Because, to some people, any change is bad/scary - no matter what it is so they delude themselves into thinking our country is perfect as it is thus giving themselves a circular argument as to why we shouldn't change anything.
I see nothing wrong with noticing something that you think a country (or region in the case of Europe) is doing right and working to replicate it in your own country. You can think that 75% of what your country does is just fine, work to change the remaining 25% based on models of other countries and still not want to leave your country. Moving to the other country might mean that you now have that 25% working right but other things that America got right are now done (in your mind) incorrectly.
"America: Love It or Leave It" is a deeply flawed slogan.
So if a company with 10,000 Windows computers has their 10,000 employees browse the web for 8 hours using IE instead of FireFox or Chrome then they'll save enough power for 4,000 cups of tea.
Or, since the article gives the figure of 1 watt saved per hour, 10,000 IE users browsing for 8 hours will save 80 kilowatts. Not a very big savings. You could replace a few incandescent light-bulbs with compact fluorescent or LED bulbs and save more energy.
I thought I'd never type the above words, but on this morning's Today Show, Bill O'Reilly was on and talking about Snowden and the NSA spying. He said that if Snowden is right and the NSA is spying on everyone then Snowden is a hero and the NSA is wrong. If Snowden is lying, then, then what he did was very wrong. O'Reilly went on to say that it is not acceptable to spy on everyone just to catch a few terrorists (if this is even effective... there's no transparency at all so we don't know) and there should be measures in place to ensure that they only collect data on people they need to spy on (e.g. suspects).
Do you see what you've done, Obama and NSA? You've got me agreeing with Bill O'Reilly! Surely, this is one of the signs of the apocalypse!
(In all seriousness, I'm sure O'Reilly supported programs like this under Bush and is only opposed to them now because Obama's doing it. I'm also sure that, had I listened to the interview a bit more I'd have disagreed with him on something - or he toned down his rhetoric for the Today Show audience. Still agreeing with him for as long as I did was scary.)
I believe the "Sharing Up To 10" means that if you buy the game then you can share it with your sibling across town, Uncle Bill across the country, and 8 other family members who don't live in your household - Not 10 people in your house.
Of course, I've read that there's a catch here too. Only one of those people (not sure if that includes you or not) can play at a time. So forget about buying a game and setting up a coast-to-coast family play session using the "Share Up To 10" feature.
They also have a "We may also cease to offer certain services or products for similar reasons." clause. So even if you like a feature (like sharing a game with up to 10 family members), you might find that feature suddenly removed or altered in such a way as to make it useless.
I kept saying just this when Bush supporters called him expanding the powers of the Executive Office "needed" and "the right thing to do." I would always ask two questions:
1) Would you be ok with someone from the opposing party to be President with those powers? I'd usually use Hillary Clinton in this question because, at the time, she seemed to be the Democratic front runner and the name Clinton is a trigger word for many Republicans.
2) How could a future President abuse these powers? Even assuming Bush or his successor didn't abuse them, it would only be a matter of time before someone did. That's why we need plenty of checks and balances. To keep one person/branch of government from getting too powerful.
Which is another reason why John Smith, sitting on his porch with his rifle, wouldn't be the one to prevent a dictatorship. If the military went with the new dictator, the guns that citizens had wouldn't stand up to the military's might. If the military stood against the dictator, their guns would bring him down.
I'm not saying that citizens shouldn't be allowed to have weapons, but "my gun will help me topple a would-be dictator" is just a delusion.
It could easily be a way to obscure who they're surveilling, so that Verizon, for example, has no way of knowing which customer they're interested in.
All they would need to do in this case would be get a warrant for the person in question and a court issued gag order preventing Verizon from revealing who it is. trusted members of Verizon's staff would give the information and then be ordered (under penalty of law) to keep quiet about it. If they blabbed, you would know who it was because a very limited amount of people would be involved. Simple, effective, and targeted.
However, asking for ALL data on EVERYONE just looks like a data fishing expedition. "Let's see what we can dig up on someone - anyone - in this block of data." Yes, they'll inevitably find something (it's a pretty good bet that SOMEONE did SOMETHING illegal that was captured by Verizon call logs), they'll credit this for the arrest, and insist they need to extend it "for the public's safety" or "for national security."
I saw that report and the first thing I thought was "have any of these 'baffled' people done some searching online?" I'm guessing these thieves aren't technological geniuses who all come up with the same amazing technology all on their own. Chances are, there's some underground site that either shows you how to make this device or, more likely, sells it.
Sure enough, someone here posted a link to a "universal unlocker" sold from China for $25. If that's the device these crooks are using then they just "invest" a small amount of money and can quietly and quickly rob valuables from dozens of cars.
A little over a decade ago, I went to visit my sister. I parked my car and locked my door. When I did so, though, I heard a second car beep. Sure enough, every time I locked my car, a car across the street (not the same make or model, by the way) would unlock. Now, it could have been a huge coincidence that I parked my car near another car that had the same access code, but exactly how big of a coincidence could that have been? How big a pool do they choose those access codes from?
That wouldn't be too hard with my car. Just sneeze within 20 feet of the panic button. Now if you could tell me how to disable that, then I'd be interested.
There should be a standard procedure for requesting access to the videos:
1) If you are a police office, you get access to all the videos (audited access, of course)
2) If you are a member of the public, you must apply (actual application, not some wimpy online form with "enter your e-mail address/choose a username"), pay a modest annual fee, be verified, and then you get access to the videos (audited just as much as the police).
This way you don't get people crawling PoliceCamVideos.com and reposting that video of the cops who chased a perp into the ladies' gym locker room.
The police department shouldn't be given the ability to delete videos from the "police surveillance cloud." Or, better yet, give them a big delete button and let it remove the video from their listing, but add into the audit trail who it was who tried to delete the video. If they are using it to prune their cloud file listing to only show active cases, fine. If they're using it in a failed attempt to destroy the video, then they've just been nailed.
My wife and I met online. In a Yahoo Chat Room of all places. She had forgotten that she was even signed in. I signed in just looking to kill some time before I headed to sleep. She contacted me when she saw "Nice Jewish boy looking for nice Jewish girl" - something I put in my profile on a whim a few weeks earlier. We began to chat and quickly found we had a lot in common. I immediately knew there was something special about her.
A month later (after many late nights chatting online and on the phone), we met in person. (Public place halfway between us just in case either of us turned out to be secretly crazy.) We had a great time. So much so that, when it came time to leave, we had a hard time saying goodbye. (We kept saying goodbye for about 30 minutes.)
We started long-distance dating until I asked her to marry me about 10 months after we first met online. We were married a little over a year after that and are approaching our 12 year anniversary.
If my previous dating experience (or lack thereof) is any indication, online dating was perfectly suited to me. Of course, that might just be because I find online communication easier than face-to-face communication in general.
Fun fact: We still find ourselves communicating via "online methods" even when we're just one room away and especially if we don't want the kids to overhear us.;-)
If you just need to call getElementByID once or twice then you're better off doing that rather than loading jQuery. If you need to do some more massive JavaScript/DOM manipulation and querying then calling getElementByID and the others repeatedly will lead to extremely long code. It will also lead to unmaintainable code if you just put everything in one big code block. To keep your code short and to enable easy reuse, you'll need to encapsulate this code into functions. Once you start making functions whose purpose it is to manipulate the DOM in a similar way across many different browsers, you are better off going with jQuery. You could wind up essentially rewriting it, but chances are it won't be shorter/more efficient. As a bonus, if you link to jQuery using the code.jquery.com URL, people's browsers will likely have it cached.
As for jQuery breaking code when they release new versions and/or dropping support for IE 6/7/8, you don't need to upgrade. I used jQuery extensively for an Intranet site and stayed on 1.4.3 for a long time. Recently, I decided it was (long past) time to upgrade so I reviewed our code, upgraded jQuery little by little, fixing things as they broke, and finally went live with jQuery 1.9.1. We'll likely stay with this (or another in the 1.x branch) until IE8 support no longer matters. (IE6 and IE7 support has been dropped already.)
You aren't even forced to upgrade if you use the code.jquery.com URL. This link has all of the jQuery versions from 1.0.1 to the current version.
Curse those typos. Then again if we're going for a female Doctor/Harry Potter crossover, how about Emma Watson (Hermione)? A female, ginger Doctor. We could have a semi-repeat of Matt Smith's first moments as the Doctor. "I'm a girl. Really, this time. And I'm ginger!"
I believe your question can be answered with the same response my 9 year old gives when asked to clean up a mess he made: "That's HARD! It's going to take SOOOOOO LOOOONG! That's BORING! I don't wanna do that. I wanna do something I LIKE doing and I want to do that NOW!"
We're not putting the Constitution aside, we're putting it on display for all to see... in a cellar... without lights or stairs... in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
But the point is that it's on display for all to see.
You know what I really like about this kind of argument is when a few years later a kid gets kidnapped and the one thing they're missing are fingerprints!
In New York State, we have this thing called the Safe Child Card. (It might be available in other states.) The police will set up a booth at local events or you go to your nearest police station. Your child weighs in, you measure their height, you fill out a form, and then they take your child's photo and fingerprints. You get a card with your child's information and fingerprints printed on it. The information goes into a database. If your child is reported missing, this information is called up and spread to every police department. No searching for photos or trying to obtain fingerprints after the fact. No gathering the information from parents who are, understandably, too shaken up for details. (How tall was little Johnny? 35 inches tall? 38? 40? When your kid goes missing, details like that don't just spring to mind.)
Plus, this is completely voluntary. If you are opposed to this, you can skip it. For me and my wife, though, we like the peace of mind it gives us knowing that the police would get a head start on finding our boys should they go missing. (Of course, we hope that we never need to use them.)
If this program stopped by the school and signed kids up (with parental approval, of course), I'd fully support it. Iris scans to prove class attendance is an answer to a non-existent problem, though.
It's the same with those "there's no separation of church and state" folks. They love, love, LOVE government mandating religious stuff so long as it is THEIR religious stuff. However, if a publicly funded school waiver is used to send a kid to a Muslim school?!!! SHOCK!!! OUTRAGE!!! HORROR!!!
I'm convinced that instances like this, more than anything else, are behind the poor performance of our public schools. Good teacher does X which doesn't conform 100% to what the school bureaucrats or politicians (who frequently don't even have their kids IN public schools) have mandated. Good teacher gets good results, but is punished by said bureaucrats/politicians for not following their mandated actions. Eventually, good teacher gets tired of fighting the system and leaves the teaching profession. This just leaves the teachers who will do exactly what they're told without any cares as to whether they are giving the students a good education.
Then the bureaucrats and politicians see falling scores, cry horribly about it (in front of as many cameras as possible, of course), and come up with more actions (ranging from misguided to idiotic) that they are sure will save our schools.
As an example, see the Common Core testing that New York State students have been subjected to. Elementary students as young as Kindergarten are taking these extremely stressful tests and teachers aren't allowed to see them at all. After taking them, they go to Pearson where they are graded and destroyed so nobody can double-check them. Kids have been so stressed that they've thrown up on the tests. Yes, Pearson demands that the thrown-up-upon tests be bagged and sent back to them. Tossing it in the trash can get a school in deep trouble (as it could leak what's on the test). Teachers hate these tests, parents hate these tests, students hate these tests, but Pearson/bureaucrats/politicians love them so they are mandated.
"Thousands of years" should probably be "millions of years." Then again, millions of years IS some large value of thousands of years. (End rationalizing errors made while commenting when tired.)
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Because, to some people, any change is bad/scary - no matter what it is so they delude themselves into thinking our country is perfect as it is thus giving themselves a circular argument as to why we shouldn't change anything.
I see nothing wrong with noticing something that you think a country (or region in the case of Europe) is doing right and working to replicate it in your own country. You can think that 75% of what your country does is just fine, work to change the remaining 25% based on models of other countries and still not want to leave your country. Moving to the other country might mean that you now have that 25% working right but other things that America got right are now done (in your mind) incorrectly.
"America: Love It or Leave It" is a deeply flawed slogan.
So if a company with 10,000 Windows computers has their 10,000 employees browse the web for 8 hours using IE instead of FireFox or Chrome then they'll save enough power for 4,000 cups of tea.
Or, since the article gives the figure of 1 watt saved per hour, 10,000 IE users browsing for 8 hours will save 80 kilowatts. Not a very big savings. You could replace a few incandescent light-bulbs with compact fluorescent or LED bulbs and save more energy.
I thought I'd never type the above words, but on this morning's Today Show, Bill O'Reilly was on and talking about Snowden and the NSA spying. He said that if Snowden is right and the NSA is spying on everyone then Snowden is a hero and the NSA is wrong. If Snowden is lying, then, then what he did was very wrong. O'Reilly went on to say that it is not acceptable to spy on everyone just to catch a few terrorists (if this is even effective... there's no transparency at all so we don't know) and there should be measures in place to ensure that they only collect data on people they need to spy on (e.g. suspects).
Do you see what you've done, Obama and NSA? You've got me agreeing with Bill O'Reilly! Surely, this is one of the signs of the apocalypse!
(In all seriousness, I'm sure O'Reilly supported programs like this under Bush and is only opposed to them now because Obama's doing it. I'm also sure that, had I listened to the interview a bit more I'd have disagreed with him on something - or he toned down his rhetoric for the Today Show audience. Still agreeing with him for as long as I did was scary.)
I believe the "Sharing Up To 10" means that if you buy the game then you can share it with your sibling across town, Uncle Bill across the country, and 8 other family members who don't live in your household - Not 10 people in your house.
Of course, I've read that there's a catch here too. Only one of those people (not sure if that includes you or not) can play at a time. So forget about buying a game and setting up a coast-to-coast family play session using the "Share Up To 10" feature.
They also have a "We may also cease to offer certain services or products for similar reasons." clause. So even if you like a feature (like sharing a game with up to 10 family members), you might find that feature suddenly removed or altered in such a way as to make it useless.
I kept saying just this when Bush supporters called him expanding the powers of the Executive Office "needed" and "the right thing to do." I would always ask two questions:
1) Would you be ok with someone from the opposing party to be President with those powers? I'd usually use Hillary Clinton in this question because, at the time, she seemed to be the Democratic front runner and the name Clinton is a trigger word for many Republicans.
2) How could a future President abuse these powers? Even assuming Bush or his successor didn't abuse them, it would only be a matter of time before someone did. That's why we need plenty of checks and balances. To keep one person/branch of government from getting too powerful.
Which is another reason why John Smith, sitting on his porch with his rifle, wouldn't be the one to prevent a dictatorship. If the military went with the new dictator, the guns that citizens had wouldn't stand up to the military's might. If the military stood against the dictator, their guns would bring him down.
I'm not saying that citizens shouldn't be allowed to have weapons, but "my gun will help me topple a would-be dictator" is just a delusion.
All they would need to do in this case would be get a warrant for the person in question and a court issued gag order preventing Verizon from revealing who it is. trusted members of Verizon's staff would give the information and then be ordered (under penalty of law) to keep quiet about it. If they blabbed, you would know who it was because a very limited amount of people would be involved. Simple, effective, and targeted.
However, asking for ALL data on EVERYONE just looks like a data fishing expedition. "Let's see what we can dig up on someone - anyone - in this block of data." Yes, they'll inevitably find something (it's a pretty good bet that SOMEONE did SOMETHING illegal that was captured by Verizon call logs), they'll credit this for the arrest, and insist they need to extend it "for the public's safety" or "for national security."
I saw that report and the first thing I thought was "have any of these 'baffled' people done some searching online?" I'm guessing these thieves aren't technological geniuses who all come up with the same amazing technology all on their own. Chances are, there's some underground site that either shows you how to make this device or, more likely, sells it.
Sure enough, someone here posted a link to a "universal unlocker" sold from China for $25. If that's the device these crooks are using then they just "invest" a small amount of money and can quietly and quickly rob valuables from dozens of cars.
A little over a decade ago, I went to visit my sister. I parked my car and locked my door. When I did so, though, I heard a second car beep. Sure enough, every time I locked my car, a car across the street (not the same make or model, by the way) would unlock. Now, it could have been a huge coincidence that I parked my car near another car that had the same access code, but exactly how big of a coincidence could that have been? How big a pool do they choose those access codes from?
That wouldn't be too hard with my car. Just sneeze within 20 feet of the panic button. Now if you could tell me how to disable that, then I'd be interested.
There should be a standard procedure for requesting access to the videos:
1) If you are a police office, you get access to all the videos (audited access, of course)
2) If you are a member of the public, you must apply (actual application, not some wimpy online form with "enter your e-mail address/choose a username"), pay a modest annual fee, be verified, and then you get access to the videos (audited just as much as the police).
This way you don't get people crawling PoliceCamVideos.com and reposting that video of the cops who chased a perp into the ladies' gym locker room.
The police department shouldn't be given the ability to delete videos from the "police surveillance cloud." Or, better yet, give them a big delete button and let it remove the video from their listing, but add into the audit trail who it was who tried to delete the video. If they are using it to prune their cloud file listing to only show active cases, fine. If they're using it in a failed attempt to destroy the video, then they've just been nailed.
My wife and I met online. In a Yahoo Chat Room of all places. She had forgotten that she was even signed in. I signed in just looking to kill some time before I headed to sleep. She contacted me when she saw "Nice Jewish boy looking for nice Jewish girl" - something I put in my profile on a whim a few weeks earlier. We began to chat and quickly found we had a lot in common. I immediately knew there was something special about her.
A month later (after many late nights chatting online and on the phone), we met in person. (Public place halfway between us just in case either of us turned out to be secretly crazy.) We had a great time. So much so that, when it came time to leave, we had a hard time saying goodbye. (We kept saying goodbye for about 30 minutes.)
We started long-distance dating until I asked her to marry me about 10 months after we first met online. We were married a little over a year after that and are approaching our 12 year anniversary.
If my previous dating experience (or lack thereof) is any indication, online dating was perfectly suited to me. Of course, that might just be because I find online communication easier than face-to-face communication in general.
Fun fact: We still find ourselves communicating via "online methods" even when we're just one room away and especially if we don't want the kids to overhear us. ;-)
If you just need to call getElementByID once or twice then you're better off doing that rather than loading jQuery. If you need to do some more massive JavaScript/DOM manipulation and querying then calling getElementByID and the others repeatedly will lead to extremely long code. It will also lead to unmaintainable code if you just put everything in one big code block. To keep your code short and to enable easy reuse, you'll need to encapsulate this code into functions. Once you start making functions whose purpose it is to manipulate the DOM in a similar way across many different browsers, you are better off going with jQuery. You could wind up essentially rewriting it, but chances are it won't be shorter/more efficient. As a bonus, if you link to jQuery using the code.jquery.com URL, people's browsers will likely have it cached.
As for jQuery breaking code when they release new versions and/or dropping support for IE 6/7/8, you don't need to upgrade. I used jQuery extensively for an Intranet site and stayed on 1.4.3 for a long time. Recently, I decided it was (long past) time to upgrade so I reviewed our code, upgraded jQuery little by little, fixing things as they broke, and finally went live with jQuery 1.9.1. We'll likely stay with this (or another in the 1.x branch) until IE8 support no longer matters. (IE6 and IE7 support has been dropped already.)
You aren't even forced to upgrade if you use the code.jquery.com URL. This link has all of the jQuery versions from 1.0.1 to the current version.
Curse those typos. Then again if we're going for a female Doctor/Harry Potter crossover, how about Emma Watson (Hermione)? A female, ginger Doctor. We could have a semi-repeat of Matt Smith's first moments as the Doctor. "I'm a girl. Really, this time. And I'm ginger!"
I loved Star Raiders. "3D" space flight/fight simulator that was way ahead of its time.
Geeky crossover. Cast Danielle Radcliffe as the next Doctor.
*ducks*
Ok, just kidding. Cast Rupert Grint (played Ron Weasley). He's ginger. The Doctor always wanted to be ginger.
*ducks again*
I believe your question can be answered with the same response my 9 year old gives when asked to clean up a mess he made: "That's HARD! It's going to take SOOOOOO LOOOONG! That's BORING! I don't wanna do that. I wanna do something I LIKE doing and I want to do that NOW!"
We're not putting the Constitution aside, we're putting it on display for all to see... in a cellar... without lights or stairs... in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
But the point is that it's on display for all to see.
In New York State, we have this thing called the Safe Child Card. (It might be available in other states.) The police will set up a booth at local events or you go to your nearest police station. Your child weighs in, you measure their height, you fill out a form, and then they take your child's photo and fingerprints. You get a card with your child's information and fingerprints printed on it. The information goes into a database. If your child is reported missing, this information is called up and spread to every police department. No searching for photos or trying to obtain fingerprints after the fact. No gathering the information from parents who are, understandably, too shaken up for details. (How tall was little Johnny? 35 inches tall? 38? 40? When your kid goes missing, details like that don't just spring to mind.)
Plus, this is completely voluntary. If you are opposed to this, you can skip it. For me and my wife, though, we like the peace of mind it gives us knowing that the police would get a head start on finding our boys should they go missing. (Of course, we hope that we never need to use them.)
If this program stopped by the school and signed kids up (with parental approval, of course), I'd fully support it. Iris scans to prove class attendance is an answer to a non-existent problem, though.
It's the same with those "there's no separation of church and state" folks. They love, love, LOVE government mandating religious stuff so long as it is THEIR religious stuff. However, if a publicly funded school waiver is used to send a kid to a Muslim school?!!! SHOCK!!! OUTRAGE!!! HORROR!!!
I'm convinced that instances like this, more than anything else, are behind the poor performance of our public schools. Good teacher does X which doesn't conform 100% to what the school bureaucrats or politicians (who frequently don't even have their kids IN public schools) have mandated. Good teacher gets good results, but is punished by said bureaucrats/politicians for not following their mandated actions. Eventually, good teacher gets tired of fighting the system and leaves the teaching profession. This just leaves the teachers who will do exactly what they're told without any cares as to whether they are giving the students a good education.
Then the bureaucrats and politicians see falling scores, cry horribly about it (in front of as many cameras as possible, of course), and come up with more actions (ranging from misguided to idiotic) that they are sure will save our schools.
As an example, see the Common Core testing that New York State students have been subjected to. Elementary students as young as Kindergarten are taking these extremely stressful tests and teachers aren't allowed to see them at all. After taking them, they go to Pearson where they are graded and destroyed so nobody can double-check them. Kids have been so stressed that they've thrown up on the tests. Yes, Pearson demands that the thrown-up-upon tests be bagged and sent back to them. Tossing it in the trash can get a school in deep trouble (as it could leak what's on the test). Teachers hate these tests, parents hate these tests, students hate these tests, but Pearson/bureaucrats/politicians love them so they are mandated.
"Thousands of years" should probably be "millions of years." Then again, millions of years IS some large value of thousands of years. (End rationalizing errors made while commenting when tired.)