The beverages aren't part of the POS system, you have to physically prepare them. How is this any different, except that the WiFi receipt system may actually have its own accounting feature, which can be checked periodically?
I don't know what coffee shops do with accounting for beverages. But to the extent they don't at chain stores, it's just because they haven't figured out a cost effective way to do so. I'm sure they keep fairly close track of other inventory (such as coffee makers).
I don't know how widespread it was, but many years ago at least one fast food franchise I went to knew they couldn't count beverages very well -- but they sure as heck could count cups - and that is just what they did. The number of beverages sold was compared to the number of cups used. I assume there was a bit more acceptance on this being slighly out of balance than the till being out of balance, but I don't know this for a fact. This was actually somewhat annoying because if you returned a soda because it was "flat" they had to account for the cup you returned to them which took an extra second or two.
Certainly there are some very large bars that have gone to the expense of accounting very carefully for beverages.
Anyway, the integration (or lack there of) is an individual business decision rather unrelated to introducing a "token" charge for WiFi to prevent abuse. If one has a lot of free counter space, low employee turnover, and few POS stations, they would be more likely to accept a non-integrated system.
If you're going to charge a nominal fee for it, it has to be part of the POS system. Else, inevitably, the number of "WIFI receipts" printed won't match the number paid for - even IF the counterdroids are smart (and especially if they are smart, enterprising, and less than honest).
Anyway, the last thing that is needed is another printer to maintain (paper jams, paper supplies, perhaps ink supplies, perhaps ribbon supplies) and find space for in the area. Integrating them for a mom-and-pop may not be worth it, but for chains, it is probably a requirement.
Clearly totally "free" is easier, but it has the problem of non (or low) paying customers hogging space.
Yep - it's got to be integrated with the POS so there's no special training/effort required by the minimum wage counter droid.
It would seem to make sense to make WiFi something you buy for a very nominal fee with any purchase over some amount. For example, with every purchase of $3 or more, you can buy one hour (and maybe up to ### MB) of WiFi for 25 cents. The counter droid just keys it in like it were a Big Mac. The access code would be printed on the receipt and expires in two hours. If you print a code on every receipt, freeloaders would pick up receipts that are lying around and use the access codes and by charging a nominal fee, it discourages patrons who are not going to use WiFi from asking for it anyway and handing the receipt to someone else.
Of course, once you begin to charge anything for it, service expectations go up (Customer: "Hey, this access code doesn't work, your system is broken."; Employee: "Well, no, that access code is all used up from MAC address ### which is NOT your notebook." OR Customer: "Hey, I couldn't of downloaded more than the 100MB limit yet - in fact, look right here at 'netstat -e' which shows I haven't."; Employee: "Sir, as 'systeminfo' shows, you rebooted your computer 45 minutes after your first access to the system so 'netstat' doesn't show activity before the reboot.") so technical support may become a cost that exceeds the revenue from the nominal charge...
Many people make the error of accepting a new job and giving notice BEFORE reading the NCA. This is THEIR error (although, I think a company should include in the offer packet anything that they require you to sign to actually begin working).
I've never heard of someone considering an offer from a respectable company being unable to get a copy of the NCA before accepting the offer.
And yes, they are negotiable - the higher you are and/or the smaller the company, the more negotiable they are.
Of course the paint is on the outside - does that get down to freezing? If so, wouldn't that mean the foam hadn't done its job and the shuttle would shed ice on takeoff? There must be some paints that are pliable just above zero.
Not because I like them to bow or scrape, not because I feel better than them, but because I feel like I am building a world where people help each other, a world where, if the situation were reversed I would be helped.
This suggests that you do expect/hope for something in return should you need it - even if you think it is unlikely you need it. True that the payoff, or even the need for it, is an abstract and uncertain future event, but this is much like insurance (except with insurance, if certain uncertain events happen, the payout is fairly certain). There's nothing wrong with doing something for others in hopes that somehow that will result in others helping you if you need it, but it may not be purely altruistic.
Although the attitudes of Rand's heroes in her fiction (I've not devoted time to figuring out what her personal views actually were and if they were quite as extreme) are way too extreme and absolute for my taste, I believe there is a significant kernel of truth to them. There is of course a big difference between transferring assets from one person to another by force (as governments do) and voluntarily (as charities do). I have much more faith in charities, overall, making the decisions about who needs what help than in government making those decisions.
For example, I would never voluntarily give rebuilding aid to people whose houses are destroyed by reasonably expected and insurable natural events (such as hurricane, earthquake, or flood - depending on the area). If the homeowner failed to properly insure themselves, why should I pick up the tab? Yet, the Federal government (mostly) has a long history of taking my money by force to help these individuals rebuild (esp. in terms of subsidizing loans). In some cases this happens multiple times as people rebuild in the same location and suffer similar fully anticipatable damage a few years later. I think a private charity that did this would find it hard to raise funds after a while and that people would begin to invest in better insurance (of course, it would reduce housing values in some areas since such insurance can be very expensive in particularly event prone areas - as it should be).
My experience is, never take drivers from Windows Update - they cause too much grief (to say nothing of often being ancient) - I always go to the manufacturer's site.
The rest of the updates seem quite reliable with the only failure I've had on multiple XP & W2K systems in the past four years was wedging W2K by upgrading to Media Player 9(?) because I have an old version of Easy CD Creator which seems to be incompatible with the Roxio/Adapatec DLLs that MS licensed to burn CDs from MP. I never did figure out how to avoid BSOD once in a while with that combination, so I carefully reject all MP updates.
It's a terrible truth of our current society in the U.S. that the children who tend to do well have the serious guidance and involvement of their parents, whereas poorer-performing children tend to lack the same parental involvement.
Sadly, IMHO, very true.
During the rearing of the baby boom generation, "progressive" education took a foothold in, at least, public education. One aspect of this included being excessively concerned with the student's emotions and insufficiently concerned with the student's actual achievement. This lowered the bar for all students (up until the past few years, I believe there were very few public schools where a student had a realistic risk of being held back to repeat a grade in middle school since social promotion was the norm).
This period was also marked by the teachers' unions increasing their power. These unions fought all attempts to objectively measure student's progress. I think this was largely due to the realization that such measurement also made them accountable and would eventually result in the public school teaching positions being held by the most qualified, not the most senior. Fortunately, there has been enough of a backlash to the lack of progress that things seem to be trending the other direction - and will probably end up with TOO much arbitrary objective measurement - but that is the nature of the beast when those paying the bills get pissed off.
In addition, families in too many underperforming districts and schools have too few options available. Even if they know their children are not being served well by the local public school, they can't send them to better schools or can't figure out how to navigate the system to do so even if the option is available. IMHO, vouchers are the only viable answer to help give the child of a single mother in South Central Los Angeles even close to the same chance that the child of a wealthy Beverly Hills family has (except to the extent that the Beverly Hills parents are irresponsible). Just pouring more money into the inner city schools will not SOLVE this problem - and within these areas, we can only hope to have a reliable "recovery rate" for those children whose parents DO understand the value of education (assuming, of course, that the state is not going to take child rearing responsibilities away from those parents who don't exercise due control over their children).
Unfortunately, the children graduating from high school today were raised by one or two generations of parents/grandparents who themselves suffer from the preceding shortcomings of the educational system. This gives me little hope - as China and India's educational systems are/were improving, the U. S. was resting on its laurels and lacks momentum. The general trend toward freedom in other countries (yes, even China in spite of all the remaining incursions on freedom) will reduce the ability of the U. S. to compensate by immigration.
The post asked (in such an elegant way) "How in the fuck do handguns have 'more legitimate' uses than illegitimate?".
Perhaps you figured out what the highly sophisticated question was - and perhaps I guessed incorrectly that the poster was counting the number of roles that handguns play and comparing the number of legitimate vs. illegitimate roles.
I could have of course listed each type of crime (holding up convenience stores, car jackings, bank robberies and so on) but then I would also have to include each type of sport shooting. You want to define the question to insure there are only two uses (illegitimate and legitimate) - in which case the answer to the original question would be that 50% of the uses are illegitimate and 50% are illegitimate - making the question meaningless.
If one examines the the primary reason that each handgun is acquired, a taxonomy such as I provided is reasonable (although, incomplete). I could be mistaken, but I doubt that most handguns used for illegitimate uses are acquired for a specific type of crime (i.e., when a gang member acquires a gun, I doubt that s/he knows which type of crime it will be used to commit, but does anticipate that it will be used primarily for criminal use) however, many guns are acquired just for sport uses - and in most cases are not even a good choice for other uses (for example, a Ruger Government Target Model.22 is a pretty bad choice for any other use but sport shooting).
If one counts instances of usage, obviously there are more legitimate usages per year than illegitimate. This is true if you compare the number of handguns involved each year in illegitimate uses to legitimate uses OR if you compare number of rounds fired for legitimate uses vs. illegitimate uses. So, what DO you want to count?
The reality is that far more shots are fired for legitimate reasons and far more guns are used for legitimate purposes than for illegitimate purposes.
I'm not sure if we responded correctly to the first WTC attack, but in the environment of that time, it was probably appropriate.
To say that 9/11 was a "phony pretext" to attack Iraq is inaccurate - 9/11 wasn't the pretext, phony or otherwise - WMDs were the pretext. Whether the WMD pretext was phony or a sincere miscalculation is of course a debatable matter which history will have to judge. Certainly Saddam's consistent failure to comply with the terms of his surrender didn't help increase clarity. At the time, we didn't quite understand why some other permanent members of the Security Council were not interested in really enforcing those terms (of course, later we discovered conflicts of interest with the oil-for-food scandal - we will see how that all eventually plays out).
I don't agree that it is "abundantly clear" that effectively fighting an enemy like Al Qaeda depends on the sympathy and support of the rest of the world and can't be done effectively w/military acts. While military acts alone are not going to be enough, our military action in Afghanistan clearly disrupted Al Qaeda and the Taliban significantly and left them weaker. As we have discovered, we can't trust even the UN to not be corrupt - I'd be hesitant to rely on them for anything any more than I would rely on Ken Lay's word. This is partially a matter of personal style - given the choice between having Winston Churchill or Neville Chamberlain developing strategy, you can probably guess which I'd pick.
I can't agree that "the evidence is plain that our response to the second attack (9/11) has done us far more harm than good." Certainly things are not going perfectly in Iraq - but what war ever has? If we had 7x24 live coverage by a press unsympathetic to the war during WWII we would have quit even before ramping up our military machinery after the attack at Pearl Harbor. CBS and NBC would have breathlessly declared the invasion of Normandy a failure by about 9AM on June 6, 1944. (Of course, the entire war would have been declared a failure much earlier). The dichotomy between what soldiers on the ground say about Iraq and what the mass media says is quite alarming - there are obviously exceptions on both sides (i.e., military personnel who paint a gloomy picture and media outlets that show some of the progress). Anyway, in the general war against terror, it isn't even close to D-day yet.
Attempting to draw parallels between how the DC snipers were caught and how we could use a similar technique to apprehend Usama Bin Laden is absurd. The snipers were not wealthy; UBL is/was. The snipers didn't have sources of funding from around the world; UBL appears to. The snipers were entirely contained within the United States where our law enforcement assets are located and in control; UBL isn't thought to be in the United States. As far as I've heard, not a single other person was actively sympathetic to the snipers or helping them to hide; UBL of course has many sympathizers - many who will willingly give their lives for his cause and personal protection and who certainly help him hide. The snipers physically committed their own crimes; UBL (to my knowledge) is never at the scene of the act - someone carries them out. The snipers didn't, IMHO, appear to be very smart; UBL appears to be pretty smart. Even with all that, remember that it took quite a while to catch the snipers and that there were some very bad leads that led the public to believe they were shooting from a white truck while - and during this delay, they continued to kill.
We invaded Afghanistan, spent 4 or 5 months there, and basically pulled out. Then we, for no justifiable reason, invaded a soverign nation and deposed the elected head of state.
From context, I'm assuming that the "soverign nation" to which you refer is Iraq and the "elected head of state" is Saddam Hussein.
Let's look at the election that last confirmed Saddam's status as an "elected head of state" (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2331951.stm). He was the only candidate and he got 100% of the vote according to Iraqi officials (which appears to be a significant improvement - as in the prior election he had only gotten 99.96% - perhaps the 0.04% that previously voted against him were, shall we say, "unavailable" to vote this time?). Doesn't this seem a little suspicious to you?
It does make me wonder, where did the crowds that were so eager to pull down his statue not that much later come from? Did they really vote unanimously for him? Oh, perhaps they were American soldiers in disguise?
(News flash - KIM Jong Il was reelected leader of North Korea in 2003. Oops, he was the only candidate also. He must be VERY popular if no one even thinks they should run against him).
"Limped-dick response to the first WTC bombing?" What are you talking about? The people responsible were caught fairly quickly through good police work,
I think that's the point - it was treated more as a ordinary crime rather than another act in an ongoing war being waged on us. This would be akin to treating the attack on Pearl Harbor as a crime and prosecuting the pilots that flew the planes and calling it a day (yes, I know the analogy is not perfect).
I don't know if, without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the US should have done more about the first WTC bombing, but clearly, in retrospect, our response was not very strong relative to the infrastructure that perpetrated it.
why would you let someone store encrypted data on your PC
Actually, this might make a lot of sense. For example, if you and a family member 500 miles away both have good upload speeds, you might agree to store each other's backups - but certainly would not entrust your "backup buddy" with the raw data. Even if you trust their integrity, you may not trust the locks on their doors or the like. Also, I wouldn't want a family member to wonder, somewhere deep in the back of their mind, if somehow I let their identity creep out. Therefore, both would want to encrypt the backup before uploading to their "backup buddy".
Indeed, I used to work for a well known company whose brilliant answer to backups of personal PCs was to tell you to "back it up to a colleague's PC" because for many months they didn't have space for more home directories on the corporate servers. Obviously I would encrypt such data before transferring it -- after all, it contained things like personnel performance reviews.
No privacy. People have access to voter registration information here.
Umm... how could we have a trusted voting process if the list of registered voters is secret? Obviously this is not sufficient for a trusted voting process, but I believe it is necessary. If I look at the list and find that 10 dead guys are voting from a vacant lot, I can bring that up only if I can see the list.
I freely admit to not being in class when I should have - software I know, thermodynamics I know not -- but since this is/. and no expertise is required to opine on most any topic, I shall ramble into the valley of humiliation:)
No question there is heat produced to move heat from inside a building to outside a building (this heat being produced due to inefficiencies at the power generation facility, the lines/transformers between the generation facility and the air conditioning units due to line resistance et al, and within the air conditioning units themselves due to friction etc). However, I'm under the impression based (in part) on this thread that it takes as little as 1/4 of a joule to move 1 joule from inside to outside with conventional air conditioning (nearly the inverse with Peltier junctions which, long ago, this thread was about).
If my lame brained assumptions are valid, then perhaps for every erg moved from inside a building by conventional AC, less than an erg may actually be released as "net additional heat".
Of course, I'm so outside my area of expertise and so inside a bottle of Lagavulin that this is probably complete crap.
Won't the building eventually return to the average temperature of the surrounding environment (for example, when the AC is shut down for the weekend or, in extreme cases, when the building power is shut off prior to demolition)? Thus the effect is temporary. The heat originally pumped out of the building/contents will eventually be reabsorbed by it. As has been noted, of course, there is a bunch of heat (and, with our current infrastructure, greenhouse gas) produced in the process of generating power for the compresser (and some wasted heat since the compresser has friction which causes the moter/compressor to convert some of the input energy to heat).
But, what do I know... I'm a software guy who was hacking ("hacking" meant something different in the 70's than it does now!) in the computer center instead of going to the classes on this stuff... Feel free to correct me!
Quick question. I've always read that when the officer asks do you know how fast you were going that you are supposed to not say because this is used as a confession in court.
IANAL, but I believe the correct answer is "Yes" (she didn't ask how fast you thought you were going, she asked if you knew how fast you were going). In court it will be hard to claim that you knew how fast you were going if you told the officer at the scene that you didn't.
If the officer then asks how fast you were going (or how fast you thought you were going), you might try a non-responsive answer of "Why, don't you know?". Obviously she can't say "no" (else, her case in court would be weak unless you were driving like 200mph in a school zone).
If the officer insists on an answer (which is unlikely), of course you don't need to give one, but you could try responding "Well, since you think you know how fast I was going, it seems unnecessary for me to provide that information to you."
Of course, somewhere along the line you will have violated one of the rules of being pulled over: Don't be memorable. You'd rather that, by the next doughnut break, the officer has forgotten all about you and that she didn't feel like she needed to take an extra note or two because she thinks you're likely to make her show up in court.
Some people think police always lie about these things, but I recall driving at upwards of 95MPH early (2AM) one morning in VERY light traffic back when the speed limit was 55MPH. As I approached an onramp, I noticed a car with its lights off parked on the shoulder of the onramp. Being no idiot (well maybe), I decided there was a reasonable chance this was an unmarked police car. Even though if it was a police car, s/he HAD to know my approximate speed, I got off the gas, and downshifted (and used the parking brake a bit) and got some speed off. As I passed the onramp, on came the car's headlights and it rapidly accelerated. By the time the car caught up with me, I was an angel going 55MPH. I thought I was toast - I figured the car would follow me for a while (in order to have the timing all work out so the cop could claim in court that s/he had paced me) and pull me over and, if I was alone in the car, nail me for what was really an estimated speed (but claimed to be a paced speed). Instead, even though s/he knew exactly what I had done, after about a quarter mile (during which time I assume s/he paced me at 55MPH) s/he pulled around me and took off. A few minutes later, I passed some poor sap who was not being alert and was getting a ticket! I was pleasantly surprised.
I've talked to a police officer who said he would often let a speeder go if the perp was sufficiently alert to notice him and if the conditions really were not all that dangerous (as in this case, virtually no traffic, good weather, and a controlled access road). He was much more concerned about drivers who were driving much slower but were not alert.
Sorry you spent so much time responding to my obviously unsuccessful attempt at subtle absurd humor - I was trying to be absurd to point out the absurdity of the parent:)
Still, I were more interested in the other issues. How do you show a webserver 'in action?'
Certainly the "hands-on-lab" described in the article would be pretty useless at showing a webserver "in action" (unless of course "in action" terminated in a BSOD or kernel panic!). I couldn't quite figure out from the article what the use of the lab was - except it did say it was to allow users to play with a range of "desktop" software - and most casual users of a desktop don't (knowenly) run a web server that they care to know anything about.
When I went to Magic Mountain many (many!) years ago, the rides were just a bit more thrilling just because the place didn't seem very well maintained. I particularly recall a ride where the operator pulled back with significant force on a couple levers about three feet long to brake the cars into the loading/unloading area. One of these levers had broken and been (sloppily) brazed back on at the bottom (and they hadn't even bothered to paint over the repair). I suspected that even if the operator did nothing, the car should have slowed down enough before the end of the track. However, I also suspected that the "failsafe" mechanism (and every other part of the ride) had probably been maintained by Mr. Brazing - which made the whole thing a bit more interesting.
Lawyers, insurance companies, engineers, lawmakers, public inspectors, and zero-tolerance drug policies in the workplace have made amusement park rides a bit less thrilling than they once were:)
Exactly - which was my point... The post I responded to was implicitly condemning MS products in general based on experiences with an ancient, many times superceded, MS product (ME) aimed at a different market than Linux - hardly a rational point of view.
I thought the absurdity of condemning Linux based on experiences with the CDs of a distro from 1995 (still in a drawer somewhere - and not used since 1995) was an obvious critique of the poster's thought process - but I forgot this was/. where nuance is often missed.
My experience with Linux is horrible compared to Windows XP. Linux is hard to install, has a horrible UI, and has little information and help available for it. XP, on the other hand, is easy to install, has a decent GUI, and good help files.
To add insult to injury, when I reinstall Linux, I'm actually getting occasional read errors on my Linux CDs -- but I guess I shouldn't fault Linux for that since these damned CDs are now ten years old.
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I don't know what coffee shops do with accounting for beverages. But to the extent they don't at chain stores, it's just because they haven't figured out a cost effective way to do so. I'm sure they keep fairly close track of other inventory (such as coffee makers).
I don't know how widespread it was, but many years ago at least one fast food franchise I went to knew they couldn't count beverages very well -- but they sure as heck could count cups - and that is just what they did. The number of beverages sold was compared to the number of cups used. I assume there was a bit more acceptance on this being slighly out of balance than the till being out of balance, but I don't know this for a fact. This was actually somewhat annoying because if you returned a soda because it was "flat" they had to account for the cup you returned to them which took an extra second or two.
Certainly there are some very large bars that have gone to the expense of accounting very carefully for beverages.
Anyway, the integration (or lack there of) is an individual business decision rather unrelated to introducing a "token" charge for WiFi to prevent abuse. If one has a lot of free counter space, low employee turnover, and few POS stations, they would be more likely to accept a non-integrated system.
Anyway, the last thing that is needed is another printer to maintain (paper jams, paper supplies, perhaps ink supplies, perhaps ribbon supplies) and find space for in the area. Integrating them for a mom-and-pop may not be worth it, but for chains, it is probably a requirement.
Clearly totally "free" is easier, but it has the problem of non (or low) paying customers hogging space.
It would seem to make sense to make WiFi something you buy for a very nominal fee with any purchase over some amount. For example, with every purchase of $3 or more, you can buy one hour (and maybe up to ### MB) of WiFi for 25 cents. The counter droid just keys it in like it were a Big Mac. The access code would be printed on the receipt and expires in two hours. If you print a code on every receipt, freeloaders would pick up receipts that are lying around and use the access codes and by charging a nominal fee, it discourages patrons who are not going to use WiFi from asking for it anyway and handing the receipt to someone else.
Of course, once you begin to charge anything for it, service expectations go up (Customer: "Hey, this access code doesn't work, your system is broken."; Employee: "Well, no, that access code is all used up from MAC address ### which is NOT your notebook." OR Customer: "Hey, I couldn't of downloaded more than the 100MB limit yet - in fact, look right here at 'netstat -e' which shows I haven't."; Employee: "Sir, as 'systeminfo' shows, you rebooted your computer 45 minutes after your first access to the system so 'netstat' doesn't show activity before the reboot.") so technical support may become a cost that exceeds the revenue from the nominal charge...
I've never heard of someone considering an offer from a respectable company being unable to get a copy of the NCA before accepting the offer.
And yes, they are negotiable - the higher you are and/or the smaller the company, the more negotiable they are.
Of course the paint is on the outside - does that get down to freezing? If so, wouldn't that mean the foam hadn't done its job and the shuttle would shed ice on takeoff? There must be some paints that are pliable just above zero.
This suggests that you do expect/hope for something in return should you need it - even if you think it is unlikely you need it. True that the payoff, or even the need for it, is an abstract and uncertain future event, but this is much like insurance (except with insurance, if certain uncertain events happen, the payout is fairly certain). There's nothing wrong with doing something for others in hopes that somehow that will result in others helping you if you need it, but it may not be purely altruistic.
Although the attitudes of Rand's heroes in her fiction (I've not devoted time to figuring out what her personal views actually were and if they were quite as extreme) are way too extreme and absolute for my taste, I believe there is a significant kernel of truth to them. There is of course a big difference between transferring assets from one person to another by force (as governments do) and voluntarily (as charities do). I have much more faith in charities, overall, making the decisions about who needs what help than in government making those decisions.
For example, I would never voluntarily give rebuilding aid to people whose houses are destroyed by reasonably expected and insurable natural events (such as hurricane, earthquake, or flood - depending on the area). If the homeowner failed to properly insure themselves, why should I pick up the tab? Yet, the Federal government (mostly) has a long history of taking my money by force to help these individuals rebuild (esp. in terms of subsidizing loans). In some cases this happens multiple times as people rebuild in the same location and suffer similar fully anticipatable damage a few years later. I think a private charity that did this would find it hard to raise funds after a while and that people would begin to invest in better insurance (of course, it would reduce housing values in some areas since such insurance can be very expensive in particularly event prone areas - as it should be).
Or, more likely, before she had to leave it!
The rest of the updates seem quite reliable with the only failure I've had on multiple XP & W2K systems in the past four years was wedging W2K by upgrading to Media Player 9(?) because I have an old version of Easy CD Creator which seems to be incompatible with the Roxio/Adapatec DLLs that MS licensed to burn CDs from MP. I never did figure out how to avoid BSOD once in a while with that combination, so I carefully reject all MP updates.
Sadly, IMHO, very true.
During the rearing of the baby boom generation, "progressive" education took a foothold in, at least, public education. One aspect of this included being excessively concerned with the student's emotions and insufficiently concerned with the student's actual achievement. This lowered the bar for all students (up until the past few years, I believe there were very few public schools where a student had a realistic risk of being held back to repeat a grade in middle school since social promotion was the norm).
This period was also marked by the teachers' unions increasing their power. These unions fought all attempts to objectively measure student's progress. I think this was largely due to the realization that such measurement also made them accountable and would eventually result in the public school teaching positions being held by the most qualified, not the most senior. Fortunately, there has been enough of a backlash to the lack of progress that things seem to be trending the other direction - and will probably end up with TOO much arbitrary objective measurement - but that is the nature of the beast when those paying the bills get pissed off.
In addition, families in too many underperforming districts and schools have too few options available. Even if they know their children are not being served well by the local public school, they can't send them to better schools or can't figure out how to navigate the system to do so even if the option is available. IMHO, vouchers are the only viable answer to help give the child of a single mother in South Central Los Angeles even close to the same chance that the child of a wealthy Beverly Hills family has (except to the extent that the Beverly Hills parents are irresponsible). Just pouring more money into the inner city schools will not SOLVE this problem - and within these areas, we can only hope to have a reliable "recovery rate" for those children whose parents DO understand the value of education (assuming, of course, that the state is not going to take child rearing responsibilities away from those parents who don't exercise due control over their children).
Unfortunately, the children graduating from high school today were raised by one or two generations of parents/grandparents who themselves suffer from the preceding shortcomings of the educational system. This gives me little hope - as China and India's educational systems are/were improving, the U. S. was resting on its laurels and lacks momentum. The general trend toward freedom in other countries (yes, even China in spite of all the remaining incursions on freedom) will reduce the ability of the U. S. to compensate by immigration.
We Are So Screwed.
Perhaps you figured out what the highly sophisticated question was - and perhaps I guessed incorrectly that the poster was counting the number of roles that handguns play and comparing the number of legitimate vs. illegitimate roles.
I could have of course listed each type of crime (holding up convenience stores, car jackings, bank robberies and so on) but then I would also have to include each type of sport shooting. You want to define the question to insure there are only two uses (illegitimate and legitimate) - in which case the answer to the original question would be that 50% of the uses are illegitimate and 50% are illegitimate - making the question meaningless.
If one examines the the primary reason that each handgun is acquired, a taxonomy such as I provided is reasonable (although, incomplete). I could be mistaken, but I doubt that most handguns used for illegitimate uses are acquired for a specific type of crime (i.e., when a gang member acquires a gun, I doubt that s/he knows which type of crime it will be used to commit, but does anticipate that it will be used primarily for criminal use) however, many guns are acquired just for sport uses - and in most cases are not even a good choice for other uses (for example, a Ruger Government Target Model .22 is a pretty bad choice for any other use but sport shooting).
If one counts instances of usage, obviously there are more legitimate usages per year than illegitimate. This is true if you compare the number of handguns involved each year in illegitimate uses to legitimate uses OR if you compare number of rounds fired for legitimate uses vs. illegitimate uses. So, what DO you want to count? The reality is that far more shots are fired for legitimate reasons and far more guns are used for legitimate purposes than for illegitimate purposes.
- Sport target shooting.
- Protection from animals.
- Offensive and defensive use in warfare.
- Self defense from evil humanoids.
...every one of them legal and legitimate...
- Commission of crime.
...and one that isn't...
To say that 9/11 was a "phony pretext" to attack Iraq is inaccurate - 9/11 wasn't the pretext, phony or otherwise - WMDs were the pretext. Whether the WMD pretext was phony or a sincere miscalculation is of course a debatable matter which history will have to judge. Certainly Saddam's consistent failure to comply with the terms of his surrender didn't help increase clarity. At the time, we didn't quite understand why some other permanent members of the Security Council were not interested in really enforcing those terms (of course, later we discovered conflicts of interest with the oil-for-food scandal - we will see how that all eventually plays out).
I don't agree that it is "abundantly clear" that effectively fighting an enemy like Al Qaeda depends on the sympathy and support of the rest of the world and can't be done effectively w/military acts. While military acts alone are not going to be enough, our military action in Afghanistan clearly disrupted Al Qaeda and the Taliban significantly and left them weaker. As we have discovered, we can't trust even the UN to not be corrupt - I'd be hesitant to rely on them for anything any more than I would rely on Ken Lay's word. This is partially a matter of personal style - given the choice between having Winston Churchill or Neville Chamberlain developing strategy, you can probably guess which I'd pick.
I can't agree that "the evidence is plain that our response to the second attack (9/11) has done us far more harm than good." Certainly things are not going perfectly in Iraq - but what war ever has? If we had 7x24 live coverage by a press unsympathetic to the war during WWII we would have quit even before ramping up our military machinery after the attack at Pearl Harbor. CBS and NBC would have breathlessly declared the invasion of Normandy a failure by about 9AM on June 6, 1944. (Of course, the entire war would have been declared a failure much earlier). The dichotomy between what soldiers on the ground say about Iraq and what the mass media says is quite alarming - there are obviously exceptions on both sides (i.e., military personnel who paint a gloomy picture and media outlets that show some of the progress). Anyway, in the general war against terror, it isn't even close to D-day yet.
Attempting to draw parallels between how the DC snipers were caught and how we could use a similar technique to apprehend Usama Bin Laden is absurd. The snipers were not wealthy; UBL is/was. The snipers didn't have sources of funding from around the world; UBL appears to. The snipers were entirely contained within the United States where our law enforcement assets are located and in control; UBL isn't thought to be in the United States. As far as I've heard, not a single other person was actively sympathetic to the snipers or helping them to hide; UBL of course has many sympathizers - many who will willingly give their lives for his cause and personal protection and who certainly help him hide. The snipers physically committed their own crimes; UBL (to my knowledge) is never at the scene of the act - someone carries them out. The snipers didn't, IMHO, appear to be very smart; UBL appears to be pretty smart. Even with all that, remember that it took quite a while to catch the snipers and that there were some very bad leads that led the public to believe they were shooting from a white truck while - and during this delay, they continued to kill.
From context, I'm assuming that the "soverign nation" to which you refer is Iraq and the "elected head of state" is Saddam Hussein.
Let's look at the election that last confirmed Saddam's status as an "elected head of state" (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2331951.stm ). He was the only candidate and he got 100% of the vote according to Iraqi officials (which appears to be a significant improvement - as in the prior election he had only gotten 99.96% - perhaps the 0.04% that previously voted against him were, shall we say, "unavailable" to vote this time?). Doesn't this seem a little suspicious to you?
It does make me wonder, where did the crowds that were so eager to pull down his statue not that much later come from? Did they really vote unanimously for him? Oh, perhaps they were American soldiers in disguise?
(News flash - KIM Jong Il was reelected leader of North Korea in 2003. Oops, he was the only candidate also. He must be VERY popular if no one even thinks they should run against him).
I think that's the point - it was treated more as a ordinary crime rather than another act in an ongoing war being waged on us. This would be akin to treating the attack on Pearl Harbor as a crime and prosecuting the pilots that flew the planes and calling it a day (yes, I know the analogy is not perfect).
I don't know if, without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the US should have done more about the first WTC bombing, but clearly, in retrospect, our response was not very strong relative to the infrastructure that perpetrated it.
Actually, this might make a lot of sense. For example, if you and a family member 500 miles away both have good upload speeds, you might agree to store each other's backups - but certainly would not entrust your "backup buddy" with the raw data. Even if you trust their integrity, you may not trust the locks on their doors or the like. Also, I wouldn't want a family member to wonder, somewhere deep in the back of their mind, if somehow I let their identity creep out. Therefore, both would want to encrypt the backup before uploading to their "backup buddy".
Indeed, I used to work for a well known company whose brilliant answer to backups of personal PCs was to tell you to "back it up to a colleague's PC" because for many months they didn't have space for more home directories on the corporate servers. Obviously I would encrypt such data before transferring it -- after all, it contained things like personnel performance reviews.
Umm... how could we have a trusted voting process if the list of registered voters is secret? Obviously this is not sufficient for a trusted voting process, but I believe it is necessary. If I look at the list and find that 10 dead guys are voting from a vacant lot, I can bring that up only if I can see the list.
No question there is heat produced to move heat from inside a building to outside a building (this heat being produced due to inefficiencies at the power generation facility, the lines/transformers between the generation facility and the air conditioning units due to line resistance et al, and within the air conditioning units themselves due to friction etc). However, I'm under the impression based (in part) on this thread that it takes as little as 1/4 of a joule to move 1 joule from inside to outside with conventional air conditioning (nearly the inverse with Peltier junctions which, long ago, this thread was about).
If my lame brained assumptions are valid, then perhaps for every erg moved from inside a building by conventional AC, less than an erg may actually be released as "net additional heat".
Of course, I'm so outside my area of expertise and so inside a bottle of Lagavulin that this is probably complete crap.
Just thinking about its possible effect on certain body piercing (well, the jewelry in same) makes my skin crawl.
Won't the building eventually return to the average temperature of the surrounding environment (for example, when the AC is shut down for the weekend or, in extreme cases, when the building power is shut off prior to demolition)? Thus the effect is temporary. The heat originally pumped out of the building/contents will eventually be reabsorbed by it. As has been noted, of course, there is a bunch of heat (and, with our current infrastructure, greenhouse gas) produced in the process of generating power for the compresser (and some wasted heat since the compresser has friction which causes the moter/compressor to convert some of the input energy to heat). But, what do I know... I'm a software guy who was hacking ("hacking" meant something different in the 70's than it does now!) in the computer center instead of going to the classes on this stuff... Feel free to correct me!
IANAL, but I believe the correct answer is "Yes" (she didn't ask how fast you thought you were going, she asked if you knew how fast you were going). In court it will be hard to claim that you knew how fast you were going if you told the officer at the scene that you didn't.
If the officer then asks how fast you were going (or how fast you thought you were going), you might try a non-responsive answer of "Why, don't you know?". Obviously she can't say "no" (else, her case in court would be weak unless you were driving like 200mph in a school zone).
If the officer insists on an answer (which is unlikely), of course you don't need to give one, but you could try responding "Well, since you think you know how fast I was going, it seems unnecessary for me to provide that information to you."
Of course, somewhere along the line you will have violated one of the rules of being pulled over: Don't be memorable. You'd rather that, by the next doughnut break, the officer has forgotten all about you and that she didn't feel like she needed to take an extra note or two because she thinks you're likely to make her show up in court.
Some people think police always lie about these things, but I recall driving at upwards of 95MPH early (2AM) one morning in VERY light traffic back when the speed limit was 55MPH. As I approached an onramp, I noticed a car with its lights off parked on the shoulder of the onramp. Being no idiot (well maybe), I decided there was a reasonable chance this was an unmarked police car. Even though if it was a police car, s/he HAD to know my approximate speed, I got off the gas, and downshifted (and used the parking brake a bit) and got some speed off. As I passed the onramp, on came the car's headlights and it rapidly accelerated. By the time the car caught up with me, I was an angel going 55MPH. I thought I was toast - I figured the car would follow me for a while (in order to have the timing all work out so the cop could claim in court that s/he had paced me) and pull me over and, if I was alone in the car, nail me for what was really an estimated speed (but claimed to be a paced speed). Instead, even though s/he knew exactly what I had done, after about a quarter mile (during which time I assume s/he paced me at 55MPH) s/he pulled around me and took off. A few minutes later, I passed some poor sap who was not being alert and was getting a ticket! I was pleasantly surprised.
I've talked to a police officer who said he would often let a speeder go if the perp was sufficiently alert to notice him and if the conditions really were not all that dangerous (as in this case, virtually no traffic, good weather, and a controlled access road). He was much more concerned about drivers who were driving much slower but were not alert.
[See post #13038733.]
Certainly the "hands-on-lab" described in the article would be pretty useless at showing a webserver "in action" (unless of course "in action" terminated in a BSOD or kernel panic!). I couldn't quite figure out from the article what the use of the lab was - except it did say it was to allow users to play with a range of "desktop" software - and most casual users of a desktop don't (knowenly) run a web server that they care to know anything about.
When I went to Magic Mountain many (many!) years ago, the rides were just a bit more thrilling just because the place didn't seem very well maintained. I particularly recall a ride where the operator pulled back with significant force on a couple levers about three feet long to brake the cars into the loading/unloading area. One of these levers had broken and been (sloppily) brazed back on at the bottom (and they hadn't even bothered to paint over the repair). I suspected that even if the operator did nothing, the car should have slowed down enough before the end of the track. However, I also suspected that the "failsafe" mechanism (and every other part of the ride) had probably been maintained by Mr. Brazing - which made the whole thing a bit more interesting.
Lawyers, insurance companies, engineers, lawmakers, public inspectors, and zero-tolerance drug policies in the workplace have made amusement park rides a bit less thrilling than they once were :)
I thought the absurdity of condemning Linux based on experiences with the CDs of a distro from 1995 (still in a drawer somewhere - and not used since 1995) was an obvious critique of the poster's thought process - but I forgot this was /. where nuance is often missed.
My experience with Linux is horrible compared to Windows XP. Linux is hard to install, has a horrible UI, and has little information and help available for it. XP, on the other hand, is easy to install, has a decent GUI, and good help files. To add insult to injury, when I reinstall Linux, I'm actually getting occasional read errors on my Linux CDs -- but I guess I shouldn't fault Linux for that since these damned CDs are now ten years old.