The VPN theory does make sense. The firewall at work has a feature where users can VPN into the firewall to relay their traffic though it. This has the advantage of protecting the user from man-in-the-middle attacks when they are using public WIFI. It also means that traffic is inspected and logged by the firewall and run through the URL filter.
It is entirely possible that this VPN client starts by default after being installed. The student may not have known that the client was running. It is also not entirely clear if this was a school-issued laptop or not. I can tell you that it the school I work for were to issue laptops, I would install our VPN client on them and have it start up by default so that we could police their after-hours use of the technology. If we were to issue laptops the students were using to access porn or pirate copyrighted material it would look very bad for us and may leave us open to civil prosecution.
Also, knowing how schools operate, I'd wager that the penalty for using profanity on the school's network is spelled out in an Acceptable Use Policy that the parents and students signed. Regardless of how ridiculous the punishment is, the student knew or should have known the punishment. He probably just didn't think it counted after school or thought he wouldn't get caught or thought school administrators had a sense of humor. Teens frequently rationalize exceptions for whatever they are doing.
But, every company needs to have someone they trust who understands IT and who understands their business. I have seen so many companies who trusted an IT company who sold them a system far more costly than they needed, or who get caught with their pants down because they would not pay for what their outside IT company thought they needed. It's hard to get that inside expertise without hiring a real employee.
I'm sure it can be cheaper, but it is situational. 50k per year, round up to 65k after benefits. 40 hours per week times 50 weeks (2 weeks vacation per year plus a few days) makes 2000 hours. $32.50 per hour. It's hard for me to get a tech on site for less than 100 bucks an hour. That's one hell of a price difference. If your business needs full-time support, having someone in-house is much more economical, even if the guy spends half his time reading Slashdot and watching porn. If you hire someone decent, time not spent putting out fires will be spent on making things work better.
My experience with service companies is that the techs are under the gun, so they do the bare minimum and get out, rather than burning up your contracted support time getting things right. While I appreciate their appreciation for my budget, I hate having to redo a contractor's work dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Where I have found using contractors to be especially helpful in specialized areas where work is intermittent and the job boundaries are well defined.
When I bought my house about 5 years ago, my lender approved me to borrow more than twice what I paid for my house. I looked at the numbers and my budget and estimated what my payments would be, and I thought "WTF are you smoking?" They eventually told me that yeah, money might be tight now, but in 5 years you will be making more money and the payments will be easy to afford. I'm glad I didn't fall for it. I bought a small, well kept house I could afford. I have not gotten a significant raise in the last 5 years.
A lot of people lost their jobs in this recession or took pay cuts. The fact that you apparently did not does not necessarily mean you were smart or insightful. It probably means you were lucky enough to work in an industry or live in an area that was not particularly hard hit by the recession. People were paying the going rate for housing. Home prices were up, not because people wanted to get into unaffordable loans, but because banks were handing out too much credit. In the 90's banks figured out that people will all ways pay the mortgage. They will starve, go with out medicine, and let their cars get repossessed before they default on a mortgage. As a result, home prices skyrocketed. It was not all the banks' faults. The feds had a hand in it by encouraging banks to make more and more sub-prime loans. But the fact is, the banks knew these were risky loans, that's effectively what a sub-prime loan is, and that these people probably could not afford to pay their mortgages if there were a recession. So, they came up with the mortgage backed securities products in order to limit their exposure, which gave them the freedom to make more bad loans. In some cases, they lied to their investors about how risky these securities were.
For those who lost their jobs, having an underwater home is a problem. If your home is underwater you can not normally refinance. If your home is underwater you can not sell because the banks don't normally allow short sales, so getting a job in a new city is not always possible. At that point, the only option is to walk away from the house, but that may get you sued depending on the state you live in. Either that, or rent out the house and go find a cheap apartment, but apartment prices are also going up.
And then you have the lenders lying to people about refinancing their home loans. Bank of America lied to me. My wife lost her job last Autumn. We bought our about 5 1/2 years ago when rates were at their peak. I spoke with my mortgage servicer, Bank of America, about refinancing. They approached me first, but they gave me an unending stream of excuses as to why they could not refinance my home. They used home value estimates that showed that I was underwater, then they explained that I did not qualify for the federal refinance programs because I had not yet fallen behind on payments. They would not even send an appraiser out to my house.
This went around and around for a month or so, then I called other banks. They were anxious for my business. I accepted an offer that chopped 2% off my interest rate. They sent out an appraiser. It turns out that Bank of America undervalued my house by about 25%. Luckily, I live in an area where the housing bubble started to pop before the rest of the country, so I got a relatively good deal. My property only declined about 15% in value from when I bought it. Last month I was talking with a coworker who was also with Bank of America and trying to refinance. They were also giving him the runaround. I related my story and they he went shopping around and was able to refinance with someone else.
The propeller blades looked to be made of plastic. If they were struck by birdshot, and there were several shots fired, I think it would have done quite a bit of damage.
This video looks fake to me. There is no video of the drone apparently being shot. The drone goes up, the camera zooms in and is off the drone a lot. Several shots are heard, but no apparent impact is seen when the drone is in view, then you see the drone coming down swiftly, but apparently controlled. Later you see a pickup and a 4-wheeler driving away, but they seem start out from a position very close to the camera people. It seems unlikely that any shooters would take up position so close to the launch site. The damage to the drone is very slight with only a few cracked propellers.
I think the also changed out he video. Earlier today the video linked in the article was muck longer and included voiceover. The video I see there now is just te clip of the drone's flight.
In the 90's I had a roommate from India. It was about the same time that Hong Kong reverted back to China. From looking at the differences between his country and Hong Kong, he lamented the early departure of the English. He thought that India would have been financially and educationally much better off.
I have a friend, an attorney, who worked for ACORN for a short time about 7or 8 years ago. His job was to call people and double check their voter registrations. ACORN would hire people and pay them piecemeal for every complete voter registration. Many of the people hired would fill out registration cards on people's behalf without talking to them, or else fill in bogus data, because it meant more cash in their pockets. My friend quit after a few months when his paychecks started bouncing.
Well, Eminem already won a similar case vs Universal Music Group. But in any case, whether iTunes "sales" are sales or licenses is probably irrelevant. The RIAA member companies does not manufacture and sell copies of digital music the way they do with physical media. With physical media, they manufacture and sell copies to distributors who sell the copies to retailers who sell the copies to consumers. With iTunes, they license the right to duplicate and distribute music to Apple. Apple then gives a sum of money to the publisher under that distribution license. The artists should be getting their 25% to 50% as specified in their contracts with the music publishers.
The only console expansion scheme that ever worked was cartridges. Realistically, what are the advantages of disk-based media? Disks are cheaper to produce and package and ship. They may be more resistant to environmental factors. But if next get consoles used a customized PCI-E or Light Peak interface for plugging in game cartridges, the cartridges could have co-processors, storage, etc built in like they used to in the late 80's and early 90's. It would free up game designers to stretch their legs a bit more as the platforms aged.
Fiber is remarkably durable. Last Spring we had bad storm roll through that took down 8 utility poles along the road right in front of work. The power was out, cable TV lines snapped, phone lines had to be restrung, but the fiber on those poles never broke. Once power was restored our Internet connection was back up. The hospital about 5 miles down the road is also serviced by that fiber trunk and never lost service. The ISP, who had not gotten any reports yet from the utility companies, had no idea there was a problem other than the connection dropping at my work.
As measured by dollars spent per kill, snipers are cost effective. In Vietnam the army estimated that the average soldier spent $23,000 in ammunition for every enemy soldier killed. US snipers spent 17 cents per kill. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/armytrng/a/sniperschool.htm
The moral of the story is: A municipalities best move is to announce a big fiber network roll-out, make a big show of surveying out the fiber corridors and drawing up plans for facilities, draw out the process long enough for the local telco/cable company to get a judge to halt the project BEFORE breaking ground, then sit back and watch the incumbent service providers build the network. Stage 3: Profit!
So how is this different than denying the 1st amendment rights of labor unions, or neighborhood groups, or the NAACP, or the NRA, or a credit union, or any other group? I do not in any way suppose person hood for corporations. I do suppose the right of people to gather with people with a common interest to pool their resources for political speech. In the case of political groups their interests are issue based. In the case of corporations the common interest is financial return. It is only natural for a corporation to lobby for laws and regulations and politicians favorable to their shareholders making money. It would be just as natural for a sole proprietor spending business proceeds to lobby for zoning or local tax law changes that would benefit his business. Yes, I agree that it is unfair that corporations have so much more money than anyone else to throw at campaigns. I would say that all donations by publicly traded corporations should be public knowledge more or less instantly. But I simply can't see how we can say that one group of people has a political voice while another does not.
A corporation should have no political voice at all.Neither should government employees lobbying to make their jobs easier - like law enforcement lobbying for our Civil Liberties to be taken away because they're too lazy to do their job or because they want more power: the wars on terror and drugs and child porn excuses have eroded our liberties too much. And keep in mind "law and order" conservatives, those will be used as an excuse to take our guns away so don't go for the lie of "if you do nothing wrong; you have nothing to worry about" bullshit.
Corporations act as representatives of their shareholders. If you remove the rights for corporations to speak on their own behalf, you are removing the collective 1st amendment rights of a whole lot of people. The same is true of labor unions.
Buying is generally cheaper than renting if you have enough work to justify the cost. If you only need a supercomputer for a short while, renting is more cost effective. You must not ignore the profit motive. The cloud provider will be charging their customers, collectively, many times the cost of the hardware, labor, and energy required to make the system run. From TFA: 'In contrast, the upfront cost of building an in-house render farm can seem astronomical. "With just eight machines, you could be looking at $50,000," said Kuchta. With only four big projects a year, he said that kind of investment might not be fully utilized.' I'll bet that if they were doing 4 big projects a month, that render farm would start looking cheaper and cheaper.
Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling. (Ha!)
I'd estimate that the average American can already walk 10 miles at a stretch, they just don't know it. Human beings are amazingly efficient walkers. I watched a mid 40's woman, ex-smoker, in apparently average shape (overweight), hike 8 miles in one day, in the Appalachians, wearing ~40 pounds of camping gear, and rising 2500 feet in elevation. On a level path on a mild day with aqueduct hydration and a bag of GORP, 10 miles is easy. Finding the motivation to do so is much harder.
Even there, among certain subcultures (cough, Catholics) the transmission rate is at or near zero. Eventually, the other subcultures, haven proven themselves unable to survive, won't.
Its interesting how on an individual basis we've tried to halt evolution and don't allow individual euthanasia. But on a cultural / subcultural level, if they as a group wanna fail, or self destruct themselves, we pretty much sit back and let them.
Are you suggesting that euthanasia is related to evolution? Euthanasia is normally practiced on or by those who are already removed from the gene pool by disease or disability. There are some exceptions with advancing reproductive technology. The way you state this, it sounds like you are talking about eugenics. I hope that was not your intention.
Cultures must adapt to changing times in order to survive. Culture is, in part, an effort of the human animal to adapt faster and in different capabilities than evolution can accommodate. Northern cultures adopted styles of dress that allow humans to cope with cold temperatures faster than evolution would have given us thick fur coats. Desert cultures domesticated animals that helped humans to survive arid climates faster than we could evolve water retaining humps. Tribalism sprang up to help groups survive in a dangerous world. With agrarian cultures, as population density increased more pacifistic religions emerged to help knit tribes together and promote behavioral norms that allowed people to coexist better. Monogamy arose to ensure a male's property was inherited by his own offspring. Cultures that no longer help one survive will either not be practiced any longer, or the people practicing them will die out, or they will adapt and thrive.
As a whole, I think people have sympathy for suffering individuals, not groups. It is easier to help a repressed woman or child than to change the religion or caste system that oppresses them. It is easier to help individuals ravished by the AIDS epidemic in Africa (or world wide for that matter) than to have empathy with those uninfected or unknowingly infected individuals who refuse to use condoms or practice abstinence due to social mores. It is easier to sympathize with a gay or lesbian couple you know who are denied marital status than to take action and reform laws defined by the majority's religious views.
There are few things I dislike more than when I try to kiss my wife and she stops me because it will smear her lipstick. And then there are the beauty products that are so subtle that I simply will never appreciate their effects.
A few years ago my wife bought a bottle of something or other that is supposed to curl the eyelashes. This is not mascara, which I can at least understand. No, this is a clear liquid that merely curls the eyelashes; like a perm for your eyes.
So my wife says to me, "I bought eyelash curler."
"You bought what?"
She goes on to explain what the product does.
"Why would you want to curl your eyelashes?"
"well, to make my eyes more attractive."
My wife hardly ever wears makeup. She generally only wears it for formal occasions and to avoid criticism from her mother.
Then she says, "I bought it to look more attractive for you."
"I love you dearly, but what from our long relationship makes you think I would even notice you were wearing it?"
"Well, you won't notice, but one day we will be out somewhere and you will look at me and think how particularly lovely I look."
"Because your eyelashes will be curlier than usual?"
"Yes"
"Go with god."
About 2 months later she agreed that I would never notice and that it was a pointless purchase.
We have an older version of Filemaker at work with a couple of small databases. My former boss loved it. I have seen some cool stuff done with FileMaker. The Filemaker Server is very snazzy in that it can take any FM database and make a web front end.
But now he's gone, and I have tried and tried to wrap my head around how those databases work and I simply can't do it. FM blends data storage and display in a way that should never be done. Hidden options that only a 12th level FM sorcerer knows how to invoke. Makes me shudder just thinking about it. I'd rather store my data in Excel.
I can fully understand someone not wanting to take a personal check, but I'm not going meet some dude from Craigslist in a dark alley with 10 grand in my pocket either. If they aren't willing to take a cashiers check or money order, or even Paypal, then I'm not buying.
Slashdot Mirror
The VPN theory does make sense. The firewall at work has a feature where users can VPN into the firewall to relay their traffic though it. This has the advantage of protecting the user from man-in-the-middle attacks when they are using public WIFI. It also means that traffic is inspected and logged by the firewall and run through the URL filter.
It is entirely possible that this VPN client starts by default after being installed. The student may not have known that the client was running. It is also not entirely clear if this was a school-issued laptop or not. I can tell you that it the school I work for were to issue laptops, I would install our VPN client on them and have it start up by default so that we could police their after-hours use of the technology. If we were to issue laptops the students were using to access porn or pirate copyrighted material it would look very bad for us and may leave us open to civil prosecution.
Also, knowing how schools operate, I'd wager that the penalty for using profanity on the school's network is spelled out in an Acceptable Use Policy that the parents and students signed. Regardless of how ridiculous the punishment is, the student knew or should have known the punishment. He probably just didn't think it counted after school or thought he wouldn't get caught or thought school administrators had a sense of humor. Teens frequently rationalize exceptions for whatever they are doing.
But, every company needs to have someone they trust who understands IT and who understands their business. I have seen so many companies who trusted an IT company who sold them a system far more costly than they needed, or who get caught with their pants down because they would not pay for what their outside IT company thought they needed. It's hard to get that inside expertise without hiring a real employee.
I'm sure it can be cheaper, but it is situational. 50k per year, round up to 65k after benefits. 40 hours per week times 50 weeks (2 weeks vacation per year plus a few days) makes 2000 hours. $32.50 per hour. It's hard for me to get a tech on site for less than 100 bucks an hour. That's one hell of a price difference. If your business needs full-time support, having someone in-house is much more economical, even if the guy spends half his time reading Slashdot and watching porn. If you hire someone decent, time not spent putting out fires will be spent on making things work better.
My experience with service companies is that the techs are under the gun, so they do the bare minimum and get out, rather than burning up your contracted support time getting things right. While I appreciate their appreciation for my budget, I hate having to redo a contractor's work dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Where I have found using contractors to be especially helpful in specialized areas where work is intermittent and the job boundaries are well defined.
I expect that is what will happen. I also expect that German news outlets will get less traffic to their sites and end up loosing revenue.
Primary grade teachers are commonly weak on math skills.
http://kathyandcalvin.com/national-math-panel-releases-preliminary-report
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/teachers-math-skills-alarmingly-weak-129577963.html
When I bought my house about 5 years ago, my lender approved me to borrow more than twice what I paid for my house. I looked at the numbers and my budget and estimated what my payments would be, and I thought "WTF are you smoking?" They eventually told me that yeah, money might be tight now, but in 5 years you will be making more money and the payments will be easy to afford. I'm glad I didn't fall for it. I bought a small, well kept house I could afford. I have not gotten a significant raise in the last 5 years.
A lot of people lost their jobs in this recession or took pay cuts. The fact that you apparently did not does not necessarily mean you were smart or insightful. It probably means you were lucky enough to work in an industry or live in an area that was not particularly hard hit by the recession. People were paying the going rate for housing. Home prices were up, not because people wanted to get into unaffordable loans, but because banks were handing out too much credit. In the 90's banks figured out that people will all ways pay the mortgage. They will starve, go with out medicine, and let their cars get repossessed before they default on a mortgage. As a result, home prices skyrocketed. It was not all the banks' faults. The feds had a hand in it by encouraging banks to make more and more sub-prime loans. But the fact is, the banks knew these were risky loans, that's effectively what a sub-prime loan is, and that these people probably could not afford to pay their mortgages if there were a recession. So, they came up with the mortgage backed securities products in order to limit their exposure, which gave them the freedom to make more bad loans. In some cases, they lied to their investors about how risky these securities were.
For those who lost their jobs, having an underwater home is a problem. If your home is underwater you can not normally refinance. If your home is underwater you can not sell because the banks don't normally allow short sales, so getting a job in a new city is not always possible. At that point, the only option is to walk away from the house, but that may get you sued depending on the state you live in. Either that, or rent out the house and go find a cheap apartment, but apartment prices are also going up.
And then you have the lenders lying to people about refinancing their home loans. Bank of America lied to me. My wife lost her job last Autumn. We bought our about 5 1/2 years ago when rates were at their peak. I spoke with my mortgage servicer, Bank of America, about refinancing. They approached me first, but they gave me an unending stream of excuses as to why they could not refinance my home. They used home value estimates that showed that I was underwater, then they explained that I did not qualify for the federal refinance programs because I had not yet fallen behind on payments. They would not even send an appraiser out to my house.
This went around and around for a month or so, then I called other banks. They were anxious for my business. I accepted an offer that chopped 2% off my interest rate. They sent out an appraiser. It turns out that Bank of America undervalued my house by about 25%. Luckily, I live in an area where the housing bubble started to pop before the rest of the country, so I got a relatively good deal. My property only declined about 15% in value from when I bought it. Last month I was talking with a coworker who was also with Bank of America and trying to refinance. They were also giving him the runaround. I related my story and they he went shopping around and was able to refinance with someone else.
The propeller blades looked to be made of plastic. If they were struck by birdshot, and there were several shots fired, I think it would have done quite a bit of damage.
This video looks fake to me. There is no video of the drone apparently being shot. The drone goes up, the camera zooms in and is off the drone a lot. Several shots are heard, but no apparent impact is seen when the drone is in view, then you see the drone coming down swiftly, but apparently controlled. Later you see a pickup and a 4-wheeler driving away, but they seem start out from a position very close to the camera people. It seems unlikely that any shooters would take up position so close to the launch site. The damage to the drone is very slight with only a few cracked propellers.
I think the also changed out he video. Earlier today the video linked in the article was muck longer and included voiceover. The video I see there now is just te clip of the drone's flight.
When you put it like that, it sounds WAY better than the life of a Slashdot troll.
In the 90's I had a roommate from India. It was about the same time that Hong Kong reverted back to China. From looking at the differences between his country and Hong Kong, he lamented the early departure of the English. He thought that India would have been financially and educationally much better off.
I have a friend, an attorney, who worked for ACORN for a short time about 7or 8 years ago. His job was to call people and double check their voter registrations. ACORN would hire people and pay them piecemeal for every complete voter registration. Many of the people hired would fill out registration cards on people's behalf without talking to them, or else fill in bogus data, because it meant more cash in their pockets. My friend quit after a few months when his paychecks started bouncing.
Well, Eminem already won a similar case vs Universal Music Group. But in any case, whether iTunes "sales" are sales or licenses is probably irrelevant. The RIAA member companies does not manufacture and sell copies of digital music the way they do with physical media. With physical media, they manufacture and sell copies to distributors who sell the copies to retailers who sell the copies to consumers. With iTunes, they license the right to duplicate and distribute music to Apple. Apple then gives a sum of money to the publisher under that distribution license. The artists should be getting their 25% to 50% as specified in their contracts with the music publishers.
The only console expansion scheme that ever worked was cartridges. Realistically, what are the advantages of disk-based media? Disks are cheaper to produce and package and ship. They may be more resistant to environmental factors. But if next get consoles used a customized PCI-E or Light Peak interface for plugging in game cartridges, the cartridges could have co-processors, storage, etc built in like they used to in the late 80's and early 90's. It would free up game designers to stretch their legs a bit more as the platforms aged.
Fiber is remarkably durable. Last Spring we had bad storm roll through that took down 8 utility poles along the road right in front of work. The power was out, cable TV lines snapped, phone lines had to be restrung, but the fiber on those poles never broke. Once power was restored our Internet connection was back up. The hospital about 5 miles down the road is also serviced by that fiber trunk and never lost service. The ISP, who had not gotten any reports yet from the utility companies, had no idea there was a problem other than the connection dropping at my work.
As measured by dollars spent per kill, snipers are cost effective. In Vietnam the army estimated that the average soldier spent $23,000 in ammunition for every enemy soldier killed. US snipers spent 17 cents per kill. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/armytrng/a/sniperschool.htm
The moral of the story is: A municipalities best move is to announce a big fiber network roll-out, make a big show of surveying out the fiber corridors and drawing up plans for facilities, draw out the process long enough for the local telco/cable company to get a judge to halt the project BEFORE breaking ground, then sit back and watch the incumbent service providers build the network. Stage 3: Profit!
So how is this different than denying the 1st amendment rights of labor unions, or neighborhood groups, or the NAACP, or the NRA, or a credit union, or any other group? I do not in any way suppose person hood for corporations. I do suppose the right of people to gather with people with a common interest to pool their resources for political speech. In the case of political groups their interests are issue based. In the case of corporations the common interest is financial return. It is only natural for a corporation to lobby for laws and regulations and politicians favorable to their shareholders making money. It would be just as natural for a sole proprietor spending business proceeds to lobby for zoning or local tax law changes that would benefit his business. Yes, I agree that it is unfair that corporations have so much more money than anyone else to throw at campaigns. I would say that all donations by publicly traded corporations should be public knowledge more or less instantly. But I simply can't see how we can say that one group of people has a political voice while another does not.
A corporation should have no political voice at all.Neither should government employees lobbying to make their jobs easier - like law enforcement lobbying for our Civil Liberties to be taken away because they're too lazy to do their job or because they want more power: the wars on terror and drugs and child porn excuses have eroded our liberties too much. And keep in mind "law and order" conservatives, those will be used as an excuse to take our guns away so don't go for the lie of "if you do nothing wrong; you have nothing to worry about" bullshit.
Corporations act as representatives of their shareholders. If you remove the rights for corporations to speak on their own behalf, you are removing the collective 1st amendment rights of a whole lot of people. The same is true of labor unions.
Buying is generally cheaper than renting if you have enough work to justify the cost. If you only need a supercomputer for a short while, renting is more cost effective. You must not ignore the profit motive. The cloud provider will be charging their customers, collectively, many times the cost of the hardware, labor, and energy required to make the system run. From TFA: 'In contrast, the upfront cost of building an in-house render farm can seem astronomical. "With just eight machines, you could be looking at $50,000," said Kuchta. With only four big projects a year, he said that kind of investment might not be fully utilized.' I'll bet that if they were doing 4 big projects a month, that render farm would start looking cheaper and cheaper.
Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling. (Ha!)
I'd estimate that the average American can already walk 10 miles at a stretch, they just don't know it. Human beings are amazingly efficient walkers. I watched a mid 40's woman, ex-smoker, in apparently average shape (overweight), hike 8 miles in one day, in the Appalachians, wearing ~40 pounds of camping gear, and rising 2500 feet in elevation. On a level path on a mild day with aqueduct hydration and a bag of GORP, 10 miles is easy. Finding the motivation to do so is much harder.
Even there, among certain subcultures (cough, Catholics) the transmission rate is at or near zero. Eventually, the other subcultures, haven proven themselves unable to survive, won't.
Its interesting how on an individual basis we've tried to halt evolution and don't allow individual euthanasia. But on a cultural / subcultural level, if they as a group wanna fail, or self destruct themselves, we pretty much sit back and let them.
Are you suggesting that euthanasia is related to evolution? Euthanasia is normally practiced on or by those who are already removed from the gene pool by disease or disability. There are some exceptions with advancing reproductive technology. The way you state this, it sounds like you are talking about eugenics. I hope that was not your intention.
Cultures must adapt to changing times in order to survive. Culture is, in part, an effort of the human animal to adapt faster and in different capabilities than evolution can accommodate. Northern cultures adopted styles of dress that allow humans to cope with cold temperatures faster than evolution would have given us thick fur coats. Desert cultures domesticated animals that helped humans to survive arid climates faster than we could evolve water retaining humps. Tribalism sprang up to help groups survive in a dangerous world. With agrarian cultures, as population density increased more pacifistic religions emerged to help knit tribes together and promote behavioral norms that allowed people to coexist better. Monogamy arose to ensure a male's property was inherited by his own offspring. Cultures that no longer help one survive will either not be practiced any longer, or the people practicing them will die out, or they will adapt and thrive.
As a whole, I think people have sympathy for suffering individuals, not groups. It is easier to help a repressed woman or child than to change the religion or caste system that oppresses them. It is easier to help individuals ravished by the AIDS epidemic in Africa (or world wide for that matter) than to have empathy with those uninfected or unknowingly infected individuals who refuse to use condoms or practice abstinence due to social mores. It is easier to sympathize with a gay or lesbian couple you know who are denied marital status than to take action and reform laws defined by the majority's religious views.
There are few things I dislike more than when I try to kiss my wife and she stops me because it will smear her lipstick. And then there are the beauty products that are so subtle that I simply will never appreciate their effects.
A few years ago my wife bought a bottle of something or other that is supposed to curl the eyelashes. This is not mascara, which I can at least understand. No, this is a clear liquid that merely curls the eyelashes; like a perm for your eyes.
So my wife says to me, "I bought eyelash curler."
"You bought what?"
She goes on to explain what the product does.
"Why would you want to curl your eyelashes?"
"well, to make my eyes more attractive."
My wife hardly ever wears makeup. She generally only wears it for formal occasions and to avoid criticism from her mother.
Then she says, "I bought it to look more attractive for you."
"I love you dearly, but what from our long relationship makes you think I would even notice you were wearing it?"
"Well, you won't notice, but one day we will be out somewhere and you will look at me and think how particularly lovely I look."
"Because your eyelashes will be curlier than usual?"
"Yes"
"Go with god."
About 2 months later she agreed that I would never notice and that it was a pointless purchase.
We have an older version of Filemaker at work with a couple of small databases. My former boss loved it. I have seen some cool stuff done with FileMaker. The Filemaker Server is very snazzy in that it can take any FM database and make a web front end.
But now he's gone, and I have tried and tried to wrap my head around how those databases work and I simply can't do it. FM blends data storage and display in a way that should never be done. Hidden options that only a 12th level FM sorcerer knows how to invoke. Makes me shudder just thinking about it. I'd rather store my data in Excel.
I think crack use has declined because meth is cheaper, gets you higher, and lasts hours longer than crack. Meth is just a more effective drug.
I can fully understand someone not wanting to take a personal check, but I'm not going meet some dude from Craigslist in a dark alley with 10 grand in my pocket either. If they aren't willing to take a cashiers check or money order, or even Paypal, then I'm not buying.