I've owned all the iPhones between 3G and 6 Plus, iPad 1 and 3. And I own a Surface Pro 2 which I use as my daily laptop for work.
I think the iPad would gain greatly in broader use cases if they would just allow bluetooth mice pairing.
I begrudgingly accept at least one likely "altruistic" reason why they didn't, because they thought it would pollute the touch screen UI. I'm sure there were more mercenary concerns that it might undercut the sales of some Macbooks, too.
IMHO, the iPad has been a great tablet for uses where a traditional laptop is just too much computer. Couch surfing, lying in bed, airplanes, all places where extreme simplicity and smaller form factor is beneficial.
But I think the touch-only user interface has limits on usability. I have some drawing apps and while the developers seem to have gone out of their way to make it useful with a touch screen, it seems to lend itself to MORE UI complexity with only touch than it would if you had a higher precision pointing system. Then there's uses like as an RDP client where you're interfacing with a mouse-centric UI like Windows where touch is just awkward.
Maybe they're still stuck on ideology or maybe it's all about commerce, but I think one of the reason iPad sales may be flagging somewhat is that whatever the reason, without a mouse there's only so much you can do with it.
I'll bet you both of them at least drank coffee, which makes them drug users. Given the era they grew up in, it's probably at least 50-50 they smoked, which would add a second drug. And then there's always drinking, even if it never happened while they worked (which I would bet is true, alcohol is conducive to being drunk and socializing only, IMHO). So now you have 2 almost guaranteed drugs and one very likely drug.
I don't see acid specifically being useful for the active task of coding, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was useful to facilitate ideas or concepts for bigger picture thinking.
We extensively remodeled our house in 2003, and I pulled a pair of Cat 5 cables to every location the remodeling gave me access to.
Wasn't enough -- the living room has 6 networked devices, the bedroom 4, the den 3, the laundry room has two but only one run to it (a Cat 5 run previously used for analog telephone).
So now I have four rooms with their own ethernet switches, which doesn't count the semi-central wiring aggregation point or my office.
Doing VLANs to every possible location with any flexibility would mean smart switches in 6 places, not to mention the time sucking chore in actually doing the configuration and the cursing-like-a-sailor irritation of discovering that the port I want to use needs some other VLAN access profile applied to it.
According to this article that summarizes the work of some academics, Rome actually had a more equal Gini coefficient than contemporary America.
It's obviously an estiimate, although these guys did some deep work analyzing some of the ancient records left over to try to dial in numbers that were probably pretty close.
You're implying that doctors know and remember every last detail of every drug and disease they've ever learned.
Shit, I was a hard-core expert on Novell Netware 3.x and 4.11 fifteen years ago. I managed a 5 site meshed network of over 800 users and a dozen servers (including Groupwise).
If someone came to me with a Netware problem today? I probably wouldn't even know where to start without a shit ton of time and probably building out a lab (how? with what unsupported hardware?) just to try to regain lost knowledge.
The idea that because doctors went to medical school means they know everything they learned in medical school is ridiculous. GPs know the common problems they see people for and refer them off for things they don't. Specialists know their specialty area in depth, but likely don't remember much otherwise outside of their practice area.
My basic argument is that most general practitioners are over-educated and way too expensive for the kinds of medicine they do practice, which is mostly treating simple, common problems they can solve with what amount to fewer than 50 drugs.
Mine originally had a swing-out murphy bed as well. The huge steel hinges were still on the door frame in the coat closet. My closet was way too small for any kind of bedroom, even if you were a midget.
My building was 12 deficiency apartments and 12 one bedrooms, built in the 1920s. It originally had some kind of central refigeration system
I always thought it would be an interesting project to convert the top floor into a giant flat with a rooftop garden. I figure the other apartments would generate about $10k in rental income but that probably means the building is worth a couple of million as a rental property, making it economicallly non-viable to convert like that.
Just what is the end game to gutting the middle class, anyway?
Is the whole goal here just to have like 3 people who control 99.99999% of the wealth?
Surely once the the middle class is denuded, they'll start going for the "HENRYs" (high earners, not rich yet) and find a way to strip them of their earning potential and wealth, too.
At least in ancient Rome the emperors would stage feasts, festivals and games.
Do you really want to incentivize the government to have offshore workers by making them profit centers for the government itself? How is that an incentive to avoid destroying domestic jobs?
You earmark the flat fee to go towards funding the enforcement of the H1B program rules. Any surplus goes to fund worker re-training programs.
This way enforcing the rules of the program is self-funding, and congress can't defund enforcement "because business" and the larger and more popular it is, the more enforcement can be funded.
Plus, you're basically forcing employers who "need" to hire cheap offshore help to also (provided there is a surplus, and at $50k per, there should be) fund worker retraining so the people needed to do the job can be found at home.
I would argue that a system like that with a less rigorously trained person could possibly handle a lot of what we now require a guy with a six figure income and the college debt to match it to diagnose.
You still would need highly trained specialists for when the analytics didn't have an answer or you were dealing with problems outside their scope.
But right now, I go see a doctor and I'm out $75 and it takes a week to get an appointment and compared to most people I have it *good*. I wonder if medicine could be improved by cutting out some chunk of the MDs and replacing them with something that could treat common stuff with data versus always relying on a really expensive guy.
The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.
I'm not sure how that's a defense of the existing highly disciplined and educated practice of medicine as we know it. What you're arguing is that there is some emphemera based on hunches and intuition, not actually quantifiable learned skills.
That, or you're justifying that the current practice of medicine is deeply flawed and despite the rigorous training and bullshit, the entire process involving multiple doctors just plain doesn't work sometimes.
I sometimes wonder if what makes medicine so difficult isn't the actual complexity of the practice, but the nature of "becoming a doctor" -- ie, the structure and process associated with going to medical school, residency, etc.
Prescribing drugs, for example. So many facts about drugs are already organized in really good databases with detailed dosing information, contraindications, side effects, safety in pregnant women, etc.
How much education do you need to prescribe a drug if the known information about almost all drugs is already available in a reference system?
Of course you have to know what you're treating, but again, either the symptoms are obvious and/or self reported or there's some canned diagnostic test that tells you what the test is. And I'm sure there are reference systems that let you cross-reference various symptoms and/or suggest tests to refine diagnoses.
Sometimes it feels like we educate doctors for the world of the 1920s, where it was like you had to fill them with all the information they'd ever need to practice medicine because they'd be doing it in a complete vacuum with no other information.
I seem to remember a story from a local group that's involved in documenting the local media scene. They had just recently inherited a *shipping container* full of VHS tapes that a recently dead woman had saved up. She had been recording all the local news programs. Every day. For decades. Never overwrote the tapes.
The documenters are thrilled, but what a daunting digitizing project.
I think a loooonnggg time ago it was called a rooming house. You got a bedroom, your in-room bath was a pitcher of water, wash basin and a chamber pot. Meals were served in the dining room. You went to {bathhouse, whorehouse, river} to bathe, although I'm sure at least some offered a tub once a week.
Then they had efficiency apartments. I lived in one built in the 1920s -- galley kitchen, breakfast nook, one giant room, large closet and a bathroom.
I rather liked the efficiency. For a while I used the breakfast nook as my bedroom with a curtain to separate it off, which made the one large room more like a combined living/dining area.
It was also dirt cheap, but I never felt quite like an adult until I moved into a place with an actual bedroom.
I don't think this is a bad idea at all, but when I moved out of the dorm one thing I actually missed was the cafeteria and meal plan.
I remember disliking the food a lot, but although I ate better living in an apartment, eating better was a burden in terms of shopping, cooking, times where food got tossed because plans and schedules change, etc. I actually found myself missing the sheer convenience of food service. Even though I didn't always love what the hot choices were and opted for yet another salad and sandwich bar sandwich, all I had to do was show up.
The shared area around the rooms would be interesting (I remember the common areas being popular), but I would worry it would be too noisy and chaotic. They'd have to do something clever with architecture and flow to make it so that individual rooms remained quiet.
I agree with this but I can't tell you the number of times, even where reasonably well implemented, it resulted in A User of Some Organizational Clout losing some data they wasn't saved where it belonged. Mostly this was ultimately consequence free, but getting to that state often required some kind of extensive recovery.
It's also iffy for mobile users, or at least was kind of iffy prior to the proliferation of cloud sync options.
I kind of wish you could do some kind of automated desktop backup of the user profile -- it'd make the process of swapping in a replacement desktop. Like scripting Windows 7 EZ transfer or something, so that on the replacement PC you could have the user regain whatever BS customizations they had.
Things like boxing (and hockey) wind up being "prize fights", are under heavy regulation, and are supposedly set up with enough safety procedures to avoid serious injury, with exceptions being considered errors, and dealt with accordingly.
My boss is a 4th degree black belt in some martial art. I mostly work remotely or at client sites so I don't see him that often, but when I do it's about 1-in-3 odds that he will have a black eye, bruise or some other "serious" injury from sparring at the martial arts place.
AFAIK, there's no regulation involved here. He doesn't hold a boxing license and there's no boxing commissioner present at his sparring sessions. People willingly show up and kick the crap out of each other, and apparently it's legal.
I'm not sure why a "tinder for fighting" would be illegal in that light. Any liability would seem to be a civil matter between the consenting parties, with the exception of possibly some kind of manslaughter liability if you killed the other guy.
It does beg the question why they don't stop as soon as they are out of immediate peril, like in Turkey or Greece.
Sure, if you're escaping a hellhole you want to make sure to end up someplace nice, but it does seem like there's a bit of opportunism there, taking advantage of the sense of peril to make sure you do end up someplace nice.
I rode on one in Louisiana and IIRC it was basically a flat bottomed aluminum boat with a Chevy 454 V8 bolted to a stand in the boat with an actual airplane propeller attached. We all wore shooting muffs.
It was a pretty fun ride, though. On wide expanses of water, I'd swear it didn't turn per se, but sort of turned sideways until you'd built up enough thrust in the new direction to stop going the old direction. And it worked in water so shallow I couldn't believe it was floating by any definition. We sort of stopped in one shallow spot and I asked the guy "What happens if it gets stuck?" And he said "Well, we have to get out and push" which was fine, other than the 6 alligators I could count within about a 30 foot radius of the boat.
The whole experience had a touch of "Southern Comfort" (IMDB it) to it. We called a tourist place looking for a ride and the operator said it was out of season for him, but he said something like "Call Pierre Thibideaux, he'll probably take you out" and sure enough we drove to some remote spot on the bayou and this guy with a French accent was waiting with an airboat. Great guy, but of course having seen "Southern Comfort" I was a little worried where we might end up.
It worked with Japan, Germany and the Confederacy.
What I'm not reading about in the paper is a resistance campaign by the Germans, Japanese or the Confederate states of America.
There actually was a weak resistance to occupation staged by Nazi loyalists after the surrender. From what I've read of it, the American answer was pretty much exactly the kind of thing I've advocated was necessary. When troops rolled into a town that was yet occupied and they faced resistance, they pulled out and shelled the town. By the next day, the resistance leaders were lined up dead in the town square.
I think that occupation and warfare follows a certain pattern:
1) A small percentage of the population has intractable ideology and nationalism
2) After the start of hostilities, the majority of the population rallies around this nationalism and supports resistance
3) If the resistance seems effective or sustainable, the idea maintains majority support and the majority is willing to accept some level of deprivation to sustain it
4) If the resistance is met with overwhelming force and is ineffective and the burden of resistance is widely felt, the resistance loses majority support. Those who hold intractable ideologies and nationalism begin to use coercive force against their own people to sustain the cause.
5) When #4 continues for long enough, the majority begins to believe that resistance is both ineffective and the deprivation required to sustain it becomes untenable. The majority begins to turn on those who hold intractable ideologies and nationalism.
When stage 5 is reached, the occupiers have effectively won. The majority will not longer support resistance, believing it to be counter-productive.
Politics and public relations has essentially stuck American military occupation between 3 and 4, unwilling to apply a level of violence necessary to break resistance.
Now, everyone criticizes me when I advocate for this. I don't think it's good. Millions of innocent people suffer. Treasure on a vast scale is expended. Both the occupier and the occupied are scarred.
What's the alternative, though? 10 years of ineffective occupation, STILL costing millions of lives and scarring both sides to achieve NO material difference.
The third alternative is do nothing, which has its own externalities.
I'm not advocating that we *should* do this but it's the *only* way that intervention will work.
We've spent how many trillions on pusillanimous police actions and "winning hearts and minds" since at least Viet Nam? And how many of them have accomplished *anything*?
You can't physically invade a country, bully it's people in half measures and hamstring your forces with politicians and public relations experts and expect to get anywhere. That WILL produce rebellion and resistance.
But if you DO invade someplace you have to go all in. You have to totally dominate the culture and people in a way that demonstrates that they have ONE choice -- submit or face the extinction of their culture. No one has conquered anything in world history without doing this.
You really only have one choice for "interfering", and that's gearing up for a massive ground invasion with the troops and manpower to militarily occupy the region at a troop scale similar to the European theater of WWII.
And you have to do it with a mindset that we're not there to build schools or make friendly with the locals, but to suppress resistance with maximum force and minimal-to-no concern for civilian casualties and collateral damage. This isn't a "police action" or "counter-insurgency" it's more Caesar's Conquest of Gaul.
You have to break the culture's will to resist. You move forward and obliterate anything that offers resistance. Use every tool in the toolkit -- carpet bombing, firebombing, internment camps. You don't avoid hospitals, power plants, water plants, food warehouses -- you hit those FIRST. You advance systematically in this manner, willing to inflict total destruction and maximum death until the people and culture recognize that further resistance is futile.
Then you occupy the territory for at least a generation, gradually, over 20 or 30 years, returning them to some kind of self rule, but all the while willing to demonstrate that resistance will not be tolerated.
Anything else is totally ineffective and produces no lasting change, at huge cost.
I have no idea how to deal with the actual legitimate concerns of the NSA and FBI and also deal with their abuse. We all know that they will keep abusing their powers if they can. If you compromise encryption in any way then others will find the backdoors also and use them.
Just what ARE their legitimate concerns? How many homacidal rapists, armed robbers, etc are out there RIGHT NOW that could have been caught if only their phones could have been cracked, but since they weren't, they had to let them go?
I see this first and foremost being used against the political enemies of whoever runs the FBI these days, whether its journalists, domestic antigovernment activists, NGOs, etc. And then after that as a way to score cheap points efficiently going after low-level crooks whose prosection would otherise require the FBI to work instead of charging a bunch of people with crimes like lying to the FBI and conspiring to lie to the FBI.
I just don't buy any "because terrorists" arguments. If a cell of terrorists wanted to plan a Mumbai/Nairobi style attack on a mall or something, it'd be easy, but it never happens and I doubt it has to do with cracking smartphones.
The NSA is supposed to by gathering intelligence outside our borders, and no amount of mandatory key escrow within the US will force overseas users to not use encryption. Banning the practice here doesn't magically make the technology disappear.
And I can only guess that the NSA has a whole array of clandestine, cloak and dagger operations to supplement their data acquisition.
I work in what amounts to version of your brother's business, and as far as I know, we do make money on Windows licensing, mostly because our partnership level with Microsoft pretty much guarantees we get a better wholesale price than most other resellers.
The product category I hear the most gripes about is hardware. Some has terrific margins, some has lousy margins.
I also hear mixed stories about service labor. Labor is usually the most expensive part of any business, so I'm told we make more money on managed services -- where lower-end guys make sure backups actually ran and miscellaneous tasks -- than higher end services. The labor rate is higher for higher end services, but project management and client inefficiency and higher labor costs for high end services make it less profitable. It gets balanced out somewhat because the overall higher end project almost always includes higher end software and hardware with more markup.
I don't know how open source fits in here. It would sound like it should be more service revenue, but in places deploying Microsoft stuff they don't have developers to work on it and IMHO for anything up to midsize businesses deploying non-customized applications and infrastructure,
I don't see how there's more service revenue to be made. It seems like there should be, if the software is free and the extra service associated with it would just come out of what wasn't paid for the software, but the labor costs are so high that it doesn't take too many hours. But I think a lot of customers balk at the no-name nature of open source software as well as the notion they're getting something "free" (which must be lower value) and paying more for labor -- it sounds like a scam.
I had a job interview once where I swear the sequence of events was designed to test my reactions.
The manager had two people to interview, me and someone else. The interviewer came out 20 minutes past my scheduled time and said she was sorry, but she was delayed and would need another 15 minutes. When she came back out 20 minutes later, she spoke to the other candidate and then came to me and said that the other candidate (who was to be interviewed after me) had an appointment and would I mind waiting and being interviewed second.
By the time she actually interviewed me, the interview took place maybe 90 minutes after it was scheduled. It was all so grossly unprofessional that I swear it was only done as a test.
Slashdot Mirror
I've owned all the iPhones between 3G and 6 Plus, iPad 1 and 3. And I own a Surface Pro 2 which I use as my daily laptop for work.
I think the iPad would gain greatly in broader use cases if they would just allow bluetooth mice pairing.
I begrudgingly accept at least one likely "altruistic" reason why they didn't, because they thought it would pollute the touch screen UI. I'm sure there were more mercenary concerns that it might undercut the sales of some Macbooks, too.
IMHO, the iPad has been a great tablet for uses where a traditional laptop is just too much computer. Couch surfing, lying in bed, airplanes, all places where extreme simplicity and smaller form factor is beneficial.
But I think the touch-only user interface has limits on usability. I have some drawing apps and while the developers seem to have gone out of their way to make it useful with a touch screen, it seems to lend itself to MORE UI complexity with only touch than it would if you had a higher precision pointing system. Then there's uses like as an RDP client where you're interfacing with a mouse-centric UI like Windows where touch is just awkward.
Maybe they're still stuck on ideology or maybe it's all about commerce, but I think one of the reason iPad sales may be flagging somewhat is that whatever the reason, without a mouse there's only so much you can do with it.
I'll bet you both of them at least drank coffee, which makes them drug users. Given the era they grew up in, it's probably at least 50-50 they smoked, which would add a second drug. And then there's always drinking, even if it never happened while they worked (which I would bet is true, alcohol is conducive to being drunk and socializing only, IMHO). So now you have 2 almost guaranteed drugs and one very likely drug.
I don't see acid specifically being useful for the active task of coding, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was useful to facilitate ideas or concepts for bigger picture thinking.
Complexity is part of it, but cost is another.
We extensively remodeled our house in 2003, and I pulled a pair of Cat 5 cables to every location the remodeling gave me access to.
Wasn't enough -- the living room has 6 networked devices, the bedroom 4, the den 3, the laundry room has two but only one run to it (a Cat 5 run previously used for analog telephone).
So now I have four rooms with their own ethernet switches, which doesn't count the semi-central wiring aggregation point or my office.
Doing VLANs to every possible location with any flexibility would mean smart switches in 6 places, not to mention the time sucking chore in actually doing the configuration and the cursing-like-a-sailor irritation of discovering that the port I want to use needs some other VLAN access profile applied to it.
It's funny, after I wrote that I did a Google search for inequality in ancient Rome.
http://persquaremile.com/2011/...
According to this article that summarizes the work of some academics, Rome actually had a more equal Gini coefficient than contemporary America.
It's obviously an estiimate, although these guys did some deep work analyzing some of the ancient records left over to try to dial in numbers that were probably pretty close.
Not quite that old. But the building my deficiency apartment was in DID have a couple in their 70s who had lived there for something like 40 years.
Even they weren't old enough to have lived in the building in the 1920s.
You're implying that doctors know and remember every last detail of every drug and disease they've ever learned.
Shit, I was a hard-core expert on Novell Netware 3.x and 4.11 fifteen years ago. I managed a 5 site meshed network of over 800 users and a dozen servers (including Groupwise).
If someone came to me with a Netware problem today? I probably wouldn't even know where to start without a shit ton of time and probably building out a lab (how? with what unsupported hardware?) just to try to regain lost knowledge.
The idea that because doctors went to medical school means they know everything they learned in medical school is ridiculous. GPs know the common problems they see people for and refer them off for things they don't. Specialists know their specialty area in depth, but likely don't remember much otherwise outside of their practice area.
My basic argument is that most general practitioners are over-educated and way too expensive for the kinds of medicine they do practice, which is mostly treating simple, common problems they can solve with what amount to fewer than 50 drugs.
Mine originally had a swing-out murphy bed as well. The huge steel hinges were still on the door frame in the coat closet. My closet was way too small for any kind of bedroom, even if you were a midget.
My building was 12 deficiency apartments and 12 one bedrooms, built in the 1920s. It originally had some kind of central refigeration system
I always thought it would be an interesting project to convert the top floor into a giant flat with a rooftop garden. I figure the other apartments would generate about $10k in rental income but that probably means the building is worth a couple of million as a rental property, making it economicallly non-viable to convert like that.
Just what is the end game to gutting the middle class, anyway?
Is the whole goal here just to have like 3 people who control 99.99999% of the wealth?
Surely once the the middle class is denuded, they'll start going for the "HENRYs" (high earners, not rich yet) and find a way to strip them of their earning potential and wealth, too.
At least in ancient Rome the emperors would stage feasts, festivals and games.
Do you really want to incentivize the government to have offshore workers by making them profit centers for the government itself? How is that an incentive to avoid destroying domestic jobs?
You earmark the flat fee to go towards funding the enforcement of the H1B program rules. Any surplus goes to fund worker re-training programs.
This way enforcing the rules of the program is self-funding, and congress can't defund enforcement "because business" and the larger and more popular it is, the more enforcement can be funded.
Plus, you're basically forcing employers who "need" to hire cheap offshore help to also (provided there is a surplus, and at $50k per, there should be) fund worker retraining so the people needed to do the job can be found at home.
I would argue that a system like that with a less rigorously trained person could possibly handle a lot of what we now require a guy with a six figure income and the college debt to match it to diagnose.
You still would need highly trained specialists for when the analytics didn't have an answer or you were dealing with problems outside their scope.
But right now, I go see a doctor and I'm out $75 and it takes a week to get an appointment and compared to most people I have it *good*. I wonder if medicine could be improved by cutting out some chunk of the MDs and replacing them with something that could treat common stuff with data versus always relying on a really expensive guy.
The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.
I'm not sure how that's a defense of the existing highly disciplined and educated practice of medicine as we know it. What you're arguing is that there is some emphemera based on hunches and intuition, not actually quantifiable learned skills.
That, or you're justifying that the current practice of medicine is deeply flawed and despite the rigorous training and bullshit, the entire process involving multiple doctors just plain doesn't work sometimes.
I sometimes wonder if what makes medicine so difficult isn't the actual complexity of the practice, but the nature of "becoming a doctor" -- ie, the structure and process associated with going to medical school, residency, etc.
Prescribing drugs, for example. So many facts about drugs are already organized in really good databases with detailed dosing information, contraindications, side effects, safety in pregnant women, etc.
How much education do you need to prescribe a drug if the known information about almost all drugs is already available in a reference system?
Of course you have to know what you're treating, but again, either the symptoms are obvious and/or self reported or there's some canned diagnostic test that tells you what the test is. And I'm sure there are reference systems that let you cross-reference various symptoms and/or suggest tests to refine diagnoses.
Sometimes it feels like we educate doctors for the world of the 1920s, where it was like you had to fill them with all the information they'd ever need to practice medicine because they'd be doing it in a complete vacuum with no other information.
I seem to remember a story from a local group that's involved in documenting the local media scene. They had just recently inherited a *shipping container* full of VHS tapes that a recently dead woman had saved up. She had been recording all the local news programs. Every day. For decades. Never overwrote the tapes.
The documenters are thrilled, but what a daunting digitizing project.
I think a loooonnggg time ago it was called a rooming house. You got a bedroom, your in-room bath was a pitcher of water, wash basin and a chamber pot. Meals were served in the dining room. You went to {bathhouse, whorehouse, river} to bathe, although I'm sure at least some offered a tub once a week.
Then they had efficiency apartments. I lived in one built in the 1920s -- galley kitchen, breakfast nook, one giant room, large closet and a bathroom.
I rather liked the efficiency. For a while I used the breakfast nook as my bedroom with a curtain to separate it off, which made the one large room more like a combined living/dining area.
It was also dirt cheap, but I never felt quite like an adult until I moved into a place with an actual bedroom.
I don't think this is a bad idea at all, but when I moved out of the dorm one thing I actually missed was the cafeteria and meal plan.
I remember disliking the food a lot, but although I ate better living in an apartment, eating better was a burden in terms of shopping, cooking, times where food got tossed because plans and schedules change, etc. I actually found myself missing the sheer convenience of food service. Even though I didn't always love what the hot choices were and opted for yet another salad and sandwich bar sandwich, all I had to do was show up.
The shared area around the rooms would be interesting (I remember the common areas being popular), but I would worry it would be too noisy and chaotic. They'd have to do something clever with architecture and flow to make it so that individual rooms remained quiet.
I agree with this but I can't tell you the number of times, even where reasonably well implemented, it resulted in A User of Some Organizational Clout losing some data they wasn't saved where it belonged. Mostly this was ultimately consequence free, but getting to that state often required some kind of extensive recovery.
It's also iffy for mobile users, or at least was kind of iffy prior to the proliferation of cloud sync options.
I kind of wish you could do some kind of automated desktop backup of the user profile -- it'd make the process of swapping in a replacement desktop. Like scripting Windows 7 EZ transfer or something, so that on the replacement PC you could have the user regain whatever BS customizations they had.
Things like boxing (and hockey) wind up being "prize fights", are under heavy regulation, and are supposedly set up with enough safety procedures to avoid serious injury, with exceptions being considered errors, and dealt with accordingly.
My boss is a 4th degree black belt in some martial art. I mostly work remotely or at client sites so I don't see him that often, but when I do it's about 1-in-3 odds that he will have a black eye, bruise or some other "serious" injury from sparring at the martial arts place.
AFAIK, there's no regulation involved here. He doesn't hold a boxing license and there's no boxing commissioner present at his sparring sessions. People willingly show up and kick the crap out of each other, and apparently it's legal.
I'm not sure why a "tinder for fighting" would be illegal in that light. Any liability would seem to be a civil matter between the consenting parties, with the exception of possibly some kind of manslaughter liability if you killed the other guy.
It does beg the question why they don't stop as soon as they are out of immediate peril, like in Turkey or Greece.
Sure, if you're escaping a hellhole you want to make sure to end up someplace nice, but it does seem like there's a bit of opportunism there, taking advantage of the sense of peril to make sure you do end up someplace nice.
Airboats are still incredibly noisy.
I rode on one in Louisiana and IIRC it was basically a flat bottomed aluminum boat with a Chevy 454 V8 bolted to a stand in the boat with an actual airplane propeller attached. We all wore shooting muffs.
It was a pretty fun ride, though. On wide expanses of water, I'd swear it didn't turn per se, but sort of turned sideways until you'd built up enough thrust in the new direction to stop going the old direction. And it worked in water so shallow I couldn't believe it was floating by any definition. We sort of stopped in one shallow spot and I asked the guy "What happens if it gets stuck?" And he said "Well, we have to get out and push" which was fine, other than the 6 alligators I could count within about a 30 foot radius of the boat.
The whole experience had a touch of "Southern Comfort" (IMDB it) to it. We called a tourist place looking for a ride and the operator said it was out of season for him, but he said something like "Call Pierre Thibideaux, he'll probably take you out" and sure enough we drove to some remote spot on the bayou and this guy with a French accent was waiting with an airboat. Great guy, but of course having seen "Southern Comfort" I was a little worried where we might end up.
It worked with Japan, Germany and the Confederacy.
What I'm not reading about in the paper is a resistance campaign by the Germans, Japanese or the Confederate states of America.
There actually was a weak resistance to occupation staged by Nazi loyalists after the surrender. From what I've read of it, the American answer was pretty much exactly the kind of thing I've advocated was necessary. When troops rolled into a town that was yet occupied and they faced resistance, they pulled out and shelled the town. By the next day, the resistance leaders were lined up dead in the town square.
I think that occupation and warfare follows a certain pattern:
1) A small percentage of the population has intractable ideology and nationalism
2) After the start of hostilities, the majority of the population rallies around this nationalism and supports resistance
3) If the resistance seems effective or sustainable, the idea maintains majority support and the majority is willing to accept some level of deprivation to sustain it
4) If the resistance is met with overwhelming force and is ineffective and the burden of resistance is widely felt, the resistance loses majority support. Those who hold intractable ideologies and nationalism begin to use coercive force against their own people to sustain the cause.
5) When #4 continues for long enough, the majority begins to believe that resistance is both ineffective and the deprivation required to sustain it becomes untenable. The majority begins to turn on those who hold intractable ideologies and nationalism.
When stage 5 is reached, the occupiers have effectively won. The majority will not longer support resistance, believing it to be counter-productive.
Politics and public relations has essentially stuck American military occupation between 3 and 4, unwilling to apply a level of violence necessary to break resistance.
Now, everyone criticizes me when I advocate for this. I don't think it's good. Millions of innocent people suffer. Treasure on a vast scale is expended. Both the occupier and the occupied are scarred.
What's the alternative, though? 10 years of ineffective occupation, STILL costing millions of lives and scarring both sides to achieve NO material difference.
The third alternative is do nothing, which has its own externalities.
I'm not advocating that we *should* do this but it's the *only* way that intervention will work.
We've spent how many trillions on pusillanimous police actions and "winning hearts and minds" since at least Viet Nam? And how many of them have accomplished *anything*?
You can't physically invade a country, bully it's people in half measures and hamstring your forces with politicians and public relations experts and expect to get anywhere. That WILL produce rebellion and resistance.
But if you DO invade someplace you have to go all in. You have to totally dominate the culture and people in a way that demonstrates that they have ONE choice -- submit or face the extinction of their culture. No one has conquered anything in world history without doing this.
You really only have one choice for "interfering", and that's gearing up for a massive ground invasion with the troops and manpower to militarily occupy the region at a troop scale similar to the European theater of WWII.
And you have to do it with a mindset that we're not there to build schools or make friendly with the locals, but to suppress resistance with maximum force and minimal-to-no concern for civilian casualties and collateral damage. This isn't a "police action" or "counter-insurgency" it's more Caesar's Conquest of Gaul.
You have to break the culture's will to resist. You move forward and obliterate anything that offers resistance. Use every tool in the toolkit -- carpet bombing, firebombing, internment camps. You don't avoid hospitals, power plants, water plants, food warehouses -- you hit those FIRST. You advance systematically in this manner, willing to inflict total destruction and maximum death until the people and culture recognize that further resistance is futile.
Then you occupy the territory for at least a generation, gradually, over 20 or 30 years, returning them to some kind of self rule, but all the while willing to demonstrate that resistance will not be tolerated.
Anything else is totally ineffective and produces no lasting change, at huge cost.
I have no idea how to deal with the actual legitimate concerns of the NSA and FBI and also deal with their abuse. We all know that they will keep abusing their powers if they can. If you compromise encryption in any way then others will find the backdoors also and use them.
Just what ARE their legitimate concerns? How many homacidal rapists, armed robbers, etc are out there RIGHT NOW that could have been caught if only their phones could have been cracked, but since they weren't, they had to let them go?
I see this first and foremost being used against the political enemies of whoever runs the FBI these days, whether its journalists, domestic antigovernment activists, NGOs, etc. And then after that as a way to score cheap points efficiently going after low-level crooks whose prosection would otherise require the FBI to work instead of charging a bunch of people with crimes like lying to the FBI and conspiring to lie to the FBI.
I just don't buy any "because terrorists" arguments. If a cell of terrorists wanted to plan a Mumbai/Nairobi style attack on a mall or something, it'd be easy, but it never happens and I doubt it has to do with cracking smartphones.
The NSA is supposed to by gathering intelligence outside our borders, and no amount of mandatory key escrow within the US will force overseas users to not use encryption. Banning the practice here doesn't magically make the technology disappear.
And I can only guess that the NSA has a whole array of clandestine, cloak and dagger operations to supplement their data acquisition.
I work in what amounts to version of your brother's business, and as far as I know, we do make money on Windows licensing, mostly because our partnership level with Microsoft pretty much guarantees we get a better wholesale price than most other resellers.
The product category I hear the most gripes about is hardware. Some has terrific margins, some has lousy margins.
I also hear mixed stories about service labor. Labor is usually the most expensive part of any business, so I'm told we make more money on managed services -- where lower-end guys make sure backups actually ran and miscellaneous tasks -- than higher end services. The labor rate is higher for higher end services, but project management and client inefficiency and higher labor costs for high end services make it less profitable. It gets balanced out somewhat because the overall higher end project almost always includes higher end software and hardware with more markup.
I don't know how open source fits in here. It would sound like it should be more service revenue, but in places deploying Microsoft stuff they don't have developers to work on it and IMHO for anything up to midsize businesses deploying non-customized applications and infrastructure,
I don't see how there's more service revenue to be made. It seems like there should be, if the software is free and the extra service associated with it would just come out of what wasn't paid for the software, but the labor costs are so high that it doesn't take too many hours. But I think a lot of customers balk at the no-name nature of open source software as well as the notion they're getting something "free" (which must be lower value) and paying more for labor -- it sounds like a scam.
I had a job interview once where I swear the sequence of events was designed to test my reactions.
The manager had two people to interview, me and someone else. The interviewer came out 20 minutes past my scheduled time and said she was sorry, but she was delayed and would need another 15 minutes. When she came back out 20 minutes later, she spoke to the other candidate and then came to me and said that the other candidate (who was to be interviewed after me) had an appointment and would I mind waiting and being interviewed second.
By the time she actually interviewed me, the interview took place maybe 90 minutes after it was scheduled. It was all so grossly unprofessional that I swear it was only done as a test.