with a minimum of force.
Second, I'm curious how exactly you define lethal force vs an unmanned, inananimate object?
By making the obvious comparison. He's playing the "won't you think of the children" card (even though there is no evidence to date that Mr. Drone Pilot was actually perving). So what if we use a more plausible scenario - a teenage boy is walking by, and decides to gawk over the fence at the teenage girls. Do we applaud this gent for immediately shooting the kid with a shotgun for trespassing?
This is a gent whose first reaction to "hey, there's something on my land" was "I'm gonna shoot it". I would not be thrilled to have this guy as my neighbor, because who knows when he's going to decide that a kid jumping the fence to retrieve a ball is a Deadly Terrorist Intruder?
So what is the helicpoter floor exactly? Can I hover a helicopter 5 yards over your backyard for an hour? At 50' for 30 minutes? What is the limit? Is it 100' for 1 minute? How long / how close to you have to be to my property before its a trespass?
Well, if we're speaking in terms of "how long before you get to use lethal force", I suspect it's a lot longer than you'd like.
More likely scenario: Sure, on the FINAL FLIGHT over this guy's house the drone operator got 22 seconds. It was the repeated previous flights that almost certainly had to have happened that the drone operators don't want to talk about because it doesn't make them look good.
I would counter that with the fact that he admits he was carrying his Glock when the pilot (and apparently friends) arrived, and then threatened to shoot them if they came closer. So now he's got a shotgun *and* pistol on hand. Oddly I have this suspicion that he was more worried about the Gov'mint than he was about terrorists...
Have you ever seen a kid when ice cream truck music starts playing? Those kids don't want a popsicle from the freezer - they want the exact same popsicle from the ice cream truck at three times the price. Adults get a little better at suppressing that kind of irrational act, but we're still susceptible to it. Even people who believe they make purchases only after coldly tabulating the marginal enjoyment of one more M&M against the penny it costs.
You can train that out of a kid. Mine still has the "OOH ICE CREAM" reaction, but unless Grandma is around she knows that we'll happily take her to the store to get a *box* of ice cream for the same price. But even pushing 40, I still have that "impulse buy" rush when I hear the music - and I've probably had less than 5 of them from the truck in my entire life. It's very memetic.
That is an interesting side effect. If Google is actually manually nuking the true site, you would think they'd take the extra five minutes to go a bit deeper, rather than serve up malware.
In all honesty, I'd respect Google (and the folks who want Google to manage/censor results) if a search for that name came up with a box saying "Yeah, we know what you want, but we're not going to show it to you because [reasons]".
Can I reserve outrage for the fact that this was granted a patent in the first place?
Bank balance or available credit or hair color is just data. This is a patent on "looking something up", and is total BS.
Now, if/when someone tries to actually implement this, I think my response will be mockery, half to whatever company thinks people will give them access to their banking histories in order to improve advertising, and the other half to the idiots that will click "yes" to be entered in a free draw.
When they tell someone with a walking stick they can't have it anymore either.
Guessing Disney forgot that you can buy walking sticks with camera mounts (no endorsement intended on the link - just the first returned result for "walking stick with camera mount")
Yes:There is no reason to assume they have a real illness
Strictly speaking, there's no reason to assume they have a physical illness. There's many reasons to suspect they have a mental illness - namely, a fear of technology. Of course, you can't crusade for people to change their lives to help you when the problem is You.
Maybe we should create a special girls-only class to teach girls about how to live in a world where they won't receive special treatment.
Please tell me you can create that world. I'd sleep much better knowing that my daughter isn't going to be treated differently from the boys around her.
No catcalling, far less risk of assault and rape, no body-shaming, no being told that liking something is wrong because "that's for boys"? Yeah, that works for me.
So what's the article trying to say? That a toy which inspires a child's interest in science and technology is BAD unless it inspires boys and girls in equal proportions? Get outta here.
I think they're asking why we feel that unless we wrap technology in comfortable gender roles girls won't get it? What's next, Blue and Pink IDEs?
And the article is pointing out that the Pink/Blue Divide is a modern advancement, because having gender-specific toys means that you have to Buy More Toys when you have a girl. (Because your girl can't play with Boy Stuff - that's just gross!)
Slashdot Mirror
You have an incompatibility in your premise.
You know that your students are going to have difficulty getting a computer (and several of your cheaper suggestions ignore the need for a monitor and keyboard and mouse, so that laptop is likely the bottom end for someone starting from scratch). But you're requiring all your assignments to be typed and emailed.
So, my hopefully armor-piercing question to you is - are you teaching English or Computer Studies? If the latter, then the 10-15% are just SOL. If the former, you should be making an allowance for hard copy submissions (for folks without email, or who perhaps have an old typewriter they can use - don't laugh, they still exist!), or for handwritten submissions. It wasn't that many years ago when you weren't allowed to type up your essays, after all - made it too easy to use the computer spellcheck instead of learning to spell yourself.
Simple and silly example: HR brings in a game console for the lunch room, encouraging people to play on their breaks.
Every single person who used it for any length of time ended up getting talked to by their boss because they were "getting a reputation for slacking off". Basically, taking HR up on their "perk" was taken as a signal that you were a bad worker.
At the same time, even though "lack of communication between departments" is perennially at the top of the feedback from employees, and management insists that they want to "break down silos", heaven forbid you actually spend time talking to other departments - that's time you could be working!
We rely on our server uptime because of someone else's electricity (we should just generate our own)
I'm not even in a tech company, and we rely on business uptime by ensuring that we *can* generate our own electricity if need be. (UPSs to guarantee the critical machines don't die, which includes certain workstations), and then a generator on-site to power the building until the utility company sorts their problems out and switch back over.
The difference you're making is "are you trusting your core business to an outsider who won't suffer as much as you if they fail"?
That only works if he doesn't know that he's sitting in a Faraday cage. Otherwise the kid would simply subconsciously - or consciously - fake symptoms just to fulfill the prophesy declared by his parents. He can't know the Faraday cage is there, else you'd never be able to rule out WiFi RF and narrow it to "something [else] environmental".
So, tell his parents to buy him a Faraday suit to handle his disability. Schools don't have to supply wheelchairs or white canes. If they're concerned that their kid has the WiFi heebie-jeebies, then they should protect their kid.
Of course, I would love to hear their explanation for why TV and radio signals don't affect him. Or cell phones. Or cordless phones, microwaves, police scanners, or light bulbs in general.
And ignoring the GamerGate angle, I wouldn't be surprised if some voters looked at a guy who openly attempted to rig voting so that his publishing house was "guaranteed" a Hugo and decided "yeah, let's not".
In the end, they were proven right that the Hugo's are being vote blocked and that it needs to be fixed.
Alternately, it was proven that while you can game the system to force your choices to be nominated, you can't force the voters to like them.
If that don't work for you, it's a reminder that stacking the nominations means squat unless you also manage to stack the voting.
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
And how much of that is because how welfare is set up? I've known someone in the position you're describing, and it's nothing to do with "comfort zone". It's the strict financials of doing the math and realizing that taking any job below $X actually *costs* you money, because you automatically lose your healthcare and other benefits. And depending on how assholean your local system is, taking even a part time job (you know, something to let you exercise your skills, build your resume) triggers the loss. And I would say there is a special place in hell for whoever came up with the idea of clawing back benefits *faster* than you're earning the money.
But to sum up - there are certainly people who are falling into depression, but it's because they've found themselves in a place where it sucks, but they'll be punished for trying to do something about it - so they spend their days knowing they'll never be able to get out.
The tactics may be reprehensible but the fact that they are trying to contain labor costs should surprise no one.
And let's not deceive ourselves here - this isn't a case of paying the cashiers a buck less an hour and Passing The Savings On To You!(tm). This is taking that forty bucks a week per person and plowing it right into executive bonuses. Throw a part of that to middle management for "controlling costs", and you end up with places where no-one knows how to make a hamburger anymore.
the justifications for such action - delivered by the character played by robert redford - sound so completely sane and rational that it's genuinely hard - rationally - to come up with a counter-argument. questions are asked such as "what if we could stop terrorists before they act?" and to be absolutely honest, the responses by the actors were really not that convincing, as they sounded lame in their "emotive" and "moral conscience" justification.
That's because the plot demands it - the counterargument is simple: until you do something, you're not guilty of *anything*. Thinking about something is not a crime. And police prevent crime not by stopping it before it happens, but by stopping it often enough *after* it happens that people think twice about doing it in the first place.
From the Google Docs, they had 2 this year.
They had 3 last year. The last six years is 2,3,5,9,3,2.
So while it's technically true that this was a good year, trying to claim that this is proof of *anything* other than being a very-slightly lower year is marketing BS at it's worst.
That list includes journalists who embarrassed the government, a few actors, some folks who had similar names to dangerous people, etc. This would have never become an issue if the government actually took people off the list when there was a mistake, but they didn't until forced by judicial sanction. For the longest time they refused to acknowledge that such a list existed at all, and refused to verify if anyone had ever been placed on it. How do you resolve mistakes in a list that's top secret? That was the whole problem; excessive secrecy led directly to the abuse they promised wouldn't happen. If they had acted responsibly we wouldn't be here now.
From the government's POV, there is absolutely no benefit currently to take a name off the list.
The list is secret and they don't have to defend it, so adding names costs them little besides the occasional lawsuit. But if they take names off the list, eventually someone who was on the list and came off will do something, and then it'll be sixteen shades of shit while everyone has to explain why the system failed.
2. But more importantly, when a department is downsized or moved - its employees are NOT fired. They are given freedom to shop around for a team to join.
How does this work in practical terms? Do they add headcount in those new teams to accommodate, or is this just a pretty way of saying "sure, you can apply for any future openings we may have"?
It's hard to jam every frequency, short of EMP weapons, which only affect stuff for a limited time, and your own fighters.
But drones may require more autonomous fighting when bandwidth is limited by jamming. In other words, AI. Sky Net :-)
Why would you bother to jam them in the first place? In order to send data back to the operator, the drone is constantly broadcasting, which means it should be a sitting duck for any number of homing ordinances. (Not like you can tell the drone to go silent, because then the operator is blind)
Well, if you're concerned about a camera (and assuming that it's watching you), you *can* gesture to the camera - and thus the operator - to indicate you want it gone. Or, while you wait for the police to arrive to deal with your trespasser, you could GO INSIDE THE HOUSE if you're worried about tiny terrorists infiltrating your pool. Or, as others had mentioned, if it's really so close that it's trespassing, you could hit it with a water hose or a baseball. But no, he decided to discharge a firearm, into the air, in a residential neighborhood.
And you're ignoring the key point - his FIRST choice was to pull out a lethal weapon and destroy it. So now, as his neighbor, the data point I have to work with is that this guy can, will, and HAS fired a shotgun in a residential neighorhood, and then threatened lethal force when the owner came to retrieve his property. And then refused to relinguish said property until the police came and made him give it back. These are not the habits of a reasonable person.
So, to answer your point, I'm sure he knows the difference between a toy and a kid. But given he had no problems threatening four people that same day, I don't think he cares about the difference.
First, what if he'd taken it down with a garden hose pressure washer? Or a butterfly net? Or a toy bow and arrow with rubber suction cup arrow heads? Or he threw a rock at it? Or he knocked it out with a stunt kite... or just got it tangled in a kite line. Or he forced it down with another drone.
I would suspect he would get a lot more leeway, if he can at least claim with a straight face that he got it off his property with a minimum of force.
Second, I'm curious how exactly you define lethal force vs an unmanned, inananimate object?
By making the obvious comparison. He's playing the "won't you think of the children" card (even though there is no evidence to date that Mr. Drone Pilot was actually perving). So what if we use a more plausible scenario - a teenage boy is walking by, and decides to gawk over the fence at the teenage girls. Do we applaud this gent for immediately shooting the kid with a shotgun for trespassing?
This is a gent whose first reaction to "hey, there's something on my land" was "I'm gonna shoot it". I would not be thrilled to have this guy as my neighbor, because who knows when he's going to decide that a kid jumping the fence to retrieve a ball is a Deadly Terrorist Intruder?
So what is the helicpoter floor exactly? Can I hover a helicopter 5 yards over your backyard for an hour? At 50' for 30 minutes? What is the limit? Is it 100' for 1 minute? How long / how close to you have to be to my property before its a trespass?
Well, if we're speaking in terms of "how long before you get to use lethal force", I suspect it's a lot longer than you'd like.
More likely scenario: Sure, on the FINAL FLIGHT over this guy's house the drone operator got 22 seconds. It was the repeated previous flights that almost certainly had to have happened that the drone operators don't want to talk about because it doesn't make them look good.
I would counter that with the fact that he admits he was carrying his Glock when the pilot (and apparently friends) arrived, and then threatened to shoot them if they came closer. So now he's got a shotgun *and* pistol on hand. Oddly I have this suspicion that he was more worried about the Gov'mint than he was about terrorists...
Have you ever seen a kid when ice cream truck music starts playing? Those kids don't want a popsicle from the freezer - they want the exact same popsicle from the ice cream truck at three times the price. Adults get a little better at suppressing that kind of irrational act, but we're still susceptible to it. Even people who believe they make purchases only after coldly tabulating the marginal enjoyment of one more M&M against the penny it costs.
You can train that out of a kid. Mine still has the "OOH ICE CREAM" reaction, but unless Grandma is around she knows that we'll happily take her to the store to get a *box* of ice cream for the same price. But even pushing 40, I still have that "impulse buy" rush when I hear the music - and I've probably had less than 5 of them from the truck in my entire life. It's very memetic.
That is an interesting side effect. If Google is actually manually nuking the true site, you would think they'd take the extra five minutes to go a bit deeper, rather than serve up malware.
In all honesty, I'd respect Google (and the folks who want Google to manage/censor results) if a search for that name came up with a box saying "Yeah, we know what you want, but we're not going to show it to you because [reasons]".
Can I reserve outrage for the fact that this was granted a patent in the first place?
Bank balance or available credit or hair color is just data. This is a patent on "looking something up", and is total BS.
Now, if/when someone tries to actually implement this, I think my response will be mockery, half to whatever company thinks people will give them access to their banking histories in order to improve advertising, and the other half to the idiots that will click "yes" to be entered in a free draw.
When they tell someone with a walking stick they can't have it anymore either.
Guessing Disney forgot that you can buy walking sticks with camera mounts (no endorsement intended on the link - just the first returned result for "walking stick with camera mount")
Yes:There is no reason to assume they have a real illness
Strictly speaking, there's no reason to assume they have a physical illness. There's many reasons to suspect they have a mental illness - namely, a fear of technology. Of course, you can't crusade for people to change their lives to help you when the problem is You.
And "Eventually I established that I was reacting to a buried cellphone tower.
Wait. What?
"Buried cellphone tower" - is that actually a thing? If so, why?
Maybe we should create a special girls-only class to teach girls about how to live in a world where they won't receive special treatment.
Please tell me you can create that world. I'd sleep much better knowing that my daughter isn't going to be treated differently from the boys around her.
No catcalling, far less risk of assault and rape, no body-shaming, no being told that liking something is wrong because "that's for boys"? Yeah, that works for me.
So what's the article trying to say? That a toy which inspires a child's interest in science and technology is BAD unless it inspires boys and girls in equal proportions? Get outta here.
I think they're asking why we feel that unless we wrap technology in comfortable gender roles girls won't get it? What's next, Blue and Pink IDEs?
And the article is pointing out that the Pink/Blue Divide is a modern advancement, because having gender-specific toys means that you have to Buy More Toys when you have a girl. (Because your girl can't play with Boy Stuff - that's just gross!)