Heh. I thought Cracked was known for making stuff up in order to be funny, but except for a couple of snide side comments, that article is, as near as I can tell, basically all true. I guess when you're talking about North Korea, the jokes just write themselves.
You're making my point for me: it is _entirely_ believable that North Korea was attempting to place a satellite into orbit and simply didn't quite get it right. In fact, Occam suggests this is the most likely interpretation of the evidence.
> Assuming that you, unlike roughly 97% of your > peers, have the *slightest* idea what you actually > want to do for the next 40 years when you're 19 or 20.
I believe, if you re-read my post, you'll find that I actually said that students fresh out of high school are usually better off going directly to the four-year school in the first place. (Granted, I stated a different reason for this. Your reason is also valid.)
My claim was that an Associates Degree can be useful for a _returning adult_ student, i.e., someone who upon graduating from high school said "I'm DONE with school" and went out and got a job, but then a few years later they started to notice that all they jobs they can get without a college degree are jobs they don't really want. The exciting glamor of raking in the dough hand over fist at $6.50 an hour has begun to pale. These students are frequently not eligible for enough financial aid to make four years at a real liberal arts school (or even a state university) an attractive option, fiscally speaking, and they've had a few years of real-world workforce experience to help them think about what they really want to do with their lives.
I'm less sure about New York City dwellers, since NYC is one of two cities in the US specifically known to have both a subway system AND large numbers of taxi cabs. (The other such place is LA.) However, people who live in those two places are, compared to the rest of the country, not really all that numerous, in absolute terms. They have an exceptionally high population _density_, so their numbers are higher than one would naively think possible after looking at a map, but they're still very much in the minority.
Canada is a first-world country with on-the-ball law enforcement that is relatively difficult to bribe (compared to, say, Central America) and a very firm extradition relationship with the US. If you're hiding from the law, you may as well stay in the US as go to Canada.
Just tell him email is very easy to forge. That's it.
You don't have to explain the technical details of exactly how it is forged, what headers are, how SMTP works, how malware mines personal data, or any of that. If he cared about the technical details, he'd read up on them, and then he wouldn't need you.
Something about Russian culture makes long periods of isolation more tolerable for them somehow (or perhaps their society is more accepting of the mental irregularities that result from overdoing it, which I guess ultimately amounts to basically the same thing). Their Antarctic teams routinely winter-over at Vostok two years in a row; whereas, the Americans at Amundsen-Scott have to cycle out every summer.
> Just FYI, I seen this guy bitching about it MONTHS ago.
Furthermore, the rant just posted on Slashdot is a verbatim copy of the one I read months ago (or, at least, the part that I re-read today is verbatim; I declined to re-read the whole thing, on the grounds that I remember it pretty well).
We also have some of the _worst_ cheese in the world, granted. If it comes in a spray can or as individually wrapped slices, you should AVOID it. Also, if it doesn't say what _kind_ of cheese it is, you should avoid it. Also, Velveeta is not something that you should eat directly. It's meant to be used together with other cheeses in baking (e.g., in macaroni and cheese), to facilitate creaminess. Good cheese comes from behind a deli counter (which can be in a grocery store) and is priced by the pound. You tell the person behind the counter that you want half a pound of this or that kind of cheese, and they ask you how thick you want it sliced, and you say "thick", "medium", or "thin". (You can also just buy a big chunk, if you're not making sandwiches.)
You can also get shredded cheese in the frozen foods section, which is alright for baking, but the number of varieties available this way is more limited -- typically just mozzarella, a couple of kinds of cheddar, and maybe "pizza cheese" (which is mostly mozzarella with a few shreds of something else mixed in, e.g, smoked provolone).
> Are there any excellent and widely available varieties?
My personal favorite is colby. Other good ones that are readily available everywhere (or at least throughout the Midwest) include mozzarella (particularly good for pasta), provolone (good on turkey sandwiches), several varieties of cheddar (mild, sharp, extra-sharp, white), monterrey jack and its various derivatives (cojack, pepper jack, jalapeno jack, lightning jack), swiss, baby swiss, muenster, brick, longhorn, and grated parmesan. Other good cheeses are available regionally, e.g., here in Galion I can easily get havarti, either with or without embedded dill. If I wanted to drive over to Holmes County (about an hour east of here) I could get all kinds of specialty cheeses. The community where I went to college, about three hours west of here, has a couple of good Latin-American cheeses readily available. When I lived in western Michigan for three years, the grocery stores there always had grated romano.
Note too that the light yellow-orange stuff you'll see that's specifically labeled "American cheese" (assuming you get the real stuff) isn't _bad_ so much as _bland_, which is actually useful in certain situations. Among other things, it's great for feeding to gradeschool children, who often don't like strong flavors yet. Admittedly, it's not what I generally want on MY sandwich, and if Europeans get this stuff imported and think it's the main kind of cheese we have in America, that would explain their low opinion of our cheeses.
If you want to visit a place that doesn't have good cheeses, try Korea. I think cheese may actually be against the law or a violation of popular religious beliefs there, or something.
That's what I was going to ask. I'm not even much of a gamer (err, unless you count NetHack...), but I thought 60fps was an annoyingly bare minimum low-end framerate. I'd vote for 85 or higher, assuming the hardware can handle displaying the frames that fast without jerking to a latency peak every few seconds.
People *prefer* 24? Is that like people who prefer to play vinyl records on a vacuum-tube-based turntable because they "sound warmer" and/or "lighter" that way and have a "better-attenuated", "less granular", "more energy-infused" "quantum noise flux distribution" with "just a hint of a spring breeze" and allow the listener to "feel the moisture in the singer's throat"?
Yeah, the phrase "due process clause" was obviously a brain fart on someone's part. They probably meant the "excessive fines" clause, except that amendment, to the best of my understanding, is specific to criminal law.
In theory any reasonable person should understand why the no-excessive-penalties concept _ought_ in principle to apply to civil law too, but to the best of my knowledge there's no direct wording in the constitution for that, so to make this argument fly in court you'd have to rely on legislation or, more likely, case law. Not being a lawyer, I cannot provide references to any specific legislation or case law that would be relevant, though I imagine there probably is some somewhere. (Of course, the plaintiff will be digging up such things to support their side as well, and they can probably afford more thorough lawyers...)
North Korea might actually be *more* likely to do something if they thought it would upset the UN.
Setting that to one side, however, I am not convinced that they have the subtlety required to disguise an ICBM test as an almost-successful satellite launch. It would be much more in character for them to try to launch a satellite (which, if successful, would theoretically demonstrate a grasp of technology similar to the Soviet Union in 1957, except for the fact that in just about every other area they rather obviously aren't quite there) and just not quite get it right.
Remember, this is an _extremely_ isolationist country. They make the Tokugawa shogunate look like free-trade enthusiasts. Where are they going to get competent engineers? When their previous leader decided he wanted to make movies, they had to kidnap a movie director from another country and force him to work for them, because there's no way anybody living in North Korea could learn how to do something like that.
This is North Korea we're talking about. The level of incompetence they have displayed, repeatedly and publicly, is difficult to overstate. Quite frankly, botching their first attempt at a satellite launch (something the Soviet Union got right on their first try in 1957) is small potatoes compared to some of their other attempted shenanigans.
Among other things, the tallest structure in the country (a would-be hotel in the capital) was started in 1987, was originally intended to be completed by mid 1989 for some locally important event or another, and at this time is still not ready for use. They're currently hoping to _partially_ open the still-incomplete building in 2013, although one wonders where they think they're going to find enough tourists to fill a hundred-story hotel, even if they do ever finish it.
(Lonely Planet's writeup of the country is interestingly clever, particularly the way it manages to put excessive positive spin on things and yet still not make the country sound like an even remotely interesting tourist destination. The only landmark attraction they specifically mention is a mountain, which they call "one of the most stunning sights in North Korea", although they do also claim that the capital city has "a few sites worth visiting".)
Nobody in the Dilbert comic strip has ever approached North Korea's level of incompetence.
Freedom of the press means that anyone who owns a press can use it to print whatever opinions he likes. It does *not* mean that somebody _else_ has to print whatever _you_ want on _their_ press.
If you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, who decides whether to print it or not? Presumably, traditionally, it was the editor. If you write a comment on a blog, who decides whether it gets published or not? The people who run the blog are the first line, but ultimately it's the people who own the web server that publishes the blog. For example, if I used Blogger to set up my blog, and you make a comment on one of my posts, I can nuke your comment because it's my blog, but also Google can nuke your comment because it's their blogging service. If I don't like that, I can go set up my own server (and buy bandwidth...) and cut Google out of the loop by not using their service. If *you* (the commenter) don't like how the what-to-print decisions are made on my blog, you can jolly well go get your own blog.
So yeah, the SMS spammer is asking for a "freedom" that has never existed. If he wants guaranteed freedom to transmit his advertisements via a cellular network and display them on a phone, he can jolly well go get his own cellular network and phone. Otherwise, the people who own the network and the phone do, in fact, have some say in the matter. Deal with it.
Now, I'm willing to bet that if he did set up his own cellular network and offer people free use of it provided they accept all of his advertisements unfiltered as part of the deal, he'd probably get some takers. (I don't know that it would necessarily be easy to run such a service in a manner that resulted in advertising revenue adequate to pay all the operating costs and turn a profit, but that's his problem to solve as the entrepreneur. If running a profitable business were easy, just about everyone would do it.)
On the one hand, an Associates Degree by itself is about as useful as a solar panel in northeastern Ohio. It doesn't qualify you for anything that you weren't already qualified for with a high school diploma.
On the other hand, many schools will accept a larger number of (undergrad) credits in transfer if you have an Associates Degree than otherwise. That is, after all, the main purpose of an Associates: to bundle up the two years' worth of gen ed courses you've already taken, from a school that doesn't offer the major you want, so that the school where you want to complete your four-year degree will take most of those credits, allowing you to finish in another two years.
Of course, even with an Associates, the credits you transfer in are still only worthwhile if they count toward any of the requirements for your four-year degree. Many schools are willing to be a little bit flexible with this, though there are usually limits. For example, maybe the school normally requires Western Civ and US History plus one other social studies course, but if you're transferring in an Associates they may decide to accept any eight credits of history and four additional credits of social studies that you happen to have taken.
So an Associates can be useful, e.g. if you live near a community college that offers a halfway decent Associates program. You can knock out a lot of your gen ed *before* going to the better, more expensive four-year college where you intend to complete your degree.
All of this assumes that you are a returning adult student (e.g., someone who went out after high school and got a job to "save up" for college; after several years you have now saved up just about enough to cover your textbooks and maybe the occasional dorm sweatshirt). Anyone who just graduated from high school, with even remotely acceptable grades, is likely to be better off, financially, going straight to the four-year school the very next fall. You can often get a LOT more financial aid that way, and it's typically all renewable, so it will take you through all four years (assuming you keep your grades up and meet whatever extracurricular requirements the school has). Admittedly, this depends somewhat on the school, but your total debt for four years this way can potentially be less than what you would have paid just for the last two years, not even counting anything you had to spend to get the Associates in the first place -- because, transferring in from a community college with an associates, the financial aid department in most cases will basically tell you to see Uncle Stafford and Cousin Perkins. If you're fresh out of high school with reasonable grades, they're far more likely to hand you a package that includes grants and maybe the odd minor scholarship plus a work study option in addition to Stafford loans.
He means Linux distributions don't generally include an RDP server in their repository. Which is true, as far as it goes. (It's also obviously irrelevant to anyone with a few dozen hours of Linux administration experience, but it's true nonetheless.)
What he actually needs is an ssh client for his Windows desktop. (Or a VNC server on the server and a VNC client on the client, but if his network connection has much latency at all the ssh option is going to have overwhelmingly superior performance.) But Windows users often don't know about ssh because, like almost everything else, Windows doesn't come with it.
The server is running Linux. The client desktop is Windows.
So what he actually wants is probably putty (or *possibly* VNC, if he's one of those mouse-only users, completely allergic to typing for some arcane reason), but being a Windows user he doesn't know the terminology needed to do a web search for it.
(Theoretically, there _is_ also an RDP server for Linux, but it's a niche thing, and so the hassle of trying to set it up is not recommended for someone who is new to Linux. It's much better for him to go with something on the server side that's in the standard repository. Installing Putty on the client side should be no big deal, since the client side is an OS with which he's already experienced.)
Realistically, that's the only really economically viable way to do manufacturing (at any significant scale) in the first world.
People can whine all day about all the jobs this means we're losing, but these are not jobs anyone in the first world would actually want. We're talking here about a job on a factory assembly line putting the same component into the same slot over and over again, eight hours a day, like some kind of dark parody of the plight of the oppressed nineteenth century proletariat.
And that's ignoring the not-insignificant issue of how much a manufacturer can afford to *pay* people to do that kind of work, without going out of business. Granted, Apple could theoretically afford (if they _would_) to pay such workers a little more than most other manufacturers, because they're in a niche market segment with significantly higher per-unit markup than is common for almost any other mass-produced goods. But it still wouldn't be a wage for anyone in the developed world to get excited about.
Actually, most Americans don't consider a country to be really modernized unless the number of cars per capita is greater than 1. Owning cars is viewed, in American culture, not so much as a necessity but rather more like a basic human dignity, comparable in importance to the ability to pick out your own clothes from the closet (or dresser or whatever) in the morning.
This is an important issue for the elderly, whose children and grandchildren sometimes want to take away their car keys for safety reasons (especially once their reaction time starts to stretch into the tens of seconds). This usually does not go over well. You just about may as well try to tell them that they need to be strait-jacketed and strapped into a geri chair for safety reasons.
Okay, I know this flies in the face of every movie ever, but in real life a person who is trying to avoid being detained by law enforcement (for something serious, like murder, not just parking tickets or whatnot) generally has to avoid international airports. Ships are almost as bad. That leaves small boats (like, personal sailboats) as the main way to get off the continent. *Buying* a boat, if you don't already have one, is a frighteningly high-profile activity.
So going by land is a fairly logical choice. That limits the possible destinations somewhat. If you go north from the US, you can only go to Canada. It's not particularly easy to hide in Canada. So the logical thing is to go south. You probably don't want to stay in Mexico, because it's directly adjacent to the country you're fleeing. And you definitely don't want to try to cross the Panama canal, because there are only a couple of bridges that cross it, and it would be trivial for someone (like, say, law enforcement) to have them watched.
So you end up in Central America. This gives you a choice of seven countries to hide in, which means anyone who's looking for you has potentially seven distinct local jurisdictions to deal with (eight if they can't be sure you're not still in Mexico), which is an annoying impediment for them and may just buy you a bit of extra time to figure out what to do. Maybe.
There's still a substantial amount of risk, of course. Running from the law is always going to be somewhat risky. And, indeed, he got caught.
> I've been using "stuffs" from time to time as long as I remember.
Native speakers instinctively use the words "stuffs" correctly, to refer to different categories of stuff. Foreign language learners just forget that "stuff" is a mass noun sometimes and use it as a synonym for "thing".
"There three stuffs we are remember for a good world." Dead giveaway: non-native speaker. (Yes, this is a constructed example. A real-world example would in most cases have fewer dead giveaways per sentence. See if you can spot the other ones, besides "stuffs".)
(This is not unique to Chinese. In fact, I am not aware of any specific linguistic background, other than English of course, that would make someone immune to this mistake. I've seen Chinese speakers do it, but also Japanese, Portuguese Polish, Italian,...)
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. I thought Cracked was known for making stuff up in order to be funny, but except for a couple of snide side comments, that article is, as near as I can tell, basically all true. I guess when you're talking about North Korea, the jokes just write themselves.
You're making my point for me: it is _entirely_ believable that North Korea was attempting to place a satellite into orbit and simply didn't quite get it right. In fact, Occam suggests this is the most likely interpretation of the evidence.
> Assuming that you, unlike roughly 97% of your
> peers, have the *slightest* idea what you actually
> want to do for the next 40 years when you're 19 or 20.
I believe, if you re-read my post, you'll find that I actually said that students fresh out of high school are usually better off going directly to the four-year school in the first place. (Granted, I stated a different reason for this. Your reason is also valid.)
My claim was that an Associates Degree can be useful for a _returning adult_ student, i.e., someone who upon graduating from high school said "I'm DONE with school" and went out and got a job, but then a few years later they started to notice that all they jobs they can get without a college degree are jobs they don't really want. The exciting glamor of raking in the dough hand over fist at $6.50 an hour has begun to pale. These students are frequently not eligible for enough financial aid to make four years at a real liberal arts school (or even a state university) an attractive option, fiscally speaking, and they've had a few years of real-world workforce experience to help them think about what they really want to do with their lives.
Huh.
Okay, so I was wrong. (Well, behind the times at least.)
Upstate New Yorkers would agree with me.
I'm less sure about New York City dwellers, since NYC is one of two cities in the US specifically known to have both a subway system AND large numbers of taxi cabs. (The other such place is LA.) However, people who live in those two places are, compared to the rest of the country, not really all that numerous, in absolute terms. They have an exceptionally high population _density_, so their numbers are higher than one would naively think possible after looking at a map, but they're still very much in the minority.
Canada is a first-world country with on-the-ball law enforcement that is relatively difficult to bribe (compared to, say, Central America) and a very firm extradition relationship with the US. If you're hiding from the law, you may as well stay in the US as go to Canada.
Just tell him email is very easy to forge. That's it.
You don't have to explain the technical details of exactly how it is forged, what headers are, how SMTP works, how malware mines personal data, or any of that. If he cared about the technical details, he'd read up on them, and then he wouldn't need you.
Keep it simple: "email is very easy to forge."
Something about Russian culture makes long periods of isolation more tolerable for them somehow (or perhaps their society is more accepting of the mental irregularities that result from overdoing it, which I guess ultimately amounts to basically the same thing). Their Antarctic teams routinely winter-over at Vostok two years in a row; whereas, the Americans at Amundsen-Scott have to cycle out every summer.
> Just FYI, I seen this guy bitching about it MONTHS ago.
Furthermore, the rant just posted on Slashdot is a verbatim copy of the one I read months ago (or, at least, the part that I re-read today is verbatim; I declined to re-read the whole thing, on the grounds that I remember it pretty well).
We have excellent cheese in America.
We also have some of the _worst_ cheese in the world, granted. If it comes in a spray can or as individually wrapped slices, you should AVOID it. Also, if it doesn't say what _kind_ of cheese it is, you should avoid it. Also, Velveeta is not something that you should eat directly. It's meant to be used together with other cheeses in baking (e.g., in macaroni and cheese), to facilitate creaminess. Good cheese comes from behind a deli counter (which can be in a grocery store) and is priced by the pound. You tell the person behind the counter that you want half a pound of this or that kind of cheese, and they ask you how thick you want it sliced, and you say "thick", "medium", or "thin". (You can also just buy a big chunk, if you're not making sandwiches.)
You can also get shredded cheese in the frozen foods section, which is alright for baking, but the number of varieties available this way is more limited -- typically just mozzarella, a couple of kinds of cheddar, and maybe "pizza cheese" (which is mostly mozzarella with a few shreds of something else mixed in, e.g, smoked provolone).
> Are there any excellent and widely available varieties?
My personal favorite is colby. Other good ones that are readily available everywhere (or at least throughout the Midwest) include mozzarella (particularly good for pasta), provolone (good on turkey sandwiches), several varieties of cheddar (mild, sharp, extra-sharp, white), monterrey jack and its various derivatives (cojack, pepper jack, jalapeno jack, lightning jack), swiss, baby swiss, muenster, brick, longhorn, and grated parmesan. Other good cheeses are available regionally, e.g., here in Galion I can easily get havarti, either with or without embedded dill. If I wanted to drive over to Holmes County (about an hour east of here) I could get all kinds of specialty cheeses. The community where I went to college, about three hours west of here, has a couple of good Latin-American cheeses readily available. When I lived in western Michigan for three years, the grocery stores there always had grated romano.
Note too that the light yellow-orange stuff you'll see that's specifically labeled "American cheese" (assuming you get the real stuff) isn't _bad_ so much as _bland_, which is actually useful in certain situations. Among other things, it's great for feeding to gradeschool children, who often don't like strong flavors yet. Admittedly, it's not what I generally want on MY sandwich, and if Europeans get this stuff imported and think it's the main kind of cheese we have in America, that would explain their low opinion of our cheeses.
If you want to visit a place that doesn't have good cheeses, try Korea. I think cheese may actually be against the law or a violation of popular religious beliefs there, or something.
That's what I was going to ask. I'm not even much of a gamer (err, unless you count NetHack...), but I thought 60fps was an annoyingly bare minimum low-end framerate. I'd vote for 85 or higher, assuming the hardware can handle displaying the frames that fast without jerking to a latency peak every few seconds.
People *prefer* 24? Is that like people who prefer to play vinyl records on a vacuum-tube-based turntable because they "sound warmer" and/or "lighter" that way and have a "better-attenuated", "less granular", "more energy-infused" "quantum noise flux distribution" with "just a hint of a spring breeze" and allow the listener to "feel the moisture in the singer's throat"?
I don't own a TV, and I haven't logged into Facebook in months. Also, one of my goals in life is to someday live in a house with no telephones at all.
But I still don't want to hang out with you. Sorry.
Yeah, the phrase "due process clause" was obviously a brain fart on someone's part. They probably meant the "excessive fines" clause, except that amendment, to the best of my understanding, is specific to criminal law.
In theory any reasonable person should understand why the no-excessive-penalties concept _ought_ in principle to apply to civil law too, but to the best of my knowledge there's no direct wording in the constitution for that, so to make this argument fly in court you'd have to rely on legislation or, more likely, case law. Not being a lawyer, I cannot provide references to any specific legislation or case law that would be relevant, though I imagine there probably is some somewhere. (Of course, the plaintiff will be digging up such things to support their side as well, and they can probably afford more thorough lawyers...)
North Korea might actually be *more* likely to do something if they thought it would upset the UN.
Setting that to one side, however, I am not convinced that they have the subtlety required to disguise an ICBM test as an almost-successful satellite launch. It would be much more in character for them to try to launch a satellite (which, if successful, would theoretically demonstrate a grasp of technology similar to the Soviet Union in 1957, except for the fact that in just about every other area they rather obviously aren't quite there) and just not quite get it right.
Remember, this is an _extremely_ isolationist country. They make the Tokugawa shogunate look like free-trade enthusiasts. Where are they going to get competent engineers? When their previous leader decided he wanted to make movies, they had to kidnap a movie director from another country and force him to work for them, because there's no way anybody living in North Korea could learn how to do something like that.
> Lots of them blame the Western world for their problems.
For those living in the capital city, it would be dangerous to do otherwise.
(Outside the capital city the concept of a "power outage" is essentially redundant.)
This is North Korea we're talking about. The level of incompetence they have displayed, repeatedly and publicly, is difficult to overstate. Quite frankly, botching their first attempt at a satellite launch (something the Soviet Union got right on their first try in 1957) is small potatoes compared to some of their other attempted shenanigans.
Among other things, the tallest structure in the country (a would-be hotel in the capital) was started in 1987, was originally intended to be completed by mid 1989 for some locally important event or another, and at this time is still not ready for use. They're currently hoping to _partially_ open the still-incomplete building in 2013, although one wonders where they think they're going to find enough tourists to fill a hundred-story hotel, even if they do ever finish it.
(Lonely Planet's writeup of the country is interestingly clever, particularly the way it manages to put excessive positive spin on things and yet still not make the country sound like an even remotely interesting tourist destination. The only landmark attraction they specifically mention is a mountain, which they call "one of the most stunning sights in North Korea", although they do also claim that the capital city has "a few sites worth visiting".)
Nobody in the Dilbert comic strip has ever approached North Korea's level of incompetence.
The traditional way this is stated is this:
Freedom of the press means that anyone who owns a press can use it to print whatever opinions he likes. It does *not* mean that somebody _else_ has to print whatever _you_ want on _their_ press.
If you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, who decides whether to print it or not? Presumably, traditionally, it was the editor. If you write a comment on a blog, who decides whether it gets published or not? The people who run the blog are the first line, but ultimately it's the people who own the web server that publishes the blog. For example, if I used Blogger to set up my blog, and you make a comment on one of my posts, I can nuke your comment because it's my blog, but also Google can nuke your comment because it's their blogging service. If I don't like that, I can go set up my own server (and buy bandwidth...) and cut Google out of the loop by not using their service. If *you* (the commenter) don't like how the what-to-print decisions are made on my blog, you can jolly well go get your own blog.
So yeah, the SMS spammer is asking for a "freedom" that has never existed. If he wants guaranteed freedom to transmit his advertisements via a cellular network and display them on a phone, he can jolly well go get his own cellular network and phone. Otherwise, the people who own the network and the phone do, in fact, have some say in the matter. Deal with it.
Now, I'm willing to bet that if he did set up his own cellular network and offer people free use of it provided they accept all of his advertisements unfiltered as part of the deal, he'd probably get some takers. (I don't know that it would necessarily be easy to run such a service in a manner that resulted in advertising revenue adequate to pay all the operating costs and turn a profit, but that's his problem to solve as the entrepreneur. If running a profitable business were easy, just about everyone would do it.)
It depends.
On the one hand, an Associates Degree by itself is about as useful as a solar panel in northeastern Ohio. It doesn't qualify you for anything that you weren't already qualified for with a high school diploma.
On the other hand, many schools will accept a larger number of (undergrad) credits in transfer if you have an Associates Degree than otherwise. That is, after all, the main purpose of an Associates: to bundle up the two years' worth of gen ed courses you've already taken, from a school that doesn't offer the major you want, so that the school where you want to complete your four-year degree will take most of those credits, allowing you to finish in another two years.
Of course, even with an Associates, the credits you transfer in are still only worthwhile if they count toward any of the requirements for your four-year degree. Many schools are willing to be a little bit flexible with this, though there are usually limits. For example, maybe the school normally requires Western Civ and US History plus one other social studies course, but if you're transferring in an Associates they may decide to accept any eight credits of history and four additional credits of social studies that you happen to have taken.
So an Associates can be useful, e.g. if you live near a community college that offers a halfway decent Associates program. You can knock out a lot of your gen ed *before* going to the better, more expensive four-year college where you intend to complete your degree.
All of this assumes that you are a returning adult student (e.g., someone who went out after high school and got a job to "save up" for college; after several years you have now saved up just about enough to cover your textbooks and maybe the occasional dorm sweatshirt). Anyone who just graduated from high school, with even remotely acceptable grades, is likely to be better off, financially, going straight to the four-year school the very next fall. You can often get a LOT more financial aid that way, and it's typically all renewable, so it will take you through all four years (assuming you keep your grades up and meet whatever extracurricular requirements the school has). Admittedly, this depends somewhat on the school, but your total debt for four years this way can potentially be less than what you would have paid just for the last two years, not even counting anything you had to spend to get the Associates in the first place -- because, transferring in from a community college with an associates, the financial aid department in most cases will basically tell you to see Uncle Stafford and Cousin Perkins. If you're fresh out of high school with reasonable grades, they're far more likely to hand you a package that includes grants and maybe the odd minor scholarship plus a work study option in addition to Stafford loans.
He means Linux distributions don't generally include an RDP server in their repository. Which is true, as far as it goes. (It's also obviously irrelevant to anyone with a few dozen hours of Linux administration experience, but it's true nonetheless.)
What he actually needs is an ssh client for his Windows desktop. (Or a VNC server on the server and a VNC client on the client, but if his network connection has much latency at all the ssh option is going to have overwhelmingly superior performance.) But Windows users often don't know about ssh because, like almost everything else, Windows doesn't come with it.
The server is running Linux. The client desktop is Windows.
So what he actually wants is probably putty (or *possibly* VNC, if he's one of those mouse-only users, completely allergic to typing for some arcane reason), but being a Windows user he doesn't know the terminology needed to do a web search for it.
(Theoretically, there _is_ also an RDP server for Linux, but it's a niche thing, and so the hassle of trying to set it up is not recommended for someone who is new to Linux. It's much better for him to go with something on the server side that's in the standard repository. Installing Putty on the client side should be no big deal, since the client side is an OS with which he's already experienced.)
> my mail spools always seem to eventually end up getting corrupted
Which backend are you using?
I've never had a problem with nnml (except in cases of hard drive failure, of course).
Realistically, that's the only really economically viable way to do manufacturing (at any significant scale) in the first world.
People can whine all day about all the jobs this means we're losing, but these are not jobs anyone in the first world would actually want. We're talking here about a job on a factory assembly line putting the same component into the same slot over and over again, eight hours a day, like some kind of dark parody of the plight of the oppressed nineteenth century proletariat.
And that's ignoring the not-insignificant issue of how much a manufacturer can afford to *pay* people to do that kind of work, without going out of business. Granted, Apple could theoretically afford (if they _would_) to pay such workers a little more than most other manufacturers, because they're in a niche market segment with significantly higher per-unit markup than is common for almost any other mass-produced goods. But it still wouldn't be a wage for anyone in the developed world to get excited about.
Actually, most Americans don't consider a country to be really modernized unless the number of cars per capita is greater than 1. Owning cars is viewed, in American culture, not so much as a necessity but rather more like a basic human dignity, comparable in importance to the ability to pick out your own clothes from the closet (or dresser or whatever) in the morning.
This is an important issue for the elderly, whose children and grandchildren sometimes want to take away their car keys for safety reasons (especially once their reaction time starts to stretch into the tens of seconds). This usually does not go over well. You just about may as well try to tell them that they need to be strait-jacketed and strapped into a geri chair for safety reasons.
> Why flee to Guatemala?
Okay, I know this flies in the face of every movie ever, but in real life a person who is trying to avoid being detained by law enforcement (for something serious, like murder, not just parking tickets or whatnot) generally has to avoid international airports. Ships are almost as bad. That leaves small boats (like, personal sailboats) as the main way to get off the continent. *Buying* a boat, if you don't already have one, is a frighteningly high-profile activity.
So going by land is a fairly logical choice. That limits the possible destinations somewhat. If you go north from the US, you can only go to Canada. It's not particularly easy to hide in Canada. So the logical thing is to go south. You probably don't want to stay in Mexico, because it's directly adjacent to the country you're fleeing. And you definitely don't want to try to cross the Panama canal, because there are only a couple of bridges that cross it, and it would be trivial for someone (like, say, law enforcement) to have them watched.
So you end up in Central America. This gives you a choice of seven countries to hide in, which means anyone who's looking for you has potentially seven distinct local jurisdictions to deal with (eight if they can't be sure you're not still in Mexico), which is an annoying impediment for them and may just buy you a bit of extra time to figure out what to do. Maybe.
There's still a substantial amount of risk, of course. Running from the law is always going to be somewhat risky. And, indeed, he got caught.
> I've been using "stuffs" from time to time as long as I remember.
...)
Native speakers instinctively use the words "stuffs" correctly, to refer to different categories of stuff. Foreign language learners just forget that "stuff" is a mass noun sometimes and use it as a synonym for "thing".
"There three stuffs we are remember for a good world." Dead giveaway: non-native speaker. (Yes, this is a constructed example. A real-world example would in most cases have fewer dead giveaways per sentence. See if you can spot the other ones, besides "stuffs".)
(This is not unique to Chinese. In fact, I am not aware of any specific linguistic background, other than English of course, that would make someone immune to this mistake. I've seen Chinese speakers do it, but also Japanese, Portuguese Polish, Italian,