"I imagine the Israelis on an individual level are generally pretty cool people."
No, no they are not. As someone who has worked in the tourism industry for 10 years in New Zealand I can safely say that are the most rude, tight fisted, obnoxious travellers on the planet.
As someone non-Jewish living in the USA who has traveled to many countries including New Zealand, I can safely say that what you are describing fits a large number of tourists to any country from any ethnic/religious/political group. Travelers, particularly long-haul global travelers, tend to be very cost-conscious and emotionally guarded when in far off countries. You really don't know the local culture at all, you don't know what's safe, what's a fair price, who to trust, what the various laws are. To judge an entire ethnicity by the way some people of that ethinicity behave while in the quite unique social situation of being on a holiday that is no doubt costing at least $3,000 per person, is a clear case of you looking to justify something you already believed.
Also, as someone who ended up sharing time on a small boat in southeast Asia with a young Israeli couple I had never met before, I found them quite charming and easy-going conversationalists.
I wonder if there are any applications to turn WiFi-enabled smartphones into a mesh relay network. That will enable a communication channel in case of provider shutdown. Self-organizing wireless mesh networks was a popular topic few years ago.
The software aspect could be done now. The problem is that turning your phone/tablet into a router/switch is gonna suck your battery down to zero in a very very short time interval.
Yet again with the black and white view of the world. There is a huge difference between "you Negroes can not protest here in a whites-only restaurant, please move it a couple hundred feet to the Colored restaurant where it is safer for everyone" and "you can not protest at all". You seem to miss a very important point; whites-only restaurants with black people in them are an inherently dangerous place. Short of shutting down all such restaurants they will always be inherently dangerous.
In a place like a subway station there are things BART and police can do to mitigate dangers 1. Block off the edges of unused portions of the platform so falling protestors and electrified rails and the underside of moving trains do not mix. Unless your engineers/architects are complete morons, the same trains stop at the same places every time, every day, within 10-24 inches. Have openings in your restraining system with sufficient +/- tolerance for the train doors. 2. Allow free movement to decrease crowding and decrease the possibility of someone being trampled. 3. Set up crowd control systems to keep opposing groups like actual passengers and protestors separate so they do not come to the apparently irresistable urge to push each other into the path of the trains.
All of this takes space which would be available on a subway platform if the operator cared to do it instead of taking the easy route of counterinsurgency measures to disrupt protestors' communications
The ONLY thing standing between the people and freedom is portable energy. The day we can instantly create and power (i.e. SUSTAIN) ad-hoc distributed P2P networks using our personal wireless devices is the day all this same old control-suppress crap ends and a bizarre future world (with all new crap) begins. This networked app -- call it an "appwork" will detect the flow of proximity/signal strength of the appwork nodes in mass protest situations and automatically direct apparticipants to move x-meters to the left or up 1 flight of stairs to ensure all apparticipants have sufficient coverage to take advantage of the appwork's features. Every protest crowd becomes as beautiful and agile as a flock of hundreds of birds which shifts directions dozens of times in a minute with only fractional delays. Instead of a carefully rehearsed, short-lived one-off scripted flash mob, every flash mob becomes a shifting wave pattern that is exceedingly difficult to disrupt.
And there are not already laws and fire codes governing maximum occupancy of BART stations? There are not already rules of conduct for ridership?
All you apologists keep saying, "someone could...." "it is possible..." "there's a chance that...." Do you have any idea how corrupted such thinking is at its core? All you have done is created a standard whereby protests must be able to guarantee 100% safety from any and all collateral damage. You are just not thinking clearly. We shouldn't allow thousands of black-skinned americans to march on Birmingham City Hall to protest for equal treatment under the law, because someone could get pushed in front of a car, it is possible that someone might get trampled in the crowd, there's a chance that there will be a riot sparked when the KKK shows up.
But she said the family's main concern was the lack of understanding from TSA agents that they were dealing with a 4-year-old child, not a terror suspect.
Umm, devil's advocate: why can't the 4-year-old girl be considered a terror suspect?
I mean, once we start saying things like "well she can't be a terrorist, she's a grandmother!" or "she can't be a terrorist, she's just a 4-year-old girl!" aren't we essentially letting the world know that these are the loopholes that can allow you to get past the TSA?
Do I think the 4-year-old girl was a terrorist? No. Do I think it's impossible though? No.
You're a terrorist cell. You need to get the (whatever) to your guy on the inside so he can hijack/blow up the plane. You find a family in a generally unsuspecting demographic. You kidnap the mother. You tell the father that unless he has his 4-year-old girl smuggle (whatever) to the terrorist who has already crossed the gate into the terminal you will kill the mother. The little girl won't actually be on the plane, she'll just be giving the (whatever) to the terrorist, then she's free to go and the father gets his family back.
Is that a movie plot? Sure. Is it likely to happen? I don't know but probably not.
You don't know? The father, under the most dire emotional stress that could ever exist in a human life, is going to just "have" his 4-year-old smuggle something to a terrorist the child doesn't know? How many 4-year-olds have you raised? A 4-year-old is as controllable and dependable for a precision operation like you describe as would be an adopted alley cat or jackrabbit. You'll have phases where it's a daily ordeal just to get a 4-year-old to share one toy with a sibling, eat a meal (even if it's something yummy like hot dogs or chicken nuggets or cheese sandwiches), brush their teeth, go potty, etc. Even being willing simply to say Hi to a stranger from six feet away is unthinkable for many toddlers/children, and you have your terrorists just happening to luck into kidnapping the mother of the next generation's Olsen twins?
Seriously, step back from the LCD screen, turn to face a window where you can see the unbroken line of sky and trees outside, and now describe your scenario again out loud to the room. If after listening to yourself speak the words you still think, "Hey man it could happen", there's a disconnect somewhere between you and Reality.
That was my first thought too. I still remember eraser and "The First Battle of Bull Run" and toreador petticoats.
Anyone who grew up reading Encylopedia Brown stores -- you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Joe Meno's wistfully spare The Boy Detective Fails. If you can imagine indie shoegazer music put into book form, this would surely by part of that imaginary genre's major canon.
I've spoke with people who let a phone caller from "Microsoft" take control of their PC.
I've had 2-3 of these a year for the last few years and I try and string them along as long as possible as a service to society... Its great fun, but don't try and buy time by saying you have to switch your computer on, they just ring off:-(
Well, if you think about it, someone who doesn't leave their computer on all the time is a less desirable target for data harvesters or trojan/botnet admins. The more someone uses their computer to manage more parts of their life (and therefore have more sensitive data stored there) the more likely they are to leave it on all the time, for later rooted perusal, DDOS zombie use, etc.
Translation: "I don't have a citation either, but trust me".
Translation: not only are you being an ass, you're also being a great fool.
You keep using the word "citation". I do not believe it means what you think it does. Asking for a citation in this kind of conversation (in which you are clearly over your head) doesn't address your problem, it simply inserts another layer of abstraction between you and someone else just like me making the same well-informed statements.
See, the thing is, I already know - from almost two decades of working in the field - that I know what I'm talking about. Therefore, I know that if you had sufficient knowledge of the subject to be in any position to judge the accuracy of my statements, you would already have recognized the truth told to you by me and several others in this sub-thread. Therefore, I can clearly infer that you can't handle this truth due to some internal problem of your own.
That is, if you can't recognize a well-informed statement when you read it, then you either have no knowledge whatsoever about how an ILS works (and therefore insufficient background to understand the conversation whooshing over your head), or you have very poor critical thinking tools (and therefore insufficient intellect to understand the conversation whooshing over your head). So, either way --- WHOOSH!
But I will point out that your objection is specious. Budgeting doesn't depend on who borrowed a book, only that it was borrowed.
You specified that *all* records were deleted - which means there's no record of it being borrowed. But getting details wrong is typical when you make stuff up.
Now you're just being an ass.
I spent many years working as an IT manager for academic libraries. Jah-Wren is correct. Subsequent to the PATRIOT Act, almost every library which previously had kept borrower history (and even this was not universal since many libraries already took an aggressive approach to the ALA privacy philosophy) began deleting identifiable borrower information, preserving only statistical data like number of times circulated/browsed/renewed, length of loan, etc. And for academic libraries in particular, the ones who didn't take the PATRIOT Act seriously have taken the same approach due to FERPA concerns.
This isn't rocket surgery, it's a pretty straightforward database tweak to discard certain data and preserve other data. Now, at many libraries the instant a book is scanned (discharged) after return, the system wipes the last user data. This adds an additional hassle in that if you find an item, say, in your curbside drop box, which is overdue/lost, then depending on how your ILS interface works (e.g. does it provide on-screen prompts or errors for such items) you may have to train your staff to immediately stop and record the information on the screen before scanning the next item, or else you'll have an "orphaned" fine/fee on a patron record, because the item was returned and some portion of the patron's fine/fee should be forgiven, but you don't have any way of knowing which patron had the item.
...are greatly exaggerated, since the valuation of a college degree is in direct correlation to the unwillingness of employers to hire anyone without some acronymic degree/certification into preferred positions, for the simple fact that well-meaning social-engineering progressive equality laws have forced them to have some legally objective standard (i.e. nothingGEDhigh school diplomasome collegeassociatestechnical certbachelor'smaster'smaster's + technical certdoctorate) by which to justify hiring Candidate A over Candidate G. May God have mercy on your soul if you hire Candidate A (unprotected class) over Candidate B (member of a protected class) without having a CYA C.V alphabet soup of "achievements" to justify your choice.
So long as employers need a "Qualification Theater" on-paper justification for hiring the best person for the job rather than a protected idiot, the college degree will maintain its value. Indeed. as government regulation and legal exposure have increased over the last 50 years, so has there been a corresponding arms race in educational qualifications for various jobs. The 1980s Bachelors is now required to hold ridiculous entry-level Word/Excel paperwork jobs, and a Masters is what you need to have a hope of management, with all those previous Masters folks going back for eMBAs or a Ph.D, J.D., Ed.D, etc.
The educational market will not crash hard until the job market crashes hard. Fact is, with modern efficiencies we have way too many bodies being employed to do way too little work. The Information Revolution has not truly even begun. You'll know it has begun when, like all revolutions, masses of people are left with their lives evaporated overnight, or perhaps lined up against the wall. This is not that. Yet.
How was this modded troll? It's sarcastic, yes... but not untruthful. Fracking DOES have potentially massive consequences... a quick google-search or even Wikipedia article glancing will tell you that.
Unless of course you were modded troll because they were perhaps referring to deep well drilling and not fracking... although as it stands, there's getting to be fewer and fewer choices to NOT resort to fracking.
I can't speak to why it was modded Troll, but as someone who currently has mod points it should have been modded Offtopic. It does the whole ironic over-exaggeration of its parent in order to attempt to rebut the parent, but in doing so it introduces an exaggeration of a claim which the parent never made. Thus, it belongs to that highly popular class of Internet argumenation known as strawmantum ad absurdum.
Absolutely nowhere in Petron's post did Petron say that no problem can result from drilling on land. Petron's point seems to be that IF you are going to continue extracting/burning oil (which unless tonight some local housewife discovers stable cold fusion using this one weird trick the gasoline companies don't want you to know about, we will still be doing tomorrow) it is safer and more efficient to use land-based or shallow-water wells where oversight is easier and disaster mitigation is speedier, cheaper, and far less technologically complex.
Petron was pointing out the irony that platforms like the Deepwater Horizon exist primarily due to the unintended consequences of a myopic out-of-sight-out-of-mind brand of environmentalism that may actually result in far greater ecological harm than if the same type of problem were to occur on land or in shallow easily-reached water. Thus, because darkmeridian doesn't address this point or offern any substantive rebuttal (e.g. presenting some argument that in fact land-based drilling is less efficient and more technologically complex than deepwater extraction [a very hard argument to make, hence resorting to the refuge of strawmantum ad absurdum]), darkmeridian's post is therefore not topically relevant to this sub-thread.
"Of the Wikileaks cache of diplomatic cables, one of the most potentially salacious is about the entertainment at a party thrown by DynCorp, a U.S. contractor training Afghan police, in April 2009. A 17-year-old boy was hired to dance.
In Afghanistan, hiring "dancing boys" is a long-held practice in which Afghan men hire young men and boys to dress like girls and dance at weddings and other parties. They don't hire girls, because in Afghan society men and women don't mix socially. . ..
. . . according to both the State Department, which investigated the incident, and DynCorp, no such sexual abuse occurred.
We did not find anything that there was any kind of misconduct of that kind at all," Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told TPM. "It was just inappropriate."
DynCorp says one manager present stopped the dancing halfway through after "recognizing that the situation was culturally insensitive." At the State Department's request, DynCorp fired several managers involved and flew "senior leadership" to Afghanistan to do face-to-face ethics training.
"They responded responsibly," the State spokeswoman said.
I'm puzzled; where's the horrible human rights abuse, or even anything remotely salacious in the above story? The story says it's a common practice among Afghans, so why is it "culturally insensitive" for a group of contractors at a training session there to share in some loca dinner entertainment which the story in no way describes as being coerced or sexual? How is this any different from when Hillary Clinton goes on a state visit to Thailand and a troupe of local dancers performs at dinner?
How so after your current Windows 7 PC breaks and Windows 8 starts coming preinstalled on all new x86 laptops that don't bear an Apple logo?
Insert your Win7 DVD and install onto your new PC.
If you don't have an install disc or you aren't able to go through the Win7 setup process on other hardware than your previous computer, then the simple reality is that you don't and never did own Windows 7 in addition to owning a PC. You owned a specific Win7 device that was a holistic sum of its multiple hardware/software/firmware parts, and the purchase price of your device was most likely subsidized by OEM licensing/rebate agreements.
When that specific Win7 device broke, you no longer owned a working Win7 device. Now, because you never purchased Windows7, but rather a device, you must go to the store and purchase whatever Win[x] devices are currently on the market (if you choose to continue using Windows). It makes little sense to complain that a specific consumer electronics device in a continually changing technology industry you bought three years ago will not still be on the market three years from now. If your approach to a computer is to buy an existing model from the store with pre-loaded software and never tweak/hack/upgrade the hardware/firmware components, then I'd say you might take a look at Apple products while you're at the store, because you're approaching a PC as if it were a Mac with two or three specific product lines that are designed to go from factory to consumer to landfill having never been opened up and played with.
I always thought the contraction was "qubit" for "Quantum Bit".
Is "quibit" an accepted variant spelling, and, if so, where does the extra letter "i" come from?
Such semantically-vacuous automobile naming reached its ironic barftastic peak back when Toyota decided to name their largest and most gas-guzzling SUV line the SEQUOIA. [facepalm]
Apparently you aren't familiar with any crackheads. It's always the "I don't use drugs" people who think legalization is such a bright idea. Legalize pot. Keep everything else illegal. I love LSD, for example, but I don't think it should be legal to buy it in a store. How comfortable would you feel knowing that anyone could go to Rite-Aid and purchase a vial of liquid they could sneak in your coffee that would make you go insane for the rest of your life?
Well, considering Home Depot and WalMart are filled with readily available toxins that you could use to poison/damage/kill someone, I think your question is just a scare tactic -- which is borne out by your question being phrased in terms of "comfortable". Since when do civil liberties have to do with you being "comfortable"? Does Rick Santorum need to be "comfortable" with porn and weed in order for them to remain legal?
"Profit" is just the special term we apply to the leftover revenue when a seller receives more money than was spent to produce something. "Savings" or "discount" or "bargain" is the special term we apply to the leftover disposable income when a buyer spends less capacity (money) than the value required to produce something themselves. But they are flip sides of the same thing -- getting more out of a transaction than you would have in a strictly equalized interaction.
Do you not feel that it is possible for both the "super-rich elite" to realize a benefit in the form of profit from selling you something, while at the same time you realize a benefit in the form of savings when you purchase that thing?
That is, the company realizes a savings because they had to spend less of their capacity (money) to produce something and bring it to market, and you the buyer realizes a profit because you sold the company an amount of dollars and received something that you value more than the total of that dollar amount.
Those businesses and their goods/services don't exist in a vacuum. Are you suggesting that nobody except the super-rich elite class benefits from cheap, secure, and reliable freight/shipping/transportation?
We have to hold the political system to its fiduciary duty to safeguard citizens against exploitation by the economic system.
Where is that duty spelled out?
Define "exploitation".
Describe what are the limits "the political system" is not allowed to cross in its efforts with regard to "the economic system".
Cool coincidince -- just yesterday I checked out this book from my local library: Through the language glass: why the world looks different in other languages
By Guy Deutscher
In the pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above [e.g. “Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions”] is – yes. In this plaidoyer for culture, I will argue that cultural differences are reflected in language in profound ways, and that a growing body of reliable scientific research provides solid evidence that our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world. But before you relegate this book to the crackpot shelf, next to last year’s fad-diet recipes and the How to Bond with Your Goldfish manual, I give you my solemn pledge that we will not indulge in groundless twaddle of any kind. We shall not be imposing monistic views on any universes, we shall not soar to such loft questions as which languages have more “esprit,” nor shall we delve into the mysteries of which cultures are more “profound.” The problems that will occupy us in this book are of a very different kind.
I've only gotten 10 pages in so I'm not sure what his foundation will rest on, but the author has a precise and smooth writing style that promises to make the book an enjoyable read -- which is often a toss-up in nonfiction even when you're very interested in the topic.
I took some linguistics classes in college, and I remember learning about the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, which the professor explained with obvious contempt. I've also read some of the work of both Pinker and Chomsky, and honestly, as persuasive and brilliant as both those men are, I never was convinced that there isn't a link between a group's native language toolset and the resulting thought process which might tend to be used to solve a problem such as differentiating between concepts or assigning priority or order to objects.
Furthermore, in this decade we have seen research indicating that native speakers of tonal languages may be more likely to develop the musical skill known as "perfect pitch". (Short version here). If the very tonal structure of a language can dramatically shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort tones in general, can we so easily scoff at the possibility that the semantic structure of a language might shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort concepts in general?
Slashdot Mirror
"I imagine the Israelis on an individual level are generally pretty cool people."
No, no they are not. As someone who has worked in the tourism industry for 10 years in New Zealand I can safely say that are the most rude, tight fisted, obnoxious travellers on the planet.
As someone non-Jewish living in the USA who has traveled to many countries including New Zealand, I can safely say that what you are describing fits a large number of tourists to any country from any ethnic/religious/political group. Travelers, particularly long-haul global travelers, tend to be very cost-conscious and emotionally guarded when in far off countries. You really don't know the local culture at all, you don't know what's safe, what's a fair price, who to trust, what the various laws are. To judge an entire ethnicity by the way some people of that ethinicity behave while in the quite unique social situation of being on a holiday that is no doubt costing at least $3,000 per person, is a clear case of you looking to justify something you already believed.
Also, as someone who ended up sharing time on a small boat in southeast Asia with a young Israeli couple I had never met before, I found them quite charming and easy-going conversationalists.
I wonder if there are any applications to turn WiFi-enabled smartphones into a mesh relay network. That will enable a communication channel in case of provider shutdown. Self-organizing wireless mesh networks was a popular topic few years ago.
The software aspect could be done now. The problem is that turning your phone/tablet into a router/switch is gonna suck your battery down to zero in a very very short time interval.
Yet again with the black and white view of the world. There is a huge difference between "you Negroes can not protest here in a whites-only restaurant, please move it a couple hundred feet to the Colored restaurant where it is safer for everyone" and "you can not protest at all". You seem to miss a very important point; whites-only restaurants with black people in them are an inherently dangerous place. Short of shutting down all such restaurants they will always be inherently dangerous.
In a place like a subway station there are things BART and police can do to mitigate dangers
1. Block off the edges of unused portions of the platform so falling protestors and electrified rails and the underside of moving trains do not mix. Unless your engineers/architects are complete morons, the same trains stop at the same places every time, every day, within 10-24 inches. Have openings in your restraining system with sufficient +/- tolerance for the train doors.
2. Allow free movement to decrease crowding and decrease the possibility of someone being trampled.
3. Set up crowd control systems to keep opposing groups like actual passengers and protestors separate so they do not come to the apparently irresistable urge to push each other into the path of the trains.
All of this takes space which would be available on a subway platform if the operator cared to do it instead of taking the easy route of counterinsurgency measures to disrupt protestors' communications
The ONLY thing standing between the people and freedom is portable energy. The day we can instantly create and power (i.e. SUSTAIN) ad-hoc distributed P2P networks using our personal wireless devices is the day all this same old control-suppress crap ends and a bizarre future world (with all new crap) begins. This networked app -- call it an "appwork" will detect the flow of proximity/signal strength of the appwork nodes in mass protest situations and automatically direct apparticipants to move x-meters to the left or up 1 flight of stairs to ensure all apparticipants have sufficient coverage to take advantage of the appwork's features. Every protest crowd becomes as beautiful and agile as a flock of hundreds of birds which shifts directions dozens of times in a minute with only fractional delays. Instead of a carefully rehearsed, short-lived one-off scripted flash mob, every flash mob becomes a shifting wave pattern that is exceedingly difficult to disrupt.
And there are not already laws and fire codes governing maximum occupancy of BART stations? There are not already rules of conduct for ridership?
All you apologists keep saying, "someone could...." "it is possible..." "there's a chance that...."
Do you have any idea how corrupted such thinking is at its core? All you have done is created a standard whereby protests must be able to guarantee 100% safety from any and all collateral damage. You are just not thinking clearly. We shouldn't allow thousands of black-skinned americans to march on Birmingham City Hall to protest for equal treatment under the law, because someone could get pushed in front of a car, it is possible that someone might get trampled in the crowd, there's a chance that there will be a riot sparked when the KKK shows up.
Umm, devil's advocate: why can't the 4-year-old girl be considered a terror suspect?
I mean, once we start saying things like "well she can't be a terrorist, she's a grandmother!" or "she can't be a terrorist, she's just a 4-year-old girl!" aren't we essentially letting the world know that these are the loopholes that can allow you to get past the TSA?
Do I think the 4-year-old girl was a terrorist? No. Do I think it's impossible though? No.
You're a terrorist cell. You need to get the (whatever) to your guy on the inside so he can hijack/blow up the plane. You find a family in a generally unsuspecting demographic. You kidnap the mother. You tell the father that unless he has his 4-year-old girl smuggle (whatever) to the terrorist who has already crossed the gate into the terminal you will kill the mother. The little girl won't actually be on the plane, she'll just be giving the (whatever) to the terrorist, then she's free to go and the father gets his family back.
Is that a movie plot? Sure. Is it likely to happen? I don't know but probably not.
You don't know? The father, under the most dire emotional stress that could ever exist in a human life, is going to just "have" his 4-year-old smuggle something to a terrorist the child doesn't know? How many 4-year-olds have you raised? A 4-year-old is as controllable and dependable for a precision operation like you describe as would be an adopted alley cat or jackrabbit. You'll have phases where it's a daily ordeal just to get a 4-year-old to share one toy with a sibling, eat a meal (even if it's something yummy like hot dogs or chicken nuggets or cheese sandwiches), brush their teeth, go potty, etc. Even being willing simply to say Hi to a stranger from six feet away is unthinkable for many toddlers/children, and you have your terrorists just happening to luck into kidnapping the mother of the next generation's Olsen twins?
Seriously, step back from the LCD screen, turn to face a window where you can see the unbroken line of sky and trees outside, and now describe your scenario again out loud to the room. If after listening to yourself speak the words you still think, "Hey man it could happen", there's a disconnect somewhere between you and Reality.
That was my first thought too. I still remember eraser and "The First Battle of Bull Run" and toreador petticoats.
Anyone who grew up reading Encylopedia Brown stores -- you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Joe Meno's wistfully spare The Boy Detective Fails. If you can imagine indie shoegazer music put into book form, this would surely by part of that imaginary genre's major canon.
I've spoke with people who let a phone caller from "Microsoft" take control of their PC.
I've had 2-3 of these a year for the last few years and I try and string them along as long as possible as a service to :-(
society... Its great fun, but don't try and buy time by saying you have to switch your computer on, they just ring off
Well, if you think about it, someone who doesn't leave their computer on all the time is a less desirable target for data harvesters or trojan/botnet admins. The more someone uses their computer to manage more parts of their life (and therefore have more sensitive data stored there) the more likely they are to leave it on all the time, for later rooted perusal, DDOS zombie use, etc.
Translation: "I don't have a citation either, but trust me".
Translation: not only are you being an ass, you're also being a great fool.
You keep using the word "citation". I do not believe it means what you think it does. Asking for a citation in this kind of conversation (in which you are clearly over your head) doesn't address your problem, it simply inserts another layer of abstraction between you and someone else just like me making the same well-informed statements.
See, the thing is, I already know - from almost two decades of working in the field - that I know what I'm talking about. Therefore, I know that if you had sufficient knowledge of the subject to be in any position to judge the accuracy of my statements, you would already have recognized the truth told to you by me and several others in this sub-thread. Therefore, I can clearly infer that you can't handle this truth due to some internal problem of your own.
That is, if you can't recognize a well-informed statement when you read it, then you either have no knowledge whatsoever about how an ILS works (and therefore insufficient background to understand the conversation whooshing over your head), or you have very poor critical thinking tools (and therefore insufficient intellect to understand the conversation whooshing over your head).
So, either way --- WHOOSH!
Translation: I don't have a citation.
You specified that *all* records were deleted - which means there's no record of it being borrowed. But getting details wrong is typical when you make stuff up.
Now you're just being an ass.
I spent many years working as an IT manager for academic libraries. Jah-Wren is correct. Subsequent to the PATRIOT Act, almost every library which previously had kept borrower history (and even this was not universal since many libraries already took an aggressive approach to the ALA privacy philosophy) began deleting identifiable borrower information, preserving only statistical data like number of times circulated/browsed/renewed, length of loan, etc. And for academic libraries in particular, the ones who didn't take the PATRIOT Act seriously have taken the same approach due to FERPA concerns.
This isn't rocket surgery, it's a pretty straightforward database tweak to discard certain data and preserve other data. Now, at many libraries the instant a book is scanned (discharged) after return, the system wipes the last user data. This adds an additional hassle in that if you find an item, say, in your curbside drop box, which is overdue/lost, then depending on how your ILS interface works (e.g. does it provide on-screen prompts or errors for such items) you may have to train your staff to immediately stop and record the information on the screen before scanning the next item, or else you'll have an "orphaned" fine/fee on a patron record, because the item was returned and some portion of the patron's fine/fee should be forgiven, but you don't have any way of knowing which patron had the item.
...are greatly exaggerated, since the valuation of a college degree is in direct correlation to the unwillingness of employers to hire anyone without some acronymic degree/certification into preferred positions, for the simple fact that well-meaning social-engineering progressive equality laws have forced them to have some legally objective standard (i.e. nothingGEDhigh school diplomasome collegeassociatestechnical certbachelor'smaster'smaster's + technical certdoctorate) by which to justify hiring Candidate A over Candidate G. May God have mercy on your soul if you hire Candidate A (unprotected class) over Candidate B (member of a protected class) without having a CYA C.V alphabet soup of "achievements" to justify your choice.
So long as employers need a "Qualification Theater" on-paper justification for hiring the best person for the job rather than a protected idiot, the college degree will maintain its value. Indeed. as government regulation and legal exposure have increased over the last 50 years, so has there been a corresponding arms race in educational qualifications for various jobs. The 1980s Bachelors is now required to hold ridiculous entry-level Word/Excel paperwork jobs, and a Masters is what you need to have a hope of management, with all those previous Masters folks going back for eMBAs or a Ph.D, J.D., Ed.D, etc.
The educational market will not crash hard until the job market crashes hard. Fact is, with modern efficiencies we have way too many bodies being employed to do way too little work. The Information Revolution has not truly even begun. You'll know it has begun when, like all revolutions, masses of people are left with their lives evaporated overnight, or perhaps lined up against the wall. This is not that. Yet.
How was this modded troll? It's sarcastic, yes... but not untruthful. Fracking DOES have potentially massive consequences... a quick google-search or even Wikipedia article glancing will tell you that.
Unless of course you were modded troll because they were perhaps referring to deep well drilling and not fracking... although as it stands, there's getting to be fewer and fewer choices to NOT resort to fracking.
I can't speak to why it was modded Troll, but as someone who currently has mod points it should have been modded Offtopic. It does the whole ironic over-exaggeration of its parent in order to attempt to rebut the parent, but in doing so it introduces an exaggeration of a claim which the parent never made. Thus, it belongs to that highly popular class of Internet argumenation known as strawmantum ad absurdum .
Absolutely nowhere in Petron's post did Petron say that no problem can result from drilling on land. Petron's point seems to be that IF you are going to continue extracting/burning oil (which unless tonight some local housewife discovers stable cold fusion using this one weird trick the gasoline companies don't want you to know about, we will still be doing tomorrow) it is safer and more efficient to use land-based or shallow-water wells where oversight is easier and disaster mitigation is speedier, cheaper, and far less technologically complex.
Petron was pointing out the irony that platforms like the Deepwater Horizon exist primarily due to the unintended consequences of a myopic out-of-sight-out-of-mind brand of environmentalism that may actually result in far greater ecological harm than if the same type of problem were to occur on land or in shallow easily-reached water. Thus, because darkmeridian doesn't address this point or offern any substantive rebuttal (e.g. presenting some argument that in fact land-based drilling is less efficient and more technologically complex than deepwater extraction [a very hard argument to make, hence resorting to the refuge of strawmantum ad absurdum]), darkmeridian's post is therefore not topically relevant to this sub-thread.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-reveals-that-mi_n_793816.html
Yep, big yawn-o-rama.
Yes, it pretty much is.
State Department Denies Sexual Abuse of ‘Dancing Boy’
I'm puzzled; where's the horrible human rights abuse, or even anything remotely salacious in the above story? The story says it's a common practice among Afghans, so why is it "culturally insensitive" for a group of contractors at a training session there to share in some loca dinner entertainment which the story in no way describes as being coerced or sexual? How is this any different from when Hillary Clinton goes on a state visit to Thailand and a troupe of local dancers performs at dinner?
Then use Windows 7.
How so after your current Windows 7 PC breaks and Windows 8 starts coming preinstalled on all new x86 laptops that don't bear an Apple logo?
Insert your Win7 DVD and install onto your new PC.
If you don't have an install disc or you aren't able to go through the Win7 setup process on other hardware than your previous computer, then the simple reality is that you don't and never did own Windows 7 in addition to owning a PC. You owned a specific Win7 device that was a holistic sum of its multiple hardware/software/firmware parts, and the purchase price of your device was most likely subsidized by OEM licensing/rebate agreements.
When that specific Win7 device broke, you no longer owned a working Win7 device. Now, because you never purchased Windows7, but rather a device, you must go to the store and purchase whatever Win[x] devices are currently on the market (if you choose to continue using Windows). It makes little sense to complain that a specific consumer electronics device in a continually changing technology industry you bought three years ago will not still be on the market three years from now. If your approach to a computer is to buy an existing model from the store with pre-loaded software and never tweak/hack/upgrade the hardware/firmware components, then I'd say you might take a look at Apple products while you're at the store, because you're approaching a PC as if it were a Mac with two or three specific product lines that are designed to go from factory to consumer to landfill having never been opened up and played with.
Oh my, I think you have largely or even entirely misunderstood your role in their business model.
How exactly is "End User" "just as ambiguous in this context as customer"? Either what or what can it mean?
Office Cube Farm Accounts Receivable Clerk = End User = WindowsOS application developer = End User = Aunt Carol on Facebook using MSIE = End User
The above equality is false.
I always thought the contraction was "qubit" for "Quantum Bit".
Is "quibit" an accepted variant spelling, and, if so, where does the extra letter "i" come from?
Plus arboreal sequoias love to drink gasoline, right?
Such semantically-vacuous automobile naming reached its ironic barftastic peak back when Toyota decided to name their largest and most gas-guzzling SUV line the SEQUOIA. [facepalm]
Apparently you aren't familiar with any crackheads. It's always the "I don't use drugs" people who think legalization is such a bright idea. Legalize pot. Keep everything else illegal. I love LSD, for example, but I don't think it should be legal to buy it in a store. How comfortable would you feel knowing that anyone could go to Rite-Aid and purchase a vial of liquid they could sneak in your coffee that would make you go insane for the rest of your life?
Well, considering Home Depot and WalMart are filled with readily available toxins that you could use to poison/damage/kill someone, I think your question is just a scare tactic -- which is borne out by your question being phrased in terms of "comfortable". Since when do civil liberties have to do with you being "comfortable"? Does Rick Santorum need to be "comfortable" with porn and weed in order for them to remain legal?
"Profit" is just the special term we apply to the leftover revenue when a seller receives more money than was spent to produce something. "Savings" or "discount" or "bargain" is the special term we apply to the leftover disposable income when a buyer spends less capacity (money) than the value required to produce something themselves. But they are flip sides of the same thing -- getting more out of a transaction than you would have in a strictly equalized interaction.
Do you not feel that it is possible for both the "super-rich elite" to realize a benefit in the form of profit from selling you something, while at the same time you realize a benefit in the form of savings when you purchase that thing?
That is, the company realizes a savings because they had to spend less of their capacity (money) to produce something and bring it to market, and you the buyer realizes a profit because you sold the company an amount of dollars and received something that you value more than the total of that dollar amount.
Those businesses and their goods/services don't exist in a vacuum. Are you suggesting that nobody except the super-rich elite class benefits from cheap, secure, and reliable freight/shipping/transportation?
We have to hold the political system to its fiduciary duty to safeguard citizens against exploitation by the economic system.
Where is that duty spelled out?
Define "exploitation".
Describe what are the limits "the political system" is not allowed to cross in its efforts with regard to "the economic system".
"Paint a Vulgar Picture" as written by Johnny Marr, Steven Patrick Morrissey
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
Through the language glass: why the world looks different in other languages
By Guy Deutscher
(GoogleBooks Preview).
From the introduction:
I've only gotten 10 pages in so I'm not sure what his foundation will rest on, but the author has a precise and smooth writing style that promises to make the book an enjoyable read -- which is often a toss-up in nonfiction even when you're very interested in the topic.
I took some linguistics classes in college, and I remember learning about the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, which the professor explained with obvious contempt. I've also read some of the work of both Pinker and Chomsky, and honestly, as persuasive and brilliant as both those men are, I never was convinced that there isn't a link between a group's native language toolset and the resulting thought process which might tend to be used to solve a problem such as differentiating between concepts or assigning priority or order to objects.
Furthermore, in this decade we have seen research indicating that native speakers of tonal languages may be more likely to develop the musical skill known as "perfect pitch". (Short version here). If the very tonal structure of a language can dramatically shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort tones in general, can we so easily scoff at the possibility that the semantic structure of a language might shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort concepts in general?