Except that Amsterdam wasn't my final destination, and I traveled in Europe on my Czech passport and returned to the US on my US passport. No way for them to know that I've been in Amsterdam. I get the same treatment when I come back from Asia.
It's the usual harassment to demonstrate how tough the US on terror.
Heck, just have the Brazilians call the US Border Patrol every time a US Citizen gets on the plane to go home.. Have them give a description and a vague state statement that the person may be carrying drugs.
I carry both a US and a Czech passport. I can travel anywhere in the former communist nations without a second look. Heck, this last time I didn't even get a stamp. We went through Amsterdam and it took a few seconds and I got a smile from a pretty cute immigration lady.
But on coming back to the States, I'm treated like a criminal - where have you been, what did you do, what are you bringing back, did you do this or that, what's in that bag....
I hate it.
And the irony isn't lost on me - we (the US) pride ourselves on our freedoms, but we have instituted what is probably the most draconian entry system in the free world. And the former communist nations, which boast no claims of freedom, allow me to travel unhindered, with a wave and a smile.
Maybe this will be a wakeup call to the US that we've gone completely off the deep end here.
Well, the bank needs to launder some of the money it got from the feds. So it emails the "wrong" account, has the account nuked, owner of said account then sues bank for $500mil, bank settles for $499mil, and the lawyers, bankers and the "wronged" email account holder split the dough.
If you read the TFA, Nate addresses this. He states that his data--SV LLC's polling results--are selected from a wide, wide, wide variety of topics, not just necessarily the highly divisive ones where there may be a relatively even split between two choices.
Moreover, (as Nate states) over enough data, even the effect of the undecided percentage on the trailing digit should be random.
OK "he says". Show me. I say the moon is made of cheese. Fuzzy green cheese, I even have some in my fridge I can show you.
Seriously, he's making a serious accusation. Back it up with demonstrated results.
You do the poll. You have to; you can't just make up the numbers. Sooner or later someone would figure out you don't have a phone bank.
But the poll numbers come up as 46 for, 43 against, and the rest undecided.
Now you can't go and say, 98 for, 1 against, and 1 undecided; that's what the communists do and everyone knows they're lying.
But you report it as 47 for, 42 against, and the rest undecided. Now you've falsified your data, but you think in a way that's hard to catch. You bump the numbers one or two or three points in favor of your position.
However, I'm unconvinced that this is some sort of smoking gun; Silver needs to really run this sort of simplistic analysis on a lot of other polls and see if there in fact is a bias towards a 47 - 43 split with 10% undecided. That actually sounds about right for a lot of the polls I remember in the last election.
I can't RTFM right now - slashdotted - but the TOS for using Google Maps for example is very explicit and very limited. (You can only use Google Maps from within browser, and you cannot cache the images.) Google doesn't necessarily own the data; they have licensing agreements with data providers. So Google has to uphold its agreement with the data providers.
While I personally have abandonded using Google Maps for my project because of the license - something I find frustrating and disappointing - it is, after all, the agreeement Google must live by and enforce.
An attorney, cross-examining the local coroner, queried, "Before you signed the death certificate had you taken the man's pulse?"
"No," the coroner replied.
"Well, then, did you listen for a heart beat?"
The coroner answered, "No."
"Did you check for respiration? Breathing?", asked the attorney.
Again the coroner replied, "No."
"Ah," the attorney said, "So when you signed the death certificate you had not taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, had you?"
The coroner rolled his eyes, and shot back "Counselor, at the time I signed the death certificate the man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk. But I can see your point. For all I know he could be out there practicing law somewhere."
+1. Children meet our expectations. If I expect that my children will lie to me, run away, and generally be disobedient little shits, then guess what - that's what they will be.
And if I expect my kids to be so helpless, so clueless, and so incapable of making decisions that mommy or daddy have to ride in to rescue every time the kid decides to cross the road, guess what - that's exactly what they'll be.
And putting a tracking bracelet on them sets up exactly that expectation. What scares me is the level of parental paranoia, the controlling mindset that goes with this.
"My kid is so untrustworthy that I must monitor him at all times."
or
"My kid is so helpless that I have to know exactly where he is at all times so I can go rescue him."
Neither one of those mindsets will result in responsible adults. Heck, my kids are unruly bastards sometimes - but overall they're responsible, they don't lie, and they make decisions.
Now convert that into an RV and you have an intrepid vehicle.
As to the OP, hire some good employees, or get an arrangement with someone you trust, and then drive like hell until you have no cell coverage. That's what I do.
[true story] we hired a new engineer, first hire. Left on a 3 week vacation to Europe, left him in charge. He's the only person in the office. No sweat, this guy was really competent. Except that a week after we left, a hurricane hit and he had to evacuate the office, with all of the files, computers, and such. And after that, he couldn't get the network going again. So he calls us - in the Czech Republic. Gets our neighbor who speaks no English. He babbles on in broken Russian - our neighbors speak no Russian either; after a while they figured out he must want the Americans next door.
Bottom line, he did fine, we had a great vacation, and we all had a great laugh about it when we came back.[/true story]
Hire good people and go away. Far, far away, or the business will eat your soul.
I wonder if the study was double-blind; did the researchers know they were testing a girl or a boy?
Anyway, I think much of it is nurture. I've seen parents at playgrounds treat boys differently from girls even from before they could walk. A dad boosts his son up the slide and guides him down; a mom keeps here infant daughter close on the bench. The message is clear, even to a 6 month old.
You hear parents say to their girls, "Now don't get your pretty dress dirty" - but boys get no such instructions.
I've heards parents tell their daughter she can't climb up the rope ladder, while at the same encouraging her younger brother to do so.
I've been so close to slapping some of these parents. So much is what we expect our kids to be and we as parents limit our children's future by imposing our own expectations on them.
But this is in range of a middle school science teacher. That's the beauty of it!
Once you break the $500 dollar limit, our underfunded schools in the US can't afford it. Heck, the elementary school my kids go to was happy to received a $200 check I won at a local race.
For $150, these kinds of parts can be built using donated stuff. Many people have cell phones they no longer use. Many people have digital cameras they don't use.
I can see doing this with some donated materials for $100. Plus the technology is there - no custom built ham radios, just "ordinary" technology we all use on a daily basis. It brings space down to ordinary kids.
It would be great if these guys provided drawings and what control they usd for the camera and see if we can launch this at our school.
Well, there's tolerant and then there's hostile. Take my workplace.
If your PDA doesn't run Windows, you can't use it to connect to your desktop.
You can check email through the web interface - but only if you use IE.
You can use our groupware through the web - but only if you use IE.
Unless it runs Windows, you're not allowed to connect to the network.
So... Yup, I can bring in my Sharp Zaurus PDA with Angstrom, and my Asus eeePC with xubuntu, but I can't actually use them for anything, or, according to IT edicts, can't connect them to our network.
So on the few occasions when I brought them in, I used the Public Library WiFi connection.
So the question has real substance. If their email is MS Outlook, and their web interface is written in ActiveX, then you're screwed if you have linux.
Take this to the basest level. At some point, the interaction of the playkey and the media is reduced to a TRUE or FALSE.
So, ultimately, they are trying to control a single bit of data with all of these convoluted schemes. This one requires a strong central authority of some sort to verify ownership of the keys. Who arbitrates the ownership? (and this is not simple thing; for some of us the worth of our legal music collection is above the felony threshhold. Will the courts then deal with this?)
I see this as a great tool for those of us working on embedded platforms. I spent quite a while hacking up elinks to work as a simple UI for a platform I was working on. At the time, there was no simple browser we could use. And we needed a browser as the backend talked html - we had to have the same interface over ethernet as over the local display.
This would have been a huge time saver. More power to them - I hope they make it work and find a niche.
+1.
My father in law knew he was dying for several years, so he spent a part of that time on a round-the-world trip, revisiting all the places that were important to him. Then he compiled several albums, with original pictures from his youth, newer pictures from his trip, and stories about what those places meant to him.
It's an incredibly powerful document, and it's the best thing he could have left for his grandkids, all the more so because in this age of high mobility and disposable housing we no longer have family histories.
Well, you earn it. My sister used to work on wall st; got all sorts of perks. Catered dinners and a chauffeur home when she worked late, that sort of thing.
Thing is, the late nights, killer pressure, and absurdly long weeks were the norm.
Me, I make probably a tenth of what she did, but I show up at 7:30 and leave at 4, and sleep at night. I have time for my kids and family. I've never worked on a weekend on this job.
So yup, you can make $millions; you can also lose your soul.
I think that depends on your perspective. I know of several medial procedures that are common in Europe but are "experimental" here, and thus horribly expensive and not covered by insurance. Our insurance companies have a lot at stake; classifying any new procedure as "experimental" for perhaps 15 years saves them a lot of money. Never mind that people suffer and die as a result.
Ditto for drugs; stuff that's common in Europe and Asia is not available here.
So I'd say for procedures related to poor lifestyle - alcohol abuse, poor diet, lack of sleep - I'd say the US has the best care, since that's what our doctors treat. But for other procedures, those due to old age or overuse injury, often other countries have better care.
Well, I have all my calls forwarded to my cell phone. Even when I'm sitting in my office, next to my landline phone. Why? it's convenient, it's always there, it puts all my messages in one box, and my clients don't have to chase me down. For all I care, they could remove the useless landline phone from my desk and I'd never miss it.
You looked at the value of the dollar lately? It's pretty much toilet paper; last year banks in Europe wouldn't accept US$ at all - and it's dropped by 30% since.
The only way the US$ can drop in value is if you wipe your butt with it; it's already toilet paper.
"Free flight" over the Pacific is one thing. Do you really want to free flight at, say, O'Hare?
As for the fire departments, even volunteer fire departments have to comply with standards, and only the firefighters are volunteers. The facility, engines, and training are likely paid for by taxes. I don't know of a single FD that is run out of someone's living room, using private vehicles.
I don't believe the gov't is the answer to all our problems, just as I don't believe it is the source of all problems. Government does certain things very, very well, and others poorly. Just like private industry. I refuse the neocon mantra that all government is a cesspool of waste and private industry is always the knight in shining armor.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Amsterdam wasn't my final destination, and I traveled in Europe on my Czech passport and returned to the US on my US passport. No way for them to know that I've been in Amsterdam. I get the same treatment when I come back from Asia.
It's the usual harassment to demonstrate how tough the US on terror.
Heck, just have the Brazilians call the US Border Patrol every time a US Citizen gets on the plane to go home.. Have them give a description and a vague state statement that the person may be carrying drugs.
Why have the Brazilians do the dirty work?
I carry both a US and a Czech passport. I can travel anywhere in the former communist nations without a second look. Heck, this last time I didn't even get a stamp. We went through Amsterdam and it took a few seconds and I got a smile from a pretty cute immigration lady.
But on coming back to the States, I'm treated like a criminal - where have you been, what did you do, what are you bringing back, did you do this or that, what's in that bag....
I hate it.
And the irony isn't lost on me - we (the US) pride ourselves on our freedoms, but we have instituted what is probably the most draconian entry system in the free world. And the former communist nations, which boast no claims of freedom, allow me to travel unhindered, with a wave and a smile.
Maybe this will be a wakeup call to the US that we've gone completely off the deep end here.
Heh... One Tokyo train station handles 4 MILLION people in rush hour. Do the math; using your numbers it will pay for itself in a couple of months.
We're talking MASS TRANSIT, folks, not 1 person per car.
like a year ago on Nova.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/microraptor/program.html
And from the documentary, it was obvious that the discovery had been made some time prior to the making of the show.
So this is old news. I guess dinosaur news travels slowly.
Well, the bank needs to launder some of the money it got from the feds. So it emails the "wrong" account, has the account nuked, owner of said account then sues bank for $500mil, bank settles for $499mil, and the lawyers, bankers and the "wronged" email account holder split the dough.
Capiche?
If you read the TFA, Nate addresses this. He states that his data--SV LLC's polling results--are selected from a wide, wide, wide variety of topics, not just necessarily the highly divisive ones where there may be a relatively even split between two choices.
Moreover, (as Nate states) over enough data, even the effect of the undecided percentage on the trailing digit should be random.
OK "he says". Show me. I say the moon is made of cheese. Fuzzy green cheese, I even have some in my fridge I can show you.
Seriously, he's making a serious accusation. Back it up with demonstrated results.
But here's the deal:
You do the poll. You have to; you can't just make up the numbers. Sooner or later someone would figure out you don't have a phone bank.
But the poll numbers come up as 46 for, 43 against, and the rest undecided.
Now you can't go and say, 98 for, 1 against, and 1 undecided; that's what the communists do and everyone knows they're lying.
But you report it as 47 for, 42 against, and the rest undecided. Now you've falsified your data, but you think in a way that's hard to catch. You bump the numbers one or two or three points in favor of your position.
However, I'm unconvinced that this is some sort of smoking gun; Silver needs to really run this sort of simplistic analysis on a lot of other polls and see if there in fact is a bias towards a 47 - 43 split with 10% undecided. That actually sounds about right for a lot of the polls I remember in the last election.
I can't RTFM right now - slashdotted - but the TOS for using Google Maps for example is very explicit and very limited. (You can only use Google Maps from within browser, and you cannot cache the images.) Google doesn't necessarily own the data; they have licensing agreements with data providers. So Google has to uphold its agreement with the data providers.
While I personally have abandonded using Google Maps for my project because of the license - something I find frustrating and disappointing - it is, after all, the agreeement Google must live by and enforce.
An attorney, cross-examining the local coroner, queried, "Before you signed the death certificate had you taken the man's pulse?"
"No," the coroner replied.
"Well, then, did you listen for a heart beat?"
The coroner answered, "No."
"Did you check for respiration? Breathing?", asked the attorney.
Again the coroner replied, "No."
"Ah," the attorney said, "So when you signed the death certificate you had not taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, had you?"
The coroner rolled his eyes, and shot back "Counselor, at the time I signed the death certificate the man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk. But I can see your point. For all I know he could be out there practicing law somewhere."
+1. Children meet our expectations. If I expect that my children will lie to me, run away, and generally be disobedient little shits, then guess what - that's what they will be.
And if I expect my kids to be so helpless, so clueless, and so incapable of making decisions that mommy or daddy have to ride in to rescue every time the kid decides to cross the road, guess what - that's exactly what they'll be.
And putting a tracking bracelet on them sets up exactly that expectation. What scares me is the level of parental paranoia, the controlling mindset that goes with this.
"My kid is so untrustworthy that I must monitor him at all times."
or
"My kid is so helpless that I have to know exactly where he is at all times so I can go rescue him."
Neither one of those mindsets will result in responsible adults. Heck, my kids are unruly bastards sometimes - but overall they're responsible, they don't lie, and they make decisions.
No shit. I've been in elementary school auctions where a fruit basket went for $2K just because it had some kid's paw print on it.
This will be in the mid 6 figures - although given the economy maybe low 6 figures.
Heh. you really need to play with some all-terrain fire fighting equipment.
http://www.gimaex.eu/?Mod1=artikel&MainMenuID=2&Sprache=GB&MenuID=556
Now convert that into an RV and you have an intrepid vehicle.
As to the OP, hire some good employees, or get an arrangement with someone you trust, and then drive like hell until you have no cell coverage. That's what I do.
[true story] we hired a new engineer, first hire. Left on a 3 week vacation to Europe, left him in charge. He's the only person in the office. No sweat, this guy was really competent. Except that a week after we left, a hurricane hit and he had to evacuate the office, with all of the files, computers, and such. And after that, he couldn't get the network going again. So he calls us - in the Czech Republic. Gets our neighbor who speaks no English. He babbles on in broken Russian - our neighbors speak no Russian either; after a while they figured out he must want the Americans next door.
Bottom line, he did fine, we had a great vacation, and we all had a great laugh about it when we came back.[/true story]
Hire good people and go away. Far, far away, or the business will eat your soul.
I wonder if the study was double-blind; did the researchers know they were testing a girl or a boy? Anyway, I think much of it is nurture. I've seen parents at playgrounds treat boys differently from girls even from before they could walk. A dad boosts his son up the slide and guides him down; a mom keeps here infant daughter close on the bench. The message is clear, even to a 6 month old. You hear parents say to their girls, "Now don't get your pretty dress dirty" - but boys get no such instructions. I've heards parents tell their daughter she can't climb up the rope ladder, while at the same encouraging her younger brother to do so. I've been so close to slapping some of these parents. So much is what we expect our kids to be and we as parents limit our children's future by imposing our own expectations on them.
But this is in range of a middle school science teacher. That's the beauty of it! Once you break the $500 dollar limit, our underfunded schools in the US can't afford it. Heck, the elementary school my kids go to was happy to received a $200 check I won at a local race. For $150, these kinds of parts can be built using donated stuff. Many people have cell phones they no longer use. Many people have digital cameras they don't use. I can see doing this with some donated materials for $100. Plus the technology is there - no custom built ham radios, just "ordinary" technology we all use on a daily basis. It brings space down to ordinary kids. It would be great if these guys provided drawings and what control they usd for the camera and see if we can launch this at our school.
Well, there's tolerant and then there's hostile. Take my workplace. If your PDA doesn't run Windows, you can't use it to connect to your desktop. You can check email through the web interface - but only if you use IE. You can use our groupware through the web - but only if you use IE. Unless it runs Windows, you're not allowed to connect to the network. So... Yup, I can bring in my Sharp Zaurus PDA with Angstrom, and my Asus eeePC with xubuntu, but I can't actually use them for anything, or, according to IT edicts, can't connect them to our network. So on the few occasions when I brought them in, I used the Public Library WiFi connection. So the question has real substance. If their email is MS Outlook, and their web interface is written in ActiveX, then you're screwed if you have linux.
Take this to the basest level. At some point, the interaction of the playkey and the media is reduced to a TRUE or FALSE. So, ultimately, they are trying to control a single bit of data with all of these convoluted schemes. This one requires a strong central authority of some sort to verify ownership of the keys. Who arbitrates the ownership? (and this is not simple thing; for some of us the worth of our legal music collection is above the felony threshhold. Will the courts then deal with this?)
I see this as a great tool for those of us working on embedded platforms. I spent quite a while hacking up elinks to work as a simple UI for a platform I was working on. At the time, there was no simple browser we could use. And we needed a browser as the backend talked html - we had to have the same interface over ethernet as over the local display. This would have been a huge time saver. More power to them - I hope they make it work and find a niche.
+1. My father in law knew he was dying for several years, so he spent a part of that time on a round-the-world trip, revisiting all the places that were important to him. Then he compiled several albums, with original pictures from his youth, newer pictures from his trip, and stories about what those places meant to him. It's an incredibly powerful document, and it's the best thing he could have left for his grandkids, all the more so because in this age of high mobility and disposable housing we no longer have family histories.
How much is 3 years of your kids lives worths?
Well, you earn it. My sister used to work on wall st; got all sorts of perks. Catered dinners and a chauffeur home when she worked late, that sort of thing. Thing is, the late nights, killer pressure, and absurdly long weeks were the norm. Me, I make probably a tenth of what she did, but I show up at 7:30 and leave at 4, and sleep at night. I have time for my kids and family. I've never worked on a weekend on this job. So yup, you can make $millions; you can also lose your soul.
I think that depends on your perspective. I know of several medial procedures that are common in Europe but are "experimental" here, and thus horribly expensive and not covered by insurance. Our insurance companies have a lot at stake; classifying any new procedure as "experimental" for perhaps 15 years saves them a lot of money. Never mind that people suffer and die as a result. Ditto for drugs; stuff that's common in Europe and Asia is not available here. So I'd say for procedures related to poor lifestyle - alcohol abuse, poor diet, lack of sleep - I'd say the US has the best care, since that's what our doctors treat. But for other procedures, those due to old age or overuse injury, often other countries have better care.
Well, I have all my calls forwarded to my cell phone. Even when I'm sitting in my office, next to my landline phone. Why? it's convenient, it's always there, it puts all my messages in one box, and my clients don't have to chase me down. For all I care, they could remove the useless landline phone from my desk and I'd never miss it.
You looked at the value of the dollar lately? It's pretty much toilet paper; last year banks in Europe wouldn't accept US$ at all - and it's dropped by 30% since. The only way the US$ can drop in value is if you wipe your butt with it; it's already toilet paper.
"Free flight" over the Pacific is one thing. Do you really want to free flight at, say, O'Hare? As for the fire departments, even volunteer fire departments have to comply with standards, and only the firefighters are volunteers. The facility, engines, and training are likely paid for by taxes. I don't know of a single FD that is run out of someone's living room, using private vehicles. I don't believe the gov't is the answer to all our problems, just as I don't believe it is the source of all problems. Government does certain things very, very well, and others poorly. Just like private industry. I refuse the neocon mantra that all government is a cesspool of waste and private industry is always the knight in shining armor.