There is absolutely no reason why you can't test the efficacy of the herbal cocktail as a whole.
Yes, absolutelely, and while I dont' disagree that there are some in the community that don't like the testing, there is also a hesistance in the western medicine community to test cocktails, since, in their mind, not knowing which chemical is the active one means that the test results aren't any good.
Are you joking? Do you even know what the placebo effect is?
I'm joking, being serious, making a metaphor, some social commentary, and maybe one or two other things at the same time. More people are saved by hope than anything else....
Re:Getting Rid Of Clippy...
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
Do you really need to buy a book to figure out how to uncheck the "Office Assistants" checkbox in the list of available modules during the install of Office?
Well actually...yes. The Office installer has its own entirely different interface, which still really doesn't make all that much sense to me.
I was doing some consultation work the other day, and I needed to reinstall some part of Office.
When I got to the customization part, it seemed like the amount of hard drive space needed was a pretty high number, in comparison to the only thing I needed to install. Since I only needed this one thing, I changed everything else to "do not run from my computer."
Which of course, uninstalled Office.
Two problems here:
a.) the installer's estimate on hard drive space needed is only for new installations, it doesn't take old installations into account (which i figure are probably reinstalled, though i didn't need them to be)
b.) this is both an installer and uninstaller. if you tell it not to install something, it actually will uninstall it (i guess "run from my computer/don't run from my computer" should make this obvious, but then my brain doesn't work that way since not a single other windows installer in this world works that way)
c.) I changed clippy to the cat. His animations and sounds amuse me.
I'd open an herbal/magnetic/psychic/everything superstore and name it PLACEBO, INC
There are of course lots of scams on the market. Then there are a lot of good alternative therapies that have not been tested scientifically, for a vareity of reasons.
Keep in mind that your company making herbal supplements has neither the money nor the inclination to run a bunch of double blind tests.
Keep in mind that a pharmaceutical company can patent the drug they make (usually by patenting the process used to make it.) An herbal supplement company can't...most supplements, frankly, are just some form of the herb grown, cut, dried, pulverized and then put into a little capsule. The relatively cheap prices reflect this.
There is also an interesting issue with the testing itself. Western medicine likes to break things down. For instance, a good study on Odelandia, a major herb used in traditional chinese medicine, came out several years ago, showing that it reduced lung cancer cells. Well that's all good, but the study was not really understood in the TCM community. Why? Traditional chinese medicine does a lot of mixing...Odelandia is never alone, it's taken in "patent" medicines which are cocktails of 4-12 different herbs.
Some of the newest prescription medications may be derived from natural herbs. However you can't patent an herb, there's no money in it. The pharmaceutical company will take the herb apart, trying to find the one chemical that may have been having the desired effect, boost that one chemical and sell it. In the long run, all those other chemicals in the herb may have been catalysts (and so the one isolated chemical may not have the same effect as just ingesting the entire flower.) Given this, patent medicines are not just 4-12 different herbs together, they really consist of hundreds of different chemicals mixed together. This simply exists outside of the bounds of your double blind placebo test.
But finally, let's say that it's all a scam anyway. Everything about alternative medicine.
So I look at your average FDA approved pharmaceutical study, and I find that the active drug is only marginally more effective than the placebo, which, in itself, is fairly effective.
The Mayo brothers (of the Mayo clinic) once said that 2/3rds of the people in their hospital were there for psychological issues...which grew into physical ailments.
Shit, billions of dollars are invested into all these great pharmaceuticals, which are still not all that much more effective than the placebo. Imagine if we put all that money into making the placebo better.
My spending on alternative medicines is no where near that of a modern pharmaceutical...and I get all the benefits without the side effects. If I'm being hoodwinked, at least it's to my advantage, and it's being done cheaply.
What is the size, in thousands, of the voting population in the UK?
o What is the size, in millions, of the voting population in the US?
Doesn't matter, since both countries will break everything done into very small jurisdictions.
The US has 280+million Ohio has 11.3 million Franklin County has 1.2 million Columbus has 750k my pollworking ward has 10k my pollworking precint (four pollworkers per precinct) has 850 registered voters and of those 850 registered, about 120 will vote in an off year election, about 300 will vote in an even year, 500 will vote in presidential election
Here in Franklin County we use machines, but with four pollworkers, I imagine we could count paper ballots up fairly quickly, even if 500 people vote. (After all, that's why there's four of us.)
systems these days are able to tell the difference between a dead/living finger
Did they actually test that? Where did they get all the dead fingers from?
Eww.
Seriously though, it occurred to me that the worst case scenario of cutting someone's finger off is probably off the mark. More likely you can just tranquilize someone temporarily (and I would rather doubt that even the most sophisticated fingerprint readers can tell if the person is fully conscious vs. comatose.)
A bankcard+pin+fingerprint is more secure than a bankcard+pin
That's absolutely true. However, bankcard+pin is actually pretty secure as it is, and you won't be seeing the latter replaced because the former is expensive and doesn't really add all that much security anyway. The fact is...biometric companies aren't developing biometrics to supplant current security solutions (no one would buy them for this, except the government(who doesn't know better)) they are developing them to replace/create new security solutions.
I predict that we will eventually see ATMs that require a card, password and biometrics.
I don't, because ATM fraud is fairly low, and there is simply no justification for the investment in new ATM security infrastructure. (If anything, phony machines caching card numbers is far more a concern.)
It is unlikely for a criminal to get both the card, the password, and a time to use the card before it gets cancelled. The current system works well.
Having said that, the introductions of biometrics with ATMs has been biometrics alone. We all know that this is stupid from a security perspective, but the biometric companies are unable to sell banks on the security (since there is little need to chage the security situation) so they sell the equipment for customer convenience. Customers are willing to be scanned so that they don't have to carry their ATM card and know their password.
Why should this be treated any differently from any other misdemeanor theft?
Cuz the guy who's the head of the Senate Transportation committee also owns a chain of gas stations.
(I happen to like him, he's helped me before on bills, though honestly, I agree with you.) If they felt that gas station crime is a problem, they could up the penalties, but I have issue with tampering with the driving license contract.
It was actually piggybacked onto a bill that suspends someone's license for not paying at a gas station. The single subject is "theft." I believe this bill was signed on 11/13, so it will become live law on 2/13.
Either way, sounds like the MPAA is lobbying hard....
Sec. 2913.07. (A) As used in this section: (1) "Audiovisual recording function" means the capability of a device to record or transmit a motion picture or any part of a motion picture by means of any technology existing on, or developed after, the effective date of this section.
(2) "Facility" includes all retail establishments and movie theaters.
(B) No person, without the written consent of the owner or lessee of the facility and of the licensor of the motion picture, shall knowingly operate an audiovisual recording function of a device in a facility in which a motion picture is being shown.
(C) Whoever violates division (B) of this section is guilty of motion picture piracy, a misdemeanor of the first degree on the first offense and a felony of the fifth degree on each subsequent offense.
(D) This section does not prohibit or restrict a lawfully authorized investigative, law enforcement, protective, or intelligence gathering employee or agent of the government of this state or a political subdivision of this state, or of the federal government, when acting in an official capacity, from operating an audiovisual recording function of a device in any facility in which a motion picture is being shown.
(E) Division (B) of this section does not limit or affect the application of any other prohibition in the Revised Code. Any act that is a violation of both division (B) of this section and another provision of the Revised Code may be prosecuted under this section, under the other provision of the Revised Code, or under both this section and the other provision of the Revised Code.
As noted in the other post, I had.edu in my domain. I had just started Ohio State, and the "honors" dorms had broadband (those of us who wanted it paid $20/month.)
By the time I moved out, in 1997, Time Warner Columbus was one of the first in the nation to offer cable internet. So I haven't gone back to a phone since.
On the other hand, webcams have become so overdone. Every teenage girl and her best friend have one.
And this is indeed true...and we can thank Jenni for that. I remember reading and finding the site in 1996 (which is when I first got broadband) and this was pretty hot shit at that time. Quite innovative--I believe I read about her in Wired. The fact that she lasted this long is actually amazing...and is a testament to her patience.
Not only did she invent this idea of camwhore (though camwhores usually perform on camera and eventually turn it off...at least, there won't be a good picture if they're not at the computer) Jenni wired her house with cameras (though that seems to have dropped off with time.)
This was of course a form of porn (figuratively and literally) and she might have even made a bit of profit in these years...much like the porn industry.
Camwhores still represent a troublesome frontier. 16 year old girls everywhere are taking off their clothes for free. Guys of all ages watch (and even if there weren't any watching, the girls would be doing it anyway.) That's gotta keep Ashcroft up late at night.
Re:Banks did this stuff all the time...
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
Banks have also been the source of ire for specific ordering of debit transactions.
For instance, you may not have the money to pay for the checks you've written. On one day, five checks come up, but one of them is a wicked large check.
Banks would order the debit transactions so that the large check would go through, and the smaller checks would fail...thereby making for four bounced check transactions ($120) and one cleared check instead of four cleared checks and one bounced check ($30.)
We are now seeing so called "overdraft" protection plans that allow debit card and checks to go through, with a $30 transaction charge. Essentially, these are very very high interest loans, and I believe there are going to be some big lawsuits concerning them.
As it's been pointed out, overdraft happens to poorer individuals, who are running day to day on much lower balances (and who likely don't have the credit to get "real" overdraft protection.) The cost of the overdraft is irrelevant to the cost of the transaction (I have overdrafted under $2 and been stuck with a $30 fee. I could have overdrafted $20k and only had a $30 fee.)
Overdraft fees cascade. I overdraft my account by a small amount of money. On the same day my employer is dropping a direct deposit in, that would have normally covered all the debits. The overdraft fee is removed immediately, so another transaction, a large debit, fails, which causes another overdraft, which causes more transactions to fail, which would have otherwise worked. Essentially, there truly was only one overdraft. But a cascade occurred, and a bunch of overdrafts were made, simply based on overdraft fees themselves. (I've hit the $200 range before....)
The Economist had a great article on tipping, several months ago. ("Gratuitous gratuities" Aug 24th 2000)
Essentially, tipping is a purely cultural phenomenon that's been proven to have no effect on service. Americans will pay a tip that's roughly the same with good service as with bad.
We americans tip for more things than anything else. The belief for this is that it's some sorta sociological/psychological feature (or depending on how you look at it...defect.) Americans are the most charitable people (on an individual basis) so it appears that they want to carry this charitableness to many transactions (that other countries won't do.) For some people a large tip is a boasting sign of wealth and charity.
(from the article) "According to Michael Lynn, the Cornell paper's co-author, countries in which people are more extrovert, sociable or neurotic tend to tip more. Tipping relieves anxiety about being served by strangers. And, says Mr Lynn, "in America, where people are outgoing and expressive, tipping is about social approval. If you tip badly, people think less of you. Tipping well is a chance to show off." Icelanders, by contrast, do not usually tip (see chart)--a measure of their introversion and lack of neuroses, no doubt.
While such explanations may be crude, the hard truth seems to be that tipping does not work. It does not benefit the customer. Nor, in the case of restaurants, does it actually incentivise the waiter, or help the restaurant manager to monitor and assess his staff. The cry of stingy tippers that service people should "just be paid a decent wage" may actually make economic sense."
In reality, the letter opener person on the other end will probably toss your bill in the can.
The vast majority of the time there is no letter opener person. It's a machine that rips open the envelopes, figures out what the check is from the invoice, and then processes it.
If you have an invoice that has a box on it that says "check here if there's an address change" then its definitely a machine opening up your letters (since it's looking for any markings in the box, which would then tell the machine to push that invoice to the side for human examination.)
The auto financing company I worked for contracted the check handling/bill opening services to Bank One, who ran the machines which did that three time zones away (along with, I suspect, hundreds of other companies invoices.) Any checks we ever saw were on microfiche.
I wonder if the RIAA checks first before serving papers?
Of course, when a law firm is going to engage in legal action with someone, they'll run their name in a database to make sure there is no conflict of interest (like they are representing the same person on a different matter.) Any member of the bar is going to pop right up, no matter what.
It is impossible to increase security without reducing anonimity.
The security through identity concept is a dead end, especially at such a wide level. If the value to criminals is there, identity verification/authentication regimes will be broken. The more complex they are, the more loopholes for leveraging there will be. The more people involved, the more difficult it is to have a working system. Watch what has happened with photo driver's licenses (more on my site in my sig) or SSNs or passports, and you see why this system doesn't work. Trust is an odd thing, and people trust others for no good reason at all. Put a legitimate looking photo ID card around your neck, and you'll see all sorts of havoc you can cause.
For example, there is not yet a possibility to only receive email from people that have revealed their identity with a trusted third party.
As noted recently (though I can't remember well) the verisign system of trust is not all its cracked up to be. How much verification can they possibly do on a small business and its https certificate? Chances are, the trusted party verfication at this time works simply because criminal entities aren't registering themselves, but once they figure out that registering brings in more trust and therefore more possibilities for illicit activity, then all sorts of cool things will happen.
P.S Yes, guns do cause more crime. The rest of the world learnt to read a bar chart years ago.. do they teach them in your schools yet?)
Apparently the book actually confirms something I've always considered true; that there simply is too much contradictory evidence to prove either side of the issue. Even though I am a pro-gun person, I tell people that the quantity of guns is irrelevant to crime, one way or another, since you can find all sorts of combinations of crime and gun ownership. Crime is a cultural thing.
There are other things like that. I've been doing a lot of reasearch into red light running cameras, and it appears that you can't prove their usefullness one way or the other (at least, with the current batch of research.) Too many biased studies done at intersections where other things could have been done. Too much money flowing into city coffers.
The story was meant to be a sad reflection on Hayes-the-man, ended up making me feel good about being a geek.
Indeed, it is interesting...the comparisons are interesting as well.
*Gates likes to surround himself with really bright people and good managers. Hayes, according to the article, tried to run everything himself.
*Jobs was a brillaint visionary all by himself. His problems in his early years stemmed from bullheadedness and personality conflicts. I suspect getting older has tamed him.
*Hayes would have had a good sum of money if it had not been for two very messy divorces.
Now he's being raked over the coals in child support (which I suspect was set to a level that reflected his original high net worth.)
The whole issue with child support is so ugly that I'm coming around to the idea that you would have to be a fool to father children. Get em snipped now, you'll save yourself a lot of hell in the long run.
That, or I'll start a company that would collect insurance premiums now and protect you from child support payments in the future. That could work.
As to learning - ultimately school should be about learning how to learn for yourself. Or, from a nice Zen perspetive, "teaching a person to not be taught". Of course that's pretty hard to do, so mostly you just aim at making sure they're literate and numerate.
Take a look at the teachings of Maria Montessori. She believed that children naturally are curious creatures, and the point of the teacher is to create and environment which encourages curiosity.
To say the least, the public school system seems intentionally designed to kill any curiosity a child could possibly have.
Unless you include Direct TV's Direcwayservice which serves anywhere that has a good view of the southern sky.
According to the site, you don't even need a modem anymore (it can upload directly to the satellite. Still imagine that the latency is a bitch though.)
**I should add here that most of the "rural" US does have internet access. Parts of the "remote" US (which is very different from rural) may not however.
including the guy (22) out at a bar, meets and goes home with the girl (16) using fake id
a.) Most US states have an age of consent set to 16. (Check out ageofconsent.com) Some states are indeed set to 18. Some may allow for 21 and 16, but not 22 and 16. Some will allow any combination with 16. Some will allow any combination with 14.
b.) At least my state (Ohio) and I suspect most states, have a provision giving an affirmative defense if the individual lied about their age. (I have not seen anything to indicate that someone over 18 has a responsibility to find out an individual's age before having sex with them. If they know beforehand, that's another story.)
Fearless prediction: The 745i will take a beating on resale.
I remember reading the article and thinking that this was not all that insightful of a prediction.
Yes, iDrive will decimate 7 series resale.
But on the other hand, the 7 series always had relatively bad resale (on the old 7 series, driving it off the lot resulted in a $20k drop in resale.) The problem is the car is pretty expensive anyway...anyone who could afford a (hypothetical) $60k used 7 series can likely pony up the extra money and get the car new (70-70k.) So the car's resale drops like a stone through a wet paper bag, into a new price area, ($45-55k) bringing in people who wouldn't be able to afford the $75k sticker, and therefore could conceivably buy the car used.
Lesson...yes, you too can get a 7 series. They may hit a 50% depreciation in 2-3 years. Wo0t.
But seriously though, why don't we all just have credit card size cards that require a pin to use...blah blah blah [insert good sercurity idea here]
Because credit card fraud is on the decrease, in store credit card fraud is a small percentage of credit card fraud (over 85% is online fraud) and Visa/MC are happy to swallow credit card fraud themselves, as opposed to the costs involved in getting merchants to switch to a new system, which will be very expensive, and will potentially drive people away from Visa/MC.
Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin.
As noted in several other posts, this issue was not caused by politicians directly.
However, it could have had a very similar outcome had politicians become involved. It's not so much the fact that politicians are stupid (though they can be) it's that voters don't do their homework and get fed stupid lines.
So a bunch of smart politicians realize that the whole master/slave thing is a white elephant that's irrelevant. They vote against it. Candidates running against them say that the current politicos are discriminatory and don't believe in diversity. A quick check into the record says otherwise but the reputation has already been set, and will take time to resolve. (This situation happens in a slightly different form to Republicans all the time. They may find themselves in a very conservative district, and once everything is said and done, discover that the right thing to do in a particular situation would be to raise taxes. Well that's just a death knell, and if someone runs against them in the primary, they just say that the incumbent is a tax raising pinko-commie; even though the incumbent may really be a spendthrift who was just dealing with a bad situation. For the Dems, Clinton will never live down reforming welfare from the more liberal parts of the political spectrum.)
At any rate, such a situation is preventable-- the head of the legislative body will realize the situation and simply prevent the bill from being voted on. That saves everyone's ass...regrettably, that's not always possible.
Slashdot Mirror
and I live in fucking Ohio, the dullest place on earth
Well then, on behalf of the good people of Ohio, I am hereby empowered to award you a free trip by kit airplane to Antartica.
There is absolutely no reason why you can't test the efficacy of the herbal cocktail as a whole.
Yes, absolutelely, and while I dont' disagree that there are some in the community that don't like the testing, there is also a hesistance in the western medicine community to test cocktails, since, in their mind, not knowing which chemical is the active one means that the test results aren't any good.
Are you joking? Do you even know what the placebo effect is?
I'm joking, being serious, making a metaphor, some social commentary, and maybe one or two other things at the same time. More people are saved by hope than anything else....
Do you really need to buy a book to figure out how to uncheck the "Office Assistants" checkbox in the list of available modules during the install of Office?
Well actually...yes. The Office installer has its own entirely different interface, which still really doesn't make all that much sense to me.
I was doing some consultation work the other day, and I needed to reinstall some part of Office.
When I got to the customization part, it seemed like the amount of hard drive space needed was a pretty high number, in comparison to the only thing I needed to install. Since I only needed this one thing, I changed everything else to "do not run from my computer."
Which of course, uninstalled Office.
Two problems here:
a.) the installer's estimate on hard drive space needed is only for new installations, it doesn't take old installations into account (which i figure are probably reinstalled, though i didn't need them to be)
b.) this is both an installer and uninstaller. if you tell it not to install something, it actually will uninstall it (i guess "run from my computer/don't run from my computer" should make this obvious, but then my brain doesn't work that way since not a single other windows installer in this world works that way)
c.) I changed clippy to the cat. His animations and sounds amuse me.
I'd open an herbal/magnetic/psychic/everything superstore and name it PLACEBO, INC
There are of course lots of scams on the market. Then there are a lot of good alternative therapies that have not been tested scientifically, for a vareity of reasons.
Keep in mind that your company making herbal supplements has neither the money nor the inclination to run a bunch of double blind tests.
Keep in mind that a pharmaceutical company can patent the drug they make (usually by patenting the process used to make it.) An herbal supplement company can't...most supplements, frankly, are just some form of the herb grown, cut, dried, pulverized and then put into a little capsule. The relatively cheap prices reflect this.
There is also an interesting issue with the testing itself. Western medicine likes to break things down. For instance, a good study on Odelandia, a major herb used in traditional chinese medicine, came out several years ago, showing that it reduced lung cancer cells. Well that's all good, but the study was not really understood in the TCM community. Why? Traditional chinese medicine does a lot of mixing...Odelandia is never alone, it's taken in "patent" medicines which are cocktails of 4-12 different herbs.
Some of the newest prescription medications may be derived from natural herbs. However you can't patent an herb, there's no money in it. The pharmaceutical company will take the herb apart, trying to find the one chemical that may have been having the desired effect, boost that one chemical and sell it. In the long run, all those other chemicals in the herb may have been catalysts (and so the one isolated chemical may not have the same effect as just ingesting the entire flower.) Given this, patent medicines are not just 4-12 different herbs together, they really consist of hundreds of different chemicals mixed together. This simply exists outside of the bounds of your double blind placebo test.
But finally, let's say that it's all a scam anyway. Everything about alternative medicine.
So I look at your average FDA approved pharmaceutical study, and I find that the active drug is only marginally more effective than the placebo, which, in itself, is fairly effective.
The Mayo brothers (of the Mayo clinic) once said that 2/3rds of the people in their hospital were there for psychological issues...which grew into physical ailments.
Shit, billions of dollars are invested into all these great pharmaceuticals, which are still not all that much more effective than the placebo. Imagine if we put all that money into making the placebo better.
My spending on alternative medicines is no where near that of a modern pharmaceutical...and I get all the benefits without the side effects. If I'm being hoodwinked, at least it's to my advantage, and it's being done cheaply.
What is the size, in thousands, of the voting population in the UK?
o What is the size, in millions, of the voting population in the US?
Doesn't matter, since both countries will break everything done into very small jurisdictions.
The US has 280+million
Ohio has 11.3 million
Franklin County has 1.2 million
Columbus has 750k
my pollworking ward has 10k
my pollworking precint (four pollworkers per precinct) has 850 registered voters and of those 850 registered, about 120 will vote in an off year election, about 300 will vote in an even year, 500 will vote in presidential election
Here in Franklin County we use machines, but with four pollworkers, I imagine we could count paper ballots up fairly quickly, even if 500 people vote. (After all, that's why there's four of us.)
systems these days are able to tell the difference between a dead/living finger
Did they actually test that? Where did they get all the dead fingers from?
Eww.
Seriously though, it occurred to me that the worst case scenario of cutting someone's finger off is probably off the mark. More likely you can just tranquilize someone temporarily (and I would rather doubt that even the most sophisticated fingerprint readers can tell if the person is fully conscious vs. comatose.)
A bankcard+pin+fingerprint is more secure than a bankcard+pin
That's absolutely true. However, bankcard+pin is actually pretty secure as it is, and you won't be seeing the latter replaced because the former is expensive and doesn't really add all that much security anyway. The fact is...biometric companies aren't developing biometrics to supplant current security solutions (no one would buy them for this, except the government(who doesn't know better)) they are developing them to replace/create new security solutions.
I predict that we will eventually see ATMs that require a card, password and biometrics.
I don't, because ATM fraud is fairly low, and there is simply no justification for the investment in new ATM security infrastructure. (If anything, phony machines caching card numbers is far more a concern.)
It is unlikely for a criminal to get both the card, the password, and a time to use the card before it gets cancelled. The current system works well.
Having said that, the introductions of biometrics with ATMs has been biometrics alone. We all know that this is stupid from a security perspective, but the biometric companies are unable to sell banks on the security (since there is little need to chage the security situation) so they sell the equipment for customer convenience. Customers are willing to be scanned so that they don't have to carry their ATM card and know their password.
Why should this be treated any differently from any other misdemeanor theft?
Cuz the guy who's the head of the Senate Transportation committee also owns a chain of gas stations.
(I happen to like him, he's helped me before on bills, though honestly, I agree with you.) If they felt that gas station crime is a problem, they could up the penalties, but I have issue with tampering with the driving license contract.
It was actually piggybacked onto a bill that suspends someone's license for not paying at a gas station. The single subject is "theft." I believe this bill was signed on 11/13, so it will become live law on 2/13.
Either way, sounds like the MPAA is lobbying hard....
HB 179
Sec. 2913.07. (A) As used in this section:
(1) "Audiovisual recording function" means the capability of a device to record or transmit a motion picture or any part of a motion picture by means of any technology existing on, or developed after, the effective date of this section.
(2) "Facility" includes all retail establishments and movie theaters.
(B) No person, without the written consent of the owner or lessee of the facility and of the licensor of the motion picture, shall knowingly operate an audiovisual recording function of a device in a facility in which a motion picture is being shown.
(C) Whoever violates division (B) of this section is guilty of motion picture piracy, a misdemeanor of the first degree on the first offense and a felony of the fifth degree on each subsequent offense.
(D) This section does not prohibit or restrict a lawfully authorized investigative, law enforcement, protective, or intelligence gathering employee or agent of the government of this state or a political subdivision of this state, or of the federal government, when acting in an official capacity, from operating an audiovisual recording function of a device in any facility in which a motion picture is being shown.
(E) Division (B) of this section does not limit or affect the application of any other prohibition in the Revised Code. Any act that is a violation of both division (B) of this section and another provision of the Revised Code may be prosecuted under this section, under the other provision of the Revised Code, or under both this section and the other provision of the Revised Code.
You had broadband in 1996?
.edu in my domain. I had just started Ohio State, and the "honors" dorms had broadband (those of us who wanted it paid $20/month.)
As noted in the other post, I had
By the time I moved out, in 1997, Time Warner Columbus was one of the first in the nation to offer cable internet. So I haven't gone back to a phone since.
On the other hand, webcams have become so overdone. Every teenage girl and her best friend have one.
And this is indeed true...and we can thank Jenni for that. I remember reading and finding the site in 1996 (which is when I first got broadband) and this was pretty hot shit at that time. Quite innovative--I believe I read about her in Wired. The fact that she lasted this long is actually amazing...and is a testament to her patience.
Not only did she invent this idea of camwhore (though camwhores usually perform on camera and eventually turn it off...at least, there won't be a good picture if they're not at the computer) Jenni wired her house with cameras (though that seems to have dropped off with time.)
This was of course a form of porn (figuratively and literally) and she might have even made a bit of profit in these years...much like the porn industry.
Camwhores still represent a troublesome frontier. 16 year old girls everywhere are taking off their clothes for free. Guys of all ages watch (and even if there weren't any watching, the girls would be doing it anyway.) That's gotta keep Ashcroft up late at night.
Banks have also been the source of ire for specific ordering of debit transactions.
For instance, you may not have the money to pay for the checks you've written. On one day, five checks come up, but one of them is a wicked large check.
Banks would order the debit transactions so that the large check would go through, and the smaller checks would fail...thereby making for four bounced check transactions ($120) and one cleared check instead of four cleared checks and one bounced check ($30.)
We are now seeing so called "overdraft" protection plans that allow debit card and checks to go through, with a $30 transaction charge. Essentially, these are very very high interest loans, and I believe there are going to be some big lawsuits concerning them.
As it's been pointed out, overdraft happens to poorer individuals, who are running day to day on much lower balances (and who likely don't have the credit to get "real" overdraft protection.) The cost of the overdraft is irrelevant to the cost of the transaction (I have overdrafted under $2 and been stuck with a $30 fee. I could have overdrafted $20k and only had a $30 fee.)
Overdraft fees cascade. I overdraft my account by a small amount of money. On the same day my employer is dropping a direct deposit in, that would have normally covered all the debits. The overdraft fee is removed immediately, so another transaction, a large debit, fails, which causes another overdraft, which causes more transactions to fail, which would have otherwise worked. Essentially, there truly was only one overdraft. But a cascade occurred, and a bunch of overdrafts were made, simply based on overdraft fees themselves. (I've hit the $200 range before....)
The Economist had a great article on tipping, several months ago. ("Gratuitous gratuities"
Aug 24th 2000)
Essentially, tipping is a purely cultural phenomenon that's been proven to have no effect on service. Americans will pay a tip that's roughly the same with good service as with bad.
We americans tip for more things than anything else. The belief for this is that it's some sorta sociological/psychological feature (or depending on how you look at it...defect.) Americans are the most charitable people (on an individual basis) so it appears that they want to carry this charitableness to many transactions (that other countries won't do.) For some people a large tip is a boasting sign of wealth and charity.
(from the article)
"According to Michael Lynn, the Cornell paper's co-author, countries in which people are more extrovert, sociable or neurotic tend to tip more. Tipping relieves anxiety about being served by strangers. And, says Mr Lynn, "in America, where people are outgoing and expressive, tipping is about social approval. If you tip badly, people think less of you. Tipping well is a chance to show off." Icelanders, by contrast, do not usually tip (see chart)--a measure of their introversion and lack of neuroses, no doubt.
While such explanations may be crude, the hard truth seems to be that tipping does not work. It does not benefit the customer. Nor, in the case of restaurants, does it actually incentivise the waiter, or help the restaurant manager to monitor and assess his staff. The cry of stingy tippers that service people should "just be paid a decent wage" may actually make economic sense."
In reality, the letter opener person on the other end will probably toss your bill in the can.
The vast majority of the time there is no letter opener person. It's a machine that rips open the envelopes, figures out what the check is from the invoice, and then processes it.
If you have an invoice that has a box on it that says "check here if there's an address change" then its definitely a machine opening up your letters (since it's looking for any markings in the box, which would then tell the machine to push that invoice to the side for human examination.)
The auto financing company I worked for contracted the check handling/bill opening services to Bank One, who ran the machines which did that three time zones away (along with, I suspect, hundreds of other companies invoices.) Any checks we ever saw were on microfiche.
I wonder if the RIAA checks first before serving papers?
Of course, when a law firm is going to engage in legal action with someone, they'll run their name in a database to make sure there is no conflict of interest (like they are representing the same person on a different matter.) Any member of the bar is going to pop right up, no matter what.
It is impossible to increase security without reducing anonimity.
The security through identity concept is a dead end, especially at such a wide level. If the value to criminals is there, identity verification/authentication regimes will be broken. The more complex they are, the more loopholes for leveraging there will be. The more people involved, the more difficult it is to have a working system. Watch what has happened with photo driver's licenses (more on my site in my sig) or SSNs or passports, and you see why this system doesn't work. Trust is an odd thing, and people trust others for no good reason at all. Put a legitimate looking photo ID card around your neck, and you'll see all sorts of havoc you can cause.
For example, there is not yet a possibility to only receive email from people that have revealed their identity with a trusted third party.
As noted recently (though I can't remember well) the verisign system of trust is not all its cracked up to be. How much verification can they possibly do on a small business and its https certificate? Chances are, the trusted party verfication at this time works simply because criminal entities aren't registering themselves, but once they figure out that registering brings in more trust and therefore more possibilities for illicit activity, then all sorts of cool things will happen.
P.S Yes, guns do cause more crime. The rest of the world learnt to read a bar chart years ago.. do they teach them in your schools yet?)
Apparently the book actually confirms something I've always considered true; that there simply is too much contradictory evidence to prove either side of the issue. Even though I am a pro-gun person, I tell people that the quantity of guns is irrelevant to crime, one way or another, since you can find all sorts of combinations of crime and gun ownership. Crime is a cultural thing.
There are other things like that. I've been doing a lot of reasearch into red light running cameras, and it appears that you can't prove their usefullness one way or the other (at least, with the current batch of research.) Too many biased studies done at intersections where other things could have been done. Too much money flowing into city coffers.
The story was meant to be a sad reflection on Hayes-the-man, ended up making me feel good about being a geek.
Indeed, it is interesting...the comparisons are interesting as well.
*Gates likes to surround himself with really bright people and good managers. Hayes, according to the article, tried to run everything himself.
*Jobs was a brillaint visionary all by himself. His problems in his early years stemmed from bullheadedness and personality conflicts. I suspect getting older has tamed him.
*Hayes would have had a good sum of money if it had not been for two very messy divorces.
Now he's being raked over the coals in child support (which I suspect was set to a level that reflected his original high net worth.)
The whole issue with child support is so ugly that I'm coming around to the idea that you would have to be a fool to father children. Get em snipped now, you'll save yourself a lot of hell in the long run.
That, or I'll start a company that would collect insurance premiums now and protect you from child support payments in the future. That could work.
As to learning - ultimately school should be about learning how to learn for yourself. Or, from a nice Zen perspetive, "teaching a person to not be taught". Of course that's pretty hard to do, so mostly you just aim at making sure they're literate and numerate.
Take a look at the teachings of Maria Montessori. She believed that children naturally are curious creatures, and the point of the teacher is to create and environment which encourages curiosity.
To say the least, the public school system seems intentionally designed to kill any curiosity a child could possibly have.
Most of the rural US has no Internet service
Unless you include Direct TV's Direcwayservice which serves anywhere that has a good view of the southern sky.
According to the site, you don't even need a modem anymore (it can upload directly to the satellite. Still imagine that the latency is a bitch though.)
**I should add here that most of the "rural" US does have internet access. Parts of the "remote"
US (which is very different from rural) may not however.
including the guy (22) out at a bar, meets and goes home with the girl (16) using fake id
a.) Most US states have an age of consent set to 16. (Check out ageofconsent.com) Some states are indeed set to 18. Some may allow for 21 and 16, but not 22 and 16. Some will allow any combination with 16. Some will allow any combination with 14.
b.) At least my state (Ohio) and I suspect most states, have a provision giving an affirmative defense if the individual lied about their age. (I have not seen anything to indicate that someone over 18 has a responsibility to find out an individual's age before having sex with them. If they know beforehand, that's another story.)
Fearless prediction: The 745i will take a beating on resale.
I remember reading the article and thinking that this was not all that insightful of a prediction.
Yes, iDrive will decimate 7 series resale.
But on the other hand, the 7 series always had relatively bad resale (on the old 7 series, driving it off the lot resulted in a $20k drop in resale.) The problem is the car is pretty expensive anyway...anyone who could afford a (hypothetical) $60k used 7 series can likely pony up the extra money and get the car new (70-70k.) So the car's resale drops like a stone through a wet paper bag, into a new price area, ($45-55k) bringing in people who wouldn't be able to afford the $75k sticker, and therefore could conceivably buy the car used.
Lesson...yes, you too can get a 7 series. They may hit a 50% depreciation in 2-3 years. Wo0t.
But seriously though, why don't we all just have credit card size cards that require a pin to use...blah blah blah [insert good sercurity idea here]
Because credit card fraud is on the decrease, in store credit card fraud is a small percentage of credit card fraud (over 85% is online fraud) and Visa/MC are happy to swallow credit card fraud themselves, as opposed to the costs involved in getting merchants to switch to a new system, which will be very expensive, and will potentially drive people away from Visa/MC.
Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin.
As noted in several other posts, this issue was not caused by politicians directly.
However, it could have had a very similar outcome had politicians become involved. It's not so much the fact that politicians are stupid (though they can be) it's that voters don't do their homework and get fed stupid lines.
So a bunch of smart politicians realize that the whole master/slave thing is a white elephant that's irrelevant. They vote against it. Candidates running against them say that the current politicos are discriminatory and don't believe in diversity. A quick check into the record says otherwise but the reputation has already been set, and will take time to resolve. (This situation happens in a slightly different form to Republicans all the time. They may find themselves in a very conservative district, and once everything is said and done, discover that the right thing to do in a particular situation would be to raise taxes. Well that's just a death knell, and if someone runs against them in the primary, they just say that the incumbent is a tax raising pinko-commie; even though the incumbent may really be a spendthrift who was just dealing with a bad situation. For the Dems, Clinton will never live down reforming welfare from the more liberal parts of the political spectrum.)
At any rate, such a situation is preventable-- the head of the legislative body will realize the situation and simply prevent the bill from being voted on. That saves everyone's ass...regrettably, that's not always possible.
I'm offended by the word cheese, from now on, I want everyone to use fromage.
And while I am sympathetic to your sensibilities, I am deeply offended by renaming the item with a French word.
As I compromise, I heartily recommend that we call the curdy product "Freedom."