Your country was just taken over, and you're up in arms about communications? You should be, literally, up in arms.
I hear that armed resistance against the government typically works very well with no means to communicate with each other, coordinate activities or, you know, go places more than one at a time to get shot in the head.
Communication is the first step to any resistance. Why do you think command and control centers are the first thing the US hits when they move in somewhere? Resistance is good, but only organized resistance has any chance of success. Right now the government has it and the... protesters (I don't really know what to call them if what is being suggested is armed rebellion) don't. Two things have to happen: The protesters need to get it and the government needs to lose it, and they need to happen in that order to happen at all.
Absent those, the only thing you can hope for is to raise a big enough stink that somebody else steps in.
I don't personally care much whether a teacher uses the same assignment(s) from year to year, nor do I particularly care what their motives are for doing so.
That said, doing so and then acting like it's some massive secret is ridiculous, and threatening to fail a student over publishing HIS work is reprehensible. That professor has absolutely no claim to the student's work. At best, he could complain if the student published the actual text of what the assignment was. Beyond that, if you're relying on the secrecy of your assignments for the functioning of your class you're lazy or a fool. Or both.
The solution seems rather simple to me: Don't make the assignments worth anything, at least not on their face (some professors I had would use whether or not you've been turning in assignments for no credit if you were on the borderline between two grades). Mark them up if you want to, purely for the students' own feedback and education. Or just go over them the next day in class, if feasible. The good students who are interested in learning and expanding will do them and come prepared with questions and comments for that class, and the bad ones--well, who cares? You're still able to compare between years, you don't have to pretend your assignments have some sort of Top Secret rating, and you develop your course around more meaningful methods of evaluation that aren't quite so easy to Google for--like say assignments you change, or in-class/in-lab assignments and exams.
There's little incentive to cheat on an assignment that has no effect on your grade, and if you're just stumped and Googleing for help and come across something from last year, chances are you're learning anyway. Isn't that what universities are supposed to be about?
I hope you were going for a funny mod or you hate all TV; otherwise that's just ignorant.
The major networks would survive and the sports channels would survive. Probably HBO and maybe a handful of the movie channels as well.
If you're anything like the average Slashdotter, the vast majority of what you watch would probably be gone. Sci-Fi would be one of the first on the chopping block, and I doubt History and Discovery and National Geographic and all the channels like that would be far behind. You can absolutely forget more niche channels like BET and the local interest stations. HGTV would probably die, which is a bummer for my mom since it's really the only station she likes to watch. I question whether something like BBC America would survive; I'd toss that in the "iffy" pile.
If you're completely anti-TV, well yes, then I guess you do believe nothing of value would be lost. Unfortunately in all likelihood the dredge programs on the major stations and the 63 different sports channels are what would survive, and the overall quality of programming would decline even farther. Such that people who only like their few programs and think the rest is garbage won't have anything to watch at all. (You can decide for yourself if that is good or bad.)
I took her to our local GP who actually admitted that he didn't know what it was, BUT STIIL PRESCRIBED a topical steroidal cream (which did absolutely nothing to cure the problem). A week later, with even more spreading, I returned to the same doctor, and he again admitted he didn't know what it was, and this time prescribed some kind of internal anti-biotic [. ..] As long as the medical community continues to hide the fact that 90% of their job is to memorize symptoms, and accept payola from pharma companies for generating prescriptions , and prescribe medication unnecessarily I will continue to treat them like scum sucking lawyers, used car salesman.
I'm not going to defend him on his inability to diagnose the particular condition. If it's as common as it seems then yes, he probably should have gotten it. Everybody makes mistakes.
That said, speaking as somebody with chronic skin problems throughout my life, I can tell with this with certainty: Very few skin issues are treated with anything other than steroids (topical or otherwise) or antibiotics, and steroids is by far the more prevalent. There is essentially no risk to short-term use of a steroid cream, so he took a shot that probably had an 80% chance of being right and prescribed some. When it didn't work, he tried the only other thing it was likely to have been--and despite your walking out on him in a huff--justified or not--it sounds from a quick Google search about the treatments that he actually would have had it the second time.
If this makes you want a new doctor, that's fine. It's certainly your prerogative. But to go on that little rant about payola and imply he must be in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies is just ridiculously idiotic hyperbole. There are a lot of problems in the medical community, and almost all of them begin with patients, not drug makers. If you want to start attacking people for unnecessary prescriptions, start with the idiots who want drugs for their flu even though antibiotics won't kill viruses; who are too ignorant to realize that what little help any drugs we have for the flu may be are almost always too late to help by the time you realize you have the flu and go to see a doctor about it; who will bitch and cry and moan and scream at that doctor if he had told him he didn't know what was wrong, regardless of what it turned out to be. Bitch at patients who walk into their doctors' offices demanding they be written a prescription for drug-they-just-saw-on-TV-and-self-diagnosed-they-need. Bitch at the patients looking for any reason at all to sue a doctor into the ground simply because the doctor has more money than they do if you want one of the most major causes of why doctors are scared to diagnose today.
If you don't think all of this happens, you're wrong. I know *many* people in the medical field from nurses to doctors and it happens every day. If you don't like your doctor, if you don't think he's competent, find a new one. But check that hyperbolic crap at the door. Most of these people are good, intelligent people doing the best they can in jobs that would overwhelm the vast majority of people in the world.
Receiving, keeping, locating and using a random username/password is going to be entirely too difficult for average Joe, sad as that may be.
That said, why does the computer need to know if you've voted at all? When we vote here--regardless of how we do so--we present an ID or voter ID card to an election worker at the desk in the front. That person has a list of names and simply crosses one off before handing you your paper ballot or the little card for the computer voting, depending on your preference (for one or the other or "first available"). There's absolutely no connection of any sort between the crossing off a voter step and the actual voting step. In fact if you really wanted to, I don't see any reason you couldn't get your name crossed off the list and then walk out the door without ever voting.
Most secure system ever? Nah. But solutions like yours are going to cause more problems than they prevent and something easier and more secure--say, tying it to your state ID/drivers license number--have their own concerns in terms of privacy and access to voting.
If someone came up to me and accused me of murder I wouldn't base my case on freedom of privacy. I would hope my lawyer could simply disprove the actual charges against me.
I would hope so, being as arguing privacy in a murder case is purely idiotic; the two things aren't even related. That said, if their case was based on a confession they tortured out of you I would hope to hell you made very sure your lawyer argued 8th/5th Amendment violations. Vigorously. It wouldn't be the only thing he argued because that's just not how court cases work, but it should undoubtedly be the core of the defense. If people are doing something they're not allowed to do, the merits by which they justify their actions matter very little to whether or not they should be made to stop.
Fighting these sorts of things largely on free speech seems to imply that that video games are actually responsible for some sort of mayhem but should be protected anyway.
I disagree. I think it says "mind your own damn business." In a free society, you shouldn't need to defend yourself if you're not doing anything wrong. I don't need to get into 75-page treatises of the psychology of adolescent minds or cite studies regarding prolonged exposure to violence if "I can make it, you can not buy it. Shut the fuck up" is a perfectly valid response. If I'm looking to change those peoples' minds, then maybe I'll do so. If I'm trying to get them off my back, I don't see a reason to waste time and breath making an unnecessary argument that, in all likelihood, will fall on deaf ears anyway.
The people making these arguments fall into two camps: The ones convinced that they're right and the ones taking advantage of the ones who are convinced that they're right. Which groups' minds are you hoping to change?
It is a free speech issue, without a doubt. Personally I think it's more important to try to get these people to realize they can't simply run roughshod over anything they disapprove of than specifically defending violent video games.
Except non-competes are illegal in California which all 4 of the listed companies are based in. Nice try though.
Except he is not talking about non-compete issues. He's talking about what the story is talking about: Companies agreeing amongst themselves to not hire people who worked for some other company. He's saying it's even worse than a non-compete because the employees don't even have a choice in the matter, whereas at least with a non-compete they know ahead of time and have to sign on the line. Nice try though.
That's great and all but non-compete clauses aren't what this probe is about.
That's great and all, but aside from the first sentence neither is any of the rest of the points the OP made, including the one you quoted.
If you're going to be a condescending douchebag to people, you really should work on your reading comprehension skills first. Or hey, you could try not being a condescending douchebag too. Whichever you prefer.
I used to think that all drugs were bad [. ..] I'm reconsidering that stance.
It's worth noting that the two positions are not incompatible. I think drugs are bad. I see nothing of value to altering my mental state, particularly if there is ANY chance of ANY long-term damages whatsoever. I've never smoked (cigarettes, marijuana or otherwise), I've never been drunk (my all-time record is 3 beers over the course of about 6 hours), I certainly have never injected any narcotics. I don't abuse prescription pills. I don't particularly care, from a personal perspective, if "you" go to jail for doing any of those things.
And yet I still see the BS and the failures in our drug laws. As you stated, even if we want to keep weed illegal, classifying it as a Schedule I narcotic is ridiculous. Moreover I think keeping it illegal costs more than it's worth in enforcement, treatment and prison usage, and the vast majority of the crime surrounding it would disappear if it were legalized. That doesn't, for the record, mean I wouldn't think people smoking it up are idiots even if it was legal.
In other words, don't think of it as an either-or. Law shouldn't be attempts to enforce our own brand of morality on others; laws should be about your interactions with other people. Recognizing that doesn't mean we forfeit that morality. Just that we have to live with more visible signs of disagreement.
I do tend to agree with you that in most cases we shouldn't be pushing anybody to take up any particular field of work just to make our numbers balance out with the general population numbers. However, in the interest of trying to see things from both perspectives let me throw out a handful of possibilities and questions:
1. Why do specific genders avoid specific jobs? I don't think anybody wants John to be a nurse just to get the nursing splits up, but it would be considerably more disconcerting if John didn't want to be a nurse because "that's a woman's job" versus "I'm not interested in nursing." In fact, nursing would be an interesting example: There are plenty of men who want to be doctors, so it doesn't seem as though there's anything about genders specifically that make men less willing to care for sick people, but there are considerably less men who would consider being a nurse than would consider being a doctor.
2. What would a different gender bring to a field? Some fields probably just don't matter. At the same time, we know without a doubt that men and women's minds work differently. What perspective are we missing in some fields dominated by one or the other? Could we solve issues or make significant progress just by bringing in people with different ways of looking at things?
Aaand I let this sit too long and lost motivation, heh. So I'll just leave it there.
what i don't understand are these anal retentive developers who are so insistent on every pixel being exactly the same in every browser. just let some browsers look a little goofy, just let it slide, move on, no big deal
Spoken as somebody who doesn't do website development for a living.
I do, and I can tell you this: No developer I have ever come across likes IE6; no developer likes having to spend fairly large chunks of the development time of a project bashing their heads against browser-specific quirks. The people who pay the bills, however, tend to care very deeply--and that means the developers care as well. "Hey guys, this site is going to look borked for 20% of your visitors" doesn't fly, nor should it.
That said, if you code in a standards-compliant way, just about every browser that isn't IE5 or earlier works very nearly the same. Not necessarily pixel-perfect, but awfully close. Generally close enough that we CAN let it slide (mostly text breaks in different places, and usually due to things like anti-aliasing/ClearType). IE6 tends to require a little hacking, but the more experience you get in doing so, the less time you ultimately have to spend whacking at things with crowbars to make IE6 happy. In other words, with experience you can draw IE6 closer to that "awfully close" realm.
As far as your example, I don't particularly understand why you'd use a draft-version CSS property instead of just adding an extra div or two (depending on if you're rounding the top or all the edges) with a small image. This isn't the sort of difference I would simply chalk up to the fact that the web isn't a pixel-perfect medium. This is a change that if you're doing this for money you're going to need to get the client to sign off on as heartily as they signed off on the original design mockups. Don't get me wrong: I LOVE the fact that those CSS properties are coming down the road, and it will be ridiculously helpful and save quite a bit of time once they arrive with force enough to rely on them. That's just not now.
It is an incentive, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it is as big as you seem to suggest.
As you said, these things run on Google's servers and communicate through Google's pipes. With the exception of the amount of data that traverses their Internet-bound pipes--which doesn't seem to be what they're referring to--all of these are sunk costs. They can't just call up their providers and downgrade their usage for a while. I don't see Google getting rid of (trashing, selling, donating) these machines if new efficiencies make them obsolete; I don't even particularly see them flipping the power switches to save on power costs. These machines will be needed again, it's just a question of when.
So the efficiency is, essentially, in slowing down the purchase of new hardware. It's certainly a pressure, but a fairly mild one considering that buying new hardware usually goes hand-in-hand with increase in demand and thus increase in revenue. In a sense, if it DIDN'T all run on their own equipment I think the pressure would be larger. Servicing the same people with a smaller monthly bill is pretty easy to sell ANYBODY on; servicing more people in the future on less new hardware than you would otherwise buy is good, but less compelling.
I must say one thing about this - isn't it assumed that by the time you hit university, you actually want to be there?
That you want to be in your university, yes (though it's not true as often as you'd like). That you want to be in your major, yes.
Unfortunately, university these days is nothing more than High School Version 2. Ridiculous chunks of time are spent in "general education" classes so that the university can claim they're making you a nice, rounded individual--as if the classes you take has any bearing on that--and are going to be filled with people who don't want to be there and worse, simply don't care what's being taught. I don't think there's anything that can be done at the professor/student levels about that.
As you progress through the class levels you'll meet more students who are genuinely interested in the topics. The 100s are a disgusting dredge of people taking the class to fulfill some requirement or another; the 300s are students in the major who typically take things more seriously; and of course, the 200s are somewhere in between. Still, even at the top-level classes you're going to find people not interested in that particular topic, since many majors are rather narrowly drawn as to what you're allowed to choose from.
Honestly, I think the solution is to stop pushing so many kids into college/university. It's just become sort of expected that that's where you go if you're not one of the "dumb kids" out tinkering with his car all day. The reality is that most people, even those WITH degrees, end up in jobs where those degrees don't benefit them (aside perhaps from them expecting more money just by virtue of having it), and even those that do benefit directly from their degrees tend to only benefit from a subset of the classes they took. There are lots of people who legitimately DO need high-end theoretical educations in various topics, and they should be in universities; most others would get by with some sort of specific job training, and they're usually the ones who want or need to start earning quickly anyway. Tossing those two groups together... well, I think that's why we have what we have.
Apple are really being dumb by sticking with their own hardware, imho.
I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but one thing they're not is stupid. I'm sure they've run the numbers and determined they make more money by keeping OS X exclusive to their hardware (ie, not cannibalizing their own hardware sales and the large profit margins they can make on them) than taking the hardware sales loss to greatly inflate their sales of OS X, where margins are probably much thinner--and where, frankly, Microsoft can and does play dirty with their pricing.
Because Macs are hideously expensive for the level of hardware you get compared to the level of hardware you can get for a PC for the same price. If you can't see the difference between $899 (tops) and $1149 for an iMac and $2300 for a Mac Pro (minimums)*, well, you either have entirely too much money to throw around or you're just a horrible fanboi.
For that matter, who says it's going to be unsupported hardware? Macs moved to Intel and commodity hardware years ago; there's nothing stopping somebody from buying literally the same components found in a Mac and simply charging less, unless you really believe that Apple isn't making... shall we say, healthy profit margins on their hardware.
There are essentially two reasons to buy a Mac: The first is you like the Mac, by which I mean the actual hardware. Whether it's the design, the clean insides, the sturdy feel or what have you. The other is OS X. If the first doesn't apply to somebody, why shouldn't they want to save several hundred dollars to get #2?
Maybe these clones will suck; we'll see. If that's the case, I'm sure the market will take care of them. If not, well, you have your answer.
* These prices pulled from their website as of the time of this posting.
This sounds like nothing more than text field input masks, which have existed for years. The first result from a Google search for "masked input fields" turns up a listing of a bunch of different ones: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/javascript-input-masks/
In my experience, step 2 involves sending the request off the management where it never gets actioned, ever.
Developers tend to want things to work; they want to code with good practices on well-designed systems. It's these "business requirements" constantly changing everything at random intervals that leads software to suck more and more as time goes on.
I've never seen a developer outright refuse to fix a bug. The closest I've seen is the developer telling his managers that it would require some major input of work to do so for whatever reason and that management ultimately decides it isn't worth the time. Second would be that non-priority bug-fixing is well down the queue from things like adding new features and just isn't gotten to. And again, that's more a failure of management to ensure that there's enough people to get the work done or by controlling the timing of the work better so that it isn't overwhelming the development team.
If your developers don't have time to meet all of your schedules and complete low-priority bug fixing at the same time, it's probably not the eveloper's fault. (Unless they're just not particularly good at their jobs. And even then, management should either seek to find somebody who is or be aware of the limitations of their staff--after all, a good manager actually manages the resources he has, not the resources he wishes he had.)
it will be intressting to see if it really leads to an 1984 big brother state, or will actually lead to superiour crime fighting.
What makes you think it's an or situation? Of course it will help with crime fighting; being able to visually track the faces of anybody you're looking for will be a boon to law enforcement trying to hunt people down, at least until criminals routinely obscure their faces.
Posting an armed military guard at every corner and in every home and shop also will greatly increase security. It's tough to justify busting in that shop window and grabbing things if you know there are people with rifles a half block away from you, tops.
Torturing people suspected of crimes also helps. Sure, you're going to hear whatever it is you want to hear and a lot of the time that will simply be bullshit, but from time to time you really will get a guilty person who sings and gives you something useful.
The question is just how much you're willing to put up with for what increase in security. How much cost? How much inconvenience, pain or death to innocent people? How much invasion of privacy? How much government tracking? How big a database of knowledge on erstwhile honest citizens? How much abuse?
All of these things help law enforcement; that's how people get the ideas in the door to begin with. "Hey, would you like us to spend millions of dollars to track you everywhere you go for absolutely no benefit?" is an awfully hard sell, after all. The question is how much a given society is willing to tolerate and what recourse they have to prevent it when they feel it has crossed a line. I disagree with all of these sorts of tracking/monitoring programs, despite the fact that they do undeniably help law enforcement to some degree. I also realize it's somewhat subjective though.
They are a business, they have no obligation to help with police work. It may have been nice but it is not necessary.
It depends on how we're defining "obligation" and "necessary." They certainly have no direct business obligation. At the same time, if this man had died I would think his family would have had a strong case for a wrongful death lawsuit.
Obviously, the respondents would argue that the man was trying to commit suicide and therefore it was his own fault. There is a lot of logic to that. However, as a society we also recognize that mentally ill people operate under a different set of rules, and we generally hold that suicidal == mentally ill by default. If cops think you're going to hurt yourself, they can lock you up for 72 hours for psychiatric observation even if you haven't broken any laws, as an immediate example.
It would boil down to the jury's interpretation--and in civil lawsuits, a jury can assign partial liability. IE, they could rule that his death was 90% his own fault and 10% Verizon's fault, and order that Verizon pay 10% of what they're suing for--potentially still in the millions. I don't think "the man owned $20, what were we supposed to do?!" is a very sympathetic case. On the other hand, I think a suicidal man is a very sympathetic case. Most likely the jury would enjoy bitchslapping Verizon for it.
Why care about the trail when you know it is going to be thrown out anyway.
So don't care about the trial. But this "hey, let's everybody send the lawyers of the winning side one penny so that they have to pay more money to process it than they collect! ha ha ha !" crap is just petty and childish.
I'm perfectly willing to accept multiple arguments on the issue of copyright infringement as valid, and for what it's worth I don't believe a tracker should ever be liable for anything. But at the same time, countries have systems of law to interpret these things, and--at least for now--that system has decided that the Pirate Bay guys are wrong and the other side is right.
Don't like it? Lobby to change the law. If you REALLY need to harass people for some reason, harass the lawmakers and judges involved. Why the hell would you direct your spite at lawyers who a judge just declared was right while you were wrong? How do you defend that as anything but purely egotistical pettiness?
As I eluded to, I support their cause. I don't think trackers violate any copyrights, even if they do help you do so. I do NOT support them, nor their behavior. Was the trial biased? I don't know. Appeal it. Appeal it as many times and as far as you can. But this childish nonsense has to stop.
I admit, there's good shock value in downing a plane. At the same time, though, whenever I'm in the airport dealing with all this security nonsense, I can't help but think that it would be just as effective in terms of deaths--maybe moreso--to just detonate a bomb in the lobby. Or, in a twist of irony, in the security point lines. Not a damn thing anybody could do to stop that from happening. Move the checkpoints? Move the detonation point. No biggie.
Do it over and over again. Do it once a month. All you need is a suicide bomber and a bomb, and it doesn't seem as though either of those are in short supply for terrorists.
Ha, and what are they going to do when people mod their vehicles to circumvent this?
Well, for starters, realize that when you pose that question, it forces us to answer as though we're already in a world where such devices are mandatory. Otherwise, people simply won't have one of these things installed to start with. So that said: Honest guess? Levy huge fines or jail time for doing so.
We're talking about a speed-limiting device, so honestly, it's not going to be particularly hard to catch these people. Go out and park your police cruiser somewhere where the speed limit and the device limit are the same are similar; anybody speeding gets caught and pays the $1000 or whatever fine. It's not like the cops aren't doing exactly this sort of thing right now, so there's no new technology or monetary investments to make to continue doing so.
This hypothetical future isn't like what we have these days; if such devices become mandatory, you can't simply speed and count on hiding amongst the crowds to avoid getting your own ticket. (SOMEBODY is getting a ticket if a cop is around -- you're just betting on it not being you right now.) If you're disabling your device in a world of mandatory installation, you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. I think just the threat of fines that large are enough to keep most people from doing it; for those who still do, I doubt it will take many thousand buck tickets for them to decide it's just not worth it. If you're REALLY concerned that nobody do it--and you should be if this went mandatory; these sort of devices really need to be all-or-nothing because the threat of somebody NOT using it weaving through traffic that is is a substantially higher risk than nobody using it at all--double the fine each subsequent offense for repeat offenders. Or just lock 'em up.
I'm not advocating for or against these devices or any such system, by the way. I'm simply stating what I think will happen if they decide to make devices like it mandatory going forward.
That said, if they DO go forward with such devices, it should absolutely NOT kill the engine. I mean seriously, how fucking stupid is it to be driving down the road and suddenly your engine stops? In the name of saving lives? Seriously? Just limit the maximum speed, preferably with some "burst" tolerance (eg, you can go past that speed but only for, say, 10 seconds on some long timer) because sometimes it really is necessary.
The key here is not that the government, or anyone, should own what they produced -- it's that when what they produced is used to convict someone, that person has the right to examine the methods used.
The real problem is that breathalyzers are allowed to convict anybody to begin with. Even if they have the most beautiful, pristine code in the world and perfectly implement every algorithm they're still prone to inaccuracies, because they assume conditions about the human body necessary to make the algorithms work. While there are "normal" values for these measurements, the very act of calling them "normal" means that there are people out there whose measurements do NOT fall into that range. A breathalyzer is little more than an educated guess as to your Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) based on the amount of alcohol measured in your breath.
That means that in addition to being inaccurate, it's entirely possible to take two breathalyzer tests from two different devices made by two different companies at (essentially) the same time and get different results. And the closer you are to whatever the state's legal limit is, the more important those differences become.
By all means, police should carry breathalyzers. They should administer such at the sides of the road if they suspect a driver is DUI. Then they should draw blood. There are portable kits if it's important for the officer to draw blood at exactly that instant (in the rare cases it's an extremely long drive back to the station I guess); you could roll a paramedic to do it; you could bring them back to the station and have a doctor do it. Whatever. The idea that the breathalyzer should be allowed as conclusive evidence when it's demonstrably not is foolhardy, and that's without any of the issues that opening this source code up revealed to us.
Let's knock this crap off. You want to convict somebody based on their BAC, measure their BAC. I don't think that's unreasonable.
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I hear that armed resistance against the government typically works very well with no means to communicate with each other, coordinate activities or, you know, go places more than one at a time to get shot in the head.
Communication is the first step to any resistance. Why do you think command and control centers are the first thing the US hits when they move in somewhere? Resistance is good, but only organized resistance has any chance of success. Right now the government has it and the... protesters (I don't really know what to call them if what is being suggested is armed rebellion) don't. Two things have to happen: The protesters need to get it and the government needs to lose it, and they need to happen in that order to happen at all.
Absent those, the only thing you can hope for is to raise a big enough stink that somebody else steps in.
I don't personally care much whether a teacher uses the same assignment(s) from year to year, nor do I particularly care what their motives are for doing so.
That said, doing so and then acting like it's some massive secret is ridiculous, and threatening to fail a student over publishing HIS work is reprehensible. That professor has absolutely no claim to the student's work. At best, he could complain if the student published the actual text of what the assignment was. Beyond that, if you're relying on the secrecy of your assignments for the functioning of your class you're lazy or a fool. Or both.
The solution seems rather simple to me: Don't make the assignments worth anything, at least not on their face (some professors I had would use whether or not you've been turning in assignments for no credit if you were on the borderline between two grades). Mark them up if you want to, purely for the students' own feedback and education. Or just go over them the next day in class, if feasible. The good students who are interested in learning and expanding will do them and come prepared with questions and comments for that class, and the bad ones--well, who cares? You're still able to compare between years, you don't have to pretend your assignments have some sort of Top Secret rating, and you develop your course around more meaningful methods of evaluation that aren't quite so easy to Google for--like say assignments you change, or in-class/in-lab assignments and exams.
There's little incentive to cheat on an assignment that has no effect on your grade, and if you're just stumped and Googleing for help and come across something from last year, chances are you're learning anyway. Isn't that what universities are supposed to be about?
I hope you were going for a funny mod or you hate all TV; otherwise that's just ignorant.
The major networks would survive and the sports channels would survive. Probably HBO and maybe a handful of the movie channels as well.
If you're anything like the average Slashdotter, the vast majority of what you watch would probably be gone. Sci-Fi would be one of the first on the chopping block, and I doubt History and Discovery and National Geographic and all the channels like that would be far behind. You can absolutely forget more niche channels like BET and the local interest stations. HGTV would probably die, which is a bummer for my mom since it's really the only station she likes to watch. I question whether something like BBC America would survive; I'd toss that in the "iffy" pile.
If you're completely anti-TV, well yes, then I guess you do believe nothing of value would be lost. Unfortunately in all likelihood the dredge programs on the major stations and the 63 different sports channels are what would survive, and the overall quality of programming would decline even farther. Such that people who only like their few programs and think the rest is garbage won't have anything to watch at all. (You can decide for yourself if that is good or bad.)
I'm not going to defend him on his inability to diagnose the particular condition. If it's as common as it seems then yes, he probably should have gotten it. Everybody makes mistakes.
That said, speaking as somebody with chronic skin problems throughout my life, I can tell with this with certainty: Very few skin issues are treated with anything other than steroids (topical or otherwise) or antibiotics, and steroids is by far the more prevalent. There is essentially no risk to short-term use of a steroid cream, so he took a shot that probably had an 80% chance of being right and prescribed some. When it didn't work, he tried the only other thing it was likely to have been--and despite your walking out on him in a huff--justified or not--it sounds from a quick Google search about the treatments that he actually would have had it the second time.
If this makes you want a new doctor, that's fine. It's certainly your prerogative. But to go on that little rant about payola and imply he must be in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies is just ridiculously idiotic hyperbole. There are a lot of problems in the medical community, and almost all of them begin with patients, not drug makers. If you want to start attacking people for unnecessary prescriptions, start with the idiots who want drugs for their flu even though antibiotics won't kill viruses; who are too ignorant to realize that what little help any drugs we have for the flu may be are almost always too late to help by the time you realize you have the flu and go to see a doctor about it; who will bitch and cry and moan and scream at that doctor if he had told him he didn't know what was wrong, regardless of what it turned out to be. Bitch at patients who walk into their doctors' offices demanding they be written a prescription for drug-they-just-saw-on-TV-and-self-diagnosed-they-need. Bitch at the patients looking for any reason at all to sue a doctor into the ground simply because the doctor has more money than they do if you want one of the most major causes of why doctors are scared to diagnose today.
If you don't think all of this happens, you're wrong. I know *many* people in the medical field from nurses to doctors and it happens every day. If you don't like your doctor, if you don't think he's competent, find a new one. But check that hyperbolic crap at the door. Most of these people are good, intelligent people doing the best they can in jobs that would overwhelm the vast majority of people in the world.
Receiving, keeping, locating and using a random username/password is going to be entirely too difficult for average Joe, sad as that may be.
That said, why does the computer need to know if you've voted at all? When we vote here--regardless of how we do so--we present an ID or voter ID card to an election worker at the desk in the front. That person has a list of names and simply crosses one off before handing you your paper ballot or the little card for the computer voting, depending on your preference (for one or the other or "first available"). There's absolutely no connection of any sort between the crossing off a voter step and the actual voting step. In fact if you really wanted to, I don't see any reason you couldn't get your name crossed off the list and then walk out the door without ever voting.
Most secure system ever? Nah. But solutions like yours are going to cause more problems than they prevent and something easier and more secure--say, tying it to your state ID/drivers license number--have their own concerns in terms of privacy and access to voting.
I would hope so, being as arguing privacy in a murder case is purely idiotic; the two things aren't even related. That said, if their case was based on a confession they tortured out of you I would hope to hell you made very sure your lawyer argued 8th/5th Amendment violations. Vigorously. It wouldn't be the only thing he argued because that's just not how court cases work, but it should undoubtedly be the core of the defense. If people are doing something they're not allowed to do, the merits by which they justify their actions matter very little to whether or not they should be made to stop.
I disagree. I think it says "mind your own damn business." In a free society, you shouldn't need to defend yourself if you're not doing anything wrong. I don't need to get into 75-page treatises of the psychology of adolescent minds or cite studies regarding prolonged exposure to violence if "I can make it, you can not buy it. Shut the fuck up" is a perfectly valid response. If I'm looking to change those peoples' minds, then maybe I'll do so. If I'm trying to get them off my back, I don't see a reason to waste time and breath making an unnecessary argument that, in all likelihood, will fall on deaf ears anyway.
The people making these arguments fall into two camps: The ones convinced that they're right and the ones taking advantage of the ones who are convinced that they're right. Which groups' minds are you hoping to change?
It is a free speech issue, without a doubt. Personally I think it's more important to try to get these people to realize they can't simply run roughshod over anything they disapprove of than specifically defending violent video games.
Except he is not talking about non-compete issues. He's talking about what the story is talking about: Companies agreeing amongst themselves to not hire people who worked for some other company. He's saying it's even worse than a non-compete because the employees don't even have a choice in the matter, whereas at least with a non-compete they know ahead of time and have to sign on the line. Nice try though.
That's great and all, but aside from the first sentence neither is any of the rest of the points the OP made, including the one you quoted.
If you're going to be a condescending douchebag to people, you really should work on your reading comprehension skills first. Or hey, you could try not being a condescending douchebag too. Whichever you prefer.
Apparently right now it's "snarky bitch." I'm sure a good recommendation algorithm could find you some appropriate songs to listen to.
It's worth noting that the two positions are not incompatible. I think drugs are bad. I see nothing of value to altering my mental state, particularly if there is ANY chance of ANY long-term damages whatsoever. I've never smoked (cigarettes, marijuana or otherwise), I've never been drunk (my all-time record is 3 beers over the course of about 6 hours), I certainly have never injected any narcotics. I don't abuse prescription pills. I don't particularly care, from a personal perspective, if "you" go to jail for doing any of those things.
And yet I still see the BS and the failures in our drug laws. As you stated, even if we want to keep weed illegal, classifying it as a Schedule I narcotic is ridiculous. Moreover I think keeping it illegal costs more than it's worth in enforcement, treatment and prison usage, and the vast majority of the crime surrounding it would disappear if it were legalized. That doesn't, for the record, mean I wouldn't think people smoking it up are idiots even if it was legal.
In other words, don't think of it as an either-or. Law shouldn't be attempts to enforce our own brand of morality on others; laws should be about your interactions with other people. Recognizing that doesn't mean we forfeit that morality. Just that we have to live with more visible signs of disagreement.
I do tend to agree with you that in most cases we shouldn't be pushing anybody to take up any particular field of work just to make our numbers balance out with the general population numbers. However, in the interest of trying to see things from both perspectives let me throw out a handful of possibilities and questions:
1. Why do specific genders avoid specific jobs? I don't think anybody wants John to be a nurse just to get the nursing splits up, but it would be considerably more disconcerting if John didn't want to be a nurse because "that's a woman's job" versus "I'm not interested in nursing." In fact, nursing would be an interesting example: There are plenty of men who want to be doctors, so it doesn't seem as though there's anything about genders specifically that make men less willing to care for sick people, but there are considerably less men who would consider being a nurse than would consider being a doctor.
2. What would a different gender bring to a field? Some fields probably just don't matter. At the same time, we know without a doubt that men and women's minds work differently. What perspective are we missing in some fields dominated by one or the other? Could we solve issues or make significant progress just by bringing in people with different ways of looking at things?
Aaand I let this sit too long and lost motivation, heh. So I'll just leave it there.
Spoken as somebody who doesn't do website development for a living.
I do, and I can tell you this: No developer I have ever come across likes IE6; no developer likes having to spend fairly large chunks of the development time of a project bashing their heads against browser-specific quirks. The people who pay the bills, however, tend to care very deeply--and that means the developers care as well. "Hey guys, this site is going to look borked for 20% of your visitors" doesn't fly, nor should it.
That said, if you code in a standards-compliant way, just about every browser that isn't IE5 or earlier works very nearly the same. Not necessarily pixel-perfect, but awfully close. Generally close enough that we CAN let it slide (mostly text breaks in different places, and usually due to things like anti-aliasing/ClearType). IE6 tends to require a little hacking, but the more experience you get in doing so, the less time you ultimately have to spend whacking at things with crowbars to make IE6 happy. In other words, with experience you can draw IE6 closer to that "awfully close" realm.
As far as your example, I don't particularly understand why you'd use a draft-version CSS property instead of just adding an extra div or two (depending on if you're rounding the top or all the edges) with a small image. This isn't the sort of difference I would simply chalk up to the fact that the web isn't a pixel-perfect medium. This is a change that if you're doing this for money you're going to need to get the client to sign off on as heartily as they signed off on the original design mockups. Don't get me wrong: I LOVE the fact that those CSS properties are coming down the road, and it will be ridiculously helpful and save quite a bit of time once they arrive with force enough to rely on them. That's just not now.
It is an incentive, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it is as big as you seem to suggest.
As you said, these things run on Google's servers and communicate through Google's pipes. With the exception of the amount of data that traverses their Internet-bound pipes--which doesn't seem to be what they're referring to--all of these are sunk costs. They can't just call up their providers and downgrade their usage for a while. I don't see Google getting rid of (trashing, selling, donating) these machines if new efficiencies make them obsolete; I don't even particularly see them flipping the power switches to save on power costs. These machines will be needed again, it's just a question of when.
So the efficiency is, essentially, in slowing down the purchase of new hardware. It's certainly a pressure, but a fairly mild one considering that buying new hardware usually goes hand-in-hand with increase in demand and thus increase in revenue. In a sense, if it DIDN'T all run on their own equipment I think the pressure would be larger. Servicing the same people with a smaller monthly bill is pretty easy to sell ANYBODY on; servicing more people in the future on less new hardware than you would otherwise buy is good, but less compelling.
That you want to be in your university, yes (though it's not true as often as you'd like). That you want to be in your major, yes.
Unfortunately, university these days is nothing more than High School Version 2. Ridiculous chunks of time are spent in "general education" classes so that the university can claim they're making you a nice, rounded individual--as if the classes you take has any bearing on that--and are going to be filled with people who don't want to be there and worse, simply don't care what's being taught. I don't think there's anything that can be done at the professor/student levels about that.
As you progress through the class levels you'll meet more students who are genuinely interested in the topics. The 100s are a disgusting dredge of people taking the class to fulfill some requirement or another; the 300s are students in the major who typically take things more seriously; and of course, the 200s are somewhere in between. Still, even at the top-level classes you're going to find people not interested in that particular topic, since many majors are rather narrowly drawn as to what you're allowed to choose from.
Honestly, I think the solution is to stop pushing so many kids into college/university. It's just become sort of expected that that's where you go if you're not one of the "dumb kids" out tinkering with his car all day. The reality is that most people, even those WITH degrees, end up in jobs where those degrees don't benefit them (aside perhaps from them expecting more money just by virtue of having it), and even those that do benefit directly from their degrees tend to only benefit from a subset of the classes they took. There are lots of people who legitimately DO need high-end theoretical educations in various topics, and they should be in universities; most others would get by with some sort of specific job training, and they're usually the ones who want or need to start earning quickly anyway. Tossing those two groups together... well, I think that's why we have what we have.
Taking things a little too seriously today, are you?
If you put things in bold you sound really smart and clearly prove that you have something extremely important to convey.
Unless, that is, you can't understand the difference between Qt and a desktop environment that uses Qt. Then... not so much.
I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but one thing they're not is stupid. I'm sure they've run the numbers and determined they make more money by keeping OS X exclusive to their hardware (ie, not cannibalizing their own hardware sales and the large profit margins they can make on them) than taking the hardware sales loss to greatly inflate their sales of OS X, where margins are probably much thinner--and where, frankly, Microsoft can and does play dirty with their pricing.
Because Macs are hideously expensive for the level of hardware you get compared to the level of hardware you can get for a PC for the same price. If you can't see the difference between $899 (tops) and $1149 for an iMac and $2300 for a Mac Pro (minimums)*, well, you either have entirely too much money to throw around or you're just a horrible fanboi.
For that matter, who says it's going to be unsupported hardware? Macs moved to Intel and commodity hardware years ago; there's nothing stopping somebody from buying literally the same components found in a Mac and simply charging less, unless you really believe that Apple isn't making... shall we say, healthy profit margins on their hardware.
There are essentially two reasons to buy a Mac: The first is you like the Mac, by which I mean the actual hardware. Whether it's the design, the clean insides, the sturdy feel or what have you. The other is OS X. If the first doesn't apply to somebody, why shouldn't they want to save several hundred dollars to get #2?
Maybe these clones will suck; we'll see. If that's the case, I'm sure the market will take care of them. If not, well, you have your answer.
* These prices pulled from their website as of the time of this posting.
This sounds like nothing more than text field input masks, which have existed for years. The first result from a Google search for "masked input fields" turns up a listing of a bunch of different ones: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/javascript-input-masks/
In my experience, step 2 involves sending the request off the management where it never gets actioned, ever.
Developers tend to want things to work; they want to code with good practices on well-designed systems. It's these "business requirements" constantly changing everything at random intervals that leads software to suck more and more as time goes on.
I've never seen a developer outright refuse to fix a bug. The closest I've seen is the developer telling his managers that it would require some major input of work to do so for whatever reason and that management ultimately decides it isn't worth the time. Second would be that non-priority bug-fixing is well down the queue from things like adding new features and just isn't gotten to. And again, that's more a failure of management to ensure that there's enough people to get the work done or by controlling the timing of the work better so that it isn't overwhelming the development team.
If your developers don't have time to meet all of your schedules and complete low-priority bug fixing at the same time, it's probably not the eveloper's fault. (Unless they're just not particularly good at their jobs. And even then, management should either seek to find somebody who is or be aware of the limitations of their staff--after all, a good manager actually manages the resources he has, not the resources he wishes he had.)
What makes you think it's an or situation? Of course it will help with crime fighting; being able to visually track the faces of anybody you're looking for will be a boon to law enforcement trying to hunt people down, at least until criminals routinely obscure their faces.
Posting an armed military guard at every corner and in every home and shop also will greatly increase security. It's tough to justify busting in that shop window and grabbing things if you know there are people with rifles a half block away from you, tops.
Torturing people suspected of crimes also helps. Sure, you're going to hear whatever it is you want to hear and a lot of the time that will simply be bullshit, but from time to time you really will get a guilty person who sings and gives you something useful.
The question is just how much you're willing to put up with for what increase in security. How much cost? How much inconvenience, pain or death to innocent people? How much invasion of privacy? How much government tracking? How big a database of knowledge on erstwhile honest citizens? How much abuse?
All of these things help law enforcement; that's how people get the ideas in the door to begin with. "Hey, would you like us to spend millions of dollars to track you everywhere you go for absolutely no benefit?" is an awfully hard sell, after all. The question is how much a given society is willing to tolerate and what recourse they have to prevent it when they feel it has crossed a line. I disagree with all of these sorts of tracking/monitoring programs, despite the fact that they do undeniably help law enforcement to some degree. I also realize it's somewhat subjective though.
It depends on how we're defining "obligation" and "necessary." They certainly have no direct business obligation. At the same time, if this man had died I would think his family would have had a strong case for a wrongful death lawsuit.
Obviously, the respondents would argue that the man was trying to commit suicide and therefore it was his own fault. There is a lot of logic to that. However, as a society we also recognize that mentally ill people operate under a different set of rules, and we generally hold that suicidal == mentally ill by default. If cops think you're going to hurt yourself, they can lock you up for 72 hours for psychiatric observation even if you haven't broken any laws, as an immediate example.
It would boil down to the jury's interpretation--and in civil lawsuits, a jury can assign partial liability. IE, they could rule that his death was 90% his own fault and 10% Verizon's fault, and order that Verizon pay 10% of what they're suing for--potentially still in the millions. I don't think "the man owned $20, what were we supposed to do?!" is a very sympathetic case. On the other hand, I think a suicidal man is a very sympathetic case. Most likely the jury would enjoy bitchslapping Verizon for it.
So don't care about the trial. But this "hey, let's everybody send the lawyers of the winning side one penny so that they have to pay more money to process it than they collect! ha ha ha !" crap is just petty and childish.
I'm perfectly willing to accept multiple arguments on the issue of copyright infringement as valid, and for what it's worth I don't believe a tracker should ever be liable for anything. But at the same time, countries have systems of law to interpret these things, and--at least for now--that system has decided that the Pirate Bay guys are wrong and the other side is right.
Don't like it? Lobby to change the law. If you REALLY need to harass people for some reason, harass the lawmakers and judges involved. Why the hell would you direct your spite at lawyers who a judge just declared was right while you were wrong? How do you defend that as anything but purely egotistical pettiness?
As I eluded to, I support their cause. I don't think trackers violate any copyrights, even if they do help you do so. I do NOT support them, nor their behavior. Was the trial biased? I don't know. Appeal it. Appeal it as many times and as far as you can. But this childish nonsense has to stop.
I admit, there's good shock value in downing a plane. At the same time, though, whenever I'm in the airport dealing with all this security nonsense, I can't help but think that it would be just as effective in terms of deaths--maybe moreso--to just detonate a bomb in the lobby. Or, in a twist of irony, in the security point lines. Not a damn thing anybody could do to stop that from happening. Move the checkpoints? Move the detonation point. No biggie.
Do it over and over again. Do it once a month. All you need is a suicide bomber and a bomb, and it doesn't seem as though either of those are in short supply for terrorists.
Well, for starters, realize that when you pose that question, it forces us to answer as though we're already in a world where such devices are mandatory. Otherwise, people simply won't have one of these things installed to start with. So that said: Honest guess? Levy huge fines or jail time for doing so.
We're talking about a speed-limiting device, so honestly, it's not going to be particularly hard to catch these people. Go out and park your police cruiser somewhere where the speed limit and the device limit are the same are similar; anybody speeding gets caught and pays the $1000 or whatever fine. It's not like the cops aren't doing exactly this sort of thing right now, so there's no new technology or monetary investments to make to continue doing so.
This hypothetical future isn't like what we have these days; if such devices become mandatory, you can't simply speed and count on hiding amongst the crowds to avoid getting your own ticket. (SOMEBODY is getting a ticket if a cop is around -- you're just betting on it not being you right now.) If you're disabling your device in a world of mandatory installation, you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. I think just the threat of fines that large are enough to keep most people from doing it; for those who still do, I doubt it will take many thousand buck tickets for them to decide it's just not worth it. If you're REALLY concerned that nobody do it--and you should be if this went mandatory; these sort of devices really need to be all-or-nothing because the threat of somebody NOT using it weaving through traffic that is is a substantially higher risk than nobody using it at all--double the fine each subsequent offense for repeat offenders. Or just lock 'em up.
I'm not advocating for or against these devices or any such system, by the way. I'm simply stating what I think will happen if they decide to make devices like it mandatory going forward.
That said, if they DO go forward with such devices, it should absolutely NOT kill the engine. I mean seriously, how fucking stupid is it to be driving down the road and suddenly your engine stops? In the name of saving lives? Seriously? Just limit the maximum speed, preferably with some "burst" tolerance (eg, you can go past that speed but only for, say, 10 seconds on some long timer) because sometimes it really is necessary.
The real problem is that breathalyzers are allowed to convict anybody to begin with. Even if they have the most beautiful, pristine code in the world and perfectly implement every algorithm they're still prone to inaccuracies, because they assume conditions about the human body necessary to make the algorithms work. While there are "normal" values for these measurements, the very act of calling them "normal" means that there are people out there whose measurements do NOT fall into that range. A breathalyzer is little more than an educated guess as to your Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) based on the amount of alcohol measured in your breath.
That means that in addition to being inaccurate, it's entirely possible to take two breathalyzer tests from two different devices made by two different companies at (essentially) the same time and get different results. And the closer you are to whatever the state's legal limit is, the more important those differences become.
By all means, police should carry breathalyzers. They should administer such at the sides of the road if they suspect a driver is DUI. Then they should draw blood. There are portable kits if it's important for the officer to draw blood at exactly that instant (in the rare cases it's an extremely long drive back to the station I guess); you could roll a paramedic to do it; you could bring them back to the station and have a doctor do it. Whatever. The idea that the breathalyzer should be allowed as conclusive evidence when it's demonstrably not is foolhardy, and that's without any of the issues that opening this source code up revealed to us.
Let's knock this crap off. You want to convict somebody based on their BAC, measure their BAC. I don't think that's unreasonable.