And it's folks like him who end up on school boards. The school I worked at had a fucking AMAZING run of characters on the school board. The most memorable ones:
The fiscal responsibility zealot and his retarded son. Dick and little Dick, as they were known. Dick would motion ANYTHING, and little Dick would second it. That's all that little Dick ever did. Never spoke a word, never made a motion, did anything. Just seconded his dad. His dad tried to cut all funding from the school, because he didn't like paying taxes.
The fired principal with a grudge against the teacher who dug up the fact that he had lied about being a certified principal. Yes, the guy who GOT FIRED FOR LYING ABOUT BEING CERTIFIED, got ONTO THE SCHOOL BOARD!!! He had enough drinking buddies and relatives to tip the scales. For years he did everything he could to destroy that teacher and her department
The guy who got expelled from the HS, and failed to graduate. Yeah, he was an awesome one. Was on the school board to fuck with the school as much as possible. Again, if you have enough drinking buddies and relatives, anything is possible.
As a former public school teacher, I can tell you that the biggest problem with public education is the public. The GP you responded to is a great example of that.
You're wrong. I taught for five years, so let me set the record straight:
Most teachers have their salary spread over the entire year. The first two years I taught, I got a check every 2 weeks, whether or not school was in session. The last three years, they dumped a lump-sum into my bank account at the end of June. Still, this doesn't make a lick of difference. The teachers don't make the schedule - that's the duty of the administration, who IS paid all year. Generally, they sign a 220-250 day contract, which means they work through most of the summer.
Once upon a time, when I was a new teacher, we got a new principal and a new head of guidance. They were tasked with scheduling classes for the school over the summer. Because they were new, the district shelled out something like $10k to send them to a 3 day training session put on by the maker of the scheduling software the district had purchased.
They packed their bags, and flew out to the resort where this was happening. They attended the first day of the training, and it was very easy stuff. Stuff they already knew. So they blew the other two days off, and had themselves a nice vacation.
Fast-forward to the end of the summer, and the principal had deleted two weeks of work on the schedule by accident, the classes were all fucked up, and nothing was working. On the first day of school, there were all sorts of issues, and it took a week or two to hammer it all out.
And by "hammer it all out", I mean, "Schedule Calculus and Physics at the same time, so students have to choose. Schedule AP English and AP History at the same time, so students have to choose. Schedule chemistry classes and labs a period apart, so the teacher is forced to break instruction into tiny bits, and rush through minimal labs."
For three years, my school went through a nightmare of scheduling. When they got rid of the horrifically incompetent administrators, it got much better.
How much do you want to bet that the administrators in charge of scheduling this district went on a vacation instead of a training session for the software?
"Instruction" isn't in the teacher contract. (I should know - I signed 5 of them before I wised up.) The wording is "student contact days" and "student contact periods".
My school ran into the same thing with snow days. If we had 2/3 of the students in school for more than a half-day, it counted as a "school day", according to the state and the district. If the weather was bad, send the kids to school. If it gets worse, we send them home at noon, and it doesn't count as a snow day, and we don't have to go a day later into the summer.
School is NOT about "instruction". If you think that, you're sorely misled. School is about a few major things:
1) Basic workplace skills. Reading, writing, addition and subtraction, showing up on time, dealing with your boss. 2) Babysitting for parents who at are work. 3) Learning to deal with people. 4) Learning to take tests. (This is the big one!)
One of the things that struck me most, going back into a high school after being out for almost a decade, was that the kids were TOTALLY unable to think. In fact, I went out and a had a few drinks with a woman who was student-teaching in my building. She was working on both a HS and Elementary certification, so was student teaching in both schools. She was told by an Elementary school math teacher that her test was inappropriate, because "The kids aren't used to that. They are used to being told stuff, and the test sees whether or not they remember it. They aren't used to having to think about it and use it." I would have called BS on that, but she had a few drinks in her and was shaking with rage as she recounted that, so I took it as near the truth.
Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." If it was true then, it's definitely true now.
I resisted that snobbery for a long time. But when my satellite bill hit $60 for a total of 5 channels I'd skip between, I called it quits.
Six months later, when I moved half-way across the country, I brought my TV and entertainment center with me, but it's still not hooked up, and is collecting dust in the other room. I could get satellite or cable here, but I haven't bothered. $35 a month for DSL, 1.5/0.3 down/up, and I'm set. I can watch shit online, surf, play games, etc.
I wholeheartedly agree with you: I'm not doing it to be a snob - I'm doing it to avoid the assraping. It feels soooo good to have that money back, and invested into quality beer. I've freed up a fair bit of time to do useful shit, and when I don't want to, the internet is there to mindlessly entertain me.
Or, since the article pointed out that it would be tethered to the ground, you just combine the tether and the power. 10,000 ft is a fairly long distance, but it should be doable. Provided the power-cord tether weights about the same as a kevlar tether + onboard power supply, it'd be foolish not to do it this way. If you can pump power up there from the ground, it never has to come down.
Eh, screw that. I get paid to ACCOMPLISH things. I don't get paid to mindlessly do the same task over and over and over. I don't get paid to sit in a chair from 9-5, because that's "working hours" regardless of whether I'm inspired or able to work at that those times.
The mentality that there is "company time" means you're owned by that company. I'm truly sorry if that's the case. I've been there, and done that. It is not a way I want to live my life.
I now get paid to do things, rather than fill a chair. I'm expected to be in on either side of noon, and to make scheduled meetings. But when I show up is flexible. When I leave is flexible. I don't have to call in sick, unless I'm going to miss a meeting.
It's truly liberating to be judged by what you accomplish, rather than your ability to punch in and punch out at the appropriate times. I've taken off work early, headed home, poured a beer, put my feet up, had an inspiration, and then ssh'd back into our systems to accomplish more.
My boss demands two things:
A weekly status meeting, with a 1-page or less bulleted list of what got done, issues/problems, and what will be tackled next. She makes changes, and then it's off to work. She also wants to see people actually in the building on a semi-regular basis. No consistent telecommuting, as we rely heavily on group interaction and trouble-shooting.
And that's it. I have to say, a working environment this pleasant has made me VERY productive. I busted my ass earlier this week, because I had my weekly meeting early this afternoon. But after that, I blew off the rest of the day to attend a social event. My boss told me to have fun. She knows that I'll be in tomorrow morning with a solid plan for the next few days, refreshed, and happy to work.
Seriously, find yourself a work environment like this. It does wonders for the soul.
I think prohibition was the gold standard for this. The mafia made billions during it, and went into steep decline once prohibition was lifted. There's no reason the same wouldn't happen if we legalized pot.
What I don't understand is how this will help. The drug cartels are massive, well organized, and well funded operations. Were I in their shoes now, I'd be ecstatic. For a buck or two each, you can hire a bunch of people to carry around *just* the personal amount of these drugs.
Want to transport your cocaine legally a couple hundred miles? Just rent a bus and a bunch of poor kids. Hand them each a baggie as they get on, and if you get stopped by the police, it's 100% legal.
Were I a drug dealer, I'd be abusing this in a heartbeat. (And I probably should be, since I came up with the "smuggling drugs in a sub" idea almost ten years before it hit the news. Man, did I choose poorly on my career path.)
I'm still waiting for the Freaklympics, where there is no testing done on anyone, ever, and there are no disqualifications.
It'd be awesome - people with 8 gallons of steroids pumped into them, high on crack, lifting heavy things until they broke themselves. Prosthetic cheater-springs on peoples' legs, exoskeletons, etc.
I'm torn. I get what you're saying, and I feel somewhat like you feel. If Google drives by in the morning while I'm walking past the window naked, between turning the coffee pot on and hitting the shower, that's not cool. For me to not even know that happened, nor have a way to remove that image is terrible. But...
I just moved 1000 miles, half-way across the country. Between the demands of my current job, and the financial issues with flying that distance more than once, I had one shot to find a place to live. I had 3 days to schedule apartment showings. Had Street View not existed, I would have been screwed.
I was able to weed out the apartments next door to a row of Fraternity houses. I was able to weed out the apt with "on street parking", which consisted of a 15' wide strip of pavement between buildings, in an area with significant snowfall. I was able to skip the apartments which were spacious, cheap, and in the middle of the ghetto.
Street view made it so I could be familiar with the places I was going to visit before I visited them. It allowed me to narrow down a search to ten places, find them, and confirm that they were what they looked like. Without that ability, I'd probably have ended up in a crappy neighborhood.
Street view IS an overwhelming invasion of privacy. It is sketchy as all hell, and can be used for all sorts of evil.
I'm wondering how a bunch of the posters in this article missed that point. It's akin to ISPs selling unlimited plans and then bitching when users gobble up bandwidth. Price your product at an appropriate price. If you fuck that up, your business dies. It's called capitalism. I can't imagine that Apple's system, set up for Visual Voicemail, somehow died under the strain of Google Voice.
The data was paid for. This is pure anti-competitive behavior.
You are a fucking idiot. I would blow my last mod point on you, but bullshit this deep needs a response.
Fine, let me come over and use your shower and all the water I want just because it's in the interest of keeping things fair.
It costs AT&T money to provide that bandwidth.
Do you not notice that those two statements are OPPOSITE EACH OTHER? The original poster had it right. This is what network neutrality is all about. You're already paying for that bandwidth. Your fancy-schmancy iPhone comes with an $80 data package. So google offers a service, USING THE INTERNET YOU'VE PAID FOR, that blows the shit out of the native functionality of the iPhone.
Network neutrality is about selling the bandwidth, the $80 data package, and letting the user use it for whatever they want to use it for. What Apple.AT&T did was limit the use of this purchased internet connection, because it out-competed their offering.
If the electric company charges me a flat rate, I GET TO USE AS MUCH ELECTRICITY AS I WANT. Period. End of story. If a company isn't smart enough to sell its product at an appropriate price, than that company dies. It's called a free market.
When a company poorly prices its offering, and denies a costumer access to a competing offer at a better price-point, that's bullshit. And that's what Apple/AT&T did here.
I recently lost half my salary, because I was stupid enough to go back to grad school for a second time. Because of that loss, I'm trying to still eat healthy, on less money than before. It's hard. I love cooking, and am pretty good at it, but fresh food costs a lot more than junk food. I'm knowledgeable enough to know how to buy in bulk and freeze stuff, and defrost it in time for dinner. However, that puts me a step above those with less education, and especially those with a minimal culinary background.
Healthy stuff takes more knowledge and effort to cook than nutrition-poor food. Boxed Mac and Cheese is filled with bad shit. However, it's easy to make. My mom's homemade Mac and Cheese is substantially healthier, made with fresh ingredients, and is substantially harder to make. In fact, it takes a recipe, a casserole dish, and some cooking skills to make it.
It's not just the cost that keeps the poor eating bad food - it's also the time, effort, and knowledge required to deal with healthy food.
There's a chicken breast purchased on sale a month ago almost thawed in my fridge right now. It's going to be far healthier than if I had stopped at KFC, but such a meal will take significantly more planning, cooking equipment, and other ingredients.
If you're ignorant and/or poor, you don't necessarily have all the tools to make a healthy dinner. In my case, I'm going to make a fairly inexpensive dinner of baked chicken breast, rice pilaf, and green beans. It will cost the same or less than a dinner I bought at KFC, and give me substantially higher quality food. However, I know a lot of people who wouldn't be able to do this, who aren't even poor. They just lack the knowledge and tools to make it happen.
Add "too poor to buy good food" to "unable to prepare good food", and it's obvious why the poor have an obesity problem.
Wikipedia broke ground as a user-editable encyclopedia. What it failed to do was set clear standards for what was to be included. It's useful to have a page on every general topic. It's not useful to have a hundred pages on each general topic.
I doubt it will go anywhere, but "One Page per Franchise" is my new rallying cry for Wikipedia.
I would. However, as other posters have noted, these are public servants. We, the people, pay them to do a job for us. As such, they lose a lot of the anonymity that the rest of us have.
If you don't want to be in the public eye, don't run for office, don't put on a uniform and run around in public, and don't take MY taxes to do a job for ME.
For those who haven't played it, Sins is the definition of good navigation in an expansive RTS world. I have NEVER seen a game with controls that polished, useful, and intuitive. Plus it's fucking beautiful from top to bottom. If you haven't played it, do yourself a favor and go get it. It was a fantastic game, and I still go back and get sucked into it.
That game is the reason I have Stardock's Impulse downloader installed. It's a download-store where you can purchase their other games, and a bunch of older titles as well. Every now and then they have a special, with older titles on sale for $5 or less. I've gotten a few, and have been moderately happy with them. Some hits, some misses, but nothing remotely close to spending $50 on a game that sucks.
I've been doing the same thing, but with computer games. Stardock sells older titles via their Impulse downloader for very little money. If you watch the sales, often under $5. I had a blast playing through Space Rangers II - many hours of wasting time for all of $5. Recently downloaded the Penumbrum games trilogy, when the linux versions were on sale for $10, I think. I've played through the first two, and they are very interesting. They're first-person-horror-puzzle games with quasi-realistic physics. I've not seen too many games put that combination together.
I've bought more games in the last two years than I did in the previous five before that. But I probably spent less money. I agree with you - lower the cost, and if you have to, change your model. I wonder if we're about to see a new generation of game companies, due to the ability to sell small, fun games at low prices to a wide market.
I wish I had mod points for you...Of COURSE the GPL favors companies.
If you use proprietary code, you reap all the benefits, but must do all the work. You pay for changes and improvements, and they happen at the rate you pay for them to happen.
If you license with BSD, the community might improve the code for you. And your competitor might take that code, add more to it, lock it away behind a proprietary license, market the hell out of it, and make a ton of money based off your work.
If you license your code with the GPL, you can still sell it and sell support, the community can improve your code, and you can add those changes back in, and your competitors can't take your work and resell it while locking all their changes away.
The GPL is all about collaborative coding. Whether between individuals, between individuals and companies, and between companies doesn't matter. If you want to harness the power of collaborative work, you need the GPL.
The transparent thing works both ways... it's easier for white hats to find holes too, by your own logic. And they can publish them, and any system admin can then fix them immediately. A similar bug existing in Windows couldn't be found easily by white hats, nor patched quickly. After all 'M$ can't code shit'. Linux and FOSS are more secure because of their development model. Trolls like the poster above make up stupid shit that runs counter to this and idiots mod them up.
I can only hope that people with mod-points mod your asinine comments into trollish oblivion.
Spam exists for one reason and one reason only: someone, somewhere is willing to buy from spammers or otherwise to give them money.
I recently read a theory that challenged the (afaict, completely factless, unproven) idea that the advertisers make money off of spam. It's P. T. Barnum's "There's a sucker born every minute", as seen in get-rich-quick schemes, applied to spam.
You have two parties - advertiser, and spammer. Advertiser pays spammer $10k to send a million spams. Spammer sends those million spams. The advertiser sits around, counting his imaginary sales. But nobody shows up. A couple of days pass, he sells $1k of stuff, and is $9k in the hole due to his spamming efforts. Does he spam again? Quite possibly not.
But who learned from that? Only that individual advertiser. Even if each advertiser never makes money, as long as there is another sucker in line, there will be no end to spam.
There's nothing I've seen that indicates the individual advertisers make good money off of spam. The spammers, sure. But they're just taking money from one sucker after another.
Indeed. And I doubt anyone will rush to build skyscrapers and bridges out of this stuff without some serious testing. However, there are plenty of non-critical applications for cement. Road beds, curbs, and sidewalks take up a lot of cement. Even if this wasn't as durable, as a net sink, replacing it 2x as often and landfilling it after you were done would be far more carbon-negative than using regular cement.
I'm imagining that single-home foundations wouldn't be an issue either - they don't (comparably) bear much weight, and the impact of replacing a house foundation earlier than normal bears no resemblance to the impact of replacing a skyscraper or bridge earlier.
There are tons of low-impact, low-danger applications to start testing this with. And I'd be damn surprised if a bunch of research colleges don't grab this and run with it. There's shittons of grant money for research and testing on "green technology" like this, and that's the bread and butter of a major materials science program.
We've got probably 75 years of really rigorous engineering science under our belts. The tests for concrete are very, VERY well established international and country-wide standards. I'd be surprised if this was steamrolled through an approval process. Building code is DAMN rigorous in most 1st world countries. Hell, there was just recently a story about some clay-based building product which was thermally amazing, to the point it stood in for insulation, and could withstand forest fires. It's not approved for building with in CA, due to its failure in earthquake tests.
In that district, the only privacy is the time you spend behind a curtain with a black marker and a paper ballot. From registration, to the ballot(s) being handed to you, to the time you enter the voting booth, it's very public. (And social!) Once you leave, you're back out into public, and you're watched from there to the ballot box.
It's a fairly tight-knit group who runs the elections, even through they come from 3-4 different parties. (We have a strong local Green and Libertarian/Unitarian movement.) A group of a dozen or so of them show up on voting morning, and they all inspect that the rosters are unmarked, the before and after voting counters are at zero, the ballot box is empty, and the optical scanner reads zero. Once they're all satisfied that everything is at zero, they take their positions, and run through the voting day.
Once the voting is over, the optical scan results are reported, and the counting of the paper ballots begins. If, for some reason, the optical scan numbers are significantly different than the counters for people in/out, they are tossed out. Same with the ballot count, which is the official tally.
Since the number of voters in/out and the optical scan results are published before the counting of the paper ballots, that's an additional failsafe. You can't go back and change the numbers reported, so even if you managed to stuff the box overnight/during the counting, it would be immediately obvious. You'd have to be able to both stuff, AND go through the ballots and remove an equal number of ballots for the other candidate. Not to say that couldn't be done, but it would be damn hard to do. The fact that there are multiple eyes on the ballot box constantly makes it very, very unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's folks like him who end up on school boards. The school I worked at had a fucking AMAZING run of characters on the school board. The most memorable ones:
The fiscal responsibility zealot and his retarded son. Dick and little Dick, as they were known. Dick would motion ANYTHING, and little Dick would second it. That's all that little Dick ever did. Never spoke a word, never made a motion, did anything. Just seconded his dad. His dad tried to cut all funding from the school, because he didn't like paying taxes.
The fired principal with a grudge against the teacher who dug up the fact that he had lied about being a certified principal. Yes, the guy who GOT FIRED FOR LYING ABOUT BEING CERTIFIED, got ONTO THE SCHOOL BOARD!!! He had enough drinking buddies and relatives to tip the scales. For years he did everything he could to destroy that teacher and her department
The guy who got expelled from the HS, and failed to graduate. Yeah, he was an awesome one. Was on the school board to fuck with the school as much as possible. Again, if you have enough drinking buddies and relatives, anything is possible.
As a former public school teacher, I can tell you that the biggest problem with public education is the public. The GP you responded to is a great example of that.
You're wrong. I taught for five years, so let me set the record straight:
Most teachers have their salary spread over the entire year. The first two years I taught, I got a check every 2 weeks, whether or not school was in session. The last three years, they dumped a lump-sum into my bank account at the end of June. Still, this doesn't make a lick of difference. The teachers don't make the schedule - that's the duty of the administration, who IS paid all year. Generally, they sign a 220-250 day contract, which means they work through most of the summer.
Once upon a time, when I was a new teacher, we got a new principal and a new head of guidance. They were tasked with scheduling classes for the school over the summer. Because they were new, the district shelled out something like $10k to send them to a 3 day training session put on by the maker of the scheduling software the district had purchased.
They packed their bags, and flew out to the resort where this was happening. They attended the first day of the training, and it was very easy stuff. Stuff they already knew. So they blew the other two days off, and had themselves a nice vacation.
Fast-forward to the end of the summer, and the principal had deleted two weeks of work on the schedule by accident, the classes were all fucked up, and nothing was working. On the first day of school, there were all sorts of issues, and it took a week or two to hammer it all out.
And by "hammer it all out", I mean, "Schedule Calculus and Physics at the same time, so students have to choose. Schedule AP English and AP History at the same time, so students have to choose. Schedule chemistry classes and labs a period apart, so the teacher is forced to break instruction into tiny bits, and rush through minimal labs."
For three years, my school went through a nightmare of scheduling. When they got rid of the horrifically incompetent administrators, it got much better.
How much do you want to bet that the administrators in charge of scheduling this district went on a vacation instead of a training session for the software?
"Instruction" isn't in the teacher contract. (I should know - I signed 5 of them before I wised up.) The wording is "student contact days" and "student contact periods".
My school ran into the same thing with snow days. If we had 2/3 of the students in school for more than a half-day, it counted as a "school day", according to the state and the district. If the weather was bad, send the kids to school. If it gets worse, we send them home at noon, and it doesn't count as a snow day, and we don't have to go a day later into the summer.
School is NOT about "instruction". If you think that, you're sorely misled. School is about a few major things:
1) Basic workplace skills. Reading, writing, addition and subtraction, showing up on time, dealing with your boss.
2) Babysitting for parents who at are work.
3) Learning to deal with people.
4) Learning to take tests. (This is the big one!)
One of the things that struck me most, going back into a high school after being out for almost a decade, was that the kids were TOTALLY unable to think. In fact, I went out and a had a few drinks with a woman who was student-teaching in my building. She was working on both a HS and Elementary certification, so was student teaching in both schools. She was told by an Elementary school math teacher that her test was inappropriate, because "The kids aren't used to that. They are used to being told stuff, and the test sees whether or not they remember it. They aren't used to having to think about it and use it." I would have called BS on that, but she had a few drinks in her and was shaking with rage as she recounted that, so I took it as near the truth.
Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." If it was true then, it's definitely true now.
Not that slashdot can render it....
I resisted that snobbery for a long time. But when my satellite bill hit $60 for a total of 5 channels I'd skip between, I called it quits.
Six months later, when I moved half-way across the country, I brought my TV and entertainment center with me, but it's still not hooked up, and is collecting dust in the other room. I could get satellite or cable here, but I haven't bothered. $35 a month for DSL, 1.5/0.3 down/up, and I'm set. I can watch shit online, surf, play games, etc.
I wholeheartedly agree with you: I'm not doing it to be a snob - I'm doing it to avoid the assraping. It feels soooo good to have that money back, and invested into quality beer. I've freed up a fair bit of time to do useful shit, and when I don't want to, the internet is there to mindlessly entertain me.
Or, since the article pointed out that it would be tethered to the ground, you just combine the tether and the power. 10,000 ft is a fairly long distance, but it should be doable. Provided the power-cord tether weights about the same as a kevlar tether + onboard power supply, it'd be foolish not to do it this way. If you can pump power up there from the ground, it never has to come down.
Eh, screw that. I get paid to ACCOMPLISH things. I don't get paid to mindlessly do the same task over and over and over. I don't get paid to sit in a chair from 9-5, because that's "working hours" regardless of whether I'm inspired or able to work at that those times.
The mentality that there is "company time" means you're owned by that company. I'm truly sorry if that's the case. I've been there, and done that. It is not a way I want to live my life.
I now get paid to do things, rather than fill a chair. I'm expected to be in on either side of noon, and to make scheduled meetings. But when I show up is flexible. When I leave is flexible. I don't have to call in sick, unless I'm going to miss a meeting.
It's truly liberating to be judged by what you accomplish, rather than your ability to punch in and punch out at the appropriate times. I've taken off work early, headed home, poured a beer, put my feet up, had an inspiration, and then ssh'd back into our systems to accomplish more.
My boss demands two things:
A weekly status meeting, with a 1-page or less bulleted list of what got done, issues/problems, and what will be tackled next. She makes changes, and then it's off to work.
She also wants to see people actually in the building on a semi-regular basis. No consistent telecommuting, as we rely heavily on group interaction and trouble-shooting.
And that's it. I have to say, a working environment this pleasant has made me VERY productive. I busted my ass earlier this week, because I had my weekly meeting early this afternoon. But after that, I blew off the rest of the day to attend a social event. My boss told me to have fun. She knows that I'll be in tomorrow morning with a solid plan for the next few days, refreshed, and happy to work.
Seriously, find yourself a work environment like this. It does wonders for the soul.
I think prohibition was the gold standard for this. The mafia made billions during it, and went into steep decline once prohibition was lifted. There's no reason the same wouldn't happen if we legalized pot.
What I don't understand is how this will help. The drug cartels are massive, well organized, and well funded operations. Were I in their shoes now, I'd be ecstatic. For a buck or two each, you can hire a bunch of people to carry around *just* the personal amount of these drugs.
Want to transport your cocaine legally a couple hundred miles? Just rent a bus and a bunch of poor kids. Hand them each a baggie as they get on, and if you get stopped by the police, it's 100% legal.
Were I a drug dealer, I'd be abusing this in a heartbeat. (And I probably should be, since I came up with the "smuggling drugs in a sub" idea almost ten years before it hit the news. Man, did I choose poorly on my career path.)
I'm still waiting for the Freaklympics, where there is no testing done on anyone, ever, and there are no disqualifications.
It'd be awesome - people with 8 gallons of steroids pumped into them, high on crack, lifting heavy things until they broke themselves. Prosthetic cheater-springs on peoples' legs, exoskeletons, etc.
Now that'd be fucking entertaining!
I'm torn. I get what you're saying, and I feel somewhat like you feel. If Google drives by in the morning while I'm walking past the window naked, between turning the coffee pot on and hitting the shower, that's not cool. For me to not even know that happened, nor have a way to remove that image is terrible. But...
I just moved 1000 miles, half-way across the country. Between the demands of my current job, and the financial issues with flying that distance more than once, I had one shot to find a place to live. I had 3 days to schedule apartment showings. Had Street View not existed, I would have been screwed.
I was able to weed out the apartments next door to a row of Fraternity houses. I was able to weed out the apt with "on street parking", which consisted of a 15' wide strip of pavement between buildings, in an area with significant snowfall. I was able to skip the apartments which were spacious, cheap, and in the middle of the ghetto.
Street view made it so I could be familiar with the places I was going to visit before I visited them. It allowed me to narrow down a search to ten places, find them, and confirm that they were what they looked like. Without that ability, I'd probably have ended up in a crappy neighborhood.
Street view IS an overwhelming invasion of privacy. It is sketchy as all hell, and can be used for all sorts of evil.
But god DAMN is it useful...
I'm wondering how a bunch of the posters in this article missed that point. It's akin to ISPs selling unlimited plans and then bitching when users gobble up bandwidth. Price your product at an appropriate price. If you fuck that up, your business dies. It's called capitalism. I can't imagine that Apple's system, set up for Visual Voicemail, somehow died under the strain of Google Voice.
The data was paid for. This is pure anti-competitive behavior.
You are a fucking idiot. I would blow my last mod point on you, but bullshit this deep needs a response.
Fine, let me come over and use your shower and all the water I want just because it's in the interest of keeping things fair.
It costs AT&T money to provide that bandwidth.
Do you not notice that those two statements are OPPOSITE EACH OTHER? The original poster had it right. This is what network neutrality is all about. You're already paying for that bandwidth. Your fancy-schmancy iPhone comes with an $80 data package. So google offers a service, USING THE INTERNET YOU'VE PAID FOR, that blows the shit out of the native functionality of the iPhone.
Network neutrality is about selling the bandwidth, the $80 data package, and letting the user use it for whatever they want to use it for. What Apple.AT&T did was limit the use of this purchased internet connection, because it out-competed their offering.
If the electric company charges me a flat rate, I GET TO USE AS MUCH ELECTRICITY AS I WANT. Period. End of story. If a company isn't smart enough to sell its product at an appropriate price, than that company dies. It's called a free market.
When a company poorly prices its offering, and denies a costumer access to a competing offer at a better price-point, that's bullshit. And that's what Apple/AT&T did here.
I recently lost half my salary, because I was stupid enough to go back to grad school for a second time. Because of that loss, I'm trying to still eat healthy, on less money than before. It's hard. I love cooking, and am pretty good at it, but fresh food costs a lot more than junk food. I'm knowledgeable enough to know how to buy in bulk and freeze stuff, and defrost it in time for dinner. However, that puts me a step above those with less education, and especially those with a minimal culinary background.
Healthy stuff takes more knowledge and effort to cook than nutrition-poor food. Boxed Mac and Cheese is filled with bad shit. However, it's easy to make. My mom's homemade Mac and Cheese is substantially healthier, made with fresh ingredients, and is substantially harder to make. In fact, it takes a recipe, a casserole dish, and some cooking skills to make it.
It's not just the cost that keeps the poor eating bad food - it's also the time, effort, and knowledge required to deal with healthy food.
There's a chicken breast purchased on sale a month ago almost thawed in my fridge right now. It's going to be far healthier than if I had stopped at KFC, but such a meal will take significantly more planning, cooking equipment, and other ingredients.
If you're ignorant and/or poor, you don't necessarily have all the tools to make a healthy dinner. In my case, I'm going to make a fairly inexpensive dinner of baked chicken breast, rice pilaf, and green beans. It will cost the same or less than a dinner I bought at KFC, and give me substantially higher quality food. However, I know a lot of people who wouldn't be able to do this, who aren't even poor. They just lack the knowledge and tools to make it happen.
Add "too poor to buy good food" to "unable to prepare good food", and it's obvious why the poor have an obesity problem.
I think that the natural progression will simply be to link to specialized wikis. There are already tons, from Blubapedia (Pokémon) to Memory-Alpha (Star Trek)
Why have "a page for every Pokémon" on Wikipedia when you can have one page explaining the basics, and a link to an expansive wiki of solely Pokémon. It will probably never happen, but I'd like to see a "One Page per Franchise" rule on Wikipedia. If a movie/series/band/company needs more than a single page, it should have its own wiki. If we're putting up a page per-product, or per-character, or per-episode, then there's a need for the subject to be in something more specialized than a general encyclopedia.
Wikipedia broke ground as a user-editable encyclopedia. What it failed to do was set clear standards for what was to be included. It's useful to have a page on every general topic. It's not useful to have a hundred pages on each general topic.
I doubt it will go anywhere, but "One Page per Franchise" is my new rallying cry for Wikipedia.
I would. However, as other posters have noted, these are public servants. We, the people, pay them to do a job for us. As such, they lose a lot of the anonymity that the rest of us have.
If you don't want to be in the public eye, don't run for office, don't put on a uniform and run around in public, and don't take MY taxes to do a job for ME.
For those who haven't played it, Sins is the definition of good navigation in an expansive RTS world. I have NEVER seen a game with controls that polished, useful, and intuitive. Plus it's fucking beautiful from top to bottom. If you haven't played it, do yourself a favor and go get it. It was a fantastic game, and I still go back and get sucked into it.
That game is the reason I have Stardock's Impulse downloader installed. It's a download-store where you can purchase their other games, and a bunch of older titles as well. Every now and then they have a special, with older titles on sale for $5 or less. I've gotten a few, and have been moderately happy with them. Some hits, some misses, but nothing remotely close to spending $50 on a game that sucks.
I've been doing the same thing, but with computer games. Stardock sells older titles via their Impulse downloader for very little money. If you watch the sales, often under $5. I had a blast playing through Space Rangers II - many hours of wasting time for all of $5. Recently downloaded the Penumbrum games trilogy, when the linux versions were on sale for $10, I think. I've played through the first two, and they are very interesting. They're first-person-horror-puzzle games with quasi-realistic physics. I've not seen too many games put that combination together.
I've bought more games in the last two years than I did in the previous five before that. But I probably spent less money. I agree with you - lower the cost, and if you have to, change your model. I wonder if we're about to see a new generation of game companies, due to the ability to sell small, fun games at low prices to a wide market.
I wish I had mod points for you...Of COURSE the GPL favors companies.
If you use proprietary code, you reap all the benefits, but must do all the work. You pay for changes and improvements, and they happen at the rate you pay for them to happen.
If you license with BSD, the community might improve the code for you. And your competitor might take that code, add more to it, lock it away behind a proprietary license, market the hell out of it, and make a ton of money based off your work.
If you license your code with the GPL, you can still sell it and sell support, the community can improve your code, and you can add those changes back in, and your competitors can't take your work and resell it while locking all their changes away.
The GPL is all about collaborative coding. Whether between individuals, between individuals and companies, and between companies doesn't matter. If you want to harness the power of collaborative work, you need the GPL.
maybe more vampire like
For a botnet, I think you've got the wrong undead example. You want ghouls or something....
The transparent thing works both ways... it's easier for white hats to find holes too, by your own logic. And they can publish them, and any system admin can then fix them immediately. A similar bug existing in Windows couldn't be found easily by white hats, nor patched quickly. After all 'M$ can't code shit'. Linux and FOSS are more secure because of their development model. Trolls like the poster above make up stupid shit that runs counter to this and idiots mod them up.
I can only hope that people with mod-points mod your asinine comments into trollish oblivion.
Spam exists for one reason and one reason only: someone, somewhere is willing to buy from spammers or otherwise to give them money.
I recently read a theory that challenged the (afaict, completely factless, unproven) idea that the advertisers make money off of spam. It's P. T. Barnum's "There's a sucker born every minute", as seen in get-rich-quick schemes, applied to spam.
You have two parties - advertiser, and spammer. Advertiser pays spammer $10k to send a million spams. Spammer sends those million spams. The advertiser sits around, counting his imaginary sales. But nobody shows up. A couple of days pass, he sells $1k of stuff, and is $9k in the hole due to his spamming efforts. Does he spam again? Quite possibly not.
But who learned from that? Only that individual advertiser. Even if each advertiser never makes money, as long as there is another sucker in line, there will be no end to spam.
There's nothing I've seen that indicates the individual advertisers make good money off of spam. The spammers, sure. But they're just taking money from one sucker after another.
Indeed. And I doubt anyone will rush to build skyscrapers and bridges out of this stuff without some serious testing. However, there are plenty of non-critical applications for cement. Road beds, curbs, and sidewalks take up a lot of cement. Even if this wasn't as durable, as a net sink, replacing it 2x as often and landfilling it after you were done would be far more carbon-negative than using regular cement.
I'm imagining that single-home foundations wouldn't be an issue either - they don't (comparably) bear much weight, and the impact of replacing a house foundation earlier than normal bears no resemblance to the impact of replacing a skyscraper or bridge earlier.
There are tons of low-impact, low-danger applications to start testing this with. And I'd be damn surprised if a bunch of research colleges don't grab this and run with it. There's shittons of grant money for research and testing on "green technology" like this, and that's the bread and butter of a major materials science program.
We've got probably 75 years of really rigorous engineering science under our belts. The tests for concrete are very, VERY well established international and country-wide standards. I'd be surprised if this was steamrolled through an approval process. Building code is DAMN rigorous in most 1st world countries. Hell, there was just recently a story about some clay-based building product which was thermally amazing, to the point it stood in for insulation, and could withstand forest fires. It's not approved for building with in CA, due to its failure in earthquake tests.
that has been proven over hundreds of years;
I believe thousands is the correct order of magnitude. The Colosseum and the Aqueducts have some of that proof.
In that district, the only privacy is the time you spend behind a curtain with a black marker and a paper ballot. From registration, to the ballot(s) being handed to you, to the time you enter the voting booth, it's very public. (And social!) Once you leave, you're back out into public, and you're watched from there to the ballot box.
It's a fairly tight-knit group who runs the elections, even through they come from 3-4 different parties. (We have a strong local Green and Libertarian/Unitarian movement.) A group of a dozen or so of them show up on voting morning, and they all inspect that the rosters are unmarked, the before and after voting counters are at zero, the ballot box is empty, and the optical scanner reads zero. Once they're all satisfied that everything is at zero, they take their positions, and run through the voting day.
Once the voting is over, the optical scan results are reported, and the counting of the paper ballots begins. If, for some reason, the optical scan numbers are significantly different than the counters for people in/out, they are tossed out. Same with the ballot count, which is the official tally.
Since the number of voters in/out and the optical scan results are published before the counting of the paper ballots, that's an additional failsafe. You can't go back and change the numbers reported, so even if you managed to stuff the box overnight/during the counting, it would be immediately obvious. You'd have to be able to both stuff, AND go through the ballots and remove an equal number of ballots for the other candidate. Not to say that couldn't be done, but it would be damn hard to do. The fact that there are multiple eyes on the ballot box constantly makes it very, very unlikely.