There's some doubt about the legality of that, as the article points out. It's definitely one of the "unknowns" that could push this into questionable legal territory. I've been pretty careful here to sprinkle my posts with "all things being equal" and "given the information available."
Assuming they do try to discriminate (at the moment even they aren't sure they can according to the article) there's actually two related questions here:
1) Can they accept tax payer money and discriminate in hiring?
2) Can they accept economic development money and still discriminate in hiring.
*If* they decide to discriminate in hiring, I would be more likely to support a suit by AU in defense of a non-creationist worker who was not hired because he refused to sign a statement of belief than a suit trying to prevent them from getting the tourism dollars. That would be a much more winnable case.
Disney parks likely benefited from the same kind of tax incentives that this park is trying to benefit from. It's not "tax payer funded", the developers are trying to take advantage of existing Tourism development laws and dollars the same way that Disney or Six Flags would if they were building a park. That's where all the separation of church and state arguments are falling apart here. This group isn't trying to get any benefit that any other, secular, group couldn't get for a similar project. The Governor isn't saying "O, hai here's 25 millions dollarz that my state iz donating to ur park." Existing law is being used to do exactly what that law was intended to do, develop tourism.
I've been really active in church/state separation politics in the past, I have a pretty good idea how these laws work. Like the lawyer from the American Atheists said, there's probably no case here (at least given the information available).
Case law on the matter of "favoring particular religious expression" nearly universally holds that as long as the state isn't giving preferential treatment to the religious organization, giving it the same thing everyone else gets is perfectly acceptable. Long story short, if Six Flags can get the exact same incentives as this organization can to build a secular theme park, then there is no favoritism in letting the wacko Christians also get the incentives. The incentive is not being given *because* this is a Christian organization, it's being given in spite of the fact that it's a Christian organization. All things being equal (and we don't have nearly all the facts here, so you can't really be "sure"), that's allowed.
The purpose of these incentives is to encourage tourism to Kentucky. Given the size of the "Crazy Christian Wacko" demographic this park is likely to do that.
I don't see it. Really, I think the Governor makes a valid point. Tourism development dollars don't care about your religion, your probable ulterior motives, or the accuracy of your science. They care whether your new facility will develop tourism. Based on the size of the "frighteningly stupid people" demographic, this park seems extremely likely to develop tourism. Therefore, it should qualify for the same incentives as any other theme park likely to develop tourism. If the state government gave this park *better* incentives than the Six Flags park down the street it would be a problem. Assuming they are offering the same incentives to these people as to any other similar tourism type site, this is a valid application of the state's funds. I suppose more properly I should say it's a legal application of state funds within the context of tourism development laws. Whether you consider that to be a valid use of state funds is probably an entirely different argument.
I typically like Americans United, but I'm not sure I'd support a lawsuit here. The Governor makes a valid point, backed by several other organizations that are usually good Church/State watchdogs. The tourism development law doesn't care about the possible ulterior motives of the developers, or the validity of the science presented by the facility. It cares about the development of tourism, which seems likely to occur if this facility is built. Now if they turned around and *didn't* fund a non-Christian theme park which had similar projections for jobs and businesses, then there would be a problem... As it is, this seems like a valid application of the state's money, much though I disagree with the park's purpose.
I'm not an explosive expert either, but I worked with enough of them in Iraq to say you're pretty much dead on. Actually disarming a device is reserved for situations where you can't or don't have time to evacuate the area. It's nearly always safer and less expensive to blow the device in place. Bomb squad guys don't have any more desire than the rest of us to get blown to pieces, as a rule.
Ordinarily a post like this would be a troll... but in this case... Yeah we're looking a a graphical desktop environment here. Can we maybe, I dunno, see it?
You think that's weird, try it with JavaScript enabled. My browser signature is *unique*. Apparently no one in the 1.2 million or so person sample group is using the latest Firefox on WinXP with my particular combination of add-ons (yes, it could see my add-ons). Which means... Relatively more "power-users" are easily identifiable by this technology than "normal people". The more vanilla your browser set-up is, the harder you are to recognize (at least through this metric)
Then theres the hobo's everywhere that you never know if they will try to mug you.
Meanwhile, people bitch about our right to own guns which essentially protects against this sort of thing.
The first quote explains, to an extent, why the second quote happens. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge gun control guy. I often question the usefulness of carrying a gun for the majority of people (I really don't think most people have any reasonable chance to employ a concealed weapon in most attack scenarios without getting themselves killed), but I don't question your right to do so... most of the time. Then I see stuff like this and I wonder if maybe taking away everyone's guns and giving them a blankey isn't a good idea.
Surely you must see that you are reacting to the same fear as the anti-terrorism security theater people are? The fear that some unknown "other" is going to do bad things to you for no other reason than they are different and often less fortunate? You're also reacting in exactly the same way, grabbing onto something that makes you feel like you'll be better able to protect yourself whether it'll be effective or not. A gun is not a self defense panacea. It will not protect you from "hobos" by itself. It's a tool. If you spend the necessary hours (and hours and hours) to learn to use it properly, it has some usefulness in some self defense situations. I'm not talking about a gun safety course and a few hours on the range making sure you can hit the broad side of a barn... I'm talking man-days spent working draw and fire drills, accuracy on moving targets, and accuracy while moving yourself. Plus knowing when to use these things so the guy with the already drawn weapon or his backup in the shadows don't blow you away before you accomplish anything.
Of course even if you spend the time to do it right, you're still just learning all this stuff and carrying the weapon in reaction your fear, the same as the guy who submits to the strip search is reacting to his fear of terrorist. So now we have a scared guy with a gun walking down the street waiting for the first "hobo" to act suspiciously enough to let him use it. Great. It's nearly enough to make me become a 'huge gun control guy". It really is.
I'm not much behind you, but to me the occasional reboot makes it interesting. That's the biggest potential pitfall here IMHO. A person who lives to 300 years old is much more likely to stagnate. Working to avoid that stagnation would become an important part of life. We'd get to where we *want* reboots every few decades (or at least to where we *should*, we might have to convince people). Robert Jordan did an interesting thing on this front in one of his cultures... The magic wielders in his Wheel of Time world live an extended time (400-450 years old for most, 250-300 for Aes Sedai who've inadvertently shortened their span artificially). One culture (the Sea Folk) deal with these long lives by tying the life of a magic wielder (a Windfinder) to the life of a normal mortal captain. The Windfinder follows the captain's career, rising (or declining in bad situations) through the ranks with her until the captain dies. Then the Windfinder is assigned to a new captain, at the bottom of the totem pole.
In the event that we could dramatically lengthen our lives it seems like that systems which encourage period "reboots" might not just be kinda fun, but almost necessary.
No, the increase comes from the failure of the death rate. Populations growths is (Babies) - (Dead People) = (Population Growth). Even if there's no increase in (Babies), if there's a huge decrease in (Dead People) then (Population Growth) will rise. It's not *quite* as bad as it sounds, the population growth numbers will rise slightly over time (very old people are unlikely to be helped by this treatment enough to substantially increase their life spans, the younger you are when you start, the more likely it will help), and likely peek in fifty years or so (when most of us who are young and healthy now would like have started to die). We'd have some time to deal with the repercussions, but a slow down in breeding would almost certainly be required (arguably it already is, even without this kind of tech). Also, assuming this technology slows, but doesn't completely stop the aging process (which seems likely) the death rate would catch back up eventually, but there would be a lag.
How many people would be willing to risk their unending lives to perform these great feats? We'd still be able to die, we wouldn't be immortal, just ageless. Not having many ageless mortals around to ask, it's hard to say, but based on most fiction regarding them it's easy to believe they would fear death far more than even normal mortals.
I don't fully comprehend all the argument here, not having had a huge background in genetics, but I do recall something that my Bio 101 teacher said... It went along the lines of "If you live long enough, you will get cancer". As I recall her basic argument was that whether or not aging per se increases your odds of getting cancer on a case by case basis, the longer you live the more cell divisions you're going to have and the more chance that one of them is wrong enough to cause a problem. So assuming all other things being equal, eventually your chance of getting some kind of cancer approaches 100%.
Not that his is exactly a problem... I mean, I'd rather live to a healthy 150 knowing that my chance for cancer is steadily rising after about 60, then pretty much be guaranteed that I won't make it past 100 and that everything after 75 or so is a crap shoot on the "healthy"; but it's still likely that if we could mostly eliminate other forms of degenerative death we'll all eventually die of cancer, right?
Te article really was terrible. It didn't provide a link to the text of the memo, gave no context for why the teacher did what she did, and then acted as though "school officials", rather than immediately retracting the statement, actually supported it. Hint: one teacher is not "school officials". "School officials" are the people saying "um, no, she shouldn't have done that".
I see a serious problem here, and it has to do with people being assholes. Also people being racists. Also people being unduly frightened of things that might happen on airplanes.
"Well your honor, he was an Arab and his pants looked like they folded a little funny around the crotch, so when he pulled out that cell phone I just knew we was gonna blow us all up. That's when I cold cocked him and took the dangerous device away."
You laugh, perhaps, but it will happen. Something like 40% of Americans are completely OK with racially profiling Arabs as an anti-terrorism measure. Never mind that statistically more terrorists are not Arabs than are, never mind that prior to 9/11 the most significant act of terrorism on US soil was committed by a white bread kid from Kansas. None of that matters. My wife was in line at Costco in Boston. An Indian couple walked by talking in what she assumes was Hindi. After they past the guy in front of her commented to his wife that someone from Homeland Security ought to be interested in that, and seemed rather disgusted that they wouldn't be. At first she actually though the guy was joking, but it became quickly clear that he really thought being brown skinned and speaking a foreign language at Costco should be grounds for DHS interest.
Now most people aren't blatant racists (I hope), but enough of them are a little extra nervous around Arabs, a little extra nervous around planes, and little extra nervous around crowds, that giving them blanket "Good Samaritan" immunity from prosecution is probably not a great idea.
I see this idea postulated a lot, and I have not doubt that it's part of why some job descriptions are written the way they are, but it's not a universal reason. I see the same kind of inflated job requirements on DoD contracting jobs and we *have* to hire US citizens. It's mostly, so far as I can tell, a fishing expedition. You advertise ridiculous requirements in the hopes that the person you really want (who is still overqualified, but not as badly as you ask for) will apply. For example:
I was hired to be a systems analyst for a very large Fortune 50 contracting company. They paid me pretty well to do most of the systems administration for a classified lab in one of their facilities. Here's the thing 95% of the time the systems I managed were completely locked down. They couldn't be changed except with the approval of a Change Control Board, and then only according to specific procedures produced by the system's development or maintenance team. So 95% of the time my job consisted of either following a procedure like a trained monkey, or providing a root login for someone from the system's maintenance group to do something.
In the first couple of months I often wondered why I had been hired, and what they were paying me for. To my certain knowledge they had rejected at least two previous candidates because it was felt they lacked sufficient Unix experience. So far as I could tell you barely needed to be conscious to do this job, much less have Unix experience. It turned out that the *other* 5% of the time, when shit was hitting the fan, and expensive simulation budgets were on the line, they needed someone who could fix stuff. Fast. It was amazing how many procedures and quality assurances rules could be bypassed or waivered when FTG-023940324309480932-b was about to go tits up because some systems couldn't get to an NFS share.
So basically they did an exhaustive search for a senior analyst to do a job that any kid fresh out of college or tech school could have done for 1/3 what I was making... mostly just so I was on hand in the event of emergency. I'd been unemployed for a few months before I got that job, so i was pretty happy to get it and have it (especially as it was during the recession), but I must admit to being pretty happy I'm not still stuck in it.
It's like anything that attempts to judge someone based on standards or attempts at "objective criteria". You don't *know* these people, you don't have anyway to realistically judge which one is the better choice. So you've got a guy with a two year degree and a couple of year worth of tech support or data center grunt experience vs a guy with a 4 yr degree. You know that *on average* the guy with the four year degree had better grades in high school and is capable of "sticking it out" to make a goal.You know the other guy *on average* had worse grades and/or was less motivated, though he also has a couple years of possibly relevant (or not) experience. Beyond that you don't have much to go on. Their resumes are equally blank slates for all intents and purposes. The relative value of an couple extra years of college vs some really grunt level experience is pretty damned hard to judge. So most places make the judgment call that the guy with the degree was either smarter or more motivated or more goal focused and they go with him.
They could easily be wrong. The other guy could have just been a bit less lucky with scholarships, a bit less willing to take on debt, or just unfortunate enough that his high school didn't offer Glee Club and that was the thing that would have gotten his university application over the top... but again, all they work with is averages and standards. They don't know either of these guys. At this point they're a couple of pieces of paper with names and really short career histories written on them.
You see this with job selections, college admissions, even sports team selections and video games (you should see the way that "Gear Score" polarizes WoW players). In the absence of real objective or subjective criteria to make a choice, people turn averages and assumptions into "objective criteria". They don't really have a choice. If you have to weed through 100 resumes for an entry level systems admin job, you have to apply some kind of criteria or you'll go mad.
It remains better than the alternative if you can't speak for some reason though. I don't think anyone is arguing that this should be a primary means of communication with 911, just that it's a useful option to have. The vast majority of the time, text message go through in a quick and timely manner. There are clearly a limited, but existent, number of situations where texting 911 would be useful. Texting systems are cheap and ubiquitous. Why not have the option open?
For precisely the reason in the summary. If you're inside on a bank robbery or other hostage type situation you can send a text in near complete silence. Talking to a dispatcher will make noise and potentially give away your position (and the fact that you're in contact with the outside). It's a limited use case, but happens often enough to justify the relatively small expense I would think.
We're replacing my wife's 3G at Christmas, it just can't keep up anymore. My 3Gs runs 4.x flawlessly though. Which kind of make me sad, I'd like an excuse to upgrade to the prettier screen:-)
Re:Been running a dev build for a few weeks now
on
Apple iOS 4.2 Hands-On
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A thing to be careful with: Turn by turn navigation software will typically keep navigating in the background unless you completely close it using the taskbar. I used my phone to get me somewhere in Boston last month (walking). I used to Home key to background the task and stuck the phone in my pocket when I got there. 30-45 Minutes later I pulled the phone out and again and realized that I was all but out of juice. The phone had been navigating the whole time I ate lunch,and GPS navigation *devours* battery life.
I think there is a difference between gambling for entertainment and gambling with the expectation you'll get rich. If it amuses you to play the lottery occasionally, go for it. I like a bet a few bucks when I'm in Vegas, it's fun. It's the people that spend some measurable fraction of their income in the real hope that it's a way to make it big... That's the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There's some doubt about the legality of that, as the article points out. It's definitely one of the "unknowns" that could push this into questionable legal territory. I've been pretty careful here to sprinkle my posts with "all things being equal" and "given the information available."
Assuming they do try to discriminate (at the moment even they aren't sure they can according to the article) there's actually two related questions here:
1) Can they accept tax payer money and discriminate in hiring?
2) Can they accept economic development money and still discriminate in hiring.
*If* they decide to discriminate in hiring, I would be more likely to support a suit by AU in defense of a non-creationist worker who was not hired because he refused to sign a statement of belief than a suit trying to prevent them from getting the tourism dollars. That would be a much more winnable case.
Disney parks likely benefited from the same kind of tax incentives that this park is trying to benefit from. It's not "tax payer funded", the developers are trying to take advantage of existing Tourism development laws and dollars the same way that Disney or Six Flags would if they were building a park. That's where all the separation of church and state arguments are falling apart here. This group isn't trying to get any benefit that any other, secular, group couldn't get for a similar project. The Governor isn't saying "O, hai here's 25 millions dollarz that my state iz donating to ur park." Existing law is being used to do exactly what that law was intended to do, develop tourism.
I've been really active in church/state separation politics in the past, I have a pretty good idea how these laws work. Like the lawyer from the American Atheists said, there's probably no case here (at least given the information available).
Case law on the matter of "favoring particular religious expression" nearly universally holds that as long as the state isn't giving preferential treatment to the religious organization, giving it the same thing everyone else gets is perfectly acceptable. Long story short, if Six Flags can get the exact same incentives as this organization can to build a secular theme park, then there is no favoritism in letting the wacko Christians also get the incentives. The incentive is not being given *because* this is a Christian organization, it's being given in spite of the fact that it's a Christian organization. All things being equal (and we don't have nearly all the facts here, so you can't really be "sure"), that's allowed.
The purpose of these incentives is to encourage tourism to Kentucky. Given the size of the "Crazy Christian Wacko" demographic this park is likely to do that.
I don't see it. Really, I think the Governor makes a valid point. Tourism development dollars don't care about your religion, your probable ulterior motives, or the accuracy of your science. They care whether your new facility will develop tourism. Based on the size of the "frighteningly stupid people" demographic, this park seems extremely likely to develop tourism. Therefore, it should qualify for the same incentives as any other theme park likely to develop tourism. If the state government gave this park *better* incentives than the Six Flags park down the street it would be a problem. Assuming they are offering the same incentives to these people as to any other similar tourism type site, this is a valid application of the state's funds. I suppose more properly I should say it's a legal application of state funds within the context of tourism development laws. Whether you consider that to be a valid use of state funds is probably an entirely different argument.
I typically like Americans United, but I'm not sure I'd support a lawsuit here. The Governor makes a valid point, backed by several other organizations that are usually good Church/State watchdogs. The tourism development law doesn't care about the possible ulterior motives of the developers, or the validity of the science presented by the facility. It cares about the development of tourism, which seems likely to occur if this facility is built. Now if they turned around and *didn't* fund a non-Christian theme park which had similar projections for jobs and businesses, then there would be a problem... As it is, this seems like a valid application of the state's money, much though I disagree with the park's purpose.
No but it weighs the same as a duck.
I'm not an explosive expert either, but I worked with enough of them in Iraq to say you're pretty much dead on. Actually disarming a device is reserved for situations where you can't or don't have time to evacuate the area. It's nearly always safer and less expensive to blow the device in place. Bomb squad guys don't have any more desire than the rest of us to get blown to pieces, as a rule.
Ordinarily a post like this would be a troll... but in this case... Yeah we're looking a a graphical desktop environment here. Can we maybe, I dunno, see it?
You think that's weird, try it with JavaScript enabled. My browser signature is *unique*. Apparently no one in the 1.2 million or so person sample group is using the latest Firefox on WinXP with my particular combination of add-ons (yes, it could see my add-ons). Which means... Relatively more "power-users" are easily identifiable by this technology than "normal people". The more vanilla your browser set-up is, the harder you are to recognize (at least through this metric)
Then theres the hobo's everywhere that you never know if they will try to mug you.
Meanwhile, people bitch about our right to own guns which essentially protects against this sort of thing.
The first quote explains, to an extent, why the second quote happens. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge gun control guy. I often question the usefulness of carrying a gun for the majority of people (I really don't think most people have any reasonable chance to employ a concealed weapon in most attack scenarios without getting themselves killed), but I don't question your right to do so... most of the time. Then I see stuff like this and I wonder if maybe taking away everyone's guns and giving them a blankey isn't a good idea.
Surely you must see that you are reacting to the same fear as the anti-terrorism security theater people are? The fear that some unknown "other" is going to do bad things to you for no other reason than they are different and often less fortunate? You're also reacting in exactly the same way, grabbing onto something that makes you feel like you'll be better able to protect yourself whether it'll be effective or not. A gun is not a self defense panacea. It will not protect you from "hobos" by itself. It's a tool. If you spend the necessary hours (and hours and hours) to learn to use it properly, it has some usefulness in some self defense situations. I'm not talking about a gun safety course and a few hours on the range making sure you can hit the broad side of a barn... I'm talking man-days spent working draw and fire drills, accuracy on moving targets, and accuracy while moving yourself. Plus knowing when to use these things so the guy with the already drawn weapon or his backup in the shadows don't blow you away before you accomplish anything.
Of course even if you spend the time to do it right, you're still just learning all this stuff and carrying the weapon in reaction your fear, the same as the guy who submits to the strip search is reacting to his fear of terrorist. So now we have a scared guy with a gun walking down the street waiting for the first "hobo" to act suspiciously enough to let him use it. Great. It's nearly enough to make me become a 'huge gun control guy". It really is.
I'm not much behind you, but to me the occasional reboot makes it interesting. That's the biggest potential pitfall here IMHO. A person who lives to 300 years old is much more likely to stagnate. Working to avoid that stagnation would become an important part of life. We'd get to where we *want* reboots every few decades (or at least to where we *should*, we might have to convince people). Robert Jordan did an interesting thing on this front in one of his cultures... The magic wielders in his Wheel of Time world live an extended time (400-450 years old for most, 250-300 for Aes Sedai who've inadvertently shortened their span artificially). One culture (the Sea Folk) deal with these long lives by tying the life of a magic wielder (a Windfinder) to the life of a normal mortal captain. The Windfinder follows the captain's career, rising (or declining in bad situations) through the ranks with her until the captain dies. Then the Windfinder is assigned to a new captain, at the bottom of the totem pole.
In the event that we could dramatically lengthen our lives it seems like that systems which encourage period "reboots" might not just be kinda fun, but almost necessary.
No, the increase comes from the failure of the death rate. Populations growths is (Babies) - (Dead People) = (Population Growth). Even if there's no increase in (Babies), if there's a huge decrease in (Dead People) then (Population Growth) will rise. It's not *quite* as bad as it sounds, the population growth numbers will rise slightly over time (very old people are unlikely to be helped by this treatment enough to substantially increase their life spans, the younger you are when you start, the more likely it will help), and likely peek in fifty years or so (when most of us who are young and healthy now would like have started to die). We'd have some time to deal with the repercussions, but a slow down in breeding would almost certainly be required (arguably it already is, even without this kind of tech). Also, assuming this technology slows, but doesn't completely stop the aging process (which seems likely) the death rate would catch back up eventually, but there would be a lag.
How many people would be willing to risk their unending lives to perform these great feats? We'd still be able to die, we wouldn't be immortal, just ageless. Not having many ageless mortals around to ask, it's hard to say, but based on most fiction regarding them it's easy to believe they would fear death far more than even normal mortals.
I don't fully comprehend all the argument here, not having had a huge background in genetics, but I do recall something that my Bio 101 teacher said... It went along the lines of "If you live long enough, you will get cancer". As I recall her basic argument was that whether or not aging per se increases your odds of getting cancer on a case by case basis, the longer you live the more cell divisions you're going to have and the more chance that one of them is wrong enough to cause a problem. So assuming all other things being equal, eventually your chance of getting some kind of cancer approaches 100%.
Not that his is exactly a problem... I mean, I'd rather live to a healthy 150 knowing that my chance for cancer is steadily rising after about 60, then pretty much be guaranteed that I won't make it past 100 and that everything after 75 or so is a crap shoot on the "healthy"; but it's still likely that if we could mostly eliminate other forms of degenerative death we'll all eventually die of cancer, right?
Te article really was terrible. It didn't provide a link to the text of the memo, gave no context for why the teacher did what she did, and then acted as though "school officials", rather than immediately retracting the statement, actually supported it. Hint: one teacher is not "school officials". "School officials" are the people saying "um, no, she shouldn't have done that".
I see a serious problem here, and it has to do with people being assholes. Also people being racists. Also people being unduly frightened of things that might happen on airplanes.
"Well your honor, he was an Arab and his pants looked like they folded a little funny around the crotch, so when he pulled out that cell phone I just knew we was gonna blow us all up. That's when I cold cocked him and took the dangerous device away."
You laugh, perhaps, but it will happen. Something like 40% of Americans are completely OK with racially profiling Arabs as an anti-terrorism measure. Never mind that statistically more terrorists are not Arabs than are, never mind that prior to 9/11 the most significant act of terrorism on US soil was committed by a white bread kid from Kansas. None of that matters. My wife was in line at Costco in Boston. An Indian couple walked by talking in what she assumes was Hindi. After they past the guy in front of her commented to his wife that someone from Homeland Security ought to be interested in that, and seemed rather disgusted that they wouldn't be. At first she actually though the guy was joking, but it became quickly clear that he really thought being brown skinned and speaking a foreign language at Costco should be grounds for DHS interest.
Now most people aren't blatant racists (I hope), but enough of them are a little extra nervous around Arabs, a little extra nervous around planes, and little extra nervous around crowds, that giving them blanket "Good Samaritan" immunity from prosecution is probably not a great idea.
You could even have repetitive fields with the same name but different effects: "Too drunk to moderate (+1)" vs "Too drunk to moderate (-1)".
Yeah, you probably want to make sure it's on "silent".
I see this idea postulated a lot, and I have not doubt that it's part of why some job descriptions are written the way they are, but it's not a universal reason. I see the same kind of inflated job requirements on DoD contracting jobs and we *have* to hire US citizens. It's mostly, so far as I can tell, a fishing expedition. You advertise ridiculous requirements in the hopes that the person you really want (who is still overqualified, but not as badly as you ask for) will apply. For example:
I was hired to be a systems analyst for a very large Fortune 50 contracting company. They paid me pretty well to do most of the systems administration for a classified lab in one of their facilities. Here's the thing 95% of the time the systems I managed were completely locked down. They couldn't be changed except with the approval of a Change Control Board, and then only according to specific procedures produced by the system's development or maintenance team. So 95% of the time my job consisted of either following a procedure like a trained monkey, or providing a root login for someone from the system's maintenance group to do something.
In the first couple of months I often wondered why I had been hired, and what they were paying me for. To my certain knowledge they had rejected at least two previous candidates because it was felt they lacked sufficient Unix experience. So far as I could tell you barely needed to be conscious to do this job, much less have Unix experience. It turned out that the *other* 5% of the time, when shit was hitting the fan, and expensive simulation budgets were on the line, they needed someone who could fix stuff. Fast. It was amazing how many procedures and quality assurances rules could be bypassed or waivered when FTG-023940324309480932-b was about to go tits up because some systems couldn't get to an NFS share.
So basically they did an exhaustive search for a senior analyst to do a job that any kid fresh out of college or tech school could have done for 1/3 what I was making... mostly just so I was on hand in the event of emergency. I'd been unemployed for a few months before I got that job, so i was pretty happy to get it and have it (especially as it was during the recession), but I must admit to being pretty happy I'm not still stuck in it.
It's like anything that attempts to judge someone based on standards or attempts at "objective criteria". You don't *know* these people, you don't have anyway to realistically judge which one is the better choice. So you've got a guy with a two year degree and a couple of year worth of tech support or data center grunt experience vs a guy with a 4 yr degree. You know that *on average* the guy with the four year degree had better grades in high school and is capable of "sticking it out" to make a goal.You know the other guy *on average* had worse grades and/or was less motivated, though he also has a couple years of possibly relevant (or not) experience. Beyond that you don't have much to go on. Their resumes are equally blank slates for all intents and purposes. The relative value of an couple extra years of college vs some really grunt level experience is pretty damned hard to judge. So most places make the judgment call that the guy with the degree was either smarter or more motivated or more goal focused and they go with him.
They could easily be wrong. The other guy could have just been a bit less lucky with scholarships, a bit less willing to take on debt, or just unfortunate enough that his high school didn't offer Glee Club and that was the thing that would have gotten his university application over the top... but again, all they work with is averages and standards. They don't know either of these guys. At this point they're a couple of pieces of paper with names and really short career histories written on them.
You see this with job selections, college admissions, even sports team selections and video games (you should see the way that "Gear Score" polarizes WoW players). In the absence of real objective or subjective criteria to make a choice, people turn averages and assumptions into "objective criteria". They don't really have a choice. If you have to weed through 100 resumes for an entry level systems admin job, you have to apply some kind of criteria or you'll go mad.
It remains better than the alternative if you can't speak for some reason though. I don't think anyone is arguing that this should be a primary means of communication with 911, just that it's a useful option to have. The vast majority of the time, text message go through in a quick and timely manner. There are clearly a limited, but existent, number of situations where texting 911 would be useful. Texting systems are cheap and ubiquitous. Why not have the option open?
For precisely the reason in the summary. If you're inside on a bank robbery or other hostage type situation you can send a text in near complete silence. Talking to a dispatcher will make noise and potentially give away your position (and the fact that you're in contact with the outside). It's a limited use case, but happens often enough to justify the relatively small expense I would think.
We're replacing my wife's 3G at Christmas, it just can't keep up anymore. My 3Gs runs 4.x flawlessly though. Which kind of make me sad, I'd like an excuse to upgrade to the prettier screen :-)
A thing to be careful with: Turn by turn navigation software will typically keep navigating in the background unless you completely close it using the taskbar. I used my phone to get me somewhere in Boston last month (walking). I used to Home key to background the task and stuck the phone in my pocket when I got there. 30-45 Minutes later I pulled the phone out and again and realized that I was all but out of juice. The phone had been navigating the whole time I ate lunch,and GPS navigation *devours* battery life.
I think there is a difference between gambling for entertainment and gambling with the expectation you'll get rich. If it amuses you to play the lottery occasionally, go for it. I like a bet a few bucks when I'm in Vegas, it's fun. It's the people that spend some measurable fraction of their income in the real hope that it's a way to make it big... That's the problem.