With a little effort and an afternoon to spare, a friend and i paid $9 a peck for apples. We went apple picking. Seems a little pricey still? We got 8 different varieties, some of which we'd never seen, like winesaps. They are some of the best apples i've ever tasted.
The capitalist model WORKS with local, especially if you consider that you're 'buying' more than stuff. You're building a local economy that will help you out when you're looking for a job by having jobs to offer. Yes, really, and not just the Mcburger kind. You're paying for the world you want. If you want fitness and environmental stability, buy a bike as well as a car.
Ride when you can. I'm physically unable to ride a bike (apple picking had to be slightly modified as an adventure to include my physical limits, like not being able to reach above lower branches) so i take the subway.
My point is not that i'm an ecosnob, because i really do believe that for most things, effort should be made to bring ecologically sound products into the lower price ranges. BUt i also believe that wherever possible, i should be willing to pay a little more to buy the ecological benefit 'added on.' One way or another, we're paying for it, and i'd rather pay up front as a preventive than more afterwards for a repair. We think about food having too much that's bad for us; it sounds like you're on the right track thinking about where your food comes from and whether it's good for what's outside of us, too.
and for the record... it was wonderfully worth it to go apple picking. Season's about over now. The place makes wine and the like, too, so there may be a return trip... and i'm going to be feasting on cortlands and winesaps and whatever these green-striped apples are for a long while...
But i'm in a city and found that my doctor -at a med center/hospital- is not only the small-town type who sees you personally and cares about how you're doing, he also takes great care with patient records, reminding nurses not to tlak about patients, never greeting you by your name in the hall or asking about a condition or finishing up advice there. What gets me is that this was the case before HIPAA, and he tells me that at one point, doctors were having this ingrained in medical school in a way that isn't happening today. He says they'd practice it with each other, making a dorm 'anonymous for a week,' where you only called people by their names in the privacy of a room. Odd. But interesting. Of course, he went to med school many years ago, and is nearing retirement now. But all my other docs there do the same.
I'll buy them, if only because i've been saying that i wish they'd come up with alternatives to plastic, and now that they are, i want to convince them that it's a good idea to keep trying. and if i don't, i should be poked with sharp sticks and branded as a hypocrite, because i said i didn't care if they would cost more. i might rethink this with other industries/products in the future. But i feel that this is a good start, and i'm willing to backup my data every few years, since regular writable discs degrade over time, too, becoming unusable.
I've been saying right along how i'll buy from indie music groups and movie groups, just to support them. And that i'll pay more for higher fuel efficiency, and that i'm willing to try to only bring home glass and cardboard food containers, so that the glass and exterior cardboard can be recycled. And that i'll buy recyclable/renewable products. *sighing and getting out the wallet* But i'll admit that you who told me that it made more sense to demand approximate equivalency in products have a VERY valid point!
But now it's a chance for me tocheer for the idea, again, and i will. Nobody's going to change ANYthing about waste management until it's a crisis, or because the market insists upon it. This is not the answer, no- this is just a start. But there are lots of things that can be done with trash other than bury it, and it has to start in my home where i decide what kinds of trash i'm going to buy in the first place. (especially since i'm one of the ones who whines about it.)
i realise that other consumers may not feel the same way, and that there's really no reason why you should have to- having the larger part of the populace hold out for a more cost-effective products is important- that steers the market, too.
Now, all i can say is- they better not package this stuff in a regular plastic case with a regular plastic spindle, or i'm going to be so bloody ticked off!!
That's a VERY relevant point- and one which you might also want to write about to the schools in your area. There are a large number of industry-wide processes that will be affected by this, and if you alert those industries to this possibility (including the national associations that libraries/librarians belong to) the message will go a lot further than one letter to a senator.
i think that you bring up a very important point, one which the study doesm't address. Either prayer has relevancy, or it does not. But the context is important. First, the question would be does prayer help the person if they do it themselves, and then if it is done by someone else with their knowledge, especially someone who knows them well. And finally, the 'does it help from a stranger whom you don't know is praying for you,' question.
I'm inclined to think that the first two would be strong 'yes' answers, myself, because a sense of hope and a sense of support are two of the important factors in a patient's prognosis. Having family and friends praying for you demonstrates a very strong community of support, and that's a subject for sociological study of patient outcomes. It's aslo common sense.
My guess is that they were trying to isolate prayer from the other support that tends to accompany it- a sense of family and place in a group, the small touches like bringing in food and news and congregational visitors to keep a sense of connection with the outside world. But i think that they failed, because even if it were a higher power, we don't know that that higher power is more or less influenced by strangers praying for strangers, whether fervency inreases prayer's effectiveness, or relation to the prayed for (prayed upon? i know, bad pun, bad pun...)
But a point for you, for bringing up that article, because that's what i thought of, too...
i got nothin'; i think if it were more on the front burner for people in THIS country, those preventable diseases vcould be better prevented. i think if we just insisted on better use of the resources that we already provide... but i don't have a ready answer how to make it all better...
Actually, there's a LOT less money going into vaccines than there needs to be... just not in the US. There are too many impoverished people in too many countries to say that the fight against preventable diseases is over. I'm not saying that throwing money at a problem will make it go away, but it's a very important point that unless companies get paid to make the vaccines, they aren't likely to do it completely for free. (most companies do donate large amounts of medically necessary products to programs that deliver them to the most needy. Just like in the US, most drug companies have assistance programs to help people who have a genuine need for the medicine but no ability to pay get it at no or low cost. But it won't cover vaccinating the children of all the countries that need the help.)
In the US, you're quite correct- there are pockets of unvaccinated children whose parents made the decision not to vaccinate. Often those parents learn too late that the health food store gave them faulty advice, and watching a child in the ICU with whooping cough punishes the child along with the parent. In some states, charges are being filed against parents who refuse to vaccinate, on the grounds that they're presenting a public health risk for those who were also unvaccinated, and for those who were vaccinated but as has happened with measles, need revaccination but find that out the hard way.
just a couple of thoughts; i'm nowhere near expert on these issues, but think that third world countries should be given a little more environmental laxity than countries like the US, where we have the technology to do better. They should have basic guidelines, aid of the echnological and material kind to get them there, and we should (in my view) be cleaning up a lot more a lot faster as an example...
So... let me get this straight. They're paying a bunch of people a pittance to hack a machine that isn't set up like the ones that hackers would usually break into.
And they think that this will reveal how hackers think.
So, what we end up with is a bunch of people getting paid a little bit of money to mess with statistics. How many are going to use obvious techniques, just to skew the results in a 'nobody thought of this so it must be safe from exploit' way?? How many are going to have a grand time hacking into their real system just for fun?
And for that matter, how many dumb wanna-bes are going to end up sharing their IP address with a company that might just duly record them, along with the name that they're writing the check out to, and hand it over to other investigators, saying, "Hey- these are the hackers who applied"?
I'm guessing that anyone who's willing to take the money but isn't up to a level where they can really accomplish anything is going to eventually get caught playing with someone else's network- i don't pay enough attention to hackers in the news, so i'm not up to speed on whether this constitutes admission of previous (potentially criminal) activity or not... but if the company has a list of people who registered to 'contribute,' to the effort, they could then give the list to anyone, right?
Somehow, the only way that this could look funnier to me is if they had to enter the system, install kazaalite, upload copyrighted music files to it, and make them available for download. At which point the RIAA would step in and prosecute, creating a net loss of approximately $14,750.00USD for the hacker.
Scenario two is the same, but they have to upload Gigli, and set it to play in a continuous loop until the machine explodes in a desperate move of self-preservation. (And the MPAA would be prosecuting.)
That is... if the hacker were dumb enough to give their real name and use their own (and static) IP address....
you're looking for a spot that appears for about 2-5 seconds. It's big; keep an eye on the left-hand side of the screen, and it's not going to be bright red, rather a reddish brown colour, ovalish in shape with a distinct edge. It appears and disappears in much the same way- and frequency- that the reel change markers do. You'll see it most distinctly when it appears against a concrete wall in the upper left while Celine is in the right-hand side of the screen. I wish i'd taken closer note of what scenes it appears in, but i was distracted by seeing it at all. I thought that it was maybe damage to the reels, as sometimes happens. But i distinctly remember it because i couldn't see any reason for it being there, and reel damage would have been intermittent (flashing) if it were local to a spot on the reel (like a pinprick through layers) or continuous top-to-ottom, like a scratch...
Maybe it says something about the movie, if i was paying that much attention to a random flaw on the screen...
googlewatch has a decent demonstration of how it works, with a proxy up for those who don't feel like sharing. WHich, i'll admit, endears them to me....
...Except that these are the same people behind NameBase. At any rate, it's interesting.
Another part of the problem is that once you find a truth, it is soon recognisable that it only holds true under certain circumstances. Bridging the gap between the large, where certain rules apply, and the small, where other rules apply, for example, is an awkward one. we know that a certain law holds true under x circumstances, and then along comes Y and the whole thing gets thrown out. So there either has to be a way to take up the slack ( a formulaic work-around of sorts), or a new description for what's going on.
Theories frequently turn into paradoxes, because bits are missing from the description that are necessary to the theory's application to more than one set of circumstances. So the theory sits in limbo for awhile until somebody starts asking the right questions. Einstein recognised this several times, although i think he'd be spinning at the thought of what's happening with his work now.
My favourite Einstein quote got translated several times, but the best one (provided by Eistein himself, in later years) comes out to, "God's slick, but he ain't mean."
That sentence always comes to mind when stuff like this comes up.
The Philanthropy Institute. Their specialty is 'helping donors make informed giving decisions.' And from what i've seen, they really do. They may be the people to contact, because they can put you in touch with the people looking for such things.
Handspring has a module for it. I used to be hypoglycemic and had the same issue. My glucose meter wasn't very inconvenient, but it was a fuss to have to deal with it, and Handspring actually does have glucose springboards. Here is one link o the news segment. I have to say that i haven't tried them; i was used to my monitor, and while i'll be looking at these in the future (because having a drastic shift away from hypoglycemia means that i'll be checked for diabetes regularly) i don't need one just this minute.
Make sure that if you get one, you get one of the calibration kits that they sell for various glucometers, to check before you start using it that it works as advertised. It's a problem even with standard glucose meters sometimes, so it's worth checking.
first, the reason nothing can be made truly idiot-proof is that no rational human being can guess all of the variations that an idiot is going to somehow come up with. And the idiot in question isn't going to be coherent enough to tell you, either. (No matter how well it's designed, there are always going to be those individuals who could be left in a padded room with two steel ball bearings- and in ten minutes, will have lost one and broken the other... and they're going to want to use your design, too)
the second one that we talk about where i work is that for design purposes, you have to think about how bright the 'average' guy is... and then realise that, by definition, likely half of them are going to be dumber than that!
That assessment is partially true, in that allows for censorship on a broader scale. But it does this because it first allows for comunication on a broader scale. It takes away the editorial process of having to get your words approved. Sure, we see a lot more typos and BS. On the other hand, it gets the word out a hundred times faster, and while the government can shut down a site, that site can be mirrored, the information can be printed or stored, and it greatly ups the odds of people being able to find alternate perspectives on how things actually happened. I'm thinking of how popular the iraq blogs got during those first few weeks of the war.
The net provides a soapbox for anyone with the ability to connect to it, and the distribution of information can now happen so rapidly and so widely that it can be nearly impossible to stamp out the information completely once it's out there. Without it, we'd be restricted to what could be spread by word of mouth, paper mediums, radio broadcasts, television- all of which take longer to put together and distribute, and none of which can reach an audience that can compete with the one online. And people can then instantly copy the information, guaranteeing that it can't vanish.
This is already happening in many places. As many have said- it's a tool. But it's a tool that many people can use interactively at the same time, and unlike television (where stations can monopolise the market, and amateurs rarely get to play) it's a tool that requires only a computer and a connection, not a whole broadcast setup of one's own. No printing press, no cameras, and if you say something that they don't like, they often have to try to trace you after the fact, with the info already released into the wild. The reason China, for example, has such issues with the internet is that it represents a flow of information that cannot be controlled. Nothing involving that many people can be controlled for long, and that's what the RIAA is finding out, too!
I spent three years working in a library and learning the dewey decimal system. Three guesses how my home media are organised. (No, not by Soviet Russia or by Natalie Portman, who let you guys in here, anyway?) By dewey decimal, of course. And now i have to think about how much i really want to keep this system... i don't hold with the idea of having to license something so overwhelmingly widely used. (and i wasn't aware that our library paid a license fee. (In fact, i don't remember that in our expenses at all, which makes me wonder whether it fell under 'miscellaneous,' or whether our relatively-new library simply failed to bother...) either way, i feel that the system should be free (as in beer) because it's... a filing system used primarily by nonprofit entities, and of course that's only my fond wish, but i'm hoping that the next system will be free. Otherwise- Hold on while i go patent the alphabet as a filing system. And copyright it. Every keyboard company will be paying me money... heh heh heh....
oke. Back to subject. This leads me to the next question. How much sense does it make to make libraries pay for one more thing? And will the next step be to raise this license fee? Most libraries are struggling along as it is, so i hope not. There isn't enough storage and there isn't enough funding, and it drives me crazy to see book sales held sometimes, in those cases where it's just because there's no way to maintain the full shelves.
Let me rephrase this. Most libraries are non-profit entities. Five bucks a year isn't a lot of money, but it's money being charged for a standard system that would take a lot of time and effort to shift away from. Maybe derivative works should be allowed; if a hotel is using it for anything other than books, maybe it should be hailed as an innovative way to make people more aware of the system itself. But i'm willing to accept that the system 'owners' may have the legal right to collect... it's the obsessive nature of this particular instance that bothers me. *shrug* i could be way off-base.
So... the most important point here, i think, is: What's a better way? And how can we make it free to libraries and other non-profits?
RIAA method: Release item under copyright. Saturate market. Raise prices until no longer sustainable. Obtain personal information of those filling market for free with the easily replicable product. Sue for 'damages.'
MPAA method: Release item under copyright. When market is saturated or copyright nears expiration (whichever is soonest) change a scene or two, or add different colour, re-release, generating 'new' item and copyright.
SCO method:Release item. Hide recipe. Claim that all competitors stole and used said recipe. Refuse to produce until suitably bribed by appeasements and concessions.
Amazon method: release item that uses obvious method. Patent said obvious method.
ISO method: Release item. Wait until standard is commonly adopted, as with SCO method. When market has adopted standard, charge for using said standard.
Windows method:Release item into market. Use all of the above whenever possible. proceeSystem error: (a)bort, (r)etry, (f)ail???
I was under the impression that the rich paid a greater share of the total of tax revenue, but that the poor paid a greater percent of their income. The last half of that statement is supported by your numbers, and if the first half is incorrect, well... *goes to book to find info* i'll go check some more. I'm in favour of pregressive taxes; i'm against the tax cut that Bush came up with (and Ari Fleischer's math is suspect at best) but numbers are numbers, so this part should be simple (i hadn't counted sales tax either *duh* )./me hits econ archives
It could be argued that they pay a greater share of the taxes, because they DO, but it's also true that they have a similar proportion of the wealth. There's a wonderful book out, called Nickel and Dimed, which addresses the fact that when you're in a lower income bracket, it costs more to live. Not just because you're poor, but because there's no longer time and energy to do things that still need doing. The poor are the ones who buy the most fast food, for example.
One of the arguments for the rich maying more taxes is simply that the poor are spending their money in the very industries which make the rich become rich. But that's a judgement call, and i don't know how true it is in real life. I do know that practicality dictates that taxing the poor just isn't going to work, and that not taxing anybody doesn't work, either. The whole point behind social programs is that they are designed to keep the poor from getting poorer, and (where possible) help the poor become richer.
Now. As for those statistics. The census indicates that not only are the poor getting poorer, the very old and the very young are suffering from it the most. (While you're there, check out the difference in median salary between men and women, too.) And bear in mind that the lowest percentage of the poor, the homeless and in shelters, don't even get counted. It's not just liberal propaganda to expect that improving the base income for everyone improves the economic structure as a whole. Political thought tends to split over how to deal with it, not whether that wage gap happens.
Just my two cents... from the just-barely-solvent side of the wage gap...
If you put long chunks of it on a server- "Pi at 7,000082370222 (squared) decimals" for example, and then let people download pieces of it at will, you would have a situation where what people are downloading would be part of a math answer set, and it would have to have huge storage, and more importantly, store it in order. Because that's the only way to provide a valid context for the arguments that since ALL of the information is present, what people do with pieces of it is up to them. Make the info stream slightly longer than the songs, if possible. And this might actually have math value to universities, as it could be used to offer number sets as well as simple pieces of pi. (yikes. pun was not intentional.)
Because this is a valid use of the technology, and because certain sections could be representative of other things, we'd have the curious situation of the burden of guilt possibly switching to the downloader. You're uploading a real math answer, and they're downloading only the chunks that can be turned into music. The storage does seem wildly impractical, but still... it's an interesting idea...
On the other hand, it's been demonstrated that valid alternate-use technology has a tough time in the courts, no matter how useful and valuable it is. The same P2P that makes the RIAA unhappy can be used to share research, genealogy info, all manner of very useful and legal things.
Since they had been screened in another state before getting to the airport that the crashed planes left from... This meant that on hitting ground, they were walked over to their next flight. No security involvement except a glanceover on the tarmac. It is (or was)a common procedure, which leaves the burden of security screening on the original flight- the first one that they got on. If you come in on an international flight (or even a regular flight) that has low security, the odds are still that you're going to have a lower security search level at airport B than if you were departing airport B to go on the first step of your journey. The theory was that if you were clean when you got on the plane, and didn't have a chance to go pick up anything new, you were clean to get on the next plane.
If the incoming terrorists had gone through security, they still might not have been stopped, but the fact that they didn't left a big gaping hole in the security plan to begin with. One that's supposedly closed now... in theory...
My former roomie had to go through extra checkpoint security to fly to a convention. She wore her knee high boots (she hadn't flown since 1999) and she got picked as a random high-level check. They wrote this on her ticket weeks in advance. But security let her through. and then realised, so they stopped her in the line and asked her to please remove her boots. She said, "Huh?? Why??" and the next thing she knew, there was a ring of guards around her, and so she took off her docs, they checked them for explosives etcetera, gave them back, searched her luggage, and let her go. What got me was that her ticket was labelled for an extra security search... my former roomie, the born in USA couldn't be less middle class white girl. Majored in geological studies, works editing textbooks, lived in one town all her life, and had a round trip ticket on a good credit history and going to a small town, and they wrote on her ticket in plain english that she needed an extra search. all i could figure was that they had a quota to meet.
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The capitalist model WORKS with local, especially if you consider that you're 'buying' more than stuff. You're building a local economy that will help you out when you're looking for a job by having jobs to offer. Yes, really, and not just the Mcburger kind. You're paying for the world you want. If you want fitness and environmental stability, buy a bike as well as a car.
Ride when you can. I'm physically unable to ride a bike (apple picking had to be slightly modified as an adventure to include my physical limits, like not being able to reach above lower branches) so i take the subway.
My point is not that i'm an ecosnob, because i really do believe that for most things, effort should be made to bring ecologically sound products into the lower price ranges. BUt i also believe that wherever possible, i should be willing to pay a little more to buy the ecological benefit 'added on.' One way or another, we're paying for it, and i'd rather pay up front as a preventive than more afterwards for a repair. We think about food having too much that's bad for us; it sounds like you're on the right track thinking about where your food comes from and whether it's good for what's outside of us, too.
and for the record... it was wonderfully worth it to go apple picking. Season's about over now. The place makes wine and the like, too, so there may be a return trip... and i'm going to be feasting on cortlands and winesaps and whatever these green-striped apples are for a long while...
sol
I've been saying right along how i'll buy from indie music groups and movie groups, just to support them. And that i'll pay more for higher fuel efficiency, and that i'm willing to try to only bring home glass and cardboard food containers, so that the glass and exterior cardboard can be recycled. And that i'll buy recyclable/renewable products. *sighing and getting out the wallet* But i'll admit that you who told me that it made more sense to demand approximate equivalency in products have a VERY valid point!
But now it's a chance for me tocheer for the idea, again, and i will. Nobody's going to change ANYthing about waste management until it's a crisis, or because the market insists upon it. This is not the answer, no- this is just a start. But there are lots of things that can be done with trash other than bury it, and it has to start in my home where i decide what kinds of trash i'm going to buy in the first place. (especially since i'm one of the ones who whines about it.)
i realise that other consumers may not feel the same way, and that there's really no reason why you should have to- having the larger part of the populace hold out for a more cost-effective products is important- that steers the market, too.
Now, all i can say is- they better not package this stuff in a regular plastic case with a regular plastic spindle, or i'm going to be so bloody ticked off!!
That's a VERY relevant point- and one which you might also want to write about to the schools in your area. There are a large number of industry-wide processes that will be affected by this, and if you alert those industries to this possibility (including the national associations that libraries/librarians belong to) the message will go a lot further than one letter to a senator.
hindsight..20-20... oh, never mind.
sol
I'm inclined to think that the first two would be strong 'yes' answers, myself, because a sense of hope and a sense of support are two of the important factors in a patient's prognosis. Having family and friends praying for you demonstrates a very strong community of support, and that's a subject for sociological study of patient outcomes. It's aslo common sense.
My guess is that they were trying to isolate prayer from the other support that tends to accompany it- a sense of family and place in a group, the small touches like bringing in food and news and congregational visitors to keep a sense of connection with the outside world. But i think that they failed, because even if it were a higher power, we don't know that that higher power is more or less influenced by strangers praying for strangers, whether fervency inreases prayer's effectiveness, or relation to the prayed for (prayed upon? i know, bad pun, bad pun...)
But a point for you, for bringing up that article, because that's what i thought of, too...
sol
i got nothin'; i think if it were more on the front burner for people in THIS country, those preventable diseases vcould be better prevented. i think if we just insisted on better use of the resources that we already provide... but i don't have a ready answer how to make it all better...
In the US, you're quite correct- there are pockets of unvaccinated children whose parents made the decision not to vaccinate. Often those parents learn too late that the health food store gave them faulty advice, and watching a child in the ICU with whooping cough punishes the child along with the parent. In some states, charges are being filed against parents who refuse to vaccinate, on the grounds that they're presenting a public health risk for those who were also unvaccinated, and for those who were vaccinated but as has happened with measles, need revaccination but find that out the hard way.
just a couple of thoughts; i'm nowhere near expert on these issues, but think that third world countries should be given a little more environmental laxity than countries like the US, where we have the technology to do better. They should have basic guidelines, aid of the echnological and material kind to get them there, and we should (in my view) be cleaning up a lot more a lot faster as an example...
sol
And they think that this will reveal how hackers think.
So, what we end up with is a bunch of people getting paid a little bit of money to mess with statistics. How many are going to use obvious techniques, just to skew the results in a 'nobody thought of this so it must be safe from exploit' way?? How many are going to have a grand time hacking into their real system just for fun?
And for that matter, how many dumb wanna-bes are going to end up sharing their IP address with a company that might just duly record them, along with the name that they're writing the check out to, and hand it over to other investigators, saying, "Hey- these are the hackers who applied"?
I'm guessing that anyone who's willing to take the money but isn't up to a level where they can really accomplish anything is going to eventually get caught playing with someone else's network- i don't pay enough attention to hackers in the news, so i'm not up to speed on whether this constitutes admission of previous (potentially criminal) activity or not... but if the company has a list of people who registered to 'contribute,' to the effort, they could then give the list to anyone, right?
Somehow, the only way that this could look funnier to me is if they had to enter the system, install kazaalite, upload copyrighted music files to it, and make them available for download. At which point the RIAA would step in and prosecute, creating a net loss of approximately $14,750.00USD for the hacker.
Scenario two is the same, but they have to upload Gigli, and set it to play in a continuous loop until the machine explodes in a desperate move of self-preservation. (And the MPAA would be prosecuting.)
That is... if the hacker were dumb enough to give their real name and use their own (and static) IP address....
Maybe it says something about the movie, if i was paying that much attention to a random flaw on the screen...
Theories frequently turn into paradoxes, because bits are missing from the description that are necessary to the theory's application to more than one set of circumstances. So the theory sits in limbo for awhile until somebody starts asking the right questions. Einstein recognised this several times, although i think he'd be spinning at the thought of what's happening with his work now.
My favourite Einstein quote got translated several times, but the best one (provided by Eistein himself, in later years) comes out to, "God's slick, but he ain't mean."
That sentence always comes to mind when stuff like this comes up.
And i mean that for real; i almost fell off my chair. Obvious, but somehow.... hysterical.
MIcrosoft! Now Banned in Boston! oke, maybe not 'banned.' but i have to predict: the headline will come up...
The Philanthropy Institute. Their specialty is 'helping donors make informed giving decisions.' And from what i've seen, they really do. They may be the people to contact, because they can put you in touch with the people looking for such things.
Make sure that if you get one, you get one of the calibration kits that they sell for various glucometers, to check before you start using it that it works as advertised. It's a problem even with standard glucose meters sometimes, so it's worth checking.
Horoscope: You're a Virgo, and Virgos are practical people who don't often believe in things like astrology. Why are you reading this?
Virgo: Good point. (closes window, goes back to work.)
first, the reason nothing can be made truly idiot-proof is that no rational human being can guess all of the variations that an idiot is going to somehow come up with. And the idiot in question isn't going to be coherent enough to tell you, either. (No matter how well it's designed, there are always going to be those individuals who could be left in a padded room with two steel ball bearings- and in ten minutes, will have lost one and broken the other... and they're going to want to use your design, too)
the second one that we talk about where i work is that for design purposes, you have to think about how bright the 'average' guy is... and then realise that, by definition, likely half of them are going to be dumber than that!
The net provides a soapbox for anyone with the ability to connect to it, and the distribution of information can now happen so rapidly and so widely that it can be nearly impossible to stamp out the information completely once it's out there. Without it, we'd be restricted to what could be spread by word of mouth, paper mediums, radio broadcasts, television- all of which take longer to put together and distribute, and none of which can reach an audience that can compete with the one online. And people can then instantly copy the information, guaranteeing that it can't vanish.
This is already happening in many places. As many have said- it's a tool. But it's a tool that many people can use interactively at the same time, and unlike television (where stations can monopolise the market, and amateurs rarely get to play) it's a tool that requires only a computer and a connection, not a whole broadcast setup of one's own. No printing press, no cameras, and if you say something that they don't like, they often have to try to trace you after the fact, with the info already released into the wild. The reason China, for example, has such issues with the internet is that it represents a flow of information that cannot be controlled. Nothing involving that many people can be controlled for long, and that's what the RIAA is finding out, too!
oke. Back to subject. This leads me to the next question. How much sense does it make to make libraries pay for one more thing? And will the next step be to raise this license fee? Most libraries are struggling along as it is, so i hope not. There isn't enough storage and there isn't enough funding, and it drives me crazy to see book sales held sometimes, in those cases where it's just because there's no way to maintain the full shelves.
Let me rephrase this. Most libraries are non-profit entities. Five bucks a year isn't a lot of money, but it's money being charged for a standard system that would take a lot of time and effort to shift away from. Maybe derivative works should be allowed; if a hotel is using it for anything other than books, maybe it should be hailed as an innovative way to make people more aware of the system itself. But i'm willing to accept that the system 'owners' may have the legal right to collect... it's the obsessive nature of this particular instance that bothers me. *shrug* i could be way off-base.
So... the most important point here, i think, is: What's a better way? And how can we make it free to libraries and other non-profits?
MPAA method: Release item under copyright. When market is saturated or copyright nears expiration (whichever is soonest) change a scene or two, or add different colour, re-release, generating 'new' item and copyright.
SCO method:Release item. Hide recipe. Claim that all competitors stole and used said recipe. Refuse to produce until suitably bribed by appeasements and concessions.
Amazon method: release item that uses obvious method. Patent said obvious method.
ISO method: Release item. Wait until standard is commonly adopted, as with SCO method. When market has adopted standard, charge for using said standard.
Windows method:Release item into market. Use all of the above whenever possible. proceeSystem error: (a)bort, (r)etry, (f)ail???
sol
One of the arguments for the rich maying more taxes is simply that the poor are spending their money in the very industries which make the rich become rich. But that's a judgement call, and i don't know how true it is in real life. I do know that practicality dictates that taxing the poor just isn't going to work, and that not taxing anybody doesn't work, either. The whole point behind social programs is that they are designed to keep the poor from getting poorer, and (where possible) help the poor become richer.
Now. As for those statistics. The census indicates that not only are the poor getting poorer, the very old and the very young are suffering from it the most. (While you're there, check out the difference in median salary between men and women, too.) And bear in mind that the lowest percentage of the poor, the homeless and in shelters, don't even get counted. It's not just liberal propaganda to expect that improving the base income for everyone improves the economic structure as a whole. Political thought tends to split over how to deal with it, not whether that wage gap happens.
Just my two cents... from the just-barely-solvent side of the wage gap...
Because this is a valid use of the technology, and because certain sections could be representative of other things, we'd have the curious situation of the burden of guilt possibly switching to the downloader. You're uploading a real math answer, and they're downloading only the chunks that can be turned into music. The storage does seem wildly impractical, but still... it's an interesting idea...
On the other hand, it's been demonstrated that valid alternate-use technology has a tough time in the courts, no matter how useful and valuable it is. The same P2P that makes the RIAA unhappy can be used to share research, genealogy info, all manner of very useful and legal things.
just my 3.14&ct..... cents...
If the incoming terrorists had gone through security, they still might not have been stopped, but the fact that they didn't left a big gaping hole in the security plan to begin with. One that's supposedly closed now... in theory...
My former roomie had to go through extra checkpoint security to fly to a convention. She wore her knee high boots (she hadn't flown since 1999) and she got picked as a random high-level check. They wrote this on her ticket weeks in advance. But security let her through. and then realised, so they stopped her in the line and asked her to please remove her boots. She said, "Huh?? Why??" and the next thing she knew, there was a ring of guards around her, and so she took off her docs, they checked them for explosives etcetera, gave them back, searched her luggage, and let her go. What got me was that her ticket was labelled for an extra security search... my former roomie, the born in USA couldn't be less middle class white girl. Majored in geological studies, works editing textbooks, lived in one town all her life, and had a round trip ticket on a good credit history and going to a small town, and they wrote on her ticket in plain english that she needed an extra search. all i could figure was that they had a quota to meet.