I dunno. Work bought a couple of iPads recently for developing a mobile app. While the high res display is non-obvious in things like the desktop or e-mail, anything graphical is quite obviously and noticeably better on the new screens. We pulled up satellite imagery in Google maps and were quite literally shocked by the quality of the images. This was without any lower res screens to compare with initially, it was just obviously better than what we had seen before. After a few minutes someone brought out an older iPad and someone else an older Android tablet so we could do a direct comparison. That made the quality more obvious, but even standing alone, the quality was impressive.
Of course we're all computer professionals (programmers and systems people), and we work with graphics day to day, so maybe that's part of it. All in all, I was impressed. Honestly, the screen update from my iPhone 3GS to my 4S, while nice and certainly noticeable in a direct comparison, hadn't impressed me all that much. On the larger screen it's *much* more obvious.
It appears to be a real product that they will sell, like the Zune. Most of the analysts seem to be debating the Wisdom of Microsoft competing directly with its hardware partners. Price point for the Win RT version has been stated as "competitive" with iPad, but the Windows 8 version is looking like it's going to be expensive (~$1000). It's going to compete with ultrabooks, and run i386 Windows software I assume. Still a bit of a risk going so high above the "standard" tablet pricing though.
I don't know anything about his specific situation, but I know enough about the Military systems situation in general to know that it's more likely he's right than that you are. Classified military system are typically either standalone or on special classified networks. Further, stuff like these drones are probably run run from a Unix system (Linux or Solaris is most likely) with local passwd and shadow files as the account infrastructure. Access to the machines is likely controller by the admin (maintainer, whatever) personally making you an account on the box after he gets a request from security. He can probably easily count the number of people with accounts and verify their authorization by simply doing a 'tail/etc/passwd' and making sure nothing got added while he wasn't looking. It's entirely possible that he and his backup have the only accounts.
On top of that, unless the systems are on a large scale classified network, just getting the info off of a classified machine is a huge rigamarole involving a CD, multiple people verifying the classification of the data, labels and stickers from document control, blah, blah, blah. *If* the systems are on a big network, *and* someone outside the immediate organization has credentials (both big ifs), someone might have gotten some information off the systems with out him knowing, but they would have to have appropriate clearance (which means three letter organizations, not police), and know to look for the info they want at a particular time. Seems unlikely.
I know it's romantic (or at least convenient for conspiracies) to think our government as some kind of big, seamless organization where every Army private knows what the FBI is looking for, and every police officer can request military support. Maybe at the highest echelons of the intelligence community it does work like that, I don't know. Mostly though, it doesn't.
It was not a "large" standing army, but it was a small full time force, intended to be the backbone of a larger Army as needed; and it was "standing". The idea was to avoid a large standing force to prevent it from being used tyrannically, but keep a small standing force so someone knew WTF they were doing if we needed to fight. Otherwise you get a bunch of amateurs with guns trying to beat off the British. It worked once, but not very well and mostly only after we'd had years to actually train the Continental Army into something worth the name.
The Size of the standing Army grew for a number of reasons, most of which seemed good at the time, and some of which are still pretty good. Part of it was certainly US imperial ambitions, but lots of other things had even greater impact. The embarrassingly long times it took for us to train effective forces after joining either World War was one. The fact that being a soldier is a much more technical task than it was in the colonial period is another. It's simply no longer possible to have a small back bone of officers and NCOs that are well trained and expect them to turn recruits into soldiers in anything like a reasonable period. Even in the well established bosom of a professional organization it takes most of a year to get a recruit fully trained for many jobs. Two years before they're competent. More technical jobs can require two years just for training. Even simple "infantry" jobs require a solider to be familiar with tactics, operation of numerous vehicles and weapon systems, and ideally air drop procedures from both high and low altitudes (planes and helicopters).
Even National Guard troops that relieve full training and periodic practice take a couple months of retraining to get fully up to standard before deployment. We're a bit beyond the days of "Hay foot, straw foot" being enough to get going.
As sibling states, there has been a standing Army of whatever counts as the "government" of the "United States" since 1775. I use the quotes because of course the Continental Congress was only nominally a government until after the end of the Revolution, and they didn't call themselves the United States until later, but where ever you count the "founding" of the country (unless you consider the "founding" to be the battles of Lexington and Concorde) there has pretty much always been a standing Army. The Army even predates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, let alone the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution. It hasn't always been a great Army, and at times it's been essentially a core of officers and NCOs intended only to form the backbone of a larger force in the event of need, but it's always been there.
I don't disagree. Your questions are valid, and had the article been written in a reasonable fashion, asking those questions and wondering how we might find out the answers it would have been a much more useful piece. As it is the piece is a written in tones intended to make the reader panicked over the hardly surprising fact that the US military is storing and using US military hardware inside the US. As if anyone should be even slightly surprised over this fact. Of course we're doing this, the bulk of all US military personnel and equipment are in the US; and except for a few periods of heavy action (the World Wars, mainly), the bulk of US military personnel and hardware are *always* located in the US. Home territory is simply the most convenient place to do most of what nondeployed need to do.
The Third Amendment prohibits quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime. WTF are you on about? This is military equipment being stored on military bases, and being used for training and readiness operations like every other piece of military hardware on every other military base spread all throughout the United States. There are *thousands* of bases in the US for all five branches of the military (if you count the Coast Guard and separate out the Marines) in the US. I've personally served on half a dozen of them. These bases have existed from the founding of the country. Where else are you going to quarter soldiers other than bases, since we've obviously (and correctly) prevented them from being quartered in private homes?
There are also more US Army, Air Force, and Navy bases in the US than in the rest of the world combined. Many of them have tanks, warplanes, aircraft carriers, howitzers, and many other weapons that can be loaded and armed with live ammunition and dangerous explosives. I mean, who knew right? Oh wait... Everybody knew. Of course we have drone bases in the US. They have to train people, provide headquarters and on going operational training for units not deployed, stored undeployed hardware... this is the stupidest thing I've ever read.
What did these guys think? They send untested multimillion dollar drones over to Yemen where they hand them to an untrained unit and expect them to just figure out how they work in the field? It's just like any other military operation: for every deployed unit there are probably five waiting in reserve, getting readiness training, refitting, etc. Most of that happens in the US.
Unlike the other responses I'm not going to argue with your premise. There certainly are time and places where anonymity is... unfortunate. Not just in dealing with small towns either. Even in big cities people form communities: around a common interest, a geographical subset of the city, Ethnic groups, or anything really. Dedicated trolls can ruin these types of community forums as easily as small town's. Then there's situations like the one in the article where someone just took it upon themselves to make a specific person as miserable as they could. For all of these sorts of situations it would be nice if you could pierce the veil of anonymity and force people to take responsibility for their words. There are two broad problems though:
1) It's technically unfeasible. While complete internet anonymity is difficult to achieve, it's fairly trivial to get to a level that is sufficiently anonymous to require the expenditure of major resources to catch you. By the simple expedient of making a few fake e-mail addresses and using them to register false accounts on Facebook you can make it pretty tough. They'd have to track you by IP which is already "get the police involved" level of effort. Add in using a public wifi hotspot and it quickly becomes "small manhunt" level of effort. Using multiple wifi hotspots randomly across jurisdictions takes it to "multi-agency task force" level and you haven't even touched on computational counter measures like anonymisers and TOR. Sure, all that stuff can be bypassed or routed around with enough resources, but unless you've pissed off an intelligence agency or something, you can get "anonymous enough" pretty easily.
2) It's next to impossible to craft laws or tools that focus on community forum trolls, but don't equally affect wikileaks contributors or Syrian activists. Laws aren't written to use cases, they're written to generalities. When we write a law that says "Twitter has to give up names on accounts without a warrant", we're maybe intending to expose cyber-bullies, but there's nothing stopping the police from getting someone else the same way. Laws are blunt force instruments, not scalpels.
For the types of problems you're talking about, wouldn't a more measured approach be better? Trusted moderators could keep forums like you're talking about controlled pretty well I'd think.
"This" as in this particular device? Sure you're probably right. "This" as in "this concept for portable computing" could be a game changer. Lots of people have been postulating the idea of a sufficiently powerful smart phone being docked into a "peripheral array" including storage, monitor, keyboard, and mouse as a possible future path for mainstream computing. This device is a strong move in that direction, and in that sense it could be a game changer. Much as the desktop, the laptop, and (arguably) the tablet have been. All of them took the essential concept of "computer" and changed how we interacted with them and thought of their capabilities. Entirely new use cases and capabilities were unlocked by each of those platforms, and equally much can be unlocked here.
Much as the first laptops were entirely forgettable, underpowered, and mostly novelties this particular device may be landfill fodder in a year or two. But like the laptop, the concept this device represents has the capability to change much about how we think about and use computers.
But is that a good thing per se? if, in the interest of better test score, teachers are focusing on what on the test, instead of a generalized and rounded "education" are we ahead or behind? I don't pretend to know the answers, but I know that I don't like the way education in general is moving. Funding is being slashed for stuff like art, music, PE, even "life skills" type classes like Shop and Home Ec. History and other "non-tested" academic subjects are also suffering. All efforts are being funneled to teaching a very limited subset of skills that many, if not most, kids master in relatively short order, then are forced to repeat ad nauseum both to ensure that their classmates get it and to make sure that they themselves really-really-really get it.
Is there value in ensuring that all kids master at least the most basic skills they need to function in society? Of course. Is it worth sacrificing all other forms of education in order to achieve that goal? I'd say no. The fact is that most kids can learn those minimal literacy skills and pass the standardized tests relatively easily. They don't need this kind of hyper-focused education and can get a lot of benefit out of learning other things; but the continued focus on 100% pass rates on standardized test forces schools to devote ever more resources to making sure that the last 20%, 10%, 5%, 2% get through the tests. Meanwhile the other 80% are
1) getting fat and 2) wondering why recess and PE are vanishing parts of the American educational system.
Or wondering why they have to learn the same vocabulary words *again*, or why they don't have music class anymore. When Massachusetts finally got clearance to opt out of NCLB, we had schools with something like 90-95% pass rates on the standardized tests, but they were still facing funding cuts because they couldn't show "improvement". You either have to have 100% or you have to show improvement every year. At what point are you just wasting resources trying to get perfection that will never occur?
The whole point of this kind of this is that students can work at their own pace. Kids with greater aptitude in, say, writing will finish those "courses" quicker, whereas kids with greater math aptitude might finish those courses quicker. Teachers are there as a kind of facilitator/tutor to help when a kid gets stuck or appears to be bottle necked. I can't comment one way or the other on the effectiveness of this a learning tool (at least for younger children, it's always worked for me at the adult level), but to make it one computer and projector pretty much misses the entire point.
It would be more accurate to say that the muscle is more *dense* than the fat, but I think it's obvious what he meant. A pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat, but takes up less space. Hence the not uncommon "problem" of the person attempting to "lose weight" with a program involving strength training. You can lose inches (or centimeters if you prefer), while the scale doesn't move much, or even goes up. It's why most exercise based weight loss plans try to keep people focused on measurements rather than weight.
And trace amount of arsenic. Don't forget the microscopic amounts of poison:-) That said, apples are fairly unusual, most fruits are pretty good sources of nutrition, though you're right that veggies are lower calorie choices with similar nutritional profiles. I'd rather people eat apples than Ho-Hos though, even if a carrot would be better still.
Make the exercise time. There's several reasons I say this (and I hope it's clear that I say this form a position of wanting to help, not accusation). First, fitness has been shown to be more important than fatness as a predictor for a long and healthy life. It's not a panacea, and fit and lean is better than fit and fat, but fit and fat is better than thin and not fit. Second, time to exercise is the easiest chink to make in the problem's armor. You can get DVDs that you can do in your living room in half an hour. It's often not the most ideal way to exercise (though some are quite good), but it gets you moving, which is step one. Or just go for a walk every afternoon. Half hour, every afternoon, rain or shine, push a little harder every day. Third, as I said in an earlier comment, fitness begets fitness. You workout. You burn calories, and the calories don't get stored as fat... that's good. You also build muscles. Muscles are really nice things, because they burn calories at rest. So after your workout you're siting on the couch watching TV, or sleeping at night, and you're still burning more calories. I've noticed tremendous increases in my weight loss since I added strength training to my exercise regime.
It's definitely doable, and it doesn't require huge lifestyle changes. You may find that it inspires lifestyle changes... I can tell you that I spend a lot more time doing fun active things than I did 35 pounds ago; it turns out that running away from people in zombie costumes while traversing mud and obstacles is actually a huge amount of fun. That's more of a choice opened up to you by greater fitness than an actual requirement though.
Mostly stuff that Hulu just links to the network's website. I ran into this when I changed to FIOS and forgot to setup "Criminal Minds" to record. It's not on On Demand, and Hulu lists it on their site, but only links to cbs.com, so I couldn't use the XBox. We just watched it on my wife's laptop, but I definitely would have preferred the TV.
I suspect it won't do Flash or ActiveX, so it'll probably be reasonably safe. No bridge to outside world is completely safe of course, but if you limit the active content to JavaScript it probably won't be too bad. IE isn't nearly as full of holes as it used to be (not much worse than any other browser these days, really) and a lot of what is there for holes are in ActiveX. Add to that the fact that the XBox won't run unsigned code, it doesn't run Windows so any exploit would have to be completely retooled, and the fact that while there are a fair number of XBoxes out there, it's only a fraction of the number of Windows PCs; and I suspect not too many people will be willing to devote the effort to put nasties in the wild. Who know though. Maybe someone will figure out how to own the things.
The problem is the zero tolerance policy of prosecution and the general lack of understanding of the technology among law enforcement. You are no doubt correct, but making those sorts of distinctions is harder than it seems when the laws say "possession is possession". If a browser cache is defined as "possession", then it's much harder to avoid prosecution of innocents. Also I have limited experience with the sort of malware that others have commented on, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like that could populate your cache pretty fast (of course it should also leave its own signature, but again law enforcement isn't always expert in these matters). Frankly I think that a real "pedobear" would probably have at least some "favorite" stuff saved somewhere other than their browser cache; so this probably won't really hurt legitimate prosecutions much, but might help a few innocents.
To be fair, the big problems with BMI (as you yourself point out) are on the high end. Especially with athletic people (muscle weighs more than fat), but also with people who have higher bone density, or other reasons that the weight more than they "should", but aren't really fat. On the low end, it's usually a pretty reasonable measure. If your BMI is too low it almost always indicates *some* kind of problem (anorexia, glandular issues, low bone density, whatever, something is making you weigh to little). It's also, even on the high end, a pretty good tool for averaging. Most people with "obese" BMIs are in fact obese. In any individual case, though it should be followed up with more info. Athletes are notoriously on the high end of the BMI scale, despite clearly not being obese.
I agree with the overall tone of your post though.
This. While software vendors certainly deserve some part of the blame for eating more cycles, much of that is not bloat, and any realistic analysis of the problem must also take into account usage patterns. Does Photoshop use more cycles and more RAM than it used to? Yes, for certain. It's also able to do many more things than it used to, and is regularly run on huge images by relative standards. I also think nothing of having a browser with 20-30 tabs open, while listening to MP3s, editing a photo, and say ripping a CD all at the same time.
Hell, right now at this moment I'm running a browser with around 12 tabs, listening to music and working on a Word document... No big deal you say? Well while I'm doing that I have an entire virtual machine running a whole separate OS instance so I can use Windows software while I'm simultaneously working in the native OS. This whole separate OS ALSO has a browser running (with a corporate training app that only works in IE chugging along), plus my Outlook e-mail, a few communications apps, and an Excel spreadsheet. My computer isn't even trying hard, and it's a year old low end Macbook model.
Compared to the days when I used to have to shut everything down before burning CDs (buffering errors), or ripping MP3s (way to slow otherwise, and sometimes you'd get encoding errors if the CPU was working too hard).
To be fair here, we aren't invading these countries and forcing them to accept our evil new weapon system on their soil. It's more like:
"Hey, you want a missile defense system?" "Sure!"
IF these systems were offensively capable, Russia might have a case. IF we were building them without the consent of the nations involved, Russia might have a case. As it is they're trying to interfere with the internal matters of their former satellite nations and getting pissy because no one wants to listen to them. The Russians firmly believe that Eastern Europe is their playground and their annoyed that the Americans are playing with their puppets. It's all bullshit, they have no right to determine who Poland does or does not accept help from.
because nobody on this entire website has any irrefutable proof or hard experience in knowing what's really inside the canisters of each defense systems' launchers...
I've seen it. I wouldn't be surprised if others have as well. It's not all that sensitive as such things go actually. Which is not to say it isn't classified or that I can give out details, but it's not one of our more closely guarded secrets either. I can say that what's in there is definitely not all the threatening in a "mass destruction" sense. It can do what it was designed to do, but couldn't, like, blow up a city, or even a city block.
Which shows the result of typing "linux hacking" into the barnesandnoble.com search box. They sell literally dozens of titles on the subject of hacking and Linux, Some of which use the "tinkering with" definition of hacking, and others of which use the "breaking into" definition. I've seen many of these books in the physical stores too. This sounds like some management weenie over reacting to a complaint and little else.
Since yesterday. I'm talking long term trends. You can't look at 24 hours and say the dollar is weakening. As little as a year ago it was more like $2 to the Pound. There were variations even then, but "in general" the dollar has been getting much stronger lately. Right now we're approximately where were against European currencies before the recession. For quite a while we were 25-50% lower than we were pre-recession.
Umm. Yeah... The US dollar is currently trading at about 1:1.6 with the Pound, well stronger than the 1:2 that it had been for quite a while. It's also about 1:1.3 against the Euro, well off the 1:1.6 that it had been. The Dollar has been strengthening the last year or so. that's not completely a good thing (it hurts our exports), but it's definitely a true thing. For all it's current weaknesses, the US economy is considered relatively strong vs Europe and good chunks of Asia right now.
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I dunno. Work bought a couple of iPads recently for developing a mobile app. While the high res display is non-obvious in things like the desktop or e-mail, anything graphical is quite obviously and noticeably better on the new screens. We pulled up satellite imagery in Google maps and were quite literally shocked by the quality of the images. This was without any lower res screens to compare with initially, it was just obviously better than what we had seen before. After a few minutes someone brought out an older iPad and someone else an older Android tablet so we could do a direct comparison. That made the quality more obvious, but even standing alone, the quality was impressive.
Of course we're all computer professionals (programmers and systems people), and we work with graphics day to day, so maybe that's part of it. All in all, I was impressed. Honestly, the screen update from my iPhone 3GS to my 4S, while nice and certainly noticeable in a direct comparison, hadn't impressed me all that much. On the larger screen it's *much* more obvious.
It appears to be a real product that they will sell, like the Zune. Most of the analysts seem to be debating the Wisdom of Microsoft competing directly with its hardware partners. Price point for the Win RT version has been stated as "competitive" with iPad, but the Windows 8 version is looking like it's going to be expensive (~$1000). It's going to compete with ultrabooks, and run i386 Windows software I assume. Still a bit of a risk going so high above the "standard" tablet pricing though.
I don't know anything about his specific situation, but I know enough about the Military systems situation in general to know that it's more likely he's right than that you are. Classified military system are typically either standalone or on special classified networks. Further, stuff like these drones are probably run run from a Unix system (Linux or Solaris is most likely) with local passwd and shadow files as the account infrastructure. Access to the machines is likely controller by the admin (maintainer, whatever) personally making you an account on the box after he gets a request from security. He can probably easily count the number of people with accounts and verify their authorization by simply doing a 'tail /etc/passwd' and making sure nothing got added while he wasn't looking. It's entirely possible that he and his backup have the only accounts.
On top of that, unless the systems are on a large scale classified network, just getting the info off of a classified machine is a huge rigamarole involving a CD, multiple people verifying the classification of the data, labels and stickers from document control, blah, blah, blah. *If* the systems are on a big network, *and* someone outside the immediate organization has credentials (both big ifs), someone might have gotten some information off the systems with out him knowing, but they would have to have appropriate clearance (which means three letter organizations, not police), and know to look for the info they want at a particular time. Seems unlikely.
I know it's romantic (or at least convenient for conspiracies) to think our government as some kind of big, seamless organization where every Army private knows what the FBI is looking for, and every police officer can request military support. Maybe at the highest echelons of the intelligence community it does work like that, I don't know. Mostly though, it doesn't.
It was not a "large" standing army, but it was a small full time force, intended to be the backbone of a larger Army as needed; and it was "standing". The idea was to avoid a large standing force to prevent it from being used tyrannically, but keep a small standing force so someone knew WTF they were doing if we needed to fight. Otherwise you get a bunch of amateurs with guns trying to beat off the British. It worked once, but not very well and mostly only after we'd had years to actually train the Continental Army into something worth the name.
The Size of the standing Army grew for a number of reasons, most of which seemed good at the time, and some of which are still pretty good. Part of it was certainly US imperial ambitions, but lots of other things had even greater impact. The embarrassingly long times it took for us to train effective forces after joining either World War was one. The fact that being a soldier is a much more technical task than it was in the colonial period is another. It's simply no longer possible to have a small back bone of officers and NCOs that are well trained and expect them to turn recruits into soldiers in anything like a reasonable period. Even in the well established bosom of a professional organization it takes most of a year to get a recruit fully trained for many jobs. Two years before they're competent. More technical jobs can require two years just for training. Even simple "infantry" jobs require a solider to be familiar with tactics, operation of numerous vehicles and weapon systems, and ideally air drop procedures from both high and low altitudes (planes and helicopters).
Even National Guard troops that relieve full training and periodic practice take a couple months of retraining to get fully up to standard before deployment. We're a bit beyond the days of "Hay foot, straw foot" being enough to get going.
As sibling states, there has been a standing Army of whatever counts as the "government" of the "United States" since 1775. I use the quotes because of course the Continental Congress was only nominally a government until after the end of the Revolution, and they didn't call themselves the United States until later, but where ever you count the "founding" of the country (unless you consider the "founding" to be the battles of Lexington and Concorde) there has pretty much always been a standing Army. The Army even predates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, let alone the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution. It hasn't always been a great Army, and at times it's been essentially a core of officers and NCOs intended only to form the backbone of a larger force in the event of need, but it's always been there.
I don't disagree. Your questions are valid, and had the article been written in a reasonable fashion, asking those questions and wondering how we might find out the answers it would have been a much more useful piece. As it is the piece is a written in tones intended to make the reader panicked over the hardly surprising fact that the US military is storing and using US military hardware inside the US. As if anyone should be even slightly surprised over this fact. Of course we're doing this, the bulk of all US military personnel and equipment are in the US; and except for a few periods of heavy action (the World Wars, mainly), the bulk of US military personnel and hardware are *always* located in the US. Home territory is simply the most convenient place to do most of what nondeployed need to do.
The Third Amendment prohibits quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime. WTF are you on about? This is military equipment being stored on military bases, and being used for training and readiness operations like every other piece of military hardware on every other military base spread all throughout the United States. There are *thousands* of bases in the US for all five branches of the military (if you count the Coast Guard and separate out the Marines) in the US. I've personally served on half a dozen of them. These bases have existed from the founding of the country. Where else are you going to quarter soldiers other than bases, since we've obviously (and correctly) prevented them from being quartered in private homes?
... Really?
There are also more US Army, Air Force, and Navy bases in the US than in the rest of the world combined. Many of them have tanks, warplanes, aircraft carriers, howitzers, and many other weapons that can be loaded and armed with live ammunition and dangerous explosives. I mean, who knew right? Oh wait... Everybody knew. Of course we have drone bases in the US. They have to train people, provide headquarters and on going operational training for units not deployed, stored undeployed hardware... this is the stupidest thing I've ever read.
What did these guys think? They send untested multimillion dollar drones over to Yemen where they hand them to an untrained unit and expect them to just figure out how they work in the field? It's just like any other military operation: for every deployed unit there are probably five waiting in reserve, getting readiness training, refitting, etc. Most of that happens in the US.
Unlike the other responses I'm not going to argue with your premise. There certainly are time and places where anonymity is... unfortunate. Not just in dealing with small towns either. Even in big cities people form communities: around a common interest, a geographical subset of the city, Ethnic groups, or anything really. Dedicated trolls can ruin these types of community forums as easily as small town's. Then there's situations like the one in the article where someone just took it upon themselves to make a specific person as miserable as they could. For all of these sorts of situations it would be nice if you could pierce the veil of anonymity and force people to take responsibility for their words. There are two broad problems though:
1) It's technically unfeasible. While complete internet anonymity is difficult to achieve, it's fairly trivial to get to a level that is sufficiently anonymous to require the expenditure of major resources to catch you. By the simple expedient of making a few fake e-mail addresses and using them to register false accounts on Facebook you can make it pretty tough. They'd have to track you by IP which is already "get the police involved" level of effort. Add in using a public wifi hotspot and it quickly becomes "small manhunt" level of effort. Using multiple wifi hotspots randomly across jurisdictions takes it to "multi-agency task force" level and you haven't even touched on computational counter measures like anonymisers and TOR. Sure, all that stuff can be bypassed or routed around with enough resources, but unless you've pissed off an intelligence agency or something, you can get "anonymous enough" pretty easily.
2) It's next to impossible to craft laws or tools that focus on community forum trolls, but don't equally affect wikileaks contributors or Syrian activists. Laws aren't written to use cases, they're written to generalities. When we write a law that says "Twitter has to give up names on accounts without a warrant", we're maybe intending to expose cyber-bullies, but there's nothing stopping the police from getting someone else the same way. Laws are blunt force instruments, not scalpels.
For the types of problems you're talking about, wouldn't a more measured approach be better? Trusted moderators could keep forums like you're talking about controlled pretty well I'd think.
"This" as in this particular device? Sure you're probably right. "This" as in "this concept for portable computing" could be a game changer. Lots of people have been postulating the idea of a sufficiently powerful smart phone being docked into a "peripheral array" including storage, monitor, keyboard, and mouse as a possible future path for mainstream computing. This device is a strong move in that direction, and in that sense it could be a game changer. Much as the desktop, the laptop, and (arguably) the tablet have been. All of them took the essential concept of "computer" and changed how we interacted with them and thought of their capabilities. Entirely new use cases and capabilities were unlocked by each of those platforms, and equally much can be unlocked here.
Much as the first laptops were entirely forgettable, underpowered, and mostly novelties this particular device may be landfill fodder in a year or two. But like the laptop, the concept this device represents has the capability to change much about how we think about and use computers.
But is that a good thing per se? if, in the interest of better test score, teachers are focusing on what on the test, instead of a generalized and rounded "education" are we ahead or behind? I don't pretend to know the answers, but I know that I don't like the way education in general is moving. Funding is being slashed for stuff like art, music, PE, even "life skills" type classes like Shop and Home Ec. History and other "non-tested" academic subjects are also suffering. All efforts are being funneled to teaching a very limited subset of skills that many, if not most, kids master in relatively short order, then are forced to repeat ad nauseum both to ensure that their classmates get it and to make sure that they themselves really-really-really get it.
Is there value in ensuring that all kids master at least the most basic skills they need to function in society? Of course. Is it worth sacrificing all other forms of education in order to achieve that goal? I'd say no. The fact is that most kids can learn those minimal literacy skills and pass the standardized tests relatively easily. They don't need this kind of hyper-focused education and can get a lot of benefit out of learning other things; but the continued focus on 100% pass rates on standardized test forces schools to devote ever more resources to making sure that the last 20%, 10%, 5%, 2% get through the tests. Meanwhile the other 80% are
1) getting fat and
2) wondering why recess and PE are vanishing parts of the American educational system.
Or wondering why they have to learn the same vocabulary words *again*, or why they don't have music class anymore. When Massachusetts finally got clearance to opt out of NCLB, we had schools with something like 90-95% pass rates on the standardized tests, but they were still facing funding cuts because they couldn't show "improvement". You either have to have 100% or you have to show improvement every year. At what point are you just wasting resources trying to get perfection that will never occur?
The whole point of this kind of this is that students can work at their own pace. Kids with greater aptitude in, say, writing will finish those "courses" quicker, whereas kids with greater math aptitude might finish those courses quicker. Teachers are there as a kind of facilitator/tutor to help when a kid gets stuck or appears to be bottle necked. I can't comment one way or the other on the effectiveness of this a learning tool (at least for younger children, it's always worked for me at the adult level), but to make it one computer and projector pretty much misses the entire point.
It would be more accurate to say that the muscle is more *dense* than the fat, but I think it's obvious what he meant. A pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat, but takes up less space. Hence the not uncommon "problem" of the person attempting to "lose weight" with a program involving strength training. You can lose inches (or centimeters if you prefer), while the scale doesn't move much, or even goes up. It's why most exercise based weight loss plans try to keep people focused on measurements rather than weight.
And trace amount of arsenic. Don't forget the microscopic amounts of poison :-) That said, apples are fairly unusual, most fruits are pretty good sources of nutrition, though you're right that veggies are lower calorie choices with similar nutritional profiles. I'd rather people eat apples than Ho-Hos though, even if a carrot would be better still.
Make the exercise time. There's several reasons I say this (and I hope it's clear that I say this form a position of wanting to help, not accusation). First, fitness has been shown to be more important than fatness as a predictor for a long and healthy life. It's not a panacea, and fit and lean is better than fit and fat, but fit and fat is better than thin and not fit. Second, time to exercise is the easiest chink to make in the problem's armor. You can get DVDs that you can do in your living room in half an hour. It's often not the most ideal way to exercise (though some are quite good), but it gets you moving, which is step one. Or just go for a walk every afternoon. Half hour, every afternoon, rain or shine, push a little harder every day. Third, as I said in an earlier comment, fitness begets fitness. You workout. You burn calories, and the calories don't get stored as fat... that's good. You also build muscles. Muscles are really nice things, because they burn calories at rest. So after your workout you're siting on the couch watching TV, or sleeping at night, and you're still burning more calories. I've noticed tremendous increases in my weight loss since I added strength training to my exercise regime.
It's definitely doable, and it doesn't require huge lifestyle changes. You may find that it inspires lifestyle changes... I can tell you that I spend a lot more time doing fun active things than I did 35 pounds ago; it turns out that running away from people in zombie costumes while traversing mud and obstacles is actually a huge amount of fun. That's more of a choice opened up to you by greater fitness than an actual requirement though.
Mostly stuff that Hulu just links to the network's website. I ran into this when I changed to FIOS and forgot to setup "Criminal Minds" to record. It's not on On Demand, and Hulu lists it on their site, but only links to cbs.com, so I couldn't use the XBox. We just watched it on my wife's laptop, but I definitely would have preferred the TV.
I suspect it won't do Flash or ActiveX, so it'll probably be reasonably safe. No bridge to outside world is completely safe of course, but if you limit the active content to JavaScript it probably won't be too bad. IE isn't nearly as full of holes as it used to be (not much worse than any other browser these days, really) and a lot of what is there for holes are in ActiveX. Add to that the fact that the XBox won't run unsigned code, it doesn't run Windows so any exploit would have to be completely retooled, and the fact that while there are a fair number of XBoxes out there, it's only a fraction of the number of Windows PCs; and I suspect not too many people will be willing to devote the effort to put nasties in the wild. Who know though. Maybe someone will figure out how to own the things.
The problem is the zero tolerance policy of prosecution and the general lack of understanding of the technology among law enforcement. You are no doubt correct, but making those sorts of distinctions is harder than it seems when the laws say "possession is possession". If a browser cache is defined as "possession", then it's much harder to avoid prosecution of innocents. Also I have limited experience with the sort of malware that others have commented on, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like that could populate your cache pretty fast (of course it should also leave its own signature, but again law enforcement isn't always expert in these matters). Frankly I think that a real "pedobear" would probably have at least some "favorite" stuff saved somewhere other than their browser cache; so this probably won't really hurt legitimate prosecutions much, but might help a few innocents.
To be fair, the big problems with BMI (as you yourself point out) are on the high end. Especially with athletic people (muscle weighs more than fat), but also with people who have higher bone density, or other reasons that the weight more than they "should", but aren't really fat. On the low end, it's usually a pretty reasonable measure. If your BMI is too low it almost always indicates *some* kind of problem (anorexia, glandular issues, low bone density, whatever, something is making you weigh to little). It's also, even on the high end, a pretty good tool for averaging. Most people with "obese" BMIs are in fact obese. In any individual case, though it should be followed up with more info. Athletes are notoriously on the high end of the BMI scale, despite clearly not being obese.
I agree with the overall tone of your post though.
This. While software vendors certainly deserve some part of the blame for eating more cycles, much of that is not bloat, and any realistic analysis of the problem must also take into account usage patterns. Does Photoshop use more cycles and more RAM than it used to? Yes, for certain. It's also able to do many more things than it used to, and is regularly run on huge images by relative standards. I also think nothing of having a browser with 20-30 tabs open, while listening to MP3s, editing a photo, and say ripping a CD all at the same time.
Hell, right now at this moment I'm running a browser with around 12 tabs, listening to music and working on a Word document... No big deal you say? Well while I'm doing that I have an entire virtual machine running a whole separate OS instance so I can use Windows software while I'm simultaneously working in the native OS. This whole separate OS ALSO has a browser running (with a corporate training app that only works in IE chugging along), plus my Outlook e-mail, a few communications apps, and an Excel spreadsheet. My computer isn't even trying hard, and it's a year old low end Macbook model.
Compared to the days when I used to have to shut everything down before burning CDs (buffering errors), or ripping MP3s (way to slow otherwise, and sometimes you'd get encoding errors if the CPU was working too hard).
To be fair here, we aren't invading these countries and forcing them to accept our evil new weapon system on their soil. It's more like:
"Hey, you want a missile defense system?"
"Sure!"
IF these systems were offensively capable, Russia might have a case. IF we were building them without the consent of the nations involved, Russia might have a case. As it is they're trying to interfere with the internal matters of their former satellite nations and getting pissy because no one wants to listen to them. The Russians firmly believe that Eastern Europe is their playground and their annoyed that the Americans are playing with their puppets. It's all bullshit, they have no right to determine who Poland does or does not accept help from.
because nobody on this entire website has any irrefutable proof or hard experience in knowing what's really inside the canisters of each defense systems' launchers...
I've seen it. I wouldn't be surprised if others have as well. It's not all that sensitive as such things go actually. Which is not to say it isn't classified or that I can give out details, but it's not one of our more closely guarded secrets either. I can say that what's in there is definitely not all the threatening in a "mass destruction" sense. It can do what it was designed to do, but couldn't, like, blow up a city, or even a city block.
I have trouble believing either the reason B&N gave, or your more sinister reason. My counter to both of them is contained in this link:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/linux-hacking?keyword=linux+hacking&store=allproducts
Which shows the result of typing "linux hacking" into the barnesandnoble.com search box. They sell literally dozens of titles on the subject of hacking and Linux, Some of which use the "tinkering with" definition of hacking, and others of which use the "breaking into" definition. I've seen many of these books in the physical stores too. This sounds like some management weenie over reacting to a complaint and little else.
Since yesterday. I'm talking long term trends. You can't look at 24 hours and say the dollar is weakening. As little as a year ago it was more like $2 to the Pound. There were variations even then, but "in general" the dollar has been getting much stronger lately. Right now we're approximately where were against European currencies before the recession. For quite a while we were 25-50% lower than we were pre-recession.
Umm. Yeah... The US dollar is currently trading at about 1:1.6 with the Pound, well stronger than the 1:2 that it had been for quite a while. It's also about 1:1.3 against the Euro, well off the 1:1.6 that it had been. The Dollar has been strengthening the last year or so. that's not completely a good thing (it hurts our exports), but it's definitely a true thing. For all it's current weaknesses, the US economy is considered relatively strong vs Europe and good chunks of Asia right now.