Mod this guy up. This was my first impression on reading the post (IHNRTFA). Unless there's been some recent resurgence in the bay depending on crabs from the Chesepeake for any kind of solution is not really sustainable.
On the other hand, maybe this is the only way to get the government interested in saving the Chesepeake Bay ecosystem.:-)
In fact, why not make it so school lunches are 100% free, limit one per student per day, if all the food there is healthy.
Two reasons:
It's more expensive to make and sell healthy food, and the profit margins are lower. A pound of french fries costs a lot less to prepare than the equivalent amount of brocolli, but kids would probably pay more for the fries than the broccoli. In the US at least, so long as education in general is underfunded I don't see funds being expanded into school food offerings. In fact (although this trend may now be on the decline), a lot of schools moved to privatization, allowing Pizza Hut and similar companies to be placed right on the school; not only does Pizza Hut get to make money, but they pay the school for the right to be there. The school doesn't have to cover the costs of food anymore *and* gets a nice check.
Americans have a very odd relationship with control. Although they don't mind the idea of parents having near draconian control over their own children, they bristle at the merest mention of the federal government "telling them what to do", *especially*, it seems, when the government is trying to tell them what's "better" for them.
This is part of the "ignore something until it's a catastrophe" mindset that is not at all unique to America and indeed is widespread. If I remember my statistics 1 in every 5 dollars in the US is spent on healthcare. If we all just ate healthier and exercised, that proportion would be much lower. But even though it would mean an overall saving, people are reluctant to let funds go towards things like improving the overall general health and diet of the country.
I'd say the problem is they're treating this as a supply problem rather than a demand problem: if you deny them the bad food, then they'll eat healthier.
But kids, especially resourceful high school kids, will figure out a way to get the food they want to eat. This is a demand problem. You need to focus on changing how kids feel about eating healthy food.
It's up to parents to raise their kids from an early age to enjoy food that's good for them. I know so many people may age or younger who don't care for vegetables, only like white bread, and think of fries as a vegetable.
From a young age, my parents forced healthy food on me. Although occasionally I was miserable and felt deprived, most of the time I greatly enjoyed the food I ate despite being "healthy".
In a sense, this is a supply problem being tackled too late. You need to have your house stocked with healthy food at an early age when the child is developing their food preferences, *not* when they're already in high school and set in their ways.
It's a shame that these parents are waiting until middle or high school to control their kids in this way. It suggests a lack of trust, and it also suggests that if the kid is unwilling or unlikely to make healthy food choices voluntarily.
Probably the best step would be to limit their budget for school food, but let them get whatever they want. Instead, focus on getting them to have a larger breakfast before they leave, and a larger dinner when they get home, minimizing the food they eat at school. Parents can easily control the food available at home so long as the child doesn't yet have the funds or wherewithal to do their own grocery shopping.
In a sense, this is what happened to me. Years of candy deprivation means it was the first thing I went for when I had my own spending money in high school. But because my funds were limited (around $5-6 per week or so, I think) I had to make my own lunch at home, and used all my money on candy or soft drinks. When I got home, there generally weren't easy snacks available, and we didn't have much in the way of frozen dinners (or a microwave), so I was forced to cook something for myself if I wanted to eat something before dinner (and on nights when my parents were busy, I'd have to cook dinenr). This had two benefits: one, it meant that I was eating food that was relatively healthy (at worst, "fast food" meant opening a can of vegetable soup) and two that I was learning to cook, something which is not encouraged enough I think.
Sorry this comment is so long but I did not have time to write a shorter one.
A) I'm not saying that death isn't bad. I'm saying that it also isn't likely that you can ever overcome it. In other words, you can hate to die but accept that when it happens, it is more or less final. And if someone ever does find a way to unfreeze people and bring them back to life, what are the odds that the "second life" will really be worth it?
Finally, I'm not suggesting that anyone who has money left over must give it all to charity. I'm simply saying that immortality isn't gained through a freezer -- it's gained through leaving a real legacy, be it a trust for scholarships or a wide circle of friends or lives that you've positively touched, a work of art, etc.
It may be so that this gentleman has donated to charity in the past. Fine. But it's nonetheless his goal to leave the money he has left when he dies to himself. I suppose it is his money, but I can't help thinking it'd be better if it went to someone living instead.
Personally, I find the idea of taking it with you when you die to be a very selfish act, but I suppose that's just me. Oh, and don't forget that there's a reason that class envy exists -- there are actually a lot of people starving to death in the world, who live miserable existences. And that's due, among other things, to the existence of economic inequality in the world. So forgive me if I find expensive luxories such as cyrogeny to be a bit distasteful. It's socially acceptable to be disdainful of the poor; why can't I be disdainful of the rich? Some of them became so through hard work, but not all of them.
Plus, I'm an organ donor, so I'm not sure how that'd work out.:-)
Disclaimer: My family was rich when I was growing up (my dad, a psychiatrist, made around $100k/year), and have been living for the past 5 years or so on $23k/year, so I'm not exactly the poster boy for poverty.
Aren't you a bit young to have a life insurance policy? It sounds like that, plus the cryo, suggests you have an unhealthy relationship with death.
You should only get a life insurance policy to leave money for those you leave behind. That's the only reason.
You want to talk about immortality? If this guy leaves the $10 million as a trust for scholarships in a fund making just 5% interest above inflation, he can pay for the tuition of around 10 college students a year for all time. And who knows who those students could become?
I personally think this guy is sick. Anyone who wants to hold onto their money after they're dead has serious problems.
Wait, were you being sarcastic? When did healthcare and education become inconsequential?
Yes!
The point being that, although torture and capital punishment still exist, the real area where the US fails miserably on "human rights" is rights associated with social welfare.
Traditionally, the US (not just the government, but the people in general) for some reason has been more hostile to treating these as "rights." Most developed countries spend far more on welfare than the US does, and it shows.
Here in America, at least we have the FCC and other governing bodies telling big business what they are allowed to do
Whee! They have that in China too.
In fact, China Telecom is the government. Or vice versa.
It's pretty meaningless to talk about things like consumer choice or business regulation in China. The government is essentially communist, and even though things appear "free market" in essence nothing happens in China without the government's approval and, in fact, urging.
This is not a matter of profit. This is a matter of speech and freedom of information.
Although there's no doubt that China may want the revenue it may get from calls to and from China, keep in mind that this *is* China, where on almost any street corner you can find a man selling you a new bargain phone card that charges only a yuan or two per minute for calls to the US. Oh, and if you're not a complete moron you don't pay face value. If the card says 80 yuan, you offer 40 tops and the seller agrees, because he probably paid 20.
So it's not so much a money thing. It's a control thing. If Chinese people are using Skype, there's no way for the government to control and monitor the communication.
Disclosure: I've been to China, loved it, still think that having no civil liberties sucks. But, as the Chinese government likes to point out every time we issue a human rights report on them, the US fails on nearly as many of the items in the International Bill of Human Rights as they do. Of course, we fail on the inconsequential things, like healthcare and education.
Unfortunately I can't remember the exact instances where this has been true. To be honest, it really is 50-50; I find that it's been less true recently, possibly because I've become a little wiser when setting up the databases to begin with.
Actually, a good example is when you need to return a recordset with only row per "real" record, but you need to pull the first value only from a one to many relationship with that record -- like, say, details of the first transaction for that record.
So say the query that takes too long looks like this:
SELECT
( SELECT order_total FROM Orders WHERE Orders.order_person=People.person_id AND Orders.order_id = ( SELECT MIN(order_id) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.order_person=People.person_id) ) as earliest_total,
Person.first_name,
Person.last_name,
[etc]
FROM
People ORDER BY
People.last_name, People.first_name
Depending on the DB server, it may be faster to just do:
FROM
People ORDER BY
People.last_name, People.first_name
LOOP OVER QUERY
SELECT order_total
FROM Orders
WHERE order_person=[person_id]
ORDER BY order_id ASC
earliest_total=order_total[0]
Of course, keep in mind I'm just pulling out an example that I can remember. Sometimes, especially with a lot large tables all joined together, some of these subqueries can take a lot of processing time -- we're talking 15-30 second. On the other hand, most generic selects can take just 1-2ms, even with database connection overhead.
I'm a lowly web programmer, not nearly as brilliant in the programming field as these other geniuses here, but I find it interesting that almost all web programming books tell you that if you can move processing into the database query instead of running it in the machine code, that it'll be faster.
This is so rarely the case. Unless you have a very powerful database server, odds are good that quite a lot of the various aggregate functions you might want to run will go much, much faster if you simple do a simple select in the database and then loop through the processing in the web app code. Not sure why this is true but it is.
A month or two ago I heard a great quote on Cartalk that I think should be plastered to every programmer, scientist, and engineer's bulletin board:
"Reality often astonishes theory."
In all honesty, though, I think that a database *would* be up to the task, even for 1M+ users. Consider Amazon, which probably gets several thousand simultaneous hits each second. And each page they pull up involves much more complex data searches than a simple mailbox.
I'd say the key concerns here aren't surrounding efficiency of processing. Mail servers, no matter how configured, are relatively low on the scale of computational complexity. It's more a size issue than anything else. The main problem will be determining how to store the data in a way that is safe, secure, fast, and reliable. Because the data needs to be redundant and widely dispersed (as in the New Orleans example someone pointed out above), it may be that a database, while not the fastest tool, may be the best tool for the problem.
I'll admit; I know nothing about how one would go about making identical file systems available simultaneously on many distant servers. But I'm guessing once you start doing that, you're starting to increase the complexity for the system in any case.
There just wouldn't be an analogy for secular viewpoints.
Oh yes there frikken would. It might be called something like Ancient Roman Archeological Review and it would be a bunch of archaeologists talking about archaeological evidence being used to describe events taking place in ancient Rome, just as Biblical Archaeological Review would discuss archaeological evidence for events taking place during the Bible.
I especially like the one a few up from this where everybody who doesn't believe all that exists is a random occurrence is summarized into a half a sentence hate rant.
It's not an either/or proposition. You can believe that the universe and life wasn't random without believing in intelligent design.
This is what the deists believed, I think. Even the most orthodox of Jews tend to believe in evolution, and they would certainly disagree that creation was "a random occurrence".
Also, Biblical Archaeology Review" sounds, to me, like a journal that should be focused on archaeology and history surrounding events or places mentioned in the bible. You don't see secular archaeologists talking about evolution or the big bang, do you?
Getting rid of public education isn't accountability; it pretty much ensures that, in fact, the status quo will continue -- that rich kids who now go to well funded schools and have parents that can provide them with time, attention, books, and tutoring will do better than poor kids whose schools tend to be poorly funded and whose parents are often too busy working, and lack education themselves, to provide a nurturing educational environment at home. Only without public education, the poor won't stand a chance. With the possible exception of a few charities here and there, the only kind of school I can see filling in for public school for the poor would be religious schools, which is fine for families who want that kind of environment, but no so hot for those who don't. And don't forget that kids taught in a religious school just might not be as informed about evolution.
So, yeah, arguing that the way to improve education is by eliminating public education is out.
And self education really has nothing to do with accountability. Each person absorbs information differently. Some people are excellent at teaching themselves things; other people need to be guided in it. And it often tends to be different for different people. I need little to no handholding when facing something new and unfamiliar on a computer, but heaven help me (and anyone within my immediate vicinity) if I tried to do much more than add a quart of oil to my car.
Once I learned how to read, I read up a storm and could read probably at high school level in elementary school (and perhaps the college level in middle school). But I had to be taught how to read. I didn't learn it on my own. There are some geniuses who somehow manage to teach themselves to read. If I'd been left in a room with a bunch of books but never taught to read, I'd probably still be playing with fingerpaint.
I think that there are a lot of useful answers beyond getting rid of public education or forcing people to teach themselves.
Here are some ideas:
1) Value teachers, and give them support. From what I understand, teaching is not an easy job, and many teachers get hell from students, and hell from the student's parents. Although people keep saying that teachers are heroes, they sure aren't treated like them. This may be why teacher burnout is so common.
In my opinion, the number one way to improve education is to prevent teacher burnout.
As long as there's teacher burnout, a lot of teachers who are great at teaching, but not great at dealing with administrative politics, angry parents and unruly students will leave. In their wake will be people who either love teaching so much that they're willing to stay in their position (although they tend to be consistently haggard), or people who are great at all the other stuff -- politics, sucking up to the administration/parents, discipline. Now, in high school I was lucky enough to be mostly in AP/Honors level classes, which meant that the students were more likely to behave, tended to care about learning, and the teacher was generally a better teacher than most. But my teacher for PE was another story -- agressive, disciplinarian, and about as mentally flexible as a cinderblock. I'm not an idiot and I tend to do well in most of my classes, but I got a C in health because the focus was exclusively on rote memorization (I remember that I got three questions on a quick marked as incorrect because we were supposed to list three items in order of relevance or something -- like I remember anything from health class -- and all three were marked wrong because I had one out of order).
Okay, I'm getting a little off track here, but my main point is that teachers aren't really valued or respected, kids aren't taught to value or respect their teacher, and in many cases teachers are seen as the obstacle that's keeping Timmy from getting in Harvard, rather than as someone trying desperately to give him the intellectual tools that would be needed
In the end, my point is, Integgegant Design != God. It could be God, it could be alians, it could be somethign we havn't thought of.
I think this is, perhaps, the biggest point. Most Americans are, I think, largely secular -- they might go to church once or twice a year but in their day to day living they have no problems with lying, cheating, coveting, killing, stealing, etc. -- all the things that the bible explicitly prohibits. Few of them tithe, almost none of them follow the rules set forth in the bible and with the possible exception of a fierce condemnation of homosexuality most of them couldn't care less about behaviors forbidden in the bible at all.
However, they don't like evolution. I'm not sure why; in "The Language Instinct" Steven Pinker argues that many people still hold fast to the old medieval view of the "great chain of being", in which creatures have an ever increasing level of "greatness" or complexity which can be described in a simple line. From that standpoint, it's difficult to understand evolution at all.
So people are more willing to entertain the idea that aliens (and where did they come from?) came down to earth and designed everything. The percentage of Americans who don't believe in "pure" evolution is very high -- something like 80% of Americans believe that humans were either created or nudged along somehow by an outside force. That's much higher than the percentage of Americans who actually are religious.
Americans just don't like evolution. I can't speak for the rest of the world, though.
In the gym in question, it's clear that this isn't being done to heighten security; it's just to keep people from having to drag a gym id around. Also, it's much faster to slam your thumb on a pad than to hold out a card for someone to scan.
But here's how to implement a thumbprint-as-login system and keep people, including the paranoid freaks here at slashdot, happy.
1) Make it optional. Don't want to submit your thumbprint? Fine. Just make sure you always show up with your card.
2) Make it hashed, using a public key unique to that system. That way, the information stored is effectively useless. If a hacker gets in, all that they will be able to do is see a bunch of GUIDs. Whoop de doo.
I'm almost 100% that this is, in fact, just what is being stored. I mean, imagine actually storing a thumbprint. That's got to take up more space, and is really slow and inefficient for data lookup.
Someone more knowledgeable in biometrics, please rip me a new one if necessary.
Sorry. I'm an ignorant fool. I just assumed that *all* that mod_deflate did was decompress a file prior to serving it. In which case, it wouldn't save bandwidth, would it?
I see now that I got it bass-ackwards. Looks like mod_deflate *compresses* files then sends them on through. And "BrowserMatch" means that for browsers not happy with the compressed file, they can get it uncompressed.
So, actually mod_deflate is exactly what you want: keeps it whole on the server, compresses it for transfer, then sends it on.
And heck, why on earth did you do the gzip? Sure it saves a few cycles over mod_deflate, but deflate has the distinct advantage that you don't have to start inventing new mime types and handlers for it.
Um, call me crazy, but I don't think they compressed it because there wasn't enough space on the server. I can't think of a single reason you'd want to have something compressed on a server and not when transferring it, so I have no idea who uses mod_deflate or why.
You save a lot of bandwidth by sending it as a compressed file. Most browsers automagically decompress HTML files and ilk when sent gzipped, so I see no reason why an svg would be treated any differently.
On the one hand, I disagree; on the other hand, DUH.
Basically, Parent poster was saying that comedy *was* secondary. It's not a comedy, really, any more than a horror movie with a few pop culture references in it is "comedy", because the comedy is secondary. Everyone knows it's not a "comedy", it's an ad. And a fairly effective one two. Although the long-term purpose of the ad is to make you choose their company, in the short term it's just to get you to think about disk backup instead of tape backup.
Move forward a month or two. The IT Manager (who sees and enjoys the film) has the idea "tape backup bad" floating in his head for a month and goes to see his boss. "I think we should move away from tape backup." "Okay," says the boss. "Research alternatives."
Now, the guy doesn't remember the name LiveVault. But when he starts doing research, the name comes up. It clicks some kind of memory in his mind -- maybe he actually remembers that it was the company in that John Cleese ad; maybe he just sees the logo and for reasons unknown to him suddenly feels happy, amused, and, for some reason, has a flashback to being a dork in middle school playing a nice game of D&D with his buddies and listening to TMBG.
Anyway, all humor has an agenda. Some of the greatest, funniest pieces are designed not only to make you laugh (agenda 1; "comedy for comedy's sake), but also to make you think about what might be a serious (or slightly boring) subject in a new way (agenda 2: "comedy as a gateway to exposition"--think satire). Anyone who's seen La Vita e' Bella (Life is Beautiful) can affirm that not all movies that classify as "comedy" are about light subjects.
I thought that this was a nice little film. It wasn't the world's funniest movie but it was more enjoyable than a standard white paper or run of the mill "Why we're better" powerpointlike flash presentation. For those of you who want hard facts on why one form of backup is better than the other, I'm sure that LiveVault has a page or two (and perhaps even a presentation or two) right up your alley. But this ad is geared towards simply getting people interested enough in the subject to explore it further, and I think it's succesful in this.
That's what Microsoft did. Apps are apps and OS is OS, and coupling one to the other has been recognized as bad design since the 1960s or earlier. Yet MS purposefully chose to do bad engineering because it looked like a good marketing strategy.
Here's something interesting I've noticed about MS apps. And believe me, I hate MS, so it really pisses me off:
They're better.
Oh, don't get me wrong; the security is crap, and you don't have the beautiful straightforward control like you do in *nix or BSD.
BUT, their applications are faster. Much faster.
Modularity comes at a cost, and that cost is response time. On a certain machine, OpenOffice will take around 30 seconds or so to load up; on the same machine, Office opens up nearly instantly.
This is also pretty much true of Internet Explorer and other Windows applications.
The response time of items like wizards, dialog boxes, etc., is pretty much always faster than their "better programmed" more modular counterparts.
If you look at a user using an application, all they care about is getting things done. They don't care about whether or not the OS is separate from the application. They don't care if Media Player is installed or not. In fact, I'm betting that one of the first things that 50% of the more tech-savvy users of these Media Player-free systems are going to do is download Media Player.
Again, I hate to admit it -- in the same way that I hate to acknowledge that there are many things about the US that are fucked up, because I live here -- but basically the OpenSource community makes supremely excellent server software and OSs, but only average desktop software. Microsoft makes very good desktop software, with fast-as-heck response times.
I think that, in all seriousness, it's getting to the point where distinguishing between what is an application and what is the OS no longer makes 100% sense. I *like* being able to view thumbnails of images in a directory folder, and to click on a link and see a 30s smaller preview of a movie file. All that would be much more difficult if the OS was made separate from the OS.
As far as the Help system is concerned, how would *you* suggest that it be set up? That Microsoft develop another application that uses code that's practically identical to the code used by Internet Explorer? Isn't it good programming to share code rather than duplicate it? And, if so, wouldn't it make sense for IE and the Help System to use the same codebase?
Oh, come on. You throw a set of keys and your wallet and your coat in a tray, you really think the guy behind the monitor is examining each and every set of keys that rolls by?
In truth, airport security is a joke. I've taken carryon bags with penknifes in them (not on purpose; just forgot that I hadn't moved it to my checked baggage) and on September 14th (yes, just after the big September 11th) I flew back with *explosives* in my bag (just fireworks really, but none-the-less). They were in a paper bag inside my backpack and despite the fact that I was one of those lucky few who was taken aside and had my bag "searched", they totally missed them. Keep in mind in both cases these were accidentally in my luggage; I'm no terrorist.
Airport security is there for one reason only. To make people who are chickenshit less scared about getting on a plane because they think that preventing "weapons" (such as the file in a nail clipper) from getting on a plane is how you make a plane safe. The truth is, people are smarter now about what to do when someone tries to start something on a plane. If I got on the plane with an Uzi hidden down the side of my leg, I still wouldn't make it to the cockpit no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll see your firecrackers and raise you smoke bombs. Although, to be fair, they were in my backpack, not my jacket.
Date of the flight? 9/14/01.
Mod this guy up. This was my first impression on reading the post (IHNRTFA). Unless there's been some recent resurgence in the bay depending on crabs from the Chesepeake for any kind of solution is not really sustainable.
:-)
On the other hand, maybe this is the only way to get the government interested in saving the Chesepeake Bay ecosystem.
Two reasons:
This is part of the "ignore something until it's a catastrophe" mindset that is not at all unique to America and indeed is widespread. If I remember my statistics 1 in every 5 dollars in the US is spent on healthcare. If we all just ate healthier and exercised, that proportion would be much lower. But even though it would mean an overall saving, people are reluctant to let funds go towards things like improving the overall general health and diet of the country.
I'd say the problem is they're treating this as a supply problem rather than a demand problem: if you deny them the bad food, then they'll eat healthier.
But kids, especially resourceful high school kids, will figure out a way to get the food they want to eat. This is a demand problem. You need to focus on changing how kids feel about eating healthy food.
It's up to parents to raise their kids from an early age to enjoy food that's good for them. I know so many people may age or younger who don't care for vegetables, only like white bread, and think of fries as a vegetable.
From a young age, my parents forced healthy food on me. Although occasionally I was miserable and felt deprived, most of the time I greatly enjoyed the food I ate despite being "healthy".
In a sense, this is a supply problem being tackled too late. You need to have your house stocked with healthy food at an early age when the child is developing their food preferences, *not* when they're already in high school and set in their ways.
It's a shame that these parents are waiting until middle or high school to control their kids in this way. It suggests a lack of trust, and it also suggests that if the kid is unwilling or unlikely to make healthy food choices voluntarily.
Probably the best step would be to limit their budget for school food, but let them get whatever they want. Instead, focus on getting them to have a larger breakfast before they leave, and a larger dinner when they get home, minimizing the food they eat at school. Parents can easily control the food available at home so long as the child doesn't yet have the funds or wherewithal to do their own grocery shopping.
In a sense, this is what happened to me. Years of candy deprivation means it was the first thing I went for when I had my own spending money in high school. But because my funds were limited (around $5-6 per week or so, I think) I had to make my own lunch at home, and used all my money on candy or soft drinks. When I got home, there generally weren't easy snacks available, and we didn't have much in the way of frozen dinners (or a microwave), so I was forced to cook something for myself if I wanted to eat something before dinner (and on nights when my parents were busy, I'd have to cook dinenr). This had two benefits: one, it meant that I was eating food that was relatively healthy (at worst, "fast food" meant opening a can of vegetable soup) and two that I was learning to cook, something which is not encouraged enough I think.
Sorry this comment is so long but I did not have time to write a shorter one.
A) I'm not saying that death isn't bad. I'm saying that it also isn't likely that you can ever overcome it. In other words, you can hate to die but accept that when it happens, it is more or less final. And if someone ever does find a way to unfreeze people and bring them back to life, what are the odds that the "second life" will really be worth it?
:-)
Finally, I'm not suggesting that anyone who has money left over must give it all to charity. I'm simply saying that immortality isn't gained through a freezer -- it's gained through leaving a real legacy, be it a trust for scholarships or a wide circle of friends or lives that you've positively touched, a work of art, etc.
It may be so that this gentleman has donated to charity in the past. Fine. But it's nonetheless his goal to leave the money he has left when he dies to himself. I suppose it is his money, but I can't help thinking it'd be better if it went to someone living instead.
Personally, I find the idea of taking it with you when you die to be a very selfish act, but I suppose that's just me. Oh, and don't forget that there's a reason that class envy exists -- there are actually a lot of people starving to death in the world, who live miserable existences. And that's due, among other things, to the existence of economic inequality in the world. So forgive me if I find expensive luxories such as cyrogeny to be a bit distasteful. It's socially acceptable to be disdainful of the poor; why can't I be disdainful of the rich? Some of them became so through hard work, but not all of them.
Plus, I'm an organ donor, so I'm not sure how that'd work out.
Disclaimer: My family was rich when I was growing up (my dad, a psychiatrist, made around $100k/year), and have been living for the past 5 years or so on $23k/year, so I'm not exactly the poster boy for poverty.
Aren't you a bit young to have a life insurance policy? It sounds like that, plus the cryo, suggests you have an unhealthy relationship with death.
You should only get a life insurance policy to leave money for those you leave behind. That's the only reason.
You want to talk about immortality? If this guy leaves the $10 million as a trust for scholarships in a fund making just 5% interest above inflation, he can pay for the tuition of around 10 college students a year for all time. And who knows who those students could become?
I personally think this guy is sick. Anyone who wants to hold onto their money after they're dead has serious problems.
Wait, were you being sarcastic? When did healthcare and education become inconsequential?
Yes!
The point being that, although torture and capital punishment still exist, the real area where the US fails miserably on "human rights" is rights associated with social welfare.
Traditionally, the US (not just the government, but the people in general) for some reason has been more hostile to treating these as "rights." Most developed countries spend far more on welfare than the US does, and it shows.
Here in America, at least we have the FCC and other governing bodies telling big business what they are allowed to do
Whee! They have that in China too.
In fact, China Telecom is the government. Or vice versa.
It's pretty meaningless to talk about things like consumer choice or business regulation in China. The government is essentially communist, and even though things appear "free market" in essence nothing happens in China without the government's approval and, in fact, urging.
This is not a matter of profit. This is a matter of speech and freedom of information.
Although there's no doubt that China may want the revenue it may get from calls to and from China, keep in mind that this *is* China, where on almost any street corner you can find a man selling you a new bargain phone card that charges only a yuan or two per minute for calls to the US. Oh, and if you're not a complete moron you don't pay face value. If the card says 80 yuan, you offer 40 tops and the seller agrees, because he probably paid 20.
So it's not so much a money thing. It's a control thing. If Chinese people are using Skype, there's no way for the government to control and monitor the communication.
Disclosure: I've been to China, loved it, still think that having no civil liberties sucks. But, as the Chinese government likes to point out every time we issue a human rights report on them, the US fails on nearly as many of the items in the International Bill of Human Rights as they do. Of course, we fail on the inconsequential things, like healthcare and education.
Unfortunately I can't remember the exact instances where this has been true. To be honest, it really is 50-50; I find that it's been less true recently, possibly because I've become a little wiser when setting up the databases to begin with.
Actually, a good example is when you need to return a recordset with only row per "real" record, but you need to pull the first value only from a one to many relationship with that record -- like, say, details of the first transaction for that record.
So say the query that takes too long looks like this:
SELECT
( SELECT order_total FROM Orders WHERE Orders.order_person=People.person_id AND Orders.order_id = ( SELECT MIN(order_id) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.order_person=People.person_id)
) as earliest_total,
Person.first_name,
Person.last_name,
[etc]
FROM
People
ORDER BY
People.last_name, People.first_name
Depending on the DB server, it may be faster to just do:
SELECT
Person.person_id,
Person.first_name,
Person.last_name,
[etc]
FROM
People
ORDER BY
People.last_name, People.first_name
LOOP OVER QUERY
SELECT order_total
FROM Orders
WHERE order_person=[person_id]
ORDER BY order_id ASC
earliest_total=order_total[0]
Of course, keep in mind I'm just pulling out an example that I can remember. Sometimes, especially with a lot large tables all joined together, some of these subqueries can take a lot of processing time -- we're talking 15-30 second. On the other hand, most generic selects can take just 1-2ms, even with database connection overhead.
In a related vein:
I'm a lowly web programmer, not nearly as brilliant in the programming field as these other geniuses here, but I find it interesting that almost all web programming books tell you that if you can move processing into the database query instead of running it in the machine code, that it'll be faster.
This is so rarely the case. Unless you have a very powerful database server, odds are good that quite a lot of the various aggregate functions you might want to run will go much, much faster if you simple do a simple select in the database and then loop through the processing in the web app code. Not sure why this is true but it is.
A month or two ago I heard a great quote on Cartalk that I think should be plastered to every programmer, scientist, and engineer's bulletin board:
"Reality often astonishes theory."
In all honesty, though, I think that a database *would* be up to the task, even for 1M+ users. Consider Amazon, which probably gets several thousand simultaneous hits each second. And each page they pull up involves much more complex data searches than a simple mailbox.
I'd say the key concerns here aren't surrounding efficiency of processing. Mail servers, no matter how configured, are relatively low on the scale of computational complexity. It's more a size issue than anything else. The main problem will be determining how to store the data in a way that is safe, secure, fast, and reliable. Because the data needs to be redundant and widely dispersed (as in the New Orleans example someone pointed out above), it may be that a database, while not the fastest tool, may be the best tool for the problem.
I'll admit; I know nothing about how one would go about making identical file systems available simultaneously on many distant servers. But I'm guessing once you start doing that, you're starting to increase the complexity for the system in any case.
I'd gladly pay for batteries every month or so, so long as it means not having to lug around a 40lb backpack.
There just wouldn't be an analogy for secular viewpoints.
Oh yes there frikken would. It might be called something like Ancient Roman Archeological Review and it would be a bunch of archaeologists talking about archaeological evidence being used to describe events taking place in ancient Rome, just as Biblical Archaeological Review would discuss archaeological evidence for events taking place during the Bible.
I especially like the one a few up from this where everybody who doesn't believe all that exists is a random occurrence is summarized into a half a sentence hate rant.
It's not an either/or proposition. You can believe that the universe and life wasn't random without believing in intelligent design.
This is what the deists believed, I think. Even the most orthodox of Jews tend to believe in evolution, and they would certainly disagree that creation was "a random occurrence".
Also, Biblical Archaeology Review" sounds, to me, like a journal that should be focused on archaeology and history surrounding events or places mentioned in the bible. You don't see secular archaeologists talking about evolution or the big bang, do you?
Not at all.
Getting rid of public education isn't accountability; it pretty much ensures that, in fact, the status quo will continue -- that rich kids who now go to well funded schools and have parents that can provide them with time, attention, books, and tutoring will do better than poor kids whose schools tend to be poorly funded and whose parents are often too busy working, and lack education themselves, to provide a nurturing educational environment at home. Only without public education, the poor won't stand a chance. With the possible exception of a few charities here and there, the only kind of school I can see filling in for public school for the poor would be religious schools, which is fine for families who want that kind of environment, but no so hot for those who don't. And don't forget that kids taught in a religious school just might not be as informed about evolution.
So, yeah, arguing that the way to improve education is by eliminating public education is out.
And self education really has nothing to do with accountability. Each person absorbs information differently. Some people are excellent at teaching themselves things; other people need to be guided in it. And it often tends to be different for different people. I need little to no handholding when facing something new and unfamiliar on a computer, but heaven help me (and anyone within my immediate vicinity) if I tried to do much more than add a quart of oil to my car.
Once I learned how to read, I read up a storm and could read probably at high school level in elementary school (and perhaps the college level in middle school). But I had to be taught how to read. I didn't learn it on my own. There are some geniuses who somehow manage to teach themselves to read. If I'd been left in a room with a bunch of books but never taught to read, I'd probably still be playing with fingerpaint.
I think that there are a lot of useful answers beyond getting rid of public education or forcing people to teach themselves.
Here are some ideas:
1) Value teachers, and give them support. From what I understand, teaching is not an easy job, and many teachers get hell from students, and hell from the student's parents. Although people keep saying that teachers are heroes, they sure aren't treated like them. This may be why teacher burnout is so common.
In my opinion, the number one way to improve education is to prevent teacher burnout.
As long as there's teacher burnout, a lot of teachers who are great at teaching, but not great at dealing with administrative politics, angry parents and unruly students will leave. In their wake will be people who either love teaching so much that they're willing to stay in their position (although they tend to be consistently haggard), or people who are great at all the other stuff -- politics, sucking up to the administration/parents, discipline. Now, in high school I was lucky enough to be mostly in AP/Honors level classes, which meant that the students were more likely to behave, tended to care about learning, and the teacher was generally a better teacher than most. But my teacher for PE was another story -- agressive, disciplinarian, and about as mentally flexible as a cinderblock. I'm not an idiot and I tend to do well in most of my classes, but I got a C in health because the focus was exclusively on rote memorization (I remember that I got three questions on a quick marked as incorrect because we were supposed to list three items in order of relevance or something -- like I remember anything from health class -- and all three were marked wrong because I had one out of order).
Okay, I'm getting a little off track here, but my main point is that teachers aren't really valued or respected, kids aren't taught to value or respect their teacher, and in many cases teachers are seen as the obstacle that's keeping Timmy from getting in Harvard, rather than as someone trying desperately to give him the intellectual tools that would be needed
In the end, my point is, Integgegant Design != God. It could be God, it could be alians, it could be somethign we havn't thought of.
I think this is, perhaps, the biggest point. Most Americans are, I think, largely secular -- they might go to church once or twice a year but in their day to day living they have no problems with lying, cheating, coveting, killing, stealing, etc. -- all the things that the bible explicitly prohibits. Few of them tithe, almost none of them follow the rules set forth in the bible and with the possible exception of a fierce condemnation of homosexuality most of them couldn't care less about behaviors forbidden in the bible at all.
However, they don't like evolution. I'm not sure why; in "The Language Instinct" Steven Pinker argues that many people still hold fast to the old medieval view of the "great chain of being", in which creatures have an ever increasing level of "greatness" or complexity which can be described in a simple line. From that standpoint, it's difficult to understand evolution at all.
So people are more willing to entertain the idea that aliens (and where did they come from?) came down to earth and designed everything. The percentage of Americans who don't believe in "pure" evolution is very high -- something like 80% of Americans believe that humans were either created or nudged along somehow by an outside force. That's much higher than the percentage of Americans who actually are religious.
Americans just don't like evolution. I can't speak for the rest of the world, though.
In the gym in question, it's clear that this isn't being done to heighten security; it's just to keep people from having to drag a gym id around. Also, it's much faster to slam your thumb on a pad than to hold out a card for someone to scan.
But here's how to implement a thumbprint-as-login system and keep people, including the paranoid freaks here at slashdot, happy.
1) Make it optional. Don't want to submit your thumbprint? Fine. Just make sure you always show up with your card.
2) Make it hashed, using a public key unique to that system. That way, the information stored is effectively useless. If a hacker gets in, all that they will be able to do is see a bunch of GUIDs. Whoop de doo.
I'm almost 100% that this is, in fact, just what is being stored. I mean, imagine actually storing a thumbprint. That's got to take up more space, and is really slow and inefficient for data lookup.
Someone more knowledgeable in biometrics, please rip me a new one if necessary.
I figured out why my Firefox did so spiffily. At some point in the past, I went here: Adobe's SVG zone and installed their handy plugin.
Works like a dream.
Sorry. I'm an ignorant fool. I just assumed that *all* that mod_deflate did was decompress a file prior to serving it. In which case, it wouldn't save bandwidth, would it?
I see now that I got it bass-ackwards. Looks like mod_deflate *compresses* files then sends them on through. And "BrowserMatch" means that for browsers not happy with the compressed file, they can get it uncompressed.
So, actually mod_deflate is exactly what you want: keeps it whole on the server, compresses it for transfer, then sends it on.
So my earlier comment is bunk.
And heck, why on earth did you do the gzip? Sure it saves a few cycles over mod_deflate, but deflate has the distinct advantage that you don't have to start inventing new mime types and handlers for it.
Um, call me crazy, but I don't think they compressed it because there wasn't enough space on the server. I can't think of a single reason you'd want to have something compressed on a server and not when transferring it, so I have no idea who uses mod_deflate or why.
You save a lot of bandwidth by sending it as a compressed file. Most browsers automagically decompress HTML files and ilk when sent gzipped, so I see no reason why an svg would be treated any differently.
My Firefox handled it just fine.
This is one of those times where's it's crucial to read the article. The headline should read,
"Opera CEO Prepares to Swim from Norway to the United States"
The story should reflect same.
Look above for the half-dozen odd people who have figured it out.
And yes, for all of you who pointed out how difficult it would be to swim across the Atlantic Ocean -- yes, you're right.
On the one hand, I disagree; on the other hand, DUH.
Basically, Parent poster was saying that comedy *was* secondary. It's not a comedy, really, any more than a horror movie with a few pop culture references in it is "comedy", because the comedy is secondary. Everyone knows it's not a "comedy", it's an ad. And a fairly effective one two. Although the long-term purpose of the ad is to make you choose their company, in the short term it's just to get you to think about disk backup instead of tape backup.
Move forward a month or two. The IT Manager (who sees and enjoys the film) has the idea "tape backup bad" floating in his head for a month and goes to see his boss. "I think we should move away from tape backup." "Okay," says the boss. "Research alternatives."
Now, the guy doesn't remember the name LiveVault. But when he starts doing research, the name comes up. It clicks some kind of memory in his mind -- maybe he actually remembers that it was the company in that John Cleese ad; maybe he just sees the logo and for reasons unknown to him suddenly feels happy, amused, and, for some reason, has a flashback to being a dork in middle school playing a nice game of D&D with his buddies and listening to TMBG.
Anyway, all humor has an agenda. Some of the greatest, funniest pieces are designed not only to make you laugh (agenda 1; "comedy for comedy's sake), but also to make you think about what might be a serious (or slightly boring) subject in a new way (agenda 2: "comedy as a gateway to exposition"--think satire). Anyone who's seen La Vita e' Bella (Life is Beautiful) can affirm that not all movies that classify as "comedy" are about light subjects.
I thought that this was a nice little film. It wasn't the world's funniest movie but it was more enjoyable than a standard white paper or run of the mill "Why we're better" powerpointlike flash presentation. For those of you who want hard facts on why one form of backup is better than the other, I'm sure that LiveVault has a page or two (and perhaps even a presentation or two) right up your alley. But this ad is geared towards simply getting people interested enough in the subject to explore it further, and I think it's succesful in this.
That's what Microsoft did. Apps are apps and OS is OS, and coupling one to the other has been recognized as bad design since the 1960s or earlier. Yet MS purposefully chose to do bad engineering because it looked like a good marketing strategy.
Here's something interesting I've noticed about MS apps. And believe me, I hate MS, so it really pisses me off:
They're better.
Oh, don't get me wrong; the security is crap, and you don't have the beautiful straightforward control like you do in *nix or BSD.
BUT, their applications are faster. Much faster.
Modularity comes at a cost, and that cost is response time. On a certain machine, OpenOffice will take around 30 seconds or so to load up; on the same machine, Office opens up nearly instantly.
This is also pretty much true of Internet Explorer and other Windows applications.
The response time of items like wizards, dialog boxes, etc., is pretty much always faster than their "better programmed" more modular counterparts.
If you look at a user using an application, all they care about is getting things done. They don't care about whether or not the OS is separate from the application. They don't care if Media Player is installed or not. In fact, I'm betting that one of the first things that 50% of the more tech-savvy users of these Media Player-free systems are going to do is download Media Player.
Again, I hate to admit it -- in the same way that I hate to acknowledge that there are many things about the US that are fucked up, because I live here -- but basically the OpenSource community makes supremely excellent server software and OSs, but only average desktop software. Microsoft makes very good desktop software, with fast-as-heck response times.
I think that, in all seriousness, it's getting to the point where distinguishing between what is an application and what is the OS no longer makes 100% sense. I *like* being able to view thumbnails of images in a directory folder, and to click on a link and see a 30s smaller preview of a movie file. All that would be much more difficult if the OS was made separate from the OS.
As far as the Help system is concerned, how would *you* suggest that it be set up? That Microsoft develop another application that uses code that's practically identical to the code used by Internet Explorer? Isn't it good programming to share code rather than duplicate it? And, if so, wouldn't it make sense for IE and the Help System to use the same codebase?
I'm just sayin'.
Oh, come on. You throw a set of keys and your wallet and your coat in a tray, you really think the guy behind the monitor is examining each and every set of keys that rolls by?
In truth, airport security is a joke. I've taken carryon bags with penknifes in them (not on purpose; just forgot that I hadn't moved it to my checked baggage) and on September 14th (yes, just after the big September 11th) I flew back with *explosives* in my bag (just fireworks really, but none-the-less). They were in a paper bag inside my backpack and despite the fact that I was one of those lucky few who was taken aside and had my bag "searched", they totally missed them. Keep in mind in both cases these were accidentally in my luggage; I'm no terrorist.
Airport security is there for one reason only. To make people who are chickenshit less scared about getting on a plane because they think that preventing "weapons" (such as the file in a nail clipper) from getting on a plane is how you make a plane safe. The truth is, people are smarter now about what to do when someone tries to start something on a plane. If I got on the plane with an Uzi hidden down the side of my leg, I still wouldn't make it to the cockpit no matter what.
Linux servers only have an uptime of 35.6%?!?
That's terrible!
Even Windows has an average uptime of 50% or so.