In the state of Missouri, there are protections in place to keep long-standing teacher from simply being fired without cause. That list of cause has been codified, long before online social networks were concieved. As a result, this sort of thing falls into a grey area.
Making the act criminal, gives just cause for school districts to terminate a tenured teacher.
The logistics of this are, however, more nightmare-like than one could imagine on the surface. What do you do if someone masqurades as a teacher online and friends students? Are teacher innocent, until a supeona for the Myspace logs, and the ISP records goes through? The policy is one thing, how you proceed with it is another, I fear.
I suspect that executives are banking on "some people" being upset being less than what the gain from having a 60% price hike. As long as they don't lose too many customers with the hike, they'll make more money.
Of course my question is: Are they adding to the back end infrastructure with the increased cost, if they're not doing anything with the lack of added feature, or are they just hiking prices because they think they can?
I'm not disagreeing with you about only collecting taxes in states where they have a physical presence. However, Amazon has more than 2 states in which they have a presence. Kansas has a major distribution center, and so did Texas. Which means any state in which Amazon has those distribution centers, they're going to have to collect taxes on. It's like having a public storefront there. That's relatively universal.
The trouble comes in when states start shifting their tax code to include having to pay taxes on not just where you shipped the product to, but if you have a facility in the state where you shipped the product FROM. Which means you pretty much have to pay taxes on anything you ship out. Therein likes the rub. As long as there are states who will make an exception for Amazon or other large companies, who are willing to pull up stakes and move to a new state to avoid taxes (and if you do enough business online, they likely are), then there's likely a state somewhere whose willing to let them have a loop hole at least for a while....so they can exact the corporate taxes out of the organization.
Alright, I'm reading through the text of the War Powers Resolution.. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sup_01_50_10_33.html..and while I do think the actions taken are hostile, the War Powers Resolution refers to introducting US "Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations."
So, the question becomes: Is sending un-manned drones into an area for hostile actions, covered by the War Powers Resolution, since there aren't any actual forces (i.e. military personnel) in a situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated?
Again, I think there ARE hostile things going on. But the laws we're looking at may not apply when we don't have men physically in the area.
I think we're still a bit ahead of the curve here. The problem being that those who are most often, though least reported, having issues with snow days are those folks who live in rural districts, which are in the last mile for high-speed. These schools are not going to be able to serve those children who are the reason they're calling the snow day, those who are out in the rural parts of the school district, who can't be reached by bus.
This may be a reasonable option for suburban districts, as a much larger portion of their students may have access to broadband at home. However, in current economic times, with local libraries and free wi-fi at McDonalds, it's easier and easier for a family to put Cable TV, Cable Internet and DLS on the chopping block when it comes to saving money in the monthy budget while one parent is out of work or under employed.
Is your system HIPPA compliant? If it's not vetted for HIPPA compliance, then you potentially place the hospital as a whole at legal risk.
It's been my experience that Hospital IT are guys who want to empower the end user who have legitimate reasons, but can be constrained by their own budgets to give "cutting edge" technology to the end user. However, it's always easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar. I would tend to agree that you need to be pretty transparent to the IT group. They certainly can help you do what you want, and perhaps even make what you're doing more efficient and maybe even more broadly available.
If you have patient information on the schedules, or potentially could have patient names or other details, you really need IT to help you be HIPPA compliant.
(And, if you're not in the US, then whatever version of HIPPA compliance your country has in place.):-)
Hey, how about we just put a tax on every breath you take? Oh, oh...wait, what about for every beat of your heart? For every mile your blood flows inside your body, how about that one?
If it's not obvious, I'm not a fan of the idea of taxing miles driven, because it will effectively punish those who have doen things like moved to hybrid and EV technologies. More than that, those who can't afford the tax will be forced to no longer travel farther to look for better work, but rather be 'stuck' in a smaller range to find lesser work, thus creating a viscious cycle.
Not only that, it punishes those who travel under normal non-hybrid/EV means as part of their employment. Visiting various clients, servicemen who go from call to call and so forth.
I would have to agree that this really is pretty ludicrous. Schools are concerned about bullying and cyber-bullying. However, they struggle with the tools and statutory authority to 'regulate' the cyber part of this. So, if Washington really wants them to police this, then they need to give them the funding and resources to do so. Not to mention indemnify them for the privacy they will violate to monitor facebook, cell phones, etc.
No, if Facebook thinks this is a good idea, to make schools more accountable, let's see how loud they will scream when they're given the un-funded mandate to give every school access to all profiles who have, at one time or another, listed their local school in their profile and/or who are located in their school district. I imagine Facebook wouldn't be too excited about having to pay for the man-hours to make that happen.
This sounds like an un-funded, all-stick, no-carrot mandate, like NCLB. I imagine this will hasten the departure of good school administrators.
Do you suppose that the Capitol Hill will allow schools to install Cell-Phone jamming technology to combat this sort of thing, keeping students off their cell phones during lunch and between classes? (I'm sure parents will be up in arms over something like that.)
It takes a village to raise a child, which means more than the local school needs to be accountable for the overseeing of our children. Perhaps we should include some 'legal action' that includes the children, not just the schools and administrators, we'd see better results?
I believe they should re-think their "caps" as well. They should consider bandwidth throttling instead. Then, if you want to lift the throttling, you have to call in and pay for the additional 50GB's for that month. This would mean no "surprise" in your monthly bill when you discover that someone has been using an excessive amount of data for the month.
Yeah, yeah...you get 2 months 'free' over the cap before they charge you, but will you know about that before the bill comes, or after you've used up your grace period?
Quick question: Just what -exactly- is a "true cyber emergency"?
Is it to isolate our network(s) from the rest of the world?
Is it to secure our important services?
Is it to keep key infrastructure operational?
What sort of 'true cyber emergency' would want to cut us off from the rest of the world? Help me out here.
I can certainly understand wanting to keep key services from being threatened...but, shouldn't those simply be secure anway? Shouldn't they be on their own secure network anyway?
I would recommend trying to get into the Western States Contracting Alliance, WSCA, (http://www.aboutwsca.org/content.cfm/id/WSCA) and get reasonable HP workstations for ~$600 and LCD's to go with them for ~$200. You get a major name brand and save $200 off what you're currently buying from DELL.
Even if you don't buy from DELL, see how fast they lower your pricing when you have a quote from HP.
Additionally, WSCA is pre-bid, which means most government agencies don't actually have to re-bid, they can just order off this contract that's already been run through the whole bidding process.
Unlike Conflict Diamonds, it's really hard to trace where the Conflict Rare Earths come from. So, if they get funneled through China, it's very difficult to say where it orginally came from.:-(
I suspect there will be folks who open up new markets for rare earths. I believe there are a number of resources that are yet undeveloped on the African continent. Likely the replacement for Conflict Diamonds...Conflict Earths. (Sounds sorta like a scifi novel title, huh?)
While I don't disagree that not changing working signs seems to be a waste of a LOT of money in a tight budget, but I guess my question would be, just how big is the NYC budget overall? In a budget where $25M is less than 1%, it would be easy to see how something could slide through like this.
Besides, the reality is that high-level budget makers aren't involved in how departments spend their money. If the Transportation took budget cuts and this was the only project they were doing in the coming fiscal year...well, it seems to me that I'd question priorities of the folks leading Transportation, but not necessarily the money given to the department for projects.
There's something of an art, or perhaps science, to not offering bad choices to clients. They like you better when you help them spend $50 on the front end that saves them $200 on the back end when you come back and charge them for your time and the built-in upgrade. They tend to be aggrivated at the hardware you recommended, and at you for charging them more on the back end when they realize the mistake they made on the front end for buying a cheap system to run Word.:-(
It seems to me to be a good idea to make good recommendations on the front end and omit [cheap] options that will cost more later.
Hey, why don't we just add $50 to the price of the processor, and skip the whole upgrade idea all together?
I mean honestly, how many folks would really rather by a 'Celeron' type processor when for $50 more they can get the real deal, and not the disabled one?
Think of all the money Intel would save on marketing alone, by just having one new line instead of two! Hey, can I have 10% of the marketing budget I just saved Intel? I suspect I could retire really early.
I suspect it may not last too long, if customers who are delayed and stranded by these 'acts of God' simply make sure they get the name of the person at the counter telling them so. "Could you please spell your name, so I can be sure to get it correct in my letter to the FAA, BBB, and when I ask about it in the Stockholders meeting?"
So, if FaceTime only works on WiFi, does that mean there will be an App for your MacBook or MacBook Pro so you can get FaceTime calls on your laptop? I mean if you can't use it over wireless, and doing WiFi-only (for now), then why not have an FaceTime app for the laptop so both users don't have to have an iPhone4?
Some states and / or cities require you to accept legal tender (cash) in order to get a business license in the city. Usually that's glossed over when you get a business license, because who wouldn't accept cash? I mean, seriously?
So, what happens when a company violates local / state law by not accepting legal tender?
Unfortunately, after they had committed to action, the follow up with the van...while questionable, I can see why they would have wanted to continue the engagement. I don't think that a guy in the field thinks (or realizes) at the time that a difference of ~600m is sufficiently safe distance to KNOW an RPG isn't going to be an issue.
However, it does go back to the fact that they tried to cover it up, which made it a very bad situation.
When I watched this video, it really got my heart racing, because I knew what I was seeing wasn't a movie, it was actual footage. And, in the heat of the moment, it definitely aggrivated me that gunships were firing on civilians. However, on the drive home, something that struck me about all of this: That gunship was standing off so they couldn't be a target of small arms fire. The problem with that was that they were standing off so far, their video wasn't very detailed. They obviously couldn't tell the difference between a camera slung over a shoulder and an AK-47. They were looking for AK's and Rocket Propelled Grenades. They weren't looking for cameras. They thought they saw someone with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. The idea of someone having a camera wasn't even in their thought process.
They responded to a preceived threat of a rocket propelled grenade launcher. A real threat to a gunship. Like other humans, they were simply wrong, and someone(s) paid with their lives.
What kept going through my thoughts was that it wasn't their order, their rules of engagement that failed, but rather the level of technology they were employing. Their equipment didn't give them a clear enough picture to tell the difference between an AK and a camera in the seconds they had to make a decision. They were looking for AK's and Grenade launchers, so in the shadows of the black and white video they were looking at, they saw AK's and grenade launchers. This feels like it was more of a failure in technology, or failure in the reliance on technology.
Had the gunships been UAVs, pilots may have been more likely to get closer, risk a machine opposed to their lives and a machine.
I wasn't there, I don't know. We can armchair things like this for years to come. But, covering it up was definitely the wrong answer.
If the $4k hearing aid is designed with modern circuits, then I would imagine that it's programable as well. Which means that if something doesn't happen to them, (like you go for a swim with them in), then they should be able to update them later as necessary. As a result, they should last you for another 20+ years, which means that you'll be paying about $200 a year. Unlike a car, you likely wouldn't have to replace it every 5 to 7+ years.
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In the state of Missouri, there are protections in place to keep long-standing teacher from simply being fired without cause. That list of cause has been codified, long before online social networks were concieved. As a result, this sort of thing falls into a grey area.
Making the act criminal, gives just cause for school districts to terminate a tenured teacher.
The logistics of this are, however, more nightmare-like than one could imagine on the surface. What do you do if someone masqurades as a teacher online and friends students? Are teacher innocent, until a supeona for the Myspace logs, and the ISP records goes through? The policy is one thing, how you proceed with it is another, I fear.
I suspect that executives are banking on "some people" being upset being less than what the gain from having a 60% price hike. As long as they don't lose too many customers with the hike, they'll make more money.
Of course my question is: Are they adding to the back end infrastructure with the increased cost, if they're not doing anything with the lack of added feature, or are they just hiking prices because they think they can?
I'm not disagreeing with you about only collecting taxes in states where they have a physical presence. However, Amazon has more than 2 states in which they have a presence. Kansas has a major distribution center, and so did Texas. Which means any state in which Amazon has those distribution centers, they're going to have to collect taxes on. It's like having a public storefront there. That's relatively universal.
The trouble comes in when states start shifting their tax code to include having to pay taxes on not just where you shipped the product to, but if you have a facility in the state where you shipped the product FROM. Which means you pretty much have to pay taxes on anything you ship out. Therein likes the rub. As long as there are states who will make an exception for Amazon or other large companies, who are willing to pull up stakes and move to a new state to avoid taxes (and if you do enough business online, they likely are), then there's likely a state somewhere whose willing to let them have a loop hole at least for a while....so they can exact the corporate taxes out of the organization.
Alright, I'm reading through the text of the War Powers Resolution.. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sup_01_50_10_33.html ..and while I do think the actions taken are hostile, the War Powers Resolution refers to introducting US "Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations."
So, the question becomes: Is sending un-manned drones into an area for hostile actions, covered by the War Powers Resolution, since there aren't any actual forces (i.e. military personnel) in a situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated?
Again, I think there ARE hostile things going on. But the laws we're looking at may not apply when we don't have men physically in the area.
I think we're still a bit ahead of the curve here. The problem being that those who are most often, though least reported, having issues with snow days are those folks who live in rural districts, which are in the last mile for high-speed. These schools are not going to be able to serve those children who are the reason they're calling the snow day, those who are out in the rural parts of the school district, who can't be reached by bus.
This may be a reasonable option for suburban districts, as a much larger portion of their students may have access to broadband at home. However, in current economic times, with local libraries and free wi-fi at McDonalds, it's easier and easier for a family to put Cable TV, Cable Internet and DLS on the chopping block when it comes to saving money in the monthy budget while one parent is out of work or under employed.
Is your system HIPPA compliant? If it's not vetted for HIPPA compliance, then you potentially place the hospital as a whole at legal risk.
It's been my experience that Hospital IT are guys who want to empower the end user who have legitimate reasons, but can be constrained by their own budgets to give "cutting edge" technology to the end user. However, it's always easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar. I would tend to agree that you need to be pretty transparent to the IT group. They certainly can help you do what you want, and perhaps even make what you're doing more efficient and maybe even more broadly available.
If you have patient information on the schedules, or potentially could have patient names or other details, you really need IT to help you be HIPPA compliant.
(And, if you're not in the US, then whatever version of HIPPA compliance your country has in place.) :-)
Hey, how about we just put a tax on every breath you take? Oh, oh...wait, what about for every beat of your heart? For every mile your blood flows inside your body, how about that one?
If it's not obvious, I'm not a fan of the idea of taxing miles driven, because it will effectively punish those who have doen things like moved to hybrid and EV technologies. More than that, those who can't afford the tax will be forced to no longer travel farther to look for better work, but rather be 'stuck' in a smaller range to find lesser work, thus creating a viscious cycle.
Not only that, it punishes those who travel under normal non-hybrid/EV means as part of their employment. Visiting various clients, servicemen who go from call to call and so forth.
This really is just a poorly concieved idea.
I would have to agree that this really is pretty ludicrous. Schools are concerned about bullying and cyber-bullying. However, they struggle with the tools and statutory authority to 'regulate' the cyber part of this. So, if Washington really wants them to police this, then they need to give them the funding and resources to do so. Not to mention indemnify them for the privacy they will violate to monitor facebook, cell phones, etc.
No, if Facebook thinks this is a good idea, to make schools more accountable, let's see how loud they will scream when they're given the un-funded mandate to give every school access to all profiles who have, at one time or another, listed their local school in their profile and/or who are located in their school district. I imagine Facebook wouldn't be too excited about having to pay for the man-hours to make that happen.
This sounds like an un-funded, all-stick, no-carrot mandate, like NCLB. I imagine this will hasten the departure of good school administrators.
Do you suppose that the Capitol Hill will allow schools to install Cell-Phone jamming technology to combat this sort of thing, keeping students off their cell phones during lunch and between classes? (I'm sure parents will be up in arms over something like that.)
It takes a village to raise a child, which means more than the local school needs to be accountable for the overseeing of our children. Perhaps we should include some 'legal action' that includes the children, not just the schools and administrators, we'd see better results?
I believe they should re-think their "caps" as well. They should consider bandwidth throttling instead. Then, if you want to lift the throttling, you have to call in and pay for the additional 50GB's for that month. This would mean no "surprise" in your monthly bill when you discover that someone has been using an excessive amount of data for the month.
Yeah, yeah...you get 2 months 'free' over the cap before they charge you, but will you know about that before the bill comes, or after you've used up your grace period?
Quick question: Just what -exactly- is a "true cyber emergency"?
Is it to isolate our network(s) from the rest of the world?
Is it to secure our important services?
Is it to keep key infrastructure operational?
What sort of 'true cyber emergency' would want to cut us off from the rest of the world? Help me out here.
I can certainly understand wanting to keep key services from being threatened...but, shouldn't those simply be secure anway? Shouldn't they be on their own secure network anyway?
And now with "4G" speeds, you can effectively use up a 5Gb alotment in a month in just over 30 minutes. At least in theory.
Actually, the Computer portion of WSCA covers alot more than the west side of the US:
http://www.aboutwsca.org/contract.cfm/contract/w2-1999
I would recommend trying to get into the Western States Contracting Alliance, WSCA, (http://www.aboutwsca.org/content.cfm/id/WSCA) and get reasonable HP workstations for ~$600 and LCD's to go with them for ~$200. You get a major name brand and save $200 off what you're currently buying from DELL.
Even if you don't buy from DELL, see how fast they lower your pricing when you have a quote from HP.
Additionally, WSCA is pre-bid, which means most government agencies don't actually have to re-bid, they can just order off this contract that's already been run through the whole bidding process.
Unlike Conflict Diamonds, it's really hard to trace where the Conflict Rare Earths come from. So, if they get funneled through China, it's very difficult to say where it orginally came from. :-(
I suspect there will be folks who open up new markets for rare earths. I believe there are a number of resources that are yet undeveloped on the African continent. Likely the replacement for Conflict Diamonds...Conflict Earths. (Sounds sorta like a scifi novel title, huh?)
While I don't disagree that not changing working signs seems to be a waste of a LOT of money in a tight budget, but I guess my question would be, just how big is the NYC budget overall? In a budget where $25M is less than 1%, it would be easy to see how something could slide through like this.
Besides, the reality is that high-level budget makers aren't involved in how departments spend their money. If the Transportation took budget cuts and this was the only project they were doing in the coming fiscal year ...well, it seems to me that I'd question priorities of the folks leading Transportation, but not necessarily the money given to the department for projects.
There's something of an art, or perhaps science, to not offering bad choices to clients. They like you better when you help them spend $50 on the front end that saves them $200 on the back end when you come back and charge them for your time and the built-in upgrade. They tend to be aggrivated at the hardware you recommended, and at you for charging them more on the back end when they realize the mistake they made on the front end for buying a cheap system to run Word. :-(
It seems to me to be a good idea to make good recommendations on the front end and omit [cheap] options that will cost more later.
Hey, why don't we just add $50 to the price of the processor, and skip the whole upgrade idea all together?
I mean honestly, how many folks would really rather by a 'Celeron' type processor when for $50 more they can get the real deal, and not the disabled one?
Think of all the money Intel would save on marketing alone, by just having one new line instead of two! Hey, can I have 10% of the marketing budget I just saved Intel? I suspect I could retire really early.
I suspect it may not last too long, if customers who are delayed and stranded by these 'acts of God' simply make sure they get the name of the person at the counter telling them so. "Could you please spell your name, so I can be sure to get it correct in my letter to the FAA, BBB, and when I ask about it in the Stockholders meeting?"
So, if FaceTime only works on WiFi, does that mean there will be an App for your MacBook or MacBook Pro so you can get FaceTime calls on your laptop? I mean if you can't use it over wireless, and doing WiFi-only (for now), then why not have an FaceTime app for the laptop so both users don't have to have an iPhone4?
Some states and / or cities require you to accept legal tender (cash) in order to get a business license in the city. Usually that's glossed over when you get a business license, because who wouldn't accept cash? I mean, seriously?
So, what happens when a company violates local / state law by not accepting legal tender?
Unfortunately, after they had committed to action, the follow up with the van...while questionable, I can see why they would have wanted to continue the engagement. I don't think that a guy in the field thinks (or realizes) at the time that a difference of ~600m is sufficiently safe distance to KNOW an RPG isn't going to be an issue.
However, it does go back to the fact that they tried to cover it up, which made it a very bad situation.
When I watched this video, it really got my heart racing, because I knew what I was seeing wasn't a movie, it was actual footage. And, in the heat of the moment, it definitely aggrivated me that gunships were firing on civilians. However, on the drive home, something that struck me about all of this: That gunship was standing off so they couldn't be a target of small arms fire. The problem with that was that they were standing off so far, their video wasn't very detailed. They obviously couldn't tell the difference between a camera slung over a shoulder and an AK-47. They were looking for AK's and Rocket Propelled Grenades. They weren't looking for cameras. They thought they saw someone with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. The idea of someone having a camera wasn't even in their thought process.
They responded to a preceived threat of a rocket propelled grenade launcher. A real threat to a gunship. Like other humans, they were simply wrong, and someone(s) paid with their lives.
What kept going through my thoughts was that it wasn't their order, their rules of engagement that failed, but rather the level of technology they were employing. Their equipment didn't give them a clear enough picture to tell the difference between an AK and a camera in the seconds they had to make a decision. They were looking for AK's and Grenade launchers, so in the shadows of the black and white video they were looking at, they saw AK's and grenade launchers. This feels like it was more of a failure in technology, or failure in the reliance on technology.
Had the gunships been UAVs, pilots may have been more likely to get closer, risk a machine opposed to their lives and a machine.
I wasn't there, I don't know. We can armchair things like this for years to come. But, covering it up was definitely the wrong answer.
If the $4k hearing aid is designed with modern circuits, then I would imagine that it's programable as well. Which means that if something doesn't happen to them, (like you go for a swim with them in), then they should be able to update them later as necessary. As a result, they should last you for another 20+ years, which means that you'll be paying about $200 a year. Unlike a car, you likely wouldn't have to replace it every 5 to 7+ years.