I am aware of how statistics work. It has an effect, just not a statistically notable effect. Certainly odds of 1 out of 7809327498375098375987342509837098 are worse than odds of 50 out of 7809327498375098375987342509837098, but both events are so unlikely as to be impossible. If you're a person who has barely enough money for food every week, you're statistically not much worse off spending a buck a week on lottery tickets than spending $50, and the other $49 can go to other things.
And yes, the Mass rules have the same affect whether you have 1 ticket or 100,000 tickets, but at around 100,000 ticket it becomes statistically likely you'll make a profit. At one ticket it still isn't likely.
I agree, and will often spend a buck or two on lottery tickets for that reason. The problem is that people who are poor will often spend more than they can afford on lottery tickets in the mistaken belief that they are significantly effecting their odds of winning. Spending $50 or $100 a week on lottery tickets costs money that could be spent on other things, and doesn't really have any noticeable affect on your odds of winning. Even spending $100,000 on tickets doesn't have a statistically significant effect really, except under the special circumstances that Massachusetts has created here.
The flip side is that you don't need to cover the entire country, and most of the areas you would need to cover have fairly low population density. This could be a real solution for rural areas that are going to be hard to service with cable or DSL. Urban and suburban areas already have wired access; and while more choices are always nice I can't see this being a match in capability, reliability and price.
(I actually had a couple of clauses added to my contract to cover one or two of my projects - which is also something you can do!)
Exactly. I have had to sign some fairly silly contracts to get jobs, but in every case it's been a relatively trivial matter to get management approval for exceptions. Companies are generally just trying to cover their collective butts with these kinds of contracts, they don't actually want to own your every thought (well they might want to, but they know it's harder to keep employees that way, especially skilled employees). Go to your manager and say "Boss, I'm working on an open source (or proprietary for my own personal gain) software stack to do "blah", would you mind signing this exception to my contract?"
9/10 times your boss will sign the paper and you're all clear (at least if you work for reasonable people, which I try to make a point of doing). Now obviously if you ask him to sign off on you working on a direct competitor or something you'll have issues; but otherwise it's just a matter of a little forward planning, knowing what you've already signed, etc.
I can verify that this is also not uncommon in the US. There are some states that put limits on what the company can claim ownership of, and different companies are often more or less generous in their contract terms, but in general check your local laws and the contract you signed. There is no certainty of it, but it's quite possible that your employer owns anything you do "related to your field" at home as well as at work. They won't own the shed you built last weekend, but they can claim ownership of the OSS software you wrote the weekend before (again, depending on state law and what you signed.)
Whoops! Spell check is not my friend: overspecialization = over sensationalize. I don't even know how it thought those were close. Clearly I need more coffee.
The problem here is that the article is seeking to overspecialization something that that really seems like an issue. For instance, I'm fairly certain you can't get a professional office desktop for 200 pounds in the UK. I know you can't get one here for anything like $350 (which would be the approximate translation), and I doubt the UK is overflowing with excessively cheap hardware. You can get a computer for that, but not one you'd want. We're also given no context. I work for a US government facility. On my desk is a decent office class computer that we spent about $1200 on. Like the UK government we buy our computers with full on, bells and whistles support. I could probably get this same system for about $600 on the open market, but we're paying for support and all which roughly doubles the price. So UK prices we're probably looking, what, 700 or 800 pounds (sorry I can't remember how to make the pound symbol)?
Now, upstairs some of my users are tapping away on full workstation class machines : Dual quad core i5s, 24 GB of RAM, Nvidia Quatro cards, etc. Those things are nearly $10K a piece (again with full support). They use those systems for modeling, simulation, and analysis, so they're justified. So, if 3500 pounds is a normal office PC than your government is wasting a LOT of money. Even with all the bells and whistles support they could get those for a third of what they're paying. If the newspaper hunted around until they found some engineer's tricked out CAD machine then presented that as if it were "normal" then there's probably no issue.
I agree with you in principle, but again must point out some practicalities. The reason it would expensive to live in some states is because they have low populations to begin with. Force people out with unreasonable tax burdens and those places will become truly abandoned. This is a) bad for our international image ("Yeah, we used to have 50 states, but after they abandoned Montana and Alaska we couldn't figure out a way to tax the bears") b) a potentially serious issue for agriculture. Remember that the more rural a state is, the lower the population density, and (with a few exceptions where desert or cold make it unfeasible) the more agriculture it supports. If we drive everyone out of Iowa with impossibly high taxes or total lack of government services, we're all gonna be a mite hungry this winter.
I don't believe he said that women ever "dominated" the field merely that it didn't used to be "male dominated". 42/58 is definitely still "mostly male", but it's much further from "Male dominated" than the current split.
Computers in the 70's and early 80's were immensely difficult to work on. They were huge, had, at best, text based interfaces assuming that they weren't older models with card readers, were programmed in either C or Assembler (FORTRAN or COBOL if you were a specialist in the relevant field) had disk drives that required physical mounting (as in you picked up the big heavy assed disk and "mounted" it on the drive, that's where the term comes from)... It was only toward the mid-eighties that things for most operators started to get easier, and even then by the standards of a world used to Windows, OSX, and Linux it was quite challenging. We're talking about a time when people actually worried about writing code compact becasue you could literally, all by yourself and without an error condition, run machines out of memory doing simple stuff.
There's complexity now too, don't get me wrong, but it's just different complexity not more or less of it.
It's not so much that people believe only the Federal Government can come up with the money for certain things as it is a subtle redistribution of wealth to make sure that low population states don't turn into bankrupt republics. Sure, if federal grants went away and the states had to fend for themselves, places like New York or California would just up the state tax rate by a few percent (after much political wrangling, no doubt) and be fine. Most people in those states would probably see little or no difference in their overall (state and federal combined) tax burdens, some might even see it lower. Places like Montana and Alaska would have a serious problem. They simply don't have the tax base to recover the lost revenue. At least not without substantial increases in state tax rates. By percentage they may not eat up as much of the federal money as more populous states, but per capita they get a level of support from the rest of us.
The other issue I see with states taking on more of the burden (as a center-left resident of a very red state) is that in general Republican controlled states don't seem interested in taking up the ball of government service and running with it. They're constantly trying to trim and reduce state budgets too. For the Republicans that I deal with on a day to day basis, it's not a question of states rights, it's a question of cutting benefits and taxes all around, at every level. If the federal government stopped providing highway funds, Alabama would not say "Oh, we should raise state taxes by a mil so we can recover those funds and keep the roads up". They'd say, "well, the highways are going to suck more now".
All-in-all I'd say that your ideas have more merit than many small government activists and you've given thought to a range of solutions much more reasonable than the usual "Hack budget till it bleeds" attempts I see posted here. To carry those idea through would require a significant level of state and federal cooperation as services were transferred and budgets adjusted to the new reality. I question if that could happen.
Do you really think this is the case? What I see is a lot of people saying: "Don't touch my Medicare, don't touch my Social Security, don't raise my taxes, and balance the budget." Which is sort of a ridiculous position to take. Even if we're allowed to touch defense (which a lot of people don't want either) that's not enough room to maneuver. Hell a strikingly large percentage of Americans don't even seem to realize that Medicare and Social Security are tied to the federal government and the debt. Remember back during the health care debate when the nice old lady stood up to President Obama to say something along the lines of "I hate socialized medicine and don't touch my Medicare?"
I don't think people are stupid, but much like with technology they often lack the bandwidth in their daily lives to learn as much about politics as they probably should. People want more responsible government, and smaller government until they see how it's going to affect them personally. Everyone's happy with the idea that we should cut "stuff" out of the budget, but when the "stuff" gets personalized to "My Medicare", "My defense industry job", "My road project in my town" or whatever the happy starts to wane. Then you start hearing the "Well don't cut stuff like that, cut stuff like funding for research on the affects of cow methane on the local owl population (or pick your ridiculous government project of choice)" crowd starts up; blithely ignoring that fact that a) some of that research actually is valuable, just not in obvious ways, and b) it represents a really small portion of the federal budget.
We have among the lowest taxes in the developed world in this country, and we have the infrastructure to prove it. I'm not saying we should move to the European model of 40% taxes (yes, I pulled this number out of my butt, your European taxes may be higher or lower than this figure), but we can easily balance the budget with some prudent and moderate cuts to spending, along with very modest tax increases to say, where they were just 10 years ago. I know that real "small government" people like you probably understand the cuts that would be needed for true "small government", I'm not saying that you don't full understand your position. I'm saying that if most people truly understood what it meant to cut government this way, far fewer of them would support the idea.
There is a very large amount of rose color in your glasses, or the you've just gotten unlucky. Speaking in broad terms, crime is lower now in the US (and in most major metro areas) than it was 25 years ago when I was a kid (God that statement makes me feel old). Now, of course that doesn't mean that crime is lower in any one particular town, or that the town you live in now doesn't have more crime than the one you grew up in despite similar size, but broadly speaking the country is a safer place than it was in the "good old days". The difference is that with our happy new 24 hour news cycles and paranoid "family values" commentators we now hear about every God damned bad thing that happens. It makes us feel less safe.
Bill is not my favorite guy ever, but that was a well crafted flame. Made even better by the fact that it aimed at his own managers. In the long run it never really accomplished much, but you could see the light bulb going off as he realized what his customers had to go through when they had problems.
Unless you don't always have an Internet connection. I mean really, this is a much more ridiculous requirement than Steam (which just uses the Internet to download and activate your game). If I have a laptop, obviously I have an Internet connection at home to download, install and activate the game... Will I have one at the hotel? Sometimes, not always, and often not free. The Airport while I'm waiting for a flight? Sometimes, but again not always, and often not free. The airplane? Sometimes, but never free. These are all places I can think of that I might want to play my new game. There are all kinds of situations where you wouldn't have an Internet connection on a laptop for some length of time, and even at home sometimes your ISP just has a bad day.
Most people, myself included, think Steam is a reasonable compromise. There's DRM, but it's pretty consumer friendly. Once the game is activated the first time it works fine without an Internet connection (or if Steam drops off the face of the Earth tomorrow). Since typically you're activating the game right after you just downloaded and installed it, chances of you not having a 'Net connection aren't high. It's not perfect, the chance exists that some time in the future you might want to reinstall a Steam game you purchased years ago and Steam might have gone out of business... By that time I've usually lost at least one of the media disks anyway, so the risk from my point of view is pretty small.
Apparently you've never met my friends' kids. He didn't want to "get the Hell out of there" he wanted to visit gramma (of course, gramma living a 3 hour car ride away was a small problem in his clever plan). What could possibly make you think that well taken care of children don't "escape"? Independent and curious kids wander off all the time, they aren't "running away" they're looking for something interesting or wanting to go somewhere that they like to go. It's one of the hardest parts of being the parent of a toddler. My friend of course thought she was "safe" becasue he couldn't reach the doorknob. Full credits for cleverness on the kid's part, if not on his ability to visualize distance.
In most developed countries if a child runs away from home and shows signs of abuse or neglect, not only will they not be sent back home immediately, but the family will be investigated: possibly losing all their kids and/or going to jail. A friend of mine laid down to take a nap with her 1 and 3 year olds. She was awakened around 35 minutes later by a knock on the door. It was the police, with her 3 year old. He'd apparently decided that he wasn't sleepy, and wanted to walk to gramma's house. He'd created a stool from some books to reach the front doorknob and had walked about three blocks before a neighbor saw him and called the cops.
Since the kids was obviously cared for and not abused, the cops brought him home; but child services was by the next day to talk about it and continued to check in for a few months. This was for an obviously well dressed, well fed, kid with no bruises or signs of abuse, who had clearly "escaped" at nap time. You can bet things wouldn't have been nearly as polite if there were any signs of abuse or neglect. Now I thought child services was being ridiculously over cautious, but then again I know my friends and I know they take care of their kids. From an outsider's perspective I suppose they were just being prudent.
1) My 3GS is working, but getting a little beat up. Also my dad has my old 3G and I'd like to be able to give him one that has a fully functional GPS, he hates paying for data plans so takes my old smartphones and puts his SIM in them.
2) Probably not right now. $200 is a fairly minor expense, $600 or $800 would be much more considerable. Since the provider does subsidize though, and I'm going to be paying my monthly fee anyway, the unsubsidized price is not really relevant to my decision. I'd keep the data plan even if I didn't have too. I work at a facility that does not allow wifi, so my cellular data is the only way I get internet on my phone for the majority of the day.
I'm not rich or anything, but I'm doing well enough that $200 every two years or so is a fairly small investment for me on a device I use a lot.
Oh, you can get unlocked phones, but with the exception of T-mobile (who don't discount much), there's no "SIM only" rate on plans. So whether you sign a contract to get a free/cheap phone or use an unlocked phone your generally paying the same amount monthly. So most of us opt to get a discounted phone every two years more or less on principle (we're paying for the company match anyway). Right now in order to get a smartphone on contract you have to also get a data plan (although you can opt for the cheap, nearly useless ones for not much money). Also smartphones tend to be fairly expensive without plan discounts and this was a post about cheap ways to get phones.
In the US it's almost exclusively required that you get some sort of data plan to get contract pricing on a smartphone. There may be exceptions for some very low cost models, but to my knowledge if you the phone cheap, you're signing up for two years of data plan.
Nor are they any indication of wealth. Anyone who can afford an Android phone can afford an iPhone. They sell the 3GS for under $100 with contract now. You have to be able to afford a data plan of course but that's true of any smartphone.
Kinda my theory too. Unless the 5 is a worse device than the 4 (which seems unlikely), I probably want one to replace my 3GS. I'm still not going to say sight unseen that I want one though. I like my 3GS, and I like my wife's 4, so it seem reasonable that I'll like the 5... but "seems reasonable" doesn't make phone calls.
You said this earlier, and I still don't see how installing Linux servers will solve you problem. They ripped out a sub-set of what were generally believed to be pretty poor GUI administration tools. No actually services or daemons were removed, just some GUI tools. The Linux boxes you replace your servers with will also not have these GUI tools. You aren't solving your problem. Either A) stick with the OSX servers and configure them using the remaining GUI tools and some command line tools, or B) install Linux on your severs and configure those services with even fewer GUI tools and even more command line tools. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Linux servers. When I used Mac clients I typically back them with Linux servers anyway, I just don't see how switching to Linux is going to "fix" the "problems" brought out in this article.
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I am aware of how statistics work. It has an effect, just not a statistically notable effect. Certainly odds of 1 out of 7809327498375098375987342509837098 are worse than odds of 50 out of 7809327498375098375987342509837098, but both events are so unlikely as to be impossible. If you're a person who has barely enough money for food every week, you're statistically not much worse off spending a buck a week on lottery tickets than spending $50, and the other $49 can go to other things.
And yes, the Mass rules have the same affect whether you have 1 ticket or 100,000 tickets, but at around 100,000 ticket it becomes statistically likely you'll make a profit. At one ticket it still isn't likely.
Lottery winning are totally taxed. They get you coming and going.
I agree, and will often spend a buck or two on lottery tickets for that reason. The problem is that people who are poor will often spend more than they can afford on lottery tickets in the mistaken belief that they are significantly effecting their odds of winning. Spending $50 or $100 a week on lottery tickets costs money that could be spent on other things, and doesn't really have any noticeable affect on your odds of winning. Even spending $100,000 on tickets doesn't have a statistically significant effect really, except under the special circumstances that Massachusetts has created here.
The flip side is that you don't need to cover the entire country, and most of the areas you would need to cover have fairly low population density. This could be a real solution for rural areas that are going to be hard to service with cable or DSL. Urban and suburban areas already have wired access; and while more choices are always nice I can't see this being a match in capability, reliability and price.
(I actually had a couple of clauses added to my contract to cover one or two of my projects - which is also something you can do!)
Exactly. I have had to sign some fairly silly contracts to get jobs, but in every case it's been a relatively trivial matter to get management approval for exceptions. Companies are generally just trying to cover their collective butts with these kinds of contracts, they don't actually want to own your every thought (well they might want to, but they know it's harder to keep employees that way, especially skilled employees). Go to your manager and say "Boss, I'm working on an open source (or proprietary for my own personal gain) software stack to do "blah", would you mind signing this exception to my contract?"
9/10 times your boss will sign the paper and you're all clear (at least if you work for reasonable people, which I try to make a point of doing). Now obviously if you ask him to sign off on you working on a direct competitor or something you'll have issues; but otherwise it's just a matter of a little forward planning, knowing what you've already signed, etc.
I can verify that this is also not uncommon in the US. There are some states that put limits on what the company can claim ownership of, and different companies are often more or less generous in their contract terms, but in general check your local laws and the contract you signed. There is no certainty of it, but it's quite possible that your employer owns anything you do "related to your field" at home as well as at work. They won't own the shed you built last weekend, but they can claim ownership of the OSS software you wrote the weekend before (again, depending on state law and what you signed.)
Whoops! Spell check is not my friend: overspecialization = over sensationalize. I don't even know how it thought those were close. Clearly I need more coffee.
The problem here is that the article is seeking to overspecialization something that that really seems like an issue. For instance, I'm fairly certain you can't get a professional office desktop for 200 pounds in the UK. I know you can't get one here for anything like $350 (which would be the approximate translation), and I doubt the UK is overflowing with excessively cheap hardware. You can get a computer for that, but not one you'd want. We're also given no context. I work for a US government facility. On my desk is a decent office class computer that we spent about $1200 on. Like the UK government we buy our computers with full on, bells and whistles support. I could probably get this same system for about $600 on the open market, but we're paying for support and all which roughly doubles the price. So UK prices we're probably looking, what, 700 or 800 pounds (sorry I can't remember how to make the pound symbol)?
Now, upstairs some of my users are tapping away on full workstation class machines : Dual quad core i5s, 24 GB of RAM, Nvidia Quatro cards, etc. Those things are nearly $10K a piece (again with full support). They use those systems for modeling, simulation, and analysis, so they're justified. So, if 3500 pounds is a normal office PC than your government is wasting a LOT of money. Even with all the bells and whistles support they could get those for a third of what they're paying. If the newspaper hunted around until they found some engineer's tricked out CAD machine then presented that as if it were "normal" then there's probably no issue.
I agree with you in principle, but again must point out some practicalities. The reason it would expensive to live in some states is because they have low populations to begin with. Force people out with unreasonable tax burdens and those places will become truly abandoned. This is a) bad for our international image ("Yeah, we used to have 50 states, but after they abandoned Montana and Alaska we couldn't figure out a way to tax the bears") b) a potentially serious issue for agriculture. Remember that the more rural a state is, the lower the population density, and (with a few exceptions where desert or cold make it unfeasible) the more agriculture it supports. If we drive everyone out of Iowa with impossibly high taxes or total lack of government services, we're all gonna be a mite hungry this winter.
I don't believe he said that women ever "dominated" the field merely that it didn't used to be "male dominated". 42/58 is definitely still "mostly male", but it's much further from "Male dominated" than the current split.
Computers in the 70's and early 80's were immensely difficult to work on. They were huge, had, at best, text based interfaces assuming that they weren't older models with card readers, were programmed in either C or Assembler (FORTRAN or COBOL if you were a specialist in the relevant field) had disk drives that required physical mounting (as in you picked up the big heavy assed disk and "mounted" it on the drive, that's where the term comes from)... It was only toward the mid-eighties that things for most operators started to get easier, and even then by the standards of a world used to Windows, OSX, and Linux it was quite challenging. We're talking about a time when people actually worried about writing code compact becasue you could literally, all by yourself and without an error condition, run machines out of memory doing simple stuff.
There's complexity now too, don't get me wrong, but it's just different complexity not more or less of it.
It's not so much that people believe only the Federal Government can come up with the money for certain things as it is a subtle redistribution of wealth to make sure that low population states don't turn into bankrupt republics. Sure, if federal grants went away and the states had to fend for themselves, places like New York or California would just up the state tax rate by a few percent (after much political wrangling, no doubt) and be fine. Most people in those states would probably see little or no difference in their overall (state and federal combined) tax burdens, some might even see it lower. Places like Montana and Alaska would have a serious problem. They simply don't have the tax base to recover the lost revenue. At least not without substantial increases in state tax rates. By percentage they may not eat up as much of the federal money as more populous states, but per capita they get a level of support from the rest of us.
The other issue I see with states taking on more of the burden (as a center-left resident of a very red state) is that in general Republican controlled states don't seem interested in taking up the ball of government service and running with it. They're constantly trying to trim and reduce state budgets too. For the Republicans that I deal with on a day to day basis, it's not a question of states rights, it's a question of cutting benefits and taxes all around, at every level. If the federal government stopped providing highway funds, Alabama would not say "Oh, we should raise state taxes by a mil so we can recover those funds and keep the roads up". They'd say, "well, the highways are going to suck more now".
All-in-all I'd say that your ideas have more merit than many small government activists and you've given thought to a range of solutions much more reasonable than the usual "Hack budget till it bleeds" attempts I see posted here. To carry those idea through would require a significant level of state and federal cooperation as services were transferred and budgets adjusted to the new reality. I question if that could happen.
Do you really think this is the case? What I see is a lot of people saying: "Don't touch my Medicare, don't touch my Social Security, don't raise my taxes, and balance the budget." Which is sort of a ridiculous position to take. Even if we're allowed to touch defense (which a lot of people don't want either) that's not enough room to maneuver. Hell a strikingly large percentage of Americans don't even seem to realize that Medicare and Social Security are tied to the federal government and the debt. Remember back during the health care debate when the nice old lady stood up to President Obama to say something along the lines of "I hate socialized medicine and don't touch my Medicare?"
I don't think people are stupid, but much like with technology they often lack the bandwidth in their daily lives to learn as much about politics as they probably should. People want more responsible government, and smaller government until they see how it's going to affect them personally. Everyone's happy with the idea that we should cut "stuff" out of the budget, but when the "stuff" gets personalized to "My Medicare", "My defense industry job", "My road project in my town" or whatever the happy starts to wane. Then you start hearing the "Well don't cut stuff like that, cut stuff like funding for research on the affects of cow methane on the local owl population (or pick your ridiculous government project of choice)" crowd starts up; blithely ignoring that fact that a) some of that research actually is valuable, just not in obvious ways, and b) it represents a really small portion of the federal budget.
We have among the lowest taxes in the developed world in this country, and we have the infrastructure to prove it. I'm not saying we should move to the European model of 40% taxes (yes, I pulled this number out of my butt, your European taxes may be higher or lower than this figure), but we can easily balance the budget with some prudent and moderate cuts to spending, along with very modest tax increases to say, where they were just 10 years ago. I know that real "small government" people like you probably understand the cuts that would be needed for true "small government", I'm not saying that you don't full understand your position. I'm saying that if most people truly understood what it meant to cut government this way, far fewer of them would support the idea.
There is a very large amount of rose color in your glasses, or the you've just gotten unlucky. Speaking in broad terms, crime is lower now in the US (and in most major metro areas) than it was 25 years ago when I was a kid (God that statement makes me feel old). Now, of course that doesn't mean that crime is lower in any one particular town, or that the town you live in now doesn't have more crime than the one you grew up in despite similar size, but broadly speaking the country is a safer place than it was in the "good old days". The difference is that with our happy new 24 hour news cycles and paranoid "family values" commentators we now hear about every God damned bad thing that happens. It makes us feel less safe.
Bill is not my favorite guy ever, but that was a well crafted flame. Made even better by the fact that it aimed at his own managers. In the long run it never really accomplished much, but you could see the light bulb going off as he realized what his customers had to go through when they had problems.
Unless you don't always have an Internet connection. I mean really, this is a much more ridiculous requirement than Steam (which just uses the Internet to download and activate your game). If I have a laptop, obviously I have an Internet connection at home to download, install and activate the game... Will I have one at the hotel? Sometimes, not always, and often not free. The Airport while I'm waiting for a flight? Sometimes, but again not always, and often not free. The airplane? Sometimes, but never free. These are all places I can think of that I might want to play my new game. There are all kinds of situations where you wouldn't have an Internet connection on a laptop for some length of time, and even at home sometimes your ISP just has a bad day.
Most people, myself included, think Steam is a reasonable compromise. There's DRM, but it's pretty consumer friendly. Once the game is activated the first time it works fine without an Internet connection (or if Steam drops off the face of the Earth tomorrow). Since typically you're activating the game right after you just downloaded and installed it, chances of you not having a 'Net connection aren't high. It's not perfect, the chance exists that some time in the future you might want to reinstall a Steam game you purchased years ago and Steam might have gone out of business... By that time I've usually lost at least one of the media disks anyway, so the risk from my point of view is pretty small.
Apparently you've never met my friends' kids. He didn't want to "get the Hell out of there" he wanted to visit gramma (of course, gramma living a 3 hour car ride away was a small problem in his clever plan). What could possibly make you think that well taken care of children don't "escape"? Independent and curious kids wander off all the time, they aren't "running away" they're looking for something interesting or wanting to go somewhere that they like to go. It's one of the hardest parts of being the parent of a toddler. My friend of course thought she was "safe" becasue he couldn't reach the doorknob. Full credits for cleverness on the kid's part, if not on his ability to visualize distance.
In most developed countries if a child runs away from home and shows signs of abuse or neglect, not only will they not be sent back home immediately, but the family will be investigated: possibly losing all their kids and/or going to jail. A friend of mine laid down to take a nap with her 1 and 3 year olds. She was awakened around 35 minutes later by a knock on the door. It was the police, with her 3 year old. He'd apparently decided that he wasn't sleepy, and wanted to walk to gramma's house. He'd created a stool from some books to reach the front doorknob and had walked about three blocks before a neighbor saw him and called the cops.
Since the kids was obviously cared for and not abused, the cops brought him home; but child services was by the next day to talk about it and continued to check in for a few months. This was for an obviously well dressed, well fed, kid with no bruises or signs of abuse, who had clearly "escaped" at nap time. You can bet things wouldn't have been nearly as polite if there were any signs of abuse or neglect. Now I thought child services was being ridiculously over cautious, but then again I know my friends and I know they take care of their kids. From an outsider's perspective I suppose they were just being prudent.
1) My 3GS is working, but getting a little beat up. Also my dad has my old 3G and I'd like to be able to give him one that has a fully functional GPS, he hates paying for data plans so takes my old smartphones and puts his SIM in them.
2) Probably not right now. $200 is a fairly minor expense, $600 or $800 would be much more considerable. Since the provider does subsidize though, and I'm going to be paying my monthly fee anyway, the unsubsidized price is not really relevant to my decision. I'd keep the data plan even if I didn't have too. I work at a facility that does not allow wifi, so my cellular data is the only way I get internet on my phone for the majority of the day.
I'm not rich or anything, but I'm doing well enough that $200 every two years or so is a fairly small investment for me on a device I use a lot.
Oh, you can get unlocked phones, but with the exception of T-mobile (who don't discount much), there's no "SIM only" rate on plans. So whether you sign a contract to get a free/cheap phone or use an unlocked phone your generally paying the same amount monthly. So most of us opt to get a discounted phone every two years more or less on principle (we're paying for the company match anyway). Right now in order to get a smartphone on contract you have to also get a data plan (although you can opt for the cheap, nearly useless ones for not much money). Also smartphones tend to be fairly expensive without plan discounts and this was a post about cheap ways to get phones.
In the US it's almost exclusively required that you get some sort of data plan to get contract pricing on a smartphone. There may be exceptions for some very low cost models, but to my knowledge if you the phone cheap, you're signing up for two years of data plan.
Nor are they any indication of wealth. Anyone who can afford an Android phone can afford an iPhone. They sell the 3GS for under $100 with contract now. You have to be able to afford a data plan of course but that's true of any smartphone.
Kinda my theory too. Unless the 5 is a worse device than the 4 (which seems unlikely), I probably want one to replace my 3GS. I'm still not going to say sight unseen that I want one though. I like my 3GS, and I like my wife's 4, so it seem reasonable that I'll like the 5... but "seems reasonable" doesn't make phone calls.
You said this earlier, and I still don't see how installing Linux servers will solve you problem. They ripped out a sub-set of what were generally believed to be pretty poor GUI administration tools. No actually services or daemons were removed, just some GUI tools. The Linux boxes you replace your servers with will also not have these GUI tools. You aren't solving your problem. Either A) stick with the OSX servers and configure them using the remaining GUI tools and some command line tools, or B) install Linux on your severs and configure those services with even fewer GUI tools and even more command line tools. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Linux servers. When I used Mac clients I typically back them with Linux servers anyway, I just don't see how switching to Linux is going to "fix" the "problems" brought out in this article.