Wild boar live about 15-20 years. They also are vegetarians which means their diet is concentrating this material for you. If you were to eat boar regularly, your own exposure to caesium-137 would be far higher than that of any of the individual boars you consume.
Carnivores have a lot higher concentrations of radioactive material, but we don't care about their radiation levels because their meat is generally nasty so humans don't eat a whole lot of it.
There may be unforeseen benefits, but they are pretty much outweighed by the foreseen and well-documented side effect of increased cancer rates.
Radiation-induced cancer from low-level radiation generally takes many years to develop, so even if the boar ended up with lots of it, their population is not about to be destroyed by something that takes most of (or more than) their lifespan to develop.
It also generally develops after fertility, which means it wouldn't really affect a "thriving" boar population to have old non-breeding boars die off. It might even be good for the younger population - less competition from no-longer-breeding elders for food.
One could, if one lacked compassion, say the same for humans. But that doesn't mean I want to die of cancer for the good of my species. Glowing Boar is not on my personal menu of choice.
You are free to make your own decision in that regard, of course. In general, I'd recommend against it. But I only have one child, and she's not on Slashdot, so I can say with great confidence that you aren't my offspring so I have little authority over what you choose to do.
If you experience any positive side effects, please do write back, OK?
And, yes, such an animal exists. They are called "boar."
(see also "sheep" in the UK, which have the same issue with Chernobyl fallout, and "reindeer" in certain Nordic regions, not to mention carnivores in a lot of places)
Lichen (aka. reindeer chow), fungi (loved by boar) and certain other plants (probably including the grasses or some other plant that sheep eat a lot of) are apparently great radioactivity concentrators.
Fortunately, C137 has a half life of about 30 years, not tens of thousands, so in a few hundred years the radioactivity remaining in most animals should be low enough that this isn't a problem any more. As long as we keep building reactors safely and running them to standards such that they don't blow up, we'll only glow when it's REALLY dark.
That may or may not have been its original purpose, but that was the way we trained people to use the mouse at a previous job, back when Windows 3.1 was being introduced.
I ran several training sessions, helping people play solitaire on a computer for 2 hours. Seemed really, REALLY silly at the time, but we tried training a couple of people using different methods and paying someone near-minimum-wage to play a game that was included with the OS for two hours turned out to be an exceptionally efficient way to get the concepts of cursor movement, click, double-click, click and drag, menu operations, etc across.
Self-study was not, however, encouraged. We did have one guy try to defend playing with "Vegas rules" enabled as "advanced self-learning" - didn't go terribly well for him.;)
and tell them that they have a week to either agree to our terms or remove their equipment.
Don't forget that, in many cases, the government also helped fund the wiring. So you should add "and refund any taxpayer dollars they have received to fund it" after "remove their equipment".
Show me a company that owns all of their wires on all of their own property, that does not benefit from the use of any public resources, and I'll show you somewhere that the First Amendment does not apply.
Not one of the current Internet, Telephone, or Power providers I've ever heard of can make that claim. They are regulated monopolies propped up by public resources, and as such must respect the regulations they accepted with their government-mandated rights of way they demanded, and the money they demanded to help pay to string the wires.
But the right-of-way that those wires were installed over was done via eminent domain, which is a government function.
The fact of the matter is that the placement of those wires is a public-private partnership because the wires could never have been placed without government-mandated rights of way.
Access to place those wires was granted in return for the company accepting a regulated monopoly position (and often taxpayer dollars were used to help fund the wires themselves).
Concepts like universal access, of which net neutrality could be considered a logical extension, were part of the package that companies signed up for when they demanded the government grant them a monopoly and use public powers to benefit a private company.
Don't like the idea of the wires the government helped pay for which are now residing in a public right of way being regulated? Pull your fucking wires out and refund the money the government paid to help you run then, or abandon the wires. Let someone else have a shot at it.
You can have the monopoly you demanded and accept regulatory and financial assistance from the government, or you can avoid regulation. PICK ONE. Figure out how to run your wires without asking the government to help you and without involving any public resources whatsoever, and you can do what you like with those wires.
Ironic, is it not, that the same companies that demanded the government exercise eminent domain in order to force landowners to allow those wires are now claiming that those selfsame wires are inviolate private property and that the regulations they accepted in return for government intervention to grant them their monopoly is somehow an exercise in eminent domain?
Even if it is, so what? "He who lives by the sword..."
No. The resolution remains the same. The scope of measurable values has changed.
They are truncating an irrelevant portion of the scale, since "D" and "D+" are no longer passing grades at that specific school. The percentages behind the remaining letters remains exactly the same, it's just that a couple of letters don't mean anything any more.
"A"-"D" and "F" are a clumsy representation of percentages, and the percentages are the real grade. There's no reason to write "D" or "D+" on a report card any more at this school, because a grade of 69% is a fail. 70% is a "C-", which is now the lowest passing grade. So their scale now contains the possible values of: A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, FAIL.
Oblig bad car analogy: If you put a permanent governor on a specific car model that keeps it from exceeding 120MPH (and assuming that governor will never be bypassed), there's no point in making speedometers that read to 150MPH any more for that model of car.
The actual measurement of the speed of the car has not changed, it still contains the same resolution (Miles Per Hour). 15MPH is still 15MPH and 85MPH is still 85MPH. But you can, if you want, remove the bits of the speedometer that read numbers that are irrelevant to the car, because they'll never be measured again.
In the same vein, D+ and D can safely be removed from the "list of things we are going to write on a report card" at this specific school. Doesn't mean the arbitrary letter-grade doesn't still EXIST, just that it will never be used at the school.
(Not to mention the legions of slashtards who're perfectly happy with sudo, but for whom UAC was apparently too cumbersome...)
Actually, UAC was, in my opinion, one of the better ideas ever to come out of Redmond (cue the criticisms that it's a ripoff of sudo, but it's still a damned good solution to an almost unsolvable problem).
The problem is that Microsoft (understandably) still wanted to keep compatibility with all that old shitty software that demanded Admin access, but UAC (logically) asked you every time you decided to start any of that old shitty software.
So UAC became a Jack Russel Terrier because it was trying to correct the deficiencies caused by shitty developers all assuming their programs would always and evermore have Admin rights, forever and ever amen.
And, yes, in the end Microsoft shared some significant fault for allowing that assumption for so many years. But changing that assumption was bound to cause pain, and I'll give them credit for finally biting the bullet and doing it in Vista.
It's not UAC that was at fault - that was actually a quite excellent design. It was the underlying problem that, frankly, can't easily be solved without some pain on the user's part.
The sad part is that UAC was a teaching opportunity, but many people don't want to learn. They just want to click on whatever it takes to get to the dancing bunny video.
This is not a criticism of those users - I have the same basic attitude about many of the things around me.
We want our ISP to not store indefinite logs on us. But, wait, then how would Mariposa's creator have been discovered if it were not for detailed historical connection logs?
In order to catch the bad kids, you need to watch all the kids closely so you know who the bad kids are. The more you watch them, the more you can tell between the good kids and the bad kids. The less you're allowed to watch them, the more the bad kids are going to be able to get away with.
If you want freedom, then you have to accept that not all the bad kids will be caught, and when they do it's going to be a harder job for the enforcement folks to manage.
Freedom's a big scary place full of unfairness that no one can fix while retaining the freedom, because freedom means there's less authority to make it all fair.
All freedoms and protections from the police and authorities come with a corresponding reduction in the ability of those same people to protect you.
I'm not espousing more police powers, far from it, just saying that you need to know the price tag that comes with freedom.
'Cause it sure as hell ain't free. You've got to fight for it, and you've got to accept that it means the exact same freedoms for people you disagree with on stuff. And it makes it easier for people to do bad things, too.
I don't disagree completely, I'm just wondering about how much this is going to be useful where it's really needed. I mean, it's a "bring your own screen", and that means it's going to need a TV. Oh, and be somewhere you have enough power to run a TV.
I suppose you could find enough of those little 9" black and white portable jobbies to fulfill some of the need, and those take various voltages of power both in AC and DC, but the kind of power a hand-crank generator puts out isn't going to run any TV anyone in Middle NoWhereistan is going to be able to get.
By and large, the market that can afford this and a TV and power to run the whole thing isn't going to want it. Or am I missing some significant market segment?
Except maybe as a portable schoolbook in areas where TVs are common, I suppose. Kid hooks it up to a TV at school, has access to textbooks, hooks it up at TV home and has same access, and if kid drops it school district is out a replacement cost that's far less than the cost of one printed textbook, and two orders of magnitude less than the cost of a brandy-new MacBook Pro.
VGA-out, if it's not terribly expensive, could at least allow it to be hooked up to a computer monitor - slightly better resolution, not all that much harder to obtain, etc.
I agree, except for what is implied by what you aren't saying (and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I want to make it clear that this is something you appear to be inferring, and is obviously what others have seen as well given prior responses to your post).
Your statement sounds like the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" meaning you appear to be OK with things going, as you say, screwy, because it won't affect you due to your discretion.
First, your sense of discretion is probably not quite as effective as you think it is. Aggregating data is a pretty scary science. Get a temporary job working for a marketing or other aggregation firm. You'd be surprised how easy it is to gather data these days.
Second, what is acceptable today may not be acceptable tomorrow, and your government should not obligate you to live in a post-Miranda-rights condition ("anything you say can and will be used against you") until someone actually reads those words to you because you are actually suspected of a crime based on, you know, real evidence and due process and innocent until proven guilty and all that "wishy-washy namby-pamby terrorist-lover" stuff that is so out of vogue these days.
It's important to hold your cards close and not offer up information that could be used against you. On that we agree.
However, it's equally important to limit the control and power of those who are supposed to serve in the cause of our freedom rather than demand that we serve them by offering the same freedoms up to them (our Government).
So, by all means, treat your actions as if "they" were watching. But don't depend on that discretion, and don't use it to dismiss the real threat that its very necessity implies.
If I have put words in your mouth, I humbly apologize.
It depends on the implementation. Who says you have to join just one network, or use separate interfaces for all the networks you join?
The breakdown of the "central player" always leads to fragmentation, and in some cases incompatibility. We saw it when Netscape was dethroned, then again when Internet Explorer was. We saw it when Microsoft and Yahoo! entered the then-AOL-dominated instant messenger market. We saw it when pop/SMTP took over for proprietary protocols like AOL, because even though message sending became trivial, message formatting is not and it turned ugly (remember IncrediMail? (shudders)). Your own example of the downfall of Newsgroups is an excellent one.
Some remain fragmented. But we invent tools to unify them.
I have to have AOLIM, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, and GoogleIM accounts to have a hope of staying in touch with everyone I use IM to reach. But I have Pidgin to unify them as if I was only on one IM server.
If social networking went open source, the APIs would be published (there could be a bunch of them, but it doesn't matter). Joining them would be generally free, and the protocols would be fairly well-known.
This means the fine folks who brought us things like GAIM/Pidgin would bring us unified social networking tools that can talk to all of the servers out there.
A friend of yours sets up his social network. You join. Eventually you set up your own, maybe, or convince others to join your friend's. Another friend of you tells you about one that his friend started up, you join that. You find a friend there who says that a bunch of people you know are on this other site. You join that. Kinda like the way LinkedIn works, but with actual separate servers instead of "1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc" connection rankings.
Eventually you've joined a few or hundreds or thousands of disparate social networking sites, but to you they are all one. Your updates go to all of them, and the program aggregates updates from all of them and you see them as a unified whole, just as if it came from a single site. One of your friends who you are connected to via 12 sites sends an update, the unifier "de-duplicates" them and you see them as one update from your friend (probably with a "connected via 12 networks" footer).
When you search, it searches all the networks you have joined. You learn about new networks from your friends, who may have joined different networks in addition to the ones you've shared. Both of you join each other's networks, and the links build.
The beauty of something like this is that, once properly established, no one can ever take it down. As long as you are connected to each of your friends through at least two networks, the loss of a single network in your view does not affect you in the slightest.
Businesses would line up to provide the service for free or low-charge, just so they could insert their own updates into their networks. But the beauty is that, if any one business decided to violate the privacy trust of their customers or overspam their network, the customers could simply drop them from their list of networks.
Plus, of course, lots of other individuals would throw up their own servers. The reliability need not be perfect, especially if there are lots of redundant networks out there.
Of course, that leads to its own problems. Instead of one heavily-watched central server whose privacy policy violations quickly become public record, you'd have thousands of servers of unknown veracity and no really effective watchdog force able to monitor them all.
And traffic could get a tad heavy if you peer to many networks (uploading a 100K picture could get costly if you were peered with 1000 networks), but I'm sure offsite aggregating services would become available (one website where the server handles all the updating of all of your networks) and you could choose to do that if you have a mobile phone or limited account.
I'm confused. Facebook is a commercial site. You joined, they give you free service, they get paid for ads. Enough people join, they make more money.
What do you think would be "fair" about them paying you money to use the site? Conversely, what do you think is "unfair" about them not paying you for something they've never, ever mentioned a single word about paying anyone to do?
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian."
- Dennis Wholey
I agree, the story sounds a little iffy. But I've also heard about successful suits because the accommodations, when made, were "not sufficient".
I don't have the details, but there was something about a theater having trouble because the only way they could get theater-goers to the seats on the second and third floor was by using a freight elevator, and that was considered degrading. Hiring ushers to carry wheelchairs and their occupants was also unacceptable, so I think they had to shut down one of their two stairways and install a wheelchair lift, which then cause some issues with fire codes, if I recall.
So the ADA has its share of issues like any other law.
Once case in point. A little further up the coast from me, we have a new bridge that was just built a few years back. The government decided to spend a few extra million and put a fancy observation tower in. Waste of money if you ask me, but the Governor didn't, and the view is admittedly pretty cool.
Anyway, the observation part of the tower had two levels. One was where the elevator came into, and had a 270-degree view of everything but a pretty but uninteresting nearby hillside. That level had a small observation area and a stairway that led to a second floor that had a 360-degree panoramic view.
The 270 degrees on the first floor were carefully chosen so that someone in a wheelchair could see all the "interesting" stuff. The nearby towns, the bridge itself, the coast, etc. There was enough room for someone with a wheelchair to roll up to the 4th wall and see all 360 degrees, but that corner was a little crowded when the elevators came up.
I bet you can see where this is going.
Someone interpreting the ADA decided that everyone needed access to BOTH floors.
So now, there are TWO elevators. The second one is a wheelchair lift that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor, and takes up almost the entire remaining part of the lower floor, and most of the walls that make up the most "interesting view" of both floors.
Now, admittedly, the wheelchair lift is enclosed in transparent plastic, so the view is still pretty much visible, through multiple sheets of Plexiglas. There's a small space left where you can walk right up to the windows and look down at the actual bridge (the most interesting part), but only one person can get right up to the window at a time now, and only on the upper floor, where there was meant to be room for about 10 per floor on that wall.
But the sad irony is that people in wheelchairs can't even see the bridge at all, except as a fuzzy impression through multiple sheets of plexiglas while they are riding the second elevator - the remaining space with a normal windowpane is too narrow to fit a wheelchair in.
So, in this case, the ADA not only made things slightly less convenient for completely mobile folks (which is fine, I'm OK with that), but more importantly it actually made things worse for the very people it was designed to help.
Small towns aren't exactly itching to shut down their local businesses.
Small towns aren't exactly filled with large planning and approval boards that can balance out personal bias, either.
Not saying that's what happened here, but I've lived in my fair share of very small towns, and love 'em, but there are two rules:
1. Don't make enemies of the local sheriff or deputy, code enforcement officer, postmaster, or anyone else who can make your life a living screaming hell. Include in that list anyone who is a good friend of theirs, or their kin.
2. When you violate rule #1, time to put the house up for sale.
It's possible that the wheelchair-bound gentleman was the code enforcement officer's dad, or maybe his son worked for Lowe's.
Sad, and certainly not the ADA's fault if true, but it happens.
Someone wrote that article. In return, they were paid. That's a commercial use.
Why did they choose the picture? Would the article have made more or less money without the image or with a different image?
How are any of these questions even relevant.
The journalist or commentator who used the image was paid for a work that included the image. As soon as someone gets paid, it's a "commercial work". That image was not licensed for use as part of a "commercial work".
from what I understand, schools just plain do not hold anyone back because they fail.
Then, meaning no offense, your level of understanding is woefully inadequate, but that's probably because the system is a tad more complex than it used to be. I don't know how long ago you went to high school, so I don't know whether to order you off my lawn, offer to get off of yours, or negotiate lawn entry rights between equally weathered curmudgeons.
Anyway, I've got a keyboard and I intend to use it, so hang on tight and keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times...
Most schools do, in fact, promote a student when they fail a single class (or fewer than a set number of classes) within a specific grade. They can continue taking most of their classes with their regular classmates. Note the use of the term "most". Not "all".
But then you get into the whole issue of "remediation". Remediation has changed a bit over the years, but I have quite a few relatives with kids going to school in many separate school districts in four separate states in different parts of the country, and not all of them are passing all of their grades. I graduated from High School nigh on 25 years ago, and the remediation process appears to have changed very little from my understanding of it while a young pup in school. I can't even begin to pretend to speak with knowledge about ALL school districts in ALL states in America, but the few I've seen are almost surprisingly consistent with each other and with the three High Schools I attended (we moved a lot) 25 years ago.
Usually, what will happen is that the student will be promoted to the next grade the next year, unless he or she fails enough classes that they didn't earn enough credits to qualify for the next grade. So, technically, the student will not be "held back" and have to repeat the whole grade for one failed class (there may be schools that do it this way, and I know that was very common much earlier than the 1980s, but I don't think many do a complete "hold back" any more unless the student fails most of their classes).
They may go to the next grade and get to attend most classes with their usual classmates, but they are NOT off the hook for the classes they failed.
For those classes that they fail, they are offered a choice of remediation via summer school, or repeating that class with the younger kids the next year. If they opt for summer school and still fail the exam, then they re-take the class the next year with the younger kids. If they need to re-take that class, then they "fall behind" in that subject area and either catch up in summer school at some point or reach the point where they don't have enough points to graduate with their class. If they have enough points, they can march with the class and receive a "conditional diploma" and (hopefully) pass whatever they need that summer and exchange it for a real Diploma.
In order to graduate with a diploma, the kids must pass all of their classes at the senior level and all of the necessary prerequisites at the lower levels, so they will either have to take summer school at some point to catch up, or go back to school for one or two classes with the next Senior class after everyone else graduates, or get an "incomplete" and pass the GED Exam to get proof that they qualified to complete high school.
This may vary a little from school to school, but the upshot is that kids aren't "held back" any more, but that does not imply that they are held to an inferior academic standard. Now, say what you like about the overall standards, giving up on students, whatever. I'm not debating whether education as a whole is better or worse than in whatever past you might remember. My point is that failing a class is not a "get out of work free" card, and the kids are not being automatically promoted and their failures ignored as a general rule.
Maybe some schools have just "given up" and don't bother with remediation, and pass the kid without any attempt at teaching them everything they need to technically pass. That would be tragic. Thankfully, I haven't heard of any.
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Wild boar live about 15-20 years. They also are vegetarians which means their diet is concentrating this material for you. If you were to eat boar regularly, your own exposure to caesium-137 would be far higher than that of any of the individual boars you consume.
Carnivores have a lot higher concentrations of radioactive material, but we don't care about their radiation levels because their meat is generally nasty so humans don't eat a whole lot of it.
There may be unforeseen benefits, but they are pretty much outweighed by the foreseen and well-documented side effect of increased cancer rates.
Radiation-induced cancer from low-level radiation generally takes many years to develop, so even if the boar ended up with lots of it, their population is not about to be destroyed by something that takes most of (or more than) their lifespan to develop.
It also generally develops after fertility, which means it wouldn't really affect a "thriving" boar population to have old non-breeding boars die off. It might even be good for the younger population - less competition from no-longer-breeding elders for food.
One could, if one lacked compassion, say the same for humans. But that doesn't mean I want to die of cancer for the good of my species. Glowing Boar is not on my personal menu of choice.
You are free to make your own decision in that regard, of course. In general, I'd recommend against it. But I only have one child, and she's not on Slashdot, so I can say with great confidence that you aren't my offspring so I have little authority over what you choose to do.
If you experience any positive side effects, please do write back, OK?
SuperManBearPig!
And, yes, such an animal exists. They are called "boar."
(see also "sheep" in the UK, which have the same issue with Chernobyl fallout, and "reindeer" in certain Nordic regions, not to mention carnivores in a lot of places)
Lichen (aka. reindeer chow), fungi (loved by boar) and certain other plants (probably including the grasses or some other plant that sheep eat a lot of) are apparently great radioactivity concentrators.
Fortunately, C137 has a half life of about 30 years, not tens of thousands, so in a few hundred years the radioactivity remaining in most animals should be low enough that this isn't a problem any more. As long as we keep building reactors safely and running them to standards such that they don't blow up, we'll only glow when it's REALLY dark.
2) Their airflow sucks.
There's your problem. You got sucky fans. You want the ones that blow.
That may or may not have been its original purpose, but that was the way we trained people to use the mouse at a previous job, back when Windows 3.1 was being introduced.
I ran several training sessions, helping people play solitaire on a computer for 2 hours. Seemed really, REALLY silly at the time, but we tried training a couple of people using different methods and paying someone near-minimum-wage to play a game that was included with the OS for two hours turned out to be an exceptionally efficient way to get the concepts of cursor movement, click, double-click, click and drag, menu operations, etc across.
Self-study was not, however, encouraged. We did have one guy try to defend playing with "Vegas rules" enabled as "advanced self-learning" - didn't go terribly well for him. ;)
and tell them that they have a week to either agree to our terms or remove their equipment.
Don't forget that, in many cases, the government also helped fund the wiring. So you should add "and refund any taxpayer dollars they have received to fund it" after "remove their equipment".
Show me a company that owns all of their wires on all of their own property, that does not benefit from the use of any public resources, and I'll show you somewhere that the First Amendment does not apply.
Not one of the current Internet, Telephone, or Power providers I've ever heard of can make that claim. They are regulated monopolies propped up by public resources, and as such must respect the regulations they accepted with their government-mandated rights of way they demanded, and the money they demanded to help pay to string the wires.
But the right-of-way that those wires were installed over was done via eminent domain, which is a government function.
The fact of the matter is that the placement of those wires is a public-private partnership because the wires could never have been placed without government-mandated rights of way.
Access to place those wires was granted in return for the company accepting a regulated monopoly position (and often taxpayer dollars were used to help fund the wires themselves).
Concepts like universal access, of which net neutrality could be considered a logical extension, were part of the package that companies signed up for when they demanded the government grant them a monopoly and use public powers to benefit a private company.
Don't like the idea of the wires the government helped pay for which are now residing in a public right of way being regulated? Pull your fucking wires out and refund the money the government paid to help you run then, or abandon the wires. Let someone else have a shot at it.
You can have the monopoly you demanded and accept regulatory and financial assistance from the government, or you can avoid regulation. PICK ONE. Figure out how to run your wires without asking the government to help you and without involving any public resources whatsoever, and you can do what you like with those wires.
Ironic, is it not, that the same companies that demanded the government exercise eminent domain in order to force landowners to allow those wires are now claiming that those selfsame wires are inviolate private property and that the regulations they accepted in return for government intervention to grant them their monopoly is somehow an exercise in eminent domain?
Even if it is, so what? "He who lives by the sword..."
No. The resolution remains the same. The scope of measurable values has changed.
They are truncating an irrelevant portion of the scale, since "D" and "D+" are no longer passing grades at that specific school. The percentages behind the remaining letters remains exactly the same, it's just that a couple of letters don't mean anything any more.
"A"-"D" and "F" are a clumsy representation of percentages, and the percentages are the real grade. There's no reason to write "D" or "D+" on a report card any more at this school, because a grade of 69% is a fail. 70% is a "C-", which is now the lowest passing grade. So their scale now contains the possible values of: A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, FAIL.
Oblig bad car analogy: If you put a permanent governor on a specific car model that keeps it from exceeding 120MPH (and assuming that governor will never be bypassed), there's no point in making speedometers that read to 150MPH any more for that model of car.
The actual measurement of the speed of the car has not changed, it still contains the same resolution (Miles Per Hour). 15MPH is still 15MPH and 85MPH is still 85MPH. But you can, if you want, remove the bits of the speedometer that read numbers that are irrelevant to the car, because they'll never be measured again.
In the same vein, D+ and D can safely be removed from the "list of things we are going to write on a report card" at this specific school. Doesn't mean the arbitrary letter-grade doesn't still EXIST, just that it will never be used at the school.
(Not to mention the legions of slashtards who're perfectly happy with sudo, but for whom UAC was apparently too cumbersome...)
Actually, UAC was, in my opinion, one of the better ideas ever to come out of Redmond (cue the criticisms that it's a ripoff of sudo, but it's still a damned good solution to an almost unsolvable problem).
The problem is that Microsoft (understandably) still wanted to keep compatibility with all that old shitty software that demanded Admin access, but UAC (logically) asked you every time you decided to start any of that old shitty software.
So UAC became a Jack Russel Terrier because it was trying to correct the deficiencies caused by shitty developers all assuming their programs would always and evermore have Admin rights, forever and ever amen.
And, yes, in the end Microsoft shared some significant fault for allowing that assumption for so many years. But changing that assumption was bound to cause pain, and I'll give them credit for finally biting the bullet and doing it in Vista.
It's not UAC that was at fault - that was actually a quite excellent design. It was the underlying problem that, frankly, can't easily be solved without some pain on the user's part.
The sad part is that UAC was a teaching opportunity, but many people don't want to learn. They just want to click on whatever it takes to get to the dancing bunny video.
This is not a criticism of those users - I have the same basic attitude about many of the things around me.
We want our ISP to not store indefinite logs on us. But, wait, then how would Mariposa's creator have been discovered if it were not for detailed historical connection logs?
In order to catch the bad kids, you need to watch all the kids closely so you know who the bad kids are. The more you watch them, the more you can tell between the good kids and the bad kids. The less you're allowed to watch them, the more the bad kids are going to be able to get away with.
If you want freedom, then you have to accept that not all the bad kids will be caught, and when they do it's going to be a harder job for the enforcement folks to manage.
Freedom's a big scary place full of unfairness that no one can fix while retaining the freedom, because freedom means there's less authority to make it all fair.
All freedoms and protections from the police and authorities come with a corresponding reduction in the ability of those same people to protect you.
I'm not espousing more police powers, far from it, just saying that you need to know the price tag that comes with freedom.
'Cause it sure as hell ain't free. You've got to fight for it, and you've got to accept that it means the exact same freedoms for people you disagree with on stuff. And it makes it easier for people to do bad things, too.
But it's so totally worth it.
correlation != causation
I don't disagree completely, I'm just wondering about how much this is going to be useful where it's really needed. I mean, it's a "bring your own screen", and that means it's going to need a TV. Oh, and be somewhere you have enough power to run a TV.
I suppose you could find enough of those little 9" black and white portable jobbies to fulfill some of the need, and those take various voltages of power both in AC and DC, but the kind of power a hand-crank generator puts out isn't going to run any TV anyone in Middle NoWhereistan is going to be able to get.
By and large, the market that can afford this and a TV and power to run the whole thing isn't going to want it. Or am I missing some significant market segment?
Except maybe as a portable schoolbook in areas where TVs are common, I suppose. Kid hooks it up to a TV at school, has access to textbooks, hooks it up at TV home and has same access, and if kid drops it school district is out a replacement cost that's far less than the cost of one printed textbook, and two orders of magnitude less than the cost of a brandy-new MacBook Pro.
VGA-out, if it's not terribly expensive, could at least allow it to be hooked up to a computer monitor - slightly better resolution, not all that much harder to obtain, etc.
"Plaid"
I agree, except for what is implied by what you aren't saying (and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I want to make it clear that this is something you appear to be inferring, and is obviously what others have seen as well given prior responses to your post).
Your statement sounds like the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" meaning you appear to be OK with things going, as you say, screwy, because it won't affect you due to your discretion.
First, your sense of discretion is probably not quite as effective as you think it is. Aggregating data is a pretty scary science. Get a temporary job working for a marketing or other aggregation firm. You'd be surprised how easy it is to gather data these days.
Second, what is acceptable today may not be acceptable tomorrow, and your government should not obligate you to live in a post-Miranda-rights condition ("anything you say can and will be used against you") until someone actually reads those words to you because you are actually suspected of a crime based on, you know, real evidence and due process and innocent until proven guilty and all that "wishy-washy namby-pamby terrorist-lover" stuff that is so out of vogue these days.
It's important to hold your cards close and not offer up information that could be used against you. On that we agree.
However, it's equally important to limit the control and power of those who are supposed to serve in the cause of our freedom rather than demand that we serve them by offering the same freedoms up to them (our Government).
So, by all means, treat your actions as if "they" were watching. But don't depend on that discretion, and don't use it to dismiss the real threat that its very necessity implies.
If I have put words in your mouth, I humbly apologize.
the back end of Facebook
His name is Mark Zuckerberg. And this isn't a family site, you don't need to use euphemisms. Calling him an asshole is OK.
It depends on the implementation. Who says you have to join just one network, or use separate interfaces for all the networks you join?
The breakdown of the "central player" always leads to fragmentation, and in some cases incompatibility. We saw it when Netscape was dethroned, then again when Internet Explorer was. We saw it when Microsoft and Yahoo! entered the then-AOL-dominated instant messenger market. We saw it when pop/SMTP took over for proprietary protocols like AOL, because even though message sending became trivial, message formatting is not and it turned ugly (remember IncrediMail? (shudders)). Your own example of the downfall of Newsgroups is an excellent one.
Some remain fragmented. But we invent tools to unify them.
I have to have AOLIM, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, and GoogleIM accounts to have a hope of staying in touch with everyone I use IM to reach. But I have Pidgin to unify them as if I was only on one IM server.
If social networking went open source, the APIs would be published (there could be a bunch of them, but it doesn't matter). Joining them would be generally free, and the protocols would be fairly well-known.
This means the fine folks who brought us things like GAIM/Pidgin would bring us unified social networking tools that can talk to all of the servers out there.
A friend of yours sets up his social network. You join. Eventually you set up your own, maybe, or convince others to join your friend's. Another friend of you tells you about one that his friend started up, you join that. You find a friend there who says that a bunch of people you know are on this other site. You join that. Kinda like the way LinkedIn works, but with actual separate servers instead of "1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc" connection rankings.
Eventually you've joined a few or hundreds or thousands of disparate social networking sites, but to you they are all one. Your updates go to all of them, and the program aggregates updates from all of them and you see them as a unified whole, just as if it came from a single site. One of your friends who you are connected to via 12 sites sends an update, the unifier "de-duplicates" them and you see them as one update from your friend (probably with a "connected via 12 networks" footer).
When you search, it searches all the networks you have joined. You learn about new networks from your friends, who may have joined different networks in addition to the ones you've shared. Both of you join each other's networks, and the links build.
The beauty of something like this is that, once properly established, no one can ever take it down. As long as you are connected to each of your friends through at least two networks, the loss of a single network in your view does not affect you in the slightest.
Businesses would line up to provide the service for free or low-charge, just so they could insert their own updates into their networks. But the beauty is that, if any one business decided to violate the privacy trust of their customers or overspam their network, the customers could simply drop them from their list of networks.
Plus, of course, lots of other individuals would throw up their own servers. The reliability need not be perfect, especially if there are lots of redundant networks out there.
Of course, that leads to its own problems. Instead of one heavily-watched central server whose privacy policy violations quickly become public record, you'd have thousands of servers of unknown veracity and no really effective watchdog force able to monitor them all.
And traffic could get a tad heavy if you peer to many networks (uploading a 100K picture could get costly if you were peered with 1000 networks), but I'm sure offsite aggregating services would become available (one website where the server handles all the updating of all of your networks) and you could choose to do that if you have a mobile phone or limited account.
Which, of course, is why you'd want to use a screenscraper and not use the API.
The site design changes frequently, however, probably to prevent just such screenscraping. So it wouldn't be easy.
I'm confused. Facebook is a commercial site. You joined, they give you free service, they get paid for ads. Enough people join, they make more money.
What do you think would be "fair" about them paying you money to use the site? Conversely, what do you think is "unfair" about them not paying you for something they've never, ever mentioned a single word about paying anyone to do?
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian."
- Dennis Wholey
overall I think the ADA does far more good than harm
No argument here.
All in all, the BASIC system is is perfect.
Crap, we were going for FORTRAN. Thanks for the feedback. Back to the drawing board, boys! :)
- Gnome Development Team
I agree, the story sounds a little iffy. But I've also heard about successful suits because the accommodations, when made, were "not sufficient".
I don't have the details, but there was something about a theater having trouble because the only way they could get theater-goers to the seats on the second and third floor was by using a freight elevator, and that was considered degrading. Hiring ushers to carry wheelchairs and their occupants was also unacceptable, so I think they had to shut down one of their two stairways and install a wheelchair lift, which then cause some issues with fire codes, if I recall.
So the ADA has its share of issues like any other law.
Once case in point. A little further up the coast from me, we have a new bridge that was just built a few years back. The government decided to spend a few extra million and put a fancy observation tower in. Waste of money if you ask me, but the Governor didn't, and the view is admittedly pretty cool.
Anyway, the observation part of the tower had two levels. One was where the elevator came into, and had a 270-degree view of everything but a pretty but uninteresting nearby hillside. That level had a small observation area and a stairway that led to a second floor that had a 360-degree panoramic view.
The 270 degrees on the first floor were carefully chosen so that someone in a wheelchair could see all the "interesting" stuff. The nearby towns, the bridge itself, the coast, etc. There was enough room for someone with a wheelchair to roll up to the 4th wall and see all 360 degrees, but that corner was a little crowded when the elevators came up.
I bet you can see where this is going.
Someone interpreting the ADA decided that everyone needed access to BOTH floors.
So now, there are TWO elevators. The second one is a wheelchair lift that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor, and takes up almost the entire remaining part of the lower floor, and most of the walls that make up the most "interesting view" of both floors.
Now, admittedly, the wheelchair lift is enclosed in transparent plastic, so the view is still pretty much visible, through multiple sheets of Plexiglas. There's a small space left where you can walk right up to the windows and look down at the actual bridge (the most interesting part), but only one person can get right up to the window at a time now, and only on the upper floor, where there was meant to be room for about 10 per floor on that wall.
But the sad irony is that people in wheelchairs can't even see the bridge at all, except as a fuzzy impression through multiple sheets of plexiglas while they are riding the second elevator - the remaining space with a normal windowpane is too narrow to fit a wheelchair in.
So, in this case, the ADA not only made things slightly less convenient for completely mobile folks (which is fine, I'm OK with that), but more importantly it actually made things worse for the very people it was designed to help.
Small towns aren't exactly itching to shut down their local businesses.
Small towns aren't exactly filled with large planning and approval boards that can balance out personal bias, either.
Not saying that's what happened here, but I've lived in my fair share of very small towns, and love 'em, but there are two rules:
1. Don't make enemies of the local sheriff or deputy, code enforcement officer, postmaster, or anyone else who can make your life a living screaming hell. Include in that list anyone who is a good friend of theirs, or their kin.
2. When you violate rule #1, time to put the house up for sale.
It's possible that the wheelchair-bound gentleman was the code enforcement officer's dad, or maybe his son worked for Lowe's.
Sad, and certainly not the ADA's fault if true, but it happens.
It boils down to this:
Someone wrote that article. In return, they were paid. That's a commercial use.
Why did they choose the picture? Would the article have made more or less money without the image or with a different image?
How are any of these questions even relevant.
The journalist or commentator who used the image was paid for a work that included the image. As soon as someone gets paid, it's a "commercial work". That image was not licensed for use as part of a "commercial work".
An old-school solution to an old-school problem. I like it. :)
from what I understand, schools just plain do not hold anyone back because they fail.
Then, meaning no offense, your level of understanding is woefully inadequate, but that's probably because the system is a tad more complex than it used to be. I don't know how long ago you went to high school, so I don't know whether to order you off my lawn, offer to get off of yours, or negotiate lawn entry rights between equally weathered curmudgeons.
Anyway, I've got a keyboard and I intend to use it, so hang on tight and keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times...
Most schools do, in fact, promote a student when they fail a single class (or fewer than a set number of classes) within a specific grade. They can continue taking most of their classes with their regular classmates. Note the use of the term "most". Not "all".
But then you get into the whole issue of "remediation". Remediation has changed a bit over the years, but I have quite a few relatives with kids going to school in many separate school districts in four separate states in different parts of the country, and not all of them are passing all of their grades. I graduated from High School nigh on 25 years ago, and the remediation process appears to have changed very little from my understanding of it while a young pup in school. I can't even begin to pretend to speak with knowledge about ALL school districts in ALL states in America, but the few I've seen are almost surprisingly consistent with each other and with the three High Schools I attended (we moved a lot) 25 years ago.
Usually, what will happen is that the student will be promoted to the next grade the next year, unless he or she fails enough classes that they didn't earn enough credits to qualify for the next grade. So, technically, the student will not be "held back" and have to repeat the whole grade for one failed class (there may be schools that do it this way, and I know that was very common much earlier than the 1980s, but I don't think many do a complete "hold back" any more unless the student fails most of their classes).
They may go to the next grade and get to attend most classes with their usual classmates, but they are NOT off the hook for the classes they failed.
For those classes that they fail, they are offered a choice of remediation via summer school, or repeating that class with the younger kids the next year. If they opt for summer school and still fail the exam, then they re-take the class the next year with the younger kids. If they need to re-take that class, then they "fall behind" in that subject area and either catch up in summer school at some point or reach the point where they don't have enough points to graduate with their class. If they have enough points, they can march with the class and receive a "conditional diploma" and (hopefully) pass whatever they need that summer and exchange it for a real Diploma.
In order to graduate with a diploma, the kids must pass all of their classes at the senior level and all of the necessary prerequisites at the lower levels, so they will either have to take summer school at some point to catch up, or go back to school for one or two classes with the next Senior class after everyone else graduates, or get an "incomplete" and pass the GED Exam to get proof that they qualified to complete high school.
This may vary a little from school to school, but the upshot is that kids aren't "held back" any more, but that does not imply that they are held to an inferior academic standard. Now, say what you like about the overall standards, giving up on students, whatever. I'm not debating whether education as a whole is better or worse than in whatever past you might remember. My point is that failing a class is not a "get out of work free" card, and the kids are not being automatically promoted and their failures ignored as a general rule.
Maybe some schools have just "given up" and don't bother with remediation, and pass the kid without any attempt at teaching them everything they need to technically pass. That would be tragic. Thankfully, I haven't heard of any.