Honestly, it's the back edge of the proverbial double-edged sword of promoting "hiring from within". If your company really feels (as most do) that the people already working in a business know more about it than outsiders, the only viable option becomes promoting technical people to management positions.
If the financial motivator (of a nice pay raise for becoming management) wasn't in place, though, a lot of the technical people would refuse to switch roles to management -- because hey, why stop doing something you're comfortable doing and know you're pretty good at?
I'd say that in my entire career doing I.T. - every single person who was promoted to a management role over me (from a role doing pretty much what I did, before that) was pretty poor as a manager. But in the big picture, what would have been better? I mean, if they decided just to skip the whole "promote from within" concept and hired outsiders with management experience, would we have respected them or their opinions? I'm not so sure? Many a company has been ruined by outsiders coming in and trying to do things their way, despite really not having much of a handle on the dynamics of the workplace they were tossed in to manage.
This idea of scrapping the whole hierarchy, as Valve has apparently done, sounds great IF and ONLY IF your business focuses squarely on producing a good or service that doesn't require much diversity. I mean, consider the fact this is not only a firm that focuses on software development, but they're focused on only one genre of software development; games.
I think even with that narrow a focus, a company like Valve surely has a lot of business challenges requiring a different type of employee than the creative software developer. For example, they must have to deal with accounts payable and receivables. I imagine they almost have to treat that work as something they outsource, since those people would have no direct involvement in the creation of the products (and that means no motivation or drive to see those ideas become commercial successes, enjoyed by millions of players).
In many other businesses I can think of, you almost need at least one layer of management, simply because a big part of your core workforce will be people doing tasks that nobody in their right mind would REALLY enjoy doing for any length of time. Their primary motivation is money and the concern that someone above them in rank in the company has the power to yank that money away from them if he/she becomes displeased with the quality of their work.
I disagree... It's pretty clear why there's still fascination with Steve Jobs after his death. Among other things, it's significant that he supposedly left several years worth of new product ideas in the pipeline at Apple before he died. The new releases coming out of Apple today and in the near future are all likely part of a "roadmap" he handed them.
It's also pretty clear that Apple tries to stay true to the formula Steve had for them, vs. changing things too drastically and getting an unknown result.
I think on the "optimal size" of the iPad, Jobs probably did what he so often did; made his decision based on his personal preference. Don't forget, this product came about when he was spending a lot of time in a hospital bed, where he was lying down. That's a perfect use-case for a tablet, and NOT for any of the traditional portable computing devices that were widely available on the market. On the first generation of the product, I'm sure things like battery life would have been compromised with a smaller device too. So all of that played a role in picking the larger size as the best.
We watched the iPads evolve through 4 generations after that before Apple decided to offer the 7.9" version.
Yep.... Back in the day, I ran an OS/2 based bulletin board system. It handled multiple nodes with dial-up modems on one computer far better than anything else available at the time. (There was even a native OS/2 version of one of the "fossil drivers" the DOS guys typically used back then as the comm. driver for their BBS packages.)
OS/2 was always one of those products you had a love/hate relationship with. It always seemed to be a few steps ahead of Windows, on the plus side. Especially when they released OS/2 Warp "Merlin" 4.0, it gained really nice voice recognition capabilities that Windows didn't have at all without buying an expensive 3rd. party application, plus some desktop UI enhancements that were closer to what the Mac offered (colored tabs for organizing folders, etc.). And although I never got real proficient with it, their REXX batch language was far more powerful than anything that came with DOS or Windows.
On the downside though? IBM support really was awful. Every time you called them, it seemed like you were put on hold multiple times and tossed all over the country to various offices, until you got someone who was familiar with what you needed. One hand never seemed to know what the other hand was doing because IBM was so big. And honestly, their file system had some flaws too. Always felt to me like it was generally pretty advanced, but just not quite 100% complete. It was always a little too prone to data corruption if you had a power failure or loss, for example.
When IBM wasn't able to license the 32-bit Windows APIs to retain full Windows compatibility in OS/2 though, that really put the nails in its coffin, IMO. It was a sign of a dying OS when it kept bragging about what was essentially Windows 3.1 compatibility in a Windows '95/NT world.
For example, I used to work for a steel fabrication company, and they had a "web press machine" out on the shop floor. Basically, it was just a big contraption with air compressors powering a punch on a moving arm, over a conveyor belt. Steel beams would roll up to it, and the machine would punch holes in the ends of them where the connector bolts would go when the beams were installed.
The whole system ran an MS-DOS based program on a desktop PC installed in the metal cabinet that served as the "control panel" for the machine. Then, a couple of 16-bit ISA controller boards were installed which interfaced with the machine itself.
The guy who supervised the initial installation and servicing of the web press made good money repairing this obsolete computer hardware, primarily because even a computer-savvy individual at a shop using such a system would probably not have access to older systems with ISA card slots that could run the special controller boards needed for it. Piece of RAM goes bad? Ok... how many people will be able to run out and grab a replacement 72-pin SIMM of the right speed for one? Failed power supply? You have a spare AT type with the power button physically attached to wires coming off of it, as is needed for the external power switch mounted in the metal control panel cabinet? He even designed the cabinet so it held a full size 15" CRT monitor just right so it had its screen up against a slanted piece of plexiglass on the control box. If you didn't have another similar shape/size of CRT to replace it with - you were in for some interesting jury-rigging to get a modern LCD mounted in its place in there!
So many people wrote the old hardware off as trash, it created enough scarcity for people like this with special purpose devices to use the stuff on purpose, so they can command a premium for the repair parts.
This is a great idea, and one that my wife often uses to get rid of things around the house we both decided are no longer needed.
BUT, freecycle can also have a hidden "cost"; your time and energy. On numerous occasions, we had people respond to a freecycle ad offering something, and then they turned into a no-show. That means we were stuck at home waiting for them to arrive, or alternately, hauled items out to the curb or doorstep, only to have to bring them back inside after they sat out all day and night, not getting picked up. That's on top of the initial time/effort required to make the listing for the item(s) in the first place.
It's great when the plan comes together and your junk becomes the next person's much needed item, in a quick and easy transaction. But it's just human nature that it's only going to work like that some of the time.
Personally, I've gotten to where I'd rather attempt to sell most of my items on Craigslist or even eBay, vs. freecycle. At least that way, I'm financially compensated in some manner for the effort required to do the listing -- and will generally come out far ahead of just that.
If there's one thing politicians are EXPERTS at, it's convincing the general public that money must keep flowing in for any and all of the projects they voted for, or else dire consequences will result.
To step back and put these cuts into perspective.... Federal govt. is STILL spending something like $13 TRILLION dollars a year in deficit spending with the full effects of the sequester in place!
The primary reason Obama is motivated to scare up people to put a stop to this and "work out a deal" is because this prevents his healthcare reform plans from taking effect. (And before we get into that whole debate on whether or not his healthcare changes would be a good or a bad thing for the USA? Let me just say that IMO, the REAL problem with them is they attempt to fix only one side of the issue, while ignoring the other side. It's great to try to ensure all Americans have healthcare options available to them. But nobody has really tried, yet, to do anything about the massive (and constantly rising) COSTS of healthcare, which SOMEBODY gets the bill for, whether it's an uninsured individual or the insurance company covering that individual by govt. mandate.
Time magazine (the online version) very recently published a great piece on all of this, breaking down line-by-line, all the costs on 6 or 7 people's hospital bills, and clearly illustrating how inflated and arbitrary those charges are. (By and large, the price Medicare/Medicaid actually compensates a hospital for a given procedure or good is pretty darn close to what a "fair" price would really be, where a small but reasonable profit is made - but no gouging takes place. But so far, Obama's healthcare reform doesn't really do anything to ensure ALL insurance companies are able to pay those bills using those same rate structures. So each of those $29 -rays becomes $300 charges, etc.)
But overall? As little effort has been made to spend our tax dollars more wisely? (Some recently approved study was going to give over $1 million to researchers for a project studying goldfish to see what they could learn about political choices people make based some some aspect of their habits!) I wouldn't mind seeing govt. grinding to a halt for a while.... even if it causes a little inconvenience and pain in the short-run.
Maybe you're just trying to troll with this comment (especially on a site like Slashdot, where it's clear the majority holds an opposing view)?
But I'll respond anyway, because I have no doubt SOME people out there feel this way about privacy.
1. Why would you advocate mandatory tracking of people? This in no way equates to enforcing a right people traditionally had anywhere on the planet. Regardless of your opinion on the legality of having the ABILITY to do such a thing, a demand that it become a REQUIREMENT for everyone amounts to no less than declaring a new basic human, inalienable right that didn't exist before. That's a pretty tall order, don't you think?
2. Right now, I think what we're struggling with is an over-saturation of information. Technology has given us the capability to monitor, track and store so many different things, we're burying ourselves in data! There's a reason some of the most successful companies today are pushing search engines (Microsoft Bing waging an advertising war on Google search, etc.). We're able to collect so much data, it's becoming completely useless without tools to sift through the whole mess, to find what someone actually needs. I don't see much value in demanding we collect MORE data on everyone's whereabouts at every moment in time. I mean, when do we stop pouring data into storage devices just because we CAN do it, and start asking ourselves what's really worth collecting?
3. You make a claim that mankind will increasingly value celebrity over privacy. I'd say that if so, that simply reflects poorly on our collective ability to reason. The desire for celebrity is usually a very short-sighted one. Basically, it amounts to a person chasing after impulses rather than thinking about the long-term ramifications of their decisions. If you ask the "experts" on this subject, meaning actual celebrities who have been in the public eye for decades? I'm pretty sure most of them would tell you how much they despise the paparazzi trying to photograph them at every turn, and the reporters constantly trying to corner them to ask them personal questions. They lost pretty much any privacy they had when they became big celebrities, and it wasn't really a conscious choice so much as an unwanted side-effect for most of them.
See, I don't necessarily agree. Every time I spend much money on something like a vacation trip, I wind up really frustrated and stressed for months after the fact,realizing that all that money is gone with nothing to show for it except some photos.
The best experiences I've had often cost very little (as in a little bit of money for gas to drive there, possibly). The country is full of cool and interesting things to see that don't have admission charges, and I'd also say I've had some of the best times of my life just hanging out with some good friends at one of our houses.
At least when you buy electronics or computer gear you enjoy, you've spent your money on something tangible, that you can make use of again and again, and eventually even resell and get a little bit of your initial investment back.
I sure wouldn't want to avoid owning items I'd enjoy and use, just because of fear that someone might come along and steal them.
Despite being a "city boy" my whole life and swearing I could never deal with life in some small "farm town", I wound up moving to one last year, when I needed to move for a new job offer and the city itself was just too expensive to live in.
Now that I've been here a little while, I can tell you it's absolutely great from a standpoint of more friendly people and a low crime rate. (Our local newspaper often has so little crime to report, the section of the paper devoted to the topic usually winds up talking about historical crimes in the area, going as far back as the early 1900s!)
The high crime rates in the U.S. are very disproportionately happening in the big cities. If you're willing to consider trying life about 45 minutes to an hour outside one of those cities, in a small outlying town, you'll probably see the crime rate drop like a rock.
And as a bonus? If you do your research and actually buy a property in the right outlying small town, you stand a good chance at seeing your home value increase if you hang onto it for 20 years or so. The big cities that having growing populations will inevitably lead to more people moving further and further out, and commuting to/from work rather than competing for the limited number of apartments/homes/condos in the cities themselves.
I agree that society is very interconnected (and we've ALWAYS been interdependent). That's what capitalism is all about, at the core of it. A farmer can't make money growing food if everyone else grows all of their own food, for example. The rest of us who didn't farm were interdependent on the farmers. Pretty much a universal truth, no matter what profession a person is in.
I simply take issue with your statement that all of this means "no one's hard earned money is entirely their own". IMO, money that's earned is a symbol of one's labor. (If you win a million dollars in a lottery? Well then, that's clearly money that isn't signifying your own labor accurately -- but that's one of the few exceptions society purposely constructed. Essentially, it uses money as a game/entertainment, just like casino gambling.)
On the whole though, you're compensated financially in return for labor performed. I know when I work, I'm giving up a certain number of hours of my time to do it, vs. doing anything else I might rather be doing instead. And the money I earn in return for that? Yes, I truly believe that is my own, too.
It's dangerous to follow that logic that simply because we're interdependent people, we're not fully entitled to the fruits of our individual labors.
Honestly, virtual machines made a BIG mess out of Microsoft licensing across pretty much their whole product line. It's likely the reason they went from being the "bad guy" to the "good guy" with their friendliness towards running VMs in a flexible manner on their server products in the last couple years. (Unless they made some drastic changes, their licensing would become pretty much a joke in the world of corporate I.T. with virtual machines.)
It's still really complicated and I'm pretty sure most people don't even really understand all of it, or license their purchased MS products correctly.
For example, do you know when it's economically feasible to purchase Windows Server "Datacenter edition" (despite it's massive cost) vs. "Enterprise edition", or Enterprise vs. "Standard"? In most real-world scenarios today, everyone would be just fine buying copies of "Standard" if they wanted a Windows Server license, EXCEPT for the virtualization rules. (With "Standard", you're allowed to run 1 virtual copy as well as 1 physical installation of the product, but your virtual copy *must* be on the SAME box you installed the physical copy on. So basically, you pay for the rights to install the product on a single machine and it gives you the right to run Microsoft's "Hyper V" virtual machine solution on top of it. When you shell out about 4x the price for an Enterprise edition of the same server product? You're actually granted 4 virtual machine installations, AND they're "stackable". So if you have a big, multi-processor, powerful server and you want to fire up 8 virtual servers on the thing? You can do it by buying 2 of the Windows Enterprise edition licenses, and you'll still have a license left over to install another physical Windows server on some other box (but not with a VM running on top of it).
All fine and good, but as you can probably see -- keeping track of this stuff in a corporate setting quickly gets kind of insane. "How is this server here legally licensed?" "Well.... I have this license I purchased here for this other box, and it gave me a spare license to use on THIS one -- but you can't add X or Y to THIS box now without buying an additional license that lets you do that to it....." And we haven't even STARTED talking about Microsoft's CALs yet ("Client access licenses", which you also have to buy based on how many people are going to CONNECT to a given server!)
Frankly, I think the best bet is to flat out AVOID their products, if you care at all about remaining provably legal on your purchases. The claim that typing one of their products to a specific PC "won't affect most users at all" is dead wrong, IMO. I've seen far more times than I can count where someone called a PC service place for a computer repair, had a new motherboard installed, and now the software considers it a different PC. Only reason this didn't cause rioting in the streets YEARS ago is Microsoft's leniency in letting someone basically break their licensing rules on demand. The license key for Windows/Office/whatever complains it's not properly licensed (since it was an OEM version). Tech knows user won't pay for ANOTHER copy of the product, so he takes advantage of having access to some "not for resale/personal use only" type license keys that came with his "Microsoft Action Pack" subscription or TechNet or what-not and enters one of those. Product works again and customer is none the wiser..... But it ain't legal.
I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's, it was really common for kids to make regular trips on their bicycles or on foot to the nearest 7-11, grocery store or dime/drug store and buy candy as snacks. Most of it was cheap, and it was just sort of "the thing to do" as a kid to spend a little bit of your allowance money or spare change you found.
I don't think I really fit the profile though, because my mom was a registered nurse and really paranoid about controlling what we ate. Unlike most of my peers, I never had snacks between meals and I practically never wanted to spend any of my money on candy. On the other hand, both of my parents were oddly ok with eating dessert after dinner as a ritual every night, so I got my share of "junk food" that way (as long as I ate my other food first, since that was the rule).
I recall getting soda most times when we went out someplace to eat, but that was the exception to the rule. At home, we had 2% or skim milk for lunch or dinner pretty much every time (and orange juice for breakfast).
These days as an adult? I rarely drink milk because frankly, I'm so sick and tired of having had it with meals every frickin' day of my life growing up.... I do drink a lot of soda, although the rest of my family tries harder than me to avoid it. Sometimes I have some apple or grape or cranberry juice with dinner, or sometimes just a glass of water. But yeah,a glass of soda just as often.
It seems like the younger people, today, are far more interested in the energy drinks and sports drinks than the carbonated sodas.... but I question whether that's really any more healthy? There seem to be an awful lot of side effects showing up from the energy drinks, and some of the sports drinks are filled with chemicals that may or may not really be so good to consume in very large quantities.
Meanwhile, the teenagers and 20-somethings I knew who really drank a LOT of soda? They actually weren't, by and large, among the overweight/obese people I knew. I think the truth is, a lot of people realize such things are a "vice" of theirs, so they compensate by trying to eat or behave more healthy in other respects to offset extra "empty calories" of soda.
That defeats one of the most attractive features/purposes of Facebook... the ability to locate (or be located) by old friends and connections you knew from school, previous jobs, etc.
Don't forget, Facebook basically sprung up from the ashes of the old pay sites like Classmates.com. People were eager enough to locate each other using a site like this, they used to pay good money for memberships. Then Facebook came along and said they'd do the same thing at no cost.
If you really don't want people to know anything about you, why would you ever use a site like Facebook in the first place? (The online games are really second-rate fare, so that's not even a very good reason, IMO.)
I'm not denying there are very real, serious privacy implications to using social networking sites... and I'm just as certain there are govt. agencies heavily backing sites like Facebook as info-gathering tools for their own purposes. But I don't have a big problem with using it in a responsible manner. I understand I'm giving up some privacy by posting info on the site, but I'm selectively about what I offer there. Most of it, I don't consider a big deal for others to have. In fact, most content I put there is along the lines of sharing URLs to other pages of information -- so I'm just redirecting some traffic in those cases. Can they analyze that and learn some of my interests? Yup. Do I care? Nope.
Although I guess they're technically doing away with the traditional BES for BB10 devices, they still have some type of server product you have to install that serves a similar function. This is both a key to the power of BB10 and a real roadblock to adoption -- especially if the software is going to cost money!
The BB users don't really see or care much about the server side of things, but corporate I.T. sure does. Traditionally, small businesses were in for a pretty serious expense if they wanted to add BES to the corporate Exchange server. The last small business I worked at went with Android and iPhone but never Blackberry for that reason alone. The cellular plans and user support were enough of a hassle without adding the high licensing cost of the BES product on top of all of it.
On the flip side, I *really* like the dual profile feature of BB10 (which relies on the back end server-side product). Companies can define all the apps they allow for business use on one side, and then users are still free to install whatever apps they like on the "personal" side of the phone. The two are firewalled off from each other, so for example - Facebook on the personal side won't allow pasting of content that was copied from apps on the business side. That could save a lot of people from carrying 2 phones around... and is a pretty elegant solution to a long unaddressed issue.
And on top of all of THAT, there's still the issue that fairly regularly, the vaccines given are found to be defective in one way or another, and people receiving the shots are asked to come back in for a second attempt with the revised vaccine.
I'm actually going to challenge your assertion. I'd argue that the vast majority of the world's starvation problems are distribution-related, not yield related. How much food goes to waste every year? (Quite a bit!) And how many people suffer because of a lack of food production in their immediate area, while other parts of the world produce more than enough to feed them?
"Every increase in crop yields due to the use of GM crops saves the lives of some people that would otherwise die from starvation. It's a direct and obvious relation - there's no need to do a scientific study here."
My point is not to particularly focus in on the parking fees, but more that they form PART of the whole agenda to discourage people from driving their own vehicles.
The fact remains that the government actually makes a profit off of every single person driving a passenger car or truck around in their community, while they take a HUGE loss trying to keep public transportation going.
If the logistical problem they're trying to solve is one of too much traffic for the roads and infrastructure in the area, then they would be better served putting the money into an improved road system and ways for people to park their vehicles less expensively!
When I drive around places like Silver Spring or Rockville, I encounter all sorts of roads which almost seem designed to maximize traffic bottlenecks! You've got such things as 2 lane roads going north-bound with a big median separating them from south-bound 2 lane roads beside them, and many establishments on both sides of said roads. Rather than offering a number of breaks in the median to allow accessing one side from the other, you're forced to drive for miles until the roads both terminate in a connecting loop! Other places have very confusing intersections that are "one way" only between certain times of day or days of the week. That's just the sort of thing that will increase the number of accidents!
And yes, while I never said the metro was a "bad value" for the fare you pay, it stinks of government bureaucracy as badly as most government projects.... Take a look at the fiasco getting it extended out to Dulles Airport, for example! That project has been an utter joke, including such nonsense as spending money MULTIPLE times to "research" if it was better to run it under or above ground near the airport, and then claiming govt. lost the original plans showing where a bunch of reinforced concrete pillars were buried in the ground that they needed to build on top of. So parts of the metro had to be shut down while surveyors ran around trying to re-locate all of them again! And I'm sorry, but it should really be a "no brainer" that if there's one GOOD place for the metro line to run, it would be to the largest airport in the D.C. area!
IMO, this is all to be expected, and hints at the true, underlying problem. The entire concept of anti-virus software developed under false pretenses.
If you read Wired magazine's lengthy story on John McAfee, for example, you learn that the guy was little more than a scammer, ever since his college years. He started out giving away "free" magazine subscriptions that he lied and told people they won, and then convinced them to pay him a "shipping and handling" charge to receive them.
He only got the idea to form his anti-virus company after reading a few news stories about the successful spreading of the first virus programs (which were really developed as an experiment to see how far they'd replicate -- not to do any damage to systems). He thought it was really scary stuff (which he claims is largely because he was beat as a child by his dad, and the idea of a computer virus suddenly attacking a machine for no known/good reason was similar in his mind).
His company only become really financially successful after he fear-mongered to the media at every turn, trumping up relatively small virus infections as "liable to wipe out entire corporations!" and so forth. (Remember, in the beginning, McAfee actually gave his product away for free - knowing home users would start recommending and/or installing the product where they worked too, and the real money was in getting companies to pay for licensing.) Obviously, others saw the flow of money and wanted a piece of that action, so they, too, started anti-virus or "computer security" companies with similar strategies.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there really are people in the computer security or anti-virus business with good intentions. Some people out there really DO think they've "built a better mousetrap" and aren't just trying to sell a bill of goods for easy money. But at best, this stuff is a rapidly moving target. In fact, the traditional virus is hardly even a problem anymore, since most malicious software writers have moved on to malware as more effective for their purposes. (Why try to make complicated code that secretly attaches to valid files and replicates itself at every turn when you can just trick a clueless user into voluntarily downloading and running your destructive application instead?)
Over the years, I've watched companies spend huge money on dedicated appliances that purported to be "advanced firewalls" and "intrusion prevention systems" and the like -- only to become pretty much obsolete when a new "security" company popped up and offered up a replacement solution that was more clever and relevant to the latest variations of threats. Meanwhile, how much money was REALLY saved by having any of this? That's the beauty of the scam, of course... there's no way to quantify it. You can make up all sorts of pretend statistics!
I grew up in the midwest, where we really didn't have much of a "mass transit system". Sure, we had a bus system, but it was primarily used by people too poor to own their own car, or people unable to get/keep a driver's license (for anything from medical reasons to alcohol problems). Basically, the bus was NOT a pleasant experience to ride.
I was always being told how great the mass transit was in other cities, and how much I'd like it if I didn't actually have to use a car to get around.
Well, I relocated to the D.C. area for a new job, not that long ago, and so far I'm not at all convinced. The fact is, it's really frickin' expensive to get around up here, and most of that really seems to be artificially manufactured by the government. For example, if I go to areas such as Bethesda, MD or the part of Rockville, MD near Bethesda where the red line metro runs and has multiple stations, the taxes placed on gas make it a good 50 cents per gallon or more higher than in the northern part of Rockville, or out in Germantown or Quince Orchard. Worse yet? Everyplace you go in areas near the metro, you're hit up for expensive parking for your vehicle too! If you work in downtown Bethesda, for example, you're stuck parking in one of the municipal parking garages, or possibly in one owned by one of the office buildings you work in. You can count on that costing you a good $140 per month or more. Need to drop a package off at a FedEx location around there, perhaps? Good luck finding street parking without feeding a meter first. Heck -- say you just want to drive your car to the nearest metro station with parking and take the metro in to work from there? Even that will set you back $5 per day, before paying for the metro fare itself -- and many stations have no or very limited parking, so you might drive to a station only to not get a space!
All of this helps create the argument that you should use and love the govt. provided mass transit, because it costs SO much to use your own car instead.
Well -- I tried to do things their way, and IMO, it's severely limiting. Essentially, you give up a considerable amount of your freedom in the interest of avoiding some of the govt. mandated penalties for using your car. On a shopping trip, for example? Good luck carrying anything back that won't fit in a couple of bags. You'll have to lug it on the metro train with you. And say a friend texts you during the work day and asks if you want to meet up at a restaurant after work? Without your car, you may just have to pass on that if it's not one of the places strategically close enough to you or a metro stop so you can get there!
To their credit, the metro trains DO run on a pretty regular and efficient schedule... but they sure do have a nasty problem with the escalators to/from the below ground stations breaking down. Again, not fun if you're carrying heavy stuff around with you.
The whole thing, to me, stinks of a forced attempt to get people to conform to an environmentally "green" agenda more than anything else. I live far enough west of the metro D.C. area so even their buses to the closest metro stop only come here a few times in the early AM and again, a few times around the dinner hour after work gets out. If I have to work late, no bus for me! And oh yeah, they don't even come out here at all on weekends.
no publisher key = no signed non-Microsoft binary = no Linux = NO SALE!
Honestly, I have no real interest in the Microsoft Surface anyway. I played with one at the store for a little while, and walked away thinking, "Pretty looking, but ultimately adds no value for me." Obviously though, others feel differently.
Still, if you're someone actually interested in a Surface but NOT to run Windows on it? The fact Microsoft has it this locked down should tell you to move along and not vote for this product with your wallet. It's great to see people enabling hardware to do new things it wasn't intended to do originally.... but where do we draw the line?
You make a great point here. There are other sites around which were more focused on being the de-facto "go to" site for product reviews, but IMO, many wound up cheapening their value in an attempt to keep earning enough revenue to survive.
Great example is epinions.com. A long time ago, I joined the site and became a reviewer. Basically, I could log in, do a search for the exact make/model of practically anything I'd purchased recently, and write up a full review on it. Then, I'd earn royalty checks every month as the review was read by others X number of times.
Over time though, I saw the quality of the site drop in several respects. More and more often, I'd try to locate a product to review, only to find it would either pull up in the search but not be eligible to review at the time, or it would simply not come up at all. (I can only assume this is because the site started becoming more selective about reviews they'd accept, because they weren't getting compensated for providing the review content for some products.) Then, I started seeing copies of their site's reviews reposted in other places. This may or may not be their fault (potentially they were just a victim of "site scrapers" stealing their content to repost as their own). But it happened often enough, I'm sure many people searching for product reviews of a specific item on Google were winding up reading the epinions content in other places and never realizing it came from their site initially.
Amazon has the combination of a huge number of product buyers and a great search engine to locate specific products. That makes them a very functional product review site - even if that's only of secondary importance to them. Without resorting to a paid subscription to something like Consumer Reports, where a whole team of people do extensive testing of products to provide "professional reviews" in all cases, I don't see how it's possible to compete with Amazon in this area anymore?
I doubt I'll *ever* make use of this project myself, but I'm inspired by the tale of how it went from "left for dead" to a full-on revival, based on something as unexpected as a rather unrelated 3rd. party software project (Atari emulator that happened to allow the m68k developers to work on their code from any laptop computer they happened to be using), as well as a single motivated individual bent on making his shell run on all known variants of Debian.
1. Aspergers is merely the very mildest form of autism on the spectrum. MANY people are diagnosed with it, and clinically, all it really means is that they have some difficulties interpreting non-verbal forms of communications (not likely to get the fact that someone just told a joke if the only clue given is a wink or a nod, for example), and they're likely to become fixated on specific topics or items of interest more than most people would. There's a whole list of other possible symptoms Aspergers people may or may not have, such as a heightened sensory response (tags on the back of clothing items annoying them and the like), too. But it's crazy to think this would flag a person as "potentially dangerous".
2. If you're a family who shoots guns, why wouldn't you want to teach all the family members what it's about? We've got so many people today who live in urban or suburban settings, who never learn the first thing about gun safety.... They often wind up being the ones who finally get ahold of somebody's gun at a party while everyone's been drinking, mis-handle it, and accidentally shoot themselves or others. Better to be familiar with a gun and how it's PROPERLY handled and used, IMO.
3. As others said, the guy was 20 years old... No longer a minor and only a year or less away from being considered an "adult" in society. We really don't know that the guns weren't properly secured anyway? He very well might have bypassed the security.
As soon as you start asking that, you really have to also estimate how many lives were SAVED by gun-owners stopping violent crimes, for starters. (In the U.S., that's not an insignificant number.)
You also have to ask if the Chinese government would have so much ability to trample on their citizen's individual rights if the masses were armed. That's really the main reason the U.S. Constitution includes the right to keep and bear arms, in the first place. I don't think folks like Jefferson and Franklin were so concerned that people might miss out on the chance to compete in target shooting in the Olympics, or that they'd have to go back to bow-hunting. It was clearly a way to ensure the people were in a "power position" if they had to negotiate with an authoritarian government.
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Yes! This!
Honestly, it's the back edge of the proverbial double-edged sword of promoting "hiring from within". If your company really feels (as most do) that the people already working in a business know more about it than outsiders, the only viable option becomes promoting technical people to management positions.
If the financial motivator (of a nice pay raise for becoming management) wasn't in place, though, a lot of the technical people would refuse to switch roles to management -- because hey, why stop doing something you're comfortable doing and know you're pretty good at?
I'd say that in my entire career doing I.T. - every single person who was promoted to a management role over me (from a role doing pretty much what I did, before that) was pretty poor as a manager. But in the big picture, what would have been better? I mean, if they decided just to skip the whole "promote from within" concept and hired outsiders with management experience, would we have respected them or their opinions? I'm not so sure? Many a company has been ruined by outsiders coming in and trying to do things their way, despite really not having much of a handle on the dynamics of the workplace they were tossed in to manage.
This idea of scrapping the whole hierarchy, as Valve has apparently done, sounds great IF and ONLY IF your business focuses squarely on producing a good or service that doesn't require much diversity. I mean, consider the fact this is not only a firm that focuses on software development, but they're focused on only one genre of software development; games.
I think even with that narrow a focus, a company like Valve surely has a lot of business challenges requiring a different type of employee than the creative software developer. For example, they must have to deal with accounts payable and receivables. I imagine they almost have to treat that work as something they outsource, since those people would have no direct involvement in the creation of the products (and that means no motivation or drive to see those ideas become commercial successes, enjoyed by millions of players).
In many other businesses I can think of, you almost need at least one layer of management, simply because a big part of your core workforce will be people doing tasks that nobody in their right mind would REALLY enjoy doing for any length of time. Their primary motivation is money and the concern that someone above them in rank in the company has the power to yank that money away from them if he/she becomes displeased with the quality of their work.
I disagree... It's pretty clear why there's still fascination with Steve Jobs after his death. Among other things, it's significant that he supposedly left several years worth of new product ideas in the pipeline at Apple before he died. The new releases coming out of Apple today and in the near future are all likely part of a "roadmap" he handed them.
It's also pretty clear that Apple tries to stay true to the formula Steve had for them, vs. changing things too drastically and getting an unknown result.
I think on the "optimal size" of the iPad, Jobs probably did what he so often did; made his decision based on his personal preference. Don't forget, this product came about when he was spending a lot of time in a hospital bed, where he was lying down. That's a perfect use-case for a tablet, and NOT for any of the traditional portable computing devices that were widely available on the market. On the first generation of the product, I'm sure things like battery life would have been compromised with a smaller device too. So all of that played a role in picking the larger size as the best.
We watched the iPads evolve through 4 generations after that before Apple decided to offer the 7.9" version.
Yep.... Back in the day, I ran an OS/2 based bulletin board system. It handled multiple nodes with dial-up modems on one computer far better than anything else available at the time. (There was even a native OS/2 version of one of the "fossil drivers" the DOS guys typically used back then as the comm. driver for their BBS packages.)
OS/2 was always one of those products you had a love/hate relationship with. It always seemed to be a few steps ahead of Windows, on the plus side. Especially when they released OS/2 Warp "Merlin" 4.0, it gained really nice voice recognition capabilities that Windows didn't have at all without buying an expensive 3rd. party application, plus some desktop UI enhancements that were closer to what the Mac offered (colored tabs for organizing folders, etc.). And although I never got real proficient with it, their REXX batch language was far more powerful than anything that came with DOS or Windows.
On the downside though? IBM support really was awful. Every time you called them, it seemed like you were put on hold multiple times and tossed all over the country to various offices, until you got someone who was familiar with what you needed. One hand never seemed to know what the other hand was doing because IBM was so big. And honestly, their file system had some flaws too. Always felt to me like it was generally pretty advanced, but just not quite 100% complete. It was always a little too prone to data corruption if you had a power failure or loss, for example.
When IBM wasn't able to license the 32-bit Windows APIs to retain full Windows compatibility in OS/2 though, that really put the nails in its coffin, IMO. It was a sign of a dying OS when it kept bragging about what was essentially Windows 3.1 compatibility in a Windows '95/NT world.
For example, I used to work for a steel fabrication company, and they had a "web press machine" out on the shop floor. Basically, it was just a big contraption with air compressors powering a punch on a moving arm, over a conveyor belt. Steel beams would roll up to it, and the machine would punch holes in the ends of them where the connector bolts would go when the beams were installed.
The whole system ran an MS-DOS based program on a desktop PC installed in the metal cabinet that served as the "control panel" for the machine. Then, a couple of 16-bit ISA controller boards were installed which interfaced with the machine itself.
The guy who supervised the initial installation and servicing of the web press made good money repairing this obsolete computer hardware, primarily because even a computer-savvy individual at a shop using such a system would probably not have access to older systems with ISA card slots that could run the special controller boards needed for it. Piece of RAM goes bad? Ok ... how many people will be able to run out and grab a replacement 72-pin SIMM of the right speed for one? Failed power supply? You have a spare AT type with the power button physically attached to wires coming off of it, as is needed for the external power switch mounted in the metal control panel cabinet? He even designed the cabinet so it held a full size 15" CRT monitor just right so it had its screen up against a slanted piece of plexiglass on the control box. If you didn't have another similar shape/size of CRT to replace it with - you were in for some interesting jury-rigging to get a modern LCD mounted in its place in there!
So many people wrote the old hardware off as trash, it created enough scarcity for people like this with special purpose devices to use the stuff on purpose, so they can command a premium for the repair parts.
This is a great idea, and one that my wife often uses to get rid of things around the house we both decided are no longer needed.
BUT, freecycle can also have a hidden "cost"; your time and energy. On numerous occasions, we had people respond to a freecycle ad offering something, and then they turned into a no-show. That means we were stuck at home waiting for them to arrive, or alternately, hauled items out to the curb or doorstep, only to have to bring them back inside after they sat out all day and night, not getting picked up. That's on top of the initial time/effort required to make the listing for the item(s) in the first place.
It's great when the plan comes together and your junk becomes the next person's much needed item, in a quick and easy transaction. But it's just human nature that it's only going to work like that some of the time.
Personally, I've gotten to where I'd rather attempt to sell most of my items on Craigslist or even eBay, vs. freecycle. At least that way, I'm financially compensated in some manner for the effort required to do the listing -- and will generally come out far ahead of just that.
If there's one thing politicians are EXPERTS at, it's convincing the general public that money must keep flowing in for any and all of the projects they voted for, or else dire consequences will result.
To step back and put these cuts into perspective.... Federal govt. is STILL spending something like $13 TRILLION dollars a year in deficit spending with the full effects of the sequester in place!
The primary reason Obama is motivated to scare up people to put a stop to this and "work out a deal" is because this prevents his healthcare reform plans from taking effect. (And before we get into that whole debate on whether or not his healthcare changes would be a good or a bad thing for the USA? Let me just say that IMO, the REAL problem with them is they attempt to fix only one side of the issue, while ignoring the other side. It's great to try to ensure all Americans have healthcare options available to them. But nobody has really tried, yet, to do anything about the massive (and constantly rising) COSTS of healthcare, which SOMEBODY gets the bill for, whether it's an uninsured individual or the insurance company covering that individual by govt. mandate.
Time magazine (the online version) very recently published a great piece on all of this, breaking down line-by-line, all the costs on 6 or 7 people's hospital bills, and clearly illustrating how inflated and arbitrary those charges are. (By and large, the price Medicare/Medicaid actually compensates a hospital for a given procedure or good is pretty darn close to what a "fair" price would really be, where a small but reasonable profit is made - but no gouging takes place. But so far, Obama's healthcare reform doesn't really do anything to ensure ALL insurance companies are able to pay those bills using those same rate structures. So each of those $29 -rays becomes $300 charges, etc.)
But overall? As little effort has been made to spend our tax dollars more wisely? (Some recently approved study was going to give over $1 million to researchers for a project studying goldfish to see what they could learn about political choices people make based some some aspect of their habits!) I wouldn't mind seeing govt. grinding to a halt for a while .... even if it causes a little inconvenience and pain in the short-run.
Maybe you're just trying to troll with this comment (especially on a site like Slashdot, where it's clear the majority holds an opposing view)?
But I'll respond anyway, because I have no doubt SOME people out there feel this way about privacy.
1. Why would you advocate mandatory tracking of people? This in no way equates to enforcing a right people traditionally had anywhere on the planet. Regardless of your opinion on the legality of having the ABILITY to do such a thing, a demand that it become a REQUIREMENT for everyone amounts to no less than declaring a new basic human, inalienable right that didn't exist before. That's a pretty tall order, don't you think?
2. Right now, I think what we're struggling with is an over-saturation of information. Technology has given us the capability to monitor, track and store so many different things, we're burying ourselves in data! There's a reason some of the most successful companies today are pushing search engines (Microsoft Bing waging an advertising war on Google search, etc.). We're able to collect so much data, it's becoming completely useless without tools to sift through the whole mess, to find what someone actually needs. I don't see much value in demanding we collect MORE data on everyone's whereabouts at every moment in time. I mean, when do we stop pouring data into storage devices just because we CAN do it, and start asking ourselves what's really worth collecting?
3. You make a claim that mankind will increasingly value celebrity over privacy. I'd say that if so, that simply reflects poorly on our collective ability to reason. The desire for celebrity is usually a very short-sighted one. Basically, it amounts to a person chasing after impulses rather than thinking about the long-term ramifications of their decisions. If you ask the "experts" on this subject, meaning actual celebrities who have been in the public eye for decades? I'm pretty sure most of them would tell you how much they despise the paparazzi trying to photograph them at every turn, and the reporters constantly trying to corner them to ask them personal questions. They lost pretty much any privacy they had when they became big celebrities, and it wasn't really a conscious choice so much as an unwanted side-effect for most of them.
See, I don't necessarily agree. Every time I spend much money on something like a vacation trip, I wind up really frustrated and stressed for months after the fact,realizing that all that money is gone with nothing to show for it except some photos.
The best experiences I've had often cost very little (as in a little bit of money for gas to drive there, possibly). The country is full of cool and interesting things to see that don't have admission charges, and I'd also say I've had some of the best times of my life just hanging out with some good friends at one of our houses.
At least when you buy electronics or computer gear you enjoy, you've spent your money on something tangible, that you can make use of again and again, and eventually even resell and get a little bit of your initial investment back.
I sure wouldn't want to avoid owning items I'd enjoy and use, just because of fear that someone might come along and steal them.
Despite being a "city boy" my whole life and swearing I could never deal with life in some small "farm town", I wound up moving to one last year, when I needed to move for a new job offer and the city itself was just too expensive to live in.
Now that I've been here a little while, I can tell you it's absolutely great from a standpoint of more friendly people and a low crime rate. (Our local newspaper often has so little crime to report, the section of the paper devoted to the topic usually winds up talking about historical crimes in the area, going as far back as the early 1900s!)
The high crime rates in the U.S. are very disproportionately happening in the big cities. If you're willing to consider trying life about 45 minutes to an hour outside one of those cities, in a small outlying town, you'll probably see the crime rate drop like a rock.
And as a bonus? If you do your research and actually buy a property in the right outlying small town, you stand a good chance at seeing your home value increase if you hang onto it for 20 years or so. The big cities that having growing populations will inevitably lead to more people moving further and further out, and commuting to/from work rather than competing for the limited number of apartments/homes/condos in the cities themselves.
I agree that society is very interconnected (and we've ALWAYS been interdependent). That's what capitalism is all about, at the core of it. A farmer can't make money growing food if everyone else grows all of their own food, for example. The rest of us who didn't farm were interdependent on the farmers. Pretty much a universal truth, no matter what profession a person is in.
I simply take issue with your statement that all of this means "no one's hard earned money is entirely their own". IMO, money that's earned is a symbol of one's labor. (If you win a million dollars in a lottery? Well then, that's clearly money that isn't signifying your own labor accurately -- but that's one of the few exceptions society purposely constructed. Essentially, it uses money as a game/entertainment, just like casino gambling.)
On the whole though, you're compensated financially in return for labor performed. I know when I work, I'm giving up a certain number of hours of my time to do it, vs. doing anything else I might rather be doing instead. And the money I earn in return for that? Yes, I truly believe that is my own, too.
It's dangerous to follow that logic that simply because we're interdependent people, we're not fully entitled to the fruits of our individual labors.
Honestly, virtual machines made a BIG mess out of Microsoft licensing across pretty much their whole product line. It's likely the reason they went from being the "bad guy" to the "good guy" with their friendliness towards running VMs in a flexible manner on their server products in the last couple years. (Unless they made some drastic changes, their licensing would become pretty much a joke in the world of corporate I.T. with virtual machines.)
It's still really complicated and I'm pretty sure most people don't even really understand all of it, or license their purchased MS products correctly.
For example, do you know when it's economically feasible to purchase Windows Server "Datacenter edition" (despite it's massive cost) vs. "Enterprise edition", or Enterprise vs. "Standard"? In most real-world scenarios today, everyone would be just fine buying copies of "Standard" if they wanted a Windows Server license, EXCEPT for the virtualization rules. (With "Standard", you're allowed to run 1 virtual copy as well as 1 physical installation of the product, but your virtual copy *must* be on the SAME box you installed the physical copy on. So basically, you pay for the rights to install the product on a single machine and it gives you the right to run Microsoft's "Hyper V" virtual machine solution on top of it. When you shell out about 4x the price for an Enterprise edition of the same server product? You're actually granted 4 virtual machine installations, AND they're "stackable". So if you have a big, multi-processor, powerful server and you want to fire up 8 virtual servers on the thing? You can do it by buying 2 of the Windows Enterprise edition licenses, and you'll still have a license left over to install another physical Windows server on some other box (but not with a VM running on top of it).
All fine and good, but as you can probably see -- keeping track of this stuff in a corporate setting quickly gets kind of insane. "How is this server here legally licensed?" "Well.... I have this license I purchased here for this other box, and it gave me a spare license to use on THIS one -- but you can't add X or Y to THIS box now without buying an additional license that lets you do that to it....." And we haven't even STARTED talking about Microsoft's CALs yet ("Client access licenses", which you also have to buy based on how many people are going to CONNECT to a given server!)
Frankly, I think the best bet is to flat out AVOID their products, if you care at all about remaining provably legal on your purchases. The claim that typing one of their products to a specific PC "won't affect most users at all" is dead wrong, IMO. I've seen far more times than I can count where someone called a PC service place for a computer repair, had a new motherboard installed, and now the software considers it a different PC. Only reason this didn't cause rioting in the streets YEARS ago is Microsoft's leniency in letting someone basically break their licensing rules on demand. The license key for Windows/Office/whatever complains it's not properly licensed (since it was an OEM version). Tech knows user won't pay for ANOTHER copy of the product, so he takes advantage of having access to some "not for resale/personal use only" type license keys that came with his "Microsoft Action Pack" subscription or TechNet or what-not and enters one of those. Product works again and customer is none the wiser..... But it ain't legal.
I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's, it was really common for kids to make regular trips on their bicycles or on foot to the nearest 7-11, grocery store or dime/drug store and buy candy as snacks. Most of it was cheap, and it was just sort of "the thing to do" as a kid to spend a little bit of your allowance money or spare change you found.
I don't think I really fit the profile though, because my mom was a registered nurse and really paranoid about controlling what we ate. Unlike most of my peers, I never had snacks between meals and I practically never wanted to spend any of my money on candy. On the other hand, both of my parents were oddly ok with eating dessert after dinner as a ritual every night, so I got my share of "junk food" that way (as long as I ate my other food first, since that was the rule).
I recall getting soda most times when we went out someplace to eat, but that was the exception to the rule. At home, we had 2% or skim milk for lunch or dinner pretty much every time (and orange juice for breakfast).
These days as an adult? I rarely drink milk because frankly, I'm so sick and tired of having had it with meals every frickin' day of my life growing up.... I do drink a lot of soda, although the rest of my family tries harder than me to avoid it. Sometimes I have some apple or grape or cranberry juice with dinner, or sometimes just a glass of water. But yeah,a glass of soda just as often.
It seems like the younger people, today, are far more interested in the energy drinks and sports drinks than the carbonated sodas .... but I question whether that's really any more healthy? There seem to be an awful lot of side effects showing up from the energy drinks, and some of the sports drinks are filled with chemicals that may or may not really be so good to consume in very large quantities.
Meanwhile, the teenagers and 20-somethings I knew who really drank a LOT of soda? They actually weren't, by and large, among the overweight/obese people I knew. I think the truth is, a lot of people realize such things are a "vice" of theirs, so they compensate by trying to eat or behave more healthy in other respects to offset extra "empty calories" of soda.
That defeats one of the most attractive features/purposes of Facebook ... the ability to locate (or be located) by old friends and connections you knew from school, previous jobs, etc.
Don't forget, Facebook basically sprung up from the ashes of the old pay sites like Classmates.com. People were eager enough to locate each other using a site like this, they used to pay good money for memberships. Then Facebook came along and said they'd do the same thing at no cost.
If you really don't want people to know anything about you, why would you ever use a site like Facebook in the first place? (The online games are really second-rate fare, so that's not even a very good reason, IMO.)
I'm not denying there are very real, serious privacy implications to using social networking sites... and I'm just as certain there are govt. agencies heavily backing sites like Facebook as info-gathering tools for their own purposes. But I don't have a big problem with using it in a responsible manner. I understand I'm giving up some privacy by posting info on the site, but I'm selectively about what I offer there. Most of it, I don't consider a big deal for others to have. In fact, most content I put there is along the lines of sharing URLs to other pages of information -- so I'm just redirecting some traffic in those cases. Can they analyze that and learn some of my interests? Yup. Do I care? Nope.
Although I guess they're technically doing away with the traditional BES for BB10 devices, they still have some type of server product you have to install that serves a similar function. This is both a key to the power of BB10 and a real roadblock to adoption -- especially if the software is going to cost money!
The BB users don't really see or care much about the server side of things, but corporate I.T. sure does. Traditionally, small businesses were in for a pretty serious expense if they wanted to add BES to the corporate Exchange server. The last small business I worked at went with Android and iPhone but never Blackberry for that reason alone. The cellular plans and user support were enough of a hassle without adding the high licensing cost of the BES product on top of all of it.
On the flip side, I *really* like the dual profile feature of BB10 (which relies on the back end server-side product). Companies can define all the apps they allow for business use on one side, and then users are still free to install whatever apps they like on the "personal" side of the phone. The two are firewalled off from each other, so for example - Facebook on the personal side won't allow pasting of content that was copied from apps on the business side. That could save a lot of people from carrying 2 phones around ... and is a pretty elegant solution to a long unaddressed issue.
The flu vaccine is FAR from proven to be effective.
http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howthingswork/a/aa011604a.htm
And on top of all of THAT, there's still the issue that fairly regularly, the vaccines given are found to be defective in one way or another, and people receiving the shots are asked to come back in for a second attempt with the revised vaccine.
I'm actually going to challenge your assertion. I'd argue that the vast majority of the world's starvation problems are distribution-related, not yield related.
How much food goes to waste every year? (Quite a bit!) And how many people suffer because of a lack of food production in their immediate area, while other parts of the world produce more than enough to feed them?
"Every increase in crop yields due to the use of GM crops saves the lives of some people that would otherwise die from starvation. It's a direct and obvious relation - there's no need to do a scientific study here."
It turns out it's exceedingly difficult to kill another person through a computer monitor ....
My point is not to particularly focus in on the parking fees, but more that they form PART of the whole agenda to discourage people from driving their own vehicles.
The fact remains that the government actually makes a profit off of every single person driving a passenger car or truck around in their community, while they take a HUGE loss trying to keep public transportation going.
If the logistical problem they're trying to solve is one of too much traffic for the roads and infrastructure in the area, then they would be better served putting the money into an improved road system and ways for people to park their vehicles less expensively!
When I drive around places like Silver Spring or Rockville, I encounter all sorts of roads which almost seem designed to maximize traffic bottlenecks! You've got such things as 2 lane roads going north-bound with a big median separating them from south-bound 2 lane roads beside them, and many establishments on both sides of said roads. Rather than offering a number of breaks in the median to allow accessing one side from the other, you're forced to drive for miles until the roads both terminate in a connecting loop! Other places have very confusing intersections that are "one way" only between certain times of day or days of the week. That's just the sort of thing that will increase the number of accidents!
And yes, while I never said the metro was a "bad value" for the fare you pay, it stinks of government bureaucracy as badly as most government projects .... Take a look at the fiasco getting it extended out to Dulles Airport, for example! That project has been an utter joke, including such nonsense as spending money MULTIPLE times to "research" if it was better to run it under or above ground near the airport, and then claiming govt. lost the original plans showing where a bunch of reinforced concrete pillars were buried in the ground that they needed to build on top of. So parts of the metro had to be shut down while surveyors ran around trying to re-locate all of them again! And I'm sorry, but it should really be a "no brainer" that if there's one GOOD place for the metro line to run, it would be to the largest airport in the D.C. area!
IMO, this is all to be expected, and hints at the true, underlying problem. The entire concept of anti-virus software developed under false pretenses.
If you read Wired magazine's lengthy story on John McAfee, for example, you learn that the guy was little more than a scammer, ever since his college years. He started out giving away "free" magazine subscriptions that he lied and told people they won, and then convinced them to pay him a "shipping and handling" charge to receive them.
He only got the idea to form his anti-virus company after reading a few news stories about the successful spreading of the first virus programs (which were really developed as an experiment to see how far they'd replicate -- not to do any damage to systems). He thought it was really scary stuff (which he claims is largely because he was beat as a child by his dad, and the idea of a computer virus suddenly attacking a machine for no known/good reason was similar in his mind).
His company only become really financially successful after he fear-mongered to the media at every turn, trumping up relatively small virus infections as "liable to wipe out entire corporations!" and so forth. (Remember, in the beginning, McAfee actually gave his product away for free - knowing home users would start recommending and/or installing the product where they worked too, and the real money was in getting companies to pay for licensing.) Obviously, others saw the flow of money and wanted a piece of that action, so they, too, started anti-virus or "computer security" companies with similar strategies.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there really are people in the computer security or anti-virus business with good intentions. Some people out there really DO think they've "built a better mousetrap" and aren't just trying to sell a bill of goods for easy money. But at best, this stuff is a rapidly moving target. In fact, the traditional virus is hardly even a problem anymore, since most malicious software writers have moved on to malware as more effective for their purposes. (Why try to make complicated code that secretly attaches to valid files and replicates itself at every turn when you can just trick a clueless user into voluntarily downloading and running your destructive application instead?)
Over the years, I've watched companies spend huge money on dedicated appliances that purported to be "advanced firewalls" and "intrusion prevention systems" and the like -- only to become pretty much obsolete when a new "security" company popped up and offered up a replacement solution that was more clever and relevant to the latest variations of threats. Meanwhile, how much money was REALLY saved by having any of this? That's the beauty of the scam, of course... there's no way to quantify it. You can make up all sorts of pretend statistics!
I grew up in the midwest, where we really didn't have much of a "mass transit system". Sure, we had a bus system, but it was primarily used by people too poor to own their own car, or people unable to get/keep a driver's license (for anything from medical reasons to alcohol problems). Basically, the bus was NOT a pleasant experience to ride.
I was always being told how great the mass transit was in other cities, and how much I'd like it if I didn't actually have to use a car to get around.
Well, I relocated to the D.C. area for a new job, not that long ago, and so far I'm not at all convinced. The fact is, it's really frickin' expensive to get around up here, and most of that really seems to be artificially manufactured by the government. For example, if I go to areas such as Bethesda, MD or the part of Rockville, MD near Bethesda where the red line metro runs and has multiple stations, the taxes placed on gas make it a good 50 cents per gallon or more higher than in the northern part of Rockville, or out in Germantown or Quince Orchard. Worse yet? Everyplace you go in areas near the metro, you're hit up for expensive parking for your vehicle too! If you work in downtown Bethesda, for example, you're stuck parking in one of the municipal parking garages, or possibly in one owned by one of the office buildings you work in. You can count on that costing you a good $140 per month or more. Need to drop a package off at a FedEx location around there, perhaps? Good luck finding street parking without feeding a meter first. Heck -- say you just want to drive your car to the nearest metro station with parking and take the metro in to work from there? Even that will set you back $5 per day, before paying for the metro fare itself -- and many stations have no or very limited parking, so you might drive to a station only to not get a space!
All of this helps create the argument that you should use and love the govt. provided mass transit, because it costs SO much to use your own car instead.
Well -- I tried to do things their way, and IMO, it's severely limiting. Essentially, you give up a considerable amount of your freedom in the interest of avoiding some of the govt. mandated penalties for using your car. On a shopping trip, for example? Good luck carrying anything back that won't fit in a couple of bags. You'll have to lug it on the metro train with you. And say a friend texts you during the work day and asks if you want to meet up at a restaurant after work? Without your car, you may just have to pass on that if it's not one of the places strategically close enough to you or a metro stop so you can get there!
To their credit, the metro trains DO run on a pretty regular and efficient schedule ... but they sure do have a nasty problem with the escalators to/from the below ground stations breaking down. Again, not fun if you're carrying heavy stuff around with you.
The whole thing, to me, stinks of a forced attempt to get people to conform to an environmentally "green" agenda more than anything else. I live far enough west of the metro D.C. area so even their buses to the closest metro stop only come here a few times in the early AM and again, a few times around the dinner hour after work gets out. If I have to work late, no bus for me! And oh yeah, they don't even come out here at all on weekends.
no publisher key = no signed non-Microsoft binary = no Linux = NO SALE!
Honestly, I have no real interest in the Microsoft Surface anyway. I played with one at the store for a little while, and walked away thinking, "Pretty looking, but ultimately adds no value for me." Obviously though, others feel differently.
Still, if you're someone actually interested in a Surface but NOT to run Windows on it? The fact Microsoft has it this locked down should tell you to move along and not vote for this product with your wallet. It's great to see people enabling hardware to do new things it wasn't intended to do originally.... but where do we draw the line?
You make a great point here. There are other sites around which were more focused on being the de-facto "go to" site for product reviews, but IMO, many wound up cheapening their value in an attempt to keep earning enough revenue to survive.
Great example is epinions.com. A long time ago, I joined the site and became a reviewer. Basically, I could log in, do a search for the exact make/model of practically anything I'd purchased recently, and write up a full review on it. Then, I'd earn royalty checks every month as the review was read by others X number of times.
Over time though, I saw the quality of the site drop in several respects. More and more often, I'd try to locate a product to review, only to find it would either pull up in the search but not be eligible to review at the time, or it would simply not come up at all. (I can only assume this is because the site started becoming more selective about reviews they'd accept, because they weren't getting compensated for providing the review content for some products.) Then, I started seeing copies of their site's reviews reposted in other places. This may or may not be their fault (potentially they were just a victim of "site scrapers" stealing their content to repost as their own). But it happened often enough, I'm sure many people searching for product reviews of a specific item on Google were winding up reading the epinions content in other places and never realizing it came from their site initially.
Amazon has the combination of a huge number of product buyers and a great search engine to locate specific products. That makes them a very functional product review site - even if that's only of secondary importance to them. Without resorting to a paid subscription to something like Consumer Reports, where a whole team of people do extensive testing of products to provide "professional reviews" in all cases, I don't see how it's possible to compete with Amazon in this area anymore?
I doubt I'll *ever* make use of this project myself, but I'm inspired by the tale of how it went from "left for dead" to a full-on revival, based on something as unexpected as a rather unrelated 3rd. party software project (Atari emulator that happened to allow the m68k developers to work on their code from any laptop computer they happened to be using), as well as a single motivated individual bent on making his shell run on all known variants of Debian.
1. Aspergers is merely the very mildest form of autism on the spectrum. MANY people are diagnosed with it, and clinically, all it really means is that they have some difficulties interpreting non-verbal forms of communications (not likely to get the fact that someone just told a joke if the only clue given is a wink or a nod, for example), and they're likely to become fixated on specific topics or items of interest more than most people would. There's a whole list of other possible symptoms Aspergers people may or may not have, such as a heightened sensory response (tags on the back of clothing items annoying them and the like), too. But it's crazy to think this would flag a person as "potentially dangerous".
2. If you're a family who shoots guns, why wouldn't you want to teach all the family members what it's about? We've got so many people today who live in urban or suburban settings, who never learn the first thing about gun safety.... They often wind up being the ones who finally get ahold of somebody's gun at a party while everyone's been drinking, mis-handle it, and accidentally shoot themselves or others. Better to be familiar with a gun and how it's PROPERLY handled and used, IMO.
3. As others said, the guy was 20 years old ... No longer a minor and only a year or less away from being considered an "adult" in society. We really don't know that the guns weren't properly secured anyway? He very well might have bypassed the security.
As soon as you start asking that, you really have to also estimate how many lives were SAVED by gun-owners stopping violent crimes, for starters. (In the U.S., that's not an insignificant number.)
You also have to ask if the Chinese government would have so much ability to trample on their citizen's individual rights if the masses were armed. That's really the main reason the U.S. Constitution includes the right to keep and bear arms, in the first place. I don't think folks like Jefferson and Franklin were so concerned that people might miss out on the chance to compete in target shooting in the Olympics, or that they'd have to go back to bow-hunting. It was clearly a way to ensure the people were in a "power position" if they had to negotiate with an authoritarian government.