You are correct right up to the point of "Dropbox wants to use Apple's servers to distribute their product to iDevices" at which point Apple gets to say "We don't sell stuff on our store that does what your product does." Pretty much every major provider of digital content has gone through this whole process at this point. Barnes and Noble and Amazon took the links to their stores out of their Apps, as did Audible. They can say in the app "you gotta go to our store to buy stuff" but Apple won't sell apps that either have in-app purchase or links to website that sell content. This has been the case for over a year, and Dropbox should have known it. It was a huge brew-hah-ha when the change was made, and lots of content providers screamed and cried and claimed they were going to have to pull their apps.
Of course then they remembered just how many iDevice users there are, and how much of their sales come from iDevices, and figured out ways around the problem. Personally I think Apple is being blindingly stupid on this. The only people they're hurting are themselves really. Everybody knows that to buy a new e-book or audiobook you got to BN.com, or Amazon.com, or Aubible.com, buy what you want then use your device to download it. They aren't hurting the content providers really at all. they're just making things slightly more annoying for their customers. Probably not annoying enough to make anyone drop the platform, but add enough straws and even the strongest camel will break.
Also, as others point out, this could eventually hurt them with antitrust authorities. probably not now, they don't have enough market share to really be considered anything like a monopoly, but in the future it could hurt them.
His point is that the vast majority of the budget on most games is spent on art and voice acting. Some of his problems could be solved with simple better writing, and that's all but free compared to a lot of what's spent on art. The rest would require a lot of coding, new algorithms, thought, etc. That does cost money, but you could skimp a little on the ultra-ultra-high-res graphics that only people with super high end systems will see and maybe drop some of that cash on programers. It just requires thinking about the problem differently, not necessarily spending more (though that always helps).
Even in the medium (10-20 years) term, it's got potential for profit. No guarantees, but if they just get lucky once, they could double the world's supply of platinum or something.
I really think there's a lot of play in where you are located too. I'm in Boston right now, and I could find a job in heartbeat if I needed too (I'm 38, mostly high end sys admin stuff.) Previously I was in Huntsville, AL and I could have found something pretty quickly there too I think. Back in Louisiana, I was pretty much screwed. You need to be in the places that have the right combination of jobs and people. Places with to many qualified people (Silicon Valley), or to few technical jobs (most of Louisiana) will find you spinning wheels. I think one of the biggest problems is that to many people are trying to find their jobs in over saturated markets instead of looking to the new growth areas.
As a card carrying liberal I feel safe admitting that antivax crowd tends to be on the left-wing end of the fringe political spectrum. There's always some overlap when it comes to people who's opinions are that far out, so there's definitely some right-wing fringers that will hop on the antivax bandwagon, but it's mostly the raving frothing end of my political peeps that love the: "modern medicine is bad, man. Takes some herbs, go to chiropractor, and use tinctures to live forever!" game. Much though it would be comforting to pretend otherwise, the extreme right wing does not have a monopoly on conspiracy theories and/or crackpots...
Having done a bit of Neopagan rights work in my younger years, I got to play with some real left wing wack jobs. I can point you at at least 10 or 12 people who will jump on this as proof that vaccines don't work.
Wait, what? Dude have you ever read a history book in you life? Shit people used to die of all the time has been eliminated or reduced to levels that occasional stories like this allow you to give your uneducated opinion on the matter. Small Pox alone, a completely eliminated disease by the way, has killed countless millions throughout history. Scarlet Fever, Whooping Cough, Mumps.Polio: all killers and destroyers of lives that you almost never hear about anymore. Do you think they just got bored and decided to stop being a scourge on humanity?
The Army boosted me for just about everything (Including Small Pox and Anthrax which I'd never had) before I went to Iraq, but now that I think about it I don't hink they hit CPox. I should talk to my doctor. I'm old enough to have had the actual disease, not the vaccine. Wouldn't relish doing that shit again.
I wonder how closely you could guess my age based on me not having had either Small Pox or CPox vaccines as a kid.
To me, this is just as bad an idea as region coding on DVD's or disallowing Americans from purchasing pharmaceuticals abroad.
It's worse really. In the case of DVDs it's a technical hurdle not a legal one. If you buy a region free DVD player or import one no one says you can't use the DVD just because you're in the wrong region. You just have to go through the trouble of getting a technical solution to a technical problem. Granted some of those solutions are themselves illegal (cracking the encryption to make a "software" region free DVD player), but to my knowledge there's nothing illegal about buying a DVD player in Japan, bringing it here and playing Japanese region DVDs on it. The case of pharmaceuticals has at least a valid safety argument. It's pretty clear that safety is not the only, or even the primary, reason for the rules; but at least there's at least something to the argument.
Here it's just, "you can't do that because you're costing a company some money they might make".
I don't per se think you're a shill, but you've explained the same thing multiple times without really explaining how what this kid did is wrong. He bought a book. He signed no contract, agreed to no user agreement, did nothing except go to a store and purchase an item. The book itself is a licensed instance of the copyrighted work, authorized by the copyright holder. By the doctrine of first sale, he now owns that item and can sell it. He comes here, and sells his book. Now obviously what upsets the publishers (beyond the fact that they'd like for us to have to purchase the same book every time we read it; or possibly license it by page, by minute) is that he did this writ large. He bought a lot of books and sold them here. Had he done it with one book he'd happened to bring with him, no one would have cared. In essence though, he bought a book, and sold the book later. He owned the book, he had a "license" for the material, what did he do wrong?
CNN had a fairly coherent opinion piece on the question of why no one wants to piss of North Korea any further despite obvious provocation (this rocket launch isn't the first, nor even the worst provocation they've performed). Basically the guy's point boiled down to a three tier deterrent used by North Korea's government to make them immune from serious attack:
1) They're fricken nuts. No one knows exactly how nuts they are, and no one particularly wants to find out. Even by the standards of repressive totalitarian regimes, the North Koreans are in a class by themselves. Most of South Korea, and all of Seoul is in range of North Korean artillery. It's widely accepted that unless China were willing to engage in open war in support of the North (unlikely), they'd be pounded into dog meat in short order by combined US, South Korean, and (probably) Japanese troops. That won't stop them from shelling Seoul, possibly with chemical weapons, and maybe hitting Tokyo with some medium range missiles before they go down. They're willing to let their own people starve to death in mass numbers to keep themselves in power, they sure aren't going to be concerned about "enemy" civilians.
2) No one wants to deal with the repercussions. Assuming we (for a value of "we" intended to mean the US and some portion of our Asian allies) go in, wipe the floor with the North Korean Army, and they don't manage to do to terribly much damage to Seoul in the process... then we have North Korea? Yay? The country is more or less without any infrastructure. A good portion of the population is starving. They're mostly brainwashed. The only thing that's had any resources at all dedicated to it in the last 50 years is the military we just presumably smashed... The quagmire's in Iraq and Afghanistan will seem like positive fun times in comparison. As the author put is (I'm paraphrasing), "You're looking at a generation worth of South Korean time and treasure just to get the place to where it could be functional". Nobody wants to deal with that.
3) They have nukes. See also (1) & (2). No one knows if they're crazy enough to use the nukes as a last ditch "take the world down with us" strategy, and no one has any idea how many there are or where. When the inevitable chaos of (2) starts, any nukes not flung at Seoul as a last spit in the eye have a high potential to become rogue. Not a pretty picture.
I can't seem to find the article now, which is a bit annoying, but it seems to be pretty well thought out. The typical reason for doing nothing about North Korea is China, but honestly at this point I don't think even the Chinese really like them. They'd just rather have a broke and desperate North on their border than a unified and strong Korea.
It's quite arguably a public health issue to begin with. If you don't get vaccinated you become a potential vector for others who lack immunity for reasons beyond their control. Something on the order of 10% of people either can't get vaccines (because of immune compromises, allergies, too young, etc) or have ineffective vaccines (for whatever reason it just didn't take). For those people, every additional unvaccinated person is an additional vector for disease. I'd say an issue that potentially affects 10% of the population (plus or minus the percentage of people unvaccinated by choice) is definitely in the realms of public health management.
Also all the other potentially fatal diseases that almost no one gets anymore because of vaccines. It's not really an exaggeration to say that in the days before vaccines, nearly everyone got at least one potentially fatal disease in childhood. Only a small fraction of those actually were fatal of course, but nearly everyone got something that could kill them at some point in early childhood. Of those that weren't killed, maiming was far more common than it is now. Autism may be forever, but so is hearing/sight loss from extreme fevers (surely everyone remembers Helen Keller) or partial/total leg paralysis from Polio. Ever read about someone being "pock-marked" in historical fiction or fantasy? It refers to the horrifying scarring that accompanies the survival of small pox. Makes the worst acne scars you've ever seen seem like some unpleasant bumps.
Even if every single case of autism on record could be directly attributed to vaccine side effects, it would still make sense to continue most of our current vaccination schedule. You could maybe drop a few of the more "optional" ones like chicken pox if that were the case (and it's not). Between diseases based fatalities, and the crippling effects even on some survivors of these diseases it makes zero sense to stop doing them.
There are a *very* limited number of markets that can support a Fry's (and you may notice that Fry's is aware of this fact, and only opens in those markets). I've always wished I lived near a Fry's (been to a few on the west coast when I was there on business), but I've always been aware that a Fry's in the places I lived would never survive. New Orleans is a great town, but there's no where near the geek population to support a Fry's. I do wish they'd open one here in Boston though. Cambridge already has a Microcenter, and you can hardly move in there for all the people. We could support one Fry's at least.
"Professor" is merely shorthand for "subject matter expert." Yes, only a subject matter expert is likely to be able to explain your mistakes or tell you if you're doing it wrong. Graduate assistant and fellow students are also a resource; but being progressively less trained themselves, they are progressively more likely to be wrong themselves. This doesn't mean that a professor is always right, that student is always wrong, or that there is not a considerable amount of subjectiveness in any of this, but in general it is found that the great majority of people learn better when they are taught by someone expert in the field being studied. Thus schools hire people, theoretically expert, in the field to teach those students. Some professors suck, some students never needed professors in the first place; but in the vast majority of cases more knowledge is transferred with even a mediocre professor than with none.
Security is a valid concern. The VPN is another layer of security. Let's say there's a zero day vulnerability in ssh. That's OK, you have to be on the inside of the corporate network to ssh into the server, so there's a layer of security there. Let's say there's a zero day vulnerability in the VPN system. That's where the security of ssh comes in. Why expose an extra potential vulnerability vector to the outside world? The VPN external interface already HAS to be exposed and can get you what you need from there.
For my more sensitive systems I actually have to get through three layers of password to get into root. Login to the VPN to get on the network, provide the password for my ssh key to get into the box, then provide either my own password (through sudo, my password is different than my ssh key password) or roots password (through su) to get to root. All three passwords are different, so that if one gets compromised somehow, you still need the other two.
Sure shh is secure. That doesn't mean you should rely exclusively on that security if you can avoid it.
Even more to the point I don't know that we can answer the question as asked. There's no standard answer to "what do I need to telecommute?" What do you do? What tools are commonly used by your employer(s)? Do you need voice or video chat? If so, what kind? Skype is easy, but Polycomms don't work with it. What do you do? If your job is "develop.NET applications", it's going to be really hard to just switch to Linux. Does your company use Exchange? Is there an OWA server available so you can hook it up to a non-Outlook client? If not is there POP or IMAP (not as good as OWA which can forward contacts, calendar, etc)? Do you use any proprietary Windows only tools? Do you have to use IE to get to certain internal web sites? What VPN solution does your company use? Is there a Linux client? My company is standardized on Office Communicator, I'm not aware of any other IM system that can hook up to our internal OC servers, that could be a huge problem with telecommuting.
I mean... Telecommuting can be as simple as "I need a phone, a VPN client, an e-mail client, and a terminal to SSH in with" or as complex as "I need a full suite of proprietary in house Windows tools, Visual Studios, and Outlook or I can't do my job". I could telecommute for a day or two with nearly any computer using any OS. Eventually I'd need at least a VM with a domain connected Windows OS or I'd be unable to do a lot of communication, internal paperwork, documentation, etc.
My religion has no problem marrying gay people. I perfectly respect that rights of your religion to not recognize the spiritual sanctity of a marriage between people of the same sex, as well as its right to refuse to have its clergy officiate the ceremony or refuse to have said ceremony on its property. If your definition of marriage is so narrow that it consists of "people married my the traditions of my faith, by a member of its clergy, on its holy ground" then certainly you have fair claim denying "marriage" to gay people. If on the other hand you recognize as "married" those who have civil ceremonies or ceremonies in other faiths or traditions than your own... well your argument breaks down. Most Neopagan, some Christian, and some reformed Jewish "churches" will happily perform gay marriages. Legally binding only in states that recognize it of course; but spiritually binding none-the-less.
There's a pretty simple way to avoid same sex relationships in the game... don't flirt with characters of the same sex. Seriously, Bioware handles relationships worse than Stephenie Meyer. The conversation paths necessary to get into "romance" with an NPC are pretty much lit up with landing lights. It's not like you're going to be choosing random friendly options and suddenly realize that the character has fallen for you.
Ironically one of the things that upsets FOM about the idea of same sex relationships in The Old Republic (which don't actually exist yet, despite what the article says, they're promised for a future update), is that you might inadvertently interact with people having same sex relationships with *their* NPC companions. Never mind that there's no interaction with other people's companions, and you can't possibly know what the romantic status of any companion relationship is for someone else. You might get gay cooties from grouping with someone who is having freaky sex with his avatar's virtual friends while you're not looking.
There's ways around that too. At Boeing we had an interesting setup. No one had admin access to their own computers, but we had a piece of software on that allowed installation of a wide and varied library of vetted software with sudo like privileges. You opened this tool, and it took you to a library of software: pretty much most of the popular web browsers, a large number of useful free (or Free) tools, and a few licensed tools that we had site licenses for. You clicked on the software you wanted to install, and a privileged installer process started up and installed it. it was pretty cool. You couldn't exactly stay bleeding edge up to date with it (not exactly a bad thing), but you could get a lot of useful tools and software without IT having to worry about infection vectors (obviously they vetted anything that went into the library).
Lots of software (like Firefox, maybe Chrome?) can be installed in a non-privileged mode anyway. It puts all the files in the user's directory and doesn't write anything to the registry. Hell Firefox has a portable mode that you can just install on a Thumb drive and run without even installing it.
"You can install what you want, but we only support IE".
Problem solved. That's how we do it. Users get approval for all kinds of crazy stuff, on the understanding that IT doesn't support it; and if anything breaks, weird stuff gets uninstalled/turned off for troubleshooting. I'm the Unix/Linux support guy so it's not really anything I worry about, but it seems to work fine for our desktop support guys. Hell, my "Corporate workstation" is a Mac with Parallels running Windows in a VM. The Mac is not a supported platform, and is basically a standalone device. My Windows VM is a member of the Domain, and I use it for all my Outlook/Office Messenger/IE needs. Obviously this is not a "supported" configuration, and I'm on my own for support, but Desktop support joined it to the domain for me and provides basic account support. I find having a Unix based machine makes my job a lot easier (Cygwin works, but always feels clunky to me), so this was the compromise I made with IT. They knew I could handle all of my own support needs, so no one cares.
Not convicted, arrested. First, the bar is *a lot* lower to arrest someone than to convict them. Innocent people get arrested all the time. This also not only for prison, it's for jail. Jail is "I got drunk and maybe a little stupid so they tossed me in here overnight", jail is "I went to this protest, and the cops decided to take a few of us in", jail is "They don't even have enough to charge me, but they can hold me here for 24 hours". A significant percentage of people who go to jails in a large city never even get *charged* with anything, let alone convicted. I know guys who've spent a night or two in jail here or there who have security clearances. Given the number of years I lived in New Orleans, and the number of mildly stupid things I've done int eh French Quarter after a long nigh, I count myself pretty lucky not to spent a night or two there myself.
That doesn't track. As the article points out, places with true "socialized" medicine (Canada and Europe) typically don't have these problems or have them in lesser degrees. When there's no profit motive, there's less incentive to over-test, less incentive to push unnecessary pills or treatments, and less over specialization. The problem with Medicare isn't that it causes people to overspend because they don't see the pain of the spending (medicare still requires copays and such), it's the system into which it's been pushed.
Doctors and insurance companies have an adversarial relationship that drives cost up so both of them can profit. Enter Medicare. It has to play the game by the rules established by private insurance and doctors. It inherits the waste in system and (being government) adds some of its own. The problem isn't that people are wasteful of things they don't pay for (some are or course, but the national health care systems of numerous countries attest that it's not all of them, nor even an unworkable number of them). It's that the profit motive of both doctors and insurers keeps driving up costs, and Medicare has to live in their world. If socialized medicine is inherently more expensive, why do we pay so much more per capita for health care than any other rich country, but achieve, at best, comparable results?
Some states, as you can guess, are hyper-regulated centrally controlled markets and are poor, and some are pretty much free-market and are relatively richer.
Erk? Really? I've live in Alabama (very free market, very poor), Louisiana (mostly free market, pretty poor), Florida (middle of road free market, fairly rich), and Massachusetts (pretty regulated, pretty rich). I don't think the correlation you're trying to make exists. I'm not saying that more regulation necessarily leads to a richer state, but certainly the opposite is not true either. Texas and Florida do pretty well with very free markets, Mass, California, and NY all do pretty well with very regulated ones (Despite the state government's financial problems, California as an economy remains strong). Many of the most free market states in the deep south are some of the poorest in the country though. In a very (very) general statement, blue states tend to be richer than red states (though the rust belt is pretty blue and gives lie to those statistics in their specific case). I think it's a lot more complicated than a simple "regulated economies poor, free economies rich" dynamic though.
Apple's "AppleCare+" warranty extension is actually pretty good. It even covers user idiocy. I dropped the hundred bucks on it, and they happily replaced the phone I dropped into a foot of water. Shockingly the thing actually worked for a day afterward, I should have done a better job of drying it. I think a corrosion short killed it, not an actual water short.
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You are correct right up to the point of "Dropbox wants to use Apple's servers to distribute their product to iDevices" at which point Apple gets to say "We don't sell stuff on our store that does what your product does." Pretty much every major provider of digital content has gone through this whole process at this point. Barnes and Noble and Amazon took the links to their stores out of their Apps, as did Audible. They can say in the app "you gotta go to our store to buy stuff" but Apple won't sell apps that either have in-app purchase or links to website that sell content. This has been the case for over a year, and Dropbox should have known it. It was a huge brew-hah-ha when the change was made, and lots of content providers screamed and cried and claimed they were going to have to pull their apps.
Of course then they remembered just how many iDevice users there are, and how much of their sales come from iDevices, and figured out ways around the problem. Personally I think Apple is being blindingly stupid on this. The only people they're hurting are themselves really. Everybody knows that to buy a new e-book or audiobook you got to BN.com, or Amazon.com, or Aubible.com, buy what you want then use your device to download it. They aren't hurting the content providers really at all. they're just making things slightly more annoying for their customers. Probably not annoying enough to make anyone drop the platform, but add enough straws and even the strongest camel will break.
Also, as others point out, this could eventually hurt them with antitrust authorities. probably not now, they don't have enough market share to really be considered anything like a monopoly, but in the future it could hurt them.
His point is that the vast majority of the budget on most games is spent on art and voice acting. Some of his problems could be solved with simple better writing, and that's all but free compared to a lot of what's spent on art. The rest would require a lot of coding, new algorithms, thought, etc. That does cost money, but you could skimp a little on the ultra-ultra-high-res graphics that only people with super high end systems will see and maybe drop some of that cash on programers. It just requires thinking about the problem differently, not necessarily spending more (though that always helps).
Even in the medium (10-20 years) term, it's got potential for profit. No guarantees, but if they just get lucky once, they could double the world's supply of platinum or something.
I really think there's a lot of play in where you are located too. I'm in Boston right now, and I could find a job in heartbeat if I needed too (I'm 38, mostly high end sys admin stuff.) Previously I was in Huntsville, AL and I could have found something pretty quickly there too I think. Back in Louisiana, I was pretty much screwed. You need to be in the places that have the right combination of jobs and people. Places with to many qualified people (Silicon Valley), or to few technical jobs (most of Louisiana) will find you spinning wheels. I think one of the biggest problems is that to many people are trying to find their jobs in over saturated markets instead of looking to the new growth areas.
As a card carrying liberal I feel safe admitting that antivax crowd tends to be on the left-wing end of the fringe political spectrum. There's always some overlap when it comes to people who's opinions are that far out, so there's definitely some right-wing fringers that will hop on the antivax bandwagon, but it's mostly the raving frothing end of my political peeps that love the: "modern medicine is bad, man. Takes some herbs, go to chiropractor, and use tinctures to live forever!" game. Much though it would be comforting to pretend otherwise, the extreme right wing does not have a monopoly on conspiracy theories and/or crackpots...
Having done a bit of Neopagan rights work in my younger years, I got to play with some real left wing wack jobs. I can point you at at least 10 or 12 people who will jump on this as proof that vaccines don't work.
Wait, what? Dude have you ever read a history book in you life? Shit people used to die of all the time has been eliminated or reduced to levels that occasional stories like this allow you to give your uneducated opinion on the matter. Small Pox alone, a completely eliminated disease by the way, has killed countless millions throughout history. Scarlet Fever, Whooping Cough, Mumps.Polio: all killers and destroyers of lives that you almost never hear about anymore. Do you think they just got bored and decided to stop being a scourge on humanity?
The Army boosted me for just about everything (Including Small Pox and Anthrax which I'd never had) before I went to Iraq, but now that I think about it I don't hink they hit CPox. I should talk to my doctor. I'm old enough to have had the actual disease, not the vaccine. Wouldn't relish doing that shit again.
I wonder how closely you could guess my age based on me not having had either Small Pox or CPox vaccines as a kid.
To me, this is just as bad an idea as region coding on DVD's or disallowing Americans from purchasing pharmaceuticals abroad.
It's worse really. In the case of DVDs it's a technical hurdle not a legal one. If you buy a region free DVD player or import one no one says you can't use the DVD just because you're in the wrong region. You just have to go through the trouble of getting a technical solution to a technical problem. Granted some of those solutions are themselves illegal (cracking the encryption to make a "software" region free DVD player), but to my knowledge there's nothing illegal about buying a DVD player in Japan, bringing it here and playing Japanese region DVDs on it. The case of pharmaceuticals has at least a valid safety argument. It's pretty clear that safety is not the only, or even the primary, reason for the rules; but at least there's at least something to the argument.
Here it's just, "you can't do that because you're costing a company some money they might make".
I don't per se think you're a shill, but you've explained the same thing multiple times without really explaining how what this kid did is wrong. He bought a book. He signed no contract, agreed to no user agreement, did nothing except go to a store and purchase an item. The book itself is a licensed instance of the copyrighted work, authorized by the copyright holder. By the doctrine of first sale, he now owns that item and can sell it. He comes here, and sells his book. Now obviously what upsets the publishers (beyond the fact that they'd like for us to have to purchase the same book every time we read it; or possibly license it by page, by minute) is that he did this writ large. He bought a lot of books and sold them here. Had he done it with one book he'd happened to bring with him, no one would have cared. In essence though, he bought a book, and sold the book later. He owned the book, he had a "license" for the material, what did he do wrong?
CNN had a fairly coherent opinion piece on the question of why no one wants to piss of North Korea any further despite obvious provocation (this rocket launch isn't the first, nor even the worst provocation they've performed). Basically the guy's point boiled down to a three tier deterrent used by North Korea's government to make them immune from serious attack:
1) They're fricken nuts. No one knows exactly how nuts they are, and no one particularly wants to find out. Even by the standards of repressive totalitarian regimes, the North Koreans are in a class by themselves. Most of South Korea, and all of Seoul is in range of North Korean artillery. It's widely accepted that unless China were willing to engage in open war in support of the North (unlikely), they'd be pounded into dog meat in short order by combined US, South Korean, and (probably) Japanese troops. That won't stop them from shelling Seoul, possibly with chemical weapons, and maybe hitting Tokyo with some medium range missiles before they go down. They're willing to let their own people starve to death in mass numbers to keep themselves in power, they sure aren't going to be concerned about "enemy" civilians.
2) No one wants to deal with the repercussions. Assuming we (for a value of "we" intended to mean the US and some portion of our Asian allies) go in, wipe the floor with the North Korean Army, and they don't manage to do to terribly much damage to Seoul in the process... then we have North Korea? Yay? The country is more or less without any infrastructure. A good portion of the population is starving. They're mostly brainwashed. The only thing that's had any resources at all dedicated to it in the last 50 years is the military we just presumably smashed... The quagmire's in Iraq and Afghanistan will seem like positive fun times in comparison. As the author put is (I'm paraphrasing), "You're looking at a generation worth of South Korean time and treasure just to get the place to where it could be functional". Nobody wants to deal with that.
3) They have nukes. See also (1) & (2). No one knows if they're crazy enough to use the nukes as a last ditch "take the world down with us" strategy, and no one has any idea how many there are or where. When the inevitable chaos of (2) starts, any nukes not flung at Seoul as a last spit in the eye have a high potential to become rogue. Not a pretty picture.
I can't seem to find the article now, which is a bit annoying, but it seems to be pretty well thought out. The typical reason for doing nothing about North Korea is China, but honestly at this point I don't think even the Chinese really like them. They'd just rather have a broke and desperate North on their border than a unified and strong Korea.
It's quite arguably a public health issue to begin with. If you don't get vaccinated you become a potential vector for others who lack immunity for reasons beyond their control. Something on the order of 10% of people either can't get vaccines (because of immune compromises, allergies, too young, etc) or have ineffective vaccines (for whatever reason it just didn't take). For those people, every additional unvaccinated person is an additional vector for disease. I'd say an issue that potentially affects 10% of the population (plus or minus the percentage of people unvaccinated by choice) is definitely in the realms of public health management.
Also all the other potentially fatal diseases that almost no one gets anymore because of vaccines. It's not really an exaggeration to say that in the days before vaccines, nearly everyone got at least one potentially fatal disease in childhood. Only a small fraction of those actually were fatal of course, but nearly everyone got something that could kill them at some point in early childhood. Of those that weren't killed, maiming was far more common than it is now. Autism may be forever, but so is hearing/sight loss from extreme fevers (surely everyone remembers Helen Keller) or partial/total leg paralysis from Polio. Ever read about someone being "pock-marked" in historical fiction or fantasy? It refers to the horrifying scarring that accompanies the survival of small pox. Makes the worst acne scars you've ever seen seem like some unpleasant bumps.
Even if every single case of autism on record could be directly attributed to vaccine side effects, it would still make sense to continue most of our current vaccination schedule. You could maybe drop a few of the more "optional" ones like chicken pox if that were the case (and it's not). Between diseases based fatalities, and the crippling effects even on some survivors of these diseases it makes zero sense to stop doing them.
There are a *very* limited number of markets that can support a Fry's (and you may notice that Fry's is aware of this fact, and only opens in those markets). I've always wished I lived near a Fry's (been to a few on the west coast when I was there on business), but I've always been aware that a Fry's in the places I lived would never survive. New Orleans is a great town, but there's no where near the geek population to support a Fry's. I do wish they'd open one here in Boston though. Cambridge already has a Microcenter, and you can hardly move in there for all the people. We could support one Fry's at least.
"Professor" is merely shorthand for "subject matter expert." Yes, only a subject matter expert is likely to be able to explain your mistakes or tell you if you're doing it wrong. Graduate assistant and fellow students are also a resource; but being progressively less trained themselves, they are progressively more likely to be wrong themselves. This doesn't mean that a professor is always right, that student is always wrong, or that there is not a considerable amount of subjectiveness in any of this, but in general it is found that the great majority of people learn better when they are taught by someone expert in the field being studied. Thus schools hire people, theoretically expert, in the field to teach those students. Some professors suck, some students never needed professors in the first place; but in the vast majority of cases more knowledge is transferred with even a mediocre professor than with none.
Thanks for that. Definitely something to try out.
Security is a valid concern. The VPN is another layer of security. Let's say there's a zero day vulnerability in ssh. That's OK, you have to be on the inside of the corporate network to ssh into the server, so there's a layer of security there. Let's say there's a zero day vulnerability in the VPN system. That's where the security of ssh comes in. Why expose an extra potential vulnerability vector to the outside world? The VPN external interface already HAS to be exposed and can get you what you need from there.
For my more sensitive systems I actually have to get through three layers of password to get into root. Login to the VPN to get on the network, provide the password for my ssh key to get into the box, then provide either my own password (through sudo, my password is different than my ssh key password) or roots password (through su) to get to root. All three passwords are different, so that if one gets compromised somehow, you still need the other two.
Sure shh is secure. That doesn't mean you should rely exclusively on that security if you can avoid it.
Even more to the point I don't know that we can answer the question as asked. There's no standard answer to "what do I need to telecommute?" What do you do? What tools are commonly used by your employer(s)? Do you need voice or video chat? If so, what kind? Skype is easy, but Polycomms don't work with it. What do you do? If your job is "develop .NET applications", it's going to be really hard to just switch to Linux. Does your company use Exchange? Is there an OWA server available so you can hook it up to a non-Outlook client? If not is there POP or IMAP (not as good as OWA which can forward contacts, calendar, etc)? Do you use any proprietary Windows only tools? Do you have to use IE to get to certain internal web sites? What VPN solution does your company use? Is there a Linux client? My company is standardized on Office Communicator, I'm not aware of any other IM system that can hook up to our internal OC servers, that could be a huge problem with telecommuting.
I mean... Telecommuting can be as simple as "I need a phone, a VPN client, an e-mail client, and a terminal to SSH in with" or as complex as "I need a full suite of proprietary in house Windows tools, Visual Studios, and Outlook or I can't do my job". I could telecommute for a day or two with nearly any computer using any OS. Eventually I'd need at least a VM with a domain connected Windows OS or I'd be unable to do a lot of communication, internal paperwork, documentation, etc.
My religion has no problem marrying gay people. I perfectly respect that rights of your religion to not recognize the spiritual sanctity of a marriage between people of the same sex, as well as its right to refuse to have its clergy officiate the ceremony or refuse to have said ceremony on its property. If your definition of marriage is so narrow that it consists of "people married my the traditions of my faith, by a member of its clergy, on its holy ground" then certainly you have fair claim denying "marriage" to gay people. If on the other hand you recognize as "married" those who have civil ceremonies or ceremonies in other faiths or traditions than your own... well your argument breaks down. Most Neopagan, some Christian, and some reformed Jewish "churches" will happily perform gay marriages. Legally binding only in states that recognize it of course; but spiritually binding none-the-less.
There's a pretty simple way to avoid same sex relationships in the game... don't flirt with characters of the same sex. Seriously, Bioware handles relationships worse than Stephenie Meyer. The conversation paths necessary to get into "romance" with an NPC are pretty much lit up with landing lights. It's not like you're going to be choosing random friendly options and suddenly realize that the character has fallen for you.
Ironically one of the things that upsets FOM about the idea of same sex relationships in The Old Republic (which don't actually exist yet, despite what the article says, they're promised for a future update), is that you might inadvertently interact with people having same sex relationships with *their* NPC companions. Never mind that there's no interaction with other people's companions, and you can't possibly know what the romantic status of any companion relationship is for someone else. You might get gay cooties from grouping with someone who is having freaky sex with his avatar's virtual friends while you're not looking.
There's ways around that too. At Boeing we had an interesting setup. No one had admin access to their own computers, but we had a piece of software on that allowed installation of a wide and varied library of vetted software with sudo like privileges. You opened this tool, and it took you to a library of software: pretty much most of the popular web browsers, a large number of useful free (or Free) tools, and a few licensed tools that we had site licenses for. You clicked on the software you wanted to install, and a privileged installer process started up and installed it. it was pretty cool. You couldn't exactly stay bleeding edge up to date with it (not exactly a bad thing), but you could get a lot of useful tools and software without IT having to worry about infection vectors (obviously they vetted anything that went into the library).
Lots of software (like Firefox, maybe Chrome?) can be installed in a non-privileged mode anyway. It puts all the files in the user's directory and doesn't write anything to the registry. Hell Firefox has a portable mode that you can just install on a Thumb drive and run without even installing it.
"You can install what you want, but we only support IE".
Problem solved. That's how we do it. Users get approval for all kinds of crazy stuff, on the understanding that IT doesn't support it; and if anything breaks, weird stuff gets uninstalled/turned off for troubleshooting. I'm the Unix/Linux support guy so it's not really anything I worry about, but it seems to work fine for our desktop support guys. Hell, my "Corporate workstation" is a Mac with Parallels running Windows in a VM. The Mac is not a supported platform, and is basically a standalone device. My Windows VM is a member of the Domain, and I use it for all my Outlook/Office Messenger/IE needs. Obviously this is not a "supported" configuration, and I'm on my own for support, but Desktop support joined it to the domain for me and provides basic account support. I find having a Unix based machine makes my job a lot easier (Cygwin works, but always feels clunky to me), so this was the compromise I made with IT. They knew I could handle all of my own support needs, so no one cares.
Not convicted, arrested. First, the bar is *a lot* lower to arrest someone than to convict them. Innocent people get arrested all the time. This also not only for prison, it's for jail. Jail is "I got drunk and maybe a little stupid so they tossed me in here overnight", jail is "I went to this protest, and the cops decided to take a few of us in", jail is "They don't even have enough to charge me, but they can hold me here for 24 hours". A significant percentage of people who go to jails in a large city never even get *charged* with anything, let alone convicted. I know guys who've spent a night or two in jail here or there who have security clearances. Given the number of years I lived in New Orleans, and the number of mildly stupid things I've done int eh French Quarter after a long nigh, I count myself pretty lucky not to spent a night or two there myself.
That doesn't track. As the article points out, places with true "socialized" medicine (Canada and Europe) typically don't have these problems or have them in lesser degrees. When there's no profit motive, there's less incentive to over-test, less incentive to push unnecessary pills or treatments, and less over specialization. The problem with Medicare isn't that it causes people to overspend because they don't see the pain of the spending (medicare still requires copays and such), it's the system into which it's been pushed.
Doctors and insurance companies have an adversarial relationship that drives cost up so both of them can profit. Enter Medicare. It has to play the game by the rules established by private insurance and doctors. It inherits the waste in system and (being government) adds some of its own. The problem isn't that people are wasteful of things they don't pay for (some are or course, but the national health care systems of numerous countries attest that it's not all of them, nor even an unworkable number of them). It's that the profit motive of both doctors and insurers keeps driving up costs, and Medicare has to live in their world. If socialized medicine is inherently more expensive, why do we pay so much more per capita for health care than any other rich country, but achieve, at best, comparable results?
Some states, as you can guess, are hyper-regulated centrally controlled markets and are poor, and some are pretty much free-market and are relatively richer.
Erk? Really? I've live in Alabama (very free market, very poor), Louisiana (mostly free market, pretty poor), Florida (middle of road free market, fairly rich), and Massachusetts (pretty regulated, pretty rich). I don't think the correlation you're trying to make exists. I'm not saying that more regulation necessarily leads to a richer state, but certainly the opposite is not true either. Texas and Florida do pretty well with very free markets, Mass, California, and NY all do pretty well with very regulated ones (Despite the state government's financial problems, California as an economy remains strong). Many of the most free market states in the deep south are some of the poorest in the country though. In a very (very) general statement, blue states tend to be richer than red states (though the rust belt is pretty blue and gives lie to those statistics in their specific case). I think it's a lot more complicated than a simple "regulated economies poor, free economies rich" dynamic though.
Apple's "AppleCare+" warranty extension is actually pretty good. It even covers user idiocy. I dropped the hundred bucks on it, and they happily replaced the phone I dropped into a foot of water. Shockingly the thing actually worked for a day afterward, I should have done a better job of drying it. I think a corrosion short killed it, not an actual water short.