The most negative thing I have any interest in doing while in a US airport is leave the country, but still I'm nervous.
That's not negative.
In fact, when I travel to the US, it always chuckels me up that the immigration goon can't wrap his head around the concept that people actually will want to go home again after their holiday.
The purpose of the screenings is not to "catch terrorists" but to deter the terrorists from even trying.
By creating new targets?
Deterrment, yes. Check for guns, X-Ray the baggage, yes. Maybe some sniff test for explosives. But what is making this ritual so tedious AND useless is this overly specific thing with water bottles and nail clippers. Not to mention undressing while standing in line with hundreds of other people and trying to juggle shoes, belt, jacket, carry on, liquid bag and all the small stuff already removed from your pockets. Not to mention holding up your pants caus ethat belt was there for a friggin reason!
Everything that is small enough to be hidden in a shoe is also small enough to be smuggled past TSA by an acomplice.
But what's more intresting: Which idiot would buy a smart fridge with cameras and network connection just to disable cameras and network connection? INstead of buying a regular fridge for half the price...
That's nothing more than the situation that you don't need a Wikileaks-like platform to know that Russian Democracy has nothing to do with democracy. Any newspaper will do.
Wait.... are you saying that if the EU demands back money from illegal tax breaks, it will be Californian teacher's money? So those teachers were actually profiting from tax fraud? Well, then they should be glad that they only have to pay back tose illegal profits and not also face criminal prosecution.
98% of the Excel usage I've seen in in appropriate.
But for 98% of THAT, the "appropriate" tool would have been a database.
Which usually requires a dedicated database server (we DO want to do it right after all this time), a DBMS including team for operating and maintanance, complete knowledge of the database design beforehand (in research?) and admin resources to set up the database.
So we blew out thousands of $ and haven't stored a single line of data yet. But at least we did it right.
And we still don't have a useable frontend for data entry and reporting, and can't send out the data to a reviewer in a different organisation in a file they can open as they would an Excel file
All in all, doing things the the "appropriate" way is wishful thinking. So people are going for 2nd best alternative to a proper database, but Access is not installed for various reasons. And that's why they end up with Excel. sad, but nothing you can blame the user for.
A software that tries to think for me without communicating this, that tries to babysit me (remember Clippy?) is bound to be somewhere between extremely annoying and dangerous, depending on the situation you want to use it in.
"Hello! It seems you just imported a long list of names, but some dates and a few numbers slipped into what otherwise seems to be text." Would haven be the kind of "babysitting" that told the user that some values showed an "anomaly" (compared to the others) and would either prevent mistakes (table header slipped into data rows) or reminded the user to set the data type for a column.
then you only need a way to attach that database to that email with the excel file, too....
But yes, that would be the proper way. But we would still need a lightweight database-as-simple-document format. Heck, that even COULD BE Excel with a special type of data-worksheets in a document that enforce data structure and do not allow formatting. For all teh use cases where you don't need the performance or multi-user or transactions/data integrity/replication of an actual database server.
The task of mailing out a file with database-data should be much simpler.
1b) Lack of a appropriate tool to wrap up stuff that should be in a database (or has been extracted from a database) for display and distribution.
There is a reason why people the spreadsheet-hammer - it is still better suited than the word processor screwdriver or the plain text chainsaw., or the pdf/png belt sander.
Here is why for those without the background. Typed variables in a database completely eliminate this issue.
If the users had used a database, even one of the MS ones (one of which newbies can deal with within a week), that would have solved it which was the poster above's point that you were unable to grasp
And how would that helped when publishers requested their supplementary data in Excel format?
They are scientists and more likely than not the did use some tools for scientific number crunching ("R") or similar that kept and processed data in typed variables or even kept the raw data in an actual database. But you can't ship your Oracle server to reviewers by email and in lack of a document-like database format, peope are turning to Excel.
Which is too late if the damage has already been done. And if the first 2000 lines look ok, no one is going to do that because, hey, the auto import worked!
I don't know how much number crunching was actually involved here. I suspect the problem comes from using a spreadsheet as a database.
Because databases are, you know, hard.
Yeah. Great.
But WHY are they so hard? Because usually, a "database" is something that is installed and stored on a network server and you can't mail a network server to your colleague, costumer or publisher. So even if you KNOW that a database would be the right tool for the job at hand, you end up with your data in a spreadsheet. Either to send it to someone or by receiving it from someone else.
The only alternative that would offer searching, filtering, sorting (in general: querying) features that you need to work with raw data (or even long lists) would be Access. I never understood why the wool that made using databases where it made sense to use them as easy as working with a doc file has been so frowned upon by the same "experts" that now complain that users use the next best thing instead: Excel.
OK.. then the US should think twice about those ideas.
And honestly, given the treatment you receive at the US border, I haven't expected tourism to be that popular. They are already doing a good job of not making you feel welcome.
Why do people still travel to the US? I haven't visited the country since they started treating visitors like criminals and I refuse any business travel towards the US. Sure, it may not always be avoidable for everyone, but if tourists simply stop coming, they will have to start treating their guests more normally at some point.
Sucks to be Hawaii, but for the rest of the states, how much money do they make from tourism? Would that be a noteable dent in USA GDP?
You never ever *have* to pick up the phone when it rings. Never. Even for deliveries. They will leave a message. It has worked for me for over 25 years.
Classical externalization: Your stuff (here: ability to receive messages) relies on others doing additional work or following your procedures.
Works only well as long as they are willing to jump through the hoops you're setting.
Slashdot Mirror
#1: How would you recognize muslims?
#2: Oklahoma City bombing
#3 Anders Breivik
Well, you may be true if by "catastrophic act of terror" you're restricting yourself to "planes flown into buildings"
Because, for the first time in US history, there's strong evidence that foreign governments are interfering with elections?
And the funny part is that even they can't make them any worse.
The most negative thing I have any interest in doing while in a US airport is leave the country, but still I'm nervous.
That's not negative.
In fact, when I travel to the US, it always chuckels me up that the immigration goon can't wrap his head around the concept that people actually will want to go home again after their holiday.
Or they just noticed that they aren't doing anything else than the Schiphol crew already did.
News stations will stand in line to get footage of hundreds confiscated water bottles and nail clippers.
The purpose of the screenings is not to "catch terrorists" but to deter the terrorists from even trying.
By creating new targets?
Deterrment, yes. Check for guns, X-Ray the baggage, yes. Maybe some sniff test for explosives. But what is making this ritual so tedious AND useless is this overly specific thing with water bottles and nail clippers. Not to mention undressing while standing in line with hundreds of other people and trying to juggle shoes, belt, jacket, carry on, liquid bag and all the small stuff already removed from your pockets. Not to mention holding up your pants caus ethat belt was there for a friggin reason!
Everything that is small enough to be hidden in a shoe is also small enough to be smuggled past TSA by an acomplice.
But what's more intresting: Which idiot would buy a smart fridge with cameras and network connection just to disable cameras and network connection? INstead of buying a regular fridge for half the price...
That's nothing more than the situation that you don't need a Wikileaks-like platform to know that Russian Democracy has nothing to do with democracy. Any newspaper will do.
Wait.... are you saying that if the EU demands back money from illegal tax breaks, it will be Californian teacher's money? So those teachers were actually profiting from tax fraud? Well, then they should be glad that they only have to pay back tose illegal profits and not also face criminal prosecution.
Yes. leagues would be great.
Zones won't work. If your town belongs to that zone, moving to the next zone would imply moving to another town.
98% of the Excel usage I've seen in in appropriate.
But for 98% of THAT, the "appropriate" tool would have been a database.
Which usually requires a dedicated database server (we DO want to do it right after all this time), a DBMS including team for operating and maintanance, complete knowledge of the database design beforehand (in research?) and admin resources to set up the database.
So we blew out thousands of $ and haven't stored a single line of data yet. But at least we did it right.
And we still don't have a useable frontend for data entry and reporting, and can't send out the data to a reviewer in a different organisation in a file they can open as they would an Excel file
All in all, doing things the the "appropriate" way is wishful thinking. So people are going for 2nd best alternative to a proper database, but Access is not installed for various reasons. And that's why they end up with Excel. sad, but nothing you can blame the user for.
A software that tries to think for me without communicating this, that tries to babysit me (remember Clippy?) is bound to be somewhere between extremely annoying and dangerous, depending on the situation you want to use it in.
"Hello! It seems you just imported a long list of names, but some dates and a few numbers slipped into what otherwise seems to be text." Would haven be the kind of "babysitting" that told the user that some values showed an "anomaly" (compared to the others) and would either prevent mistakes (table header slipped into data rows) or reminded the user to set the data type for a column.
then you only need a way to attach that database to that email with the excel file, too....
But yes, that would be the proper way. But we would still need a lightweight database-as-simple-document format. Heck, that even COULD BE Excel with a special type of data-worksheets in a document that enforce data structure and do not allow formatting. For all teh use cases where you don't need the performance or multi-user or transactions/data integrity/replication of an actual database server.
The task of mailing out a file with database-data should be much simpler.
I think that feature is build into excel since the Office of 95. And it still is somewhere.
And each time I need it I am not able to find it for the life of me.
1b) Lack of a appropriate tool to wrap up stuff that should be in a database (or has been extracted from a database) for display and distribution.
There is a reason why people the spreadsheet-hammer - it is still better suited than the word processor screwdriver or the plain text chainsaw., or the pdf/png belt sander.
Here is why for those without the background.
Typed variables in a database completely eliminate this issue.
If the users had used a database, even one of the MS ones (one of which newbies can deal with within a week), that would have solved it which was the poster above's point that you were unable to grasp
And how would that helped when publishers requested their supplementary data in Excel format?
They are scientists and more likely than not the did use some tools for scientific number crunching ("R") or similar that kept and processed data in typed variables or even kept the raw data in an actual database. But you can't ship your Oracle server to reviewers by email and in lack of a document-like database format, peope are turning to Excel.
Which is too late if the damage has already been done. And if the first 2000 lines look ok, no one is going to do that because, hey, the auto import worked!
I don't know how much number crunching was actually involved here. I suspect the problem comes from using a spreadsheet as a database.
Because databases are, you know, hard.
Yeah. Great.
But WHY are they so hard? Because usually, a "database" is something that is installed and stored on a network server and you can't mail a network server to your colleague, costumer or publisher. So even if you KNOW that a database would be the right tool for the job at hand, you end up with your data in a spreadsheet. Either to send it to someone or by receiving it from someone else.
The only alternative that would offer searching, filtering, sorting (in general: querying) features that you need to work with raw data (or even long lists) would be Access. I never understood why the wool that made using databases where it made sense to use them as easy as working with a doc file has been so frowned upon by the same "experts" that now complain that users use the next best thing instead: Excel.
From today's bash.org successor:
It says a lot about you if your Autocorrect turns Voltaire into Voltaren or the other way round....
(doesn't need to be explicit, although in keeping with the Pokemon theme, they could call it a new town/island/whatever),
That's exactly what would NOT work here as you're supposed to play in a setting that's recognizably your own town/city/island.
That's the problem: PG isn't very fun.
It CAN'T BE fun!
It it was fun, people would actually play it to progress instead of buying pokeballs from the shop.
Now, tor a game to be successful, it has to be some boring grind that people would want to pay for to avoid.....
And that's why we can't have nice things.
OK.. then the US should think twice about those ideas.
And honestly, given the treatment you receive at the US border, I haven't expected tourism to be that popular. They are already doing a good job of not making you feel welcome.
Why do people still travel to the US? I haven't visited the country since they started treating visitors like criminals and I refuse any business travel towards the US. Sure, it may not always be avoidable for everyone, but if tourists simply stop coming, they will have to start treating their guests more normally at some point.
Sucks to be Hawaii, but for the rest of the states, how much money do they make from tourism? Would that be a noteable dent in USA GDP?
Yes.
Bad luck then....
You never ever *have* to pick up the phone when it rings. Never. Even for deliveries. They will leave a message. It has worked for me for over 25 years.
Classical externalization: Your stuff (here: ability to receive messages) relies on others doing additional work or following your procedures.
Works only well as long as they are willing to jump through the hoops you're setting.