If you REALLY want to get the message across (desperate times call for desperate measures?) then having public executions for poachers seem like it would be a sizable deterrent for teens who want to make a quick buck (ivory is >$1000/kilo)
If only it were that simple. The poaching industry is not built around a bunch of hoodlums with guns making a "quick buck". It goes all the way up to the highest levels of government, with lots of people taking their cut along the way. There is complicity by people at all the stages of the process of getting the horns/tusks from the animal to the people who consume it. And if you think only poor people are involved in poaching, you couldn't be further from the truth.
There are insiders in the very organisations that are supposed to be protecting the animals who leak information to the poachers so they know when and where to strike without being caught. There are crooked officials at customs checkpoints who let the illicit goods through the ports. There are politicians and lawmakers who are handsomely rewarded for not enforcing existing punishments and not instituting harsher ones. Punishing the guy who pulls the trigger, however harshly, isn't going to stop all of this. He will be replaced by someone else equally desperate for money. And where poverty is rife, it's always worth the risk.
There are some more realistic ways to address to the problem:
- Try and educate the ignorant people in China and other (mostly far-Eastern) countries who think horns and tusks have magical powers (I am not optimistic about this, but hey, we have to try).
- Research ways to artificially create horn/tusk material in the lab (similar to what was done with pearls), and flood the market with it so that the value of the product plummets.
- Work on making the living animals more valuable to the local community. Engage them in conservation efforts and make sure they receive a meaningful portion of the income from tourism activity. There are efforts being made to do this but the government could do a lot more.
Unfortunately all of these things take time, which is fast running out.
No. They showed that provided the bullet maintained a ballistic trajectory and its spin (i.e., wasn't fired vertically into the air), it could be lethal on the way down.
I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone here, but there are plenty of other WordPress plugins that do the same thing. Some backup plugins seem to be particularly good at this, giving you unrestricted access to entire DB backups which you can hack in your own time.
I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands of Gmail users who have an old and defunct Hotmail account that they forward to their Gmail account (just in case that high-school sweetheart tries to get back in touch). They will be pushing up the Hotmail count, despite the fact that they aren't active users in any sense.
They actually make some pragmatic conclusions in the report itself, and don't claim that machine-guided learning is some sort of panacea:
The findings in this study warn against “too much hype.” To the best of our knowledge, there is no compelling evidence that online learning systems
available today—not even highly interactive systems, of which there are very few—can in fact deliver improved educational outcomes across the board, at scale, on campuses other than the one where the system was born, and on a sustainable basis.
...
We do not mean to suggest—because we do not believe—that ILO systems are some kind of panacea for this country’s deep-seated educational problems, which are rooted in fiscal dilemmas and changing national priorities as well as historical practices. Many claims about “online learning” (especially about simpler variants in their present state of development) are likely to be exaggerated. But it is important not to go to the other extreme and accept equally unfounded assertions that adoption of online systems invariably leads to inferior learning outcomes and puts students at risk.
"Accelerated feedback cycles, short-term but achievable goals, compelling narrative."
So basically they're predicting that organizations will become even more focused on the short-term and immediate gain, and even step away from reality in order to make it more exciting. Because that's not what got us into this financial mess in the first place.
I don't think they are suggesting that this would be a security/verification system in and of itself, just part of one. So for example if mouse movements appeared different (say due to new hardware) then it would prompt for a password or key, but otherwise it would verify them. No different really to if a user forgets a password and is required to do some extra things (secret questions, backup email etc) to verify their identity.
I have worked with accounting graduates who haven't the first clue about drawing real-world conclusions from financial statements. And I've worked with psychology graduates who do. The point is that it's not the degree, but the character and intelligence of the person holding it that determines whether they make a competent CEO.
We have learned of a possible glitch in the TLD application system software that has allowed a limited number of users to view some other users' file names and user names in certain scenarios.
Out of an abundance of caution, we took the system offline to protect applicant data. We are examining how this issue occurred and considering appropriate steps forward.
Here in Kenya, very productive crop farms (wheat, corn) are been constantly replaced with farms that export fruit, vegetables and flowers to Europe, because government subsidies encourage export over local industry. Not only are the latter much more intensive in their water/energy/chemical requirements, they also mean that the country is seriously dependent on increasingly fickle Western markets (people buy fewer flowers and exotic vegetables in a recession).
This has happened so much that the country no longer is self-sufficient when it comes to things like wheat and corn (which form the basis of the local diet). We now import these things from places like Russia. If instead we hadn't bothered with silly flower farms and stuck to feeding the local population, things would be a lot less precarious.
Slashdot Mirror
If only it were that simple. The poaching industry is not built around a bunch of hoodlums with guns making a "quick buck". It goes all the way up to the highest levels of government, with lots of people taking their cut along the way. There is complicity by people at all the stages of the process of getting the horns/tusks from the animal to the people who consume it. And if you think only poor people are involved in poaching, you couldn't be further from the truth.
There are insiders in the very organisations that are supposed to be protecting the animals who leak information to the poachers so they know when and where to strike without being caught. There are crooked officials at customs checkpoints who let the illicit goods through the ports. There are politicians and lawmakers who are handsomely rewarded for not enforcing existing punishments and not instituting harsher ones. Punishing the guy who pulls the trigger, however harshly, isn't going to stop all of this. He will be replaced by someone else equally desperate for money. And where poverty is rife, it's always worth the risk.
There are some more realistic ways to address to the problem:
Unfortunately all of these things take time, which is fast running out.
http://xkcd.com/1181/
Er, no. Metric ton is a unit of mass.
Why does it matter where you measure it? The mass won't change.
No. They showed that provided the bullet maintained a ballistic trajectory and its spin (i.e., wasn't fired vertically into the air), it could be lethal on the way down.
It caches DB queries to disk to (ostensibly) enhance performance.
I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone here, but there are plenty of other WordPress plugins that do the same thing. Some backup plugins seem to be particularly good at this, giving you unrestricted access to entire DB backups which you can hack in your own time.
You can still make lots of pain perdu!
Fedora
We are talking about accessing Hotmail via POP3, not Gmail. Hotmail doesn't support IMAP.
You can set up Gmail to access your Hotmail account via POP3.
I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands of Gmail users who have an old and defunct Hotmail account that they forward to their Gmail account (just in case that high-school sweetheart tries to get back in touch). They will be pushing up the Hotmail count, despite the fact that they aren't active users in any sense.
Reading the headline I though that would mean one less piece of rubbish to remove from the system after buying it... it's a shame that isn't the case.
I'm not sure whether "over analized" is supposed to be some sort of pun, or is just an unfortunate spelling mistake...
They actually make some pragmatic conclusions in the report itself, and don't claim that machine-guided learning is some sort of panacea:
"Accelerated feedback cycles, short-term but achievable goals, compelling narrative."
So basically they're predicting that organizations will become even more focused on the short-term and immediate gain, and even step away from reality in order to make it more exciting. Because that's not what got us into this financial mess in the first place.
I don't think they are suggesting that this would be a security/verification system in and of itself, just part of one. So for example if mouse movements appeared different (say due to new hardware) then it would prompt for a password or key, but otherwise it would verify them. No different really to if a user forgets a password and is required to do some extra things (secret questions, backup email etc) to verify their identity.
I have worked with accounting graduates who haven't the first clue about drawing real-world conclusions from financial statements. And I've worked with psychology graduates who do. The point is that it's not the degree, but the character and intelligence of the person holding it that determines whether they make a competent CEO.
Meaning it is obvious that an accounting degree would contribute much to skills as a CEO?
How's that for an oxymoron:
is here.
Here it is:
http://aclum.org/sites/all/files/legal/re_david_house/fong_robles_vincent_re_david_House_12-21-10.pdf
For the same reason that Russians recently "elected" Putin back into office.
Here in Kenya, very productive crop farms (wheat, corn) are been constantly replaced with farms that export fruit, vegetables and flowers to Europe, because government subsidies encourage export over local industry. Not only are the latter much more intensive in their water/energy/chemical requirements, they also mean that the country is seriously dependent on increasingly fickle Western markets (people buy fewer flowers and exotic vegetables in a recession).
This has happened so much that the country no longer is self-sufficient when it comes to things like wheat and corn (which form the basis of the local diet). We now import these things from places like Russia. If instead we hadn't bothered with silly flower farms and stuck to feeding the local population, things would be a lot less precarious.
This TED talk was posted just yesterday, and addresses your question perfectly.