Like most medicine, it will be the privilege of those that can afford it. Basic medical care is not expensive, but specialists, medicine, and the like is available to a minority of the worlds population. Even in the US, I doubt the majority has easy access to the full range of medical care.
In any case, the $1,000 mark is probably way low, even in current dollars. This will probably be 'experimental' for a long while, not covered by insurance, but easily available to the top 5% of earners in the US. Manufacturers will probably charge $1,000 a month. Their marketing will ask how much is avoiding a heart transplant worth? Those who can afford it will buy the bots, those who can't will continue to employ the surgeons.
To be honest the first bots will be likely be for things such as hair loss, sexual disfunction, maybe cosmetic age reversal. The manufacturers will not want to jeopardize the profits of existing surgeons. Over time, as fewer surgeons are trained, the useful bots will be manufactured.
Most honest companies will estimates all costs and expected profits into a price quote. They will than add taxes to that quote . Most honest companies, like some car dealers, will even estimate the additional taxes and fees up front.
What the phone companies are doing is making the costs of service look cheaper than it is. They quote you $50, but in fact are charging you $55. The $5 is not going to an government agency. The $5 is revenue. It is what you pay for the private company for the service, which most of us would consider the real cost of the service.
The problem with this is that limits your ability to compare prices. Many mail order places use this shady tactic to make their inferior products seem less costly. For instance, a music service may list prices for CDs that are, on average, $8. However, after adding the handling fee, a fee that is in fact revenue to the company, the real costs of the CD may be closer to $12. Note that is not the shipping fee that is paid to the carrier, which may be as low as $1.50. By quoting an intentionally deflated price, they deceive consumers. Many of the shady mail order place, like fingerhut, play the same game. I believe UPS paid a fine for doing this with the insurance charge.
As an example, suppose car insurance companies were allowed to add a statutory loss fee that would pay the expected claims of the year. In this way the insurance company could quote you a price that would only cover their administrative costs, which might be 65%-75% of the real quote, and then add the fee onto that. When you compare prices, you would not be able to find the cheapest quote because of this large percentage that was unknown. The companies that were in fact the cheapest would tell you this missing bit. This might make these companies seem more expensive.
In the end there is no reason for a telco not to quote the actual money the customer will have to pay everyone month. It is generally going to be the same for all providersin a region.. In fact, them not doing this is costing the major telcos business. The smaller companies are doing one of two things. Everyone knows how much they pay for the land line every month, but not everyone know how much basic service costs. The small telcos are taking advantage of this. Some telcos are targeting the good customer looking to save a few bucks. These are quoting basic service that is one or two dollars cheaper the the major telco, but are doing it in such a way that it looks like this is all the customer will have to pay, therefore making the service appear much cheaper than it is. Other telcos are targeting the customers that don't always pay their bills. These companies set their basic service charge to the average amount the customer would pay at the major telco, and then add taxes on top of that. They advertise in such a way that it looks like the customer would be paying the same as if they went with the major telco.
Clearly it is deceptive and we should not tolerate it. If Walmart charged a two dollar store use fee on every transaction, fewer people would shop there.
It is a bit more complicated than that. There is plenty of room for electives. However there are several issues that make it complicated for a student to participate in electives.
First, many things that were electives are now mandatory. The obvious course is keyboarding. This is required. A kid who went to a good jr. high school will already have this course. For others, this fills the one elective slot available in the 9th grade.
Second, a significant number of kids fail courses in the 9th grade. Some students can and will make up the course in summer school. Others will make up the course in 10th grade. Which of course will tend to kill elective opportunities there.
Third, many will opt for work study in 12th grade. This limits the number of of hours available for non-core courses in the other grades.
So it does little good for a school to offer electives if an insufficient number of students can take advantage of those courses. My high school did offer many electives. My high school also tended to remove students that were not make satisfactory academic progress.
The intersting thing is that Enron and Tyco may have reported proper numbers. At least in Enrons case the accounting firm got in trouble for not following procedure not for any specific accounting problems.
The problem was that they the numbers reported were carefully crafted as to hide the reality of the health of the company. This was fine until the markets realized that certain assumptions about the meaning of the numbers were incorrect.
This is the problem with the RIAA numbers. They may be perfectly open about the numbers. Even though they may not be actively creating a false reality, the day may come when the markets realize the numbers are none the less presented to mislead.
Well, no one really heard the new about the jewish people being rounded up and murdered in the original case. or at least no one believed it. And it wasn't just he jewish people. It was all sorts of questionable persons.
It was really a round up of people that could be blamed for the failed economic policies of the goverment. In other words, those that took our jorbs. Or want to eat our babies. Part of the general irrational mode.
And you may not have noticed, but we are very much killing a large number of questionable people.
I believe MS is the cause of most proffesional developer job loss in the US. They create products that encapsulate knowledge and often allow less skilled workers to approximate common tasks in a shorter time.
This has been going on for a long time. I personally remember the original SCO losing sales to MS as developers began to port products over to DOS and Windows. This meant that qualfied admins were being replaced with college kids who knew Windows.
Then it was the visual languages. A person no longer needed to have a basis in best coding practices and best GUI practices. Just whip some widgets on the screen, and look Ma, I got me a program thingy.
Then it was Frontpage. Who needs W3C compliance. Who needs to employ web browser developers. MS gives away IE and kills the browser industry. Who needs to hire qualified developers. Just put some Flash on the screen, say it is IE only, and the public will think it is a proffesional job.
honestly the labels are dorks. Most of the money they have recieved from me has been through iTunes. Most of my other music purchases have been used CDs, which only indirectly benifits them, and, with the ease of ripping CDs, may in fact be indirectly supporting copyright violation anyway.
I would be more than happy to pay a $1 for a track if it were not damaged. As it is, I am ok with occasionally paying $1 for the iTunes damaged track. The encryption to me is stupid. It keeps me from buying more tracks. It also keeps me from buying a iPod.
The labels just need to let the music be sold. Everyone would make a lot of money.
The problem with/. is that there are few posters with a long term view of the computing industry. Although 1998 seems a long time ago, in a certain sense it is not, and another certain sense it is.
First, MS cannot be compared to Linux. The former is a very mature product, the later is very immature. Linux gets the same pass we gave to Windows up to about NT. Windows was maturing from a single machine/single person/single node toy to a hybrid OS. Linux is maturing from multiuser multiperson/networked machine to a hybrid OS. Linux may never be simple enough for the average user, and Windows may never be reliable enough for high performance applications.
MS had no problems until they wanted to do everything. The groupthink MS created over the past 5 to 10 years is that your business is best run using a single OS, and it is even better if you use the same OS as everyone else. This is a far cry than the late 70's/early 80's when they were crying not to trust the single vendor IBM, or in the mid 80's when they were crying no to trust Apple.
Over the years they have gotten themselves into more trouble. Hacking on a GUI on top of a function command line was done quickly and without enough understandings of the difficulties. The problems and ridicule were absolutely deserved given the demonstrated state of the art. Likewise hacking on a network protocol, with the additional disks, additional hours, and additional support, was a joke compared to the plug and play capabilities of AppleTalk and the much more advanced feature of Novell.
And I always find it ridiculous when I hear complaints about the drivers. It took me half an hour at the command line to get a zip drive to work in 1994 on a PC. The Mac was plug and Play. Installing a printer driver required acquiring the printer driver and several reboots, not to mention a clunky choosing of the printer. On the Mac at the same time may popular printers were almost plug and play. Of course by them manufacturers had fallen for the myth of the 'simplicity' of the PC, and so often did not include serial ports for the Mac.
So, many posts you read are also from people who have seen Windows develop from the day MS released that they had missed the boat. They worked on original Unix machines, even microcomputers, that in some ways were better than anything we have today. The hope is that we will get back to the time when computers worked, when we weren't forced to run services we did not need. There is a place for Windows. There would be more of a place if it were customizable.
In short, if the issues were just results Windows would be a non-starter. However, since cheapness, groupthink myths, and communicating to the PHB plays a big part, it is now what we are stuck with.
Defensive weaponry helps reduce the threat of war.
Defensive weaponry help reduce the effect of war. As the current situation in the US, it does not help the reduce the threat of war. The US for all intents and purposes is at war. We have all sorts of defensive systems, but none of them helped.
The threat of war is reduced when all sides feel that there is no benefit to attack. This means that there is no significant net advantage. This was the state with the US and USSR for many years. Both had large number of nuclear missiles. Both had equal defensive capability. This meant that there unless some external issue caused a war, there was no reason to engage in a direct attack. All fighting occurred in safer proxy wars.
Reagan wanted to change this balance with Star Wars, which was politically and technologically ill conceived. First, the technology would not work against the wide range of effective countermeasures. This has been well documented over the past 20 years. Second, it would have shifted the balance of power to the US. If the system would have gotten to the deployment stage, the USSR would have had the choice of starting a first strike scenario or waiting defenselessly until the US chose to so do.
What reduces the threat of war is reliable intelligence and consistent diplomacy backed up by a suitable combination of defensive and offensive weapons. A case study on this was the Cuban Missile Crisis. A case study on how not to do this is the current situation in the Middle East.
To your specific question. This system may makes certain areas safer, but does nothing to reduce the threat. A few missiles may be destroyed, thus reducing some physical damage. But missiles do not cause the misery and hatred of the area. They are merely a symptom of it. Peace-types want to spend money curing the disease not fighting the symptoms. Of course, the disease may be incurable, and money needs to be spent on both. The exact formula for spending is usually the point of contention.
But it would be much better driving experience with a huge spoiler, bigger exhaust pipes, a VTEC plate, and few stickers. For good measure, perhaps you could add some neon glow runners.
They tout the convenience of no more swiping or giving your card to cashiers
It seems that competing security issues have been in play wrt to the credit card processes. First, the credit card companies want to know if a purchaser and seller are using a physical credit card. This is the swipe. Second, many firms would like the employees, most of whom are minimally paid with no incentives such as healthcare or retirement, to not handle the card. This is another benefit of the card holder to swipe the card. So for a long time, all a card holder had to do was swipe.
However, this did apparently did not provide enough security against fake and stolen cards. Some places want additional information such as a zip code. Other want to inspect the card and enter the check digits.
I do not see the universal possibility of just passing your card by a reader. I do not see the possibility of just passing you wallet past a reader, unless you only have one card. The shops that currently want to see the card will continue to so do.
I agree with you to a point. I have most of my data mirrored on two computers. If one fails or gets hacked, I can just use the other machine. I do this because my data is not all that important. Life will not stop and a company will not fail if I lose a few days of even weeks of data.
When I was dealing with real data, it was backed up on tape. One tape with a week end full backup. One tape per day with the changed data. I made an effort to store the previous cycle of tapes off site. Offline storage accomplished two things. It allowed me to store offsite and allowed me to have some assurance that no one messed with data.
But all this is really beside the point. The original question was how to effeciently refesh optical media to minimize loss. Sure, one can buy a couple external 50 GB drives every couple months, and then cycle them out every couple years, but that was not the question, and may not fullfill the requirements of the poster. For example, as others have mentioned, sometimes it is good to be pretty sure that the data you think in on the media is actually the data on the meida. One can also imagine that hooking up and searching the hardisk might be harder than putting in a CD.
As far as cost, i have not seen dirt cheap drives, even using the slower and cheaper USB format. Even cheap internal harddisk approach $1/gigabyte, much more expensive that the $.25 a gigabyte that a CD costs. Assuming a good cd replicator is $1500, and you burn 5 disks a day, you might pay for the unit in a year with the CD savings over disk.
As we all know, violating copyrights is not stealing. It is violating the copyright, with civil penalties.
Furthermore, much of MS profit result from the fact that it has near 100% market penetration. MS did not achieve this by selling full price copies of software. It achieved this in some respects by allowing some copyright violation. Lately, it has modified it corporate licensing policies to allow for the violations that were happening anyone. People can't afford a copy of office. By they do take a copy from work. But MS still needs to reach those who do not have an office to take from, and those offices that cannot afford licensing. MS will probably make more money by continuing 95% market pentration that they will lose if 20% of the software is violating copyright.
If the above situation is true, then they have a responsibility to provice minimal support for the software.
Because we all know Security by Obscurity is the best approach
As part of a comprehensive package, it is often a necessary and recommended approach. The problems only occur when it is the primary means of securing your assets. Most security systems depend on a secret, hopefully a short term secret. Furthermore, most well implemented security systems will not advertise the exact form of security or the exact processes they use. Giving an attacker such information is often foolhardy. There is little benefit to me telling the attacker the names and versions of all my software when they ping my machine.
I have a hotmail account that I use only to complain about spam. The address in never listed anywhere. I use it for no other purpose. It has never recieved any spam. This may be because it is listed somewhere as a known malcontent, but to be fair, I see not evidence that MS sells addresses. This is very different from other services.
Wasn't there a time when cars were designed to fall apart around the passenger cabin? You know, the car absorbing all the energy leaving the occupants as uninjured as possible. Now we design vehicle that transfer all the energy to the occupants or the family the occupants just impacted. Is the car more valuable than the people?
I wish car manufacturere were required to spend more time thinking about how the car will function in a major impact, rather than how much damage will be done in a small impact. It seems Mercedes does a good job at both. It especially annoys me when it appears people buy cars that put everyone else at risk.
Re: New horseless carriages travel as irresponsible speed and employ explosive aether.
As you may know, horseless carriages are becoming increasingly popular. Up to a few years ago these carriages were only available to the wealthy, but now are in the hand of the common irresponsible man. We have seen a significant increase in the incidents of collision. We urge all volunteers to use all care when responding to such incidents.
The volunteer must first remember that these carriages travel at immense speed, over twenty miles per hour, without the aid of a track or any other guide to help them set their course. This allows the carriage to impact all manner of object and person with a force previously unknown. It is likely the occupants of the vehicle will be thrown onto the path with even greater force. This force can rip the body apart, exposing fluid and organs, as well as fracturing bones into bits capable of cutting. This leads to the possibility of the spread of disease such as malaria and hepatitis and the pox. The volunteer is urged to follow all hazmat procedures to protect his person.
The volunteer must also remember that aether used to power these monstrosities are highly combustible and carcinogenic. The rescuer should not breathe any fumes nor allow any fluid to contact the body. The hazmat suit may not protect the person as the aether can penetrate the fabric. The aether can act as a carrier for the body fluid, which make is a double crisis.
of course, we knew nothing of this, so I wonder how rescuers were trained to manage the new fangled machines.
We have choice. I can choose from any number of p2p networks. I can choose to monitor a stream. I can choose to pay money for the damaged version of the song off an increasingly number of increasingly limited online stores. I can choose to stop by Wal* record store and license the music on a plastic disc. I can choose to pick up a used copy for a fraction of the cost of the damged version. I can choose to borrow the CD from a friend. I can choose to take my portable to a friends house and rip all the CDs.
Of course the Sony choice is only available to me if I choose to own a PC and pay the MS tax. And upon this choice, I then choose to use a specific proprietary DRM which, at the whim of the owners, could annialate my collection. This is no different from any other service, which is why I choose DRM free music.
There is nothing wrong with the Sony service. It is available to most people. It will be attractive to those people already locked into the Sony DRM. It may increase the popularity of that DRM. However, beyond choice of DRM, it really is not about consumer choice.
The brilliant show was way destrouyed before the strike.
It is not the responsibility of the employee to work for the current rate of pay any more than it is the responsibility for the employer to continue to retain the employee. In a competative environment, both strive to maximize thier position. The fact tht they got the money means that the understanding was justified. And we can thank the greed of the producers for that. If it weren't for greed, they would have shut down production.
OTOH, my understanding is that if most of them work like 50 days and gross like a a couple million.
In the end, however, the voice actors are just trying to get a retirement nest egg. Just like the cast of any other hit show, they have worked for years building a product. Now that the end is in sight they want to get a bit of the value they helped create. They don't neccesarily deserve it, but they are smart to ask. The studio claimed that the voice actors were irrrelevent and could be replaced like they did with the Power Rangers kids. The studio was wrong.
Well we obviously need to find those 1500 homes and burn them down. We can't have then using the power needed for the Apple Cluster.
No, really. I understand and what you are saying, I just think it is silly to compare one use of power to another, as if one were a good use of power and one were a bad. No matter what, creation of power increases the entropy of the universe and leads us closer to the big heat death (or cold death, or perhaps nothing, depending on your image of the shape of the universe). Why is powering a home better than a data server. Is someone cooking meth more valuable than discovering a new state of matter?
OTOH, comparing equal things might make sense. For example, that asault vehicle might use 5 times as many resources as the mid sived car. Or the Intel computer might use twice as much power at the PowerPC. Or the 15,000 housing running the air conditioning 24 hours a day might use as much power all the poject housing in the entire state.
The hardware cost is not the issue. If it were MSN would be the leader already. MS, the company that will likely lose a couple billion on XBox by the second aniversary of the console, would not likely consider even a quarter of a billion dollars, or even a half, a signifcant barrier to entry.
The issue, as in XBox, is not being the first or even second product to market, and in the long run, stagnating products. Xbox is a well designed machine, but Sony has the games. Windows and the Office suites are very competative, but the later is stagnating and the development of the former has devolved into a series of minimially neccesary me-too features. The significant evolution of the OS, something that other companies started on in the mid-90's and have available now, might be available and stable in two or three years.
I have recently been getting the variation in which a relative(same last name) has died in some far off place and the scammer will help me launder the estate in exchange for personal information.
It seems that they are taking a page from Publishers Clearing House and using a trivial amount of peronalization to get people to open the email. I wonder if the victims will actually check to see if such a relative exists, or allow greed to take over. It is like those ad that say 'the government owes you thousands of dollars.'
The basic fallacy is that profit is right. It is not. The value of a product in the free market is what the people will pay. We have laws to create monopolies so that products that people might not naturally value, like sports and books, can make a profit, but even these have to live within the basic rule: profit is not a right.
This is why so much time is spent building value. To take a regular/. example. Many do not value the Apple computer and will instead buy cheap knock offs, but many will pay the premium to own the original. Apple has taken the time to make their machine have a value beyond the parts that it takes to build one. MS has done the same thing. One thing I notice with the music labels is that they spend no time creating a value for the CD. This is quite different from the movie studios who do spend time adding value to the DVD.
I think the same is true for games. A developer cannot just create a game and expect profit to magically appear. The game must not only compete against other games, but also against the nearly free versions of itself. To say that we can't compete against free is just naive. Kids are spending good money for Rice krispy snacks, a delicacy that I can make for 1/10th the cost. Shoppers regularly spend twice as much for makeup or 10 times as much for accessories to get the name. A good brand is worth it's weight in gold. Cartridges can compete against free, they just need to get over the mentality that the player somehow have a responsibility to buy the game. They don't. The supplier has the responsibility to create value.
And the licensing is kind of a separate issue. We have copyrights to provide the author an opportunity to make money. Licensing in an additional creation to maximize the opportunity by limiting the rights of the consumer. Probably the person who uploaded the game violated the license. For the person who download, the violation would likely only be copyright. Unless the click through license is gospel, I see no reason for an end user to be liable merely for use. OTOH, the GPL, as we all know, exists to give users additional rights.
First, I find rating a comment like this as insightful a much more accurate predictor of low intelligence than whether a kid has down syndrome.
Second, the graduation certificate given to a child who received significant accommodations is different from the graduation certificate given to a child that met all standard without significant accommodations.
Third, as much as people wish to malign our education program, and it may be that it is less able to put out compulsive eggheads, education in the US has created some of the most free thinking and entrepreneurial people in the world. The reason is that our students in public schools has traditionally had to fight for every aspect of their education. Those that wish to be educated had to resist the onslaught of the majority that just wished to get high and play and fuck. That means the people who succeed are well trained to fit into the competitive environment of adulthood.
I live in fear that the standards based education being pushed on us from the ignorant assholes in washington, assholes who never had to fight for a single thing in their life, assholes who were given their education, money, and success on a silver platter, is going to turn the next generation of kids into pussies that can only whine that someone is taking their jobs, and someone has to do something about it, and someone has to subsidize them because they are not creative enough to come up with a way to make money, or they believe they should have that new car even if they did not every lift a finger to earn it. We have enough of these people already. We do not need to create more.
America is about diversity. It is a false ideal, but one that is often functional. It is why our Germans were smarter than most of Europe's Germans, and why the US can blow everyone to hell with minimal risk to the homeland.
I know this a bit inflammatory, but really. The US public school system has been educating the vast majority of Americans for a very long time. Average intelligence is not all that intelligence, but we still are able to turn kids out that have a basic knowledge and abilities. These kids are not critical thinkers, but how many people in the world are. We teach kids in need of extreme accommodations everything they are able to learn, and then some pissant says that we did a bad thing, as if education is reserved for the privileged. As I said, an adequate education is reserved for those who really want it. Those who don't slack off, barely graduate, and everyone knows it. We give opportunity. Those who don't want find something else to do.
If you or your child receive what you feel is an inadequate education, take responsibility for it. Not all the responsibility, but some of it. Did you go to the library for free books or buy comics? Did you go to free museums and theater, or did you pay for movies? Did you read the free textbooks or pay for car magazines? Did you eat the free lunch or pay for junkfood? Did you watch the free education programing on PBS or pay for the crap on cable? Did you go to the free park or pay for sports? Did you ask help from your free teachers? Were you at school everyday with your free desk and free educational aids? In short, did you take advantage off the low cost opportunities this country offers every citizen, and many non-citizens, or did you just take then for granted and are now too much of a pussy to admit it.
It is unlikely that BASIC is the problem. I suspect that instead it the way the instructors are teaching, and as such the statement indicates an inferior pedagogy at the university.
The problem was, is, and will continue to be that most do notlearn how to program. Instead they learn about the mechanics of a particular language and how to make reality conform to the limitations of the language.
As I was learning programming, the technology was changing quickly. I started playing on teletype, and then an early mini, and then an old mini, and then a mainframe and microcomputer. We learned Basic, Fortran and then C. Because I had an exposure to a set of tools, I learned to program. Because my teahers made us do quite a bit of thinking before we coded, I learned to program. If they had just let us code, then it would have been a different story.
Every language that does anything useful has harmful bits. These bits are a critical part of the language if for no other reason that they allow us to immidiately identify the incompetent.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, the $1,000 mark is probably way low, even in current dollars. This will probably be 'experimental' for a long while, not covered by insurance, but easily available to the top 5% of earners in the US. Manufacturers will probably charge $1,000 a month. Their marketing will ask how much is avoiding a heart transplant worth? Those who can afford it will buy the bots, those who can't will continue to employ the surgeons.
To be honest the first bots will be likely be for things such as hair loss, sexual disfunction, maybe cosmetic age reversal. The manufacturers will not want to jeopardize the profits of existing surgeons. Over time, as fewer surgeons are trained, the useful bots will be manufactured.
What the phone companies are doing is making the costs of service look cheaper than it is. They quote you $50, but in fact are charging you $55. The $5 is not going to an government agency. The $5 is revenue. It is what you pay for the private company for the service, which most of us would consider the real cost of the service.
The problem with this is that limits your ability to compare prices. Many mail order places use this shady tactic to make their inferior products seem less costly. For instance, a music service may list prices for CDs that are, on average, $8. However, after adding the handling fee, a fee that is in fact revenue to the company, the real costs of the CD may be closer to $12. Note that is not the shipping fee that is paid to the carrier, which may be as low as $1.50. By quoting an intentionally deflated price, they deceive consumers. Many of the shady mail order place, like fingerhut, play the same game. I believe UPS paid a fine for doing this with the insurance charge.
As an example, suppose car insurance companies were allowed to add a statutory loss fee that would pay the expected claims of the year. In this way the insurance company could quote you a price that would only cover their administrative costs, which might be 65%-75% of the real quote, and then add the fee onto that. When you compare prices, you would not be able to find the cheapest quote because of this large percentage that was unknown. The companies that were in fact the cheapest would tell you this missing bit. This might make these companies seem more expensive.
In the end there is no reason for a telco not to quote the actual money the customer will have to pay everyone month. It is generally going to be the same for all providersin a region.. In fact, them not doing this is costing the major telcos business. The smaller companies are doing one of two things. Everyone knows how much they pay for the land line every month, but not everyone know how much basic service costs. The small telcos are taking advantage of this. Some telcos are targeting the good customer looking to save a few bucks. These are quoting basic service that is one or two dollars cheaper the the major telco, but are doing it in such a way that it looks like this is all the customer will have to pay, therefore making the service appear much cheaper than it is. Other telcos are targeting the customers that don't always pay their bills. These companies set their basic service charge to the average amount the customer would pay at the major telco, and then add taxes on top of that. They advertise in such a way that it looks like the customer would be paying the same as if they went with the major telco.
Clearly it is deceptive and we should not tolerate it. If Walmart charged a two dollar store use fee on every transaction, fewer people would shop there.
First, many things that were electives are now mandatory. The obvious course is keyboarding. This is required. A kid who went to a good jr. high school will already have this course. For others, this fills the one elective slot available in the 9th grade.
Second, a significant number of kids fail courses in the 9th grade. Some students can and will make up the course in summer school. Others will make up the course in 10th grade. Which of course will tend to kill elective opportunities there.
Third, many will opt for work study in 12th grade. This limits the number of of hours available for non-core courses in the other grades.
So it does little good for a school to offer electives if an insufficient number of students can take advantage of those courses. My high school did offer many electives. My high school also tended to remove students that were not make satisfactory academic progress.
The problem was that they the numbers reported were carefully crafted as to hide the reality of the health of the company. This was fine until the markets realized that certain assumptions about the meaning of the numbers were incorrect.
This is the problem with the RIAA numbers. They may be perfectly open about the numbers. Even though they may not be actively creating a false reality, the day may come when the markets realize the numbers are none the less presented to mislead.
It was really a round up of people that could be blamed for the failed economic policies of the goverment. In other words, those that took our jorbs. Or want to eat our babies. Part of the general irrational mode.
And you may not have noticed, but we are very much killing a large number of questionable people.
This has been going on for a long time. I personally remember the original SCO losing sales to MS as developers began to port products over to DOS and Windows. This meant that qualfied admins were being replaced with college kids who knew Windows.
Then it was the visual languages. A person no longer needed to have a basis in best coding practices and best GUI practices. Just whip some widgets on the screen, and look Ma, I got me a program thingy.
Then it was Frontpage. Who needs W3C compliance. Who needs to employ web browser developers. MS gives away IE and kills the browser industry. Who needs to hire qualified developers. Just put some Flash on the screen, say it is IE only, and the public will think it is a proffesional job.
I would be more than happy to pay a $1 for a track if it were not damaged. As it is, I am ok with occasionally paying $1 for the iTunes damaged track. The encryption to me is stupid. It keeps me from buying more tracks. It also keeps me from buying a iPod.
The labels just need to let the music be sold. Everyone would make a lot of money.
First, MS cannot be compared to Linux. The former is a very mature product, the later is very immature. Linux gets the same pass we gave to Windows up to about NT. Windows was maturing from a single machine/single person/single node toy to a hybrid OS. Linux is maturing from multiuser multiperson/networked machine to a hybrid OS. Linux may never be simple enough for the average user, and Windows may never be reliable enough for high performance applications.
MS had no problems until they wanted to do everything. The groupthink MS created over the past 5 to 10 years is that your business is best run using a single OS, and it is even better if you use the same OS as everyone else. This is a far cry than the late 70's/early 80's when they were crying not to trust the single vendor IBM, or in the mid 80's when they were crying no to trust Apple.
Over the years they have gotten themselves into more trouble. Hacking on a GUI on top of a function command line was done quickly and without enough understandings of the difficulties. The problems and ridicule were absolutely deserved given the demonstrated state of the art. Likewise hacking on a network protocol, with the additional disks, additional hours, and additional support, was a joke compared to the plug and play capabilities of AppleTalk and the much more advanced feature of Novell.
And I always find it ridiculous when I hear complaints about the drivers. It took me half an hour at the command line to get a zip drive to work in 1994 on a PC. The Mac was plug and Play. Installing a printer driver required acquiring the printer driver and several reboots, not to mention a clunky choosing of the printer. On the Mac at the same time may popular printers were almost plug and play. Of course by them manufacturers had fallen for the myth of the 'simplicity' of the PC, and so often did not include serial ports for the Mac.
So, many posts you read are also from people who have seen Windows develop from the day MS released that they had missed the boat. They worked on original Unix machines, even microcomputers, that in some ways were better than anything we have today. The hope is that we will get back to the time when computers worked, when we weren't forced to run services we did not need. There is a place for Windows. There would be more of a place if it were customizable.
In short, if the issues were just results Windows would be a non-starter. However, since cheapness, groupthink myths, and communicating to the PHB plays a big part, it is now what we are stuck with.
Defensive weaponry help reduce the effect of war. As the current situation in the US, it does not help the reduce the threat of war. The US for all intents and purposes is at war. We have all sorts of defensive systems, but none of them helped.
The threat of war is reduced when all sides feel that there is no benefit to attack. This means that there is no significant net advantage. This was the state with the US and USSR for many years. Both had large number of nuclear missiles. Both had equal defensive capability. This meant that there unless some external issue caused a war, there was no reason to engage in a direct attack. All fighting occurred in safer proxy wars.
Reagan wanted to change this balance with Star Wars, which was politically and technologically ill conceived. First, the technology would not work against the wide range of effective countermeasures. This has been well documented over the past 20 years. Second, it would have shifted the balance of power to the US. If the system would have gotten to the deployment stage, the USSR would have had the choice of starting a first strike scenario or waiting defenselessly until the US chose to so do.
What reduces the threat of war is reliable intelligence and consistent diplomacy backed up by a suitable combination of defensive and offensive weapons. A case study on this was the Cuban Missile Crisis. A case study on how not to do this is the current situation in the Middle East.
To your specific question. This system may makes certain areas safer, but does nothing to reduce the threat. A few missiles may be destroyed, thus reducing some physical damage. But missiles do not cause the misery and hatred of the area. They are merely a symptom of it. Peace-types want to spend money curing the disease not fighting the symptoms. Of course, the disease may be incurable, and money needs to be spent on both. The exact formula for spending is usually the point of contention.
But it would be much better driving experience with a huge spoiler, bigger exhaust pipes, a VTEC plate, and few stickers. For good measure, perhaps you could add some neon glow runners.
It seems that competing security issues have been in play wrt to the credit card processes. First, the credit card companies want to know if a purchaser and seller are using a physical credit card. This is the swipe. Second, many firms would like the employees, most of whom are minimally paid with no incentives such as healthcare or retirement, to not handle the card. This is another benefit of the card holder to swipe the card. So for a long time, all a card holder had to do was swipe.
However, this did apparently did not provide enough security against fake and stolen cards. Some places want additional information such as a zip code. Other want to inspect the card and enter the check digits.
I do not see the universal possibility of just passing your card by a reader. I do not see the possibility of just passing you wallet past a reader, unless you only have one card. The shops that currently want to see the card will continue to so do.
When I was dealing with real data, it was backed up on tape. One tape with a week end full backup. One tape per day with the changed data. I made an effort to store the previous cycle of tapes off site. Offline storage accomplished two things. It allowed me to store offsite and allowed me to have some assurance that no one messed with data.
But all this is really beside the point. The original question was how to effeciently refesh optical media to minimize loss. Sure, one can buy a couple external 50 GB drives every couple months, and then cycle them out every couple years, but that was not the question, and may not fullfill the requirements of the poster. For example, as others have mentioned, sometimes it is good to be pretty sure that the data you think in on the media is actually the data on the meida. One can also imagine that hooking up and searching the hardisk might be harder than putting in a CD.
As far as cost, i have not seen dirt cheap drives, even using the slower and cheaper USB format. Even cheap internal harddisk approach $1/gigabyte, much more expensive that the $.25 a gigabyte that a CD costs. Assuming a good cd replicator is $1500, and you burn 5 disks a day, you might pay for the unit in a year with the CD savings over disk.
Furthermore, much of MS profit result from the fact that it has near 100% market penetration. MS did not achieve this by selling full price copies of software. It achieved this in some respects by allowing some copyright violation. Lately, it has modified it corporate licensing policies to allow for the violations that were happening anyone. People can't afford a copy of office. By they do take a copy from work. But MS still needs to reach those who do not have an office to take from, and those offices that cannot afford licensing. MS will probably make more money by continuing 95% market pentration that they will lose if 20% of the software is violating copyright.
If the above situation is true, then they have a responsibility to provice minimal support for the software.
As part of a comprehensive package, it is often a necessary and recommended approach. The problems only occur when it is the primary means of securing your assets. Most security systems depend on a secret, hopefully a short term secret. Furthermore, most well implemented security systems will not advertise the exact form of security or the exact processes they use. Giving an attacker such information is often foolhardy. There is little benefit to me telling the attacker the names and versions of all my software when they ping my machine.
I have a hotmail account that I use only to complain about spam. The address in never listed anywhere. I use it for no other purpose. It has never recieved any spam. This may be because it is listed somewhere as a known malcontent, but to be fair, I see not evidence that MS sells addresses. This is very different from other services.
I wish car manufacturere were required to spend more time thinking about how the car will function in a major impact, rather than how much damage will be done in a small impact. It seems Mercedes does a good job at both. It especially annoys me when it appears people buy cars that put everyone else at risk.
Re: New horseless carriages travel as irresponsible speed and employ explosive aether.
As you may know, horseless carriages are becoming increasingly popular. Up to a few years ago these carriages were only available to the wealthy, but now are in the hand of the common irresponsible man. We have seen a significant increase in the incidents of collision. We urge all volunteers to use all care when responding to such incidents.
The volunteer must first remember that these carriages travel at immense speed, over twenty miles per hour, without the aid of a track or any other guide to help them set their course. This allows the carriage to impact all manner of object and person with a force previously unknown. It is likely the occupants of the vehicle will be thrown onto the path with even greater force. This force can rip the body apart, exposing fluid and organs, as well as fracturing bones into bits capable of cutting. This leads to the possibility of the spread of disease such as malaria and hepatitis and the pox. The volunteer is urged to follow all hazmat procedures to protect his person.
The volunteer must also remember that aether used to power these monstrosities are highly combustible and carcinogenic. The rescuer should not breathe any fumes nor allow any fluid to contact the body. The hazmat suit may not protect the person as the aether can penetrate the fabric. The aether can act as a carrier for the body fluid, which make is a double crisis.
of course, we knew nothing of this, so I wonder how rescuers were trained to manage the new fangled machines.
Of course the Sony choice is only available to me if I choose to own a PC and pay the MS tax. And upon this choice, I then choose to use a specific proprietary DRM which, at the whim of the owners, could annialate my collection. This is no different from any other service, which is why I choose DRM free music.
There is nothing wrong with the Sony service. It is available to most people. It will be attractive to those people already locked into the Sony DRM. It may increase the popularity of that DRM. However, beyond choice of DRM, it really is not about consumer choice.
It is not the responsibility of the employee to work for the current rate of pay any more than it is the responsibility for the employer to continue to retain the employee. In a competative environment, both strive to maximize thier position. The fact tht they got the money means that the understanding was justified. And we can thank the greed of the producers for that. If it weren't for greed, they would have shut down production.
OTOH, my understanding is that if most of them work like 50 days and gross like a a couple million.
In the end, however, the voice actors are just trying to get a retirement nest egg. Just like the cast of any other hit show, they have worked for years building a product. Now that the end is in sight they want to get a bit of the value they helped create. They don't neccesarily deserve it, but they are smart to ask. The studio claimed that the voice actors were irrrelevent and could be replaced like they did with the Power Rangers kids. The studio was wrong.
No, really. I understand and what you are saying, I just think it is silly to compare one use of power to another, as if one were a good use of power and one were a bad. No matter what, creation of power increases the entropy of the universe and leads us closer to the big heat death (or cold death, or perhaps nothing, depending on your image of the shape of the universe). Why is powering a home better than a data server. Is someone cooking meth more valuable than discovering a new state of matter?
OTOH, comparing equal things might make sense. For example, that asault vehicle might use 5 times as many resources as the mid sived car. Or the Intel computer might use twice as much power at the PowerPC. Or the 15,000 housing running the air conditioning 24 hours a day might use as much power all the poject housing in the entire state.
The issue, as in XBox, is not being the first or even second product to market, and in the long run, stagnating products. Xbox is a well designed machine, but Sony has the games. Windows and the Office suites are very competative, but the later is stagnating and the development of the former has devolved into a series of minimially neccesary me-too features. The significant evolution of the OS, something that other companies started on in the mid-90's and have available now, might be available and stable in two or three years.
It seems that they are taking a page from Publishers Clearing House and using a trivial amount of peronalization to get people to open the email. I wonder if the victims will actually check to see if such a relative exists, or allow greed to take over. It is like those ad that say 'the government owes you thousands of dollars.'
This is why so much time is spent building value. To take a regular /. example. Many do not value the Apple computer and will instead buy cheap knock offs, but many will pay the premium to own the original. Apple has taken the time to make their machine have a value beyond the parts that it takes to build one. MS has done the same thing. One thing I notice with the music labels is that they spend no time creating a value for the CD. This is quite different from the movie studios who do spend time adding value to the DVD.
I think the same is true for games. A developer cannot just create a game and expect profit to magically appear. The game must not only compete against other games, but also against the nearly free versions of itself. To say that we can't compete against free is just naive. Kids are spending good money for Rice krispy snacks, a delicacy that I can make for 1/10th the cost. Shoppers regularly spend twice as much for makeup or 10 times as much for accessories to get the name. A good brand is worth it's weight in gold. Cartridges can compete against free, they just need to get over the mentality that the player somehow have a responsibility to buy the game. They don't. The supplier has the responsibility to create value.
And the licensing is kind of a separate issue. We have copyrights to provide the author an opportunity to make money. Licensing in an additional creation to maximize the opportunity by limiting the rights of the consumer. Probably the person who uploaded the game violated the license. For the person who download, the violation would likely only be copyright. Unless the click through license is gospel, I see no reason for an end user to be liable merely for use. OTOH, the GPL, as we all know, exists to give users additional rights.
Second, the graduation certificate given to a child who received significant accommodations is different from the graduation certificate given to a child that met all standard without significant accommodations.
Third, as much as people wish to malign our education program, and it may be that it is less able to put out compulsive eggheads, education in the US has created some of the most free thinking and entrepreneurial people in the world. The reason is that our students in public schools has traditionally had to fight for every aspect of their education. Those that wish to be educated had to resist the onslaught of the majority that just wished to get high and play and fuck. That means the people who succeed are well trained to fit into the competitive environment of adulthood.
I live in fear that the standards based education being pushed on us from the ignorant assholes in washington, assholes who never had to fight for a single thing in their life, assholes who were given their education, money, and success on a silver platter, is going to turn the next generation of kids into pussies that can only whine that someone is taking their jobs, and someone has to do something about it, and someone has to subsidize them because they are not creative enough to come up with a way to make money, or they believe they should have that new car even if they did not every lift a finger to earn it. We have enough of these people already. We do not need to create more.
America is about diversity. It is a false ideal, but one that is often functional. It is why our Germans were smarter than most of Europe's Germans, and why the US can blow everyone to hell with minimal risk to the homeland.
I know this a bit inflammatory, but really. The US public school system has been educating the vast majority of Americans for a very long time. Average intelligence is not all that intelligence, but we still are able to turn kids out that have a basic knowledge and abilities. These kids are not critical thinkers, but how many people in the world are. We teach kids in need of extreme accommodations everything they are able to learn, and then some pissant says that we did a bad thing, as if education is reserved for the privileged. As I said, an adequate education is reserved for those who really want it. Those who don't slack off, barely graduate, and everyone knows it. We give opportunity. Those who don't want find something else to do.
If you or your child receive what you feel is an inadequate education, take responsibility for it. Not all the responsibility, but some of it. Did you go to the library for free books or buy comics? Did you go to free museums and theater, or did you pay for movies? Did you read the free textbooks or pay for car magazines? Did you eat the free lunch or pay for junkfood? Did you watch the free education programing on PBS or pay for the crap on cable? Did you go to the free park or pay for sports? Did you ask help from your free teachers? Were you at school everyday with your free desk and free educational aids? In short, did you take advantage off the low cost opportunities this country offers every citizen, and many non-citizens, or did you just take then for granted and are now too much of a pussy to admit it.
The problem was, is, and will continue to be that most do notlearn how to program. Instead they learn about the mechanics of a particular language and how to make reality conform to the limitations of the language.
As I was learning programming, the technology was changing quickly. I started playing on teletype, and then an early mini, and then an old mini, and then a mainframe and microcomputer. We learned Basic, Fortran and then C. Because I had an exposure to a set of tools, I learned to program. Because my teahers made us do quite a bit of thinking before we coded, I learned to program. If they had just let us code, then it would have been a different story.
Every language that does anything useful has harmful bits. These bits are a critical part of the language if for no other reason that they allow us to immidiately identify the incompetent.