It's my understanding that Asians are very meritocratically oriented, and one of the results is that they must know how people rank. Even if there were more schools to accept all the potential students, people would still be racking their brains because exams would be designed to order 9 million people from the top person to Mr. 9 million.
Their fascination with meritocracy is not necessarily a bad thing. Thomas Friedman mentioned in The world is flat that the Chinese insist on promoting people who know what they're talking about in government. With a meritocratically oriented civil service that runs all the way to the top, the leaders of Chinese government tend to be engineers and scientists, whereas we in the democratic USA are stuck with lawyers.
It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into
To be fair, I've not actually heard of an incident of a predator who used information from myspace to stalk someone (which is not to say it hasn't happened, just that it's probably very rare.)
Internet predators don't work that way. If they were ballsy enough to do so (find info off of myspace, use it to stalk), then they'd be ballsy enough to stalk someone in a mall parking lot, which is a lot faster and more effective.
It's also worth noting that the vast majority of stalkers are exes--and others already (well) known to the stalkee.
This MUST be why 1 in 5 female undergrads are sexually assulted sometime during their 4(+) years at university.
A statistic which implies that your average sexual predator is basically harmless in comparison to the people sitting around you in your History 101 class.
Here in the USA, we have an interesting cultural/political phenomenon: many lower middle class people strongly support the republican party whose policies are very biased towrads helping the very rich.
I wouldn't necessarily call that an American phenomenon. For instance, an interesting study showed that Latin Americans who immigrate to the US are horrifed by estate taxes...even when the estate taxes don't kick in until the estate is worth $1mil.
The estate tax is purely a tax on the wealthy, so its elimination would benefit the wealthy the most (though keeping it is not necessariliy helpful to the non-wealthy.) In either case, these immigrants see some type of potential for them to be worth that much, and plus some other type of cultural aversion to taxation at death, make them highly supportive of the estate taxe's elimination.
Since when does outsourcing to other nations, helping their economies, ensure that we have plenty of jobs here? That makes zero sense. All you need to do is ask automotive workers, textile workers, and manufacturing workers how they feel about the practice. I assure you, you aren't going to get a positive response.
If a person had their heart on being an automotive worker, textile worker...et cetera, then yes, they're getting screwed. America is simply too expensive and not competitive enough for these industries. It's no longer something we specialize in, just like growing bananas in America just doesn't work. I'm not sure how people can talk about manufacturing in this country anymore...there's just no future in it at this time. (I incidentally am from a state which is big into manufacturing, and am watching this reality slowly dawn on people here. Other states have figured it out faster.)
However, flexible labor markets do help people get jobs which are appropriate for the country. Our flexible labor market has helped us get contracting, research and all sorts of other jobs that we are exceedingly competitive in.
I'm not saying that we have to enact laws that make it difficult to fire people. I'm saying that a company should not be permitted to displace 10,000 people's jobs by moving them to a foreign country. The practice damages American lives.
Aren't those two sentences in contradiction to each other?
What's the difference between a company firing 10k people to outsouce to a foreign country and a company firing 10k people because they have invested a lot in capital (machinery) and just don't need the people? Which is a better outcome?
There just is no way to create such a law. Eventually the company will just continue manufacturing at the higher costs, lose market share due to excessive price, and go into bankruptcy. Once that occurs, they close down and some other cheaper manufacturer takes thier place.
With wages having such a huge differential from place to place, there simply is *no* legitimate expectation that countries like the United States can engage in most types of manufacturing. Anyone who believes that is fooling themselves terribly. Either the other countries will have to become more expensive (which is arguably happening...costs for Indian IT professionals are still cheaper than in the US, but have risen to a point where they aren't exactly competitive anymore) or costs in the US have to decrease (and this might begin happening on a regional basis. For instance, New York has essentially priced itself out of the market, and you're starting to see a reluctance of any job growth there--it's being reallocated in cheaper parts of the country. Still, the US is too expensive.)
Well, I disagree with the entire statement. But more importantly, it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
I admit, it was a bit of a tangent...since you're more interested in "saving" jobs...and my paragraph focused on "creating" them (or, more accurately, introducing more velocity in the labor market.) You say you disagree...does that imply that you think my ideas would not achieve more velocity in the labor market?
If you want to save American jobs, you have to start by keeping the jobs here. That is accomplished through legislation.
Can you name a country that has successfully done that? There are plenty of nations that are far more protectionist than we are, and the results are pretty mediocre.
The politicians in this country have not introduced any kind of real legislation which protects US jobs.
What do you propose then? Flexible labor markets are key to making sure there are plenty of jobs.
In fact, the Economist just had a survey on India, which noted that India has a surprisingly low quantity of textile workers. This is blamed on a unique law that companies who employ more than 100 people have to ask for permission to law anyone off from the state they're in. The result is that a lot of Indian textile companies, rather than deal with the law, just outsource elsewhere (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) or they invest in capital equipment (machinery) than people. The undeniable fact is that companies avoid countries with labor laws that make it difficult to fire people (look at the horribly slow job growth of France and Germany.
I believe a lot of the future of employment won't be employees working for companies. I haven't had a job that paid me via a W-2 in 2 years...and I'm starting to think I might never again. I'm an independent contractor on a 1099 for a variety of different companies doing a variety of different things. The 1099 lifestyle I suspect will become more common, and there are peculiar things about it (god help me the taxes couldn't be more complex.) But essentially, its in-country-outsourcing.
And this is because big business donates billions of dollars to politicians to prevent them from doing it.
Fact: Most Americans work for small (under 50 employees) companies.
Fact: Most large companies care little about labor laws (they're more interested in protective legislation for themselves). The huge amount of lobbying that occurs in regard to labor laws come from the NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Between the NFIB and the evangelicals you've got most of the power of the Republican party.
Personally, I believe the main thing that's needed are laws that make it easier to hire people and make discrimination more difficult (including prohibitions on using credit rating data, drug tests, criminal records beyond 5-7 years in judging a job candidate. Further, I'd like to see a system where resumes are submittedly "blindly" (with no name) to prevent google name searches on canidate's names, as well as hidden college information (so that people are not chosen simply because they went to one college or another--just as long as the college is accreditated.)
That will allow people who have been left out of the market labor a chance to break-in.
I do think there's a learning curve for young people and their interaction on sites like MySpace, they need to learn not to put voluntarily so much personal information out there as to make themselves vulnerable to predators, a lesson I think they're learning.
But in the longrun, that seems to be the less important thing to learn. I'm much more concerned about people putting up pictures of themselves doing illicit activity (drinking underage, toking, et cetera) or pictures of them just plain looking foolish--which will be archived permanently on the net.
The internet predator menace remains terribly overblown in comparison.
Actually, in several countries you couldn't even do that. In Finland, wherever you erect a house is considered completely private property, but if you own forest beyond your back yard, you can't prevent people from using it. " That concept does exist in the United States (there's a Roman law concept called the public trust doctrine that carried to common law.) In basically all states (particularly California) the beach beyond the high tide line is public property and freely accessible, regardless as to who owns in it. (Essentially, that's the part of the beach with wet sand.)
That's not to say that this issue is clearly settled (even in California where there's a lot of litigation) or universal (my Ohio, for instance, seems to push the public area of the beach beyond the high tide line to the water...so you can walk along the 312 miles of Ohio coastline without issue...as long as you are always standing in water, which is a tougher standard than always being on the wet sand.)
If you think about how Californians prize the beach and their cultural attitudes to it, simply transfer that passion to Finland and their forests.
Few airplane accidents (these days) are caused by "major" failures. Modern aircraft accidents are typically caused by a series of minor issues that add together to create a lethal cascade.
When you have trained professionals navigating an extremely complex machine, minor issues matter, and Douglas engineers overlooked (or were forced to overlook) these issues. To be fair, the 747 and L1011 shared some of them in common, but the DC-10 time and time again shared a disastrous combination of minor issues.
There have been undoubtedly lethal crashes caused by computer interface issues as well as software issues of modern planes (a bit more with Airbus, but that's not to say that Boeing has been excluded.)
However, historically, pilot error (also called, amusing, controlled flight into terrain) has killed more people than any other issue.
I like to cite American Airlines 965, which crashed in the mountains surrounding Cali, Columbia. Like any accident, the situation was a long series of mistakes (many of which were computer interface issues in regards to navigation.)
The aicraft was slowing down to land and so had the flaps down. The pilots were giving a terrain alarm and told to pull up. They did so and put the engines on maximum power to avoid ramming into the mountain the aircraft was warning them about. According to the investigation, had they put the flaps back up, the aircraft would have made it, but with the flaps down the engines couldn't overcome the drag--but in all the excitement, they forgot the flaps.
I believe a newer Airbus would have put 2+2 together and pulled the flaps up.
Businesses choose NYC for lots of reasons, some of which are...and then again, a lot are leaving. New York is simply pricing itself out of the market.
A friend of mine works for Chase here in Columbus, noting that there are people in Manhattan making $200k/year doing what a person in Columbus does for $75k/year.
Unless those people are magically 2 1/2 times more productive, it'll be difficult to justify their current situation.
As an economist, I'm curious to see what happens./used to live in new york
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but my Indian friends (as well as friends from other countries, but particularly India) tell me that a lot of people are getting Vonage units here in the US, with a US phone number, and using them in India for low priced/easy phone calls to the US (not to mention an easy way of taking calls from friends/family in the US.)
I hear their pleased. After all, what number do they have to port-over?
It was caused by a fire in the cargo hold that cut critical links between the cockpit controls and the hydraulic systems needed to keep the plane running.
Newer designed (and better designed) aircraft have multiple-redundant control systems which are channeled through different parts of the aircraft (for instance, one control system through the passenger floor, another through the ceiling, and a third through the floor of the fuselage.)
Several accidents, notably with the DC-10, were blamed on the manufacturer channeling all the control systems through the same part of the aircraft (United 232, Turkish 981.)
In America you have all sorts of additional sales taxes on top of prices
The exceptions to that, incidentally, are gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes.
For reasons unknown, governments work hard to hide the true cost of the taxes for those products, but keep the taxes on all other goods in the open. (Whereas in Europe, all sales taxes are hidden from the consumer.)
It's a lot easier to feel the "pain" of the tax when it's out in the open, and that keeps sales taxes more reasonable (after all, if we had a 17% sales tax, it too would have to be hidden just to keep people from revolting.)
Ohio actually has a law on the books saying that the fingerprints from children collected at schools (for this purpose) must be retained by the parents, and may not be retained by anyone else.
ORC 3313.96
Informational programs relative to missing children; fingerprinting program. [snip] If developed, the fingerprinting program shall be developed for the sole purpose of providing a means by which a missing child might be located or identified and shall be operated on the following basis:
(1) No student or minor shall be required to participate in the program
(4) All fingerprint cards shall be given to the parents, parent who is the residential parent and legal custodian, guardian, legal custodian, or other person responsible for a student or minor after the fingerprinting of the student or minor. No copy of a fingerprinting shall be retained by a law enforcement agency, school, school district, or any other person except the student or minor's parent, guardian, or legal custodian.
Georgia, for example, requires a digital fingerprint before you can get your driver's license or your state ID.
Fortunately, the fingerprinting requirement in Georgia is eliminated as of July 1, 2006. On that date, the state is also required to delete the fingerprints on file.
But, because I didn't get the 'different' vibe at first, by the time I could/should have I wasn't paying attention to it anymore.
I don't consider your post as disagreeing with me. I never said that all indications of issues with an individual would manifest online, just that some will. I generally agree that online conversations can be lacking in certain regards, and that lack won't be filled until you meet the person in real life.
My contention only was that more indicators indicating a safety issue will be more likely to manifest quicker online than in person. If other indicators only manifest in person, then that leaves you at basically the same place you would have started if you just met them in real life first.
Admittedly, I just haven't had the same experiences as you have.
Can anyone explain the enduring popularity of those voting machines despites the numerous flaws?
Disability rights groups (like for the blind) are enamored with DRE machines. It allows them to vote privately without any help.
Some places have adopted the obvious solution--for instance, there are counties in Ohio which use optical scan for most voters (and absentee ballots of course) but will have one DRE per precinct for voters with disabilities.
Optical scan ballots also have a high level of non-voting/spoiled ballots. Some voting rights people are troubled by that, and prefer machines, which are much more difficult to misvote on.
In answer to your original question, we in Franklin County had 57 different ballot issues, candidates, referenda, et cetera on the November 2004 ballot. Even on optical scan, that's a lot of paper (and 550,000 ballots were voted.)
You'd think with the amount of computer literacy children are growing up with these days, they'd have an inkling of paranoia about meeting people from MySpace and other sources.
And actually, I believe they do. The problem is media/politician spin.
A 50 year old who harrasses a 14 year old at a mall is a dirty old man, but in the same event happening via Myspace and AIM the 50 year old is a "sexual predator." The reality of course is that the online event is much safer (after all, the 14 year old is behind a monitor at an unknown location and is in complete control over the situation) but is newer and easier to misunderstand.
I contend that meeting people online first then meeting them in real life is far safer than meeting them in real life first--profiles and conversation (both online and on the phone) will give clues to the nature and personality of the person you're meeting--all of which you don't have the luxury of if you just meet them in real life first.
Personally, I find it telling that politicians "expressed astonishment" that every company and their dog asks for your SS#. How the hell do these guys live in the modern world? Do they actually have servants
Yes, they do have servants (including, of course, their wife, family, people in their campaign, et cetera.) They do not realize how often their SSN is given out, because they have people who do that for them. Being a congressman is just too complex for them to take care of life themselves.
For a time I worked at a friend's life insurance brokerage. He had contracts with a dozen different companies, and probably 300 agents under him, with various contracts with various companies.
All of the companies used my boss' SSN in some stupid way (with the most egregious using it as the main identifier for logging in to the website to check on pending cases.) This meant that we, in his office, had to throw around the SSN and document its use for others (and it also meant that many of his agents had his SSN in their files as well.) If he knew how his SSN was being used, he'd be furious.
Whoever came up with this system needs to be beaten.
At the state school everything was all about the SSN. One every test, you had to put your SSN...
In the early 1990s a group of students took Rutgers to court regarding SSN use as the student identifier. They won in federal court, and that case was considered precedence in this field. (Not to mention kinna cool because it was just a bunch of students going at the university pro se.)
That case specifically enumerated
*prohibitions using all or part of the SSN as an identifier on tests or assignments
*prohibitions using all or part of the SSN as an identifier en masse (such as posting grades by last four digits)
*prohibitions regarding using all or part of the SSN as an identifier on student ID cards
Universities damn well know of the Krebs v. Rutgers prohibitions but they have taken their time in implimenting them. Hell, even my university broke/still breaks the Privacy Act of 1974, by not disclosing how the SSN will be used and if its necessary to disclose, when applying for admission.
Slashdot Mirror
why don't they just open more schools?
(Stereotype alert)
It's my understanding that Asians are very meritocratically oriented, and one of the results is that they must know how people rank. Even if there were more schools to accept all the potential students, people would still be racking their brains because exams would be designed to order 9 million people from the top person to Mr. 9 million.
Their fascination with meritocracy is not necessarily a bad thing. Thomas Friedman mentioned in The world is flat that the Chinese insist on promoting people who know what they're talking about in government. With a meritocratically oriented civil service that runs all the way to the top, the leaders of Chinese government tend to be engineers and scientists, whereas we in the democratic USA are stuck with lawyers.
It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into
To be fair, I've not actually heard of an incident of a predator who used information from myspace to stalk someone (which is not to say it hasn't happened, just that it's probably very rare.)
Internet predators don't work that way. If they were ballsy enough to do so (find info off of myspace, use it to stalk), then they'd be ballsy enough to stalk someone in a mall parking lot, which is a lot faster and more effective.
It's also worth noting that the vast majority of stalkers are exes--and others already (well) known to the stalkee.
companies market like rabid dogs towards teenagers. They just look so tasty as a market.
Rabid? Tasty? Teenagers?
I knew I should have majored in Marketing.
This MUST be why 1 in 5 female undergrads are sexually assulted sometime during their 4(+) years at university.
A statistic which implies that your average sexual predator is basically harmless in comparison to the people sitting around you in your History 101 class.
Here in the USA, we have an interesting cultural/political phenomenon: many lower middle class people strongly support the republican party whose policies are very biased towrads helping the very rich.
I wouldn't necessarily call that an American phenomenon. For instance, an interesting study showed that Latin Americans who immigrate to the US are horrifed by estate taxes...even when the estate taxes don't kick in until the estate is worth $1mil.
The estate tax is purely a tax on the wealthy, so its elimination would benefit the wealthy the most (though keeping it is not necessariliy helpful to the non-wealthy.) In either case, these immigrants see some type of potential for them to be worth that much, and plus some other type of cultural aversion to taxation at death, make them highly supportive of the estate taxe's elimination.
Since when does outsourcing to other nations, helping their economies, ensure that we have plenty of jobs here? That makes zero sense. All you need to do is ask automotive workers, textile workers, and manufacturing workers how they feel about the practice. I assure you, you aren't going to get a positive response.
If a person had their heart on being an automotive worker, textile worker...et cetera, then yes, they're getting screwed. America is simply too expensive and not competitive enough for these industries. It's no longer something we specialize in, just like growing bananas in America just doesn't work. I'm not sure how people can talk about manufacturing in this country anymore...there's just no future in it at this time. (I incidentally am from a state which is big into manufacturing, and am watching this reality slowly dawn on people here. Other states have figured it out faster.)
However, flexible labor markets do help people get jobs which are appropriate for the country. Our flexible labor market has helped us get contracting, research and all sorts of other jobs that we are exceedingly competitive in.
I'm not saying that we have to enact laws that make it difficult to fire people. I'm saying that a company should not be permitted to displace 10,000 people's jobs by moving them to a foreign country. The practice damages American lives.
Aren't those two sentences in contradiction to each other?
What's the difference between a company firing 10k people to outsouce to a foreign country and a company firing 10k people because they have invested a lot in capital (machinery) and just don't need the people? Which is a better outcome?
There just is no way to create such a law. Eventually the company will just continue manufacturing at the higher costs, lose market share due to excessive price, and go into bankruptcy. Once that occurs, they close down and some other cheaper manufacturer takes thier place.
With wages having such a huge differential from place to place, there simply is *no* legitimate expectation that countries like the United States can engage in most types of manufacturing. Anyone who believes that is fooling themselves terribly. Either the other countries will have to become more expensive (which is arguably happening...costs for Indian IT professionals are still cheaper than in the US, but have risen to a point where they aren't exactly competitive anymore) or costs in the US have to decrease (and this might begin happening on a regional basis. For instance, New York has essentially priced itself out of the market, and you're starting to see a reluctance of any job growth there--it's being reallocated in cheaper parts of the country. Still, the US is too expensive.)
Well, I disagree with the entire statement. But more importantly, it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
I admit, it was a bit of a tangent...since you're more interested in "saving" jobs...and my paragraph focused on "creating" them (or, more accurately, introducing more velocity in the labor market.) You say you disagree...does that imply that you think my ideas would not achieve more velocity in the labor market?
If you want to save American jobs, you have to start by keeping the jobs here. That is accomplished through legislation.
Can you name a country that has successfully done that? There are plenty of nations that are far more protectionist than we are, and the results are pretty mediocre.
The politicians in this country have not introduced any kind of real legislation which protects US jobs.
What do you propose then? Flexible labor markets are key to making sure there are plenty of jobs.
In fact, the Economist just had a survey on India, which noted that India has a surprisingly low quantity of textile workers. This is blamed on a unique law that companies who employ more than 100 people have to ask for permission to law anyone off from the state they're in. The result is that a lot of Indian textile companies, rather than deal with the law, just outsource elsewhere (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) or they invest in capital equipment (machinery) than people. The undeniable fact is that companies avoid countries with labor laws that make it difficult to fire people (look at the horribly slow job growth of France and Germany.
I believe a lot of the future of employment won't be employees working for companies. I haven't had a job that paid me via a W-2 in 2 years...and I'm starting to think I might never again. I'm an independent contractor on a 1099 for a variety of different companies doing a variety of different things. The 1099 lifestyle I suspect will become more common, and there are peculiar things about it (god help me the taxes couldn't be more complex.) But essentially, its in-country-outsourcing.
And this is because big business donates billions of dollars to politicians to prevent them from doing it.
Fact: Most Americans work for small (under 50 employees) companies.
Fact: Most large companies care little about labor laws (they're more interested in protective legislation for themselves). The huge amount of lobbying that occurs in regard to labor laws come from the NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Between the NFIB and the evangelicals you've got most of the power of the Republican party.
Personally, I believe the main thing that's needed are laws that make it easier to hire people and make discrimination more difficult (including prohibitions on using credit rating data, drug tests, criminal records beyond 5-7 years in judging a job candidate. Further, I'd like to see a system where resumes are submittedly "blindly" (with no name) to prevent google name searches on canidate's names, as well as hidden college information (so that people are not chosen simply because they went to one college or another--just as long as the college is accreditated.)
That will allow people who have been left out of the market labor a chance to break-in.
In all seriousness, while most Indians know Hindi, the main languages of Bangalore and Hyderabad are more likely to be Tamil or Telegu.
Hindi is spoken in Northern India, which is the expensive part of India, and therefore outsourcing is much rarer there.
I do think there's a learning curve for young people and their interaction on sites like MySpace, they need to learn not to put voluntarily so much personal information out there as to make themselves vulnerable to predators, a lesson I think they're learning.
But in the longrun, that seems to be the less important thing to learn. I'm much more concerned about people putting up pictures of themselves doing illicit activity (drinking underage, toking, et cetera) or pictures of them just plain looking foolish--which will be archived permanently on the net.
The internet predator menace remains terribly overblown in comparison.
Actually, in several countries you couldn't even do that. In Finland, wherever you erect a house is considered completely private property, but if you own forest beyond your back yard, you can't prevent people from using it.
"
That concept does exist in the United States (there's a Roman law concept called the public trust doctrine that carried to common law.) In basically all states (particularly California) the beach beyond the high tide line is public property and freely accessible, regardless as to who owns in it. (Essentially, that's the part of the beach with wet sand.)
That's not to say that this issue is clearly settled (even in California where there's a lot of litigation) or universal (my Ohio, for instance, seems to push the public area of the beach beyond the high tide line to the water...so you can walk along the 312 miles of Ohio coastline without issue...as long as you are always standing in water, which is a tougher standard than always being on the wet sand.)
If you think about how Californians prize the beach and their cultural attitudes to it, simply transfer that passion to Finland and their forests.
The problems with the DC-10 are minor...
Few airplane accidents (these days) are caused by "major" failures. Modern aircraft accidents are typically caused by a series of minor issues that add together to create a lethal cascade.
When you have trained professionals navigating an extremely complex machine, minor issues matter, and Douglas engineers overlooked (or were forced to overlook) these issues. To be fair, the 747 and L1011 shared some of them in common, but the DC-10 time and time again shared a disastrous combination of minor issues.
There have been undoubtedly lethal crashes caused by computer interface issues as well as software issues of modern planes (a bit more with Airbus, but that's not to say that Boeing has been excluded.)
However, historically, pilot error (also called, amusing, controlled flight into terrain) has killed more people than any other issue.
I like to cite American Airlines 965, which crashed in the mountains surrounding Cali, Columbia. Like any accident, the situation was a long series of mistakes (many of which were computer interface issues in regards to navigation.)
The aicraft was slowing down to land and so had the flaps down. The pilots were giving a terrain alarm and told to pull up. They did so and put the engines on maximum power to avoid ramming into the mountain the aircraft was warning them about. According to the investigation, had they put the flaps back up, the aircraft would have made it, but with the flaps down the engines couldn't overcome the drag--but in all the excitement, they forgot the flaps.
I believe a newer Airbus would have put 2+2 together and pulled the flaps up.
Businesses choose NYC for lots of reasons, some of which are ...and then again, a lot are leaving. New York is simply pricing itself out of the market.
/used to live in new york
A friend of mine works for Chase here in Columbus, noting that there are people in Manhattan making $200k/year doing what a person in Columbus does for $75k/year.
Unless those people are magically 2 1/2 times more productive, it'll be difficult to justify their current situation.
As an economist, I'm curious to see what happens.
May I ask...do you know how it was contracted?
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but my Indian friends (as well as friends from other countries, but particularly India) tell me that a lot of people are getting Vonage units here in the US, with a US phone number, and using them in India for low priced/easy phone calls to the US (not to mention an easy way of taking calls from friends/family in the US.)
I hear their pleased. After all, what number do they have to port-over?
It was caused by a fire in the cargo hold that cut critical links between the cockpit controls and the hydraulic systems needed to keep the plane running.
Newer designed (and better designed) aircraft have multiple-redundant control systems which are channeled through different parts of the aircraft (for instance, one control system through the passenger floor, another through the ceiling, and a third through the floor of the fuselage.)
Several accidents, notably with the DC-10, were blamed on the manufacturer channeling all the control systems through the same part of the aircraft (United 232, Turkish 981.)
In America you have all sorts of additional sales taxes on top of prices
The exceptions to that, incidentally, are gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes.
For reasons unknown, governments work hard to hide the true cost of the taxes for those products, but keep the taxes on all other goods in the open. (Whereas in Europe, all sales taxes are hidden from the consumer.)
It's a lot easier to feel the "pain" of the tax when it's out in the open, and that keeps sales taxes more reasonable (after all, if we had a 17% sales tax, it too would have to be hidden just to keep people from revolting.)
I didn't mean "sexually harass"
What state did that occur in?
Ohio actually has a law on the books saying that the fingerprints from children collected at schools (for this purpose) must be retained by the parents, and may not be retained by anyone else.
ORC 3313.96
Informational programs relative to missing children; fingerprinting program.
[snip]
If developed, the fingerprinting program shall be developed for the sole purpose of providing a means by which a missing child might be located or identified and shall be operated on the following basis:
(1) No student or minor shall be required to participate in the program
(4) All fingerprint cards shall be given to the parents, parent who is the residential parent and legal custodian, guardian, legal custodian, or other person responsible for a student or minor after the fingerprinting of the student or minor. No copy of a fingerprinting shall be retained by a law enforcement agency, school, school district, or any other person except the student or minor's parent, guardian, or legal custodian.
Georgia, for example, requires a digital fingerprint before you can get your driver's license or your state ID.
Fortunately, the fingerprinting requirement in Georgia is eliminated as of July 1, 2006. On that date, the state is also required to delete the fingerprints on file.
But, because I didn't get the 'different' vibe at first, by the time I could/should have I wasn't paying attention to it anymore.
I don't consider your post as disagreeing with me. I never said that all indications of issues with an individual would manifest online, just that some will. I generally agree that online conversations can be lacking in certain regards, and that lack won't be filled until you meet the person in real life.
My contention only was that more indicators indicating a safety issue will be more likely to manifest quicker online than in person. If other indicators only manifest in person, then that leaves you at basically the same place you would have started if you just met them in real life first.
Admittedly, I just haven't had the same experiences as you have.
Can anyone explain the enduring popularity of those voting machines despites the numerous flaws?
Disability rights groups (like for the blind) are enamored with DRE machines. It allows them to vote privately without any help.
Some places have adopted the obvious solution--for instance, there are counties in Ohio which use optical scan for most voters (and absentee ballots of course) but will have one DRE per precinct for voters with disabilities.
Optical scan ballots also have a high level of non-voting/spoiled ballots. Some voting rights people are troubled by that, and prefer machines, which are much more difficult to misvote on.
In answer to your original question, we in Franklin County had 57 different ballot issues, candidates, referenda, et cetera on the November 2004 ballot. Even on optical scan, that's a lot of paper (and 550,000 ballots were voted.)
You'd think with the amount of computer literacy children are growing up with these days, they'd have an inkling of paranoia about meeting people from MySpace and other sources.
And actually, I believe they do. The problem is media/politician spin.
A 50 year old who harrasses a 14 year old at a mall is a dirty old man, but in the same event happening via Myspace and AIM the 50 year old is a "sexual predator." The reality of course is that the online event is much safer (after all, the 14 year old is behind a monitor at an unknown location and is in complete control over the situation) but is newer and easier to misunderstand.
I contend that meeting people online first then meeting them in real life is far safer than meeting them in real life first--profiles and conversation (both online and on the phone) will give clues to the nature and personality of the person you're meeting--all of which you don't have the luxury of if you just meet them in real life first.
Personally, I find it telling that politicians "expressed astonishment" that every company and their dog asks for your SS#. How the hell do these guys live in the modern world? Do they actually have servants
Yes, they do have servants (including, of course, their wife, family, people in their campaign, et cetera.) They do not realize how often their SSN is given out, because they have people who do that for them. Being a congressman is just too complex for them to take care of life themselves.
For a time I worked at a friend's life insurance brokerage. He had contracts with a dozen different companies, and probably 300 agents under him, with various contracts with various companies.
All of the companies used my boss' SSN in some stupid way (with the most egregious using it as the main identifier for logging in to the website to check on pending cases.) This meant that we, in his office, had to throw around the SSN and document its use for others (and it also meant that many of his agents had his SSN in their files as well.) If he knew how his SSN was being used, he'd be furious.
Whoever came up with this system needs to be beaten.
At the state school everything was all about the SSN. One every test, you had to put your SSN...
In the early 1990s a group of students took Rutgers to court regarding SSN use as the student identifier. They won in federal court, and that case was considered precedence in this field. (Not to mention kinna cool because it was just a bunch of students going at the university pro se.)
That case specifically enumerated
*prohibitions using all or part of the SSN as an identifier on tests or assignments
*prohibitions using all or part of the SSN as an identifier en masse (such as posting grades by last four digits)
*prohibitions regarding using all or part of the SSN as an identifier on student ID cards
Universities damn well know of the Krebs v. Rutgers prohibitions but they have taken their time in implimenting them. Hell, even my university broke/still breaks the Privacy Act of 1974, by not disclosing how the SSN will be used and if its necessary to disclose, when applying for admission.