Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.
There's a little thing called "shelf life". Nukes have one, too.
...after which they decommission themselves by becoming non-operational through the decay of the fissile materials. Which is what these people want. I'm not seeing the problem here that would require actively decommissioning the things.
"Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey"
Not really. A one-time cost to decommission, defrayed by salvage, versus a large recurring expense.
There's no salvage value; there's just nuclear material which can't be stored safely very close to similar nuclear material. It's not like the plutonium can be used in anything other than weapons or RTGs, and we only build RTGs for the space program. Given the critical mass for the Pu isotope used in most weapons, taking apart one weapon will fuel most of the RTG-using projects Nasa has planned out for the next 30 years. It's only the Russians who thought using RTGs for civil usage was a good idea (e.g. automated lighthouses). The U.S. still has enough fear/guilt over what they did to win WWII in the Pacific Theatre that the NIMBY effect is huge.
But nukes are extremely expensive toys and the maintanence cost is huge, and NOT mostly on personel. Just maintaining the nuclear arsenal accounts for around $18million a year currently and it's rising every year.
More is spent from the $1T/year on visitor badges for the Pentagon. Seriously. $18M/year is nothing. As a weapon equivalence, that's just over two M1 Abrams main battle tanks, and a heck of a lot more effective as a deterrent than two more tanks would be.
These are very delicate, precision machines, and each and every one of them is a minimum of 20 years old, many much older than that. As time goes on they require more maintanence, and it becomes more expensive.
Only if you care about them remaining operational; otherwise, they are safe where they are. Since your argument is that they should be made non-operational, just let it happen through lack of maintenance. Problem solved.
The blast radius of a modern nuke is more than large enough to take out multiple small cities or a large metropolitan area of a major cities and the outlaying (small cities) area.
The blast radius is limited by the curvature of the earth. For most median altitude bursts, this works out to a 13 mile radius for moderate to heavy damage.
Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is really pricy. They're full of dangerous things.
Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.
They require LOTS of upkeep. You have to guard them. (They have the power to destroy the world after all) The infrastructure to maintain your active arsenal is massive and costs piles of money, which seems silly for something you hope to never use.
Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East. Safer for the people who get the make-work jobs, too.
Some say the nuclear arms race was as much as way to drain money out of the USSR until it collapsed as much as anything else.
Yeah, those people obviously don't work for the Brookings Institute, or the Sante Fe Institute, and so they have no understanding of the games theory basis that led to the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), resulted in the "Cold War", and kept us out of a hot war.
We're done with that, and I'm sure both sides are sick of throwing money in to a pit. You really only need to blow the world up once, if you're going to do it at all.
If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there.
I also hear that most nuclear material for peacetime power reactors comes from decommissioned nuclear warheads.
You heard incorrectly. RTG's, or Radioisotope Thermionic Generators, operate on Plutonium. These are used in spacecraft and space probes, Mars landers, and so on. The U.S. mostly buys the Plutonium for those from Russia and other former Soviet republics. Commercial power reactors, other than breeders, run off of Uranium, and the Uranium not only isn't weapons grade, it *can't* be, since if it were, the reactors wouldn't operate properly. Breeders can run on Plutonium, but most of them operate from reprocessed fuel, or as a means of reprocessing fuel.
The U.S. only operates two breeder sites, for the purpose of producing medically useful isotopes, and they are generally not run at capacity. They are under the control of the DOE, and there has been serious talk lately about shutting the one in Oak Ridge down. At which point we will be buying those isotopes from Japan and France - assuming Japan restarts their reactor network again, rather than it committing seppuku after Fukushima made them paranoid.
Why is this a thing? Why must we dumb down everything?
It was Ian Elliot that assumed that the decision was made to "dumb things down", and you are foolish for buying into this idea and perpetuating it.
The simple answer is that portions of the UI in Firefox itself are written in JS, and that JS is an integral part of the Firefox OS platform, and are necessary to supporting its application marketplace.
Consider how useless Android would be if you could disable Dalvik ("Java") on the platform: the UI wouldn't even work at all.
By removing the option to turn of JS directly, and forcing you to use NoScript or a similar plugin if you want to disable it yourself, you get to be responsible for any breakage that occurs, while they get to have a taller base platform on which to build better and more complex applications and innovate in their UI. That it allows web sites with JS content to function by default as well is just a bonus, not the primary driver.
Personally, if I am going to use my phone in the movie theater, I like to switch it to the same red-pixels-only mode (using an open source app I made for it), which I normally use for amateur astronomy not to disturb dark adaptation. I don't think dim red screens disturb much. Such modes should be available on all phones, not just some rooted ones.:-)
Is this in the same vein as streetlights capturing drivers attention more than stoplights, or are you going to make an exception for people who have been trained to pay more attention to red than to white? You know, like everyone who drives their car at night?
Nothing on an Android or iPhone device is ever secure; it's too easy for the NSA or other organizations to install Trojan horses. And installing a crypto app from the market is like painting a red bulls eye on your phone.
This particular library is GPL'ed and therefore can not be used in iPhone Apps without violating the App Store terms of service agreement. So this library, and therefore your statement based on the vulnerability of this library, doesn't apply to iPhones.
If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.
You are assuming that the terrorist would be on board the plane. Iran was able to capture a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 operated by the CIA using an attack on the remote location and command and control systems.
They have to spy on everybody, because anybody could be, or become, a terrorist, either willingly or unwillingly.
Obviously, the most at risk people, when it comes to turning on us, are those who actively resent being spied upon. We especially have to spy on those people.
One mustn't overlook the change in social values that makes formerly taboo subjects acceptable in ordinary conversation.
Public displays of affection used to be taboo regardless of whether your were straight, gay, or into animals. There's a lot of "we're in your face to be in your face" these days, and pretty much everyone is doing it regardless that it pushes other people outside their comfort zones, and the other people sometimes react violently to what is, in effect, an act of assault.
If something is outside your comfort zone, but you don't have to actively acknowledge it, then social friction is vastly reduced compared to being held upside down with your head in the toilet, which is something you'd be more or less forced to acknowledge, and likely, react to.
Have you ever been to the Bay Area? With Oakland, there's some really shitty parts, there's also middle parts, and then some of the most expensive housing in the Bay Area, with excellent schools and no crime.
Oakland is a pit. There are suburbs of Oakland which are not pits, but they are not Oakland, which is kind of the point.
There is a good reason it costs to go over the bay bridge from Oakland into San Francisco, but that it's free to go over the same bay bridge when you are going from San Francisco to Oakland.
I love to go hiking in Oakland's Redwood forests.
I'm pretty sure you meant to say "Clarement/Piedmont/Rock Ridge/Joaquin Miller Park/Redwood Heights" here, rather than saying "Oakland". Which is to say, you meant to say that you are not in Oakland, but in the suburbs, since that's what's actually close to the redwood forests.
Emeryville is rather nice (we held the first BSD Con there, years ago, and Sendmail is located there, but it's a separate place from Oakland. It's mostly where Oakland drives to to get to the Ikea, since Ikea would not be caught dead with a store in Oakland itself.
I suppose you could claim the Oakland airport as an attraction, but everyone pretty much flies into SFO. TheOakland airport exists as a place to divert planes when SFO is being pissy about not being allowed to expand its runways and making planes come in on a single runway because they like to pretend the airport doesn't have a moratorium on planes that do not have a modern high accuracy ILS such that it could be zero visibility, and they'd still be able to take off and land on all runways, even if they painted over the cockpit windows. That's only because people don't want to add the extra hour and a half for the shuttle for the pit which is San Jose Mineta.
PS: It might also have something to do with the only thing the Oakland airport being a Hub for being FedEx Express, which is great if you've FedEx'ed yourself, but otherwise not so nifty for humans. They have ~13 non-hubbed airlines that fly in and out, compared to the ~40 airlines that fly in and out of SFO, which is a hub for both Virgin America and United.
Oh, and don't get started on Oakland. When you have documentaries named "Gangland Oakland", you know to stay the hell away with your 100k+ tech salary.
What exactly do you have against Oakland, other than the massive amount of industrial pollution, drug manufacturing, gang shooting, and having your $6000 entertainment system, which your $100K salary allows you to afford, stolen once a week, the windows busted out on your BMW, and taggers deciding your car and house are great places to express themselves, you know, when they aren't too busy doing other things, like mugging you?
PPS: Google alone has 32 restaurants on campus, most of which are managed by the same people who used to go out on tour and cook for The Grateful Dead.
No. In the summary, OP said that this was being done 'without informing the students' parents of what is at stake'.
The summary also says there is a "lack of disclosure in the parental consent process." Just getting parental consent to "use the internet" or "use Google Apps" is not enough. Unless the parents are explicitly giving their consent to the disclosure of identifying information, then this school is breaking the law.
Maybe the OP is being alarmist, and he certainly doesn't appear to be very competent, but the obvious solution is to read the applicable law (which is COPPA), go down the legal checklist, and make sure his school complies.
Just because a child is enrolled in Google's "Apps for Education" as a matter of allowing their coursework to be monitored, have analytics applied to it by a teacher or their parents, and have the progress tracked by a teacher or parent in a uniform and API transparent way, doesn't meant that their schoolwork is being posted to reddit. You can search your ass off, and you will not find the kids work online, or even their name, unless they put it some place else, like Facebook or Slashdot, where the information *is* public.
The OP is being asinine and alarmist in the extreme: "Oh noes! The clouds, the clouds are going to eat you! All parents should be informed that the clouds are about to eat their children so that we can get a reasonable backlash going, and continue to sell copies of Office on heavyweight, brandy-new Windows 8.1 PCs! 'Case a bad guy has never yet compromised a Windows PC!".
And yeah, maybe an external audit by a competent domain expert might be a good idea, but as long as we are auditing, I;d like to know why we can afford to house the school administration in a new building in the expensive real estate part of tow, but supposedly can't afford to fix the roof in the place where tyhe students are actually being educated. That's an audit I could get behind.
Typically, outsourcing saves money, whether that's sending IT jobs to places where the workers are willing to take less money, or building PCs in places where the labor costs are relatively low and the environmental laws effectively non-existant - or not buying a metric buttload of Microsoft software because it happens to be tied to a particular machine, rather than a person who has to access their data in multiple locations from multiple machines (home, library, multiple classrooms).
Re-buying software to be able to access it on another device makes about as much sense as rebying an eBook to access it from another device, or rebuying an mp3 because you want to listen to it on the home stero, when you're out jogging, and in your car.
Put another way: licensing software to a machine instead of a person is another form of DRM.
California spends more than 7 times what Utah spends, and gets a poorer result.
But if you don't like Utah because you don't like mormons, pick another state higher up in the second table, and compare it to California; California is only going to look worse.
A local school was complaining that they'd have to lay off a bunch of teachers recently.
They always complain about that. Then they send out pink slips. Then they don't lay anyone off. It's a scam by the teachers union, where your career path exits teaching and moves into administration so that you can make 2-3x the money while parents are forced to buy paper and pencils for their students.
BTW, the student/teacher ratio is about 2X larger in Utah, and their SAT scores are in the top 10 of the nation, rather than in the bottom 10, as in California. So throwing money or teachers at it doesn't fix what's wrong with education in California.
If I want to search for exact words in any order, "A" "B" "C" is NOT the same as +A +B +C was, since it doesn't force inclusion. Instead I get ""best" and "useful" results, rather than results based on my judgement.
This is great for most people, who don't know how search engines work, don't care, or are just looking for sponsored results or porn, but it's not that useful to, for example, get results containing technical reports and papers in a particular field (for example). For CS, there's citeseer searching, but for biology and other fields, it's a real pain.
Not if you are into video or image editing it isn't.
If I want to do professional video or image editing, I use what the professionals use, which is Mac OS X. That goes for most major studios and television networks.
I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.
From the for what it's worth department... when Google dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms, which was shortly before it introduced Google+, it was incredibly contentious inside Google itself, and a lot of Google employees at the time, myself included, complained bitterly about the ability to get accurate results any more.
Most of use were natural lexicographers who could think hierarchically enough that we knew the search terms we wanted in order to get the results we wanted. surprising how we ended up working at a search engine, right? About 2/3rds of us really felt they were "dumbing down" search in order to use the same datastores for normal search as the first and second order relationships being used to generate targetted advertising results. Altavista was mentioned *a lot*.
How Google (a private company) defines "adult" is irrelevant. Google's not under any contractual relationship with its users to provide them with free hosting and bandwidth so that the users can make money off ads whether adult or not.
I'm not arguing this for anyone, mind you, but... I believe there is an implied contract, which would mean shutting these sites down based on their content is a form of promissory estoppel resulting in a condition called detrimental reliance. Because Google offered these blogging services for free, and had not placed prior restrain on the content.
The upshot? - A promise was made - Relying on the promise was reasonable or forseeable - There was actual and reasonable reliance on the promise - The reliance was detrimental - Injustice can only be prevented by enforcing the promise
I think it could be reasonably argued that had Google itself offered a venue for the advertising now prohibited, the majority of the blogs would not have gone to third party affiliates for their advertising, they would instead be using Google provided ad services.
I understand Google is under increasing pressure, both with regard to adult speech and grey market pharmaceuticals, from government as well as other agencies using the government as a cat's paw *cough*pharmaceutical industry*cough* to enforce artificial price barriers; it will be interesting to see how they deal with this.
The U.S. government runs a lottery that gives out an additional 50,000 VISA's per year beyond the level playing field of normal immigration, but people from Mexico arent allowed to win any of them, and you are there claiming its not racist by any stretch of the imagination?
Really?
What fucking distortion field do you live in?
He's probably living in the distortion field perpetuated by both the CIA World Fact Book and Wikipedia, in which it is well known that Mexico isn't comprised of a single race any more than Los Angeles is comprised of a single race, thus making it impossible to discriminate against a particular, single race by discriminating against all of Mexico.
Or maybe it was the one where, under NAFTA, there's already an economic agreement in place for non-professional workers, and professional workers get TN-1 visa rather than H-1B visa?
You know what? Those TN-1 visas discriminate against Europeans, who are require to return to their own countries after a period of time, whereas a TN-1 can be renewed again and again, indefinitely, without ever actually leaving the US. Those bastards! Favoring Mexico and Canada over Germany and New Zealand!
They should block the whole internet by now. Or rather, nuke it from orbit.
Unfortunately for the U.S., the TCP/IP network, which had been designed by DARPA to withstand huge infrastructure damage of exactly the type the U.S. was inflicting on Iraq and continue to function... did so, keeping communication up in Iraq.
Easy there, ganjadude. Personally, I'd like to see the guy rot in a cell.
Keeping people alive to make them think about what they've done seems far more just to me than letting them escape their guilty conscience.
I think one of the major arguments in favor of the death penalty in cases like this is it makes it more difficult for some idiot somewhere to take hostages and then demand "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev must be released!".
Also, you should realize that the death penalty is often misapplied in the U.S., in part due to prosecutorial over-charging for a single crime in order to get something to stick. I'm pretty all right with Ted Bundy being dead, but I think it would be difficult to move with the speed that Utah moved with in order to get him executed in the present day climate.
The reason for a penalty that severe is NOT to punish the offender; it's to deter the rest of society from acting the same way in the future. If the family and victims of the criminal feel good afterwords, so much the better, but frankly the punishment isn't being enacted for their benefit, it's being enacted to benefit everyone.
I also doubt that, despite having killed 30 young women, and having decapitated 12 of them and kept their heads around his apartment for prolonged period of time, applying makeup and grooming their hair, that we would be able to execute him via electric chair, since that's considered a "cruel and unusual punishment" these days (but realize that, while cruel, it would not be "and unusual" if we used the method a bit more often, and therefore would not fit the technicality which currently keeps the method from being used these days).
If executions were more of a public spectacle, they would both serve a stronger deterrent purpose, and force people to acknowledge what the government is doing in their name -- both of which would likely have net positive effects on society at large.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.
There's a little thing called "shelf life". Nukes have one, too.
...after which they decommission themselves by becoming non-operational through the decay of the fissile materials. Which is what these people want. I'm not seeing the problem here that would require actively decommissioning the things.
"Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey"
Not really. A one-time cost to decommission, defrayed by salvage, versus a large recurring expense.
There's no salvage value; there's just nuclear material which can't be stored safely very close to similar nuclear material. It's not like the plutonium can be used in anything other than weapons or RTGs, and we only build RTGs for the space program. Given the critical mass for the Pu isotope used in most weapons, taking apart one weapon will fuel most of the RTG-using projects Nasa has planned out for the next 30 years. It's only the Russians who thought using RTGs for civil usage was a good idea (e.g. automated lighthouses). The U.S. still has enough fear/guilt over what they did to win WWII in the Pacific Theatre that the NIMBY effect is huge.
But nukes are extremely expensive toys and the maintanence cost is huge, and NOT mostly on personel. Just maintaining the nuclear arsenal accounts for around $18million a year currently and it's rising every year.
More is spent from the $1T/year on visitor badges for the Pentagon. Seriously. $18M/year is nothing. As a weapon equivalence, that's just over two M1 Abrams main battle tanks, and a heck of a lot more effective as a deterrent than two more tanks would be.
These are very delicate, precision machines, and each and every one of them is a minimum of 20 years old, many much older than that. As time goes on they require more maintanence, and it becomes more expensive.
Only if you care about them remaining operational; otherwise, they are safe where they are. Since your argument is that they should be made non-operational, just let it happen through lack of maintenance. Problem solved.
The blast radius of a modern nuke is more than large enough to take out multiple small cities or a large metropolitan area of a major cities and the outlaying (small cities) area.
The blast radius is limited by the curvature of the earth. For most median altitude bursts, this works out to a 13 mile radius for moderate to heavy damage.
I think like 16 or something would destroy the entire world's weather for decades so yeah, completely pointless.
I can't believe it would only take 16 of them... ...to trigger a nuclear winter and totally reverse global warming.
What are we waiting for?
(Also, other posters have pointed out: we've set off more than 16 of them already).
Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is really pricy. They're full of dangerous things.
Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.
They require LOTS of upkeep. You have to guard them. (They have the power to destroy the world after all) The infrastructure to maintain your active arsenal is massive and costs piles of money, which seems silly for something you hope to never use.
Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East. Safer for the people who get the make-work jobs, too.
Some say the nuclear arms race was as much as way to drain money out of the USSR until it collapsed as much as anything else.
Yeah, those people obviously don't work for the Brookings Institute, or the Sante Fe Institute, and so they have no understanding of the games theory basis that led to the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), resulted in the "Cold War", and kept us out of a hot war.
We're done with that, and I'm sure both sides are sick of throwing money in to a pit. You really only need to blow the world up once, if you're going to do it at all.
If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there.
I also hear that most nuclear material for peacetime power reactors comes from decommissioned nuclear warheads.
You heard incorrectly. RTG's, or Radioisotope Thermionic Generators, operate on Plutonium. These are used in spacecraft and space probes, Mars landers, and so on. The U.S. mostly buys the Plutonium for those from Russia and other former Soviet republics. Commercial power reactors, other than breeders, run off of Uranium, and the Uranium not only isn't weapons grade, it *can't* be, since if it were, the reactors wouldn't operate properly. Breeders can run on Plutonium, but most of them operate from reprocessed fuel, or as a means of reprocessing fuel.
The U.S. only operates two breeder sites, for the purpose of producing medically useful isotopes, and they are generally not run at capacity. They are under the control of the DOE, and there has been serious talk lately about shutting the one in Oak Ridge down. At which point we will be buying those isotopes from Japan and France - assuming Japan restarts their reactor network again, rather than it committing seppuku after Fukushima made them paranoid.
Why is this a thing?
Why must we dumb down everything?
It was Ian Elliot that assumed that the decision was made to "dumb things down", and you are foolish for buying into this idea and perpetuating it.
The simple answer is that portions of the UI in Firefox itself are written in JS, and that JS is an integral part of the Firefox OS platform, and are necessary to supporting its application marketplace.
Consider how useless Android would be if you could disable Dalvik ("Java") on the platform: the UI wouldn't even work at all.
By removing the option to turn of JS directly, and forcing you to use NoScript or a similar plugin if you want to disable it yourself, you get to be responsible for any breakage that occurs, while they get to have a taller base platform on which to build better and more complex applications and innovate in their UI. That it allows web sites with JS content to function by default as well is just a bonus, not the primary driver.
Personally, if I am going to use my phone in the movie theater, I like to switch it to the same red-pixels-only mode (using an open source app I made for it), which I normally use for amateur astronomy not to disturb dark adaptation. I don't think dim red screens disturb much. Such modes should be available on all phones, not just some rooted ones. :-)
Is this in the same vein as streetlights capturing drivers attention more than stoplights, or are you going to make an exception for people who have been trained to pay more attention to red than to white? You know, like everyone who drives their car at night?
Nothing on an Android or iPhone device is ever secure; it's too easy for the NSA or other organizations to install Trojan horses. And installing a crypto app from the market is like painting a red bulls eye on your phone.
This particular library is GPL'ed and therefore can not be used in iPhone Apps without violating the App Store terms of service agreement. So this library, and therefore your statement based on the vulnerability of this library, doesn't apply to iPhones.
If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.
You are assuming that the terrorist would be on board the plane. Iran was able to capture a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 operated by the CIA using an attack on the remote location and command and control systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident#Capture_of_the_drone
They have to spy on everybody, because anybody could be, or become, a terrorist, either willingly or unwillingly.
Obviously, the most at risk people, when it comes to turning on us, are those who actively resent being spied upon. We especially have to spy on those people.
One mustn't overlook the change in social values that makes formerly taboo subjects acceptable in ordinary conversation.
Public displays of affection used to be taboo regardless of whether your were straight, gay, or into animals. There's a lot of "we're in your face to be in your face" these days, and pretty much everyone is doing it regardless that it pushes other people outside their comfort zones, and the other people sometimes react violently to what is, in effect, an act of assault.
If something is outside your comfort zone, but you don't have to actively acknowledge it, then social friction is vastly reduced compared to being held upside down with your head in the toilet, which is something you'd be more or less forced to acknowledge, and likely, react to.
Have you ever been to the Bay Area? With Oakland, there's some really shitty parts, there's also middle parts, and then some of the most expensive housing in the Bay Area, with excellent schools and no crime.
Oakland is a pit. There are suburbs of Oakland which are not pits, but they are not Oakland, which is kind of the point.
There is a good reason it costs to go over the bay bridge from Oakland into San Francisco, but that it's free to go over the same bay bridge when you are going from San Francisco to Oakland.
I love to go hiking in Oakland's Redwood forests.
I'm pretty sure you meant to say "Clarement/Piedmont/Rock Ridge/Joaquin Miller Park/Redwood Heights" here, rather than saying "Oakland". Which is to say, you meant to say that you are not in Oakland, but in the suburbs, since that's what's actually close to the redwood forests.
Emeryville is rather nice (we held the first BSD Con there, years ago, and Sendmail is located there, but it's a separate place from Oakland. It's mostly where Oakland drives to to get to the Ikea, since Ikea would not be caught dead with a store in Oakland itself.
I suppose you could claim the Oakland airport as an attraction, but everyone pretty much flies into SFO. TheOakland airport exists as a place to divert planes when SFO is being pissy about not being allowed to expand its runways and making planes come in on a single runway because they like to pretend the airport doesn't have a moratorium on planes that do not have a modern high accuracy ILS such that it could be zero visibility, and they'd still be able to take off and land on all runways, even if they painted over the cockpit windows. That's only because people don't want to add the extra hour and a half for the shuttle for the pit which is San Jose Mineta.
PS: It might also have something to do with the only thing the Oakland airport being a Hub for being FedEx Express, which is great if you've FedEx'ed yourself, but otherwise not so nifty for humans. They have ~13 non-hubbed airlines that fly in and out, compared to the ~40 airlines that fly in and out of SFO, which is a hub for both Virgin America and United.
Oh, and don't get started on Oakland. When you have documentaries named "Gangland Oakland", you know to stay the hell away with your 100k+ tech salary.
What exactly do you have against Oakland, other than the massive amount of industrial pollution, drug manufacturing, gang shooting, and having your $6000 entertainment system, which your $100K salary allows you to afford, stolen once a week, the windows busted out on your BMW, and taggers deciding your car and house are great places to express themselves, you know, when they aren't too busy doing other things, like mugging you?
PS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attractions_in_Silicon_Valley
PPS: Google alone has 32 restaurants on campus, most of which are managed by the same people who used to go out on tour and cook for The Grateful Dead.
No. In the summary, OP said that this was being done 'without informing the students' parents of what is at stake'.
The summary also says there is a "lack of disclosure in the parental consent process." Just getting parental consent to "use the internet" or "use Google Apps" is not enough. Unless the parents are explicitly giving their consent to the disclosure of identifying information, then this school is breaking the law.
Maybe the OP is being alarmist, and he certainly doesn't appear to be very competent, but the obvious solution is to read the applicable law (which is COPPA), go down the legal checklist, and make sure his school complies.
Just because a child is enrolled in Google's "Apps for Education" as a matter of allowing their coursework to be monitored, have analytics applied to it by a teacher or their parents, and have the progress tracked by a teacher or parent in a uniform and API transparent way, doesn't meant that their schoolwork is being posted to reddit. You can search your ass off, and you will not find the kids work online, or even their name, unless they put it some place else, like Facebook or Slashdot, where the information *is* public.
The OP is being asinine and alarmist in the extreme: "Oh noes! The clouds, the clouds are going to eat you! All parents should be informed that the clouds are about to eat their children so that we can get a reasonable backlash going, and continue to sell copies of Office on heavyweight, brandy-new Windows 8.1 PCs! 'Case a bad guy has never yet compromised a Windows PC!".
And yeah, maybe an external audit by a competent domain expert might be a good idea, but as long as we are auditing, I;d like to know why we can afford to house the school administration in a new building in the expensive real estate part of tow, but supposedly can't afford to fix the roof in the place where tyhe students are actually being educated. That's an audit I could get behind.
Typically, outsourcing saves money, whether that's sending IT jobs to places where the workers are willing to take less money, or building PCs in places where the labor costs are relatively low and the environmental laws effectively non-existant - or not buying a metric buttload of Microsoft software because it happens to be tied to a particular machine, rather than a person who has to access their data in multiple locations from multiple machines (home, library, multiple classrooms).
Re-buying software to be able to access it on another device makes about as much sense as rebying an eBook to access it from another device, or rebuying an mp3 because you want to listen to it on the home stero, when you're out jogging, and in your car.
Put another way: licensing software to a machine instead of a person is another form of DRM.
HOW do you teach K12 students about the risks in the digital world?
What ist thou going on about, English?
Wait. What?
Cite source?
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/states/uschartsat.html ...But even using your source, change it to "Utah is in the top 20, California is in the bottom 20".
http://www.publicagendaarchives.org/charts/state-state-sat-and-act-scores
And I really don't care about cultural bias because college admissions boards don't really care about cultural bias, they care about SAT scores.
And to get a reasonable picture, you should compare spending per capita by state:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/compare_state_spending_2013b20s
California spends more than 7 times what Utah spends, and gets a poorer result.
But if you don't like Utah because you don't like mormons, pick another state higher up in the second table, and compare it to California; California is only going to look worse.
...and this is why our schools are failing.
A local school was complaining that they'd have to lay off a bunch of teachers recently.
They always complain about that. Then they send out pink slips. Then they don't lay anyone off. It's a scam by the teachers union, where your career path exits teaching and moves into administration so that you can make 2-3x the money while parents are forced to buy paper and pencils for their students.
BTW, the student/teacher ratio is about 2X larger in Utah, and their SAT scores are in the top 10 of the nation, rather than in the bottom 10, as in California. So throwing money or teachers at it doesn't fix what's wrong with education in California.
It hasn't shifted away from Apple hardware and OS.
Here's a nive video about J.J. Abrahms Bad Robot production company, and it has Apple hardware everywhere in it:
http://apps.avid.com/2012-Webcast/Bad-Robot-archive/
So, basically Alias, the last two Start Trek movies, Super 8, and so on. Thanks, I'll stick to Mac OS X, like the pros do.
If I want to search for exact words in any order, "A" "B" "C" is NOT the same as +A +B +C was, since it doesn't force inclusion. Instead I get ""best" and "useful" results, rather than results based on my judgement.
This is great for most people, who don't know how search engines work, don't care, or are just looking for sponsored results or porn, but it's not that useful to, for example, get results containing technical reports and papers in a particular field (for example). For CS, there's citeseer searching, but for biology and other fields, it's a real pain.
Not if you are into video or image editing it isn't.
If I want to do professional video or image editing, I use what the professionals use, which is Mac OS X. That goes for most major studios and television networks.
I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.
From the for what it's worth department... when Google dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms, which was shortly before it introduced Google+, it was incredibly contentious inside Google itself, and a lot of Google employees at the time, myself included, complained bitterly about the ability to get accurate results any more.
Most of use were natural lexicographers who could think hierarchically enough that we knew the search terms we wanted in order to get the results we wanted. surprising how we ended up working at a search engine, right? About 2/3rds of us really felt they were "dumbing down" search in order to use the same datastores for normal search as the first and second order relationships being used to generate targetted advertising results. Altavista was mentioned *a lot*.
How Google (a private company) defines "adult" is irrelevant. Google's not under any contractual relationship with its users to provide them with free hosting and bandwidth so that the users can make money off ads whether adult or not.
I'm not arguing this for anyone, mind you, but... I believe there is an implied contract, which would mean shutting these sites down based on their content is a form of promissory estoppel resulting in a condition called detrimental reliance. Because Google offered these blogging services for free, and had not placed prior restrain on the content.
The upshot?
- A promise was made
- Relying on the promise was reasonable or forseeable
- There was actual and reasonable reliance on the promise
- The reliance was detrimental
- Injustice can only be prevented by enforcing the promise
I think it could be reasonably argued that had Google itself offered a venue for the advertising now prohibited, the majority of the blogs would not have gone to third party affiliates for their advertising, they would instead be using Google provided ad services.
I understand Google is under increasing pressure, both with regard to adult speech and grey market pharmaceuticals, from government as well as other agencies using the government as a cat's paw *cough*pharmaceutical industry*cough* to enforce artificial price barriers; it will be interesting to see how they deal with this.
The U.S. government runs a lottery that gives out an additional 50,000 VISA's per year beyond the level playing field of normal immigration, but people from Mexico arent allowed to win any of them, and you are there claiming its not racist by any stretch of the imagination?
Really?
What fucking distortion field do you live in?
He's probably living in the distortion field perpetuated by both the CIA World Fact Book and Wikipedia, in which it is well known that Mexico isn't comprised of a single race any more than Los Angeles is comprised of a single race, thus making it impossible to discriminate against a particular, single race by discriminating against all of Mexico.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_people#Today
Or maybe it was the one where, under NAFTA, there's already an economic agreement in place for non-professional workers, and professional workers get TN-1 visa rather than H-1B visa?
http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1274.html
You know what? Those TN-1 visas discriminate against Europeans, who are require to return to their own countries after a period of time, whereas a TN-1 can be renewed again and again, indefinitely, without ever actually leaving the US. Those bastards! Favoring Mexico and Canada over Germany and New Zealand!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TN_status
They should block the whole internet by now. Or rather, nuke it from orbit.
Unfortunately for the U.S., the TCP/IP network, which had been designed by DARPA to withstand huge infrastructure damage of exactly the type the U.S. was inflicting on Iraq and continue to function ... did so, keeping communication up in Iraq.
as long as he is left lifeless in the end.
Easy there, ganjadude. Personally, I'd like to see the guy rot in a cell.
Keeping people alive to make them think about what they've done seems far more just to me than letting them escape their guilty conscience.
I think one of the major arguments in favor of the death penalty in cases like this is it makes it more difficult for some idiot somewhere to take hostages and then demand "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev must be released!".
Also, you should realize that the death penalty is often misapplied in the U.S., in part due to prosecutorial over-charging for a single crime in order to get something to stick. I'm pretty all right with Ted Bundy being dead, but I think it would be difficult to move with the speed that Utah moved with in order to get him executed in the present day climate.
The reason for a penalty that severe is NOT to punish the offender; it's to deter the rest of society from acting the same way in the future. If the family and victims of the criminal feel good afterwords, so much the better, but frankly the punishment isn't being enacted for their benefit, it's being enacted to benefit everyone.
I also doubt that, despite having killed 30 young women, and having decapitated 12 of them and kept their heads around his apartment for prolonged period of time, applying makeup and grooming their hair, that we would be able to execute him via electric chair, since that's considered a "cruel and unusual punishment" these days (but realize that, while cruel, it would not be "and unusual" if we used the method a bit more often, and therefore would not fit the technicality which currently keeps the method from being used these days).
If executions were more of a public spectacle, they would both serve a stronger deterrent purpose, and force people to acknowledge what the government is doing in their name -- both of which would likely have net positive effects on society at large.