I have an extremely important piece of advice with regards to this:
When you deal with the INS, you always deal with the office/branch at the location you first immigrated to. In my fiancee's case, this means the California INS. Even though she lives in Portland and hasn't lived in California for 5 years.
This absolutely sucks. The California INS is swamped with millions of Hispanic/Latino immigrants. I am not trying to make a negative comment about those folks, but the system is overloaded by the sheer mass of people and it will take YEARS longer to get through it than it would if you were going to a different office.
Not necessarily so, or at least it wasn't so when my wife and I went through The Process. My wife's from out of town. When we were first married, our immigration stuff was handled by the DC office (which had handled her previous immigration history, as we met in the US. Long story, but her visa lapsed and she had to go back home before we got married). We then moved to New Jersey and had her case transferred to the Newark office (after much wrangling). Much better. At one point we heard that the backlog in DC was on the order of 12 - 24 months whereas Newark was taking 60 days.
It does pay to figure out what immigration office you'll have to deal with. Check the BCS website, they'll tell you (by state) which immigration office covers your part of the country. In our case, Newark had a relatively light load compared to DC (tons of diplomatic issues) and NYC (tons of... people). Depending on how you want to live your life, you might consider living on one side or another of a state line or river for the better BCS service.
One other piece of advice about dealing with immigration: follow up with them a lot. Ultimately, we made the decision to go to INS (as it was then known) every three months or so, just to remind them that we existed and that we'd like our papers processed. Yes, we both had to spend vacation time on it. Yes, waiting on line for an hour in January is freezing. But, if it shaves six months to a year off your wait time, or helps them to untangle their own mess, I believe it is worth it. We got to the point where the door guards recognized us. Not that they were any nicer....
Also, a little nitpick, I don't think it's only the Latino immigrants who are overwhelming INS in California. California is host to millions of immigrants from other places as well (Southeast Asia, for instance). Not to mention that I have a feeling that any given BCS office would be overwhelmed by more than five cases in a given month.
Re:Slashdot becoming fascist?
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know about becoming fascist, but I would have thought someone would check the credentials/site before approving the article. From vdare.com:
"The articles on VDARE.com are brought to you by The Center for American Unity."
"The Center is concerned with what has been called the National Question - whether the United States can survive as a nation-state, the political expression of a distinct American people, in the face of these emerging threats: mass immigration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and affirmative action."
Regardless of what you think about affirmative action, I would hardly see mass immigration, multiculturalism and multilingualism as "threats". It seems that vdare.com is funding by yet another one of those groups that forgets that the founders of America were immigrants, America has always had immigration as one of its strengths and that a large portion of the economy is supported by immigration. Idiots.
Shame on whoever approved this claptrap. It's a step above the KKK, at best. I wonder if any of Slashdot's staff members are immigrants or first generation Americans. I wonder how they feel knowing this sort of crap gets posted to the main page.
NOW, Police Academy was art at its highest. HOW DARE YOU. Steve Guttenberg was a hero (dead at 54, and will truly be missed, but thats for another post) Plus the guy made all those noises. VROOM VROOM BEEP WAKAKA
Ok, I realize that this whole paragraph was enclosed in <sarcasm> tags (really... look at the source). But I did go to IMDB and make sure that Steve Guttenberg was not in fact dead. Hell, he's not even 54, dammit.
Is there any company that doesn't want to exploit a tragedy for financial gain?
Certainly there are many who have no intenion of profiting from tragedy. Probably at least as many as intend the opposite. The question is, I hope, rhetorical, even if silly its face. I'll ask one that's going to get an equal, but opposite response, and is just as useless:
Can a company intend to do something that is not purely profit-based? Is it possible for a Company to be less than Wholly Evil?
And didn't each and every one of the hijackers present valid ID?
Possibly. Although the interesting thing is that this presumes that presenting ID, as such, would have prevented the events on 9/11 in some way. I think everyone knows that presenting IDs and answering three questions isn't a security system. Many, many people get credible IDs merely to drink alocohol. Many people follow this up by lying when asked their age. So clearly, the system as a whole was completely inadequate.
ID cards, such as they are currently, are indeed, largely useless for security purposes. But what if we had a national ID that would be useful for increased security? There are, of course, many, many potential pitfalls. But also many potential benefits. I will not argue the case for or against ID cards. Many people much smarter and more eloquent have done so. But it seems that this is an issue worth considering, regardless of the companies that may or may not profit from it. Skip the knee-jerk anti-corporate reaction and actually consider those arguments.
I think the decision to drop Java from XP won't be all the huge. Consider that most full-on Java apps ship or can ship with their own JREs. Who cares whether the JVM is there on the OS. Just ship with a JVM as part of the application install. Bingo, your program runs.
Over the net, this gets more difficult. But applets aren't as huge a part of the web as they once were. Plus, won't IE just pop up a dialog box asking people if they want to download a JVM? And wouldn't other browsers ship with a JVM anyway?
Several points in this week's screed are just plain wrong:
"We usually relied on third-party judgments by gatekeepers and screeners -- journalists, producers, academics -- to tell us what we needed to know."
Editors and contributors at Slashdot are the first to whine about geeks being generalized or the "rest of the world" not "getting it" when it comes to so-called "geek culture." This weeks' JonKatz rant is based on the very premise that we all used to subscribe to the New York Times and listen to Walter Cronkite's evening newcast for our news. Not true.
"For centuries, we saw information as something valuable, something worth paying for; we subscribed to the newspaper, read the ad, bought the movie ticket."
Again, a very broad generalization that isn't true. But I'll make a generalization to counter it: smart people know that it isn't information that is valuable, it's reliable information that's valuable. And, though I'm not sure if JonKatz is just being cynical but, many of us used library cards so we got the information without paying for the movie ticket.
"Buying attention is already an accepted part of doing business...."
"Already, search engines like AltaVista can exchange favorable placement in search results for a fee. And publishers have paid Amazon for years for prominent attention of new books (they also pay book chains for placement of new books up front.). "
Ok, these are facts. But interesting in light of...
"The risks of not managing attention are enormous, as countless dot.coms, like traditional businesses before them, have recently learned. Educational institutions know, whether they admit it or not, that many of their students are paying less attention to their curriculums. Citizens pay less attention all the time to civics and voting. Media consumers spend less time reading papers, magazines, watching the evening news. "
Pardon the coarseness of my argument, but well, duh! JonKatz asserts that attention is bought. Then, with a straight face, mere paragraphs later, wails about the enormous risks of not paying attention. As long as we're asserting things about people in general: People don't pay attention because, on some level, they understand that information isn't organized according to their own priorities but according to others' priorities. Why pay attention when the material is a lie, is manufactured and has nothing to do with my interests?
That's why I find irony and detachment so much more fun. It's much more fun to pay attention to things that interest me. So I'll watch Springer to laugh at the rednecks, "West Wing" for the wit, some commercials for the hotties, read the comics and sports sections of the Daily News ('cause the Times is too prententious for my tastes) and watch "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on TCM tonight because it's a great film about a great guy.
In the current world, everything is manufactured. So what I pay attention to is essentially irrelevant, certainly on the so-called national scale. If I watch a show or don't watch a show, it doesn't matter. If I vote for president or don't vote for president, it doesn't matter. (Local elections are different.) It's all been manufactured. And just like anything manufactured, I'll just throw it in the trash when I'm done.
Reminds me of when my father used to work for Crosfield Electronics. They made $100K scanners for publishing companies before the bottom dropped out an you could get what they were making to fit on your desktop.
Crosfield was interested in selling some of the scanners to the Soviet Union ('cause back then, that's what it was called). They had to go through the Pentagon to get an export license, since the feds thought that these scanners might be repurposed for image analysis. In a meeting with the Designated Bureaucrat, my father was asked "Do you think that Crosfield's scanners present a potential threat to Americans?"
My father, ever the wiseguy, responded: "Well, if the scanner was dropped out of an airplane above someone's house, yes, I think they would constitute a threat."
I just had to respond to the Star Trek posit. While I agree with the person who responded that "*duh* it's a story..." I've often wondered about how a starship computer would work.
WARNING: Heavy-duty offtopicness ahead.
As best I can figure, the computer is always listening. (Insert paranoid privacy concerns here.) It has some sort of Natural Language Processor which allows it to guess when it is being addressed or when someone else is being addressed. It is also making the call when Picard stands and says "Cmdr. Data..." and Data comes over the comm system without Picard ever touching his comm badge.
This isn't terribly unrealistic with the right amount of computer programming. The computer simply has to understand language enough to make educated guesses about when it's being addressed. And there's a default: whenever someone says "Computer: " with the right intonation, the computer waits for a command.
Of course, the testing of this would certainly take many years. Remember that Kirk and company had to press on a glorified intercom button to actually address the computer.
<ontopic>
I found the piece rather fluffy myself. There are a few good points here and there, though. But it misses a huge problem. The reason that help desks are necessary is because humans interact with software. By and large, human beings don't touch hardware.
Think of a wrench. There's really only a few things you can do with it. One of the biggest booms in PC sales has come from the model of "pull it out of the box, plug in two or three things and you're ready to go!" The hardware interface has been completely simplified. There's not much you can do outside of it.
Software on the other hand (and this is due as much to feature bloat as other things) requires designers to try to figure out the dumbass things that people are going to do. Wrench makers don't really have to anticipate people using wrenches as hammers, forks or remote controls. But software designers have to deal with the possibility that the user won't do what is supposed to happen, but instead does something illogically or out of order. It hurts to try to think stupidly.
</ontopic>
I work in DC as a web development trainer for
this company.
</credentials>
There are a few things you can do to make your website work better for your clientele:
Accessibility is key. Don't go too fancy with the design. Make sure that the interface makes sense. Provide a text-only version.
View your logs. Learn where people are going. Make that stuff more accessible so that people don't have to go through a lot of links to get to what they want. Believe it or not, the IRS is a really good example of this. If you're really hip, you can write a web log analyzer that posts the top ten favorite links.
Get a sensible URL for your agency. The INS used to be www.ins.usdoj.gov. Now it's www.ins.gov. That makes sense.
You're presenting regulatory requirements? Post a FAQ. Talk to the people who field phone calls for the agency. Find out what questions they get. Post them in the FAQ.
Provide an area for feedback on the website. React to it. The toughest part about building a web site is that you are, to a certain extent, groping in the dark. You should expect that the first version of the website should change a bit in the first few months. Make it modular. In the first year, you'll make a lot of changes, but after that, the pace of change will drop dramatically.
(Side note: go _out_ to listen to music every now and again, ya freak!)
Go read the business section of a newspaper or a news site. Tell me how many people got laid off last week, this week. How many people will get laid off next week?
Now, take the $1 million you're putting into your house and hire 20 people back at $50K/year. Or whatever proportion you'd like.
Or don't build something into your house that's going to consume all the power in California. Or how about that asshole who has a 300 gallon/minute shower. Nice concern for the environment there.
What amazes me is human beings' capacity for selfishness and complete and utter disregard for others' needs.
If you have that kind of money, put it somewhere where it can help others.
Here's my thoughts, though I've only spent [unbelievably short period of time so that I can post to Slashdot] looking at this:
* Gawd, I hate that Netscape was bought by AOHELL
* Really, who needs skins?
* It doesn't render nearly as fast as [my favorite browser here]
* It would render a lot faster if they got rid of all the cruft
* My system crashed [x] times
* Why don't they change the download system from [x] to [y]?
In summation, I have waited [ever increasing period of time since last decent Netscape release] for this and it's still not as good as IE.
[General praise for old Netscape. Expression of sadness for what it has become. Resigned to living in a Microsoft world.]
The problem is the parties
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
The problem isn't technical... we have workable systems now (Didn't Arizona recently allow Internet voting in a primary?). The problem is with the culture.
Who appeared first on the presidential ballot in your state, Gore or Bush? It's different from state to state because different states have different rules about how ballots are constructed. One of the significant aspects of the upcoming court cases in Florida is whether the presidential ballot was even _legal_. People spend weeks arguing over how the ballots will appear, imagining that putting Bush over Gore or Gore over Bush will give one candidate some imagined advantage.
Now imagine these folks having to deal with a computerized solution. Massive Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt on their own parts. These people barely understand paper in the first place. Now you're going to have to deal with arguing who appears first in the list, "what about those teenage hackers?", "I don't trust anything I can't see," phsyical ballot security, etc.
I agree that it would be nice if today's 14 year olds could vote the way they are used to doing everything else. But that's not going to happen until today's 14 year old is 50 and a pillar of the community and can basically dictate that it's time to move on to electronic voting. It won't happen before then.
First off, money is not speech. There are plenty of things you are not allowed to spend money on which you are allowed to speak about (drugs are a very good example of this). You can get money out of politics, but politicians have to choose to do so (and we know how likely that is). (Of course, constitutional amendments can start from the ground up.... hm......)
But I think that the post above seems to imply that you're guaranteed a voice ("And if you need money to pay for this lobbying does that mean that people with no money have no voice?"). Forgive me if I misread, but you're not guaranteed a voice, per se. You're guaranteed the right to speak your mind. No one said that your local/state/national politician had to listen.
Now whether it's naive to try to get money out of politics is another matter....
That's right, the retraction. The original press release was wrong. What's interesting is that the film will be about what it was originally chastised for (does that make sense?). The film concerns a director who loses the star for his movie at the last minute, so he decides to get a CGI replacement.
I'm not really sure whether this is art imitating life, life imitating art or some weird combination of all of the above.:>
--Pax
Useful for trauma, not for illness
on
Blood Type: NULL
·
· Score: 3
I used to be an EMT, but am way out of certification, so don't take this as gospel, but...
Most critical issue when assesing a patient: is he/she getting oxygen? So you check and clear the airway first. But then you have to make sure that once the oxygen is in the body, it is actually getting used by the body. So check the pulse and the blood pressure. If either are out of range, you've got trouble.
At a scene or in the hospital, one of the most difficult things to deal with is loss of blood, especially if it is on a massive scale. If your patient is losing blood quickly, you've got to replace that liquid quickly. In Emergency Medicine circles, people talk about the Golden Hour. From when the blood pressure drops, you have about an hour to significantly help that person. If you stabilize the blood pressure in that hour (presuming no worse problems like cardiac arrest, cerebral events or blocked airway), patient's chances of full recovery increase significantly.
In the field solutions? Well, if it's a pulse problem , you've got big issues, but they're usually solved by a defibrillator. If it's blood pressure, you've pretty much only got Mass pants to use. These increase blood pressure in the trunk of the body by squeezing the legs.
Once you get to the hospital, you've got other options. One of the first things to do is to match blood type and start forcing blood into the body. The loss of volume (thus, the loss in oxygen-carrying capacity) must be made up. If you can't match blood types immediately, or the situation is particularly dire, you might manufacture blood pressure by injecting large amounts of relatively harmless saline.
This product is interesting because it's essentially a more healthy version of saline. Where saline simply adds blood pressure (while not helping with the associated problem of loss of oxygen) this stuff could actually add volume and oxygen. A one-two punch. Very useful.
Eek. I don't know if that's a benefit. So when Donald Wildmon or PMRC-type groups put pressure on a scene, suddenly it's edited out? I honestly think that one of the factors that has encouraged corporate entities in fighting censorship is that the cost associated with reediting a film/CD/what have you is prohibitive enough that it's more fiscally responsible to leave the original product on the market. On the other hand, maybe we could edit Jar Jar Binks the hell out of Episode 1.:> --Pax
Interesting that you brought up Star Trek to point out complexity as opposed to the ease of use of current mice. Remember Star Trek IV, where Scotty actually interacts with a mouse? The first thing he does with this "intuitive" tool is pick it up and speak into it, assuming it's a device for voice input. It's often very difficult to guess just what will be "intuitive." --Pax
Slashdot Mirror
I have an extremely important piece of advice with regards to this:
When you deal with the INS, you always deal with the office/branch at the location you first immigrated to. In my fiancee's case, this means the California INS. Even though she lives in Portland and hasn't lived in California for 5 years.
This absolutely sucks. The California INS is swamped with millions of Hispanic/Latino immigrants. I am not trying to make a negative comment about those folks, but the system is overloaded by the sheer mass of people and it will take YEARS longer to get through it than it would if you were going to a different office.
Not necessarily so, or at least it wasn't so when my wife and I went through The Process. My wife's from out of town. When we were first married, our immigration stuff was handled by the DC office (which had handled her previous immigration history, as we met in the US. Long story, but her visa lapsed and she had to go back home before we got married). We then moved to New Jersey and had her case transferred to the Newark office (after much wrangling). Much better. At one point we heard that the backlog in DC was on the order of 12 - 24 months whereas Newark was taking 60 days.
It does pay to figure out what immigration office you'll have to deal with. Check the BCS website, they'll tell you (by state) which immigration office covers your part of the country. In our case, Newark had a relatively light load compared to DC (tons of diplomatic issues) and NYC (tons of... people). Depending on how you want to live your life, you might consider living on one side or another of a state line or river for the better BCS service.
One other piece of advice about dealing with immigration: follow up with them a lot. Ultimately, we made the decision to go to INS (as it was then known) every three months or so, just to remind them that we existed and that we'd like our papers processed. Yes, we both had to spend vacation time on it. Yes, waiting on line for an hour in January is freezing. But, if it shaves six months to a year off your wait time, or helps them to untangle their own mess, I believe it is worth it. We got to the point where the door guards recognized us. Not that they were any nicer....
Also, a little nitpick, I don't think it's only the Latino immigrants who are overwhelming INS in California. California is host to millions of immigrants from other places as well (Southeast Asia, for instance). Not to mention that I have a feeling that any given BCS office would be overwhelmed by more than five cases in a given month.
I don't know about becoming fascist, but I would have thought someone would check the credentials/site before approving the article. From vdare.com:
So, on to The Center for American Unity:
Regardless of what you think about affirmative action, I would hardly see mass immigration, multiculturalism and multilingualism as "threats". It seems that vdare.com is funding by yet another one of those groups that forgets that the founders of America were immigrants, America has always had immigration as one of its strengths and that a large portion of the economy is supported by immigration. Idiots.
Shame on whoever approved this claptrap. It's a step above the KKK, at best. I wonder if any of Slashdot's staff members are immigrants or first generation Americans. I wonder how they feel knowing this sort of crap gets posted to the main page.
NOW, Police Academy was art at its highest. HOW DARE YOU. Steve Guttenberg was a hero (dead at 54, and will truly be missed, but thats for another post) Plus the guy made all those noises. VROOM VROOM BEEP WAKAKA
Ok, I realize that this whole paragraph was enclosed in <sarcasm> tags (really... look at the source). But I did go to IMDB and make sure that Steve Guttenberg was not in fact dead. Hell, he's not even 54, dammit.
Start with the summary for the story:
Is there any company that doesn't want to exploit a tragedy for financial gain?Certainly there are many who have no intenion of profiting from tragedy. Probably at least as many as intend the opposite. The question is, I hope, rhetorical, even if silly its face. I'll ask one that's going to get an equal, but opposite response, and is just as useless:
Can a company intend to do something that is not purely profit-based? Is it possible for a Company to be less than Wholly Evil?
And didn't each and every one of the hijackers present valid ID?Possibly. Although the interesting thing is that this presumes that presenting ID, as such, would have prevented the events on 9/11 in some way. I think everyone knows that presenting IDs and answering three questions isn't a security system. Many, many people get credible IDs merely to drink alocohol. Many people follow this up by lying when asked their age. So clearly, the system as a whole was completely inadequate.
ID cards, such as they are currently, are indeed, largely useless for security purposes. But what if we had a national ID that would be useful for increased security? There are, of course, many, many potential pitfalls. But also many potential benefits. I will not argue the case for or against ID cards. Many people much smarter and more eloquent have done so. But it seems that this is an issue worth considering, regardless of the companies that may or may not profit from it. Skip the knee-jerk anti-corporate reaction and actually consider those arguments.
I think the decision to drop Java from XP won't be all the huge. Consider that most full-on Java apps ship or can ship with their own JREs. Who cares whether the JVM is there on the OS. Just ship with a JVM as part of the application install. Bingo, your program runs.
Over the net, this gets more difficult. But applets aren't as huge a part of the web as they once were. Plus, won't IE just pop up a dialog box asking people if they want to download a JVM? And wouldn't other browsers ship with a JVM anyway?
Several points in this week's screed are just plain wrong:
"We usually relied on third-party judgments by gatekeepers and screeners -- journalists, producers, academics -- to tell us what we needed to know."
Editors and contributors at Slashdot are the first to whine about geeks being generalized or the "rest of the world" not "getting it" when it comes to so-called "geek culture." This weeks' JonKatz rant is based on the very premise that we all used to subscribe to the New York Times and listen to Walter Cronkite's evening newcast for our news. Not true.
"For centuries, we saw information as something valuable, something worth paying for; we subscribed to the newspaper, read the ad, bought the movie ticket."
Again, a very broad generalization that isn't true. But I'll make a generalization to counter it: smart people know that it isn't information that is valuable, it's reliable information that's valuable. And, though I'm not sure if JonKatz is just being cynical but, many of us used library cards so we got the information without paying for the movie ticket.
"Buying attention is already an accepted part of doing business...."
"Already, search engines like AltaVista can exchange favorable placement in search results for a fee. And publishers have paid Amazon for years for prominent attention of new books (they also pay book chains for placement of new books up front.). "
Ok, these are facts. But interesting in light of...
"The risks of not managing attention are enormous, as countless dot.coms, like traditional businesses before them, have recently learned. Educational institutions know, whether they admit it or not, that many of their students are paying less attention to their curriculums. Citizens pay less attention all the time to civics and voting. Media consumers spend less time reading papers, magazines, watching the evening news. "
Pardon the coarseness of my argument, but well, duh! JonKatz asserts that attention is bought. Then, with a straight face, mere paragraphs later, wails about the enormous risks of not paying attention. As long as we're asserting things about people in general: People don't pay attention because, on some level, they understand that information isn't organized according to their own priorities but according to others' priorities. Why pay attention when the material is a lie, is manufactured and has nothing to do with my interests?
That's why I find irony and detachment so much more fun. It's much more fun to pay attention to things that interest me. So I'll watch Springer to laugh at the rednecks, "West Wing" for the wit, some commercials for the hotties, read the comics and sports sections of the Daily News ('cause the Times is too prententious for my tastes) and watch "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on TCM tonight because it's a great film about a great guy.
In the current world, everything is manufactured. So what I pay attention to is essentially irrelevant, certainly on the so-called national scale. If I watch a show or don't watch a show, it doesn't matter. If I vote for president or don't vote for president, it doesn't matter. (Local elections are different.) It's all been manufactured. And just like anything manufactured, I'll just throw it in the trash when I'm done.
Reminds me of when my father used to work for Crosfield Electronics. They made $100K scanners for publishing companies before the bottom dropped out an you could get what they were making to fit on your desktop.
Crosfield was interested in selling some of the scanners to the Soviet Union ('cause back then, that's what it was called). They had to go through the Pentagon to get an export license, since the feds thought that these scanners might be repurposed for image analysis. In a meeting with the Designated Bureaucrat, my father was asked "Do you think that Crosfield's scanners present a potential threat to Americans?"
My father, ever the wiseguy, responded: "Well, if the scanner was dropped out of an airplane above someone's house, yes, I think they would constitute a threat."
They got the export license.
I just had to respond to the Star Trek posit. While I agree with the person who responded that "*duh* it's a story..." I've often wondered about how a starship computer would work.
WARNING: Heavy-duty offtopicness ahead.
As best I can figure, the computer is always listening. (Insert paranoid privacy concerns here.) It has some sort of Natural Language Processor which allows it to guess when it is being addressed or when someone else is being addressed. It is also making the call when Picard stands and says "Cmdr. Data..." and Data comes over the comm system without Picard ever touching his comm badge.
This isn't terribly unrealistic with the right amount of computer programming. The computer simply has to understand language enough to make educated guesses about when it's being addressed. And there's a default: whenever someone says "Computer: " with the right intonation, the computer waits for a command.
Of course, the testing of this would certainly take many years. Remember that Kirk and company had to press on a glorified intercom button to actually address the computer.
<ontopic>
I found the piece rather fluffy myself. There are a few good points here and there, though. But it misses a huge problem. The reason that help desks are necessary is because humans interact with software. By and large, human beings don't touch hardware.
Think of a wrench. There's really only a few things you can do with it. One of the biggest booms in PC sales has come from the model of "pull it out of the box, plug in two or three things and you're ready to go!" The hardware interface has been completely simplified. There's not much you can do outside of it.
Software on the other hand (and this is due as much to feature bloat as other things) requires designers to try to figure out the dumbass things that people are going to do. Wrench makers don't really have to anticipate people using wrenches as hammers, forks or remote controls. But software designers have to deal with the possibility that the user won't do what is supposed to happen, but instead does something illogically or out of order. It hurts to try to think stupidly.
</ontopic>
I work in DC as a web development trainer for this company.
</credentials>There are a few things you can do to make your website work better for your clientele:
My $.02
Forget about nice architecture for a moment.
Forget about tasteful furniture.
Forget about the "listenting spot."
(Side note: go _out_ to listen to music every now and again, ya freak!)
Go read the business section of a newspaper or a news site. Tell me how many people got laid off last week, this week. How many people will get laid off next week?
Now, take the $1 million you're putting into your house and hire 20 people back at $50K/year. Or whatever proportion you'd like.
Or don't build something into your house that's going to consume all the power in California. Or how about that asshole who has a 300 gallon/minute shower. Nice concern for the environment there.
What amazes me is human beings' capacity for selfishness and complete and utter disregard for others' needs.
If you have that kind of money, put it somewhere where it can help others.
Generic Reaction to latest version of Netscape:
Here's my thoughts, though I've only spent [unbelievably short period of time so that I can post to Slashdot] looking at this:
* Gawd, I hate that Netscape was bought by AOHELL
* Really, who needs skins?
* It doesn't render nearly as fast as [my favorite browser here]
* It would render a lot faster if they got rid of all the cruft
* My system crashed [x] times
* Why don't they change the download system from [x] to [y]?
In summation, I have waited [ever increasing period of time since last decent Netscape release] for this and it's still not as good as IE.
[General praise for old Netscape. Expression of sadness for what it has become. Resigned to living in a Microsoft world.]
The problem isn't technical... we have workable systems now (Didn't Arizona recently allow Internet voting in a primary?). The problem is with the culture.
Who appeared first on the presidential ballot in your state, Gore or Bush? It's different from state to state because different states have different rules about how ballots are constructed. One of the significant aspects of the upcoming court cases in Florida is whether the presidential ballot was even _legal_. People spend weeks arguing over how the ballots will appear, imagining that putting Bush over Gore or Gore over Bush will give one candidate some imagined advantage.
Now imagine these folks having to deal with a computerized solution. Massive Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt on their own parts. These people barely understand paper in the first place. Now you're going to have to deal with arguing who appears first in the list, "what about those teenage hackers?", "I don't trust anything I can't see," phsyical ballot security, etc.
I agree that it would be nice if today's 14 year olds could vote the way they are used to doing everything else. But that's not going to happen until today's 14 year old is 50 and a pillar of the community and can basically dictate that it's time to move on to electronic voting. It won't happen before then.
You're both wrong. :>
First off, money is not speech. There are plenty of things you are not allowed to spend money on which you are allowed to speak about (drugs are a very good example of this). You can get money out of politics, but politicians have to choose to do so (and we know how likely that is). (Of course, constitutional amendments can start from the ground up.... hm......)
But I think that the post above seems to imply that you're guaranteed a voice ("And if you need money to pay for this lobbying does that mean that people with no money have no voice?"). Forgive me if I misread, but you're not guaranteed a voice, per se. You're guaranteed the right to speak your mind. No one said that your local/state/national politician had to listen.
Now whether it's naive to try to get money out of politics is another matter....
Relevant links:
The original story
The retraction
That's right, the retraction. The original press release was wrong. What's interesting is that the film will be about what it was originally chastised for (does that make sense?). The film concerns a director who loses the star for his movie at the last minute, so he decides to get a CGI replacement.
I'm not really sure whether this is art imitating life, life imitating art or some weird combination of all of the above. :>
--Pax
I used to be an EMT, but am way out of certification, so don't take this as gospel, but...
Most critical issue when assesing a patient: is he/she getting oxygen? So you check and clear the airway first. But then you have to make sure that once the oxygen is in the body, it is actually getting used by the body. So check the pulse and the blood pressure. If either are out of range, you've got trouble.
At a scene or in the hospital, one of the most difficult things to deal with is loss of blood, especially if it is on a massive scale. If your patient is losing blood quickly, you've got to replace that liquid quickly. In Emergency Medicine circles, people talk about the Golden Hour. From when the blood pressure drops, you have about an hour to significantly help that person. If you stabilize the blood pressure in that hour (presuming no worse problems like cardiac arrest, cerebral events or blocked airway), patient's chances of full recovery increase significantly.
In the field solutions? Well, if it's a pulse problem , you've got big issues, but they're usually solved by a defibrillator. If it's blood pressure, you've pretty much only got Mass pants to use. These increase blood pressure in the trunk of the body by squeezing the legs.
Once you get to the hospital, you've got other options. One of the first things to do is to match blood type and start forcing blood into the body. The loss of volume (thus, the loss in oxygen-carrying capacity) must be made up. If you can't match blood types immediately, or the situation is particularly dire, you might manufacture blood pressure by injecting large amounts of relatively harmless saline.
This product is interesting because it's essentially a more healthy version of saline. Where saline simply adds blood pressure (while not helping with the associated problem of loss of oxygen) this stuff could actually add volume and oxygen. A one-two punch. Very useful.
--Pax
Eek. I don't know if that's a benefit. So when Donald Wildmon or PMRC-type groups put pressure on a scene, suddenly it's edited out? I honestly think that one of the factors that has encouraged corporate entities in fighting censorship is that the cost associated with reediting a film/CD/what have you is prohibitive enough that it's more fiscally responsible to leave the original product on the market. On the other hand, maybe we could edit Jar Jar Binks the hell out of Episode 1. :> --Pax
Interesting that you brought up Star Trek to point out complexity as opposed to the ease of use of current mice. Remember Star Trek IV, where Scotty actually interacts with a mouse? The first thing he does with this "intuitive" tool is pick it up and speak into it, assuming it's a device for voice input. It's often very difficult to guess just what will be "intuitive." --Pax