I can't really speak for the quality (or lack of) of the Charter schools, since none of our kids ever attended one.
But what I've definitely witnessed first-hand is a situation where the area public schools achieve very high ratings (according to the "GreatSchools" scoring system and so forth), partially by squeezing out the kids who don't "fit the mold". These days, more and more kids come into the public schools with IEPs, which is IMO a good thing. But the public schools see these and think "Warning: Extra expense! Warning: Confrontational parents!"
The first thing many of them do at "IEP meetings" is work on convincing you, as a parent, that many of the items on the plan no longer need to be on there, or that the school is "able to accommodate the request in another manner". (EG. You specify your kid should be able to bring his/her laptop to class every day to do assignments. The school retorts that it's a "security risk to the school's network" so it can't allow that, but "We have plenty of computers of our own your kid can use." Clearly, that's not the same thing. The school computer can't come home at the end of the day and only has the applications on it the school chose to install.)
A minority of parents opt to fight, spending thousands of dollars on "child advocates" and lawyers, until they get what they're after in the public school system. Many more just resign themselves to doing things the way the school administration prefers. When that become intolerable (kid starts failing or practically refuses to go to school anymore because it's so bad) -- a private school is often considered, and the public school "won", in the sense it eliminated one more kid who was screwing up its stellar statistics.
I guess my point is, not all "good public schools" are really so good beneath the surface. I'm almost to the point where I'd look at public schools with a GreatSchools ranking of 9 or 10 and be suspicious. The schools with a 6 or 7 may truly be the better schools since they care about students' learning more than maximizing standardized test scores and graduation rates at all costs.
It's really not an "either / or" situation, where EITHER the public accepts the GPS based data collection by auto-makers, OR they lose any way to benefit from more rapid/reliable emergency response in case of accidents! This is much more of a case where the auto makers desperately want to collect that valuable data and they need some kind of "selling point" to make people accept it. What could be more convincing that promising it might save your life, or the life of a loved one?
In reality though, there are plenty of ways to implement improved emergency response in case of car accidents that have NOTHING to do with sending your driving history to a car maker for collection and long-term storage! Heck, a system could be designed so whenever the airbag is deployed, a transponder begins sending out location data and some type of distress signal. This could be tied in with emergency 911 systems. Effective and delivers the needed information directly to the parties you want it to go to, with NO data leakage to commercial entities the rest of the time.
I think OBDII was a big advancement in vehicle technology, really. I have no problem with the idea of making engine computers intelligent enough so they can pinpoint which component of the whole system has a fault. I'm sure the ability to borrow a code reader from the local auto parts store and fish out the trouble codes has saved many, many people hundreds or even thousands of dollars in repair bills where unnecessary parts were swapped out before something was fixed properly. But sure, any further revisions to that standard should focus solely on improving the level of ability to report these problems -- not on broadcasting data externally to 3rd. parties.
I'm as much a believer as anyone that government has way too much control and power in our daily lives. But most people's vehicles are owned by the lenders, since they haven't yet fulfilled the terms of their loans. If you actually have a vehicle that's paid for, free and clear? The face you hold a "certificate of title" is really just some paperwork that satisfies the requirements the State has created for receiving permission to operate it on govt. owned "public roads".
The bottom line, though, is the vehicle really is owned by YOU and not the State. The state you reside in would have no more authority to reclaim it from you than it would any other piece of personal property. (And these days, that's not necessarily saying much, thanks to such legal concepts as "eminent domain", acceptance of the idea that police can seize objects as "evidence" and hold it practically indefinitely without actually charging a person with a related crime, etc.) But still, the matter of getting valid license plates to legally *operate* the vehicle on public roads is completely independent of ownership of the vehicle itself.
Worse yet, until around the beginning of 2012 (and likely only because of enough media outrage, including Glenn Beck complaining about it for years), OnStar was still collecting data from cars that were equipped with the system but weren't subscribers!
In order to use any of the current breed of crypto-coins, I think you have to trust quite a few "random people on the Internet" anyway?
For starters, you have to put some trust in whoever developed the coin you're using -- because let's face it. The entire thing is just a piece of software that someone wrote. Did the developer pre-mine a bunch of coins that he/she is hoarding up secretly, waiting for everyone else to "establish" the coin as a viable currency, only to dump all of it in the future and crash the market -- walking away with the loot? Is there some sort of "back door" designed into a particular crypto-coin so the developer has a way to "cheat" and obtain coins more quickly than everyone else, bypassing the usual rules for mining one?
You have to put a lot of trust in the people running the currency exchanges. These places typically want you to transfer (sometimes relatively large) sums of crypto into wallets maintained on their servers, just so you can conduct a trade with that money. THEN, you have to further trust that they'll properly handle any withdrawal requests you make.
To a lesser extent, anyone in ANY mining pool has to put trust in the pool operator. While sure, most competent pools provide all sorts of statistics so you can see how your returns are being calculated and what they estimate your "hash rate" is? It's not out of the realm of possibility that one of these places could "skim off the top" by shorting you just a tiny little bit of hash rate that you wouldn't even notice. Multiplied by all of the miners using the pool, though, it amounts to a lot of CPU time the owner could be redirecting towards coins mined into his own personal wallet someplace?
If you want to talk about trusting government instead? Now you're talking about a very small group of elite, powerful individuals who call all the shots for a given currency. There's no "moving mining to another pool" if you don't trust the first one here.
So yeah, it really is a "choose your poison" situation -- but IMO, my own government has proven itself shady, not at all trustworthy, and relatively inept at accomplishing stated goals in a timely manner and under budget. By contrast, the people running the mining pools and exchanges I've used are still more of an "unknown" - but ones who so far, appear to have treated me fairly. So I know which one I'd rather place trust in right now.
I think the only effective preventative measures are the automated ones. Unfortunately, so many of these work relatively poorly, blocking intended software updates or changes. Ultimately though, I think improvement of the automatic process blockers/killers is the best place to put effort -- not redesigning warning dialogs for people to click through or "approve/deny".
Most users, in my experience, don't even know what's safe to approve or deny when they're prompted. With so much software doing automatic updates, they're used to things wanting to install even if they haven't intentionally installed or changed ANY of the software they use in years. So malware prompting to install, to them, is likely just "another one of those darn Adobe or Microsoft or Java apps" doing its thing. So they'll approve it when asked.
You're absolutely correct, except for the "strength in numbers" part of the equation. If you're one man with a gun trying to fight the massive Federal government? Yeah, it'll pretty much do you no good. If, however, there's civil unrest because government clamped down a little too much on individual rights and freedoms? Now you're looking at a possible scenario where a good chunk of the government's own military is liable to defect and side with the average citizens. That plus a well armed general citizenry means a real possibility of overthrowing the unjust government, or at least pushing back to the point where certain states could institute different sets of laws and break off from said government.
Unfortunately, the mass media won't really acknowledge your primary point, because it's still not considered acceptable to label our government a "police state". Doing so gets you categorized as a fringe element, which impacts advertising dollars negatively as well as potential readership/subscriptions/viewers.
Nonetheless, it's increasingly difficult, IMO, not to come to that conclusion. In fact, I believe it's those OUTSIDE the U.S. borders who may best understand it. Just the other day, here on Slashdot, an American born individual who now resides in Canada talked about his fear of crossing the border to visit the U.S. anymore, despite having an interest in seeing friends and places here in the USA. I don't blame him! I remember as a teenager attending a computer convention in Chicago where a number of Canadians were in attendance. Back then, crossing the border was really no big deal. You didn't need a passport to do it, and customs consisted of a guy stopping your car for a minute and asking if you "Have any items to declare today?" An answer of "no", and you were waved on and told to enjoy the rest of your day.
Yep.... I remember a while back, taking my kid to see the psychologist the school recommended, after a lot of prodding that she needed to see someone about her apparent ADHD. (While not a big fan of all the use of drugs for this, I relented because I'm divorced, with pretty much full custody of my kid. Today's combination of public schools and child services means they can quickly make things get ugly for you if you say no to their repeated suggestions.)
Anyway, the doctor looked over some of the notes the school made and some of her homework assignments, spent a few minutes interviewing her (and me), and pretty quickly wrote up a prescription for a particular ADHD medication. Having done a little research myself first (plus knowing other families with kids on these meds), I asked him why he was prescribing the one he did, vs. an alternative I felt might make more sense to try first. His answer? "Oh, there are a number of options out there, but I just like this one because it's the one I'm most familiar with." (A quick survey of his office revealed several promotional items around from guess which drug company? Yep....)
I mean, come on.... if you're in this field, shouldn't you be "familiar with" pretty much ALL of the drugs for something as common as ADHD?
Global governance is "badly needed"? Please feel free to argue your assertion, but I'm going to challenge it. (I suspect your reasoning is going to be along the line of thought that since we're "all on this planet together", we need to be more aware of our natural resources and conservation of wildlife, and other such things which "can affect the rest of the world, not just our nation"?) I'd say that throughout the entire history of mankind, we've NEVER agreed to one global set of rules, and yet we're still here - not only still existing but thriving. If global governance was so important, the lack of it for so long should have done us in!
People in "any given spot of the world" thinking the people across the border are out to get them won't change, just because you add another layer of governance to everything we've already put in place! What we have is a lot of variety. Different nations run things in different ways and some do better than others. I agree that it might not be "fair" for a baby to be born in into a corrupt dictatorship someplace where quality of life is especially poor. But it's not, IMO, any less fair than demanding people living under more successful systems use their own resources to bolster whatever was lacking in the inferior system.
The whole "base on the moon" thing? It speaks more to me of a larger idea that someday, Earth might not be big enough for all of us to live comfortably. The moon was the object everyone clearly saw when looking up at the night sky, and the first one we succeeded in traveling to. So sure, you'd figure we'd have a lot of fiction referring to moon bases. But truthfully, it's not looking like all that wise of an idea to try to do it right now (if ever?). It might give people more square miles of space to spread out, but with no atmosphere, no bodies of fresh water, and no plants or trees growing there -- it would probably require a whole lot of regular deliveries of supplies from Earth to sustain it. What you want is to colonize a place that's quickly self-sustaining -- and I think we're going to find there are better choices than our moon for that. I don't think it's really about politicians considering it as a project, but saying "Nah... put that back on the shelf because I think we're going to get a better ROI starting a war with somebody!" I think it's about nobody currently having any means to cost justify doing it at ALL.
And as for that whole thing of fairly distributing gains from automation? I think that one's really LONG TERM predicting, vs. something that's just flat out incorrect based on what humans choose to do today. The process of automation is happening pretty gradually, despite all the hype. It has to, because robotics are still expensive and pretty limited in functionality. Yes, we've figured out how to automate things like automobile assembly or producing a fast food item, and we can probably tackle the problem of automating truck deliveries. But so far, you still have a lot of humans working at the auto plants and I imagine you'll still have humans working at restaurants for a LONG time to come. Humans like to interact with other people and especially for things like dining out, it's a social and entertainment experience as much as anything else. If you never get to speak with anyone except maybe some robotic order-taking robot? A lot of people will express the willingness to pay more to go elsewhere, where live interaction is still done.
And yes, if things reach the point where the majority are unable to find employment because everything has been automated? You'll have to go through a massive change in society to resolve it. It's no less revolutionary than a complete change of government. But the dust will eventually settle and knowing you can't really"un-invent" what's been invented? I'd say a prediction that society will morph into one where everyone has lots of free "personal time" is a likely end result. When we reach that stage? There won't really be a point to amassing wealth anymore. Maybe everyone in a country
I know most of us don't give a care that yet another alt-coin is launching (and with a primary feature of a sound-alike name to a rapper).
But to me, this is part of a much larger question. How long will it remain feasible to create new alt-coins, and what does this do to the existing alt-coin economy?
Not more than 6 months ago, I was fairly convinced that Litecoin had an interesting and very viable creation. (You know, the ever popular quotes of it being the "silver to Bitcoin's gold", and the fact it still used (scrypt) protocol so people could mine it with off the shelf, relatively affordable graphics cards?) Actually, it's still doing really well by most measures, with a current worth of something like $23-25 USD per Litecoin. But as more and more alt-coins pop up and scrypt mining trends towards people mining on sites that auto-switch among whichever coin is most profitable to mine at that given hour -- I start losing faith in the whole thing.
I mean, clearly anyone can launch an alt-coin just by essentially copy/pasting the code used to make an earlier one, give it some cute or catchy name, and its off and running. Common sense might tell you there's no point in wasting time trying to amass these silly creations, except with automation bundling laundry lists of altcoins under one roof, so to speak? I'm not sure miners will care WHAT their mining rigs are pointed at, as long as the system they use indicates it has the best combo of ease of mining and exchange rate at that moment in time. Eventually, it seems to me that behavior will just "normalize" all of the altcoin values so if you mine with scrypt, all scrypt generated currencies wind up being worth about the same thing. I guess a few that were clearly scams (developer was shown to have pre-mined a bunch before release with intentions to dump it all at once and walk away with a profit after it crashes) might get de-listed and rejected. But overall, it just seems to me like we're headed to a bad place with these coins -- where you've got Bitcoin out there standing alone as a high value cryptocoin (due largely to the huge financial investment needed to mine it successfully right now). The rest becomes a sea of mediocrity, all worth some piddly amount because as difficulty levels climb too high on one altcoin, people migrate to an easier to mine variant -- generally feeling like they're all "about the same thing anyway", being all scrypt-based and little more than coins you trade out for fiat currency or swap for Bitcoin as the long term plan.
And what of Mastercoin? Sounds to me like this is an attempt to obsolete the whole mess of altcoins by tying new ones onto the back of the existing Bitcoin blockchain? Is that an accurate assessment?
Management may be a human-contrived concept, but that doesn't automatically make it invalid. Man has created all sorts of things that never existed in nature and we're far better for it.
I agree that management becomes more of a necessity when the workers being managed are brought in with lower expectations (and pay). But my experience has been, the places filled with cubicles full of idiots waiting for daily instructions are the places that never valued the rank and file workers to begin with. They just need warm bodies able to perform specific, repetitive tasks for them to meet quotas.
But just planning on getting a capable group of peers together to accomplish things doesn't tend to work well in a structured office environment. Sure, they might identify problems and be able to produce a result without having a manager. But the problem is, they aren't the ones who have any ownership stake in the company. If they come up with a solution that's technically excellent, but simply too costly for the business to use and still make a profit? It's at best a non-workable solution and at worst, an idea that gets implemented anyway and slowly kills the business. There have to be other people in the company watching all of the financials and making final decisions as to the company's direction. A good manager will keep in close touch with all of that and translate it into useful requests and goals for the people under him to use as constraints as they "do what needs to be done".
Agreed. I'm not a developer but work in I.T. on the support and sysadmin side of things, and this is pretty much the case. The best way to avoid the problem of being "almost invisible" (whether you're I.T. staff or an I.T. manager) is regular communications. The fact that our I.T. manager has a weekly video conference meeting with all of us for an hour or more, once a week, really helps remind everyone what's going on beyond our day to day challenges and keeps everyone working as more of a unit. (Despite that, I think all of us would admit that at times, the meetings feel like an annoyance or a "waste of time" if they interrupt other tasks we're in the middle of trying to get done. But that's the trap you have to avoid getting too caught up in. The value of setting this block of time aside to communicate with each other pays dividends in the long term which can often be much greater than the near-term perceived cost of losing that hour of productive time.)
When it comes to I.T. staff? I think the best communication often takes the form of shooting out a quick email to update everyone on changes or improvements you made. Sure, 90% of the people might not even care that "I.T. upgraded the backup software to version 9 today." or "A failing hard drive was replaced last night in the server." But it only takes them a few seconds to read and delete your email, while it leaves the idea in their head that "Our I.T. people were taking care of problems for us today."
Really? So what have YOU done to further the hope for greater freedom in the United States?
IMO, he's exactly the type of hero our country needs many more of.... People willing to take action when they see government wrong-doing, rather than sit back, collecting a paycheck at the taxpayer's expense, and perpetuating the problem. All the while, convincing themselves they're "just doing their job".
If nothing gets done based on what he revealed, that just speaks to how deep we're all stuck in the pit of Fascism, inside our nation that pays lip service to completely different concepts. The courts should NOT be ruling this stuff is legal, and people should be outraged when they do! Unfortunately, we seem to live in a country where the majority still take an attitude of, "I don't care as long as it doesn't affect me personally right now. I'll happily piss away a basic right or freedom if it punishes people for doing something I'm not personally a fan of."
As far as your claim that all Snowden did was confirm what everyone already knew? I strongly disagree with that! I don't think the vast majority of people knew, for example, that the NSA might redirect your mail orders for brand new computer systems, planting spyware on them before they reached your address. I don't think the vast majority of people knew for sure that the NSA collected as much information about US citizens as we now know it does. (It's one thing to joke in passing about how the government "already knows you sent that email" or "heard what you said in that phone call". But that just speaks to a very vague, general sense that a well funded government agency with spying capabilities could theoretically do such a thing. Having an inside contractor verify they actually do it, AND detailing the extent of it is a whole different level.)
The fact Snowden found it safer to run to a nation known for a lack of personal liberty and huge privacy issues speaks volumes about how far the USA has slipped. If our country was a more sane and just place to live, he would never have felt the need to flee at all! Fact is, he couldn't trust any of the B.S. spouted off by govt. officials, promising to work with him if he just turned himself in. (Heck, a former head of the NSA was recently quoted as essentially saying he'd like to see Snowden's head on a platter.) These people still view him a a traitor who deserves execution, since he didn't go along with the status quo of trampling all over the rights of U.S. citizens in order to build a more powerful organization for themselves.
I'm in my 40's and married, but back when I tried seriously using a few of the dating sites (never was willing to pay for the commercial ones, but gave sites like PoF and OKCupid a shot) -- I ran across a general theme for the individual who'd find the most success there. Basically, the formula seemed to be:
1. Into sports 2. Posted at least one sexy/arousing type photo instead of only head-shots 3. Somewhere in the "under 35" age range 4. Liked to "go out for a few beers/drinks" (but not "drink heavily", of course) 5. Claimed to have some type of job people perceived as "successful" 6. Those under 25 who bragged about "420 friendliness" (marijuana) seemed to do well with others in that age range.
Older people definitely tend to be the "outliers" on these sites -- with relatively few peers using them for dating. Worse yet, I think some of the 50 and 60 somethings use them to troll for much younger dates, sometimes even lying about their age to get the first in-person meetup.
I tried to be pretty honest about exactly what my interests were (and weren't), but found that didn't get me many initial contacts. I think just as in "real life", there's still sort of an expectation that the man is supposed to make the first move. Women will put a profile out there and just let the emails rolls in. Men put one out there and it gets viewed a number of times, but winds up only serving the purpose of getting reviewed closely if he contacts a woman first and she's trying to decide if she wants to write him back or not.
I'll tell you another thing that might be worth doing, if you want a "reality check" about your level of physical attractiveness to the opposite sex. Find a couple of photos of yourself you feel represent you well/accurately and post them on one of those "Hot or Not?" sites. Come back a few weeks later and see what your average rating was. I did this once, and frankly, it was pretty brutal. I wound up ranked about a 3 out of 10 -- despite being a guy I'm somewhat regularly told is "fairly attractive". I tried to analyze it, and discovered a few things -- like much younger women rating me really low, simply because I was "too old for them". But at the end of the day, I think it's important to realize that a lot of people using these dating sites will be clicking through guys' photos and profiles with this same mindset. "Ick... he's wearing an ugly shirt! Next!" "Looks like he could be my dad or something. Ugly! Next!" So without letting it shred your ego, I think it does provide some perspective at least -- when you get mad that "There are 1,000 women on this site right now and not ONE wants to write me back!?!"
It's not that you won't find anyone who wants it. Surely some people will welcome the chance to play with a version of Android running on more powerful desktop class PC hardware.
But the idea this will somehow scare Microsoft? That's the part where I'm lost.... Pretty much 0% of the critical business apps in use all across corporate America have Android versions right now, and I'd say it'll be an awfully small percentage of them that get a full rewrite to offer an Android edition. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious Microsoft won't be porting the stuff they sell like Microsoft Office, Great Plains accounting, SQL Server, etc.
The machines in question aren't even threatening to sell this Android OS in place of Windows either... only in addition to it. So basically, those needing Windows for the applications they already purchased and rely on will keep on doing things as per usual, only users now possibly have to be aware of one small extra step; when powering on the PC, make sure not to select the "Android" boot option.
Well, to be fair, it's pretty hard to do much trading of crypto-coins at all if you're just going to keep them in your private wallet all the time.
That's one of the problems with this whole thing, IMO, and I hope better solutions are developed for it soon. I can't really trade my LTC, for example, until I move it to a wallet sitting on one of the web sites where it can be bought and sold. Being in the USA, my options for that are very limited if I want ways to convert it into US dollars. I've used www.litetree.com since it seems to be one of my only viable options, and as far as I can tell -- it's operated by a guy who is trying to do everything above-board and by the books.
Even so, the last time there was a big spike in LTC value and I wanted to sell a number of my coins? His site was down, reporting SQL server errors and unable to do anything once I logged in. By the time he had it back up the next morning, I had lost my opportunity to sell at the price I was after. There wasn't anything I could do either, since the LTC had been transferred into a wallet on his site earlier that day.
Maybe I haven't thought everything through well enough, but I'm not quite sure I understand why we couldn't just *require* all transactions to be pushed or pulled from each person's private wallets -- with all exchange sites simply acting as middle-men issuing the various transaction requests? Couldn't you use something akin to PGP with a public/private key pair involved, protecting each request happening between two anonymous parties, but skipping the whole step of making someone place funds on a wallet managed by the site so withdrawal or deposit actions happen on those?
If we had truly privatized power companies, I'd expect this behavior. After all, it would only make sense. You invested a bunch of money to build a whole infrastructure for power generation, doing all of your cost calculations based on people relying on it for 100% of their electricity needs. You have no provisions in place to store incoming electricity for future resale to users. What upside would you have if your customers start to generate their own power?
But we don't. We have government regulated monopolies. I'm not trying to argue the merits for or against the arrangement right now, except to say this means to me, they should be required to comply with whatever the government believes is the best way forward. If government is going to issue tax breaks and incentives for installing solar power? Then it's clear it thinks this type of energy generation on an individual basis should be encouraged. So how can it sit by and tolerate the power companies imposing rules that run counter to that goal?
Personally, I think as a homeowner, my ideal solar installation would be one where I don't need to be tied to the grid at all. Tesla is working on battery packs for homes that look a lot like refrigerators, which you'd couple to a solar panel installation to provide power at night or during bad weather conditions when the panels aren't capturing energy. I've heard that currently, they make the cost of the installation a bit prohibitive, but there's a good chance they'll become successful as part of a mainstream installation in the next 3 years or so. From what I've heard, reviewers of the setup said it was possible to run the entire home for as long as 48 hours or so on nothing but the battery pack, as long as power was used somewhat sensibly (not just leaving all the lights on in the house for no reason, etc.).
Any attempts to place blame on the employees working 10+ hour days for the carriers and not getting any vacation time is uncalled for. But the problem does lie at the feet of upper management!
As others said, it's not like they should have been taken by surprise that they had a pending problem, if there was a backlog of undelivered packages due to bad weather., just ahead of the holiday rush.
Every online merchant I visited promised "guaranteed delivery before Xmas" if I placed an order by a certain cutoff date (and paid the heavy markup on shipping costs required to upgrade to overnight delivery).
It was irresponsible of the carriers to let everyone believe those commitments would still be met, if they had a backlog in the pipeline.
It might be in the "spirit of the holiday" to say we should just forgive and not get worried about this. But this was a corporation charging you good money based on a promise they literally failed to deliver on. I'm sure some people spent nearly as much as the merchandise itself cost to ensure it arrived someplace before Christmas. They certainly deserve refunds.
I understand your decision to buy a Nexus instead of another iPhone. But your logic doesn't make much sense to me?
People spend far more than just $650 all the time on software packages they "don't really own". They don't receive any source code which would allow them to make any changes to what they purchased, nor are they even given more than a limited set of usage rights (can only install on a single PC, etc.).
At the hardware level, you can change whatever you like inside your Apple device, if you're technically capable of doing it. That's no different than any other piece of consumer electronics gear I know of. It will pretty much always void your warranty, but that's a given.
Apple sells you a device that works within the parameters they've outlined; apps come from their App Store, and only apps they approve are listed there. If that's unacceptable to you, you can either jailbreak the device and use it in that "gray area", or use a competitor's product with a different set of design parameters.
I have to thank "93 Escort Wagon" for those comments, first of all. That's exactly what I keep trying to explain to people who seem to be under the impression that jailbreaking is simply a tool to allow piracy on the device.
Personally, I do a bit of litecoin mining and I find it immensely frustrating that I can't manage my wallet with an iOS device, thanks to Apple imposing a ban on App Store apps related to crypto-coin exchange.
I also like some of those apps they have for Android phones (such as the one AT&T recently advertised) which automatically read your incoming SMS text messages to you when you're in the car. Again though, iOS doesn't have any because Apple decided any code that interfaces directly with the "cellular side" of the phone is off limits. You can use Siri in a limited way to compose an SMS reply or have one read to you, but it's still a manual process. It doesn't automatically detect you're plugged into a car charger and see you're in motion, so probably driving, and automatically go into that mode.
You already mentioned another thing I'd be interested in having on my phone; a packet sniffer for wifi troubleshooting.
Despite all of this? I still prefer iOS to Android or other options. I've used both types of phones at various times and I keep going back to a personal preference for iOS and support for integration of Apple iOS devices with other devices on the market. (My iPhone is a "superset" of an iPod, after all, which means my iPod aware car stereo can queue up custom playlists of songs from it, etc.)
So yes, a jailbreak gives me the best of both worlds, since Apple has motivation to disallow a few things I want to do on my devices.
The problem I've always seen when working in corporate I.T. is "when it rains, it pours", but just as often, there's not a proverbial cloud in the sky.
Management justifies hiring of additional staff by analyzing how much workload there is, above pretty much everything else. This is usually a pretty sensible way to go about things. After all, if you're talking about people working in, say, your warehouse's shipping department? When they complain they need an additional employee out there? Management is going to try to figure out how busy the existing people are. Are they all working as hard as possible for 8 hours straight (minus any legally required breaks), or do you have people sitting on their butt goofing around a lot while they wait for a truck to come in? If the later is going on, then there's probably going to be a meeting held about ways to improve efficiency in lieu of hiring another body.
I think I.T. is odd, in the sense that really, people are there to keep the expensive infrastructure functioning like it's supposed to, and secondarily, to recommend and design improvements to the existing systems. When you're doing a really good job keeping things going, you tend to look the LEAST busy (because truthfully, what you've done is positioned yourself in a mode where you can read, research, experiment and generally learn on the job, to try to accomplish that second part of your job expectations). When you're sitting on a computer surfing the net for hours -- you simply don't appear to be working (or at least, other people don't really understand what you're doing that contributes to the company).
When you do have those fires to put out and you're stressed out and too short-handed to get things back to normal again in a prompt manner, you start asking for additional staff. But management says, "Huh? Just last week, I saw everyone in I.T. just sitting there on their computers, not doing much of anything. How can we justify paying out another salary? Surely these guys could find a better way to use their time!"
They don't really tend to grasp the fact that you need X amount of manpower to cover any "disaster situations" or "need this change now!" situations, regardless of how busy those people seem to be the rest of the time. That's the cost of getting quick results in a crisis.
Where I work now, we're in the middle of one of those battles. We've got offices spread out around the country, and one of them has no I.T. person working there, so their manager constantly complains he gets the "short end of the stick" with support, even though his office pays as much of a percentage towards I.T. expenses as everyone else. When we start tracking our help tickets in detail though, we see his office uses MORE of our time than almost any of the others, so they're getting support. It's just that they realize it's a slightly faster, more efficient quality of support when you can just yell across the hall to an I.T. guy right there to "come look at this" -- vs. putting a ticket and waiting your turn for a return call, followed by having to help doing a lot of over the phone troubleshooting. We know we're overworked in our dept. -- at least whenever a big change is called for like our recent mail server move/upgrade. But management's response to all of this? "If I.T. would define exactly what they do and don't support, and would document/publish this in detail, it could trim back its workload without the need to hire another staffer." (Yeah right.... We can write a laundry list of things we "won't support" anymore, but every single time it gets in the way of something deemed important enough to the company, to clients, or to business profits in general? Exceptions will immediately be made and we'll be right back at square one.)
But honestly, I've done the self-employed I.T. thing too -- and it's no bowl of cherries. Every single thing you do directly affects your potential future earnings. Get a phone call from a client you find annoying and decide, "I *really* don't want to take his call righ
I mean, if you're really the type who spends a lot of time wishing you had kids and have big ideas about all the fun you'll have teaching them new things, watching them grow up, and you look forward to attending all the little league sports games, piano recitals, and school functions -- by all means, have a kid or kids and don't let me discourage you!
But I know I'm in the same camp as "Lumpy" here.... Got married to a woman who insisted she wanted a kid (or kids) badly. Got talked into the whole thing, with a lot of suggesting that I "wouldn't really have to do much of the work anyway, as long as I was going to work full-time and making most of the money". Not long after we had the kid, things disintegrated. She fell into a state of depression, left me (initially took the kid too, but pretty much handed her back to me after a month or two, deciding she couldn't handle it). So after a messy divorce, I was stuck raising my daughter pretty much on my own. Eventually got re-married, but to a woman who already had a couple of kids of her own, so now I've got 3 to worry about.
Honestly, it's one of those things where I take the responsibility very seriously, and feel a sense of "duty" to make sure the kids grow up as successful as possible. But if there was some kind of time machine or way to wind the clock back and do it all over again? I would have certainly made different choices.
I have a buddy who is adamant about the idea that every man should strive to accomplish things that leave something behind that outlasts them. (In fact, he got into woodworking after having a long career in I.T., because he got disgusted with the throw-away nature of all the work put into I.T. related projects. Today's hot new software is discarded tomorrow, and even entire programming languages become obsolete by declaration of a big name company like Microsoft, almost on a whim. He felt that with woodworking, it was possible to build physical pieces of furniture that would last hundreds of years and be used and enjoyed by generations long after his death.) Of course, this also means he sees great value in becoming a parent. I get that, but I also don't feel that need to create people OR things that outlive me? Once you're dead, you won't know the difference anyway, right? Often, I feel like the time (and money) needed for parenting is time/money I could have been doing something more personally rewarding -- especially with kids who are generally ungrateful for what they're given or have.
I think you definitely want to have good, true friends... Nobody wants to wind up alone, or have nobody else to care for or about. But having kids isn't always the best avenue for that. It actually runs counter to the ability to make and keep good friends, IMO, because your time and resources are stretched so thin taking care of the family that comes first.
As someone else commented earlier on here, you should *always* really be working for yourself, not anyone else. You may be employed by someone else to carry out a specific set of tasks for them -- but what's wrong with those crossing over into the larger set of things you take a personal interest in and want to do on your own time anyway?
I don't think I've ever gone as far as to try to duplicate a complete computer/network environment I used in the workplace? But certainly I've set up machines with software I would never have bothered to install if I didn't use the same or comparable stuff at work.
It's been my experience that my former co-workers who made it clear they "don't like to take their work home with them" were the ones who were less effective at thinking outside the box to get problems solved at work. You know.... the types who lean heavily on support and maintenance agreements for various products and don't really try anything if they're not instructed, step by step, by the person on the other end of the phone? Or the types who strongly dislike and fight changes in the environment, if they involve them learning a new workflow?
I'm not saying you should spend your free time giving your employer free hours of your labor. But I'm saying if you're in the right career, you should actually find some of this stuff interesting enough that you LIKE and WANT to play around with it at home, occasionally. It helps you land the next new job as much as it helps with whatever you might be currently employed for.
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I can't really speak for the quality (or lack of) of the Charter schools, since none of our kids ever attended one.
But what I've definitely witnessed first-hand is a situation where the area public schools achieve very high ratings (according to the "GreatSchools" scoring system and so forth), partially by squeezing out the kids who don't "fit the mold". These days, more and more kids come into the public schools with IEPs, which is IMO a good thing. But the public schools see these and think "Warning: Extra expense! Warning: Confrontational parents!"
The first thing many of them do at "IEP meetings" is work on convincing you, as a parent, that many of the items on the plan no longer need to be on there, or that the school is "able to accommodate the request in another manner". (EG. You specify your kid should be able to bring his/her laptop to class every day to do assignments. The school retorts that it's a "security risk to the school's network" so it can't allow that, but "We have plenty of computers of our own your kid can use." Clearly, that's not the same thing. The school computer can't come home at the end of the day and only has the applications on it the school chose to install.)
A minority of parents opt to fight, spending thousands of dollars on "child advocates" and lawyers, until they get what they're after in the public school system. Many more just resign themselves to doing things the way the school administration prefers. When that become intolerable (kid starts failing or practically refuses to go to school anymore because it's so bad) -- a private school is often considered, and the public school "won", in the sense it eliminated one more kid who was screwing up its stellar statistics.
I guess my point is, not all "good public schools" are really so good beneath the surface. I'm almost to the point where I'd look at public schools with a GreatSchools ranking of 9 or 10 and be suspicious. The schools with a 6 or 7 may truly be the better schools since they care about students' learning more than maximizing standardized test scores and graduation rates at all costs.
Agreed.
It's really not an "either / or" situation, where EITHER the public accepts the GPS based data collection by auto-makers, OR they lose any way to benefit from more rapid/reliable emergency response in case of accidents! This is much more of a case where the auto makers desperately want to collect that valuable data and they need some kind of "selling point" to make people accept it. What could be more convincing that promising it might save your life, or the life of a loved one?
In reality though, there are plenty of ways to implement improved emergency response in case of car accidents that have NOTHING to do with sending your driving history to a car maker for collection and long-term storage! Heck, a system could be designed so whenever the airbag is deployed, a transponder begins sending out location data and some type of distress signal. This could be tied in with emergency 911 systems. Effective and delivers the needed information directly to the parties you want it to go to, with NO data leakage to commercial entities the rest of the time.
I think OBDII was a big advancement in vehicle technology, really. I have no problem with the idea of making engine computers intelligent enough so they can pinpoint which component of the whole system has a fault. I'm sure the ability to borrow a code reader from the local auto parts store and fish out the trouble codes has saved many, many people hundreds or even thousands of dollars in repair bills where unnecessary parts were swapped out before something was fixed properly. But sure, any further revisions to that standard should focus solely on improving the level of ability to report these problems -- not on broadcasting data externally to 3rd. parties.
I'm as much a believer as anyone that government has way too much control and power in our daily lives. But most people's vehicles are owned by the lenders, since they haven't yet fulfilled the terms of their loans. If you actually have a vehicle that's paid for, free and clear? The face you hold a "certificate of title" is really just some paperwork that satisfies the requirements the State has created for receiving permission to operate it on govt. owned "public roads".
The bottom line, though, is the vehicle really is owned by YOU and not the State. The state you reside in would have no more authority to reclaim it from you than it would any other piece of personal property. (And these days, that's not necessarily saying much, thanks to such legal concepts as "eminent domain", acceptance of the idea that police can seize objects as "evidence" and hold it practically indefinitely without actually charging a person with a related crime, etc.) But still, the matter of getting valid license plates to legally *operate* the vehicle on public roads is completely independent of ownership of the vehicle itself.
Worse yet, until around the beginning of 2012 (and likely only because of enough media outrage, including Glenn Beck complaining about it for years), OnStar was still collecting data from cars that were equipped with the system but weren't subscribers!
In order to use any of the current breed of crypto-coins, I think you have to trust quite a few "random people on the Internet" anyway?
For starters, you have to put some trust in whoever developed the coin you're using -- because let's face it. The entire thing is just a piece of software that someone wrote. Did the developer pre-mine a bunch of coins that he/she is hoarding up secretly, waiting for everyone else to "establish" the coin as a viable currency, only to dump all of it in the future and crash the market -- walking away with the loot? Is there some sort of "back door" designed into a particular crypto-coin so the developer has a way to "cheat" and obtain coins more quickly than everyone else, bypassing the usual rules for mining one?
You have to put a lot of trust in the people running the currency exchanges. These places typically want you to transfer (sometimes relatively large) sums of crypto into wallets maintained on their servers, just so you can conduct a trade with that money. THEN, you have to further trust that they'll properly handle any withdrawal requests you make.
To a lesser extent, anyone in ANY mining pool has to put trust in the pool operator. While sure, most competent pools provide all sorts of statistics so you can see how your returns are being calculated and what they estimate your "hash rate" is? It's not out of the realm of possibility that one of these places could "skim off the top" by shorting you just a tiny little bit of hash rate that you wouldn't even notice. Multiplied by all of the miners using the pool, though, it amounts to a lot of CPU time the owner could be redirecting towards coins mined into his own personal wallet someplace?
If you want to talk about trusting government instead? Now you're talking about a very small group of elite, powerful individuals who call all the shots for a given currency. There's no "moving mining to another pool" if you don't trust the first one here.
So yeah, it really is a "choose your poison" situation -- but IMO, my own government has proven itself shady, not at all trustworthy, and relatively inept at accomplishing stated goals in a timely manner and under budget. By contrast, the people running the mining pools and exchanges I've used are still more of an "unknown" - but ones who so far, appear to have treated me fairly. So I know which one I'd rather place trust in right now.
I think the only effective preventative measures are the automated ones. Unfortunately, so many of these work relatively poorly, blocking intended software updates or changes. Ultimately though, I think improvement of the automatic process blockers/killers is the best place to put effort -- not redesigning warning dialogs for people to click through or "approve/deny".
Most users, in my experience, don't even know what's safe to approve or deny when they're prompted. With so much software doing automatic updates, they're used to things wanting to install even if they haven't intentionally installed or changed ANY of the software they use in years. So malware prompting to install, to them, is likely just "another one of those darn Adobe or Microsoft or Java apps" doing its thing. So they'll approve it when asked.
You're absolutely correct, except for the "strength in numbers" part of the equation. If you're one man with a gun trying to fight the massive Federal government? Yeah, it'll pretty much do you no good. If, however, there's civil unrest because government clamped down a little too much on individual rights and freedoms? Now you're looking at a possible scenario where a good chunk of the government's own military is liable to defect and side with the average citizens. That plus a well armed general citizenry means a real possibility of overthrowing the unjust government, or at least pushing back to the point where certain states could institute different sets of laws and break off from said government.
Unfortunately, the mass media won't really acknowledge your primary point, because it's still not considered acceptable to label our government a "police state". Doing so gets you categorized as a fringe element, which impacts advertising dollars negatively as well as potential readership/subscriptions/viewers.
Nonetheless, it's increasingly difficult, IMO, not to come to that conclusion. In fact, I believe it's those OUTSIDE the U.S. borders who may best understand it. Just the other day, here on Slashdot, an American born individual who now resides in Canada talked about his fear of crossing the border to visit the U.S. anymore, despite having an interest in seeing friends and places here in the USA. I don't blame him! I remember as a teenager attending a computer convention in Chicago where a number of Canadians were in attendance. Back then, crossing the border was really no big deal. You didn't need a passport to do it, and customs consisted of a guy stopping your car for a minute and asking if you "Have any items to declare today?" An answer of "no", and you were waved on and told to enjoy the rest of your day.
Yep.... I remember a while back, taking my kid to see the psychologist the school recommended, after a lot of prodding that she needed to see someone about her apparent ADHD. (While not a big fan of all the use of drugs for this, I relented because I'm divorced, with pretty much full custody of my kid. Today's combination of public schools and child services means they can quickly make things get ugly for you if you say no to their repeated suggestions.)
Anyway, the doctor looked over some of the notes the school made and some of her homework assignments, spent a few minutes interviewing her (and me), and pretty quickly wrote up a prescription for a particular ADHD medication. Having done a little research myself first (plus knowing other families with kids on these meds), I asked him why he was prescribing the one he did, vs. an alternative I felt might make more sense to try first. His answer? "Oh, there are a number of options out there, but I just like this one because it's the one I'm most familiar with." (A quick survey of his office revealed several promotional items around from guess which drug company? Yep....)
I mean, come on.... if you're in this field, shouldn't you be "familiar with" pretty much ALL of the drugs for something as common as ADHD?
Global governance is "badly needed"? Please feel free to argue your assertion, but I'm going to challenge it. (I suspect your reasoning is going to be along the line of thought that since we're "all on this planet together", we need to be more aware of our natural resources and conservation of wildlife, and other such things which "can affect the rest of the world, not just our nation"?) I'd say that throughout the entire history of mankind, we've NEVER agreed to one global set of rules, and yet we're still here - not only still existing but thriving. If global governance was so important, the lack of it for so long should have done us in!
People in "any given spot of the world" thinking the people across the border are out to get them won't change, just because you add another layer of governance to everything we've already put in place! What we have is a lot of variety. Different nations run things in different ways and some do better than others. I agree that it might not be "fair" for a baby to be born in into a corrupt dictatorship someplace where quality of life is especially poor. But it's not, IMO, any less fair than demanding people living under more successful systems use their own resources to bolster whatever was lacking in the inferior system.
The whole "base on the moon" thing? It speaks more to me of a larger idea that someday, Earth might not be big enough for all of us to live comfortably. The moon was the object everyone clearly saw when looking up at the night sky, and the first one we succeeded in traveling to. So sure, you'd figure we'd have a lot of fiction referring to moon bases. But truthfully, it's not looking like all that wise of an idea to try to do it right now (if ever?). It might give people more square miles of space to spread out, but with no atmosphere, no bodies of fresh water, and no plants or trees growing there -- it would probably require a whole lot of regular deliveries of supplies from Earth to sustain it. What you want is to colonize a place that's quickly self-sustaining -- and I think we're going to find there are better choices than our moon for that. I don't think it's really about politicians considering it as a project, but saying "Nah... put that back on the shelf because I think we're going to get a better ROI starting a war with somebody!" I think it's about nobody currently having any means to cost justify doing it at ALL.
And as for that whole thing of fairly distributing gains from automation? I think that one's really LONG TERM predicting, vs. something that's just flat out incorrect based on what humans choose to do today. The process of automation is happening pretty gradually, despite all the hype. It has to, because robotics are still expensive and pretty limited in functionality. Yes, we've figured out how to automate things like automobile assembly or producing a fast food item, and we can probably tackle the problem of automating truck deliveries. But so far, you still have a lot of humans working at the auto plants and I imagine you'll still have humans working at restaurants for a LONG time to come. Humans like to interact with other people and especially for things like dining out, it's a social and entertainment experience as much as anything else. If you never get to speak with anyone except maybe some robotic order-taking robot? A lot of people will express the willingness to pay more to go elsewhere, where live interaction is still done.
And yes, if things reach the point where the majority are unable to find employment because everything has been automated? You'll have to go through a massive change in society to resolve it. It's no less revolutionary than a complete change of government. But the dust will eventually settle and knowing you can't really"un-invent" what's been invented? I'd say a prediction that society will morph into one where everyone has lots of free "personal time" is a likely end result. When we reach that stage? There won't really be a point to amassing wealth anymore. Maybe everyone in a country
I know most of us don't give a care that yet another alt-coin is launching (and with a primary feature of a sound-alike name to a rapper).
But to me, this is part of a much larger question. How long will it remain feasible to create new alt-coins, and what does this do to the existing alt-coin economy?
Not more than 6 months ago, I was fairly convinced that Litecoin had an interesting and very viable creation. (You know, the ever popular quotes of it being the "silver to Bitcoin's gold", and the fact it still used (scrypt) protocol so people could mine it with off the shelf, relatively affordable graphics cards?) Actually, it's still doing really well by most measures, with a current worth of something like $23-25 USD per Litecoin. But as more and more alt-coins pop up and scrypt mining trends towards people mining on sites that auto-switch among whichever coin is most profitable to mine at that given hour -- I start losing faith in the whole thing.
I mean, clearly anyone can launch an alt-coin just by essentially copy/pasting the code used to make an earlier one, give it some cute or catchy name, and its off and running. Common sense might tell you there's no point in wasting time trying to amass these silly creations, except with automation bundling laundry lists of altcoins under one roof, so to speak? I'm not sure miners will care WHAT their mining rigs are pointed at, as long as the system they use indicates it has the best combo of ease of mining and exchange rate at that moment in time. Eventually, it seems to me that behavior will just "normalize" all of the altcoin values so if you mine with scrypt, all scrypt generated currencies wind up being worth about the same thing. I guess a few that were clearly scams (developer was shown to have pre-mined a bunch before release with intentions to dump it all at once and walk away with a profit after it crashes) might get de-listed and rejected. But overall, it just seems to me like we're headed to a bad place with these coins -- where you've got Bitcoin out there standing alone as a high value cryptocoin (due largely to the huge financial investment needed to mine it successfully right now). The rest becomes a sea of mediocrity, all worth some piddly amount because as difficulty levels climb too high on one altcoin, people migrate to an easier to mine variant -- generally feeling like they're all "about the same thing anyway", being all scrypt-based and little more than coins you trade out for fiat currency or swap for Bitcoin as the long term plan.
And what of Mastercoin? Sounds to me like this is an attempt to obsolete the whole mess of altcoins by tying new ones onto the back of the existing Bitcoin blockchain? Is that an accurate assessment?
Management may be a human-contrived concept, but that doesn't automatically make it invalid. Man has created all sorts of things that never existed in nature and we're far better for it.
I agree that management becomes more of a necessity when the workers being managed are brought in with lower expectations (and pay). But my experience has been, the places filled with cubicles full of idiots waiting for daily instructions are the places that never valued the rank and file workers to begin with. They just need warm bodies able to perform specific, repetitive tasks for them to meet quotas.
But just planning on getting a capable group of peers together to accomplish things doesn't tend to work well in a structured office environment. Sure, they might identify problems and be able to produce a result without having a manager. But the problem is, they aren't the ones who have any ownership stake in the company. If they come up with a solution that's technically excellent, but simply too costly for the business to use and still make a profit? It's at best a non-workable solution and at worst, an idea that gets implemented anyway and slowly kills the business. There have to be other people in the company watching all of the financials and making final decisions as to the company's direction. A good manager will keep in close touch with all of that and translate it into useful requests and goals for the people under him to use as constraints as they "do what needs to be done".
Agreed. I'm not a developer but work in I.T. on the support and sysadmin side of things, and this is pretty much the case. The best way to avoid the problem of being "almost invisible" (whether you're I.T. staff or an I.T. manager) is regular communications. The fact that our I.T. manager has a weekly video conference meeting with all of us for an hour or more, once a week, really helps remind everyone what's going on beyond our day to day challenges and keeps everyone working as more of a unit. (Despite that, I think all of us would admit that at times, the meetings feel like an annoyance or a "waste of time" if they interrupt other tasks we're in the middle of trying to get done. But that's the trap you have to avoid getting too caught up in. The value of setting this block of time aside to communicate with each other pays dividends in the long term which can often be much greater than the near-term perceived cost of losing that hour of productive time.)
When it comes to I.T. staff? I think the best communication often takes the form of shooting out a quick email to update everyone on changes or improvements you made. Sure, 90% of the people might not even care that "I.T. upgraded the backup software to version 9 today." or "A failing hard drive was replaced last night in the server." But it only takes them a few seconds to read and delete your email, while it leaves the idea in their head that "Our I.T. people were taking care of problems for us today."
Really? So what have YOU done to further the hope for greater freedom in the United States?
IMO, he's exactly the type of hero our country needs many more of.... People willing to take action when they see government wrong-doing, rather than sit back, collecting a paycheck at the taxpayer's expense, and perpetuating the problem. All the while, convincing themselves they're "just doing their job".
If nothing gets done based on what he revealed, that just speaks to how deep we're all stuck in the pit of Fascism, inside our nation that pays lip service to completely different concepts. The courts should NOT be ruling this stuff is legal, and people should be outraged when they do! Unfortunately, we seem to live in a country where the majority still take an attitude of, "I don't care as long as it doesn't affect me personally right now. I'll happily piss away a basic right or freedom if it punishes people for doing something I'm not personally a fan of."
As far as your claim that all Snowden did was confirm what everyone already knew? I strongly disagree with that! I don't think the vast majority of people knew, for example, that the NSA might redirect your mail orders for brand new computer systems, planting spyware on them before they reached your address. I don't think the vast majority of people knew for sure that the NSA collected as much information about US citizens as we now know it does. (It's one thing to joke in passing about how the government "already knows you sent that email" or "heard what you said in that phone call". But that just speaks to a very vague, general sense that a well funded government agency with spying capabilities could theoretically do such a thing. Having an inside contractor verify they actually do it, AND detailing the extent of it is a whole different level.)
The fact Snowden found it safer to run to a nation known for a lack of personal liberty and huge privacy issues speaks volumes about how far the USA has slipped. If our country was a more sane and just place to live, he would never have felt the need to flee at all! Fact is, he couldn't trust any of the B.S. spouted off by govt. officials, promising to work with him if he just turned himself in. (Heck, a former head of the NSA was recently quoted as essentially saying he'd like to see Snowden's head on a platter.) These people still view him a a traitor who deserves execution, since he didn't go along with the status quo of trampling all over the rights of U.S. citizens in order to build a more powerful organization for themselves.
I'm in my 40's and married, but back when I tried seriously using a few of the dating sites (never was willing to pay for the commercial ones, but gave sites like PoF and OKCupid a shot) -- I ran across a general theme for the individual who'd find the most success there. Basically, the formula seemed to be:
1. Into sports
2. Posted at least one sexy/arousing type photo instead of only head-shots
3. Somewhere in the "under 35" age range
4. Liked to "go out for a few beers/drinks" (but not "drink heavily", of course)
5. Claimed to have some type of job people perceived as "successful"
6. Those under 25 who bragged about "420 friendliness" (marijuana) seemed to do well with others in that age range.
Older people definitely tend to be the "outliers" on these sites -- with relatively few peers using them for dating. Worse yet, I think some of the 50 and 60 somethings use them to troll for much younger dates, sometimes even lying about their age to get the first in-person meetup.
I tried to be pretty honest about exactly what my interests were (and weren't), but found that didn't get me many initial contacts. I think just as in "real life", there's still sort of an expectation that the man is supposed to make the first move. Women will put a profile out there and just let the emails rolls in. Men put one out there and it gets viewed a number of times, but winds up only serving the purpose of getting reviewed closely if he contacts a woman first and she's trying to decide if she wants to write him back or not.
I'll tell you another thing that might be worth doing, if you want a "reality check" about your level of physical attractiveness to the opposite sex. Find a couple of photos of yourself you feel represent you well/accurately and post them on one of those "Hot or Not?" sites. Come back a few weeks later and see what your average rating was. I did this once, and frankly, it was pretty brutal. I wound up ranked about a 3 out of 10 -- despite being a guy I'm somewhat regularly told is "fairly attractive". I tried to analyze it, and discovered a few things -- like much younger women rating me really low, simply because I was "too old for them". But at the end of the day, I think it's important to realize that a lot of people using these dating sites will be clicking through guys' photos and profiles with this same mindset. "Ick... he's wearing an ugly shirt! Next!" "Looks like he could be my dad or something. Ugly! Next!" So without letting it shred your ego, I think it does provide some perspective at least -- when you get mad that "There are 1,000 women on this site right now and not ONE wants to write me back!?!"
It's not that you won't find anyone who wants it. Surely some people will welcome the chance to play with a version of Android running on more powerful desktop class PC hardware.
But the idea this will somehow scare Microsoft? That's the part where I'm lost.... Pretty much 0% of the critical business apps in use all across corporate America have Android versions right now, and I'd say it'll be an awfully small percentage of them that get a full rewrite to offer an Android edition. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious Microsoft won't be porting the stuff they sell like Microsoft Office, Great Plains accounting, SQL Server, etc.
The machines in question aren't even threatening to sell this Android OS in place of Windows either... only in addition to it. So basically, those needing Windows for the applications they already purchased and rely on will keep on doing things as per usual, only users now possibly have to be aware of one small extra step; when powering on the PC, make sure not to select the "Android" boot option.
Well, to be fair, it's pretty hard to do much trading of crypto-coins at all if you're just going to keep them in your private wallet all the time.
That's one of the problems with this whole thing, IMO, and I hope better solutions are developed for it soon. I can't really trade my LTC, for example, until I move it to a wallet sitting on one of the web sites where it can be bought and sold. Being in the USA, my options for that are very limited if I want ways to convert it into US dollars. I've used www.litetree.com since it seems to be one of my only viable options, and as far as I can tell -- it's operated by a guy who is trying to do everything above-board and by the books.
Even so, the last time there was a big spike in LTC value and I wanted to sell a number of my coins? His site was down, reporting SQL server errors and unable to do anything once I logged in. By the time he had it back up the next morning, I had lost my opportunity to sell at the price I was after. There wasn't anything I could do either, since the LTC had been transferred into a wallet on his site earlier that day.
Maybe I haven't thought everything through well enough, but I'm not quite sure I understand why we couldn't just *require* all transactions to be pushed or pulled from each person's private wallets -- with all exchange sites simply acting as middle-men issuing the various transaction requests? Couldn't you use something akin to PGP with a public/private key pair involved, protecting each request happening between two anonymous parties, but skipping the whole step of making someone place funds on a wallet managed by the site so withdrawal or deposit actions happen on those?
If we had truly privatized power companies, I'd expect this behavior. After all, it would only make sense. You invested a bunch of money to build a whole infrastructure for power generation, doing all of your cost calculations based on people relying on it for 100% of their electricity needs. You have no provisions in place to store incoming electricity for future resale to users. What upside would you have if your customers start to generate their own power?
But we don't. We have government regulated monopolies. I'm not trying to argue the merits for or against the arrangement right now, except to say this means to me, they should be required to comply with whatever the government believes is the best way forward. If government is going to issue tax breaks and incentives for installing solar power? Then it's clear it thinks this type of energy generation on an individual basis should be encouraged. So how can it sit by and tolerate the power companies imposing rules that run counter to that goal?
Personally, I think as a homeowner, my ideal solar installation would be one where I don't need to be tied to the grid at all. Tesla is working on battery packs for homes that look a lot like refrigerators, which you'd couple to a solar panel installation to provide power at night or during bad weather conditions when the panels aren't capturing energy. I've heard that currently, they make the cost of the installation a bit prohibitive, but there's a good chance they'll become successful as part of a mainstream installation in the next 3 years or so. From what I've heard, reviewers of the setup said it was possible to run the entire home for as long as 48 hours or so on nothing but the battery pack, as long as power was used somewhat sensibly (not just leaving all the lights on in the house for no reason, etc.).
Any attempts to place blame on the employees working 10+ hour days for the carriers and not getting any vacation time is uncalled for. But the problem does lie at the feet of upper management!
As others said, it's not like they should have been taken by surprise that they had a pending problem, if there was a backlog of undelivered packages due to bad weather., just ahead of the holiday rush.
Every online merchant I visited promised "guaranteed delivery before Xmas" if I placed an order by a certain cutoff date (and paid the heavy markup on shipping costs required to upgrade to overnight delivery).
It was irresponsible of the carriers to let everyone believe those commitments would still be met, if they had a backlog in the pipeline.
It might be in the "spirit of the holiday" to say we should just forgive and not get worried about this. But this was a corporation charging you good money based on a promise they literally failed to deliver on. I'm sure some people spent nearly as much as the merchandise itself cost to ensure it arrived someplace before Christmas. They certainly deserve refunds.
I understand your decision to buy a Nexus instead of another iPhone. But your logic doesn't make much sense to me?
People spend far more than just $650 all the time on software packages they "don't really own". They don't receive any source code which would allow them to make any changes to what they purchased, nor are they even given more than a limited set of usage rights (can only install on a single PC, etc.).
At the hardware level, you can change whatever you like inside your Apple device, if you're technically capable of doing it. That's no different than any other piece of consumer electronics gear I know of. It will pretty much always void your warranty, but that's a given.
Apple sells you a device that works within the parameters they've outlined; apps come from their App Store, and only apps they approve are listed there. If that's unacceptable to you, you can either jailbreak the device and use it in that "gray area", or use a competitor's product with a different set of design parameters.
How is this Apple's fault though? Skype isn't owned by Apple. Square payment systems don't have ties back to Apple.
If all Apple does is provide an API that can be queried to see if the device is jailbroken, I'd say they're pretty much a neutral party.
People should get angry with the developers who opt to use it to prevent you from using their software, if they have a problem with it.
I have to thank "93 Escort Wagon" for those comments, first of all. That's exactly what I keep trying to explain to people who seem to be under the impression that jailbreaking is simply a tool to allow piracy on the device.
Personally, I do a bit of litecoin mining and I find it immensely frustrating that I can't manage my wallet with an iOS device, thanks to Apple imposing a ban on App Store apps related to crypto-coin exchange.
I also like some of those apps they have for Android phones (such as the one AT&T recently advertised) which automatically read your incoming SMS text messages to you when you're in the car. Again though, iOS doesn't have any because Apple decided any code that interfaces directly with the "cellular side" of the phone is off limits. You can use Siri in a limited way to compose an SMS reply or have one read to you, but it's still a manual process. It doesn't automatically detect you're plugged into a car charger and see you're in motion, so probably driving, and automatically go into that mode.
You already mentioned another thing I'd be interested in having on my phone; a packet sniffer for wifi troubleshooting.
Despite all of this? I still prefer iOS to Android or other options. I've used both types of phones at various times and I keep going back to a personal preference for iOS and support for integration of Apple iOS devices with other devices on the market. (My iPhone is a "superset" of an iPod, after all, which means my iPod aware car stereo can queue up custom playlists of songs from it, etc.)
So yes, a jailbreak gives me the best of both worlds, since Apple has motivation to disallow a few things I want to do on my devices.
The problem I've always seen when working in corporate I.T. is "when it rains, it pours", but just as often, there's not a proverbial cloud in the sky.
Management justifies hiring of additional staff by analyzing how much workload there is, above pretty much everything else. This is usually a pretty sensible way to go about things. After all, if you're talking about people working in, say, your warehouse's shipping department? When they complain they need an additional employee out there? Management is going to try to figure out how busy the existing people are. Are they all working as hard as possible for 8 hours straight (minus any legally required breaks), or do you have people sitting on their butt goofing around a lot while they wait for a truck to come in? If the later is going on, then there's probably going to be a meeting held about ways to improve efficiency in lieu of hiring another body.
I think I.T. is odd, in the sense that really, people are there to keep the expensive infrastructure functioning like it's supposed to, and secondarily, to recommend and design improvements to the existing systems. When you're doing a really good job keeping things going, you tend to look the LEAST busy (because truthfully, what you've done is positioned yourself in a mode where you can read, research, experiment and generally learn on the job, to try to accomplish that second part of your job expectations). When you're sitting on a computer surfing the net for hours -- you simply don't appear to be working (or at least, other people don't really understand what you're doing that contributes to the company).
When you do have those fires to put out and you're stressed out and too short-handed to get things back to normal again in a prompt manner, you start asking for additional staff. But management says, "Huh? Just last week, I saw everyone in I.T. just sitting there on their computers, not doing much of anything. How can we justify paying out another salary? Surely these guys could find a better way to use their time!"
They don't really tend to grasp the fact that you need X amount of manpower to cover any "disaster situations" or "need this change now!" situations, regardless of how busy those people seem to be the rest of the time. That's the cost of getting quick results in a crisis.
Where I work now, we're in the middle of one of those battles. We've got offices spread out around the country, and one of them has no I.T. person working there, so their manager constantly complains he gets the "short end of the stick" with support, even though his office pays as much of a percentage towards I.T. expenses as everyone else. When we start tracking our help tickets in detail though, we see his office uses MORE of our time than almost any of the others, so they're getting support. It's just that they realize it's a slightly faster, more efficient quality of support when you can just yell across the hall to an I.T. guy right there to "come look at this" -- vs. putting a ticket and waiting your turn for a return call, followed by having to help doing a lot of over the phone troubleshooting. We know we're overworked in our dept. -- at least whenever a big change is called for like our recent mail server move/upgrade. But management's response to all of this? "If I.T. would define exactly what they do and don't support, and would document/publish this in detail, it could trim back its workload without the need to hire another staffer." (Yeah right.... We can write a laundry list of things we "won't support" anymore, but every single time it gets in the way of something deemed important enough to the company, to clients, or to business profits in general? Exceptions will immediately be made and we'll be right back at square one.)
But honestly, I've done the self-employed I.T. thing too -- and it's no bowl of cherries. Every single thing you do directly affects your potential future earnings. Get a phone call from a client you find annoying and decide, "I *really* don't want to take his call righ
I mean, if you're really the type who spends a lot of time wishing you had kids and have big ideas about all the fun you'll have teaching them new things, watching them grow up, and you look forward to attending all the little league sports games, piano recitals, and school functions -- by all means, have a kid or kids and don't let me discourage you!
But I know I'm in the same camp as "Lumpy" here.... Got married to a woman who insisted she wanted a kid (or kids) badly. Got talked into the whole thing, with a lot of suggesting that I "wouldn't really have to do much of the work anyway, as long as I was going to work full-time and making most of the money". Not long after we had the kid, things disintegrated. She fell into a state of depression, left me (initially took the kid too, but pretty much handed her back to me after a month or two, deciding she couldn't handle it). So after a messy divorce, I was stuck raising my daughter pretty much on my own. Eventually got re-married, but to a woman who already had a couple of kids of her own, so now I've got 3 to worry about.
Honestly, it's one of those things where I take the responsibility very seriously, and feel a sense of "duty" to make sure the kids grow up as successful as possible. But if there was some kind of time machine or way to wind the clock back and do it all over again? I would have certainly made different choices.
I have a buddy who is adamant about the idea that every man should strive to accomplish things that leave something behind that outlasts them. (In fact, he got into woodworking after having a long career in I.T., because he got disgusted with the throw-away nature of all the work put into I.T. related projects. Today's hot new software is discarded tomorrow, and even entire programming languages become obsolete by declaration of a big name company like Microsoft, almost on a whim. He felt that with woodworking, it was possible to build physical pieces of furniture that would last hundreds of years and be used and enjoyed by generations long after his death.) Of course, this also means he sees great value in becoming a parent. I get that, but I also don't feel that need to create people OR things that outlive me? Once you're dead, you won't know the difference anyway, right? Often, I feel like the time (and money) needed for parenting is time/money I could have been doing something more personally rewarding -- especially with kids who are generally ungrateful for what they're given or have.
I think you definitely want to have good, true friends... Nobody wants to wind up alone, or have nobody else to care for or about. But having kids isn't always the best avenue for that. It actually runs counter to the ability to make and keep good friends, IMO, because your time and resources are stretched so thin taking care of the family that comes first.
As someone else commented earlier on here, you should *always* really be working for yourself, not anyone else. You may be employed by someone else to carry out a specific set of tasks for them -- but what's wrong with those crossing over into the larger set of things you take a personal interest in and want to do on your own time anyway?
I don't think I've ever gone as far as to try to duplicate a complete computer/network environment I used in the workplace? But certainly I've set up machines with software I would never have bothered to install if I didn't use the same or comparable stuff at work.
It's been my experience that my former co-workers who made it clear they "don't like to take their work home with them" were the ones who were less effective at thinking outside the box to get problems solved at work. You know.... the types who lean heavily on support and maintenance agreements for various products and don't really try anything if they're not instructed, step by step, by the person on the other end of the phone? Or the types who strongly dislike and fight changes in the environment, if they involve them learning a new workflow?
I'm not saying you should spend your free time giving your employer free hours of your labor. But I'm saying if you're in the right career, you should actually find some of this stuff interesting enough that you LIKE and WANT to play around with it at home, occasionally. It helps you land the next new job as much as it helps with whatever you might be currently employed for.