Yes, they are completely separate issues. We didn't get improved syringe access in *exchange* for an essential liberty (if that were the case I'd also be opposed to it) - we coincidentally got the improved access to syringes at the same time the law preventing warrantless phone searches was vetoed. My point is that I disagree that the veto of warrantless searches is "the most important thing Jerry Brown has done" because allowing expanded syringe access will save lives, whereas the warrantless search issue will not kill anyone. And will probably be overturned by either a subsequent legislature or a court. But that's just my opinion.
Prior to 2002 the only places where it was legal to distribute syringes were counties (local government areas) where the county government declared a public health emergency to override state law (and they had to re-declare the public health emergency every 2 weeks). From 2002-2005 counties could authorize syringe exchange programs, so syringe exchange workers could distribute syringes, but possession of syringes remained illegal - ie as soon as you walked out the door with your syringes you were breaking the law. Since 2005 it's been legal to possess syringes in a county with an authorized syringe exchange program (as long as they're stored in an approved biohazard container) but not elsewhere in the state, and it's been legal for pharmacies in counties with local authorization to register to sell syringes. The new law just signed will make it legal to possess a syringe without a prescription anywhere in the state, and allows the state health department to open a syringe exchange anywhere where it's needed without the requirement of local government authorization (something many local governments are delighted by because the only reason they weren't allowing it was fear of local political backlash).
You could say the same thing about obesity (and subsequent type II diabetes and coronary issues), tobacco use (kills 1 in 3 long term users, compared to 1 in 30 long term heroin users), or any number of other "stupid" behaviors which cause major expensive public health problems and which would disappear completely if only human beings would behave differently.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, people do do all sorts of stupid things all the time, with costly consequences for the entire society. Providing needles to drug users has long since been demonstrated to not increase drug use and to reduce the incidence of HIV. Providing 10 cent needles to drug users is far far cheaper than providing the estimated $109,000 in lifetime treatment costs for every new case of HIV.
I agree that it'd be great if people stopped using drugs. 70 years of research and experimentation on getting people to stop using drugs, from Russian experiments with beating the shit out of drug users in prison camps through to the most touchy-feely Californian efforts have so far never produced anything that produced more than 15% abstinence after one year. Until someone comes up with a genuinely effective way of helping people stop using drugs, I'd like to see demonstrably effective ways of preventing people catching expensive diseases(and spreading them to the surrounding population) continue, thanks just the same.
"In probably the most important decision Gov. Brown of California will make this year, he has vetoed the bill that would require officers to get a search warrant"
Um, he also signed into law a bill which allows any adult to purchase and possess 30 or fewer syringes from a pharmacy, physician or Syringe Exchange Program anywhere in California. Which will probably save hundreds of lives from HIV and thousands from hepatitis C. You know, the lives of human beings?
Warrantless searches of phones sucks, but in the grand scheme of things I'd rather have the cops search mine or my friends' phones without a warrant than watch people die of AIDS.
I trust google more than facebook, but I have several aspects of my professional life tied up in google products. If facebook suddenly decides one day that I've violated their TOS and boots me, nothing of value will be lost. If google suddenly decides one day that I've violated their TOS (as they seem to have been doing to people around the 'identity' issue) and boots me, losing me access to gmail, documents, scholar, and other things I rely upon, then it'll be a right PITA. Yes, I back all that stuff up against just such an eventuality, so I won't have *lost* emails and documents etc, but moving it all over to replacement systems will suck.
Find the stupidest most computer-illiterate person you can who is in the intended user group (General public - get your aol-using grandfather. Sales team - get that moron who keeps calling tech support because he accidentally moved his desktop icons and now can't launch word. etc). Pay them some money to sit in front of your UI and then ask them to do various tasks you're worried about. Don't give them any hints - just let them solve the puzzle of how to do [whatever] themselves. Video it. Show the video of how they attempt to do the tasks to your developers. Tell them that what that person did was *logical* given their previous experience, and work out how to change the UI so it matches the *user's* logic, not the logic of the people who know computers and how they work really really well.
No-one makes money from 'creativity'. You make money from what economists call 'rent-seeking' from creative output, be it yours or someone else's. The people who get rich (or even just make a decent living) are those who are good at rent seeking, and those people aren't necessarily the same people who are good at 'creating'. Hence Disney inc still aggressively rent-seeking from the creative output of illustrators, animators, voice artists etc 70 years after the creative act, and you can bet those creatives or their descendants aren't making any ongoing money from it.
Being able to work at home or from your local cafe on your laptop doesn't magically free you from the need to either have a lot of capital to promote and exploit your creative output, or alternately the need to sell your creative labor to someone who does, it just frees those with that capital from the need to supply the infrastructure of an OSHA-compliant workplace.
Because they don't pay for it. In my workplace full of academics, 'software costs' are written into every grant we all write. As well as new computers. So my colleagues all buy top of the line Macs every two years, install parallels and the latest *windows* version of office, and never leave the virtual window (because they use some windows-only statistical software as part of their actual work). Its an odd mix of status (hence the macs and the 'must have the latest version of all software') and not giving a shit (because they're not really paying for it). Further, the $200 for office (or whatever it is after an educational bulk discount) is tiny compared to the costs associated with the specialized software we use for our research (thousands per year per install in licensing fees) let alone relative to the total amount of money involved in the grant (USD$10k for 'three laptop computers and base software' is nothing in the context of a USD$2.5 million grant..). So my colleagues are unlikely to ever have any monetary incentive to do things differently. If someone convinced them that using LibreOffice was the sexy high status thing to do, or the granting agencies started insisting on the use of.odt files for all communication or something, then maybe. But until then..
Ahh well, I just tested the main piece of software I use with windows (MaxQDA, a qualitative research tool) and it did no better on ReactOS than it does under WINE. Still, I'll keep an eye on it - anything that can effectively clone XP in functional terms will work just fine for these occasional uses. I doubt I'm the only one who regards windows as an underlayer for a necessary piece of software rather than an end in itself.
I use ICD-10 to look at fatal overdose using the national data provided by the CDC (google CDC Wonder compressed mortality file if you want to play with it). There's already a problem that there's at least 8 ways to code a fatal heroin overdose, and overworked coroner/medical examiner investigators are already prone to use the most generic and least specific ones to speed things up. Adding another 140,000 codes might be great for coding cause of non-fatal injury for insurance purposes, but for working out how rates of death from specific causes are changing and comparing them across states (or other common epidemological tasks) this new system is going to be a hideous nightmare.
At the moment I have an XP virtual machine in Virtualbox which I use about every two or three months for those rare occasions when I need to run some odd piece of windows-only software which doesn't work in WINE (or doesn't work without more tweaking than I have time to waste on it). To have this virtual image, I either need to pay the $100+ that a legal copy costs these days, which is a bit steep for something I rarely use, or use a pirated copy, which I also don't want to do. If ReactOS works with those last couple of pieces of software I occasionally need to use, it'll let me save that $100. This actually seems to be at least part of their intended market - three of the five download options on their downloads page are for virtual machines preinstalled with the OS. In short, I don't really care if they're playing 'catch up' to current versions of windows, and won't until or unless the software I use suddenly won't run on an XP clone, which is unlikely.
They already do. I worked on a gold mine in Western Australia in the 80s where the next-door processing plant was scraping the waste from a mine last run in the '30s to get the extra 0.05 grams per ton of gold out that '30s methods had missed. Running eWaste through a ball mill works just fine too.
Although the British system tends to produce television that people think they want rather than what it turns out they actually want. When all you care about is the number of eyeballs you can deliver to advertisers, you tend to get extremely creative in attracting attention. Not that this is necessarily a good thing - most of the time it's a race to the bottom. Sometimes, however, it can produce fascinating things..
One size never fits all. In the near term, electric vehicles have promise for moving small mass cargoes (ie people and their shopping) relatively small distances - which covers a huge percentage of all vehicle trips undertaken in cities (and over 60% of Americans live in cities where air pollution is at levels considered to be detrimental to health (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429131158.htm)). The combination of environmental concerns, strategic concerns about dependence on externally-sourced energy, and increases in fuel cost may lead to a lot more electric or at least hybrid vehicles being used in cities.
But combustion engines have a number of particular strengths against current battery-based electric vehicles that will keep them in use long after electric vehicles become dominant for city-based transport. Such as work vehicles in locations where long trips, often with high mass cargoes, are common.
Because if it's 4am everywhere I *still* won't know if the phone call I'm about to make in Los Angeles, USA to my brother in Brisbane, Australia is going to wake him up three hours before local sunrise. Not without checking some handy table, perhaps divided into convenient longitudinal 'zones' based on local sunrise/sunset times for each 'zone'. What's that you say? We already have such a system and the current proposal does nothing to improve on it?
The army is doing its job in Syria and Libya too. Having the army in Egypt decide *not* to obey orders to start shooting people in Tahir square a couple of months ago was a good thing, not a bad thing.
You need the stand alone program either way to generate your own keys; plugins for firefox and most common email clients just simplify using the keys.
But the originator of the message has to have used *your* public key to encrypt the message for *you* to be able to decrypt it. The post by ZankerH will only be readable by whichever person generated the pubic key s/he used to encrypt it.
Seriously. JSTOR is non-profit in the same way IKEA is non-profit. I use JSTOR a lot because I have to, but I really wish someone else had been first to the table on the 'scan and OCR back-issues of journals' game.
And her phone will also give the scanner both her loyalty card number and the five coupons she 'clipped' by photographing the barcode with her camera phone, speeding up the entire process. Of course, she'll still hold up the line by assuming the clerk's "how are you today?" was meant literally and giving a five minute disquisition on her lumbago.
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Yes, they are completely separate issues. We didn't get improved syringe access in *exchange* for an essential liberty (if that were the case I'd also be opposed to it) - we coincidentally got the improved access to syringes at the same time the law preventing warrantless phone searches was vetoed. My point is that I disagree that the veto of warrantless searches is "the most important thing Jerry Brown has done" because allowing expanded syringe access will save lives, whereas the warrantless search issue will not kill anyone. And will probably be overturned by either a subsequent legislature or a court. But that's just my opinion.
Prior to 2002 the only places where it was legal to distribute syringes were counties (local government areas) where the county government declared a public health emergency to override state law (and they had to re-declare the public health emergency every 2 weeks). From 2002-2005 counties could authorize syringe exchange programs, so syringe exchange workers could distribute syringes, but possession of syringes remained illegal - ie as soon as you walked out the door with your syringes you were breaking the law. Since 2005 it's been legal to possess syringes in a county with an authorized syringe exchange program (as long as they're stored in an approved biohazard container) but not elsewhere in the state, and it's been legal for pharmacies in counties with local authorization to register to sell syringes. The new law just signed will make it legal to possess a syringe without a prescription anywhere in the state, and allows the state health department to open a syringe exchange anywhere where it's needed without the requirement of local government authorization (something many local governments are delighted by because the only reason they weren't allowing it was fear of local political backlash).
You could say the same thing about obesity (and subsequent type II diabetes and coronary issues), tobacco use (kills 1 in 3 long term users, compared to 1 in 30 long term heroin users), or any number of other "stupid" behaviors which cause major expensive public health problems and which would disappear completely if only human beings would behave differently.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, people do do all sorts of stupid things all the time, with costly consequences for the entire society. Providing needles to drug users has long since been demonstrated to not increase drug use and to reduce the incidence of HIV. Providing 10 cent needles to drug users is far far cheaper than providing the estimated $109,000 in lifetime treatment costs for every new case of HIV.
I agree that it'd be great if people stopped using drugs. 70 years of research and experimentation on getting people to stop using drugs, from Russian experiments with beating the shit out of drug users in prison camps through to the most touchy-feely Californian efforts have so far never produced anything that produced more than 15% abstinence after one year. Until someone comes up with a genuinely effective way of helping people stop using drugs, I'd like to see demonstrably effective ways of preventing people catching expensive diseases(and spreading them to the surrounding population) continue, thanks just the same.
"In probably the most important decision Gov. Brown of California will make this year, he has vetoed the bill that would require officers to get a search warrant"
Um, he also signed into law a bill which allows any adult to purchase and possess 30 or fewer syringes from a pharmacy, physician or Syringe Exchange Program anywhere in California. Which will probably save hundreds of lives from HIV and thousands from hepatitis C. You know, the lives of human beings?
Warrantless searches of phones sucks, but in the grand scheme of things I'd rather have the cops search mine or my friends' phones without a warrant than watch people die of AIDS.
I trust google more than facebook, but I have several aspects of my professional life tied up in google products. If facebook suddenly decides one day that I've violated their TOS and boots me, nothing of value will be lost. If google suddenly decides one day that I've violated their TOS (as they seem to have been doing to people around the 'identity' issue) and boots me, losing me access to gmail, documents, scholar, and other things I rely upon, then it'll be a right PITA. Yes, I back all that stuff up against just such an eventuality, so I won't have *lost* emails and documents etc, but moving it all over to replacement systems will suck.
Rocket launched from a balloon? Done for decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon
THIS. It was my one big one for the survey too.
I was thinking 1052509 myself.
Find the stupidest most computer-illiterate person you can who is in the intended user group (General public - get your aol-using grandfather. Sales team - get that moron who keeps calling tech support because he accidentally moved his desktop icons and now can't launch word. etc). Pay them some money to sit in front of your UI and then ask them to do various tasks you're worried about. Don't give them any hints - just let them solve the puzzle of how to do [whatever] themselves. Video it. Show the video of how they attempt to do the tasks to your developers. Tell them that what that person did was *logical* given their previous experience, and work out how to change the UI so it matches the *user's* logic, not the logic of the people who know computers and how they work really really well.
No-one makes money from 'creativity'. You make money from what economists call 'rent-seeking' from creative output, be it yours or someone else's. The people who get rich (or even just make a decent living) are those who are good at rent seeking, and those people aren't necessarily the same people who are good at 'creating'. Hence Disney inc still aggressively rent-seeking from the creative output of illustrators, animators, voice artists etc 70 years after the creative act, and you can bet those creatives or their descendants aren't making any ongoing money from it.
Being able to work at home or from your local cafe on your laptop doesn't magically free you from the need to either have a lot of capital to promote and exploit your creative output, or alternately the need to sell your creative labor to someone who does, it just frees those with that capital from the need to supply the infrastructure of an OSHA-compliant workplace.
Because they don't pay for it. In my workplace full of academics, 'software costs' are written into every grant we all write. As well as new computers. So my colleagues all buy top of the line Macs every two years, install parallels and the latest *windows* version of office, and never leave the virtual window (because they use some windows-only statistical software as part of their actual work). Its an odd mix of status (hence the macs and the 'must have the latest version of all software') and not giving a shit (because they're not really paying for it). Further, the $200 for office (or whatever it is after an educational bulk discount) is tiny compared to the costs associated with the specialized software we use for our research (thousands per year per install in licensing fees) let alone relative to the total amount of money involved in the grant (USD$10k for 'three laptop computers and base software' is nothing in the context of a USD$2.5 million grant..). So my colleagues are unlikely to ever have any monetary incentive to do things differently. If someone convinced them that using LibreOffice was the sexy high status thing to do, or the granting agencies started insisting on the use of .odt files for all communication or something, then maybe. But until then..
Ahh well, I just tested the main piece of software I use with windows (MaxQDA, a qualitative research tool) and it did no better on ReactOS than it does under WINE. Still, I'll keep an eye on it - anything that can effectively clone XP in functional terms will work just fine for these occasional uses. I doubt I'm the only one who regards windows as an underlayer for a necessary piece of software rather than an end in itself.
I use ICD-10 to look at fatal overdose using the national data provided by the CDC (google CDC Wonder compressed mortality file if you want to play with it). There's already a problem that there's at least 8 ways to code a fatal heroin overdose, and overworked coroner/medical examiner investigators are already prone to use the most generic and least specific ones to speed things up. Adding another 140,000 codes might be great for coding cause of non-fatal injury for insurance purposes, but for working out how rates of death from specific causes are changing and comparing them across states (or other common epidemological tasks) this new system is going to be a hideous nightmare.
At the moment I have an XP virtual machine in Virtualbox which I use about every two or three months for those rare occasions when I need to run some odd piece of windows-only software which doesn't work in WINE (or doesn't work without more tweaking than I have time to waste on it). To have this virtual image, I either need to pay the $100+ that a legal copy costs these days, which is a bit steep for something I rarely use, or use a pirated copy, which I also don't want to do. If ReactOS works with those last couple of pieces of software I occasionally need to use, it'll let me save that $100. This actually seems to be at least part of their intended market - three of the five download options on their downloads page are for virtual machines preinstalled with the OS. In short, I don't really care if they're playing 'catch up' to current versions of windows, and won't until or unless the software I use suddenly won't run on an XP clone, which is unlikely.
They already do. I worked on a gold mine in Western Australia in the 80s where the next-door processing plant was scraping the waste from a mine last run in the '30s to get the extra 0.05 grams per ton of gold out that '30s methods had missed. Running eWaste through a ball mill works just fine too.
Although the British system tends to produce television that people think they want rather than what it turns out they actually want. When all you care about is the number of eyeballs you can deliver to advertisers, you tend to get extremely creative in attracting attention. Not that this is necessarily a good thing - most of the time it's a race to the bottom. Sometimes, however, it can produce fascinating things..
One size never fits all. In the near term, electric vehicles have promise for moving small mass cargoes (ie people and their shopping) relatively small distances - which covers a huge percentage of all vehicle trips undertaken in cities (and over 60% of Americans live in cities where air pollution is at levels considered to be detrimental to health (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429131158.htm)). The combination of environmental concerns, strategic concerns about dependence on externally-sourced energy, and increases in fuel cost may lead to a lot more electric or at least hybrid vehicles being used in cities.
But combustion engines have a number of particular strengths against current battery-based electric vehicles that will keep them in use long after electric vehicles become dominant for city-based transport. Such as work vehicles in locations where long trips, often with high mass cargoes, are common.
Because if it's 4am everywhere I *still* won't know if the phone call I'm about to make in Los Angeles, USA to my brother in Brisbane, Australia is going to wake him up three hours before local sunrise. Not without checking some handy table, perhaps divided into convenient longitudinal 'zones' based on local sunrise/sunset times for each 'zone'. What's that you say? We already have such a system and the current proposal does nothing to improve on it?
The army is doing its job in Syria and Libya too. Having the army in Egypt decide *not* to obey orders to start shooting people in Tahir square a couple of months ago was a good thing, not a bad thing.
Surrounded on three sides by water and one side by reality..
You need the stand alone program either way to generate your own keys; plugins for firefox and most common email clients just simplify using the keys.
But the originator of the message has to have used *your* public key to encrypt the message for *you* to be able to decrypt it. The post by ZankerH will only be readable by whichever person generated the pubic key s/he used to encrypt it.
Seriously. JSTOR is non-profit in the same way IKEA is non-profit. I use JSTOR a lot because I have to, but I really wish someone else had been first to the table on the 'scan and OCR back-issues of journals' game.
No new science came out of the I405 project either. We just got a marginal extension on the life of a deeply inefficient way of moving people around.
And her phone will also give the scanner both her loyalty card number and the five coupons she 'clipped' by photographing the barcode with her camera phone, speeding up the entire process. Of course, she'll still hold up the line by assuming the clerk's "how are you today?" was meant literally and giving a five minute disquisition on her lumbago.
What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A bloody good start.