I propose that this will be as effective as the war on drugs. Sure, some kids will write their essays, get some free stuff, and the salespeople, uh, I mean, volunteer educators, will feel as if they did a good job.
But consider the following:
1. Low income children do not have the access to computers and network connections that more well-to-do children have. I doubt, therefore, that they're reaching their target audience.
2. What's more effective at influencing behavior, some JA instructor or your cool friends giving you a copy of the latest hit song/album that they ripped off the net?
3. One sided propaganda campaigns may make people feel good, but they gloss over serious issues (ie, copyright, fair use, etc) and end up breeding a ridiculous environment in which people claim to want such rules and laws yet break them anyway.
All of this sounds a lot like the war on drugs. We have our "just say no" campaigns in schools, celebrities tell us to stay off the drugs, and we make all these claims about how bad drugs are for you while ignoring or outright suppressing the truth about their effects as we trample civil liberties. And just how effective is that?
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but how can one stop all "secure" file swapping communications w/o killing off unrelated important stuff? I tunnel through anonymizer.com when I surf, and I imagine any file sharing program worth its salt could do a similar type thing through the same port (22). Wouldn't they end up not only killing file sharing but also people checking their bank accounts, registering online, buying stuff on Ebay, etc?
As for looking into email, sheesh! Public key encryption will avoid that, and any attempt to block those types of communications would be rather stupid and overreaching.
Go ahead and mod me down as a troll, but why do I have this feeling we'll see a religiously-based backlash against this? Given the furor over stem cell research, cloning, etc., I'd imagine social conservatives would see this as yet another threat of some kind. After all, this is the holy grail in separating sex from reproduction. Hell, I could easily imagine them complaining about "them thar homo-shex-u-als" now being able to reproduce.
One reason that I don't watch television is because of all the awful advertising. It seems like for every three minutes of programming there are two minutes of commercials.
One of the best channels on TV is Noggin. From 6 am to 6 pm, it's kids' programming with no commericials. Instead, they have songs, little games, or "mini-shows" between the major programs. (They run advertising the other 12 hours when they're programming for older kids.)
This, of course, has conditioned my kids to be adverse to advertising. One day, we let my older son stay up to watch some animated show on another channel. Everytime a commericial came on, he kept asking if the show was over. We had to explain what the commericials were. He seemed to become thoroughly unimpressed with the idea of someone interrupting his show with other stuff.
On a side note, I think Noggin is a great example of how you can make something in TV/cable/satellite that people would actually be willing to pay good money for. The only reason I have my existing level of cable service is because of Noggin. If they didn't have it, I'd have almost nothing beyond the basic/extended package.
# Percent reduction in the American homicide rate between 1993 and 1996: 20
# Percent increase in number of violent scenes per hour on 10 major channels from 1992 to 1994: 41
Hmmm....so all we need is a 200% increase in violent scenes to reduce the homicide rate by 100%. It's Full Metal Jacket for the masses!
Spreadheets are absolutely the worst tool imaginable for such a task. Spreadsheets are good for simple calculations with well know quantities where you can check the intermediate results and make sure you have not made a bonehead mistake. They are best for back of the envelope, simplified model sanity checks. What you want for MC are any of the premade specialty packages, usually written in FORTRAN, that run as a batch process and have been extensively peer reviewed. I can imagine a dinky spreadheet MC tool with inputs for numbers of runs and odds, but with the underlying math hidden. UGH, you can't tell what it's doing! Anyone trying to cowboy a spreadsheet "solution" to this kind of problem is wasting their time.
I believe Excel also has limitations regarding its random number sequence. I never found out exactly what it was, but I've talked to a couple OR types who've said that they feel much more comfortable with the random numbers from dedicated simulation packages.
You're right about alpha being much worse than gamma, but that's only if it gets to you. Alpha is stopped by a decent amount of air, or your clothing or even your epidermis without harming you. It really harms you if you ingest it and it can get to your cells without passing through clothes first.
True, I failed to mention that. Still, I'd imagine there'd be a lot of dust, dirt, etc. in an abandoned town that one could easily inhale. If you ride with her, stay on the side, not behind her!
Roentgens, the unit used in her journal, measure ionization of the air. The general conversion is that 1 Roentgen = 1 REM, the unit we use for human radiation exposure in the US.
That's usually true for beta radiation and gamma, too, if I'm not mistaken. Alpha radiation has a factor of something like 20 (ie, 20 rem for 1 rad of alpha radiation). For those not versed in things nuclear, that's because alpha radiation is massively ionizing compared to others. Neutron radiation has different factors depending on whether it's thermal or fast neutrons.
For a quick explanation on all these units and radiation dosage in general, check here.
Many Windows users will think it's too much to type in google.com and hit enter before they do a search, so Microsoft will once again use its monopoly to ruin a great product. Just like IE. Just like Windows Media. Just like Office. Just like Windows itself.
I think you're being a little hard on users. There's a big difference between a) typing www.google.com in the address field of any browser and b) finding, downloading, installing, and configuring an alternative browser such as Netscape, Opera, Firebird/fox/whatever.
Google has also become such a part of the culture that it will be hard to disrupt. No one ever said, "Let's just netscape the web" back in the 90s. The longer MS takes to build search technology into the next version of Windows (2005, 2006, when?), the deeper Google extends into online search experiences.
Programming is just like stamping "Ford" on the grill in a Detroit assembly plant these days and nothing more.
You mean it pays 6 figures (w/ overtime) with full benefits and damn near ultimate job security yet requires almost no education whatsoever? Man, I picked the wrong major....
But on the bright side, you can dissolve styrofoam in gasoline (or other hydrocarbons). When you add enough, the solution becomes viscous and sticky (just like honey). If you love the smell of napalm in the morning, styrofoam is your friend.:)
We used to do this in the boy scouts. We'd then pour/mold the mixture onto a newspaper, twist the newspaper around the stuff, and make a "starter log" for camping. Make 'em two or three inches thick, throw a couple into your fire pit, and you've got a great way to start a fire. Very good for drying out damp wood and getting a blaze going.
I'd wager that computer literacy amongst people who've tried Linux would be twice what it is today if when you typed help foobar bash would perform a man foobar if 'foobar' wasn't a builtin command. And it'd probably be double that if you incorporated some kind of search facility too. Type in help disk space and get a hit on the df command, for instance.
What I'd really like to see is a more helpful man page with examples. It's frustrating when using a new command to read "usage: foobar [VNFHDMudndghfud8734yfhfnbgdh] filename | device | dir | options filename[]" and then read through 5 pages of options and switches I'll never use. If every man page had at least a few examples of how to do stuff most people want to do, it'd be easier to both do those things and learn the more complex commands.
Another nice thing would be a howdoi command which allows the input of natural language and spits out a small man page (with examples!) or help file, ie, "$>howdoi see how much hard drive space i have" spits out how to use df.
My father works as the sys admin for the accounting department of a company that owns a bunch of convenience stores. Every day, the computers at the stores dial in to their system and report on what was purchased, what the price was, what inventory is, etc., etc. The company does all the accounting paperwork for the stores and keeps track of what's selling where, if promotional activities are working, etc.
This is no real big deal, just a good example of IT making business work. Now if AB implemented one of those "loyalty" cards like grocery stores that give you price breaks in exchange for your privacy, then you might have something.
I'd also like to point out that AB doesn't sell beer. They sell advertising in the form of colored fizzy water.
If you bother to go to the wine country of northern California, I suggest going through Sonoma rather than Napa. Napa has some good wines, but it's very touristy. Sonoma has great wines and is fairly quiet, off the beaten path.
A good book to read is "A Tale of Two Valleys." The author talks about how several interesting characters in the Sonoma valley fought to avoid becoming like Napa. A pretty interesting read for those into the people behind the wines.
Something to keep in mind is that debt isn't necessarily bad. Many companies use a combination of equity and debt to finance their operations. Sometimes no debt with lots of cash can actually be dangerous, particularly with the ongoing rise in leveraged buyouts. Granted, Apple is probably protected against this since there is very little to be gained by "breaking up" Apple. (I'd wager it's not even possible.)
It's how a company uses its debt and the amount of debt relative to things like cash flow, equity, etc., that's important.
Hmmmm....so if they install readers in copy machines, how about I just hand copy the document (or just the very important facts, figures, etc.)? How about a little hand scanner? How about an older USB scanner attached to my laptop?
No, the only logical point to say life has started is at the very beginning. Researchers have the unique challenge of finding ways to enhance human life without taking or harming it. Granted this can be difficult, but I have confidence that people can work within ethical limits and still find honorable ways to do the things they are now trying to do through cloning and abortion.
Where, exactly, is the beginning? Even the "moment" of conception is not an actual moment. It takes a non-insignificant amount of time for chromosomes to match up.
You also need to address the flip side of the "beginning" argument. Over half of all pregnancies end through natural abortion/failure to implant. If we assume "life has started at the very beginning" then why do we let all those people die simply because they fail to implant in their mother's wombs? That number is far greater than abortions, murders, car accidents, etc. Why are those lives valued less or treated with less care than others? If we say it's "nature", then why do we interfere with nature by making antibiotics, developing vaccines, or outlawing murder?
My point is not to start an abortion/when does life begin argument here. Rather it's to point out that you cannot simply solve an ethical issue such as this by taking one extreme viewpoint or another (or any inbetween, for that matter) and implying it logically solves all our ethical problems.
The fact that credit history is included and is documented along with these other aspects of identity and is run and managed by a private company is disturbing leading me to wonder what connections Gov. Leavitt might have with this company.
Given the "accuracy" credit reporting companies have, this may actually help the terrorists and criminals they seek to combat. I have to keep telling at least one credit agency every year that the "current" address they have for me is incorrect. If I decide to commit a crime, it's nice to know cops will be tracking me down in a place I haven't lived at in 6 years!
If you are often late on deadlines, I'd like to know that you are aware of it and have an idea about how to self-improve. You mean you'd actually consider paying this person while they fix a problem a good employee shouldn't have in the first place?
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Don't forget that you've stolen any gift you've ever received. Hmm....that gives me an idea!
New MPAA campaign that finally has an answer to the ??? question:
1) Send out free CDs to people.
2) Enforce mantra: "If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it."
3) Sue people.
4) Profit!
I propose that this will be as effective as the war on drugs. Sure, some kids will write their essays, get some free stuff, and the salespeople, uh, I mean, volunteer educators, will feel as if they did a good job.
But consider the following:
1. Low income children do not have the access to computers and network connections that more well-to-do children have. I doubt, therefore, that they're reaching their target audience.
2. What's more effective at influencing behavior, some JA instructor or your cool friends giving you a copy of the latest hit song/album that they ripped off the net?
3. One sided propaganda campaigns may make people feel good, but they gloss over serious issues (ie, copyright, fair use, etc) and end up breeding a ridiculous environment in which people claim to want such rules and laws yet break them anyway.
All of this sounds a lot like the war on drugs. We have our "just say no" campaigns in schools, celebrities tell us to stay off the drugs, and we make all these claims about how bad drugs are for you while ignoring or outright suppressing the truth about their effects as we trample civil liberties. And just how effective is that?
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but how can one stop all "secure" file swapping communications w/o killing off unrelated important stuff? I tunnel through anonymizer.com when I surf, and I imagine any file sharing program worth its salt could do a similar type thing through the same port (22). Wouldn't they end up not only killing file sharing but also people checking their bank accounts, registering online, buying stuff on Ebay, etc?
As for looking into email, sheesh! Public key encryption will avoid that, and any attempt to block those types of communications would be rather stupid and overreaching.
Go ahead and mod me down as a troll, but why do I have this feeling we'll see a religiously-based backlash against this? Given the furor over stem cell research, cloning, etc., I'd imagine social conservatives would see this as yet another threat of some kind. After all, this is the holy grail in separating sex from reproduction. Hell, I could easily imagine them complaining about "them thar homo-shex-u-als" now being able to reproduce.
One reason that I don't watch television is because of all the awful advertising. It seems like for every three minutes of programming there are two minutes of commercials.
One of the best channels on TV is Noggin. From 6 am to 6 pm, it's kids' programming with no commericials. Instead, they have songs, little games, or "mini-shows" between the major programs. (They run advertising the other 12 hours when they're programming for older kids.)
This, of course, has conditioned my kids to be adverse to advertising. One day, we let my older son stay up to watch some animated show on another channel. Everytime a commericial came on, he kept asking if the show was over. We had to explain what the commericials were. He seemed to become thoroughly unimpressed with the idea of someone interrupting his show with other stuff.
On a side note, I think Noggin is a great example of how you can make something in TV/cable/satellite that people would actually be willing to pay good money for. The only reason I have my existing level of cable service is because of Noggin. If they didn't have it, I'd have almost nothing beyond the basic/extended package.
# Percent reduction in the American homicide rate between 1993 and 1996: 20
# Percent increase in number of violent scenes per hour on 10 major channels from 1992 to 1994: 41
Hmmm....so all we need is a 200% increase in violent scenes to reduce the homicide rate by 100%. It's Full Metal Jacket for the masses!
Spreadheets are absolutely the worst tool imaginable for such a task. Spreadsheets are good for simple calculations with well know quantities where you can check the intermediate results and make sure you have not made a bonehead mistake. They are best for back of the envelope, simplified model sanity checks. What you want for MC are any of the premade specialty packages, usually written in FORTRAN, that run as a batch process and have been extensively peer reviewed. I can imagine a dinky spreadheet MC tool with inputs for numbers of runs and odds, but with the underlying math hidden. UGH, you can't tell what it's doing! Anyone trying to cowboy a spreadsheet "solution" to this kind of problem is wasting their time.
I believe Excel also has limitations regarding its random number sequence. I never found out exactly what it was, but I've talked to a couple OR types who've said that they feel much more comfortable with the random numbers from dedicated simulation packages.
You're right about alpha being much worse than gamma, but that's only if it gets to you. Alpha is stopped by a decent amount of air, or your clothing or even your epidermis without harming you. It really harms you if you ingest it and it can get to your cells without passing through clothes first.
True, I failed to mention that. Still, I'd imagine there'd be a lot of dust, dirt, etc. in an abandoned town that one could easily inhale. If you ride with her, stay on the side, not behind her!
Roentgens, the unit used in her journal, measure ionization of the air. The general conversion is that 1 Roentgen = 1 REM, the unit we use for human radiation exposure in the US.
That's usually true for beta radiation and gamma, too, if I'm not mistaken. Alpha radiation has a factor of something like 20 (ie, 20 rem for 1 rad of alpha radiation). For those not versed in things nuclear, that's because alpha radiation is massively ionizing compared to others. Neutron radiation has different factors depending on whether it's thermal or fast neutrons.
For a quick explanation on all these units and radiation dosage in general, check here.
Many Windows users will think it's too much to type in google.com and hit enter before they do a search, so Microsoft will once again use its monopoly to ruin a great product. Just like IE. Just like Windows Media. Just like Office. Just like Windows itself.
I think you're being a little hard on users. There's a big difference between a) typing www.google.com in the address field of any browser and b) finding, downloading, installing, and configuring an alternative browser such as Netscape, Opera, Firebird/fox/whatever.
Google has also become such a part of the culture that it will be hard to disrupt. No one ever said, "Let's just netscape the web" back in the 90s. The longer MS takes to build search technology into the next version of Windows (2005, 2006, when?), the deeper Google extends into online search experiences.
Programming is just like stamping "Ford" on the grill in a Detroit assembly plant these days and nothing more.
You mean it pays 6 figures (w/ overtime) with full benefits and damn near ultimate job security yet requires almost no education whatsoever? Man, I picked the wrong major....
But on the bright side, you can dissolve styrofoam in gasoline (or other hydrocarbons). When you add enough, the solution becomes viscous and sticky (just like honey). If you love the smell of napalm in the morning, styrofoam is your friend. :)
We used to do this in the boy scouts. We'd then pour/mold the mixture onto a newspaper, twist the newspaper around the stuff, and make a "starter log" for camping. Make 'em two or three inches thick, throw a couple into your fire pit, and you've got a great way to start a fire. Very good for drying out damp wood and getting a blaze going.
Where you would never think to look.
Actually, no there aren't any in general. Sometimes, yes, but for the most part, no.
I'd wager that computer literacy amongst people who've tried Linux would be twice what it is today if when you typed help foobar bash would perform a man foobar if 'foobar' wasn't a builtin command. And it'd probably be double that if you incorporated some kind of search facility too. Type in help disk space and get a hit on the df command, for instance.
What I'd really like to see is a more helpful man page with examples. It's frustrating when using a new command to read "usage: foobar [VNFHDMudndghfud8734yfhfnbgdh] filename | device | dir | options filename[]" and then read through 5 pages of options and switches I'll never use. If every man page had at least a few examples of how to do stuff most people want to do, it'd be easier to both do those things and learn the more complex commands.
Another nice thing would be a howdoi command which allows the input of natural language and spits out a small man page (with examples!) or help file, ie, "$>howdoi see how much hard drive space i have" spits out how to use df.
I'm Canadian, can you tell :)
They have beer in Canada? Oh that's right. It's usually the same crap as AB only in blue colored bottles.
That said, there *are* some good Canadian microbreweries. Too bad I can't get some bottles where I am in the States....
My father works as the sys admin for the accounting department of a company that owns a bunch of convenience stores. Every day, the computers at the stores dial in to their system and report on what was purchased, what the price was, what inventory is, etc., etc. The company does all the accounting paperwork for the stores and keeps track of what's selling where, if promotional activities are working, etc.
This is no real big deal, just a good example of IT making business work. Now if AB implemented one of those "loyalty" cards like grocery stores that give you price breaks in exchange for your privacy, then you might have something.
I'd also like to point out that AB doesn't sell beer. They sell advertising in the form of colored fizzy water.
If you bother to go to the wine country of northern California, I suggest going through Sonoma rather than Napa. Napa has some good wines, but it's very touristy. Sonoma has great wines and is fairly quiet, off the beaten path.
A good book to read is "A Tale of Two Valleys." The author talks about how several interesting characters in the Sonoma valley fought to avoid becoming like Napa. A pretty interesting read for those into the people behind the wines.
Something to keep in mind is that debt isn't necessarily bad. Many companies use a combination of equity and debt to finance their operations. Sometimes no debt with lots of cash can actually be dangerous, particularly with the ongoing rise in leveraged buyouts. Granted, Apple is probably protected against this since there is very little to be gained by "breaking up" Apple. (I'd wager it's not even possible.)
It's how a company uses its debt and the amount of debt relative to things like cash flow, equity, etc., that's important.
I can see the future:
All operating systems are divided into three parts...OS X, Linux, and Windows.
(if you don't get it, you obviously never read Caesar in Latin.....)
Hmmmm....so if they install readers in copy machines, how about I just hand copy the document (or just the very important facts, figures, etc.)? How about a little hand scanner? How about an older USB scanner attached to my laptop?
No, the only logical point to say life has started is at the very beginning. Researchers have the unique challenge of finding ways to enhance human life without taking or harming it. Granted this can be difficult, but I have confidence that people can work within ethical limits and still find honorable ways to do the things they are now trying to do through cloning and abortion.
Where, exactly, is the beginning? Even the "moment" of conception is not an actual moment. It takes a non-insignificant amount of time for chromosomes to match up.
You also need to address the flip side of the "beginning" argument. Over half of all pregnancies end through natural abortion/failure to implant. If we assume "life has started at the very beginning" then why do we let all those people die simply because they fail to implant in their mother's wombs? That number is far greater than abortions, murders, car accidents, etc. Why are those lives valued less or treated with less care than others? If we say it's "nature", then why do we interfere with nature by making antibiotics, developing vaccines, or outlawing murder?
My point is not to start an abortion/when does life begin argument here. Rather it's to point out that you cannot simply solve an ethical issue such as this by taking one extreme viewpoint or another (or any inbetween, for that matter) and implying it logically solves all our ethical problems.
If your penis doesn't enlarge when you rub cream on it, maybe you're buying the wrong product.
Maybe you're rubbing it on the wrong appendage...
The fact that credit history is included and is documented along with these other aspects of identity and is run and managed by a private company is disturbing leading me to wonder what connections Gov. Leavitt might have with this company.
Given the "accuracy" credit reporting companies have, this may actually help the terrorists and criminals they seek to combat. I have to keep telling at least one credit agency every year that the "current" address they have for me is incorrect. If I decide to commit a crime, it's nice to know cops will be tracking me down in a place I haven't lived at in 6 years!
If you are often late on deadlines, I'd like to know that you are aware of it and have an idea about how to self-improve.
You mean you'd actually consider paying this person while they fix a problem a good employee shouldn't have in the first place?