Actually, here in the USA, it may be... we have the Americans with Disabilities Act.
For the purposes of this thread, I therefore deem the USA to be a country where doorways (and lots of other things) must legally be built to accommodate fat people. That would seem to imply that the fatness of US citizens is legally protected. And you wonder why there's an obesity epidemic...
And for the bazillion people who will correct me or mod me down, come on, have a laugh.
Otis didn't have the nuts to say anything so bold.
Lex: Otisburg.. Otisburg? Otis: Miss Tessmacher, she's got her own place. Lex: Otisburg?? Otis: It's a little bitty place... Lex: Otisburg?!?!? Otis: Okay, I'll just wipe it off, that's all. It's just a little town.
That's why you have the system store more than one copy, and you have it validate their integrity when reading them. Think of it as sensible RAID. I suggest a quick Google for "zfs data integrity", etc.
I found a ton of stuff I didn't really care for with Nexenta. They've put some good effort into it, and it'd be a fine way to go if you wanted commercial support, but overall it doesn't really seem to fit our needs here. ZFS itself is a resource pig, but on the other hand, resources have become relatively cheap. It's not unthinkable to jam gigs of RAM in a storage server... today. Five years ago, though, that would have been much more likely to be a deal-breaker.
ZFS offers dedupe, and is even available in prepackaged NAS distributions such as Nexenta and OpenNAS. You too can have these great features, for much less than NetApp and friends.
We use the current parole system largely as a way to do exactly what this plan is suggesting: it allows people out of prison early in a supervised manner, to reduce crowding and to provide some of those benefits that you're talking about.
Parole means serving the remainder of your sentence outside a prison.
This plan seems to simply remove the word "remainder", and as far as I can tell, is not different in any other substantive way. They're effectively parolees for the entire term of their sentence.
If we use this plan as a substitute for prison, we are basically increasing the number of people out on "parole." I fail to understand why you think that parole officers would be "freed up" to concentrate on this system. Not only would they be supervising normal parolees, but they would also be supervising this new class of GPS-prisoner-parolees.
My point was that parole officers were already having problems keeping tabs on the current parolee population. My question is, therefore, why would you think that the same parole officers would be able to keep up with a heavier workload, when they're unable to cope effectively with the workload that they have?
Just so we're clear: I agree with the basic concept that building prisons and locking people up is failing, in many ways. I am certainly interested in discussing the problem and solutions. I'm just trying to be realistic about it at the same time.
There have been numerous reports of how our GPS-tracked parolees have violated parole and their overburdened parole officers have simply not been able to pursue the matter. While I'm not necessarily a fan of prisons and throwing people in one for every little infraction, it seems like replacing one failed strategy with another that we can reasonably predict will also fail is just foolish.
Perhaps we need to figure out a way to make the GPS solution work before we start to use it.
Or perhaps we need to figure out whether or not prison is the appropriate punishment for all these crimes?
When I travel, it is often with family, for a week or two at a time, which means two large suitcases, a diaper bag, a laptop bag, a car seat, a car booster seat, and two kids. So you've magically appeared on the Red Line, and you get off in downtown Chicago, navigate down the stairs to the tunnel to the Blue Line, then climb up the stairs to the Blue Line, get on a train, get off at Clinton, then have to walk up a dingy set of concrete stairs, with protesting kids and all your stuff, up into the cold snowy Chicago sub-zero temperatures, where you then get to walk three blocks through slush and crap to get to Union Station, where you are once again faced with stairs or escalators. Never mind that the kids are whining about being tired, too hot, then too cold, then wet, or that the bottom of your luggage is now soppy, crappy, and full of muddy snow, everybody's wet and tired, and you suddenly learn that your train will be departing at midnight instead of 5PM because Amtrak's got some problem.
At what point do you decide that it's more convenient to just take the car?
We've taken the train from here to NYC and then to Tampa. This is a nontrivial undertaking (four different trains) with a family, especially when you get to someplace like NYC where you have to get a room overnite because the service to Tampa is only daily. Suggesting I'm lazy is probably unfair. The reality, though, is that many people will tend to prefer the easier thing over the harder thing.
Low population density is the foe of urban transit: it works very well where users are dense, but if you look at the Chicago area, you can travel 50 miles in a straight line and still be in the "greater Chicago metro" area.
That's why CTA works (more or less); it covers areas of Chicago with greater population density (== more riders, == less room for parking spaces, == less of a walk to the station, etc). Urban transit works and works WELL where you have a model that can be adapted to it; in Chicago, for example, work-in-the-loop and live-in-the-near-downtown-area makes the El viable.
If you live in Schaumburg and work in Joliet, however, I'm guessing your mass transit options are less than optimal (note: I'm not a Chicago resident, just kind of familiar with the city, so just pick points on different Metra/CTA "spokes" at some distance from the Loop for examples). A car and 355 look attractive there though.
Older urban centers grew up dense because people did not have cars and had to rely on mass transit (trolleys, electric rail, El, etc). Neighborhoods were designed to be self-sufficient, with corner grocery stores and stuff like that, so that you didn't need to drive 5 miles to the Big Low Price Mart for your loaf of bread. The density enabled mass transit to be successful.
Newer urban centers grew up sparse because of suburban sprawl; if everyone has a house on a quarter acre lot, everyone wants to drive because no one wants to walk a mile to the bus, then ride that to a train station or whatever, then transfer to another train, and another bus, so that they can wind up in $other-suburb where their job is.
The sad reality is that the American dream of a house on a big lot is an urban transit killer, because you can't generate enough ridership, because cars are more convenient.
Cities with downtown areas with lots of office jobs are also losing out: at least around here, many office buildings (== high worker density) are being remodeled into condos (== low residential density), which means that mass transit into the downtown area is becoming less useful as jobs migrate 20-30 miles away from downtown.
I don't know anything about Alton or Dwight, sorry, not from Chicago. I just picked an example I knew of that other people would likely be able to identify with. Clinton Street Subway sounds interesting.
I don't think there are any simple solutions to our transit problems, but I do see inter-city high-speed rail service as addressing obvious problems we have with our current car- and plane-oriented transit system. I don't think we'll implement a good inter-city system, sadly, we just don't have the vision or political will, just as we lack those things to fix obvious problems with the urban transit systems.
While that's often true, it's by no means universal. Taxi is quite viable, for example. This problem has been "solved" at airports (connections to mass transit, car rentals, shuttles, taxi stands, etc) and can be solved with the same set of solutions for rail.
The point of the train isn't necessarily to kill the car, but rather to change the way it all works. If I have to drive from Chicago to Washington DC, that's about 700 miles (~12 hours) and it's a pain to do alone. I'm burning gas, I'm not able to do work, I'm driving on busy roads. If I take the Capitol Limited, it's an overnight trip, so even though it takes a similar amount of time, I'm sleeping on the trip... and if it was a high speed train, maybe it'd only be a six hour day trip during which I could be working, rather than just being another idiot behind the wheel. I may be adding the need to rent a car in the DC area, but for the long haul portion, someone else is doing the driving and I am enjoying the trip without the stress of driving. Almost all the benefits of flying (which takes approx. 4 hours with get-there-early and checkin and all that) without the hassle and frustration of the airlines and TSA. For six hours (high speed rail) vs four hours (total airport+hassle time), the six looks attractive. The twelve of current Amtrak service, somewhat less so.
We have to stop sabotaging mass transit in the US.
Mass transit is made hard-to-use. Consider, for example, arriving in Chicago via train at Union Station. Chicago's got a good subway system, but to get on it, you've got to leave the station and walk several blocks outdoors. Metra? Somewhat better, if you're lucky enough to be leaving on a train from Union or maybe Ogilvie, but LaSalle and Van Buren are quite the hike. God forbid you want to take rail into Chicago so you can get to O'Hare for an international flight. If you come into Union, you're faced with hauling your luggage down a dingy concrete stairway to a subway station for a long el trip to the airport.
Mass transit is made second-class. Amtrak has for years struggled to be on-time, even though they're supposed to have priority over freight, they're using the rails of the freight railroads, and it's quite common to be waiting for some freight train to do its business before you can continue on your way. The tracks are poor and the trains wobble. People who suffer from motion sickness sometimes get sick from them, especially on the upper deck of a Superliner. Train speeds are low, meaning that a long haul trip is probably overnite, and if you want to be able to sleep in peace, that means paying for a roomette on the train, at substantial extra cost.
If we had high speed rail that was interconnected intelligently with subways, regional rail, buses, airports, etc., it'd be a great incentive to leave the car at home. I for one have driven enough miles that I'm happy to let someone else do the driving, but it also has to be convenient. For me, driving to O'Hare for an international flight and paying to park the car for several days is still more compelling than taking Amtrak, walking to the subway station, wrestling our luggage down the stairs and through the turnstiles, then taking the hour long trip to O'Hare.
I don't expect the current high speed rail proposals to address this sufficiently, so it isn't clear to me just how many people would start to take the train.
I can see that possibility, though I idly wonder whether a dating site is going to be able to create sufficient volume... presumably they're paying some large sum to get screen real estate on every Vodafone (360) phone, but that seems like it'd need to be a rather big number, and what happens when the expense crushes the dating site because actual clickthroughs don't match projections? Or maybe Vodafone sells their customers for cheap. That doesn't quite make sense to me because I would expect that the profit might easily be offset by the support costs of answering to angry customers as to why they were locked in this manner... and that's what seems to have happened.
I'm not saying that you're not correct, I'm just saying that someone someplace... miscalculated.
If they're going to dictate mandatory apps and screen layout, that seems like it's moving away from a true smartphone and towards the realm of featurephone.
I can definitely see having some predefined layouts handy for new smartphone users who don't really know what to do next, but it seems to me that one of the biggest advantages of a smartphone is the ability to customize it for your own arbitrary uses, adding your own layout and apps. If wireless companies are going to start dictating layout and apps, that seems like a step backwards. These phones are going to keep getting more capable with every passing month, new hardware design, and OS release, and if anything the market for featurephones would seem like it ought to be shrinking (since a smartphone can completely replace a featurephone). At some point, it'll be easier to sell a smartphone with a predefined featurephone-like template for users who would prefer that - instead of developing separate featurephones.
Is it possible that someone at Vodafone simply doesn't quite understand this? I couldn't quite put my finger on what problem Vodafone 360 was designed to solve...
I picked up some TekCharge MP1550's; they take either 2 or 4 AA's and put out USB. A short USB-to-phone cable and you have a handy charge-to-go. 4 rechargeable AA's will take an iPhone 3GS from 20% to 100% without a problem, and the gizmo can also be used to charge the batteries too with a separate USB-in.
For those who prefer a little electronics project, there are things like the "Altoids" or MintyBoost charger.
Either way, there's a lot of flexibility here. I carry a set of rechargeable AA's in an MP1550 with me, and it's good to know that even if that somehow goes awry, I need only stop at the gas station or store for some AA's in order to be able to have a charge available for my phone. It is still awkward to need to carry something with you, of course, but less awkward than being out of juice.
3 blank screens DOESN'T equate to "we're not working hard on this." Unfortunately, whoever ordered the photoshop of the picture probably thought otherwise.
As I said before, it'd have been perfectly reasonable for them to post an image with three blank monitors. You might try re-reading what I wrote, since you clearly missed the point, or even what I actually said.
We use photographs to convey images. This has historically been "thought" to be relatively foolproof; people tend to trust what they see in photographs. It's just in the last generation that picture editing has become really feasible (before that we maybe had some airbrush touch-ups, etc). The average person will generally believe a photograph that appears plausible.
Editing a photograph that's part of your PR effort to show the world how you're on top of the biggest ecological disaster in a long time is essentially putting out manufactured propaganda.
How much editing of the facts is allowable?
What if there were only two guys there instead of three, and they added a third "to look good"?
What if they added two of the guys?
What if they had Photoshopped in a bunch of screens of the current oil spill on a stock crisis management center photo from years ago?
Would it have been worse if it was clear that they had just Photoshopped the whole thing and that they never actually had a "crisis management center"?
At what point does the message being conveyed become more than cosmetic changes, and move into the deceptive (whether intentionally or not)? I draw that line at when substantive changes are made to the image, and I deem the insertion of fake images to be substantive changes.
I didn't say it was man-hours times screens. I said that it was more than a cosmetic edit, in that it changed the substance of the picture. It's very hard to argue that fact, since the very fact that such a large edit would have been made would have been on substantive grounds rather than cosmetic.
Or, to put it back in the "timecard" analogy:
Cosmetic edit: putting a little smiley face inside the top of the 8 to make it look like a little happy person. Harmless.
Substantive edit: writing "10" on your timecard when you only worked 8. You've just stolen from your employer.
Removing blemishes for aesthetics from the face of a model is one thing. Had BP merely been adjusting the image for aesthetic reasons (brightening, removing redeye, etc), that'd be fine. However, the purpose of this picture is to convey BP propaganda, in the form of "look, we're working really hard on this disaster", and altering the image to show images on monitors that aren't really there is like saying "I worked 10 hours" when you actually worked 8. That's not an aesthetic modification. That's materially lying about the facts of the response center, even if it's relatively harmless in the overall scheme of things.
It'd have been perfectly reasonable for them to have posted an image with the original blank monitors. It's real-world. Not every resource is used at every moment to the fullest of its potential. A blank screen is a space for the next remote operated vehicle to start displaying images when it comes on scene. The humans in the response center will be focusing on the things that they need to, and there isn't guaranteed to be one thing for each screen at all times. That's real-world.
It's a stupid mistake for them to have made, in any case.
Yes, we do. We don't let the kids read the Kama Sutra, or Playboy, but there's plenty of available reading material that's appropriate for kids, including books, current magazines like Time and PopMech, etc., and an hour of reading daily is part of the summer homework we've assigned. The average reading level of much of the material tends to be a grade or two above, as well.
There's plenty of free access to ideas and information, but as parents, we feel that it's appropriate to take responsibility for what an elementary-aged child is taking in.
There's plenty of opportunity for Internet use outside of the children's bedrooms, if and when that actually becomes necessary, under the watchful eye of a parent. We control the TV, too; there's not an hour of SpongeBob on the TiVo, but there's a wide selection of stuff including Naked Science, Mega Disasters, Top Gear, Crash Science, Doctor Who, Mythbusters, Mega Engineering, etc.
Part of the responsibility of being a parent is introducing your child to the world, but that doesn't happen all at once. You have to make choices about what's age-appropriate. Do you show pornography to a kindergartner, for example?
You can troll by labeling it fascist, but that's a bit harsh. We've introduced our kids to terrorism (including visits to the WTC site and OKC, discussion of religious extremism, etc). We've seen disasters firsthand, including flooding, and the aftermath of fire and tornadoes. They know what happens to farm animals, and even the conditions under which we keep animals like hens. As parents, it is our job to expose the kids to the world, in a guided and controlled manner, and placing them in front of the firehose that is the Internet is simply not necessary.
Many generations have grown up without unfettered access to the Internet, and they show no apparent lack of independent thinkers. Therefore, I challenge you to explain why it must be different for this generation.
Don't take it personally, but I find it troubling that it's okay with you for kids to flap their lives away on Facebook instead of actually using the resources to learn.
It's probably a good idea to get motivated learners using technology, and it's absolutely a great idea on many levels to get the other kids to go outside and play.
We need to find motivation to innovate and succeed, and Twittering your life away doesn't seem to be a path to that. Now if you're Twittering *and* doing other educational things, that's fine... just as it's fine to play video games now and then, or to watch TV once in a while, etc. However, when these developmentally-meaningless activities take over all your time, then that's unhealthy.
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
With kids being expected to learn typing in elementary school these days, we did provide a computer (even in the bedroom!), but it was loaded with a locked down version of FreeBSD, and had no Internet/e-mail/etc access. Daily typing drills resulted in a fantastic improvement in typing (according to the technology teacher), and Tux Math, a math drill game, seems to be more attractive than flash cards or printed math sheets, especially since getting a high score involves having to do the work more quickly, and our insistence on home row means that it's effectively also typing drill for the numbers row.
Perhaps the real problem here is that a computer is of limited usefulness, and that if it isn't thoughtfully and carefully deployed and monitored, then the benefits become more questionable. The tech teacher implied that we're very different than most families in that we've not provided Internet access or e-mail, but quite frankly that's going to be delayed for as long as possible precisely because we don't see a huge amount of value in Internet access for kids in elementary school, and "requirements" that homework be "e-mailed" in isn't going to change that.
There are significant negative aspects to uncontrolled access to computers and the Internet, ranging from benign time-wasting to dangerous predators. As a tech-aware parent, it's difficult to find suitable and relevant things to use the computer for, especially without Internet access, and so it comes as no shock to me that placing a computer into a random family's educational mix has limited effectiveness.
I fully agree with this interpretation of aviation security; it's been the way I've looked at it for years.
However, I went one step further. I reflected upon it a long time ago and decided that when I fly, if the unthinkable were to happen, I want to be an obstacle to any terrorists. It's easy to say "oh yeah of course I would," but there are moral, social, ethical, and legal implications to actually getting involved in a situation. For example, if you had the opportunity to interfere with a hijacking by killing a terrorist, would you do it?/Could/ you do it? Having thought this through in advance might allow one to act (or react) more quickly if opportunity presented itself. That, at least, is the way I felt about the issue, so I did spend some time thinking about it.
It's a useful exercise to contemplate all the possibilities, including the ones that don't necessarily end up with your name as hero on the front page.
Is it ever going to matter? Probably not. I hope not. It's kind of like buying insurance, though. It's nice to know that if it were to happen, I wouldn't have to wrestle with my conscience before feeling free to take action.
I'm not afraid of the terrorists. Terrorists should be terrified of what will happen to them if we catch them on a plane. That's how we win the war on terror. Plan ahead, be prepared, and refuse to give in to terror.
That, too, is a great question... my script, of course, being the obvious tr-based solution. I so rarely run across rot13 these days. It's mostly something I see in e-mail on a few obscure mailing lists, or occasionally on Usenet. I was a bit shocked to discover that there's a Firefox browser plugin for it...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, here in the USA, it may be... we have the Americans with Disabilities Act.
For the purposes of this thread, I therefore deem the USA to be a country where doorways (and lots of other things) must legally be built to accommodate fat people. That would seem to imply that the fatness of US citizens is legally protected. And you wonder why there's an obesity epidemic...
And for the bazillion people who will correct me or mod me down, come on, have a laugh.
Otis didn't have the nuts to say anything so bold.
Lex: Otisburg .. Otisburg?
Otis: Miss Tessmacher, she's got her own place.
Lex: Otisburg??
Otis: It's a little bitty place...
Lex: Otisburg?!?!?
Otis: Okay, I'll just wipe it off, that's all. It's just a little town.
Just get Google Maps to incorrectly show the border, right?
Whatever did we do in the days before Google Maps? Didn't the military used to use paper maps that were actually vetted and verified?
That's why you have the system store more than one copy, and you have it validate their integrity when reading them. Think of it as sensible RAID. I suggest a quick Google for "zfs data integrity", etc.
I found a ton of stuff I didn't really care for with Nexenta. They've put some good effort into it, and it'd be a fine way to go if you wanted commercial support, but overall it doesn't really seem to fit our needs here. ZFS itself is a resource pig, but on the other hand, resources have become relatively cheap. It's not unthinkable to jam gigs of RAM in a storage server ... today. Five years ago, though, that would have been much more likely to be a deal-breaker.
ZFS offers dedupe, and is even available in prepackaged NAS distributions such as Nexenta and OpenNAS. You too can have these great features, for much less than NetApp and friends.
We use the current parole system largely as a way to do exactly what this plan is suggesting: it allows people out of prison early in a supervised manner, to reduce crowding and to provide some of those benefits that you're talking about.
Parole means serving the remainder of your sentence outside a prison.
This plan seems to simply remove the word "remainder", and as far as I can tell, is not different in any other substantive way. They're effectively parolees for the entire term of their sentence.
If we use this plan as a substitute for prison, we are basically increasing the number of people out on "parole." I fail to understand why you think that parole officers would be "freed up" to concentrate on this system. Not only would they be supervising normal parolees, but they would also be supervising this new class of GPS-prisoner-parolees.
My point was that parole officers were already having problems keeping tabs on the current parolee population. My question is, therefore, why would you think that the same parole officers would be able to keep up with a heavier workload, when they're unable to cope effectively with the workload that they have?
Just so we're clear: I agree with the basic concept that building prisons and locking people up is failing, in many ways. I am certainly interested in discussing the problem and solutions. I'm just trying to be realistic about it at the same time.
There have been numerous reports of how our GPS-tracked parolees have violated parole and their overburdened parole officers have simply not been able to pursue the matter. While I'm not necessarily a fan of prisons and throwing people in one for every little infraction, it seems like replacing one failed strategy with another that we can reasonably predict will also fail is just foolish.
Perhaps we need to figure out a way to make the GPS solution work before we start to use it.
Or perhaps we need to figure out whether or not prison is the appropriate punishment for all these crimes?
When I travel, it is often with family, for a week or two at a time, which means two large suitcases, a diaper bag, a laptop bag, a car seat, a car booster seat, and two kids. So you've magically appeared on the Red Line, and you get off in downtown Chicago, navigate down the stairs to the tunnel to the Blue Line, then climb up the stairs to the Blue Line, get on a train, get off at Clinton, then have to walk up a dingy set of concrete stairs, with protesting kids and all your stuff, up into the cold snowy Chicago sub-zero temperatures, where you then get to walk three blocks through slush and crap to get to Union Station, where you are once again faced with stairs or escalators. Never mind that the kids are whining about being tired, too hot, then too cold, then wet, or that the bottom of your luggage is now soppy, crappy, and full of muddy snow, everybody's wet and tired, and you suddenly learn that your train will be departing at midnight instead of 5PM because Amtrak's got some problem.
At what point do you decide that it's more convenient to just take the car?
We've taken the train from here to NYC and then to Tampa. This is a nontrivial undertaking (four different trains) with a family, especially when you get to someplace like NYC where you have to get a room overnite because the service to Tampa is only daily. Suggesting I'm lazy is probably unfair. The reality, though, is that many people will tend to prefer the easier thing over the harder thing.
Low population density is the foe of urban transit: it works very well where users are dense, but if you look at the Chicago area, you can travel 50 miles in a straight line and still be in the "greater Chicago metro" area.
That's why CTA works (more or less); it covers areas of Chicago with greater population density (== more riders, == less room for parking spaces, == less of a walk to the station, etc). Urban transit works and works WELL where you have a model that can be adapted to it; in Chicago, for example, work-in-the-loop and live-in-the-near-downtown-area makes the El viable.
If you live in Schaumburg and work in Joliet, however, I'm guessing your mass transit options are less than optimal (note: I'm not a Chicago resident, just kind of familiar with the city, so just pick points on different Metra/CTA "spokes" at some distance from the Loop for examples). A car and 355 look attractive there though.
Older urban centers grew up dense because people did not have cars and had to rely on mass transit (trolleys, electric rail, El, etc). Neighborhoods were designed to be self-sufficient, with corner grocery stores and stuff like that, so that you didn't need to drive 5 miles to the Big Low Price Mart for your loaf of bread. The density enabled mass transit to be successful.
Newer urban centers grew up sparse because of suburban sprawl; if everyone has a house on a quarter acre lot, everyone wants to drive because no one wants to walk a mile to the bus, then ride that to a train station or whatever, then transfer to another train, and another bus, so that they can wind up in $other-suburb where their job is.
The sad reality is that the American dream of a house on a big lot is an urban transit killer, because you can't generate enough ridership, because cars are more convenient.
Cities with downtown areas with lots of office jobs are also losing out: at least around here, many office buildings (== high worker density) are being remodeled into condos (== low residential density), which means that mass transit into the downtown area is becoming less useful as jobs migrate 20-30 miles away from downtown.
I don't know anything about Alton or Dwight, sorry, not from Chicago. I just picked an example I knew of that other people would likely be able to identify with. Clinton Street Subway sounds interesting.
I don't think there are any simple solutions to our transit problems, but I do see inter-city high-speed rail service as addressing obvious problems we have with our current car- and plane-oriented transit system. I don't think we'll implement a good inter-city system, sadly, we just don't have the vision or political will, just as we lack those things to fix obvious problems with the urban transit systems.
"The first thing you need is a car."
While that's often true, it's by no means universal. Taxi is quite viable, for example. This problem has been "solved" at airports (connections to mass transit, car rentals, shuttles, taxi stands, etc) and can be solved with the same set of solutions for rail.
The point of the train isn't necessarily to kill the car, but rather to change the way it all works. If I have to drive from Chicago to Washington DC, that's about 700 miles (~12 hours) and it's a pain to do alone. I'm burning gas, I'm not able to do work, I'm driving on busy roads. If I take the Capitol Limited, it's an overnight trip, so even though it takes a similar amount of time, I'm sleeping on the trip... and if it was a high speed train, maybe it'd only be a six hour day trip during which I could be working, rather than just being another idiot behind the wheel. I may be adding the need to rent a car in the DC area, but for the long haul portion, someone else is doing the driving and I am enjoying the trip without the stress of driving. Almost all the benefits of flying (which takes approx. 4 hours with get-there-early and checkin and all that) without the hassle and frustration of the airlines and TSA. For six hours (high speed rail) vs four hours (total airport+hassle time), the six looks attractive. The twelve of current Amtrak service, somewhat less so.
We have to stop sabotaging mass transit in the US.
Mass transit is made hard-to-use. Consider, for example, arriving in Chicago via train at Union Station. Chicago's got a good subway system, but to get on it, you've got to leave the station and walk several blocks outdoors. Metra? Somewhat better, if you're lucky enough to be leaving on a train from Union or maybe Ogilvie, but LaSalle and Van Buren are quite the hike. God forbid you want to take rail into Chicago so you can get to O'Hare for an international flight. If you come into Union, you're faced with hauling your luggage down a dingy concrete stairway to a subway station for a long el trip to the airport.
Mass transit is made second-class. Amtrak has for years struggled to be on-time, even though they're supposed to have priority over freight, they're using the rails of the freight railroads, and it's quite common to be waiting for some freight train to do its business before you can continue on your way. The tracks are poor and the trains wobble. People who suffer from motion sickness sometimes get sick from them, especially on the upper deck of a Superliner. Train speeds are low, meaning that a long haul trip is probably overnite, and if you want to be able to sleep in peace, that means paying for a roomette on the train, at substantial extra cost.
If we had high speed rail that was interconnected intelligently with subways, regional rail, buses, airports, etc., it'd be a great incentive to leave the car at home. I for one have driven enough miles that I'm happy to let someone else do the driving, but it also has to be convenient. For me, driving to O'Hare for an international flight and paying to park the car for several days is still more compelling than taking Amtrak, walking to the subway station, wrestling our luggage down the stairs and through the turnstiles, then taking the hour long trip to O'Hare.
I don't expect the current high speed rail proposals to address this sufficiently, so it isn't clear to me just how many people would start to take the train.
I can see that possibility, though I idly wonder whether a dating site is going to be able to create sufficient volume... presumably they're paying some large sum to get screen real estate on every Vodafone (360) phone, but that seems like it'd need to be a rather big number, and what happens when the expense crushes the dating site because actual clickthroughs don't match projections? Or maybe Vodafone sells their customers for cheap. That doesn't quite make sense to me because I would expect that the profit might easily be offset by the support costs of answering to angry customers as to why they were locked in this manner... and that's what seems to have happened.
I'm not saying that you're not correct, I'm just saying that someone someplace ... miscalculated.
If they're going to dictate mandatory apps and screen layout, that seems like it's moving away from a true smartphone and towards the realm of featurephone.
I can definitely see having some predefined layouts handy for new smartphone users who don't really know what to do next, but it seems to me that one of the biggest advantages of a smartphone is the ability to customize it for your own arbitrary uses, adding your own layout and apps. If wireless companies are going to start dictating layout and apps, that seems like a step backwards. These phones are going to keep getting more capable with every passing month, new hardware design, and OS release, and if anything the market for featurephones would seem like it ought to be shrinking (since a smartphone can completely replace a featurephone). At some point, it'll be easier to sell a smartphone with a predefined featurephone-like template for users who would prefer that - instead of developing separate featurephones.
Is it possible that someone at Vodafone simply doesn't quite understand this? I couldn't quite put my finger on what problem Vodafone 360 was designed to solve...
I picked up some TekCharge MP1550's; they take either 2 or 4 AA's and put out USB. A short USB-to-phone cable and you have a handy charge-to-go. 4 rechargeable AA's will take an iPhone 3GS from 20% to 100% without a problem, and the gizmo can also be used to charge the batteries too with a separate USB-in.
For those who prefer a little electronics project, there are things like the "Altoids" or MintyBoost charger.
Either way, there's a lot of flexibility here. I carry a set of rechargeable AA's in an MP1550 with me, and it's good to know that even if that somehow goes awry, I need only stop at the gas station or store for some AA's in order to be able to have a charge available for my phone. It is still awkward to need to carry something with you, of course, but less awkward than being out of juice.
3 blank screens DOESN'T equate to "we're not working hard on this." Unfortunately, whoever ordered the photoshop of the picture probably thought otherwise.
As I said before, it'd have been perfectly reasonable for them to post an image with three blank monitors. You might try re-reading what I wrote, since you clearly missed the point, or even what I actually said.
We use photographs to convey images. This has historically been "thought" to be relatively foolproof; people tend to trust what they see in photographs. It's just in the last generation that picture editing has become really feasible (before that we maybe had some airbrush touch-ups, etc). The average person will generally believe a photograph that appears plausible.
Editing a photograph that's part of your PR effort to show the world how you're on top of the biggest ecological disaster in a long time is essentially putting out manufactured propaganda.
How much editing of the facts is allowable?
What if there were only two guys there instead of three, and they added a third "to look good"?
What if they added two of the guys?
What if they had Photoshopped in a bunch of screens of the current oil spill on a stock crisis management center photo from years ago?
Would it have been worse if it was clear that they had just Photoshopped the whole thing and that they never actually had a "crisis management center"?
At what point does the message being conveyed become more than cosmetic changes, and move into the deceptive (whether intentionally or not)? I draw that line at when substantive changes are made to the image, and I deem the insertion of fake images to be substantive changes.
I didn't say it was man-hours times screens. I said that it was more than a cosmetic edit, in that it changed the substance of the picture. It's very hard to argue that fact, since the very fact that such a large edit would have been made would have been on substantive grounds rather than cosmetic.
Or, to put it back in the "timecard" analogy:
Cosmetic edit: putting a little smiley face inside the top of the 8 to make it look like a little happy person. Harmless.
Substantive edit: writing "10" on your timecard when you only worked 8. You've just stolen from your employer.
Removing blemishes for aesthetics from the face of a model is one thing. Had BP merely been adjusting the image for aesthetic reasons (brightening, removing redeye, etc), that'd be fine. However, the purpose of this picture is to convey BP propaganda, in the form of "look, we're working really hard on this disaster", and altering the image to show images on monitors that aren't really there is like saying "I worked 10 hours" when you actually worked 8. That's not an aesthetic modification. That's materially lying about the facts of the response center, even if it's relatively harmless in the overall scheme of things.
It'd have been perfectly reasonable for them to have posted an image with the original blank monitors. It's real-world. Not every resource is used at every moment to the fullest of its potential. A blank screen is a space for the next remote operated vehicle to start displaying images when it comes on scene. The humans in the response center will be focusing on the things that they need to, and there isn't guaranteed to be one thing for each screen at all times. That's real-world.
It's a stupid mistake for them to have made, in any case.
Yes, we do. We don't let the kids read the Kama Sutra, or Playboy, but there's plenty of available reading material that's appropriate for kids, including books, current magazines like Time and PopMech, etc., and an hour of reading daily is part of the summer homework we've assigned. The average reading level of much of the material tends to be a grade or two above, as well.
There's plenty of free access to ideas and information, but as parents, we feel that it's appropriate to take responsibility for what an elementary-aged child is taking in.
There's plenty of opportunity for Internet use outside of the children's bedrooms, if and when that actually becomes necessary, under the watchful eye of a parent. We control the TV, too; there's not an hour of SpongeBob on the TiVo, but there's a wide selection of stuff including Naked Science, Mega Disasters, Top Gear, Crash Science, Doctor Who, Mythbusters, Mega Engineering, etc.
Part of the responsibility of being a parent is introducing your child to the world, but that doesn't happen all at once. You have to make choices about what's age-appropriate. Do you show pornography to a kindergartner, for example?
You can troll by labeling it fascist, but that's a bit harsh. We've introduced our kids to terrorism (including visits to the WTC site and OKC, discussion of religious extremism, etc). We've seen disasters firsthand, including flooding, and the aftermath of fire and tornadoes. They know what happens to farm animals, and even the conditions under which we keep animals like hens. As parents, it is our job to expose the kids to the world, in a guided and controlled manner, and placing them in front of the firehose that is the Internet is simply not necessary.
Many generations have grown up without unfettered access to the Internet, and they show no apparent lack of independent thinkers. Therefore, I challenge you to explain why it must be different for this generation.
Don't take it personally, but I find it troubling that it's okay with you for kids to flap their lives away on Facebook instead of actually using the resources to learn.
It's probably a good idea to get motivated learners using technology, and it's absolutely a great idea on many levels to get the other kids to go outside and play.
We need to find motivation to innovate and succeed, and Twittering your life away doesn't seem to be a path to that. Now if you're Twittering *and* doing other educational things, that's fine... just as it's fine to play video games now and then, or to watch TV once in a while, etc. However, when these developmentally-meaningless activities take over all your time, then that's unhealthy.
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
With kids being expected to learn typing in elementary school these days, we did provide a computer (even in the bedroom!), but it was loaded with a locked down version of FreeBSD, and had no Internet/e-mail/etc access. Daily typing drills resulted in a fantastic improvement in typing (according to the technology teacher), and Tux Math, a math drill game, seems to be more attractive than flash cards or printed math sheets, especially since getting a high score involves having to do the work more quickly, and our insistence on home row means that it's effectively also typing drill for the numbers row.
Perhaps the real problem here is that a computer is of limited usefulness, and that if it isn't thoughtfully and carefully deployed and monitored, then the benefits become more questionable. The tech teacher implied that we're very different than most families in that we've not provided Internet access or e-mail, but quite frankly that's going to be delayed for as long as possible precisely because we don't see a huge amount of value in Internet access for kids in elementary school, and "requirements" that homework be "e-mailed" in isn't going to change that.
There are significant negative aspects to uncontrolled access to computers and the Internet, ranging from benign time-wasting to dangerous predators. As a tech-aware parent, it's difficult to find suitable and relevant things to use the computer for, especially without Internet access, and so it comes as no shock to me that placing a computer into a random family's educational mix has limited effectiveness.
I fully agree with this interpretation of aviation security; it's been the way I've looked at it for years.
However, I went one step further. I reflected upon it a long time ago and decided that when I fly, if the unthinkable were to happen, I want to be an obstacle to any terrorists. It's easy to say "oh yeah of course I would," but there are moral, social, ethical, and legal implications to actually getting involved in a situation. For example, if you had the opportunity to interfere with a hijacking by killing a terrorist, would you do it? /Could/ you do it? Having thought this through in advance might allow one to act (or react) more quickly if opportunity presented itself. That, at least, is the way I felt about the issue, so I did spend some time thinking about it.
It's a useful exercise to contemplate all the possibilities, including the ones that don't necessarily end up with your name as hero on the front page.
Is it ever going to matter? Probably not. I hope not. It's kind of like buying insurance, though. It's nice to know that if it were to happen, I wouldn't have to wrestle with my conscience before feeling free to take action.
I'm not afraid of the terrorists. Terrorists should be terrified of what will happen to them if we catch them on a plane. That's how we win the war on terror. Plan ahead, be prepared, and refuse to give in to terror.
That, too, is a great question... my script, of course, being the obvious tr-based solution. I so rarely run across rot13 these days. It's mostly something I see in e-mail on a few obscure mailing lists, or occasionally on Usenet. I was a bit shocked to discover that there's a Firefox browser plugin for it...
I guess the question is, how many people even know what rot13 is these days?
I mean, really, my rot13 script's nearly 20 years old and I'll bet I use it less than once a year these days...
% ls -l bin/script/rot13
-rwx------ 1 jgreco user 64 Nov 11 1991 bin/script/rot13*
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