I don't think we can blame it all on the pedestrian-friendliness of the environment. Finland has many good examples of pedestrian-friendly cities, with great regional public transportation, and plenty of shops and services within easy walking distance even in smaller towns. In fact, many people in the Helsinki area don't even own a car. Nonetheless, obesity is reaching epidemic proportions (especially among young people) here as well. If having pedestrian-friendly cities were the deciding factor, obesity in Finland should be very low, but that is clearly not the case.
As someone who suffers really badly from jet lag, I can't make up my mind if it would be better or worse to get to my destination faster. One one hand, I suppose I would be better equipped to deal with the time difference if I hadn't spent the previous 12 hours crammed into a pressurized aluminum tube. On the other hand, the time change would come much more suddenly, and I think I would be far more tempted to "nap" (and go into very deep sleep because it feels like the middle of the night) at inappropriate times.
Personally, I would like to see more development in the opposite direction: slower, but more comfortable travel. I would be thrilled to see a revival of trans-atlantic passenger airship service. I'd definitely be willing to pay more and accept the longer travel time if I could do it more comfortably.
I really don't see how you can have "murder" without a body, remains of a body, or some specific claim as to how the body was disposed of.
It's entirely possible to make a conviction based on circumstantial evidence, such as the suspect having a strong motive (like opening a new life insurance policy on the victim) or finding evidence of intent (such as plans or a list of supplies for committing the murder) after the victim's disappearance. There could also be physical evidence to indicate that the victim had sustained non-survivable injuries, such as finding that the victim bled a fatal amount of blood in the suspect's house.
Also, as you pointed out, convictions have been made based on witnesses to and evidence of body disposal. I don't remember the exact case, but it involved the victim's body being put into a large cooler, carried onto a boat (this was observed by a witness), and dumped at sea. The cooler was also dumped, and the suspects shot holes in it in an effort to make it sink. However, it floated, and was found by a fisherman, who decided it was a perfectly good cooler, even though it had bullet holes in it, was missing its lid, and was covered in what he thought was fish blood. When investigators asked around about the cooler, the fisherman turned it over to them. I think they may have found some traces of the victim's blood in it, and they could tie it to the witness who saw the suspects carrying it onto their boat. They got a conviction in that case.
Kitchen appliances/gadgets seem to go over well with geeks and non-geeks alike. They're certainly popular with the kitchen hackers in our house.
Also, Heston Blumenthal and other proponents of molecular gastronomy have taken cooking to a seriously geeky level. Heston Blumenthal has written several books that would make excellent gifts to get non-geeks to question how they think about cooking.
I'm a geek, but I'm also a girl, so I appreciate non-geeky gifts like jewelry, etc. Of course, I was extra appreciative the year I got the microchip earrings.
Chlamydia from a computer? Erm, no. Those folks need to do a little reading.
Ok, not directly from the computer itself, but I can see how this scenario could happen. Teens are using instant messaging in astounding numbers these days. I also recently found out that the incidence of STDs among teenagers is way higher than I ever imagined it to be (and many teens don't know they're infected, further spreading STDs). So, here's how it could happen: two teenagers meet and start flirting through instant messages (or other chat). They decide to meet in real life and have sex. One of them has an STD (let's say chlamydia), and now the other one is infected. Granted, they may or may not have met each other in real life without the chat, but in this case the computer was where the relationship started, and therefore it is indirectly responsible for teen #2 getting chlamydia.
I should probably point out that I met my husband on IRC, and I have my own story about how computers literally changed my life. I probably wouldn't have ever tried IRC if I hadn't been interested in the demoscene. I wouldn't have known about the demoscene if I hadn't met my first boyfriend. I wouldn't have met my first boyfriend if I didn't call BBSs. I wouldn't have called BBSs if I wasn't interested in computers. I wouldn't have been as interested in computers as I was if we didn't start using them at school when I was in the first or second grade. So in a very real way, if it hadn't been for computers (and especially IRC), I would not be married to my husband, and our daughter would not exist.
Says YOU. Tell me, what is it that babies were supposed to drink 6000 years ago? Formula? Diet Coke?
Breast milk, either from their mother or from another woman. A quote from the History of Breastfeeding:
"In the early years of the human species, breastfeeding was as common as it was for other mammals feeding their young. There were no alternative foods for the infants, and the mother, along with other lactating females, would have no choice but to breastfeed the children. This process is still seen in many developing countries and is known as shared breastfeeding."
It's very rare for a baby to be intolerant to the lactose in its mother's milk (see Myth 21 at this page), and as another poster pointed out, babies that couldn't digest human milk didn't live very long.
The leading cause of death for infants less than 100 years ago in developed nations (and STILL the leading killer today in underdeveloped countries) was diarrhea. How do you get diarrhea? Hmm, lactose intolerance causes - guess? Diarrhea. Baby can't drink breast milk, so you give it something else - something more likely to be contaminated with diarrhea causing viruses. Net result? More diarrhea.
Until fairly recently in the history of human beings, if babies didn't get breast milk from their mothers, they were usually nursed by another lactating woman (see wet nurse). Although breast milk substitutes were already available in the mid-1800s (see a history of baby formula here) it was only about in the 1940s, when women were needed in the workforce, that the use of baby formula really became widespread. Incidentally, one major way babies get diarrhea in developing countries today is from drinking formula mixed with contaminated water. Breast milk is definitely a safer alternative.
Humans have recently (in the evolutionary time scale) started doing something that few (if any) other mammals do: drinking the milk of another animal. The fact that adult humans are developing a better tolerance for lactose is quite significant.
Also, note that you can't just use debit cards for everything. There are quite a few things in life that you do need cash for, and blind people should not be excluded from being able to use regular money.
The US has perfectly good coins in denominations up to $1, which can be distinguished by blind people. If people are mainly using cash for small (for example, under $5) purchases, and cards for everything else, why not promote the use of coins for small purchases more?
I considered using a sort of turing-test obfuscation for my personal e-mail address on newsgroups, etc, but I haven't gotten around to trying it out.
I was planning to list my address as something like janeruth@example.com, with the instruction that you have to be "ruthless" to e-mail me. Not sure how well that would work out.
Sneakemail also offers a similar service. I haven't tried SpamGourmet, but I am quite happy with Sneakemail. The thing I like best is that having a unique e-mail address for each website I visit lets me know exactly where the spam is coming from. Sneakemail also lets you use filters to control who is allowed to send mail to an address, but if you start getting too much spam from a particular address, you can deactivate or even delete the e-mail address and generate a new one. As I mentioned in a previous thread, until a friend submitted my real e-mail address to a fake friends-network website, I was getting no spam whatsoever.
Sneakemail's basic service is also free, but I pay a nominal amount (something like $2 a month) for a premium account because I like the service and I want to support it.
I use Sneakemail. For those who are not familiar with the service, it allows you to generate unique, disposable e-mail addresses (I have different addresses for each site/contact). That way, you can immediately see where the spammers got your address, and if the spam gets too bad, you can deactivate/delete an address and generate a new one.
Until a friend gave my real e-mail address to a fake friends-network site (grr!), I never got any spam at all. Now I'm thinking about changing my real address because the amount of spam is just getting ridiculous (even with filters).
Is there any person still out there not aware that smoking cigarattes will eventually kill them? Is there any person still out there not aware that they can be infected with HIV through unprotected sex or sharing needles? These utterly clueless people apparently do exist, because I see young people (young enough to have started after the dangers were known) smoking every day, and the rate of HIV infection is actually going up again now that people are becoming complacent about the AIDS crisis. Even if we're not so clueless as to be completely unaware of the facts, we do need a reminder every now and then that these things do happen, and that they could happen to us.
Microsoft would never go for apple pie. Or maybe they would, and claim it was their original recipe.
Their cafeteria did have an excellent chocolate-peanut-butter pie though (one of the only things I remember clearly from my visit there). Can anyone comment on the current state of baked goods at Microsoft?
I also remember when Discovery showed interesting, informative documentaries. Now more than anything, it seems like they're showing (slightly) higher-brow reality shows, shows like American Chopper, Deadliest Catch, and their latest, Oil, Sweat and Rigs. Even a semi-recent episode of Megastructures (the one about building the Turning Torso building in Sweden) was more of a reality show than a documentary: rather than focusing on the challenges of designing and building an innovative building, they followed the construction workers to the pub where they tried to pick up women. This is NOT what I want to see when I turn on Discovery. I think one reason they've gone this route is that they now have a whole group of Discovery-brand channels. They've moved all the animal-related shows to Animal Planet. The historical documentaries are on Discovery Civilisation. The hard-core scientific shows are on Discovery Science. What's left is the lowest common denominator on the original Discovery Channel.
The weird thing about watching it in Europe is that they felt the need to re-dub the narration with a British-accented narrator. I've noticed that in a lot of English-language shows imported from outside Europe (Crocodile Hunter being an notable example). Are non-British accents so offensive to British audiences that they have to be re-dubbed?
Some stores are just more with it than others. Like J Crew, Gap also uses the sewn-in EAS tags, but they seem to be pretty bad about deactivating them (and about telling customers to cut them out). I found this out the hard way when I didn't notice one in my 3-year-old's jeans and she set of theft alarms wherever we went.
When I worked in Accessories at Dillard's in Austin, I was right near an exit to the parking lot. Our alarms went off all the time, but it was seldom because of our own merchandise. Most often, it was because of stuff from the Gap (I can't help wondering if the Gap even bothers to turn on their security system, because it seems like active tags make it out of their stores pretty regularly). We did not remove other stores' tags: customers were always sent back to the store where they purchased the items to have the tags removed.
Interestingly enough, a store's own employees usually account for the majority of shrinkage. I didn't realize quite how closely they monitored us until one day security called me at the jewelry counter and asked whether I had just seen my co-worker at the watch counter take a very expensive watch out of the display case and add/remove links. They wanted to know if I had any idea what she was up to, and even asked me to keep an eye on her for the rest of the shift!
I'm sure they also monitored our actual cash register transactions pretty closely. The whole register system had an OS/2 database backend. It was pretty cool actually - you could pull up all kinds of statistics about the sales pretty much in realtime. I know they kept track of things like whether credit cards were scanned on the electronic signature pad or if the customer signed on hard copy (in which case, the store paid a penalty fee to the signature pad company), so I'm sure they also audited other employee actions as well.
Here are some of the strategies our store used:
Proof of Purchase (POP) labels - every item got a bar code sticker put on it and scanned when it was purchased. It's pretty easy to tell at a glance whether an item has the sticker or not (returned items make this a little tricky though).
Employee discount tied to a store credit card - the employee discount did not get applied at the time of sale, but rather was deducted as a credit from the credit card statement. This seriously cut down on fraudulent use of the employee discount.
Employee purchases held at the Customer Service desk until end of shift - if you bought something on your break, you took it to Customer Service where they inspected the receipt and sealed the bag. You only got the bag back once you clocked out. I kind of remember security checking the bag again when you left the store.
No employee bags on the floor - employees had to use see-through bags for their belongings and leave them in their lockers. A small bag (i.e. makeup-bag-sized) for personal items was allowed in the retail areas of the store.
Of course, like you (and the article) said, you have to use the technology properly for it to really make a difference.
I think the ultimate goal of parenting is to help your children learn how to make good decisions. The only way to do that is to let them make some and experience the logical consequences of their actions. For example, if your kid leaves his bike outside in the rain and it rusts, he gets a much clearer message about why it's important to put the bike away than if you simply tell him to put it away "because I said so". I do draw the line at safety issues, but even then I don't have iron-clad rules enforced by punishment. I let my daughter know what is the safe thing to do and why (i.e. "Your head can get hurt if you fall off the bike. Always wear a bike helmet.") and help her do it until she's ready to do it on her own.
Children also need to feel worthwhile and valued in the family. When children feel that they are worthwhile human beings, they are more likely to act with their safety in mind, and to want to please their parents. More than anything, I think the feeling that my parents cared about my well-being was what made me want to be a safe driver as a teenager. I knew that people often got hurt or killed while driving, and I did my best to make sure it wouldn't happen to me (at least not through my own fault).
Parents need to guide and advise their children - by sharing their values and stating their expectations - but in the end children need to learn to think for themselves. Hopefully by the time a child is old enough to drive, he/she will have had enough practice making good decisions about other things to also make smart choices when driving. If not, all the high-tech parental spying gadgets in the world aren't going to help.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the album on RIAA Radar. Ironically, the label (Volcano) is apparently a member of the RIAA. In fact, pretty much all of Weird Al's albums have been released on labels that are RIAA members.
I would suggest they probably tried introducing HIV into a blood sample of the patient, and tried to see how successful HIV was in reproducing. If it can reproduce well in "normal" blood, but badly in the blood of the patient, that's a reasonable indication that they're immune.
An interesting study would be to take a control blood sample from the volunteers before vaccination and see how successfully HIV reproduces in it. Then, take another sample after there has been time for immunity to develop and compare how successfully HIV can reproduce in that to the control sample. That way, you could be reasonably sure that the vaccine was causing the results in this particular patient. After all, some people are genetically immune to HIV to begin with.
If the child has not yet reached the age where they are allowed to engage in activities without parental or some other form of supervision, then they are too young to need a cell phone. Consequently, this age will probably fall somewhat in line with the legal driving age most of the time.
It's entirely possible for kids under driving age to get around by themselves. Even in the US, I biked almost everywhere I wanted to go as a young teen. Now that I live in Finland, where public transportation is abundant, I frequently see children as young as 7 or 8 years old riding the bus, streetcar, subway, and sometimes even the local trains without parents. Add to that the fact that public payphones are a critically endangered species, and it's completely understandable that young children have mobile phones here. I would say that when the child starts traveling to and from school alone (usually around age 8 or 9 here), they are ready for a mobile phone.
Putting all seriousness aside for a second, am I the only one who snickered at the inadvertent bit of poetry in the phrase "Children arrested, DNA tested"?
I agree: honesty is the best policy in this case. Having done a lot of work in customer service, here is the approach I would recommend to get rid of your problem customer without causing hard feelings (hopefully):
When the end-user calls up asking for help with something that is not your responsibility, politely inform him (I'm assuming it's a him) of the fact. If you can, have a list of resources ready so that you can point him to someone who can help him. You can also use what's called the "Fast Food Rule" - repeating back and summarizing the message you get from the user - to show that you are really listening and sympathize with his problems, while at the same time pointing out that it's not your job to fix them. You might want to say something like "It sounds like you're having some problems with viruses/spyware/Windows. It's not my responsibility to provide support for that, but here's the number of someone who can help you."
Hopefully, if this user is not too dense, he will get the message that you're not the person to call for support about those things without taking it personally.
P.S. This approach also works well with toddlers who want to eat cookies before dinner.
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I don't think we can blame it all on the pedestrian-friendliness of the environment. Finland has many good examples of pedestrian-friendly cities, with great regional public transportation, and plenty of shops and services within easy walking distance even in smaller towns. In fact, many people in the Helsinki area don't even own a car. Nonetheless, obesity is reaching epidemic proportions (especially among young people) here as well. If having pedestrian-friendly cities were the deciding factor, obesity in Finland should be very low, but that is clearly not the case.
As someone who suffers really badly from jet lag, I can't make up my mind if it would be better or worse to get to my destination faster. One one hand, I suppose I would be better equipped to deal with the time difference if I hadn't spent the previous 12 hours crammed into a pressurized aluminum tube. On the other hand, the time change would come much more suddenly, and I think I would be far more tempted to "nap" (and go into very deep sleep because it feels like the middle of the night) at inappropriate times.
Personally, I would like to see more development in the opposite direction: slower, but more comfortable travel. I would be thrilled to see a revival of trans-atlantic passenger airship service. I'd definitely be willing to pay more and accept the longer travel time if I could do it more comfortably.
I really don't see how you can have "murder" without a body, remains of a body, or some specific claim as to how the body was disposed of.
It's entirely possible to make a conviction based on circumstantial evidence, such as the suspect having a strong motive (like opening a new life insurance policy on the victim) or finding evidence of intent (such as plans or a list of supplies for committing the murder) after the victim's disappearance. There could also be physical evidence to indicate that the victim had sustained non-survivable injuries, such as finding that the victim bled a fatal amount of blood in the suspect's house.
Also, as you pointed out, convictions have been made based on witnesses to and evidence of body disposal. I don't remember the exact case, but it involved the victim's body being put into a large cooler, carried onto a boat (this was observed by a witness), and dumped at sea. The cooler was also dumped, and the suspects shot holes in it in an effort to make it sink. However, it floated, and was found by a fisherman, who decided it was a perfectly good cooler, even though it had bullet holes in it, was missing its lid, and was covered in what he thought was fish blood. When investigators asked around about the cooler, the fisherman turned it over to them. I think they may have found some traces of the victim's blood in it, and they could tie it to the witness who saw the suspects carrying it onto their boat. They got a conviction in that case.
(IANAL, IANACSI)
Kitchen appliances/gadgets seem to go over well with geeks and non-geeks alike. They're certainly popular with the kitchen hackers in our house.
Also, Heston Blumenthal and other proponents of molecular gastronomy have taken cooking to a seriously geeky level. Heston Blumenthal has written several books that would make excellent gifts to get non-geeks to question how they think about cooking.
I'm a geek, but I'm also a girl, so I appreciate non-geeky gifts like jewelry, etc. Of course, I was extra appreciative the year I got the microchip earrings.
Chlamydia from a computer? Erm, no. Those folks need to do a little reading.
Ok, not directly from the computer itself, but I can see how this scenario could happen. Teens are using instant messaging in astounding numbers these days. I also recently found out that the incidence of STDs among teenagers is way higher than I ever imagined it to be (and many teens don't know they're infected, further spreading STDs). So, here's how it could happen: two teenagers meet and start flirting through instant messages (or other chat). They decide to meet in real life and have sex. One of them has an STD (let's say chlamydia), and now the other one is infected. Granted, they may or may not have met each other in real life without the chat, but in this case the computer was where the relationship started, and therefore it is indirectly responsible for teen #2 getting chlamydia.
I should probably point out that I met my husband on IRC, and I have my own story about how computers literally changed my life. I probably wouldn't have ever tried IRC if I hadn't been interested in the demoscene. I wouldn't have known about the demoscene if I hadn't met my first boyfriend. I wouldn't have met my first boyfriend if I didn't call BBSs. I wouldn't have called BBSs if I wasn't interested in computers. I wouldn't have been as interested in computers as I was if we didn't start using them at school when I was in the first or second grade. So in a very real way, if it hadn't been for computers (and especially IRC), I would not be married to my husband, and our daughter would not exist.
Says YOU. Tell me, what is it that babies were supposed to drink 6000 years ago? Formula? Diet Coke?
Breast milk, either from their mother or from another woman. A quote from the History of Breastfeeding:
"In the early years of the human species, breastfeeding was as common as it was for other mammals feeding their young. There were no alternative foods for the infants, and the mother, along with other lactating females, would have no choice but to breastfeed the children. This process is still seen in many developing countries and is known as shared breastfeeding."
It's very rare for a baby to be intolerant to the lactose in its mother's milk (see Myth 21 at this page), and as another poster pointed out, babies that couldn't digest human milk didn't live very long.
The leading cause of death for infants less than 100 years ago in developed nations (and STILL the leading killer today in underdeveloped countries) was diarrhea. How do you get diarrhea? Hmm, lactose intolerance causes - guess? Diarrhea. Baby can't drink breast milk, so you give it something else - something more likely to be contaminated with diarrhea causing viruses. Net result? More diarrhea.
Until fairly recently in the history of human beings, if babies didn't get breast milk from their mothers, they were usually nursed by another lactating woman (see wet nurse). Although breast milk substitutes were already available in the mid-1800s (see a history of baby formula here) it was only about in the 1940s, when women were needed in the workforce, that the use of baby formula really became widespread. Incidentally, one major way babies get diarrhea in developing countries today is from drinking formula mixed with contaminated water. Breast milk is definitely a safer alternative.
Humans have recently (in the evolutionary time scale) started doing something that few (if any) other mammals do: drinking the milk of another animal. The fact that adult humans are developing a better tolerance for lactose is quite significant.
Also, note that you can't just use debit cards for everything. There are quite a few things in life that you do need cash for, and blind people should not be excluded from being able to use regular money.
The US has perfectly good coins in denominations up to $1, which can be distinguished by blind people. If people are mainly using cash for small (for example, under $5) purchases, and cards for everything else, why not promote the use of coins for small purchases more?
I considered using a sort of turing-test obfuscation for my personal e-mail address on newsgroups, etc, but I haven't gotten around to trying it out.
I was planning to list my address as something like janeruth@example.com, with the instruction that you have to be "ruthless" to e-mail me. Not sure how well that would work out.
Sneakemail also offers a similar service. I haven't tried SpamGourmet, but I am quite happy with Sneakemail. The thing I like best is that having a unique e-mail address for each website I visit lets me know exactly where the spam is coming from. Sneakemail also lets you use filters to control who is allowed to send mail to an address, but if you start getting too much spam from a particular address, you can deactivate or even delete the e-mail address and generate a new one. As I mentioned in a previous thread, until a friend submitted my real e-mail address to a fake friends-network website, I was getting no spam whatsoever.
Sneakemail's basic service is also free, but I pay a nominal amount (something like $2 a month) for a premium account because I like the service and I want to support it.
I use Sneakemail. For those who are not familiar with the service, it allows you to generate unique, disposable e-mail addresses (I have different addresses for each site/contact). That way, you can immediately see where the spammers got your address, and if the spam gets too bad, you can deactivate/delete an address and generate a new one.
Until a friend gave my real e-mail address to a fake friends-network site (grr!), I never got any spam at all. Now I'm thinking about changing my real address because the amount of spam is just getting ridiculous (even with filters).
I'm legally obligated to mention the Onion article that predicted this.
So did Irregular Webcomic. Fractal razor technology could well be the answer to the phsysical limitation on the number of blades.
Is there any person still out there not aware that smoking cigarattes will eventually kill them? Is there any person still out there not aware that they can be infected with HIV through unprotected sex or sharing needles? These utterly clueless people apparently do exist, because I see young people (young enough to have started after the dangers were known) smoking every day, and the rate of HIV infection is actually going up again now that people are becoming complacent about the AIDS crisis. Even if we're not so clueless as to be completely unaware of the facts, we do need a reminder every now and then that these things do happen, and that they could happen to us.
Microsoft would never go for apple pie. Or maybe they would, and claim it was their original recipe.
Their cafeteria did have an excellent chocolate-peanut-butter pie though (one of the only things I remember clearly from my visit there). Can anyone comment on the current state of baked goods at Microsoft?
I also remember when Discovery showed interesting, informative documentaries. Now more than anything, it seems like they're showing (slightly) higher-brow reality shows, shows like American Chopper, Deadliest Catch, and their latest, Oil, Sweat and Rigs. Even a semi-recent episode of Megastructures (the one about building the Turning Torso building in Sweden) was more of a reality show than a documentary: rather than focusing on the challenges of designing and building an innovative building, they followed the construction workers to the pub where they tried to pick up women. This is NOT what I want to see when I turn on Discovery. I think one reason they've gone this route is that they now have a whole group of Discovery-brand channels. They've moved all the animal-related shows to Animal Planet. The historical documentaries are on Discovery Civilisation. The hard-core scientific shows are on Discovery Science. What's left is the lowest common denominator on the original Discovery Channel.
The weird thing about watching it in Europe is that they felt the need to re-dub the narration with a British-accented narrator. I've noticed that in a lot of English-language shows imported from outside Europe (Crocodile Hunter being an notable example). Are non-British accents so offensive to British audiences that they have to be re-dubbed?
Some stores are just more with it than others. Like J Crew, Gap also uses the sewn-in EAS tags, but they seem to be pretty bad about deactivating them (and about telling customers to cut them out). I found this out the hard way when I didn't notice one in my 3-year-old's jeans and she set of theft alarms wherever we went.
When I worked in Accessories at Dillard's in Austin, I was right near an exit to the parking lot. Our alarms went off all the time, but it was seldom because of our own merchandise. Most often, it was because of stuff from the Gap (I can't help wondering if the Gap even bothers to turn on their security system, because it seems like active tags make it out of their stores pretty regularly). We did not remove other stores' tags: customers were always sent back to the store where they purchased the items to have the tags removed.
Interestingly enough, a store's own employees usually account for the majority of shrinkage. I didn't realize quite how closely they monitored us until one day security called me at the jewelry counter and asked whether I had just seen my co-worker at the watch counter take a very expensive watch out of the display case and add/remove links. They wanted to know if I had any idea what she was up to, and even asked me to keep an eye on her for the rest of the shift!
I'm sure they also monitored our actual cash register transactions pretty closely. The whole register system had an OS/2 database backend. It was pretty cool actually - you could pull up all kinds of statistics about the sales pretty much in realtime. I know they kept track of things like whether credit cards were scanned on the electronic signature pad or if the customer signed on hard copy (in which case, the store paid a penalty fee to the signature pad company), so I'm sure they also audited other employee actions as well.
Here are some of the strategies our store used:
Of course, like you (and the article) said, you have to use the technology properly for it to really make a difference.
Bill? Is that you? (J/K... went to the prom with a nerd, but got asked in person in the computer lab, not on IRC).
It's called parenting.
I think the ultimate goal of parenting is to help your children learn how to make good decisions. The only way to do that is to let them make some and experience the logical consequences of their actions. For example, if your kid leaves his bike outside in the rain and it rusts, he gets a much clearer message about why it's important to put the bike away than if you simply tell him to put it away "because I said so". I do draw the line at safety issues, but even then I don't have iron-clad rules enforced by punishment. I let my daughter know what is the safe thing to do and why (i.e. "Your head can get hurt if you fall off the bike. Always wear a bike helmet.") and help her do it until she's ready to do it on her own.
Children also need to feel worthwhile and valued in the family. When children feel that they are worthwhile human beings, they are more likely to act with their safety in mind, and to want to please their parents. More than anything, I think the feeling that my parents cared about my well-being was what made me want to be a safe driver as a teenager. I knew that people often got hurt or killed while driving, and I did my best to make sure it wouldn't happen to me (at least not through my own fault).
Parents need to guide and advise their children - by sharing their values and stating their expectations - but in the end children need to learn to think for themselves. Hopefully by the time a child is old enough to drive, he/she will have had enough practice making good decisions about other things to also make smart choices when driving. If not, all the high-tech parental spying gadgets in the world aren't going to help.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the album on RIAA Radar. Ironically, the label (Volcano) is apparently a member of the RIAA. In fact, pretty much all of Weird Al's albums have been released on labels that are RIAA members.
I would suggest they probably tried introducing HIV into a blood sample of the patient, and tried to see how successful HIV was in reproducing. If it can reproduce well in "normal" blood, but badly in the blood of the patient, that's a reasonable indication that they're immune.
An interesting study would be to take a control blood sample from the volunteers before vaccination and see how successfully HIV reproduces in it. Then, take another sample after there has been time for immunity to develop and compare how successfully HIV can reproduce in that to the control sample. That way, you could be reasonably sure that the vaccine was causing the results in this particular patient. After all, some people are genetically immune to HIV to begin with.
If the child has not yet reached the age where they are allowed to engage in activities without parental or some other form of supervision, then they are too young to need a cell phone. Consequently, this age will probably fall somewhat in line with the legal driving age most of the time.
It's entirely possible for kids under driving age to get around by themselves. Even in the US, I biked almost everywhere I wanted to go as a young teen. Now that I live in Finland, where public transportation is abundant, I frequently see children as young as 7 or 8 years old riding the bus, streetcar, subway, and sometimes even the local trains without parents. Add to that the fact that public payphones are a critically endangered species, and it's completely understandable that young children have mobile phones here. I would say that when the child starts traveling to and from school alone (usually around age 8 or 9 here), they are ready for a mobile phone.
Putting all seriousness aside for a second, am I the only one who snickered at the inadvertent bit of poetry in the phrase "Children arrested, DNA tested"?
I agree: honesty is the best policy in this case. Having done a lot of work in customer service, here is the approach I would recommend to get rid of your problem customer without causing hard feelings (hopefully):
When the end-user calls up asking for help with something that is not your responsibility, politely inform him (I'm assuming it's a him) of the fact. If you can, have a list of resources ready so that you can point him to someone who can help him. You can also use what's called the "Fast Food Rule" - repeating back and summarizing the message you get from the user - to show that you are really listening and sympathize with his problems, while at the same time pointing out that it's not your job to fix them. You might want to say something like "It sounds like you're having some problems with viruses/spyware/Windows. It's not my responsibility to provide support for that, but here's the number of someone who can help you."
Hopefully, if this user is not too dense, he will get the message that you're not the person to call for support about those things without taking it personally.
P.S. This approach also works well with toddlers who want to eat cookies before dinner.
"bodyweight" pitäis olla kaksi sanaa: body weight