Civil liberty groups are against this because it would, among other things, require a national ID card
Not really. Birth certificates are good enough. Yes, they can be forged, but they can also be checked against state and hospital records. What's needed is just something to motivate employers to actually check. A law imposing stiff penalties on employers of undocumented workers would accomplish that, as long as there's a good chance of getting caught. Another law offering illegal aliens a green card for turning in their boss would nearly ensure that employers would be caught.
either fines and enforcement make employing illegals an economically bad decision or the status quo continues no matter how much money is wasted at the border or how many hispanics are harassed in the streets
THIS is the only solution that will work. You have to remove the motive, which means removing the jobs. How to do that? Simple: severely punish any US citizens who hire undocumented immigrants. I mean significant fines (say, $10K per worker) plus jail time. The first sentences can be short (maybe 30 days), but repeat offenses should ratchet the time up quickly, and being found to have hired N undocumented immigrants counts as N-1 repeat offenses.
How to identify those citizens? Also simple: Offer green cards to undocumented workers who turn in their boss. Very few employers of undocumented workers will be safe, and almost none of them will dare believe they're safe.
No one has to man those.....and should prove to be effective a stopping illegal invaders from crossing.
Also... fences with machine guns wired to sensors on the fence. And the guards should be ready to shoot down any homemade hot-air balloons that try to float over.
A program's mainline code is statically linked. At least when I'm writing a program, I often use small utilities I've written over the years. They aren't substantial enough to be put into a shared library, and they contain plenty of functions a given program never calls.
I use shared libraries for those.
On Unix systems there's very little reason not to. On Windows it's a bit of work (not a lot, but some) to fix your code up so it can be used as a DLL, but on Unix it's just some compiler and linker flags -- and not even that if you're using a build system that takes care of it for you. The only downsides are (a) possibly a tiny bit of wasted RAM as unused functions that happen to be on the same page as used function are loaded, but that is typically more than offset if two programs using the library might be running at once, and (b) an extra lib to distribute with the executable. In practice, (b) is a non-issue as the installation and packaging tools can pick up all such dependencies automagically. Well, I guess it increases the size of the distributed package a bit, but that's trivial.
Function-level linking is comparison is so trivial, I'm wondering why it's so uncommon on Unix
Because static linking is so uncommon. If you are linking statically, you can use -ffunction-sections to put each function into its own section so the linker can skip all the unused ones.
Sufficiently-large environmental differences may result in a significantly different phenotype, though. So while actual speciation might take a very long time, it's possible that a child born and raised on Mars might be physically different from an Earth child. I would expect the decreased gravity to have an effect on bone development, for example.
Are your fingers not capable of independent movement? Multitouch gestures on any mobile device have always meant multiple-fingers, one-hand.
It's impossible to perform multi-touch gestures with the hand holding the phone. Multi-touch inherently requires two hands -- one to hold the phone and one to perform the gesture. Well, unless you have a convenient, stable surface on which to place the phone and don't mind taking the time to put it down, perform the gesture, and pick it up again.
While 1000ft exclusion zones around schools, parks, playgrounds, daycares etc sound like a reasonable idea to most people I've always wondered how difficult it must be to actually go places and obey them.
Danged near impossible.
I interact on a regular basis with law-abiding people who'd like to be able to carry a gun for self-defense, but for whatever reason don't have a concealed carry permit. In the state I live in (Utah), it is perfectly legal to carry a gun without a permit as long as it isn't concealed, and as long as you don't have a round chambered, BUT there's a huge caveat -- school zones.
Per state law, within 1000 feet of the property of any school, which includes pre-school, day-care, K-12 and post-secondary schools (universities, cosmetology schools, etc.), it's illegal to be in possession of a firearm. So, being the careful, conscientious citizens that they are, some of these open carriers have carefully identified all of the school properties and plotted out 1000 foot-radius areas around them. The result is that in any community in Utah the map is pretty much a solid red zone, with only occasional "cracks" where it's legal to possess a gun. It's the same in many other states. There's also a federal law that says much the same thing, though it isn't enforced.
Of course, in the case of the gun-free zones, the laws have some exceptions for firearms in vehicle, firearms on private property, etc., so with some care it is possible to carry without a permit without breaking the law. But similar exceptions aren't likely to be applied to sex offenders. The result will be that there is virtually no place for them to live, or work, or shop, and even if they can find places for all of them, there aren't likely to be any routes between those places.
He is also in campaign mode because he is going up for re-election in 2012 and already has some people in his own party nipping on his heels to kick him out if he makes a big mistake (to the Utah voters).
That's an understatement. There are lots of people in the Republican party in Utah who are planning to do the same thing to him that they did to Bob Bennett -- who didn't even make it to the primary. I don't mean he was defeated in the primary, I mean he was a sitting Senator who didn't even get his party's nomination. A lot of people in Utah are very unhappy with Hatch, bacon or no bacon, and I think it's highly likely that he's going down in 2012.
The reason people were given the right to own arms, is because their government is obligated to keep a "standing army" to repel invaders. But freedom lovers (including our Founding Fathers) were aware that it was that very standing army that was the biggest threat to the people and their freedom.
More precisely, the Founding Fathers feared standing armies and so tried to establish a system where a standing army was not required. To that end, they wanted citizens to be armed, and they wanted the military forces to be primarily under the control of the states, not the federal government. That's why the Constitution limits appropriations for an army to two years, and why it specifies that Congress' role is to define the "discipline" of the militias, but that the states were to appoint the officers.
The plan was to put the arms in the hands of the people, the leadership in the hands of the states and then have Congress define the training and equipment standards to maintain uniformity so that in the event of a war, the militias could come together into a cohesive military force, funded by short-term appropriations from Congress.
This was all intended not as a counter to the power of a standing army, but as an alternative to even having a standing army. This doesn't discount your point, of course. We're talking about a group of men who had just violently tossed their own oppressive government out, and knew very well that the ability of the people to resist tyranny was critical.
Personally, I think we've done ourselves a huge disservice by moving away from the militia model. It'll never happen, but I'd really like to see all of the high-tech non-naval forces of the federal military moved to the control of the states' organized militias (aka the National Guards), and I'd like to see the bulk of our infantry fighting power moved back to the unorganized militia, encouraging (and perhaps even subsidizing) individual ownership of military small arms and training in their use.
Among other things, this would force us to treat military power as a defensive tool, and stop "projecting power" around the world so much -- which gets us in lots of other peoples' trouble. It would also massively reduce federal military expenditures and would help transfer the balance of power back to the states. Even when it's not used, everyone understands that he who has the military power holds a lot of political power. That would be the biggest benefit... more dispersal of power, to the states and to the people.
You'll notice that the criteria don't include "intellectual fulfillment." Actuaries rate pretty highly in all the criteria the study considers, but perhaps their job is not as interesting as some others.
I know some actuaries, and they find their jobs very intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. For people who really like math and statistics, doing it professionally is enjoyable and challenging. It's not like actuaries spend their days adding up big columns of numbers -- we have computers for that. Actuaries figure out how to use sophisticated statistics to tease out subtle patterns from large masses of information. It's challenging and the results are often surprising.
Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.6 which which [sic] increases the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac
Looks like CmdrTaco has been studying at the Fox News School of Journalistic Neutrality. I believe the preferred formulation would be,
"Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.6 which Apple claims 'increases the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac'".
So, Apple admits their previous OS was unstable, incompatible and insecure?
Less stable, less compatible and less secure. It's not like any of those things are bi-valued. Each is a continuum... in fact each is a continuum in multiple dimensions.
And, obviously, your phone can act as a contactless credit card -- but one with much better security because the phone has the ability to authenticate the user where the card doesn't, necessarily.
I don't think so. A smartcard is much more secure than a phone. In fact, I've worked on an NFC project where the phone was just a relay between the user and the SIM card. All the cryptographic operations were done on the card. The phone was just used as a user interface to enter the PIN code.
An NFC chip is a smart card (which may or may not be the same smart card chip as the SIM). Yes, the phone is "just" a user interface to enter the PIN code, but contrast that with a typical contactless smart card which, if a PIN is used at all, is only entered via a payment terminal which isn't under your control and may have been hacked or may even be bogus. Moving the PIN authentication to a device that's under your control is a big win for security (assuming it's actually under your control -- I'm really worried that handset and OS manufacturers aren't paying enough attention to security).
The recently-published EMV Chip & PIN hack is completely irrelevant if the attacker can't insert something between your keypad and the smart card chip, for example. Also, with a phone as the authentication device, there's no technological reason why we have to stick with four-digit PINs. It's perfectly feasible to put a fingerprint scanner in the phone, for example, or to use a longer password, or to apply cadence analysis as an additional metric. Or you could use the phone's camera, aimed at yourself, to use facial recognition for authentication. Or any combination of the above. The specific tradeoffs of convenience vs security can be customized by the user.
When you embed the payment chip in a phone, you add to it a screen, a keypad, a camera, a microphone and a network connection, plus the possibility to add additional I/O devices. Applied with some intelligence and a focus on security, that can be used to create a payment mechanism that is vastly more secure than an ISO 7816-1 plastic card.
NFC isn't RFID. It's RFID plus a simple extension to allow it to both read and be read..
It's not just RFID. NFC is two completely different RF technologies packaged together. One is contactless smart card technology (ISO 14443), at the frequency 13.56 Mhz, which enables very close-range (centimeters) relatively high-bandwidth (up to 800 kbps) bi-directional communication and is the technology used by the better contactless credit card payment systems, using cryptographic security. The other is what's normally called RFID, I forget which ISO standard, but it's at 900 Mhz and functions at much longer ranges (up to a meter or two) but only enables very simple communication. RFID tags are typically very "stupid" -- no microprocessor and many of them can't do anything other than respond with a number fixed at manufacture time when energized by a reader. Others allow the short numeric code they contain to be changed.
NFC actually enables the phone to operate as either reader or card/tag with both of these RF technologies.
This means that your phone can, in theory, act as a contactless smart card payment terminal, allowing you to accept credit card payments from an ordinary contactless credit card, or from another phone acting as a card. And, obviously, your phone can act as a contactless credit card -- but one with much better security because the phone has the ability to authenticate the user where the card doesn't, necessarily. Well, better security unless your phone gets rooted...
Oh, and of course, you'll be able to put multiple credit card accounts on your phone, so you can eliminate your cards from your wallet.
An NFC phone can also act as RFID reader, meaning that as retailers shift from putting barcodes on packages to cheap RFID tags, you'll be able to scan merchandise with your phone (you can do this now with phone cameras and UPC codes, but it's much less fiddly with RFID). Other use cases that get bandied about are things like embedding RFID tags in movie posters so you can scan the poster and get taken to a web site with more information (really, this is a use case that is OFTEN discussed in the industry as a sample application, as lame as it is). Finally, an NFC phone can act as an RFID tag. A commonly-suggested application for that is simple loyalty cards, like the Subway card that gets you a free sandwich after so many purchases. So you can get rid of those from your wallet also.
All of these features will, of course, be controllable by the phone's software, so they can be completely disabled when they should not be used, which is very nice for security and privacy. Again, assuming your phone remains under your control.
And thereby do we traverse the tortuous path from intelligence to wisdom...
And at the end of the road we realize that we should act just as we did in the beginning, not because it's a more productive way to work, but so we can get a little damned peace and quiet!
I didn't say we're equally bad. But any time you find yourself thinking you are better than someone else, you should think again. Most likely you're just not noticing your own faults, and not recognizing their virtues. Working on yourself is great. Pointing fingers and saying the world's problems are because others aren't as good as you is not only wrong... it's the source of at least as many of the world's problems as the faults you listed.
And, yes, I recognize the inherent hypocrisy of that paragraph.
Contract negotiation is a right that only entities with significant amounts of money have.
Contract negotiation is something that happens between peers, more or less. If you're dirt poor, you can (and often do) negotiate contracts with other people of your same economic status. You may not write it all down in legalese, of course, but that's not a required element of a contract.
The "more or less" is important as well. I have negotiated employment contracts a few times, and I was negotiating with a multi-billion-dollar company. But they wanted to hire me and my changes to the standard contract terms were reasonable, so they accepted them. In this case, Wikipedia and Google aren't peers in any financial sense, but they certainly are in terms of web prominence and name recognition. More importantly, Wikipedia brings enough opportunity for Google to the table that Wikipedia has a strong position. Particularly since Wikipedia has proven that it can operate, and very successfully, without Google's ads.
And, actually, you CAN negotiate with Comcast and Verizon. I called Comcast a few months ago when my introductory rate expired and told them I wanted to cancel because the regular price was too high. They extended my introductory rate for another year. That's contract negotiation. It's a different form of it, because when you're dealing with large retailers it's simply impractical for them to negotiate highly-individualized contracts with every one of their customers. So the contracts are written by the retailers and customers are given the option of taking it or leaving it... mostly. Some caveats are included to allow customer service reps to tweak the deal in specific ways in order to retain business, and all of those introductory offers and promotional deals are just another way of altering the deal slightly in order to entice more people to sign up.
Contract negotiation is for everyone. What you can negotiate, as well as as why and how, changes depending on your position (which encompasses more than just your financial position, though that's a huge element), but it's nearly always an option to some degree.
Because he doesn't want to date a fat chick. It's not like fat guys want to date fat girls.
And it's not like girls want to date fat guys, either. His own obesity has a much larger impact on his prospects than the obesity of the female population. Men who are fit and look good are hunting among the population of females who are fit and look good. Given that the obesity rates are about equal among males and females, fit men may have fewer fit women to choose from, but they're also facing fewer competitors.
Net impact on prospects is that they're unchanged.
Actually, my attitude isn't cynical, it's accepting. Everyone is stupid, ignorant, greedy and power-hungry at least some of the time. Some people try harder to avoid it than others, but we all fail.
I find your attitude to be pretentious and holier-than-thou. Any time you find yourself thinking "I'm better than THOSE people because X, Y and Z", you need a dose of humility and you need to pay more attention to your own failings -- in particular, your own stupidity, ignorance, greed and hunger for power.
Yes, and after Wikipedia has become dependend on the income from Google they can start changing the policy as they wish.
So Wikipedia should ask for the policy to be specified contractually, with a specified re-negotiation interval and a defined re-negotiation process that requires mutual agreement for any changes. The contract should also specify that either party may walk away, but that, say, six months' notice is required. That would give Google an out, but ensure that Wikipedia has time to restructure their fundraising.
Really, all of these sorts of problems can be solved. This is what contract negotiation is for.
From the perspective of an average man in the United States : there are a number of factors working against the average man in the U.S. today in terms of dating.
1. The obesity epidemic. This removes millions of women who have the genetics to be desirable, but are instead obese.
How does that work against the average US man? He's fat, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Civil liberty groups are against this because it would, among other things, require a national ID card
Not really. Birth certificates are good enough. Yes, they can be forged, but they can also be checked against state and hospital records. What's needed is just something to motivate employers to actually check. A law imposing stiff penalties on employers of undocumented workers would accomplish that, as long as there's a good chance of getting caught. Another law offering illegal aliens a green card for turning in their boss would nearly ensure that employers would be caught.
either fines and enforcement make employing illegals an economically bad decision or the status quo continues no matter how much money is wasted at the border or how many hispanics are harassed in the streets
THIS is the only solution that will work. You have to remove the motive, which means removing the jobs. How to do that? Simple: severely punish any US citizens who hire undocumented immigrants. I mean significant fines (say, $10K per worker) plus jail time. The first sentences can be short (maybe 30 days), but repeat offenses should ratchet the time up quickly, and being found to have hired N undocumented immigrants counts as N-1 repeat offenses.
How to identify those citizens? Also simple: Offer green cards to undocumented workers who turn in their boss. Very few employers of undocumented workers will be safe, and almost none of them will dare believe they're safe.
Illegal immigration is illegal (duh)
Are you sure about that? Can you find me the federal criminal law that says so?
I've done this research, and I could tell you what you'll find, but it's more instructive if you do it yourself.
Why not just line the border with land mines?
No one has to man those.....and should prove to be effective a stopping illegal invaders from crossing.
Also... fences with machine guns wired to sensors on the fence. And the guards should be ready to shoot down any homemade hot-air balloons that try to float over.
A program's mainline code is statically linked. At least when I'm writing a program, I often use small utilities I've written over the years. They aren't substantial enough to be put into a shared library, and they contain plenty of functions a given program never calls.
I use shared libraries for those.
On Unix systems there's very little reason not to. On Windows it's a bit of work (not a lot, but some) to fix your code up so it can be used as a DLL, but on Unix it's just some compiler and linker flags -- and not even that if you're using a build system that takes care of it for you. The only downsides are (a) possibly a tiny bit of wasted RAM as unused functions that happen to be on the same page as used function are loaded, but that is typically more than offset if two programs using the library might be running at once, and (b) an extra lib to distribute with the executable. In practice, (b) is a non-issue as the installation and packaging tools can pick up all such dependencies automagically. Well, I guess it increases the size of the distributed package a bit, but that's trivial.
Function-level linking is comparison is so trivial, I'm wondering why it's so uncommon on Unix
Because static linking is so uncommon. If you are linking statically, you can use -ffunction-sections to put each function into its own section so the linker can skip all the unused ones.
And that's different from most marriages.....how?
Duh. The space travel.
Sufficiently-large environmental differences may result in a significantly different phenotype, though. So while actual speciation might take a very long time, it's possible that a child born and raised on Mars might be physically different from an Earth child. I would expect the decreased gravity to have an effect on bone development, for example.
Are your fingers not capable of independent movement? Multitouch gestures on any mobile device have always meant multiple-fingers, one-hand.
It's impossible to perform multi-touch gestures with the hand holding the phone. Multi-touch inherently requires two hands -- one to hold the phone and one to perform the gesture. Well, unless you have a convenient, stable surface on which to place the phone and don't mind taking the time to put it down, perform the gesture, and pick it up again.
While 1000ft exclusion zones around schools, parks, playgrounds, daycares etc sound like a reasonable idea to most people I've always wondered how difficult it must be to actually go places and obey them.
Danged near impossible.
I interact on a regular basis with law-abiding people who'd like to be able to carry a gun for self-defense, but for whatever reason don't have a concealed carry permit. In the state I live in (Utah), it is perfectly legal to carry a gun without a permit as long as it isn't concealed, and as long as you don't have a round chambered, BUT there's a huge caveat -- school zones.
Per state law, within 1000 feet of the property of any school, which includes pre-school, day-care, K-12 and post-secondary schools (universities, cosmetology schools, etc.), it's illegal to be in possession of a firearm. So, being the careful, conscientious citizens that they are, some of these open carriers have carefully identified all of the school properties and plotted out 1000 foot-radius areas around them. The result is that in any community in Utah the map is pretty much a solid red zone, with only occasional "cracks" where it's legal to possess a gun. It's the same in many other states. There's also a federal law that says much the same thing, though it isn't enforced.
Of course, in the case of the gun-free zones, the laws have some exceptions for firearms in vehicle, firearms on private property, etc., so with some care it is possible to carry without a permit without breaking the law. But similar exceptions aren't likely to be applied to sex offenders. The result will be that there is virtually no place for them to live, or work, or shop, and even if they can find places for all of them, there aren't likely to be any routes between those places.
He is also in campaign mode because he is going up for re-election in 2012 and already has some people in his own party nipping on his heels to kick him out if he makes a big mistake (to the Utah voters).
That's an understatement. There are lots of people in the Republican party in Utah who are planning to do the same thing to him that they did to Bob Bennett -- who didn't even make it to the primary. I don't mean he was defeated in the primary, I mean he was a sitting Senator who didn't even get his party's nomination. A lot of people in Utah are very unhappy with Hatch, bacon or no bacon, and I think it's highly likely that he's going down in 2012.
The reason people were given the right to own arms, is because their government is obligated to keep a "standing army" to repel invaders. But freedom lovers (including our Founding Fathers) were aware that it was that very standing army that was the biggest threat to the people and their freedom.
More precisely, the Founding Fathers feared standing armies and so tried to establish a system where a standing army was not required. To that end, they wanted citizens to be armed, and they wanted the military forces to be primarily under the control of the states, not the federal government. That's why the Constitution limits appropriations for an army to two years, and why it specifies that Congress' role is to define the "discipline" of the militias, but that the states were to appoint the officers.
The plan was to put the arms in the hands of the people, the leadership in the hands of the states and then have Congress define the training and equipment standards to maintain uniformity so that in the event of a war, the militias could come together into a cohesive military force, funded by short-term appropriations from Congress.
This was all intended not as a counter to the power of a standing army, but as an alternative to even having a standing army. This doesn't discount your point, of course. We're talking about a group of men who had just violently tossed their own oppressive government out, and knew very well that the ability of the people to resist tyranny was critical.
Personally, I think we've done ourselves a huge disservice by moving away from the militia model. It'll never happen, but I'd really like to see all of the high-tech non-naval forces of the federal military moved to the control of the states' organized militias (aka the National Guards), and I'd like to see the bulk of our infantry fighting power moved back to the unorganized militia, encouraging (and perhaps even subsidizing) individual ownership of military small arms and training in their use.
Among other things, this would force us to treat military power as a defensive tool, and stop "projecting power" around the world so much -- which gets us in lots of other peoples' trouble. It would also massively reduce federal military expenditures and would help transfer the balance of power back to the states. Even when it's not used, everyone understands that he who has the military power holds a lot of political power. That would be the biggest benefit... more dispersal of power, to the states and to the people.
However, at least in the US, the results the actuaries come up with are invariably used to screw people out of money.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Z8 already covered the rest, but I had to at least say that.
You'll notice that the criteria don't include "intellectual fulfillment." Actuaries rate pretty highly in all the criteria the study considers, but perhaps their job is not as interesting as some others.
I know some actuaries, and they find their jobs very intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. For people who really like math and statistics, doing it professionally is enjoyable and challenging. It's not like actuaries spend their days adding up big columns of numbers -- we have computers for that. Actuaries figure out how to use sophisticated statistics to tease out subtle patterns from large masses of information. It's challenging and the results are often surprising.
Looks like CmdrTaco has been studying at the Fox News School of Journalistic Neutrality. I believe the preferred formulation would be,
"Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.6 which Apple claims 'increases the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac'".
So, Apple admits their previous OS was unstable, incompatible and insecure?
Less stable, less compatible and less secure. It's not like any of those things are bi-valued. Each is a continuum... in fact each is a continuum in multiple dimensions.
There's no end. It's arrogant to even think otherwise.
And not very funny.
And, obviously, your phone can act as a contactless credit card -- but one with much better security because the phone has the ability to authenticate the user where the card doesn't, necessarily.
I don't think so. A smartcard is much more secure than a phone. In fact, I've worked on an NFC project where the phone was just a relay between the user and the SIM card. All the cryptographic operations were done on the card. The phone was just used as a user interface to enter the PIN code.
An NFC chip is a smart card (which may or may not be the same smart card chip as the SIM). Yes, the phone is "just" a user interface to enter the PIN code, but contrast that with a typical contactless smart card which, if a PIN is used at all, is only entered via a payment terminal which isn't under your control and may have been hacked or may even be bogus. Moving the PIN authentication to a device that's under your control is a big win for security (assuming it's actually under your control -- I'm really worried that handset and OS manufacturers aren't paying enough attention to security).
The recently-published EMV Chip & PIN hack is completely irrelevant if the attacker can't insert something between your keypad and the smart card chip, for example. Also, with a phone as the authentication device, there's no technological reason why we have to stick with four-digit PINs. It's perfectly feasible to put a fingerprint scanner in the phone, for example, or to use a longer password, or to apply cadence analysis as an additional metric. Or you could use the phone's camera, aimed at yourself, to use facial recognition for authentication. Or any combination of the above. The specific tradeoffs of convenience vs security can be customized by the user.
When you embed the payment chip in a phone, you add to it a screen, a keypad, a camera, a microphone and a network connection, plus the possibility to add additional I/O devices. Applied with some intelligence and a focus on security, that can be used to create a payment mechanism that is vastly more secure than an ISO 7816-1 plastic card.
NFC isn't RFID. It's RFID plus a simple extension to allow it to both read and be read..
It's not just RFID. NFC is two completely different RF technologies packaged together. One is contactless smart card technology (ISO 14443), at the frequency 13.56 Mhz, which enables very close-range (centimeters) relatively high-bandwidth (up to 800 kbps) bi-directional communication and is the technology used by the better contactless credit card payment systems, using cryptographic security. The other is what's normally called RFID, I forget which ISO standard, but it's at 900 Mhz and functions at much longer ranges (up to a meter or two) but only enables very simple communication. RFID tags are typically very "stupid" -- no microprocessor and many of them can't do anything other than respond with a number fixed at manufacture time when energized by a reader. Others allow the short numeric code they contain to be changed.
NFC actually enables the phone to operate as either reader or card/tag with both of these RF technologies.
This means that your phone can, in theory, act as a contactless smart card payment terminal, allowing you to accept credit card payments from an ordinary contactless credit card, or from another phone acting as a card. And, obviously, your phone can act as a contactless credit card -- but one with much better security because the phone has the ability to authenticate the user where the card doesn't, necessarily. Well, better security unless your phone gets rooted...
Oh, and of course, you'll be able to put multiple credit card accounts on your phone, so you can eliminate your cards from your wallet.
An NFC phone can also act as RFID reader, meaning that as retailers shift from putting barcodes on packages to cheap RFID tags, you'll be able to scan merchandise with your phone (you can do this now with phone cameras and UPC codes, but it's much less fiddly with RFID). Other use cases that get bandied about are things like embedding RFID tags in movie posters so you can scan the poster and get taken to a web site with more information (really, this is a use case that is OFTEN discussed in the industry as a sample application, as lame as it is). Finally, an NFC phone can act as an RFID tag. A commonly-suggested application for that is simple loyalty cards, like the Subway card that gets you a free sandwich after so many purchases. So you can get rid of those from your wallet also.
All of these features will, of course, be controllable by the phone's software, so they can be completely disabled when they should not be used, which is very nice for security and privacy. Again, assuming your phone remains under your control.
And thereby do we traverse the tortuous path from intelligence to wisdom...
And at the end of the road we realize that we should act just as we did in the beginning, not because it's a more productive way to work, but so we can get a little damned peace and quiet!
I didn't say we're equally bad. But any time you find yourself thinking you are better than someone else, you should think again. Most likely you're just not noticing your own faults, and not recognizing their virtues. Working on yourself is great. Pointing fingers and saying the world's problems are because others aren't as good as you is not only wrong... it's the source of at least as many of the world's problems as the faults you listed.
And, yes, I recognize the inherent hypocrisy of that paragraph.
Contract negotiation is a right that only entities with significant amounts of money have.
Contract negotiation is something that happens between peers, more or less. If you're dirt poor, you can (and often do) negotiate contracts with other people of your same economic status. You may not write it all down in legalese, of course, but that's not a required element of a contract.
The "more or less" is important as well. I have negotiated employment contracts a few times, and I was negotiating with a multi-billion-dollar company. But they wanted to hire me and my changes to the standard contract terms were reasonable, so they accepted them. In this case, Wikipedia and Google aren't peers in any financial sense, but they certainly are in terms of web prominence and name recognition. More importantly, Wikipedia brings enough opportunity for Google to the table that Wikipedia has a strong position. Particularly since Wikipedia has proven that it can operate, and very successfully, without Google's ads.
And, actually, you CAN negotiate with Comcast and Verizon. I called Comcast a few months ago when my introductory rate expired and told them I wanted to cancel because the regular price was too high. They extended my introductory rate for another year. That's contract negotiation. It's a different form of it, because when you're dealing with large retailers it's simply impractical for them to negotiate highly-individualized contracts with every one of their customers. So the contracts are written by the retailers and customers are given the option of taking it or leaving it... mostly. Some caveats are included to allow customer service reps to tweak the deal in specific ways in order to retain business, and all of those introductory offers and promotional deals are just another way of altering the deal slightly in order to entice more people to sign up.
Contract negotiation is for everyone. What you can negotiate, as well as as why and how, changes depending on your position (which encompasses more than just your financial position, though that's a huge element), but it's nearly always an option to some degree.
Because he doesn't want to date a fat chick. It's not like fat guys want to date fat girls.
And it's not like girls want to date fat guys, either. His own obesity has a much larger impact on his prospects than the obesity of the female population. Men who are fit and look good are hunting among the population of females who are fit and look good. Given that the obesity rates are about equal among males and females, fit men may have fewer fit women to choose from, but they're also facing fewer competitors.
Net impact on prospects is that they're unchanged.
Actually, my attitude isn't cynical, it's accepting. Everyone is stupid, ignorant, greedy and power-hungry at least some of the time. Some people try harder to avoid it than others, but we all fail.
I find your attitude to be pretentious and holier-than-thou. Any time you find yourself thinking "I'm better than THOSE people because X, Y and Z", you need a dose of humility and you need to pay more attention to your own failings -- in particular, your own stupidity, ignorance, greed and hunger for power.
Yes, and after Wikipedia has become dependend on the income from Google they can start changing the policy as they wish.
So Wikipedia should ask for the policy to be specified contractually, with a specified re-negotiation interval and a defined re-negotiation process that requires mutual agreement for any changes. The contract should also specify that either party may walk away, but that, say, six months' notice is required. That would give Google an out, but ensure that Wikipedia has time to restructure their fundraising.
Really, all of these sorts of problems can be solved. This is what contract negotiation is for.
From the perspective of an average man in the United States : there are a number of factors working against the average man in the U.S. today in terms of dating.
1. The obesity epidemic. This removes millions of women who have the genetics to be desirable, but are instead obese.
How does that work against the average US man? He's fat, too.