It doesn't matter if the average age was 48 or 28 (which has turned up in a Popular Mechanics article); even a 28 year old would have started elementary school in the early forties and for most of their elementary grades (ESPECIALLY during WW II) would have used educational facilities and resources probably identical to their peers 10 or 20 years older.
They largely attended schools with simple teaching methods and basic resources like paper, pencils, books, chalk, blackboards -- even science (physics, biology, chemistry) lab space was probably not a guarantee in the high schools of the era, or it was rudimentary and improvised.
Yet they managed to accomplish some of the greatest travel & flight dreams of civilized man, basically inventing how to do it as they went.
Assume the average age of the Apollo program engineers was 40 in 1969.
That means they were in elementary school in the late 30s and early 40s -- what kind of "technology" were they taught with? Chalk, pencils and books -- maybe even slide rules and a compass. And those guys figured out how to put men on the moon!
I do work with schools occasionally and am appalled at the money pissed away on worthless shit like smartboards and computers & software that go obsolete faster than the districts can implement them. And after that I hear the ridiculous appeals from administrators who claim they don't have enough money to fix broken windows, paint the walls or other basic maintenance, because they pissed it all away on technology that is useless in 4 years and literally junk in 8. I want to cry when they say they need to raise my taxes for it.
Technology probably has more of a place in junior and senior high schools, but even then at a fraction of the level they try to implement it at.
Of the many problems with the fascist approach to "internet use", "impossible" isn't one of them.
The many problems do include not insignificant costs (software, systems, and people required to implement & maintain), lost legitimate productivity (motivated employees + information = successful innovation) and cultivating a hostile work environment by making people feel as if they're working under total surveillance.
Altogether it assumes you want the smart, motivated and talented people to get jobs where the rules on internet use are more relaxed and you want to keep the losers with no other options, who, by the way, are the ones that do the absolute least amount of work they can get away with without getting fired.
Of course there are exceptions and variations depending on the place of work -- obviously, NSA jobs come with different standards than people selling packaged food, and some regulatory environments such as law and securities also come with baggage.
However, you may be right that this is the future in our long emergency-style world of economic shortage where people will accept work under any conditions to escape poverty.
A lot of OSS projects don't sell support contracts; you might be able to hire a key contributor to an OSS project on some kind of consulting basis, but they aren't really on call for support.
There may be third parties good at implementing and possibly troubleshooting some OSS software or components, but if you need some fix implemented due to a bug you're back to being at mercy of the OSS developers unless your third party has developers on staff who can fix OSS products.
None of this is to say the existing commercial market is perfect -- its not, we know that -- but it is a mature market and my experience has been that a lot of commercial applications, including MS, have pretty decent support available when you need it.
Surgeons dress in scrubs for reasons of health and cleanliness. Pilots wear uniforms as the result of the martial origin of their profession and the centuries old tradition of uniforms in maritime settings.
In my experience a lot of these "IT Failures" are actually management/client/accounting failures that happen to overlap the IT spectrum.
YES! I couldn't agree more. A gold-plated backup/recovery system for a small/mid sized enterprise (multiple drives, multiple applications, maintenance, on-site support, frequent media replacement, secure off-site storage) -- far beyond what I'd consider adequate -- is what, $10-15k per year? You could do pretty well at half that, yet I see plenty of clients with budgets over a million dollars seriously question spending a quarter of that.
Some of my co-workers and I have even suggested management draw up a "hold harmless"-type agreement that we give to It decision makers AND their bosses; a cover letter outlines the rationale for the agreement and its practical meaning (we will help you get back on your feet, you agree not to blame us and accept in principal the magnified costs of data recovery).
Its not that we'd expect practical legal cover, but it'd be more about scaring the fuck out of management so they do SOMETHING, as well as giving the controller/financial person a discussion point with their boss over their "sharp pencil" IT strategy and whether its a risk worth taking.
I'm surprised that cannabis did only marginally better than alcohol and that the gap between heroin and alcohol was so large.
I've never known anyone to fight or commit vandalism after smoking pot and while I'd agree its inadvisable, I think stoned drivers are less risky than drunk ones, especially at the low end of drunkenness/stonedness. Pot also is much easier on your body and does not produce a physical dependence or illness to the same magnitude that alcohol does (even if you factor in high cholesterol from snacking).
Heroin addiction I can see being destructive, but much of that seems to be a result of legal sanction, not the inherent danger of the drug (interaction with criminal enterprise, impure/uncertain quality, high prices leading to theft, etc). True it is addictive and many addicts chase the "rush" of injection (as opposed to the high itself) which ends up resulting in overdoses, the opiates are not corrosive to the body and in fact are tolerated very well for long periods of time.
I suspect these "scores" factor in maleable social and legal circumstances as constant factors and do not weight the actual pharmacological properties enough.
For phones connecting to Exchange, ActiceSync capability (supported by Google, Apple, WinMobile, and I think Android) is better than IMAP.
I can't understand the justification for BES either unless whatever security provided by it is really meaningful to the organization in question.
I have a number of clients who CONSTANTLY ask me if they can get a Blackberry. I always tell them they will need the BES & infrastucture at $$$$ but they can do iPhone/WinMo for free. They're never satisfied (which has nothing to do with the handhelds themselves).
I think showing up at the big tough corporate meeting with your Blackberry is some kind of status symbol -- it shows you're important enough to have somebody pay for your Blackberry, mobile phone service, AND a BES license. I guess.
It used to be if you wanted email on your Blackberry, you had two choices -- the desktop sync software (which blew donkey dicks) or BES. BES worked well and had all kinds of gee-whiz management features for places that insist on gee-whiz management. But BES was complicated, expensive and generally required its own box/VM due to a laundry list of "don't-install-with..." conflicts.
Then came a reduced cost Blackberry server (Blackberry Small Biz or some other name) that was much cheaper and limited to maybe 10 licenses. Now they have some other one (Blackberry Professional?) that is essentially free for one user and appears to have eliminated some of the conflicts that drove BES to its own box.
Consumers and solo users can use the "Blackberry Internet Service" which looks to me when I've set it up like a web-interfaced hosted BES with a limited feature set (get/send email on a variety of systems & protocols, but no calendering or contact management).
I don't know how long they can keep this up, though, before they have to start allowing direct-data and bypass the RIM centric model.
I think at places like that your career actually becomes "Portfolio Development" since there's really no goal or end to the project itself. People actually end up spending days and days just honing portfolios.
It sounds like you should have gotten a high def box to begin with.
AFAIK Comcast doesn't charge extra for HD versions of channels you'd normally get with whatever plan you have, and the "free" HD channels you get with your TV tuner and no box are just the OTA HD channels; HD versions of channels sent in the clear on the "classic" analog cable channels (33-99) aren't broadcast in the clear.
I just added another cable card my household for a new Tivo and the tech told me that they are planning on ditching ALL the "classic" analog channels completely to gain back bandwidth. He said you'd need a box, my guess is they will transmit the same channels ATSC to keep their "no box required" advantage over the satellite systems.
What would be the point? Aren't all medications that require prescriptions before dispensing "controlled" substances, or are we talking about Schedule II only?
Or will they write "prescriptions" for overpriced formulations like Ibuprofen 800 (just take 4 of the over the counter 200s)?
I like the idea of telemedicine, I think it holds a lot of promise for reducing costs and increasing access (both in terms of speed and breadth of access), but it sucks we have to let our moronic prohibitionist mentality get in the way.
We've all seen "Fatal Attraction". She's good looking & friendly, and comes off as if the sex were no strings attached. After a while it becomes apparent that the strings are attached and you're worried she'll go psycho on you, so the only way out is a clean break.
And they're also recruiting from the same talent pool as Google, Microsoft, and the Fortune 100.
Those companies will also sniff around your background, but won't have a hissy fit if you've smoked a joint, own a gun or got a DUI in a rented Escalade with your mistress.
After reading some of the disclosure materials required for government employment I'm pretty sure I will never even bother applying. Way too intrusive and not telling them exactly what they want is some kind of nasty Federal felony.
What is the technological difficulty here? I would have thought that practical, quality heads up displays would have been about as ubiquitous as in-dash navigation is now in newer cars. With the development of pico projectors, I'd kind of assume by now it would be relatively trivial to have an in-dash display augmented or replaced entirely by an image projected onto the windshield.
Is it that complicated to make it work in the daytime or with decent quality? I would have thought they would have had a film applied to the inside of the windshield or integrated with the windshield itself that caused it to reflect back some percentage of light, and a projector in the dash that shined up with the image. Perhaps an adjustably opaqueable back side for bright days.
It must be harder than it seems or limited to basic "analog" displays of simple numbers or symbols.
The problem isn't public mistrust of science, it's crusading scientists.
Scientists, like, military commanders and supreme court judges, need to be apolitical. If you want to be an advocate for a cause, you need to not be involved in the science associated with the cause or your motivations and credibility will be called into question.
Even if your motivations are consciously honest or true, its still possible that strong belief in your cause may influence your science.
Most people, even though they don't use data much, would much prefer to pay a fixed $30/mo and have no surprises than to pay as they go and end up with $150 in data usage some month.
By providing piecemeal pricing that's so high, almost everybody is herded into the fixed rate pricing to avoid surprises, even though if they did the math over a two year period they'd be better off with a couple of $150 "surprise" months and a few piecemeal months (say, $450) than had they paid the higher "unlimited" monthly plan ($720 for 2 years).
My first thought. Their methods & technique were crude, but with practice and probably some refinement it could probably be made turnkey for anyone who could make chocolate chip cookies from the recipe on the chip bag.
Do you it find it that effective? I tried it a couple of times and found reasonable hits on some artists but overall not enough to make it worthwhile without substantial digging.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter if the average age was 48 or 28 (which has turned up in a Popular Mechanics article); even a 28 year old would have started elementary school in the early forties and for most of their elementary grades (ESPECIALLY during WW II) would have used educational facilities and resources probably identical to their peers 10 or 20 years older.
They largely attended schools with simple teaching methods and basic resources like paper, pencils, books, chalk, blackboards -- even science (physics, biology, chemistry) lab space was probably not a guarantee in the high schools of the era, or it was rudimentary and improvised.
Yet they managed to accomplish some of the greatest travel & flight dreams of civilized man, basically inventing how to do it as they went.
Assume the average age of the Apollo program engineers was 40 in 1969.
That means they were in elementary school in the late 30s and early 40s -- what kind of "technology" were they taught with? Chalk, pencils and books -- maybe even slide rules and a compass. And those guys figured out how to put men on the moon!
I do work with schools occasionally and am appalled at the money pissed away on worthless shit like smartboards and computers & software that go obsolete faster than the districts can implement them. And after that I hear the ridiculous appeals from administrators who claim they don't have enough money to fix broken windows, paint the walls or other basic maintenance, because they pissed it all away on technology that is useless in 4 years and literally junk in 8. I want to cry when they say they need to raise my taxes for it.
Technology probably has more of a place in junior and senior high schools, but even then at a fraction of the level they try to implement it at.
Of the many problems with the fascist approach to "internet use", "impossible" isn't one of them.
The many problems do include not insignificant costs (software, systems, and people required to implement & maintain), lost legitimate productivity (motivated employees + information = successful innovation) and cultivating a hostile work environment by making people feel as if they're working under total surveillance.
Altogether it assumes you want the smart, motivated and talented people to get jobs where the rules on internet use are more relaxed and you want to keep the losers with no other options, who, by the way, are the ones that do the absolute least amount of work they can get away with without getting fired.
Of course there are exceptions and variations depending on the place of work -- obviously, NSA jobs come with different standards than people selling packaged food, and some regulatory environments such as law and securities also come with baggage.
However, you may be right that this is the future in our long emergency-style world of economic shortage where people will accept work under any conditions to escape poverty.
...pronouncement out of Russia sound like the ramblings of a paranoid, a tyrant, a drunk, or some weird combination of all of them?
And they are conspiracists; they assume that any "scientific study" was rigged by Big Pharma or some other enemy to discredit herbals.
So that means that Paxil is equally ineffective?
A lot of OSS projects don't sell support contracts; you might be able to hire a key contributor to an OSS project on some kind of consulting basis, but they aren't really on call for support.
There may be third parties good at implementing and possibly troubleshooting some OSS software or components, but if you need some fix implemented due to a bug you're back to being at mercy of the OSS developers unless your third party has developers on staff who can fix OSS products.
None of this is to say the existing commercial market is perfect -- its not, we know that -- but it is a mature market and my experience has been that a lot of commercial applications, including MS, have pretty decent support available when you need it.
Surgeons dress in scrubs for reasons of health and cleanliness. Pilots wear uniforms as the result of the martial origin of their profession and the centuries old tradition of uniforms in maritime settings.
In my experience a lot of these "IT Failures" are actually management/client/accounting failures that happen to overlap the IT spectrum.
YES! I couldn't agree more. A gold-plated backup/recovery system for a small/mid sized enterprise (multiple drives, multiple applications, maintenance, on-site support, frequent media replacement, secure off-site storage) -- far beyond what I'd consider adequate -- is what, $10-15k per year? You could do pretty well at half that, yet I see plenty of clients with budgets over a million dollars seriously question spending a quarter of that.
Some of my co-workers and I have even suggested management draw up a "hold harmless"-type agreement that we give to It decision makers AND their bosses; a cover letter outlines the rationale for the agreement and its practical meaning (we will help you get back on your feet, you agree not to blame us and accept in principal the magnified costs of data recovery).
Its not that we'd expect practical legal cover, but it'd be more about scaring the fuck out of management so they do SOMETHING, as well as giving the controller/financial person a discussion point with their boss over their "sharp pencil" IT strategy and whether its a risk worth taking.
I'm surprised that cannabis did only marginally better than alcohol and that the gap between heroin and alcohol was so large.
I've never known anyone to fight or commit vandalism after smoking pot and while I'd agree its inadvisable, I think stoned drivers are less risky than drunk ones, especially at the low end of drunkenness/stonedness. Pot also is much easier on your body and does not produce a physical dependence or illness to the same magnitude that alcohol does (even if you factor in high cholesterol from snacking).
Heroin addiction I can see being destructive, but much of that seems to be a result of legal sanction, not the inherent danger of the drug (interaction with criminal enterprise, impure/uncertain quality, high prices leading to theft, etc). True it is addictive and many addicts chase the "rush" of injection (as opposed to the high itself) which ends up resulting in overdoses, the opiates are not corrosive to the body and in fact are tolerated very well for long periods of time.
I suspect these "scores" factor in maleable social and legal circumstances as constant factors and do not weight the actual pharmacological properties enough.
For phones connecting to Exchange, ActiceSync capability (supported by Google, Apple, WinMobile, and I think Android) is better than IMAP.
I can't understand the justification for BES either unless whatever security provided by it is really meaningful to the organization in question.
I have a number of clients who CONSTANTLY ask me if they can get a Blackberry. I always tell them they will need the BES & infrastucture at $$$$ but they can do iPhone/WinMo for free. They're never satisfied (which has nothing to do with the handhelds themselves).
I think showing up at the big tough corporate meeting with your Blackberry is some kind of status symbol -- it shows you're important enough to have somebody pay for your Blackberry, mobile phone service, AND a BES license. I guess.
I think the cracks are showing in the facade.
It used to be if you wanted email on your Blackberry, you had two choices -- the desktop sync software (which blew donkey dicks) or BES. BES worked well and had all kinds of gee-whiz management features for places that insist on gee-whiz management. But BES was complicated, expensive and generally required its own box/VM due to a laundry list of "don't-install-with..." conflicts.
Then came a reduced cost Blackberry server (Blackberry Small Biz or some other name) that was much cheaper and limited to maybe 10 licenses. Now they have some other one (Blackberry Professional?) that is essentially free for one user and appears to have eliminated some of the conflicts that drove BES to its own box.
Consumers and solo users can use the "Blackberry Internet Service" which looks to me when I've set it up like a web-interfaced hosted BES with a limited feature set (get/send email on a variety of systems & protocols, but no calendering or contact management).
I don't know how long they can keep this up, though, before they have to start allowing direct-data and bypass the RIM centric model.
I think at places like that your career actually becomes "Portfolio Development" since there's really no goal or end to the project itself. People actually end up spending days and days just honing portfolios.
It sounds like you should have gotten a high def box to begin with.
AFAIK Comcast doesn't charge extra for HD versions of channels you'd normally get with whatever plan you have, and the "free" HD channels you get with your TV tuner and no box are just the OTA HD channels; HD versions of channels sent in the clear on the "classic" analog cable channels (33-99) aren't broadcast in the clear.
I just added another cable card my household for a new Tivo and the tech told me that they are planning on ditching ALL the "classic" analog channels completely to gain back bandwidth. He said you'd need a box, my guess is they will transmit the same channels ATSC to keep their "no box required" advantage over the satellite systems.
What would be the point? Aren't all medications that require prescriptions before dispensing "controlled" substances, or are we talking about Schedule II only?
Or will they write "prescriptions" for overpriced formulations like Ibuprofen 800 (just take 4 of the over the counter 200s)?
I like the idea of telemedicine, I think it holds a lot of promise for reducing costs and increasing access (both in terms of speed and breadth of access), but it sucks we have to let our moronic prohibitionist mentality get in the way.
We've all seen "Fatal Attraction". She's good looking & friendly, and comes off as if the sex were no strings attached. After a while it becomes apparent that the strings are attached and you're worried she'll go psycho on you, so the only way out is a clean break.
I think most people have seen her type before.
And they're also recruiting from the same talent pool as Google, Microsoft, and the Fortune 100.
Those companies will also sniff around your background, but won't have a hissy fit if you've smoked a joint, own a gun or got a DUI in a rented Escalade with your mistress.
After reading some of the disclosure materials required for government employment I'm pretty sure I will never even bother applying. Way too intrusive and not telling them exactly what they want is some kind of nasty Federal felony.
The problem isn't being protected from remote governments, its the tacit approval and involvement of the local government.
Russia, anyone? Do you think that cybercrime there doesn't involve FSB?
What is the technological difficulty here? I would have thought that practical, quality heads up displays would have been about as ubiquitous as in-dash navigation is now in newer cars. With the development of pico projectors, I'd kind of assume by now it would be relatively trivial to have an in-dash display augmented or replaced entirely by an image projected onto the windshield.
Is it that complicated to make it work in the daytime or with decent quality? I would have thought they would have had a film applied to the inside of the windshield or integrated with the windshield itself that caused it to reflect back some percentage of light, and a projector in the dash that shined up with the image. Perhaps an adjustably opaqueable back side for bright days.
It must be harder than it seems or limited to basic "analog" displays of simple numbers or symbols.
Sure, the in-house guys "manage" all the litigation but don't do much besides draw a nice salary.
They hire outside counsel to do the actual litigation and the other tedious BS.
Apolitical at least in the sense of their area of scientific inquiry.
As a holder of a degree in Political Science, I'm pretty aware of the word's many meanings, thanks.
The problem isn't public mistrust of science, it's crusading scientists.
Scientists, like, military commanders and supreme court judges, need to be apolitical. If you want to be an advocate for a cause, you need to not be involved in the science associated with the cause or your motivations and credibility will be called into question.
Even if your motivations are consciously honest or true, its still possible that strong belief in your cause may influence your science.
Shock avoidance pricing.
Most people, even though they don't use data much, would much prefer to pay a fixed $30/mo and have no surprises than to pay as they go and end up with $150 in data usage some month.
By providing piecemeal pricing that's so high, almost everybody is herded into the fixed rate pricing to avoid surprises, even though if they did the math over a two year period they'd be better off with a couple of $150 "surprise" months and a few piecemeal months (say, $450) than had they paid the higher "unlimited" monthly plan ($720 for 2 years).
My first thought. Their methods & technique were crude, but with practice and probably some refinement it could probably be made turnkey for anyone who could make chocolate chip cookies from the recipe on the chip bag.
Do you it find it that effective? I tried it a couple of times and found reasonable hits on some artists but overall not enough to make it worthwhile without substantial digging.