Of course, $25/hour is a lot in some places. If he's in a cheap location, and you're in, say, NYC or LA and earn even $75/hour, in the end, he wins with the $25. Especially if quality of life counts. Nothing lowers your real hourly wage like a three hour commute.
For most of our people, I think we're around $500/system, including the extra XP license.
If we were to put Vista everywhere, we'd have to upgrade about 90% of our systems. Not likely to happen. Despite being a Microsoft shop, if we upgrade before three years go by, it will be either do to developer demand (and then only their machines), or we'll be shifting our staff to a nicely manageable Linux system, like Novell Desktop.
I really like the idea of having project teams situated near each other, with some kind of cubicle walls separating them from each other. It helps build a team spirit, and also helps keep noise down a little.
The most important thing, in my experience, is to stuff the phone-talkers into their own cubicles or offices. They have a tendency to have the phone ring when they aren't there, and also make quite a bit of noise just yammering away. Yeah, I realise this includes sales, project managers, etc.
Use decorative elements to separate groups as well, such a plants. Not everything has to be a cubicle wall. Lighting effects can also create unified workspaces.
And if your teams may switch off or rebuild regularly, find ways to keep everything fluid, so you can shift around as needed.
The vast majority of times when people are killed, it is needlessly.
We face a serious problem in this country of shifting blame. Parents don't actually parent anymore. Whatever happened to laying down the law in the house? Why do they shift so many things onto the schools, corporations, etc.?
The reality is that until you're 18, you don't have many rights, and your parents are held responsible for your actions to a fairly large degree, at least in civil litigation. Unfortunately, we keep shifting around laws based on a whole bunch of liberal crap that starts allowing 14 year olds to run away (committing a crime), not get charged, refuse to go home, and then be put in foster care, with the state charging the parents - even with no actual investigation or fault being found against the parents. This has created a small, but growing youth subculture who not only feel entitled (because of all the BS pseudo-self-esteem crap in our schools), but also able to manipulate adults, with no responsibility of their own.
On top of that, parents shift blame to schools over their kids not learning, when they refuse to make their kids study at home.
No small wonder that this country is going to hell in a handbasket. People like Jack Thompson just fuel it.
Ok, so if the 14-year-old playing the rated "M" game (for those 17+) was playing obsessively for months, then I would argue that the fault lies with whomever was responsible for him. This sounds like the fault of parents/guardians to properly raise the child. Any child that plays ANYTHING obsessively (as in, to the exclusion of any other interests) clearly has some kind of mental/emotional problem and should have help sought for them.
Failure to parent and seek help cannot be blamed on Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar or anyone else. However, the direct consequences of allowing the child to continue to act in an obsessive manner can be blamed directly on parental negligence.
File for summary dismissal based on their own grounds for the suit.
As if there wasn't enough junk to try to monitor in space and worry about falling to earth, now we're going to have private enterprise try to make a buck or two off of going to space.
Government contractors worry me enough, but what happens to a space hotel when the business runs out of money? I can see this going through a boom and bust cycle like just about every new business, and I want to know. It's not like running lots of fiber optic cable and then going bankrupt. Who's going to take care of the degrading orbit of the hotel?
Of course, most people don't know enough about Word to even want to let them use it. I end up having to reformat documents all the time for eventual public consumption, and I spend three times as long ripping out formatting put in by users than it takes me to clean up, edit, and apply the right styles (even if I just dump the text to Notepad and use the original as a pseudo-style guide to figure out what they MEANT to do.
I honestly don't think most of the people I encounter should have anything more complicated than Wordpad, and often, Notepad would be better.
But I totally agree, that aside from the crap they call Outlook and it's security issues, as an office suite, Office 97 was a LOT better, took fewer resources, etc.
Assuming a Linux system that will do automated security updates and be user-friendly enough that my mom can find her browser and her games, and not had to decrypt arcane crap, honestly, that would be better than having her or anyone else sit on Windows 98 or Me in the long run.
Most of the people I know who don't care about upgrading their systems are those who just need some Internet capability (e-mail, surfing the web, and playing a few web-based games), and then they need some limiting word-processing and so on. That's it.
These aren't the people who want to hook up their digital cameras, nor the people who need the latest games, or want to use TurboTax to do their taxes.
As long as the system updates, will update the latest JRE and Flash player to allow them to see the stuff they want online, a Linux system will be perfectly fine.
Now, for the Best Buy / Circuit City junkies.... God help us all if they start using Linux.
It is entirely your right as a consumer to choose what you want to see, hear, etc.
However, it is a copyright holder's right to choose in what format his/her work will be distributed. Many works are available in an edited format for distribution on television. However, not all directors, screenwriters, etc., are willing to allow their works to be edited. Fine. Then they can't be shown to a wider audience.
Removing part of a movie for yourself, with your own copy, is not likely to be illegal (depending on interpretations or allowances for "fair use" in your country). However, systematic distribution of derived/edited copies without the copyright holder's permission is illegal.
All those movies you see where the content and length have been edited for showing on television, have had that done with the permission of the studio, director, etc.
It is exactly the same as if I decided to publish a book by, let's say, Billy Graham, edited out various parts that he might consider essential to his writing, made sure he got paid the same royalties. Without his permission, that would be an illegal derivative work.
Remember that when you get those movies, you are licensing the film. That's it. You have a license to a copy of the film to watch. While you may be able to control how you want to see it, the owner of the copyright of that film has the right to how it is distributed.
Actually it's not that wide as regards interpretation.
Unless your company is functioning as a non-profit, you are making money off their work, using it to illustrate point. So, you need their permission, which may or may not come with certain royalty payments needing to be made.
While the scope for written materials is fairly wide, because one can cite a small piece, generally speaking when it comes to visual elements, there tends to not be much latitude given, with the possible exception of academic work.
I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I have been given to understand over the years.
Issuing an executive order is not the same as legislating. As the head of the executive branch, the President can authorise or limit the actions of any agency under the executive branch as long as doing so would not contradict any legislation.
But you're assuming that higher education is an entitlement, which it is not.
The reality is that in signing a contract, the government can restrict your freedoms in exchange for a number of things. This does not mean that you can't have those rights, but you will lose the benefits. Members of the military are constantly restricted in what they can and cannot do (hence when the media report that no one in the military is objecting to the President's actions, it's a worthless argument, because to do so publicly is a chargeable offense under the UCMJ).
It would potentially be arguable that these things are wrong for those under 18, because you can't hold a minor to a contract, but that's another issue entirely.
A simple way to look at this is that effectively these athletes become paid representatives of the university and if the university does not wish for them to associate with a particular location and makes it a condition of the contract, the athletes have a choice of whether or not they wish to continue.
I agree that Backslash is conservative on this, but I would argue that a sense of entitlement is one of the great problems facing this country. Because so many people believe they are entitled to thing, we have incurred massive debt as a nation in the last 25 years. Not only have Federal deficits run up, but personal debt has skyrocketed. People run up charges for things they really don't need.
I believe education is a wonderful thing and enables people to tackle many aspects of life. However, our idiot move to a 'knowledge-based' economy has created an environment where we constantly encourage people to be mediocre managers rather than top-rate plumbers. We stopped manufacturing a lot of things in an environment of artificially low oil and exported it. We then exported a lot of services, too, to save money. Now oil has corrected, and we still ship cotton to China to make clothes and then ship it back. We keep trying to use just-in-time manufacturing, when shipping smaller loads is more expensive than warehousing. The dollar is down, which is good for exports, except we don't export anymore. Trade balance is important for many reasons, most because when currencies devalue, the import-export balance allows other sectors to compensate. Instead, we threaten to topple the global economy as a whole.
So, when people feel entitled to those scholarships and not having any strings attached that might have to do with behaviour other than playing on the field and their academics, well, I have little sympathy. If you don't like it, don't whine. Either ask the court to decide, or vote for different policies.
(Yeah, I'm conservative, but I think public universities should be free and fiercely competitive instead.)
I had the same issue... That is, until I turned of Adblock.
If you have it on, you will see nothing in any of the money.cnn.com galleries. So turn it off, temporarily, and hit reload. The one banner is gonna kill you. Then, when you're done, turn it back on. CNN has the worst Java-based ads.
Slashdot is one of the few site for which I allow all the ads to come through.
Unless the proxy was specifically directed to be used by the network, the school in all honesty could not take action against him with regard to the proxy server. They could go after him for connecting to it, but simply changing the name, location, address, etc. of his system, without modifying the school's system, would render him as immune as any of the other proxy services out there.
Frankly, most attempts to bypass proxies I've seen, having working in both academic and corporate setting, is the attempt to use chat services that are otherwise blocked.
Providing access to disrupting material on the Internet that requires the students to log on and go find it is no more punishable that if the bookstore down the street sells a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Yes, at 18 you have adult punishment. But you also have to meet the criteria of the law in order to use them.
Lastly, for the hypothetical girl being raped because of MySpace contact... Criminally, neither party would be liable (only the rapist). As far as a civil tort goes, yes, they could possibly pursue a case, but since the access to the Internet was provided by the school, they would be majority responsible. It is not in the school's power or jursidiction, however, to determine the liability that the student wants to open himself to.
Of course, since the operation of proxy server is not done under school property and doesn't have anything to do with the care of the student, the argument for it being in loco parentis doesn't really hold water.
Of particular note, if he's near graduating, he may well be 18 already, at which point in loco parentis no longer applies. By threatening his academic situation, a publically mandated and required function of the school, by regarding his own actions off school time, then they could actually be sued on grounds of harrassment.
Now, they could pursue action against him for access the proxy from the school, but not against him for others.
Moreover, since I was nailed under in loco parentis when I was in middle school, I can tell you that loco parentis ceases the instant you enter your front door, if you ride the bus home from school. I got nailed for verbally assaulting the bus driver (who later was nailed for felony hit and runs against mailboxes, thus disproving the slander and defamation charges they 'threatened' me with). As I was told, if I'd entered my house, come back out, and then yelled at her, it would have been out of the school's hands.
I remember when I used to use a regular land line all the time that I got faxes all the time sent to whatever phone line I had. I always loved the automatic fax spam at 10pm or whatever. Phone numbers get recycled, and for some reason so many places use really old phone book software (probably because it costs them a whopping $10 by then). So, my solution is to be on VoIP. I don't really want a ton of places calling me anyway, so my friends have my contact info. If for some reason I start to get a bunch of calls, I can change numbers easily.
The second thing is that we need to start really questioning politicians. During the next presidential campaign, we need to look for comprehensive answers to questions, and not just soundbites. What does better education mean? What about health insurance, taxes, foreign policy, etc.? But there is more to my life than that. How do they see television, Internet, and other data? That's important to me. What about DRM? Do they think it's a great feature or is a pain? What do they know about copyright? What do they know about gardening, or the price of food? How do they see a balance between farmers and the poor? What about the quality of food? Or postal regulations, or delivery regulations? Do they have any opinion on how postal privatization has succeeded or failed?
I want to know things about candidates that really affect my life, not just my belief system. Of course I don't want some guy whose beliefs massively contradict mine, but that's for most people. But I really want to know on a practical level, how is any candidate going to affect my life? If we ask these questions, maybe we won't get FCC commissioners who are simply tools of corporations. (Or Treasury Secretaries, or Defense Secretaries, or a useless Sec of State.)
Of course, if things are half as complex as this article makes it sound, well, I think there will be the issue of training budgets for companies.
If the new Office/Vista interfaces are too different from the current Windows setup, the training budget will be cheaper to go to a Linux desktop (GNOME or KDE) and use OpenOffice.org. Never mind the license fees to upgrade being saved.
This has become typical of Microsoft. While SQL has gotten better, and they're getting better with Visual Studio and the new version of IE, so many other things are broken. I can't speak for BizTalk 2006, but 2004 has struck me as a huge waste of cash.
I've been trying to justify using MS products for quite some time (aside from the fact that.NET programmers are cheap). If the user interface is more complex for most of our users, then there will be little to no reason to stick with it.
I would check out the refresh rate of the monitor, and possibly the resolution. I myself am light sensitive to begin with, and whenever a CRT is set at 60 Hz (the default), I find myself reacting, even from across the room.
Also, if it's an old monitor and the resolution is set higher than the pixels will easily show, then it become very tiring trying to pick out what one is seeing.
I think eBooks are wonderful tools when we can really use them in a truly electronic fashion. As a D&D gamer, if I'm not gaming at home, it's really inconvenient to haul all the books with me. When I've been able to get copies that have been scanned, OCR'd, and put into some kind of format, I've found it to be really useful to haul a laptop with me to look up stuff, instead of hauling all 50+ lbs. of books I have.
That said, I really don't have much use for them when I'm not travelling or in the hospital (with limited space) or any other kind of inconvenient situation. When I can sit in a chair, on my sofa, or even lie in bed with an actual book, it is much easier to read and focus on what I'm reading. As mentioned elsewhere, fears of dropping my laptop are definitely frustrating, as is the resolution for reading.
I really don't care about DRM, but honestly, I would love it if after I buy a book, I get authorisation to download the electronic copy, and that hopefully when they make errata changes, I can find them included in the electronic copy (which will hopefully be made off the prep for the next printing). Of course, seriously annoying DRM is a turn-off. (Not use a code in the book to download, but use a code in the book to read the eBook? Or even better, let me download it all of once, so when my HD fails, I'm screwed.)
Campaign finance reform has been offered up as a token gesture. There has never been a serious reform regarding campaign financing in ages.
Labelling of someone else's view in a derogatory fashion is generally the purview of those who have little to contribute, and is often a tactic I've seen espoused by those with power who feel threatened. (Refer to debates regarding patriotism or educational reform to find views by both major American parties.)
Obviously we don't have perfection. We have democracy, or at least should have. Which at its worst is a mob-mentality. But it is fairer than most. But unfortunately to have a well-functioning democracy, you need a well-educated populace. (Refer to democracy imposed on Third World countries with poor education systems.)
The fallacious argument is that we don't need campaign finance reform, just education reform. Except that politicians who are making these reforms are often making them in ways that will continue power. More formulaic testing, less teaching about critical argument. It is a very convenient system to have those in power provide money to those who legislate to keep those with no power providing money back to those in power.
Funnily enough, many of those who are in the lower reaches of the upper class actually consider themselve average citizens and members of the middle class. Skewed realities. (Like the Sunnis in Iraq who still belive they are 50% of the population.)
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Of course, $25/hour is a lot in some places. If he's in a cheap location, and you're in, say, NYC or LA and earn even $75/hour, in the end, he wins with the $25. Especially if quality of life counts. Nothing lowers your real hourly wage like a three hour commute.
For most of our people, I think we're around $500/system, including the extra XP license.
If we were to put Vista everywhere, we'd have to upgrade about 90% of our systems. Not likely to happen. Despite being a Microsoft shop, if we upgrade before three years go by, it will be either do to developer demand (and then only their machines), or we'll be shifting our staff to a nicely manageable Linux system, like Novell Desktop.
I really like the idea of having project teams situated near each other, with some kind of cubicle walls separating them from each other. It helps build a team spirit, and also helps keep noise down a little.
The most important thing, in my experience, is to stuff the phone-talkers into their own cubicles or offices. They have a tendency to have the phone ring when they aren't there, and also make quite a bit of noise just yammering away. Yeah, I realise this includes sales, project managers, etc.
Use decorative elements to separate groups as well, such a plants. Not everything has to be a cubicle wall. Lighting effects can also create unified workspaces.
And if your teams may switch off or rebuild regularly, find ways to keep everything fluid, so you can shift around as needed.
The vast majority of times when people are killed, it is needlessly.
We face a serious problem in this country of shifting blame. Parents don't actually parent anymore. Whatever happened to laying down the law in the house? Why do they shift so many things onto the schools, corporations, etc.?
The reality is that until you're 18, you don't have many rights, and your parents are held responsible for your actions to a fairly large degree, at least in civil litigation. Unfortunately, we keep shifting around laws based on a whole bunch of liberal crap that starts allowing 14 year olds to run away (committing a crime), not get charged, refuse to go home, and then be put in foster care, with the state charging the parents - even with no actual investigation or fault being found against the parents. This has created a small, but growing youth subculture who not only feel entitled (because of all the BS pseudo-self-esteem crap in our schools), but also able to manipulate adults, with no responsibility of their own.
On top of that, parents shift blame to schools over their kids not learning, when they refuse to make their kids study at home.
No small wonder that this country is going to hell in a handbasket. People like Jack Thompson just fuel it.
That's because they have no money and aren't worth a suit.
It's too bad, because of such piss-poor parenting, the parents should be looking at criminal charges.
Ok, so if the 14-year-old playing the rated "M" game (for those 17+) was playing obsessively for months, then I would argue that the fault lies with whomever was responsible for him. This sounds like the fault of parents/guardians to properly raise the child. Any child that plays ANYTHING obsessively (as in, to the exclusion of any other interests) clearly has some kind of mental/emotional problem and should have help sought for them.
Failure to parent and seek help cannot be blamed on Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar or anyone else. However, the direct consequences of allowing the child to continue to act in an obsessive manner can be blamed directly on parental negligence.
File for summary dismissal based on their own grounds for the suit.
As if there wasn't enough junk to try to monitor in space and worry about falling to earth, now we're going to have private enterprise try to make a buck or two off of going to space.
Government contractors worry me enough, but what happens to a space hotel when the business runs out of money? I can see this going through a boom and bust cycle like just about every new business, and I want to know. It's not like running lots of fiber optic cable and then going bankrupt. Who's going to take care of the degrading orbit of the hotel?
When I was looking into being a full-time grad student, if you got a fellowship, yes, you had health insurance.
And for my department, pretty much everyone got a fellowship.
Of course, most people don't know enough about Word to even want to let them use it. I end up having to reformat documents all the time for eventual public consumption, and I spend three times as long ripping out formatting put in by users than it takes me to clean up, edit, and apply the right styles (even if I just dump the text to Notepad and use the original as a pseudo-style guide to figure out what they MEANT to do.
I honestly don't think most of the people I encounter should have anything more complicated than Wordpad, and often, Notepad would be better.
But I totally agree, that aside from the crap they call Outlook and it's security issues, as an office suite, Office 97 was a LOT better, took fewer resources, etc.
Well, my mom hung onto Windows for Workgroups 3.11 as long as she could. And I can understand fully well that being supported and maintaining.
Why?
Without all the integrated Internet crap that came with Windows 95 and later, it was actually more secure.
I can't imagine doing anything online with Windows 98 with no security patches at all. Forget it. Not worth the time and effort to maintain.
Assuming a Linux system that will do automated security updates and be user-friendly enough that my mom can find her browser and her games, and not had to decrypt arcane crap, honestly, that would be better than having her or anyone else sit on Windows 98 or Me in the long run.
Most of the people I know who don't care about upgrading their systems are those who just need some Internet capability (e-mail, surfing the web, and playing a few web-based games), and then they need some limiting word-processing and so on. That's it.
These aren't the people who want to hook up their digital cameras, nor the people who need the latest games, or want to use TurboTax to do their taxes.
As long as the system updates, will update the latest JRE and Flash player to allow them to see the stuff they want online, a Linux system will be perfectly fine.
Now, for the Best Buy / Circuit City junkies.... God help us all if they start using Linux.
It is entirely your right as a consumer to choose what you want to see, hear, etc.
However, it is a copyright holder's right to choose in what format his/her work will be distributed. Many works are available in an edited format for distribution on television. However, not all directors, screenwriters, etc., are willing to allow their works to be edited. Fine. Then they can't be shown to a wider audience.
Removing part of a movie for yourself, with your own copy, is not likely to be illegal (depending on interpretations or allowances for "fair use" in your country). However, systematic distribution of derived/edited copies without the copyright holder's permission is illegal.
All those movies you see where the content and length have been edited for showing on television, have had that done with the permission of the studio, director, etc.
It is exactly the same as if I decided to publish a book by, let's say, Billy Graham, edited out various parts that he might consider essential to his writing, made sure he got paid the same royalties. Without his permission, that would be an illegal derivative work.
Remember that when you get those movies, you are licensing the film. That's it. You have a license to a copy of the film to watch. While you may be able to control how you want to see it, the owner of the copyright of that film has the right to how it is distributed.
Actually it's not that wide as regards interpretation.
Unless your company is functioning as a non-profit, you are making money off their work, using it to illustrate point. So, you need their permission, which may or may not come with certain royalty payments needing to be made.
While the scope for written materials is fairly wide, because one can cite a small piece, generally speaking when it comes to visual elements, there tends to not be much latitude given, with the possible exception of academic work.
I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I have been given to understand over the years.
Issuing an executive order is not the same as legislating. As the head of the executive branch, the President can authorise or limit the actions of any agency under the executive branch as long as doing so would not contradict any legislation.
But you're assuming that higher education is an entitlement, which it is not.
The reality is that in signing a contract, the government can restrict your freedoms in exchange for a number of things. This does not mean that you can't have those rights, but you will lose the benefits. Members of the military are constantly restricted in what they can and cannot do (hence when the media report that no one in the military is objecting to the President's actions, it's a worthless argument, because to do so publicly is a chargeable offense under the UCMJ).
It would potentially be arguable that these things are wrong for those under 18, because you can't hold a minor to a contract, but that's another issue entirely.
A simple way to look at this is that effectively these athletes become paid representatives of the university and if the university does not wish for them to associate with a particular location and makes it a condition of the contract, the athletes have a choice of whether or not they wish to continue.
I agree that Backslash is conservative on this, but I would argue that a sense of entitlement is one of the great problems facing this country. Because so many people believe they are entitled to thing, we have incurred massive debt as a nation in the last 25 years. Not only have Federal deficits run up, but personal debt has skyrocketed. People run up charges for things they really don't need.
I believe education is a wonderful thing and enables people to tackle many aspects of life. However, our idiot move to a 'knowledge-based' economy has created an environment where we constantly encourage people to be mediocre managers rather than top-rate plumbers. We stopped manufacturing a lot of things in an environment of artificially low oil and exported it. We then exported a lot of services, too, to save money. Now oil has corrected, and we still ship cotton to China to make clothes and then ship it back. We keep trying to use just-in-time manufacturing, when shipping smaller loads is more expensive than warehousing. The dollar is down, which is good for exports, except we don't export anymore. Trade balance is important for many reasons, most because when currencies devalue, the import-export balance allows other sectors to compensate. Instead, we threaten to topple the global economy as a whole.
So, when people feel entitled to those scholarships and not having any strings attached that might have to do with behaviour other than playing on the field and their academics, well, I have little sympathy. If you don't like it, don't whine. Either ask the court to decide, or vote for different policies.
(Yeah, I'm conservative, but I think public universities should be free and fiercely competitive instead.)
I had the same issue... That is, until I turned of Adblock.
If you have it on, you will see nothing in any of the money.cnn.com galleries. So turn it off, temporarily, and hit reload. The one banner is gonna kill you. Then, when you're done, turn it back on. CNN has the worst Java-based ads.
Slashdot is one of the few site for which I allow all the ads to come through.
Unless the proxy was specifically directed to be used by the network, the school in all honesty could not take action against him with regard to the proxy server. They could go after him for connecting to it, but simply changing the name, location, address, etc. of his system, without modifying the school's system, would render him as immune as any of the other proxy services out there.
Frankly, most attempts to bypass proxies I've seen, having working in both academic and corporate setting, is the attempt to use chat services that are otherwise blocked.
Providing access to disrupting material on the Internet that requires the students to log on and go find it is no more punishable that if the bookstore down the street sells a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Yes, at 18 you have adult punishment. But you also have to meet the criteria of the law in order to use them.
Lastly, for the hypothetical girl being raped because of MySpace contact... Criminally, neither party would be liable (only the rapist). As far as a civil tort goes, yes, they could possibly pursue a case, but since the access to the Internet was provided by the school, they would be majority responsible. It is not in the school's power or jursidiction, however, to determine the liability that the student wants to open himself to.
Of course, since the operation of proxy server is not done under school property and doesn't have anything to do with the care of the student, the argument for it being in loco parentis doesn't really hold water.
Of particular note, if he's near graduating, he may well be 18 already, at which point in loco parentis no longer applies. By threatening his academic situation, a publically mandated and required function of the school, by regarding his own actions off school time, then they could actually be sued on grounds of harrassment.
Now, they could pursue action against him for access the proxy from the school, but not against him for others.
Moreover, since I was nailed under in loco parentis when I was in middle school, I can tell you that loco parentis ceases the instant you enter your front door, if you ride the bus home from school. I got nailed for verbally assaulting the bus driver (who later was nailed for felony hit and runs against mailboxes, thus disproving the slander and defamation charges they 'threatened' me with). As I was told, if I'd entered my house, come back out, and then yelled at her, it would have been out of the school's hands.
What a wonderfully insulting statement to make, especially for those of who have lost children to SIDS.
You wouldn't happen to be a Scientologist like Tom Cruise, would you?
I have two parts to my two cents here.
I remember when I used to use a regular land line all the time that I got faxes all the time sent to whatever phone line I had. I always loved the automatic fax spam at 10pm or whatever. Phone numbers get recycled, and for some reason so many places use really old phone book software (probably because it costs them a whopping $10 by then). So, my solution is to be on VoIP. I don't really want a ton of places calling me anyway, so my friends have my contact info. If for some reason I start to get a bunch of calls, I can change numbers easily.
The second thing is that we need to start really questioning politicians. During the next presidential campaign, we need to look for comprehensive answers to questions, and not just soundbites. What does better education mean? What about health insurance, taxes, foreign policy, etc.? But there is more to my life than that. How do they see television, Internet, and other data? That's important to me. What about DRM? Do they think it's a great feature or is a pain? What do they know about copyright? What do they know about gardening, or the price of food? How do they see a balance between farmers and the poor? What about the quality of food? Or postal regulations, or delivery regulations? Do they have any opinion on how postal privatization has succeeded or failed?
I want to know things about candidates that really affect my life, not just my belief system. Of course I don't want some guy whose beliefs massively contradict mine, but that's for most people. But I really want to know on a practical level, how is any candidate going to affect my life? If we ask these questions, maybe we won't get FCC commissioners who are simply tools of corporations. (Or Treasury Secretaries, or Defense Secretaries, or a useless Sec of State.)
Of course, if things are half as complex as this article makes it sound, well, I think there will be the issue of training budgets for companies.
.NET programmers are cheap). If the user interface is more complex for most of our users, then there will be little to no reason to stick with it.
If the new Office/Vista interfaces are too different from the current Windows setup, the training budget will be cheaper to go to a Linux desktop (GNOME or KDE) and use OpenOffice.org. Never mind the license fees to upgrade being saved.
This has become typical of Microsoft. While SQL has gotten better, and they're getting better with Visual Studio and the new version of IE, so many other things are broken. I can't speak for BizTalk 2006, but 2004 has struck me as a huge waste of cash.
I've been trying to justify using MS products for quite some time (aside from the fact that
I would check out the refresh rate of the monitor, and possibly the resolution. I myself am light sensitive to begin with, and whenever a CRT is set at 60 Hz (the default), I find myself reacting, even from across the room.
Also, if it's an old monitor and the resolution is set higher than the pixels will easily show, then it become very tiring trying to pick out what one is seeing.
I think eBooks are wonderful tools when we can really use them in a truly electronic fashion. As a D&D gamer, if I'm not gaming at home, it's really inconvenient to haul all the books with me. When I've been able to get copies that have been scanned, OCR'd, and put into some kind of format, I've found it to be really useful to haul a laptop with me to look up stuff, instead of hauling all 50+ lbs. of books I have.
That said, I really don't have much use for them when I'm not travelling or in the hospital (with limited space) or any other kind of inconvenient situation. When I can sit in a chair, on my sofa, or even lie in bed with an actual book, it is much easier to read and focus on what I'm reading. As mentioned elsewhere, fears of dropping my laptop are definitely frustrating, as is the resolution for reading.
I really don't care about DRM, but honestly, I would love it if after I buy a book, I get authorisation to download the electronic copy, and that hopefully when they make errata changes, I can find them included in the electronic copy (which will hopefully be made off the prep for the next printing). Of course, seriously annoying DRM is a turn-off. (Not use a code in the book to download, but use a code in the book to read the eBook? Or even better, let me download it all of once, so when my HD fails, I'm screwed.)
Campaign finance reform has been offered up as a token gesture. There has never been a serious reform regarding campaign financing in ages.
Labelling of someone else's view in a derogatory fashion is generally the purview of those who have little to contribute, and is often a tactic I've seen espoused by those with power who feel threatened. (Refer to debates regarding patriotism or educational reform to find views by both major American parties.)
Obviously we don't have perfection. We have democracy, or at least should have. Which at its worst is a mob-mentality. But it is fairer than most. But unfortunately to have a well-functioning democracy, you need a well-educated populace. (Refer to democracy imposed on Third World countries with poor education systems.)
The fallacious argument is that we don't need campaign finance reform, just education reform. Except that politicians who are making these reforms are often making them in ways that will continue power. More formulaic testing, less teaching about critical argument. It is a very convenient system to have those in power provide money to those who legislate to keep those with no power providing money back to those in power.
Funnily enough, many of those who are in the lower reaches of the upper class actually consider themselve average citizens and members of the middle class. Skewed realities. (Like the Sunnis in Iraq who still belive they are 50% of the population.)