In regards to point 1. The police are the most ineffective defense in the world. By the time the police arrive you are dead. It's not like the criminal is going to give you a chance to call 911. Further more, even if you get a call off to the police, the average crime takes less than 5 minutes. The average police response time is 20-30. A bit of anedotal eveidence to go along with the various evidences other posters have given you. About 2 years ago, gun shots were fired in the apartment complex I lived in, and bullets started coming through our windows. We called the cops, a specificaly told them that shots were currently being fired. The police showed up 45 minutes later, they had a sub station 15 minutes walking time from our complex. Police are almost by definition reactionary, they can not help you stop a crime, just clean up the pieces afterward.
In regards to point 2. The reason that the people were so effective against the governments way back when and would not be as much now is due to the fact that way back then, the people were the armies. All the battle ships, all the guns, all the cannons, all the swords, all the weapons (or at the very least almost all) were owned by private citizens. When the citizens have the same weaponry that the government has, the government and the citizens are much more on equal footing.
That said, even without that, it seems the people in Iraq are doing a fairly good job against our military with mere AK-47's and RPGs.
As one last note that may be of interest to you, I once did the numbers on this a few years back. If you took the entire population of the US and subtracted out the military so that you had two groups Citizens and Military; if you then divided the citizens in half, and subtracted from one of those halves any one younger than 18 or older than 65 and gave the remainder guns and then you assumed that those with guns (less than half the non military population) fought with the military at a casualty rate of 50 armed citizens to every 1 military person, by the time you killed everyone in the military, you would still have a few hundred thousand armed citizens and all the rest of the civilian population left. It is indeed vary possible for the citizens of the US to defeat the US government, but the more weapons you take away from the citizens and reserve to just the military, the worse the casualty ratio becomes.
You got a funny, but the sad truth is, you could be arrested for carrying a quarter staff around with you. Likewise for swords, any large knives and any other weapon. Many states have laws about "carrying to the terror of the people" which essentialy say that if you're carying a weapon, and someone thinks you're scary they can arrest you.
Which one of the previously mentioned technologies could I set my computer to aquire for me the night before I leave for a trip and upload to a portable player of some sort? Did I mention also being enviromentaly friendly?
I don't think that's right (then again I don't think many laws are right). If you are using my property, then you don't have a right to any sort of privacy beyond what one could consider a private space (i.e. the bathroom) and even then if I inform you that places where you might normaly expect privacy there will be monitoring and you continue to use such space (provided you are given the option not to use such space) then you have given consent to that monitoring.
So no, I don't think your phone call to your doctor on company time with the company phone using the company phone service is not recordable. You made it company business when you used company property to conduct it. That isn't to say that I think that the company should be able to do whatever it wants with such data but that the data is the domain of the company. So while I can record it and keep the record, I could not for example submit a memo to the office that you have cancer.
And the resume thing is even easier. If you want a new job, you can find that new job off company time and off company property, you have no right to use company property or time to conduct non company business.
Note however that I don't think that businesses should be this hard nosed. In fact I think it's very much not something that a business should do, but I also believe it's well within their rights. Consequently I feel the same way about anything your company makes you do or use with your personal equipment. It then becomes your domain. So for example if the company makes you use your personal cell phone to make company calls, you should have the right to record and store those as the phone is your property. Again, you may not have the right to distribute but you have the right to record and store.
Not that I care about the specific matter too much, but why the hell is the author under any obligation to you to release the code before he's ready to? You may not care that it's messy but maybe he does. What right do you have to his code to demand it any sooner or later than he decides to release it?
They may not own your soul, but they own the network connection, the computer, the keyboard, the mouse and the office you're in. While you are on the company clock, you should (in theory) be doing the work they asked you to do because while you're on the clock you're being paid, and as you said, they pay you for specific work.
Why shouldn't it? If I'm in charge of managing, controling, supporting and securing a companie's machines then I damn well better be privy to every scrap of data on the machines. Whether I will use that is irellevant, I should indeed have access. Any one who charges you with securing something and doesn't give you full access to it is only looking for a security blanket. If you can't trust your IT guys with your sensitive data, then you need to get your data out of the IT guys domain or hold the IT guys innocent of any problems arrising with the data you won't give them access to.
Not that I agree with incopetent IT managers who can't figure out how to lock certain options in a system dictating software policy for Microsoft but while individuals may have a right to privacy and to keep things to themselves, they certainly don't have a right to store it on MY system. The problem is, too many people assume that because they use something it is now theirs to do with as they please and that's not the case. The computer belongs to the company, if they let you do non work related things on that computer that's their perogative but you have no right to use that computer for any purpose other than those the company allows you to do. Now by the same token I believe that if a company is going to require that I use my personal equipment for a job, that I have the same rights and control over that equipment as they have over theirs which means if I want to store that information triple encrypted that's my perogative because it's my machine. But unless it's a personal machine, you have no rights to do anything on it.
No unstructured recess/play periods for kids (esp boys) to let off steam
This is the biggest failure of modern schooling. There is no "free time" to enjoy. All through grade school you have recess. And while you may not be popular with everyone, you almost always had your little group of friends. Then you get into middle school, recess goes away and all of a sudden you can find yourself highly ostracised with little chance to meet or interact with new people in anything other than a "learning environment". And don't think because they had friends in elementary they'll have them in middle school, more often than not I've seen kids lose whole groups of friends at once. It's natural because kids grow and change. So it continues into highschool. And yet when I was in highschool something happened to change it. The school got the bright idea to impliment a "study hall". A roughly 45 minute period in which there were no classes. It was supposed to be used so that if someone needed extra help they could meet with any teacher because the teacher was guaranteed to be not teaching a class. In reality it became a recess of sorts, and it was during that time when I saw a lot of people (myself included) learn much more socialization than they learned in the previous 6 years of their lives.
I think you need to be a bit more specific. Teachers would love appropriate parental involvement. Growing up where I did (every third house a doctor or a lawer) no teacher would dare fail a kid from their classes. Well one did, but his grades were changed by the administration. The problem was, too many parents thought of their children as the perfect angels who could do no wrong and therefore whenever they got involved it was because someone was pointing out that their kid was doing wrong.
I have actualy. In fact, just the other day I met a kid at my workplace who was with his dad. Turns out the kid was being home schooled and the father was there to pick up some supplies and get some information about what he would need to teach his kid some video production / editing. The kid was probably the most well mannered, nice and appropriate kid I've ever met. To tell the truth his demeanor was more appropriate than 95% of the adults I work with on a daily basis. If that's what home schooling produces, then more power to the home schoolers.
Well, I guess what I was trying to get at is that 9/11 was a unique emergency in that it wasn't an emergency until everyone already knew about it. Contrast this to something like an actual military strike on US soil or even something as simple as a natural disaster that the public doesn't have good warning for. Specificaly I think the intent and purpose of the system is to be used if we have warning BEFORE an event happens. 9/11 happened already so the system was redundant. But if some missiles are on their way, I'd prefer to know before they hit.
And by that point, so did everyone else. The first plane hitting was all over the news long before the second plane hit. That was my point, by the time the government figured out it wasn't an accident, so did everyone else.
I have a theory that the reason emergency response was sort of slow on 9/11 (including use of a system like this) was that no one thought it was an actual attack and by the time everyone did it was already well known. I mean the first plane hit, and there was news converage because the media was more thinking it was an accident / disaster rather than a deliberate attack. By the time everyone figured out it was a real and focussed attack, using the system would be akin to telling a person who's stop dropping and rolling that they're on fire.
Since he's not a minority the newspapers/tv stations/etc. will ignore whatever the police do to him and they will eventually find something he's really guilty of to charge him with, probably multiple somethings.
This is why I always find it ammusing when the media publishes X Y or Z controversial thing and when they get lambasted by government/public/company they hide behind the "freedom of the press" and their "duty to the public" bullshit. These people are no better than professional bloggers with their "if it bleeds it leads" mentality. In fact, some I would say are worse than bloggers, but we give them a special place in society free from 99% of accountability.
The government needs to be watched, but the press isn't doing it.
The enron people were arrested and tried. Meanwhile a congresswoman assaults a security guard and gets off crying "RACE!". Another kenedy is unsuprisingly drunk, and crashes into a building and gets off with a fine. The government is hardly accountable at all. If they were, the entirety of congress would have been tried for treason already.
Presuming the student is strapped for cash, a larger monitor in general is probably not an option. A 17 inch LCD display will start at $150 for a no name cheap brand. A reliable one will probably be upwards of $200, and that's where a 20 inch starts with it's no name brands. That said, if said strapped for cash student wants a mac with a bigger screen, they could buy the mac mini and a bigger screen. My answer was not particularly serious, however, it's worth noting that if you're going to buy a tower setup anyways to get a bigger screen, a dual screen setup might not be a bad idea.
The sad and unfortunate side effect of personal computers is that the majority of users will be in the admin group. There's no way around it. Sure you could make it so they need to type a password to do anything, but then typing the password becomes routine and it's game over.
Actualy, I think the card based system could work wonders if applied differently. Not by credits, but by time. Have the machines in the arcade set up to accept quarters or the card. The card costs $X / hr or half hour of play and is accepted at all the machines, meanwhile the games also accept quarters (even if you keep the current prices this works). That way the people just here on their lunch break can pop in for a quick 25 or so game and the kids looking for something to do for the afternoon can pay their $5 or 10 and not have to worry about running out of quarters at the last boss. Conveniently this also gives car users an incentive to have quarters arround too because when they get game over and find their time has expired, the only way they could continue is to use quarters and have someone go refill their card.
Why should it not reveal the next most recently selected window in that application? Why should closing a window in the application that has focus give focus to a new application?
Because in this case you are operating in the Finder. Before you close the window (if I'm readin right) you have (from back to front) finder, app, finder. To add that last finder window you had to switch to the finder application. When that front window goes away, the Finder is still the active application, why shouldn't the next window back get focus and come to the front?
Slashdot Mirror
In regards to point 1. The police are the most ineffective defense in the world. By the time the police arrive you are dead. It's not like the criminal is going to give you a chance to call 911. Further more, even if you get a call off to the police, the average crime takes less than 5 minutes. The average police response time is 20-30. A bit of anedotal eveidence to go along with the various evidences other posters have given you. About 2 years ago, gun shots were fired in the apartment complex I lived in, and bullets started coming through our windows. We called the cops, a specificaly told them that shots were currently being fired. The police showed up 45 minutes later, they had a sub station 15 minutes walking time from our complex. Police are almost by definition reactionary, they can not help you stop a crime, just clean up the pieces afterward.
In regards to point 2. The reason that the people were so effective against the governments way back when and would not be as much now is due to the fact that way back then, the people were the armies. All the battle ships, all the guns, all the cannons, all the swords, all the weapons (or at the very least almost all) were owned by private citizens. When the citizens have the same weaponry that the government has, the government and the citizens are much more on equal footing.
That said, even without that, it seems the people in Iraq are doing a fairly good job against our military with mere AK-47's and RPGs.
As one last note that may be of interest to you, I once did the numbers on this a few years back. If you took the entire population of the US and subtracted out the military so that you had two groups Citizens and Military; if you then divided the citizens in half, and subtracted from one of those halves any one younger than 18 or older than 65 and gave the remainder guns and then you assumed that those with guns (less than half the non military population) fought with the military at a casualty rate of 50 armed citizens to every 1 military person, by the time you killed everyone in the military, you would still have a few hundred thousand armed citizens and all the rest of the civilian population left. It is indeed vary possible for the citizens of the US to defeat the US government, but the more weapons you take away from the citizens and reserve to just the military, the worse the casualty ratio becomes.
You got a funny, but the sad truth is, you could be arrested for carrying a quarter staff around with you. Likewise for swords, any large knives and any other weapon. Many states have laws about "carrying to the terror of the people" which essentialy say that if you're carying a weapon, and someone thinks you're scary they can arrest you.
Simple. Convenience.
Which one of the previously mentioned technologies could I set my computer to aquire for me the night before I leave for a trip and upload to a portable player of some sort? Did I mention also being enviromentaly friendly?
I don't think that's right (then again I don't think many laws are right). If you are using my property, then you don't have a right to any sort of privacy beyond what one could consider a private space (i.e. the bathroom) and even then if I inform you that places where you might normaly expect privacy there will be monitoring and you continue to use such space (provided you are given the option not to use such space) then you have given consent to that monitoring.
So no, I don't think your phone call to your doctor on company time with the company phone using the company phone service is not recordable. You made it company business when you used company property to conduct it. That isn't to say that I think that the company should be able to do whatever it wants with such data but that the data is the domain of the company. So while I can record it and keep the record, I could not for example submit a memo to the office that you have cancer.
And the resume thing is even easier. If you want a new job, you can find that new job off company time and off company property, you have no right to use company property or time to conduct non company business.
Note however that I don't think that businesses should be this hard nosed. In fact I think it's very much not something that a business should do, but I also believe it's well within their rights. Consequently I feel the same way about anything your company makes you do or use with your personal equipment. It then becomes your domain. So for example if the company makes you use your personal cell phone to make company calls, you should have the right to record and store those as the phone is your property. Again, you may not have the right to distribute but you have the right to record and store.
So in short, you're exactly like the Nazi's except for all the things that made them Nazi's?
Not that I care about the specific matter too much, but why the hell is the author under any obligation to you to release the code before he's ready to? You may not care that it's messy but maybe he does. What right do you have to his code to demand it any sooner or later than he decides to release it?
They may not own your soul, but they own the network connection, the computer, the keyboard, the mouse and the office you're in. While you are on the company clock, you should (in theory) be doing the work they asked you to do because while you're on the clock you're being paid, and as you said, they pay you for specific work.
Why shouldn't it? If I'm in charge of managing, controling, supporting and securing a companie's machines then I damn well better be privy to every scrap of data on the machines. Whether I will use that is irellevant, I should indeed have access. Any one who charges you with securing something and doesn't give you full access to it is only looking for a security blanket. If you can't trust your IT guys with your sensitive data, then you need to get your data out of the IT guys domain or hold the IT guys innocent of any problems arrising with the data you won't give them access to.
Not that I agree with incopetent IT managers who can't figure out how to lock certain options in a system dictating software policy for Microsoft but while individuals may have a right to privacy and to keep things to themselves, they certainly don't have a right to store it on MY system. The problem is, too many people assume that because they use something it is now theirs to do with as they please and that's not the case. The computer belongs to the company, if they let you do non work related things on that computer that's their perogative but you have no right to use that computer for any purpose other than those the company allows you to do. Now by the same token I believe that if a company is going to require that I use my personal equipment for a job, that I have the same rights and control over that equipment as they have over theirs which means if I want to store that information triple encrypted that's my perogative because it's my machine. But unless it's a personal machine, you have no rights to do anything on it.
No unstructured recess/play periods for kids (esp boys) to let off steam
This is the biggest failure of modern schooling. There is no "free time" to enjoy. All through grade school you have recess. And while you may not be popular with everyone, you almost always had your little group of friends. Then you get into middle school, recess goes away and all of a sudden you can find yourself highly ostracised with little chance to meet or interact with new people in anything other than a "learning environment". And don't think because they had friends in elementary they'll have them in middle school, more often than not I've seen kids lose whole groups of friends at once. It's natural because kids grow and change. So it continues into highschool. And yet when I was in highschool something happened to change it. The school got the bright idea to impliment a "study hall". A roughly 45 minute period in which there were no classes. It was supposed to be used so that if someone needed extra help they could meet with any teacher because the teacher was guaranteed to be not teaching a class. In reality it became a recess of sorts, and it was during that time when I saw a lot of people (myself included) learn much more socialization than they learned in the previous 6 years of their lives.
I think you need to be a bit more specific. Teachers would love appropriate parental involvement. Growing up where I did (every third house a doctor or a lawer) no teacher would dare fail a kid from their classes. Well one did, but his grades were changed by the administration. The problem was, too many parents thought of their children as the perfect angels who could do no wrong and therefore whenever they got involved it was because someone was pointing out that their kid was doing wrong.
Have you met kids who were home schooled?
I have actualy. In fact, just the other day I met a kid at my workplace who was with his dad. Turns out the kid was being home schooled and the father was there to pick up some supplies and get some information about what he would need to teach his kid some video production / editing. The kid was probably the most well mannered, nice and appropriate kid I've ever met. To tell the truth his demeanor was more appropriate than 95% of the adults I work with on a daily basis. If that's what home schooling produces, then more power to the home schoolers.
Well, I guess what I was trying to get at is that 9/11 was a unique emergency in that it wasn't an emergency until everyone already knew about it. Contrast this to something like an actual military strike on US soil or even something as simple as a natural disaster that the public doesn't have good warning for. Specificaly I think the intent and purpose of the system is to be used if we have warning BEFORE an event happens. 9/11 happened already so the system was redundant. But if some missiles are on their way, I'd prefer to know before they hit.
And by that point, so did everyone else. The first plane hitting was all over the news long before the second plane hit. That was my point, by the time the government figured out it wasn't an accident, so did everyone else.
I have a theory that the reason emergency response was sort of slow on 9/11 (including use of a system like this) was that no one thought it was an actual attack and by the time everyone did it was already well known. I mean the first plane hit, and there was news converage because the media was more thinking it was an accident / disaster rather than a deliberate attack. By the time everyone figured out it was a real and focussed attack, using the system would be akin to telling a person who's stop dropping and rolling that they're on fire.
Because the patriot act only passed with a very slim split exactly down party lines right wing majority.
Since he's not a minority the newspapers/tv stations/etc. will ignore whatever the police do to him and they will eventually find something he's really guilty of to charge him with, probably multiple somethings.
This is why I always find it ammusing when the media publishes X Y or Z controversial thing and when they get lambasted by government/public/company they hide behind the "freedom of the press" and their "duty to the public" bullshit. These people are no better than professional bloggers with their "if it bleeds it leads" mentality. In fact, some I would say are worse than bloggers, but we give them a special place in society free from 99% of accountability.
The government needs to be watched, but the press isn't doing it.
At least the government is somewhat accountable.
The enron people were arrested and tried. Meanwhile a congresswoman assaults a security guard and gets off crying "RACE!". Another kenedy is unsuprisingly drunk, and crashes into a building and gets off with a fine. The government is hardly accountable at all. If they were, the entirety of congress would have been tried for treason already.
Presuming the student is strapped for cash, a larger monitor in general is probably not an option. A 17 inch LCD display will start at $150 for a no name cheap brand. A reliable one will probably be upwards of $200, and that's where a 20 inch starts with it's no name brands. That said, if said strapped for cash student wants a mac with a bigger screen, they could buy the mac mini and a bigger screen. My answer was not particularly serious, however, it's worth noting that if you're going to buy a tower setup anyways to get a bigger screen, a dual screen setup might not be a bad idea.
Plug a second bigger monitor in?
The sad and unfortunate side effect of personal computers is that the majority of users will be in the admin group. There's no way around it. Sure you could make it so they need to type a password to do anything, but then typing the password becomes routine and it's game over.
A correction, users are not in the admin group by default, only the first user of the machine. Subsequent users are by default not administrators.
Actualy, I think the card based system could work wonders if applied differently. Not by credits, but by time. Have the machines in the arcade set up to accept quarters or the card. The card costs $X / hr or half hour of play and is accepted at all the machines, meanwhile the games also accept quarters (even if you keep the current prices this works). That way the people just here on their lunch break can pop in for a quick 25 or so game and the kids looking for something to do for the afternoon can pay their $5 or 10 and not have to worry about running out of quarters at the last boss. Conveniently this also gives car users an incentive to have quarters arround too because when they get game over and find their time has expired, the only way they could continue is to use quarters and have someone go refill their card.
Why should it not reveal the next most recently selected window in that application? Why should closing a window in the application that has focus give focus to a new application?
Because in this case you are operating in the Finder. Before you close the window (if I'm readin right) you have (from back to front) finder, app, finder. To add that last finder window you had to switch to the finder application. When that front window goes away, the Finder is still the active application, why shouldn't the next window back get focus and come to the front?