And have a good fraction of three hundred million people who should be drunk walking around stone cold sober? You, sir, are putting us on a collision course with certain destruction.
IMO, it comes down to the storage of the data. Regardless of the actual purpose, the storage of the data means that it can be accessed for purposes which may or may not be in the interest of the general public. More troubling is that storage of any data leaves it vulnerable to loss or theft, where it can be used by people who do not have authorization. If one thing has been proven time and again, it is that stored data has a finite chance of being lost, stolen, or leaked - and no matter what penalties you create, nothing you can do will get that data back.
Correlation of data and movement patterns is also somewhat of a concern, but moreso for people who prefer to be anonymous in their daily lives. It's a relatively small but vocal group - at least vocal here on slashdot. One could suggest that the use of credit cards and frequent shopper cards in return for discounts is a "fair trade" of money for divulging personal information. In the case of police actions, it could be argued that the reduced need for personnel to manually monitor these things reduces overall costs and thus results in an effective reduction in taxes (example: both Maryland and Virginia have operated the past two years with roughly 12% lower tax income - about $2 Billion/yr combined; taxes really do go down sometimes). The question still must be asked - does the benefit of the "service" justify the cost.
If the system were incapable of storing data, I suspect it would not be nearly as much of a concern, but there would still some outcry against the perceived 24/7 monitoring.
The constitution does not grant specific rights, except where the founders believed there may be questions. Rights are innate unless specifically prohibited. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness covers most of that (including marriage, dogs, and cars).
It's interesting to note that the second amendment does not apply to the mentally ill, felons, and other classes deemed unfit for militia duty.
Unlikely. If the US Gov't went all Saddam Hussein or Al Assad on us there would be lots and lots of dead civilians and twenty years of slowly ferreting out and killing every gun owner in the land. It would be bloody, but it would devolve into total domination in less than 4 weeks and terrorist attacks past that.
It won't happen - Americans aren't cohesive enough to take on such a task, nobody has balls big enough to lead it, and even if they did half the army would defect. But the populace - even the ones who know what to do - will have zero chance against outright defeat of the US war machine.
Go to school in California - a full load (15 credits) at a community college for in state residents is about $1400/yr plus student fees (maybe a couple hundred). You'd be out book costs and some exceptional class fees.
Hey, you forgot aliens. Humanoid aliens, acid-blood aliens, hunter aliens, cute aliens, blue aliens. You can't simply leave out aliens. And cowboys...they'll throw some cowboy movies in there two. If you're lucky you'll get cowboys in space (Serenity), if not, you'll get aliens in a western (Cowboys vs...well, you get the picture).
No, this is apple. You'll be expected to buy all new accessories. Just ask any of the video-out products - Apple tends to change the requirements to make each iteration incompatible with the (cracked one) 1-2 generations old.
It is enough. In laptops, the limit is not the power outlet but the lap upon which the device sits and the operators who regularly shun laptops with 2hrs of batter capacity. No, you may not be able to operate that 8 core Dell Precision mobile workstation with the 17+" monitor at full tilt and still charge the battery, but it will automatically scale the demand to match the power.
Laptops are getting lower in demand, not higher. Well, until they all get those crazy, power hungry "retina" displays. But even those will get more efficient over time.
Who would allow a truly secure system to have static passwords - most require a change once a month. Now it costs 9 hours a year, or 0.5% of your entire payroll costs just to learn the passwords. Since the sequence must be played back using a large string of random sequences in which the password sequence is embedded, I presume that would probably take at least 2 minutes to be of both necessary and sufficient length. Let's presume that you only have to log in twice a day (when you arrive, and when you come back after lunch) to this truly secure system...that's 4 minutes a day or another 1000 minutes ~ 16 hours ~ a year. Now we're up to 1.25% of employee costs. If you have a 100,000 person company with US average wages (and they'll probably be higher than average if they're logging into a secure system), that's $75,000,000 a year.
Now, tell me again how much the executive board splitting an extra $75,000,000 in bonuses is going to react when you tell them that they need this highly secure password system, compared to the one they have that had resulted in few or no breaches in the past decade.
Teaching is a challenging job. It can be extremely difficult in some areas with difficult populations.
Teaching is, generally, not underpaid. What is missing is a vertical path for teachers - teachers with 30 years of experience are rarely more effective than those with five. Contrast that to some other professions where workers with decades of experience can use that leverage to do more work.
Just as there are great people in all public sector professions, there are great teachers...and they all get paid similarly. Along with that top 10% is the bottom 90% who really aren't so great and are in it for the salary and benefits, and little else. Since, statistically, most people will deal with that bottom 90% that's what they see.
Your comment about teaching (embracing low pay, constant criticism, and every increasing workload, and a political environment looking for more ways to fire you) - change political environment to competitive business environment and you have just described about 70% of the white collar jobs in America. We all see the big salaries on the news, but the simple truth is that the national median hourly rate is $22/hr, which is not far off of, if not a bit lower, than the average teacher hourly rate for compensated hours. The best teachers, and the best business and professional people, put in more hours than those they get paid for; it's a fact of life (and business). If your job can be outsourced, done by someone else, or simply omitted, you can bet that management is trying to figure out a good way to eliminate your job.
Teaching to tests sucks - for practically everyone involved in the teaching process (but not to the legislators). Working for this quarters profits with little regard for long term success also sucks.
1. Tort reform. Serious, hardcore tort reform at the state level which takes an axe to all of the areas where frivolous lawsuits can be brought would eliminate the argument for any policy that is grounded in the fear of what some idiot might sue over.
This must be important where you live. It makes no difference in my area (Virginia, if that even matters). Our systems spends very little on this.
2. End zero tolerance under pain of imprisonment for anyone who punishes a student for acting in self-defense.
Oh, that's a slippery slope.
3. Remove any student who is constantly disrupting class. If they become a problem (and don't have a documented mental handicap), simply expel them and kick them out onto the street.
Why limit this to those without a diagnosed condition. Whether they are disruptive because they are poorly disciplines or disrupting due to uncontrollable outbursts, they are disrupting the class and causing difficulties for all other learners. I understand that mainstreaming is very popular with parents of children with problems, and there will always be a case where someone with borderline conditions is sorted in to the wrong camp. For the most part, though, a single disruptive child can reduce an entire classes uptake of material. Our school system compensates for this by dedicating an aid to every child with major mental disabilities. I feel for those kids and their parents, as it's a tough cross to bear, but it also means that our school spends 15-20% more on teaching personnel for about 2-3% of the population.
4. Establish a general policy of erring on the side of pacing the class to the speed of the top 50% of the class, not the bottom 50%. If the bottom cannot keep up, offer them tutoring; if they fail objectively, fail them for the year.
Again, you are asking for more resources in an area where spending is going down and nobody wants to pay more. If you hire a tutor for each class to help the bottom 50% (and giving just 30 minutes of day of tutoring to half of a 25 student class is essentially a full time position). How many people will support a 30% increase in their taxes to cover those additional tutors?
I agree with some of your points, but the ramifications are difficult to deal with for most school districts.
'Instead of forgotten in a dump or recycling facility, the boxes sit on shelves serving as a constant reminder that there are hoards of people on eBay willing to pay top dollar for your gently used iDevice when you're done with it, and having that all-important box increases the value of the resale"
There were two reasons I got an iPhone instead of an Android device when I abandoned WinMo - better apps for musicians (now that is no longer the case) and high resale value. That latter was an important point - if I didn't like my iPhone, I knew I could resell it for at or above(!) what I paid for it. In fact, I bought a 3GS used to try out the device, then two months later sold it for ~$10 less than I paid - net - when the 4 came out. Same thing happened with an iPad - when v2 came out I picked up a used v1, Apple refurb'd wi-fi model. Within two weeks I found that I go a lot of places that don't have wifi, so I boxed it back up and re-sold it for $25 MORE than I paid for it.
With most iDevices, there is little chance you'll end up with a dud that gets relegated to the bargain bin a month after you bought it. Being able to advertise a lightly used device in the box with all the accessories makes it very, very attractive to buyers.
Guess it's time to get together with my extended family and see if we can pool our phone resources. Me, wife, mom, dad, two in-laws, plus three tablets: 10GB/$120 + 6 phones @ $30 and three tablets at $10 = $330 split between us.
It's interesting that for a 3 phone household, the prices separating 1GB and 10GB are less than a single GB of overage, and the 6GB is actually more expensive than the 10GB plan!
No, Microsoft won the war. This is but a side skirmish in a town which has lost all relevance. Whether Novell wins or loses is irrelevant because WordPerfect is dead, killed by the horrific mis-management which let them start with the post popular and most powerful consumer word processor on the planet and drive is so far into the ground that most/.ers with a 7 digit UID will wonder if that was the word processor that was bundled with Visicalc, or that ran on one of those computers that used tubes.
The bigger problem is that technology moves so many orders of magnitude faster than traditional brick and mortar processes that the laws and court system can't keep pace in its current incarnation. Patents lasting 28 years? Copyrights lasting 120 years? Common delay tactics and court backlog taking over a decade to resolve? Useless in an industry with a 6-24 month product lifecycle.
You've clearly never traveled with my wife. It's an object lesson in how parents can unwittingly twist a child's development to result in an amazingly limited palate. We usually stop at a fast food restaurant before attending any "nice" meal occasion (say, a wedding or rehearsal dinner, or charity banquet) so that she has something to eat. SMH
Yes, but if the old time-of-use rates I remember from years ago hold, electricity at midnight can be bought for 4c/kwh, and then sold back the next day at noon for 16c/kWh in the summer.
Slashdot Mirror
No wifi, less space than a Nomad....lame.
And have a good fraction of three hundred million people who should be drunk walking around stone cold sober? You, sir, are putting us on a collision course with certain destruction.
That was my second thought. My first was "millions...hey, that's kind of cute, and off by a several orders of magnitude."
As long as by "that" you mean "the App store." It was hard to tell from your context. ;-)
What do you think happens when a company and a CEO part ways?
IMO, it comes down to the storage of the data. Regardless of the actual purpose, the storage of the data means that it can be accessed for purposes which may or may not be in the interest of the general public. More troubling is that storage of any data leaves it vulnerable to loss or theft, where it can be used by people who do not have authorization. If one thing has been proven time and again, it is that stored data has a finite chance of being lost, stolen, or leaked - and no matter what penalties you create, nothing you can do will get that data back.
Correlation of data and movement patterns is also somewhat of a concern, but moreso for people who prefer to be anonymous in their daily lives. It's a relatively small but vocal group - at least vocal here on slashdot. One could suggest that the use of credit cards and frequent shopper cards in return for discounts is a "fair trade" of money for divulging personal information. In the case of police actions, it could be argued that the reduced need for personnel to manually monitor these things reduces overall costs and thus results in an effective reduction in taxes (example: both Maryland and Virginia have operated the past two years with roughly 12% lower tax income - about $2 Billion/yr combined; taxes really do go down sometimes). The question still must be asked - does the benefit of the "service" justify the cost.
If the system were incapable of storing data, I suspect it would not be nearly as much of a concern, but there would still some outcry against the perceived 24/7 monitoring.
Have you ever seen your average order taker/waiter try to make change?
The constitution does not grant specific rights, except where the founders believed there may be questions. Rights are innate unless specifically prohibited. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness covers most of that (including marriage, dogs, and cars).
It's interesting to note that the second amendment does not apply to the mentally ill, felons, and other classes deemed unfit for militia duty.
Patience...and a cell phone. I think we'll all live though it.
Nobody makes a billion dollars a year on buckyball magnets.
See how easy that is?
Unlikely. If the US Gov't went all Saddam Hussein or Al Assad on us there would be lots and lots of dead civilians and twenty years of slowly ferreting out and killing every gun owner in the land. It would be bloody, but it would devolve into total domination in less than 4 weeks and terrorist attacks past that.
It won't happen - Americans aren't cohesive enough to take on such a task, nobody has balls big enough to lead it, and even if they did half the army would defect. But the populace - even the ones who know what to do - will have zero chance against outright defeat of the US war machine.
Go to school in California - a full load (15 credits) at a community college for in state residents is about $1400/yr plus student fees (maybe a couple hundred). You'd be out book costs and some exceptional class fees.
Hey, you forgot aliens. Humanoid aliens, acid-blood aliens, hunter aliens, cute aliens, blue aliens. You can't simply leave out aliens. And cowboys...they'll throw some cowboy movies in there two. If you're lucky you'll get cowboys in space (Serenity), if not, you'll get aliens in a western (Cowboys vs...well, you get the picture).
No, this is apple. You'll be expected to buy all new accessories. Just ask any of the video-out products - Apple tends to change the requirements to make each iteration incompatible with the (cracked one) 1-2 generations old.
It is enough. In laptops, the limit is not the power outlet but the lap upon which the device sits and the operators who regularly shun laptops with 2hrs of batter capacity. No, you may not be able to operate that 8 core Dell Precision mobile workstation with the 17+" monitor at full tilt and still charge the battery, but it will automatically scale the demand to match the power.
Laptops are getting lower in demand, not higher. Well, until they all get those crazy, power hungry "retina" displays. But even those will get more efficient over time.
Who would allow a truly secure system to have static passwords - most require a change once a month. Now it costs 9 hours a year, or 0.5% of your entire payroll costs just to learn the passwords. Since the sequence must be played back using a large string of random sequences in which the password sequence is embedded, I presume that would probably take at least 2 minutes to be of both necessary and sufficient length. Let's presume that you only have to log in twice a day (when you arrive, and when you come back after lunch) to this truly secure system...that's 4 minutes a day or another 1000 minutes ~ 16 hours ~ a year. Now we're up to 1.25% of employee costs. If you have a 100,000 person company with US average wages (and they'll probably be higher than average if they're logging into a secure system), that's $75,000,000 a year.
Now, tell me again how much the executive board splitting an extra $75,000,000 in bonuses is going to react when you tell them that they need this highly secure password system, compared to the one they have that had resulted in few or no breaches in the past decade.
Teaching is a challenging job. It can be extremely difficult in some areas with difficult populations.
Teaching is, generally, not underpaid. What is missing is a vertical path for teachers - teachers with 30 years of experience are rarely more effective than those with five. Contrast that to some other professions where workers with decades of experience can use that leverage to do more work.
Just as there are great people in all public sector professions, there are great teachers...and they all get paid similarly. Along with that top 10% is the bottom 90% who really aren't so great and are in it for the salary and benefits, and little else. Since, statistically, most people will deal with that bottom 90% that's what they see.
Your comment about teaching (embracing low pay, constant criticism, and every increasing workload, and a political environment looking for more ways to fire you) - change political environment to competitive business environment and you have just described about 70% of the white collar jobs in America. We all see the big salaries on the news, but the simple truth is that the national median hourly rate is $22/hr, which is not far off of, if not a bit lower, than the average teacher hourly rate for compensated hours. The best teachers, and the best business and professional people, put in more hours than those they get paid for; it's a fact of life (and business). If your job can be outsourced, done by someone else, or simply omitted, you can bet that management is trying to figure out a good way to eliminate your job.
Teaching to tests sucks - for practically everyone involved in the teaching process (but not to the legislators). Working for this quarters profits with little regard for long term success also sucks.
1. Tort reform. Serious, hardcore tort reform at the state level which takes an axe to all of the areas where frivolous lawsuits can be brought would eliminate the argument for any policy that is grounded in the fear of what some idiot might sue over.
This must be important where you live. It makes no difference in my area (Virginia, if that even matters). Our systems spends very little on this.
2. End zero tolerance under pain of imprisonment for anyone who punishes a student for acting in self-defense.
Oh, that's a slippery slope.
3. Remove any student who is constantly disrupting class. If they become a problem (and don't have a documented mental handicap), simply expel them and kick them out onto the street.
Why limit this to those without a diagnosed condition. Whether they are disruptive because they are poorly disciplines or disrupting due to uncontrollable outbursts, they are disrupting the class and causing difficulties for all other learners. I understand that mainstreaming is very popular with parents of children with problems, and there will always be a case where someone with borderline conditions is sorted in to the wrong camp. For the most part, though, a single disruptive child can reduce an entire classes uptake of material. Our school system compensates for this by dedicating an aid to every child with major mental disabilities. I feel for those kids and their parents, as it's a tough cross to bear, but it also means that our school spends 15-20% more on teaching personnel for about 2-3% of the population.
4. Establish a general policy of erring on the side of pacing the class to the speed of the top 50% of the class, not the bottom 50%. If the bottom cannot keep up, offer them tutoring; if they fail objectively, fail them for the year.
Again, you are asking for more resources in an area where spending is going down and nobody wants to pay more. If you hire a tutor for each class to help the bottom 50% (and giving just 30 minutes of day of tutoring to half of a 25 student class is essentially a full time position). How many people will support a 30% increase in their taxes to cover those additional tutors?
I agree with some of your points, but the ramifications are difficult to deal with for most school districts.
'Instead of forgotten in a dump or recycling facility, the boxes sit on shelves serving as a constant reminder that there are hoards of people on eBay willing to pay top dollar for your gently used iDevice when you're done with it, and having that all-important box increases the value of the resale"
There were two reasons I got an iPhone instead of an Android device when I abandoned WinMo - better apps for musicians (now that is no longer the case) and high resale value. That latter was an important point - if I didn't like my iPhone, I knew I could resell it for at or above(!) what I paid for it. In fact, I bought a 3GS used to try out the device, then two months later sold it for ~$10 less than I paid - net - when the 4 came out. Same thing happened with an iPad - when v2 came out I picked up a used v1, Apple refurb'd wi-fi model. Within two weeks I found that I go a lot of places that don't have wifi, so I boxed it back up and re-sold it for $25 MORE than I paid for it.
With most iDevices, there is little chance you'll end up with a dud that gets relegated to the bargain bin a month after you bought it. Being able to advertise a lightly used device in the box with all the accessories makes it very, very attractive to buyers.
Guess it's time to get together with my extended family and see if we can pool our phone resources. Me, wife, mom, dad, two in-laws, plus three tablets:
10GB/$120 + 6 phones @ $30 and three tablets at $10 = $330 split between us.
It's interesting that for a 3 phone household, the prices separating 1GB and 10GB are less than a single GB of overage, and the 6GB is actually more expensive than the 10GB plan!
1GB $40 + 3x45 = $175
4GB $70 + 3x40= $190
6GB $90 + 3x35= $195
10GB$100+3x30= $190
I wonder if the big V will try to match the $30/device level that AT&T is offering?
When was the last time you read a sundial or navigated by the position of the stars - both a mostly lost art.
No, Microsoft won the war. This is but a side skirmish in a town which has lost all relevance. Whether Novell wins or loses is irrelevant because WordPerfect is dead, killed by the horrific mis-management which let them start with the post popular and most powerful consumer word processor on the planet and drive is so far into the ground that most /.ers with a 7 digit UID will wonder if that was the word processor that was bundled with Visicalc, or that ran on one of those computers that used tubes.
The bigger problem is that technology moves so many orders of magnitude faster than traditional brick and mortar processes that the laws and court system can't keep pace in its current incarnation. Patents lasting 28 years? Copyrights lasting 120 years? Common delay tactics and court backlog taking over a decade to resolve? Useless in an industry with a 6-24 month product lifecycle.
It's probably so he can make it though security checks.
You've clearly never traveled with my wife. It's an object lesson in how parents can unwittingly twist a child's development to result in an amazingly limited palate. We usually stop at a fast food restaurant before attending any "nice" meal occasion (say, a wedding or rehearsal dinner, or charity banquet) so that she has something to eat. SMH
Yes, but if the old time-of-use rates I remember from years ago hold, electricity at midnight can be bought for 4c/kwh, and then sold back the next day at noon for 16c/kWh in the summer.