Zero tolerance makes me both cry and laugh. We had citrus trees and I'd bring a kitchen knife, properly sleeved and everything, to score the fruit at lunch for easy peeling. (If I scored them before school, they'd start to dry out by lunchtime.) My science teacher saw this one day and advised me to keep that thing hidden from sight in the future, as it could get me expelled. Never mind that I have a clean record or that I'm eating lunch in the bio/chem lab where I have free access to much more serious weaponry.
Your school days were quite different from my school daze. The only "harsh regime of terror" I encountered was when I wanted to accelerate my education beyond the lowest common denominator approach. Students did not need to "be a genius in all areas of human knowledge" but they did need to try things that they weren't already experts at. If that included analyzing poetry, learning research methods, or doing geometry proofs, then so be it. And you could score decent grades if you just tried. There was none of this "dog must fly like bird" nonsense you speak of. I think I might have been challenged at your high school. Please let me know where you went so I can look into sending my kids there.
The prevailing winds of authoritarian thought seem to be obsessed with dependency culture, but are aghast at the suggestion of doing anything about it, except possibly ending the dependency by cutting people loose completely, leaving them to die or fend for themselves. The social harm we're causing today is saying that no-one has a chance unless they fit a very narrow set of working skills and mental abilities. Don't have them? Tough shit, welfare dependency for you. We should really be looking at providing employment opportunities for those who don't fit into school, as well as those who do.
Agree. One of the goals should be to broaden the mindset away from "Everybody must go to college." Why college? Did we learn nothing useful during the first 13 years of education? Some folks want to drive the dump truck, or run a hair salon, or other professions for which high school could adequately prepare them if the school board were willing to take vocational education seriously. The failure to provide students real world options other than a 4-year residential college borders on criminal neglect. Some of these schools are essentially holding kids against their will and costing taxpayers thousands of dollars per student while giving the students nothing of value in return, because they refuse to assess the students' motivations and to address their future life goals.
If we can address the needs of the non-college-bound, then we can also change the supply-and-demand curves driving the crazy inflation of college tuition. jconline.com reported yesterday that while Indiana statewide median household income has risen only 33% in the past 22 years, state schools have raised tuition between 350% and 395%, while private schools have raised tuition betwen 230% and 300% as well. Truly college-oriented people are getting priced out of higher ed by others who just need to complete college to get the equivalent of a decent high school education and land a job somewhere.
Your description of Vancouver sounds much different than dr2chase's 40 mile commute in the San Francisco area. I am truly sorry to hear about the terrible urban planning going on up your way. I hope that they do add more curb cuts to support wheelchair mobility -- and that when they do, they don't put in the weird squares of tactile bumps that they keep doing around here, which are jarring to wheelchairs, strollers, and pedestrians alike.
Slightly off-topic and a possible attractant for unthinking flamers, but I really liked your post and it inspired a line of thinking in me:
If all those millions of years, carbon was being sequestered -- i.e. a net carbon reduction each year -- when does that become unsustainable? Without something to bring back to the cycle some of the sequestered carbon, the system is not in equilibrium and possibly results in climate change. Perhaps that rate of change is much smaller than our current situation -- this isn't intended to be an AGW-denial comment -- but just a question of curiosity about how life has changed over those millions of years specifically due to the sequestration of carbon that previously was accessible for plants to grow and become animal food, and became unavailable for those plants because it turned into coal/oil/gas reserves. Thoughts?
No doubt the bike is more efficient than the bus/train, so when you can bicycle the full distance, you are to be commended. The parent was referring to a region of the country where some folks live 40+ miles from work. You blew off his point, so I'll spell it out: bicycling the full distance is not possible. Their options are: drive the full distance, drive to bus/train depot and then figure out how to get to your office at the other end of the line (taxi?), or bike/walk to train and then bike/walk in San Francisco. Of these three, the bike/walk plus train option is the most carbon-friendly under most assumptions.
One summer while I was in school, I worked about 8 miles from home -- but had to be in full dress suit and they had no showers at the office. So I took my bike on the bus in the morning, and bike home in the evening. Gave me time to read in the morning or get to know other folks, and the workout at day's end felt so good.
Others have debated in this thread the idea and cost of relocating closer to work; I don't have anything to add to that part of the conversation because it's so situation-specific with too many variables (rent/own, spouse yes/no who works near/far, children yes/no in good/bad schools, cost of living...)
Overall you're completely right. I went the other direction from bike-only to bike-plus-car and it does suck up a bunch of money. But there are little ways in which the car seems more efficient that I like. I save a lot of money and time on tires now, and I save a lot of money by being able to traverse the city-wide garage sales and pick up all sorts of usefulness for bargain prices. I'm most pleased by the mover-quality utility dolly where I saved enough to equal my car's insurance for the year.
You're also helping others' medical health by being the one sucking up the exhaust fumes and taking those noxious pollutants out of the air into your body so that others do not have to breathe them. This presumes that exercising does not increase your methane output. I used to ride year-round and remember hating the trade-offs between small slow back streets with all their stop signs versus the fume-laden expressways, especially on cold mornings where the exhaust stayed low to the ground.
The key bit from the linked story:
“Having separate fuel economy standards for cars and trucks encourages people to continue to use trucks as if they were cars,” he said.
It seems that the problem is not fuel efficiency standards leading to under-powered death traps. Rather, the problem is size disparity driven by misuse of large vehicles. To me, that's a different story.
Glad you RTFA. The fuel economy standards absolutely delivered this disparity, and the article explained why. Lower fuel standards on trucks made them less expensive than similar automobiles. Example: someone needs either a heavyweight pickup or a lighter-weight mid-sized sedan to meet his needs. He has $X, which can buy a tiny car or a pickup truck; he needs $X+N to buy a mid-size sedan. So he buys the pickup. If he plows into you in your tiny car, fuel economy standards are responsible for the weight disparity which has turned your cute little gas-saving car into a death trap, and saved his life.
Based on what I read in other news articles, Perlman himself says that interference from others is a problem.
'Perlman estimates that the first commercial use of DIDO technology could come as early as the end of next year. But even then, the first deployments are likely to be outside of the United States.
In a DIDO system, a data center on the Internet determines the wireless signals that each transmitter will send based in part on the location and number of other DIDO transmitters in the area. In order for the data center to know what the resulting interference patterns will be, there can't be any other sources of signals outside those generated by the DIDO transmitters.
What that means is that a DIDO system would have to be used on currently unused or completely reclaimed spectrum. So DIDO won't be improving your Wi-Fi or 3G experience, because those parts of the spectrum are already crowded with transmitters. It's more likely to be embraced in the near term in countries that have a lot more unused spectrum than does the United States, Perlman said.' (Source: San Jose Mercury News, 8/3/2011 http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_18603178)
So Perlman himself says that, yes, in a closed system, his design works -- but only in that closed system. Given that some stray RF emissions are generated from various things (as we know from the amateur radio folks whenever BPL comes up, for example), there is an interference problem.
[*...actially, if you're really gonzo, you can adjust all the transmitters to make their signals cancel out exactly, at everyone else's cell phones, so long as you have more transmitters than cell phones. In principle. But I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that...]
From the above-mentioned article, Perlman says you do not need more transmitters than cell phones. He suggests a 1:1 ratio instead. "To offer everyone on a DIDO system the maximum data rate and the best experience, a DIDO system would require one transmitter for every user on the system."
Not mentioned in this article, but called out elsewhere in the press surrounding this, is that this new interference formula only works where nobody else is broadcasting. This can't be used in the existing wi-fi spectrum, for example, because the interference from non-DIDO devices will corrupt his receivers. Unlike FM, for example, which grabs the strongest local signal, this tries to grab and combine all signals under the belief that they will combine properly. If anyone else is emitting on that same spectrum (intentionally or not), it will be troublesome.
A recent comic strip proposed that collective intelligence remains constant even though population continues to grow. It made me laugh, but when smart* people around me complain that the world is filling up with idiots of one persuasion or another, I ask them why, if they are so smart, they aren't doing their part to raise public intelligence by having kids -- and lots of them too.
* Smart as measured by IQ in the Mensa range. Not necessarily in any other department.
It's fine to tell an individual, "Here are the keys to the car you just purchased. Here is how to lock it so others cannot steal it. Here is how to unlock it so that you can enter the vehicle and drive. You're on your own now." But when you give them the ability to lock and unlock other peoples' stuff (i.e. corporate intellectual property generated in a company of more than one person), there exists a responsibility to those other persons. Most organizations have found that, left to one's own devices, mankind prefers ease-of-use to safety and security, and mankind also has crooks and thieves. Since not every user will operate at a level of security necessary to safeguard everyone else's data, central choke points and defense-in-depth become necessary. Yes, there can be false securities established, but this is probably not one of them. More likely, the user's belief that "nobody will guess my iPhone swipe password" is false security, and "I'm not important enough in this big company for my login to be a target" is false security.
Uh, mankind has survived, but I think the point is that for all but the top 1% survival has been a brutal and unpleasant ordeal. Things like leaving your children on the side of the road to die (happening right now in Africa, as a matter of fact)...
Used to be highly practiced even by the top 1% in Roman days. Our valuation of human life has, on aggregate, improved since then. Back then girls were considered worth significantly less than boys, so even if you had the resources to raise kids, you could be considered justified in abandoning your infant daughter to die. Rodney Stark has pointed to this as one of the reasons Christianity took off in the Roman Empire, because it declared life to be valuable, and thus gained followers both in the persons who thought it made sense, and in the many children that they had. Fun fact: Rome was importing barbarians like mad not just to fight their wars, but to populate their cities. The Roman Empire had achieved negative population growth apart from immigration when Christianity came onto the scene.
My experience with XP SUCKED. It was klunky, slow, insecure, and IE 7 kept crashing and locking up. I know it is a shitty browser, but I wanted to see if other websites still catered to it for my experiment. Here on Windows 7 IE 8 FLIES and is fast and bugfree if you are a clueless user.
Upgrading from IE7 to even Firefox 3 or Opera 9 fixes most of that. The later versions of these browsers work great as well, and are all XP-compatible. You had a bad experience with XP, but apparently right now people are on XP better than 2:1 over Win7.
What would it take for the average user (think of someone you know who reads USA Today or People Magazine instead of/.) to want to upgrade? If Microsoft could figure that out, it would be neat. Instead, I hear about a series of technical features that sound like they mainly support bleeding-edge users, and about a set of design locks (like WMP12 only in Win7) that are intended to force unwilling herds of people into upgrades.
Meanwhile Apple makes people ooh and ahh over form factor and user experience enough that a recent survey showed 35% of people willing to buy iPhone 5 without ever seeing it, hearing its pricetag, or knowing what makes it different from version 4. You'll know MS has succeeded in this when/. readers regularly accuse each other of being MS fanbois. Until then... no dice and give me XP.
Church bookkeeping is part of it; this aids in providing receipts for charitable donations and compliance with Internal Revenue Service (tax authority) guidelines. Also they can track the songs used in worship to feed proper royalty distribution under CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International). [Note: unlike **AA organizations, CCLI license fees are based primarily on the size of the congregation rather than the number of songs sung, rehearsed, etc., so a church is not penalized financially for deciding to sing additional songs. The $675,000 initially awarded in RIAA v. Tenenbaum for sharing 31 songs would pay for the annual licenses of over 300 "mega-churches" with tens of thousands of members each.]
The church bulletins may be laid out in desktop publishing software, and the sermons are researched, written, and type-set as well as often posted online in pdf, html, and/or various audio formats for those who were unable to make it to church that week or who are otherwise interested in the sermons being preached there for their own learning and inspiration. Some churches extensively use PowerPoint or other A/V during services. In addition, there are a plethora of resources available electronically to enhance study of the Bible, from Greek and Hebrew source documents and commentaries to libraries of the writings of highly-regarded Christian writers and preachers of the past. There might be other uses of computers in American churches -- I hope this non-exhaustive list helps.
No, it's a realistic balance of the difference between the upside and downside potentials of the transaction given some unknown variables. Some of my family advised strongly that I have some written up agreement with my fellow renters when we jointly rented a place, to spell out details such as if damages occur or one person isn't paying their full share or other contingencies. Because I knew these fellow renters reasonably, I made the decision to forego such write-ups but if I were rooming with strangers, I would have wanted better documentation. As it was, I think I came out slightly ahead in one of the situations and slightly behind in the other, but valued the cameraderie more than the financial impact.
If there were more at stake, such as a large personal loan to family or friends, I would want something in writing acknowledging the loan and the terms of repayment, even if it were just in plain English or one of the Nolo Press forms. Part of the point of the written agreement is that you hope they are not scumbags and they hope the same of you; by clearly defining some general expectations in advance, you can complete the transaction knowing that you won't be seen as a scumbag to the other person.
Depends whether the burglar has a phone giving location info to Microsoft. Then it becomes a local police department's IT team's dream come true. Fingerprints that point to where he was when, which can be aligned with a matrix of known burglaries, and now he's plausibly connected to other crimes. Unfortunately, for them to catch this one burglar, they'll have to start tracking all of us all the time, and someone will wise up enough to steal someone else's phone and carry it to several crime scenes... I'll let someone else finish the story.
Very true. And even most classical stations play only "hits" nowadays -- the movement or two of the piece which is most familiar to the average audience, and which keeps a minimum noise floor to remain heard over all the background noise. Mastering audio for earbud headphones and car stereos (road noise!) distorts it enough that sometimes I feel I'm up against a wall of sound. The point of music, like the point of art, is to have focal points that get your attention, and to do that you must create negative space in your work. When the mastering process compresses everything upward, the focal points disappear. But rather than turn this into a "get off my lawn, unappreciative and uneducated young'uns" comment, I'll say I've started buying older music because I can get the broader dynamic range that I'm looking for in music from before my time.
I wonder if, 25 years after this, "the excellent doctors will still be excellent"? There will always be a range of ability levels, but how will the range change with this? One thing I've heard from my pilot friends is that the commercial airline industry used to be able to rely on very good pilots coming out of the military and taking civilian jobs flying big jetliners. Since the average number of hours of flying time for a commercial airline pilot was high, the pilots were very capable in handling unusual situations. Now that fewer ex-military pilots are being created, commercial airlines are pulling from other places and getting less-qualified individuals as a result, and their relative lack of flight time is cited as a factor in some incidents. So the likelihood of "excellent" pilots is decreasing, due to the declining caliber of the collective pool of pilots from which to draw excellent ones. I can't demonstrate conclusively that this is analogous to the situation we will experience in medicine with increased computerized diagnostics but I think it is an important question to work through.
Personally, I love electronic search engines for the ability to get me exactly to exactly what I want. But until all books in libraries are full-digital and full-searchable, I like the browse feature. The Dewey Decimal system means that when I get interested in a subject because of one book, I can find similar books to expand my understanding. So when I know exactly what I want, bits are great. When I know sortof what I want, then the library is great. It also helps that I am cheap and when I don't know exactly what I want, I am not a perfectionist, so the library's limited options are easier for me to select from than the nearly unlimited set at Alibris.
Interesting. If you bought this in California, they may not be following the law. California Board of Equalization Regulation 1603 governs sales tax on food. Section (f) specifically says "Tax applies to sales of sandwiches, ice cream, and other foods sold in a form for consumption at tables, chairs, or counters or from trays,
glasses, dishes, or other tableware provided by the retailer or by a person with whom the retailer contracts to furnish, prepare, or serve food products to others." So if they have chairs and tables for you to consume it on the premises (or are part of a food court), then it should be taxed.
Another bizarre thing about California is that "sales for a separate price of hot bakery goods and hot beverages such as coffee" count as cold food and should not be taxed; I think of this as the Starbucks clause.
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Zero tolerance makes me both cry and laugh. We had citrus trees and I'd bring a kitchen knife, properly sleeved and everything, to score the fruit at lunch for easy peeling. (If I scored them before school, they'd start to dry out by lunchtime.) My science teacher saw this one day and advised me to keep that thing hidden from sight in the future, as it could get me expelled. Never mind that I have a clean record or that I'm eating lunch in the bio/chem lab where I have free access to much more serious weaponry.
Your school days were quite different from my school daze. The only "harsh regime of terror" I encountered was when I wanted to accelerate my education beyond the lowest common denominator approach. Students did not need to "be a genius in all areas of human knowledge" but they did need to try things that they weren't already experts at. If that included analyzing poetry, learning research methods, or doing geometry proofs, then so be it. And you could score decent grades if you just tried. There was none of this "dog must fly like bird" nonsense you speak of. I think I might have been challenged at your high school. Please let me know where you went so I can look into sending my kids there.
The prevailing winds of authoritarian thought seem to be obsessed with dependency culture, but are aghast at the suggestion of doing anything about it, except possibly ending the dependency by cutting people loose completely, leaving them to die or fend for themselves. The social harm we're causing today is saying that no-one has a chance unless they fit a very narrow set of working skills and mental abilities. Don't have them? Tough shit, welfare dependency for you. We should really be looking at providing employment opportunities for those who don't fit into school, as well as those who do.
Agree. One of the goals should be to broaden the mindset away from "Everybody must go to college." Why college? Did we learn nothing useful during the first 13 years of education? Some folks want to drive the dump truck, or run a hair salon, or other professions for which high school could adequately prepare them if the school board were willing to take vocational education seriously. The failure to provide students real world options other than a 4-year residential college borders on criminal neglect. Some of these schools are essentially holding kids against their will and costing taxpayers thousands of dollars per student while giving the students nothing of value in return, because they refuse to assess the students' motivations and to address their future life goals.
If we can address the needs of the non-college-bound, then we can also change the supply-and-demand curves driving the crazy inflation of college tuition. jconline.com reported yesterday that while Indiana statewide median household income has risen only 33% in the past 22 years, state schools have raised tuition between 350% and 395%, while private schools have raised tuition betwen 230% and 300% as well. Truly college-oriented people are getting priced out of higher ed by others who just need to complete college to get the equivalent of a decent high school education and land a job somewhere.
Your description of Vancouver sounds much different than dr2chase's 40 mile commute in the San Francisco area. I am truly sorry to hear about the terrible urban planning going on up your way. I hope that they do add more curb cuts to support wheelchair mobility -- and that when they do, they don't put in the weird squares of tactile bumps that they keep doing around here, which are jarring to wheelchairs, strollers, and pedestrians alike.
Slightly off-topic and a possible attractant for unthinking flamers, but I really liked your post and it inspired a line of thinking in me:
If all those millions of years, carbon was being sequestered -- i.e. a net carbon reduction each year -- when does that become unsustainable? Without something to bring back to the cycle some of the sequestered carbon, the system is not in equilibrium and possibly results in climate change. Perhaps that rate of change is much smaller than our current situation -- this isn't intended to be an AGW-denial comment -- but just a question of curiosity about how life has changed over those millions of years specifically due to the sequestration of carbon that previously was accessible for plants to grow and become animal food, and became unavailable for those plants because it turned into coal/oil/gas reserves. Thoughts?
One summer while I was in school, I worked about 8 miles from home -- but had to be in full dress suit and they had no showers at the office. So I took my bike on the bus in the morning, and bike home in the evening. Gave me time to read in the morning or get to know other folks, and the workout at day's end felt so good.
Others have debated in this thread the idea and cost of relocating closer to work; I don't have anything to add to that part of the conversation because it's so situation-specific with too many variables (rent/own, spouse yes/no who works near/far, children yes/no in good/bad schools, cost of living...)
Overall you're completely right. I went the other direction from bike-only to bike-plus-car and it does suck up a bunch of money. But there are little ways in which the car seems more efficient that I like. I save a lot of money and time on tires now, and I save a lot of money by being able to traverse the city-wide garage sales and pick up all sorts of usefulness for bargain prices. I'm most pleased by the mover-quality utility dolly where I saved enough to equal my car's insurance for the year.
I don't remember. I haven't had one since junior high school.
You're also helping others' medical health by being the one sucking up the exhaust fumes and taking those noxious pollutants out of the air into your body so that others do not have to breathe them. This presumes that exercising does not increase your methane output. I used to ride year-round and remember hating the trade-offs between small slow back streets with all their stop signs versus the fume-laden expressways, especially on cold mornings where the exhaust stayed low to the ground.
The key bit from the linked story: “Having separate fuel economy standards for cars and trucks encourages people to continue to use trucks as if they were cars,” he said.
It seems that the problem is not fuel efficiency standards leading to under-powered death traps. Rather, the problem is size disparity driven by misuse of large vehicles. To me, that's a different story.
Glad you RTFA. The fuel economy standards absolutely delivered this disparity, and the article explained why. Lower fuel standards on trucks made them less expensive than similar automobiles. Example: someone needs either a heavyweight pickup or a lighter-weight mid-sized sedan to meet his needs. He has $X, which can buy a tiny car or a pickup truck; he needs $X+N to buy a mid-size sedan. So he buys the pickup. If he plows into you in your tiny car, fuel economy standards are responsible for the weight disparity which has turned your cute little gas-saving car into a death trap, and saved his life.
My bank never checks my ID or asks who I am when I want to deposit money.
My bank, however wants some verification when I try to take money out, even if I give them a correct account number.
'Perlman estimates that the first commercial use of DIDO technology could come as early as the end of next year. But even then, the first deployments are likely to be outside of the United States.
In a DIDO system, a data center on the Internet determines the wireless signals that each transmitter will send based in part on the location and number of other DIDO transmitters in the area. In order for the data center to know what the resulting interference patterns will be, there can't be any other sources of signals outside those generated by the DIDO transmitters.
What that means is that a DIDO system would have to be used on currently unused or completely reclaimed spectrum. So DIDO won't be improving your Wi-Fi or 3G experience, because those parts of the spectrum are already crowded with transmitters. It's more likely to be embraced in the near term in countries that have a lot more unused spectrum than does the United States, Perlman said.' (Source: San Jose Mercury News, 8/3/2011 http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_18603178)
So Perlman himself says that, yes, in a closed system, his design works -- but only in that closed system. Given that some stray RF emissions are generated from various things (as we know from the amateur radio folks whenever BPL comes up, for example), there is an interference problem.
[* ...actially, if you're really gonzo, you can adjust all the transmitters to make their signals cancel out exactly, at everyone else's cell phones, so long as you have more transmitters than cell phones. In principle. But I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that...]
From the above-mentioned article, Perlman says you do not need more transmitters than cell phones. He suggests a 1:1 ratio instead. "To offer everyone on a DIDO system the maximum data rate and the best experience, a DIDO system would require one transmitter for every user on the system."
Not mentioned in this article, but called out elsewhere in the press surrounding this, is that this new interference formula only works where nobody else is broadcasting. This can't be used in the existing wi-fi spectrum, for example, because the interference from non-DIDO devices will corrupt his receivers. Unlike FM, for example, which grabs the strongest local signal, this tries to grab and combine all signals under the belief that they will combine properly. If anyone else is emitting on that same spectrum (intentionally or not), it will be troublesome.
* Smart as measured by IQ in the Mensa range. Not necessarily in any other department.
It's fine to tell an individual, "Here are the keys to the car you just purchased. Here is how to lock it so others cannot steal it. Here is how to unlock it so that you can enter the vehicle and drive. You're on your own now." But when you give them the ability to lock and unlock other peoples' stuff (i.e. corporate intellectual property generated in a company of more than one person), there exists a responsibility to those other persons. Most organizations have found that, left to one's own devices, mankind prefers ease-of-use to safety and security, and mankind also has crooks and thieves. Since not every user will operate at a level of security necessary to safeguard everyone else's data, central choke points and defense-in-depth become necessary. Yes, there can be false securities established, but this is probably not one of them. More likely, the user's belief that "nobody will guess my iPhone swipe password" is false security, and "I'm not important enough in this big company for my login to be a target" is false security.
Uh, mankind has survived, but I think the point is that for all but the top 1% survival has been a brutal and unpleasant ordeal. Things like leaving your children on the side of the road to die (happening right now in Africa, as a matter of fact)...
Used to be highly practiced even by the top 1% in Roman days. Our valuation of human life has, on aggregate, improved since then. Back then girls were considered worth significantly less than boys, so even if you had the resources to raise kids, you could be considered justified in abandoning your infant daughter to die. Rodney Stark has pointed to this as one of the reasons Christianity took off in the Roman Empire, because it declared life to be valuable, and thus gained followers both in the persons who thought it made sense, and in the many children that they had. Fun fact: Rome was importing barbarians like mad not just to fight their wars, but to populate their cities. The Roman Empire had achieved negative population growth apart from immigration when Christianity came onto the scene.
My experience with XP SUCKED. It was klunky, slow, insecure, and IE 7 kept crashing and locking up. I know it is a shitty browser, but I wanted to see if other websites still catered to it for my experiment. Here on Windows 7 IE 8 FLIES and is fast and bugfree if you are a clueless user.
Upgrading from IE7 to even Firefox 3 or Opera 9 fixes most of that. The later versions of these browsers work great as well, and are all XP-compatible. You had a bad experience with XP, but apparently right now people are on XP better than 2:1 over Win7.
What would it take for the average user (think of someone you know who reads USA Today or People Magazine instead of /.) to want to upgrade? If Microsoft could figure that out, it would be neat. Instead, I hear about a series of technical features that sound like they mainly support bleeding-edge users, and about a set of design locks (like WMP12 only in Win7) that are intended to force unwilling herds of people into upgrades.
Meanwhile Apple makes people ooh and ahh over form factor and user experience enough that a recent survey showed 35% of people willing to buy iPhone 5 without ever seeing it, hearing its pricetag, or knowing what makes it different from version 4. You'll know MS has succeeded in this when /. readers regularly accuse each other of being MS fanbois. Until then... no dice and give me XP.
Church bookkeeping is part of it; this aids in providing receipts for charitable donations and compliance with Internal Revenue Service (tax authority) guidelines. Also they can track the songs used in worship to feed proper royalty distribution under CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International). [Note: unlike **AA organizations, CCLI license fees are based primarily on the size of the congregation rather than the number of songs sung, rehearsed, etc., so a church is not penalized financially for deciding to sing additional songs. The $675,000 initially awarded in RIAA v. Tenenbaum for sharing 31 songs would pay for the annual licenses of over 300 "mega-churches" with tens of thousands of members each.]
The church bulletins may be laid out in desktop publishing software, and the sermons are researched, written, and type-set as well as often posted online in pdf, html, and/or various audio formats for those who were unable to make it to church that week or who are otherwise interested in the sermons being preached there for their own learning and inspiration. Some churches extensively use PowerPoint or other A/V during services. In addition, there are a plethora of resources available electronically to enhance study of the Bible, from Greek and Hebrew source documents and commentaries to libraries of the writings of highly-regarded Christian writers and preachers of the past. There might be other uses of computers in American churches -- I hope this non-exhaustive list helps.
No, it's a realistic balance of the difference between the upside and downside potentials of the transaction given some unknown variables. Some of my family advised strongly that I have some written up agreement with my fellow renters when we jointly rented a place, to spell out details such as if damages occur or one person isn't paying their full share or other contingencies. Because I knew these fellow renters reasonably, I made the decision to forego such write-ups but if I were rooming with strangers, I would have wanted better documentation. As it was, I think I came out slightly ahead in one of the situations and slightly behind in the other, but valued the cameraderie more than the financial impact.
If there were more at stake, such as a large personal loan to family or friends, I would want something in writing acknowledging the loan and the terms of repayment, even if it were just in plain English or one of the Nolo Press forms. Part of the point of the written agreement is that you hope they are not scumbags and they hope the same of you; by clearly defining some general expectations in advance, you can complete the transaction knowing that you won't be seen as a scumbag to the other person.
Depends whether the burglar has a phone giving location info to Microsoft. Then it becomes a local police department's IT team's dream come true. Fingerprints that point to where he was when, which can be aligned with a matrix of known burglaries, and now he's plausibly connected to other crimes. Unfortunately, for them to catch this one burglar, they'll have to start tracking all of us all the time, and someone will wise up enough to steal someone else's phone and carry it to several crime scenes... I'll let someone else finish the story.
Very true. And even most classical stations play only "hits" nowadays -- the movement or two of the piece which is most familiar to the average audience, and which keeps a minimum noise floor to remain heard over all the background noise. Mastering audio for earbud headphones and car stereos (road noise!) distorts it enough that sometimes I feel I'm up against a wall of sound. The point of music, like the point of art, is to have focal points that get your attention, and to do that you must create negative space in your work. When the mastering process compresses everything upward, the focal points disappear. But rather than turn this into a "get off my lawn, unappreciative and uneducated young'uns" comment, I'll say I've started buying older music because I can get the broader dynamic range that I'm looking for in music from before my time.
When I visited Alaska, I learned that 1 in 60 or so Alaskans has a pilot's license. Is that a feasible alternative for you for travel?
I wonder if, 25 years after this, "the excellent doctors will still be excellent"? There will always be a range of ability levels, but how will the range change with this? One thing I've heard from my pilot friends is that the commercial airline industry used to be able to rely on very good pilots coming out of the military and taking civilian jobs flying big jetliners. Since the average number of hours of flying time for a commercial airline pilot was high, the pilots were very capable in handling unusual situations. Now that fewer ex-military pilots are being created, commercial airlines are pulling from other places and getting less-qualified individuals as a result, and their relative lack of flight time is cited as a factor in some incidents. So the likelihood of "excellent" pilots is decreasing, due to the declining caliber of the collective pool of pilots from which to draw excellent ones. I can't demonstrate conclusively that this is analogous to the situation we will experience in medicine with increased computerized diagnostics but I think it is an important question to work through.
Personally, I love electronic search engines for the ability to get me exactly to exactly what I want. But until all books in libraries are full-digital and full-searchable, I like the browse feature. The Dewey Decimal system means that when I get interested in a subject because of one book, I can find similar books to expand my understanding. So when I know exactly what I want, bits are great. When I know sortof what I want, then the library is great. It also helps that I am cheap and when I don't know exactly what I want, I am not a perfectionist, so the library's limited options are easier for me to select from than the nearly unlimited set at Alibris.
Interesting. If you bought this in California, they may not be following the law. California Board of Equalization Regulation 1603 governs sales tax on food. Section (f) specifically says "Tax applies to sales of sandwiches, ice cream, and other foods sold in a form for consumption at tables, chairs, or counters or from trays, glasses, dishes, or other tableware provided by the retailer or by a person with whom the retailer contracts to furnish, prepare, or serve food products to others." So if they have chairs and tables for you to consume it on the premises (or are part of a food court), then it should be taxed.
Another bizarre thing about California is that "sales for a separate price of hot bakery goods and hot beverages such as coffee" count as cold food and should not be taxed; I think of this as the Starbucks clause.