I *just* got back home from a trip to Memphis from St. Louis, and drove through a lot of small towns down I-55 in the process. I stopped at a few along the way, too, for food and gas. (Thanks to apps like "Gas Buddy" for my phone, I quickly learned that it's easy to save at least 10-15 cents per gallon on gas by driving a few miles into town, vs. stopping at any of the gas stations right off the exits.)
I won't argue your assertion that the jails are among the "nicest buildings" in some of these towns. As many people as we imprison in the U.S. today, that would certainly not be a surprise, unfortunately.
I'd say the most immediately noticeable "big/nice structures" in the places I visited were mid-sized businesses. For example, one place I stopped had a couple of big buildings in a row, right off the exit. One was a spark plug manufacturer and the other a plastic molding company.
Interestingly, another trend I noticed in the small farm towns was a tax prep service having a nice, new building (H&R Block, for example). I suppose all the complexities of doing Federal and State taxes when you're involved in farming makes that a lucrative business.
Yes, there were often big Wal-Mart stores to be found too -- but that's been the case for as long as I can remember (especially since that WAS the entire point of Wal-Mart's original business model - to go to all the small towns and outlying areas). What I *also* noticed, though, was a tendency for those big Wal-Mart stores to draw in other retailers, forming a whole shopping center with a shared parking lot. The stand-alone Wal-Mart in the middle of nowhere doesn't seem as prevalent as it once was. There seems to be a synergy effect, where places like restaurants or home improvement stores do well next to a Wal-Mart, for example.
All in all, yeah - you can drive through one of these towns and get "super depressed" by what you see. But it's also easy to forget how few people actually live in many of these places. Only so much industry is sustainable when your total population is only several thousand. You actually get a little bit better picture of how much business is really taking place in some of these towns with a look through their local phone book (although even that is becoming less useful as people turn to the internet more and more). Still, you'll usually see everything from on-site computer services to hair stylists running business out of their homes, even when a drive down the street gives an impression that it's nothing but collapsing structures that once were businesses.
While I agree with much your sentiment, I think it's also true that small businesses that manage to become/stay profitable are often "brass rings" in their own right, for their owners. Sure, they don't make the kind of money the big guys do. But there's a lot of wisdom to the old recommendation to pursue work that you truly enjoy, vs. working "to make money". Most of the time, profits will result as a byproduct. If and when they do, you've found yourself in a great situation, where you're getting paid to do something you actually like doing. You may not get truly rich off of it, but you very well may be living a richer lifestyle in the process, with less stress and more gratification.
The OWS 99% problem is a problem, but I don't think it's quite as much of one as the protestors make it out to be. That's why you have FAR fewer than 99% of the general population out there joining them in protesting. The aspects of their protest I can easily get behind include such topics as the U.S. Federal Reserve cheating all of us out of the "buying power" our currency should otherwise have with fractional reserve banking methods and their insistence on "billing" the government interest on the money it elects to print. The argument that "big businesses are evil because they crush all the small guys who try to get started" is far less accurate, IMO. How many of the protestors actually gave running their own business an honest try? If they haven't, I don't think they're even experienced enough to argue the topic.
That's true, but how often are you really encountering this?
I'm wondering because where I work, I saw a little bit of this when I first took over as network manager, 5 or 6 years ago. Within the first year or two though, it seemed to diminish. These days, software requests tend to take the form of, "Could you possibly recommend a program for me that would do X, Y, and Z?"
I can't really take all the credit for that change... some of it, I'm at a loss to even explain. I think it did help, though, that in some cases, I helped people install 30 day trial versions of software they were interested in. I found that 3 out of 4 times when I did this? They wound up deciding the program wasn't such a great fit for them after all, and no longer wanted it.
I also made sure that our I.T. budget allocated a little bit of money each year for misc. software purchasing. (Basically, it's allocated so each division of our company gets $200 per month or something like that. It's not a lot, but it's perfect for those random situations like a new office assistant who really, really wants a copy of MS Publisher so she can create office schedules or phone directories or what-not, to print out.) It's not going to be a big I.T. crisis when the random person starts using a package that doesn't integrate with everything else.... The trick is, you only buy one or two software licenses for those situations and let them do their thing with it. Eventually, that employee is either going to leave, or decide to change software on their own accord. When that happens, the old (incompatible) documents they created sit out there, unused, until they reach an age where everyone involved can agree they're safe to purge - OR, they just sit there indefinitely. If someone actually decides to use them again, you dig that software license back out and say, "Well, you gotta install this thing to open those files."
Ultimately, no user is an island, but they ARE individuals who may have different preferred workflows to get tasks accomplished in the most efficient ways. I'd rather see a happy employee being productive with an app that's not really on my "preferred" list of company standards than see an unhappy employee being unproductive and frustrated with the standard issued package.
I've worked in I.T. for about 20 years and still do.
The secret to keeping my sanity, though, has been sticking with only smaller businesses where I had more say-so. I think when you look at larger companies, I.T. becomes another big department tasked with implementing the whims of upper management. That puts I.T. workers right in the line of fire when a change is unpopular, yet they're not even able to articulate a good reason for the change to the upset employees challenging them. All they can say is, "Just doing what we were told." which comes across as a cop-out, or at the very least, a reason to express disapproval at them, hoping they'll report it to their superiors who CAN do something about it.
Where I work, I'm the only person doing the I.T. full-time. Sure, we have outside consultants we bring in on a case-by-case basis, since I can't do everything (or at least, do it efficiently) by myself. But all in all, I get to run the environment the way I see fit. That means I have to explain myself to the owners occasionally, and we do hold regular meetings to catch everyone up on the future plans and make sure they don't have reasons to veto them. As long as I keep in mind their budgetary limitations and don't propose changes that aren't cost justifiable though, they usually go with what I suggest.
I can't speak for everyone working there, but overall I get the idea that people are satisfied with the way our I.T. is managed. I'm always amazed when my friends tell me stories of new employees needing wait days just to get their Windows account or email mailbox activated. I've made sure to always get a new hire up and running with their PC and phone on their desk in a matter of 30 minutes or less after they start. We're small enough that when people call with problems, I can usually just go over to their desk in person and get it fixed for them while they wait, too. I think the personal interaction helps a lot, so I.T. isn't viewed as some faceless division of the company that you leave voicemails with when you have issues. I do run an automated web site filter and proxy, but it's configured to only block sites in a few categories we simply can't let people surf while "on the clock" (such as porn or sites known to distribute viruses and spyware). I let them use anything else freely, and tried my best to get management to understand that THEY are the ones empowered to handle problems in that area, not me. (EG. If your employee is constantly on Facebook and not getting work done, you should take note of that as their manager and discipline them accordingly. Blocking Facebook for everybody doesn't fix the problem, because that's a passive "fix" for the problem employee. He/she never gets called to the carpet for their own actions, so he/she winds up wasting company time in some other manner, like Facebook from their own mobile phone.)
Well, actually, let me explain my reasoning, because your idea is perfectly good *if* you're advising someone who really has an intent to get into photography as a serious hobby,
I think the original poster is merely saying that he's someone who finally decided the snapshots he was getting from cellphone cameras and the like weren't satisfactory. He went his whole life without ever owning a single-purpose camera, so it doesn't sound to me like he's expressing an interest in learning all about interchanging lenses and carrying a lot of gear around.
He just wants to take a more presentable photo and is finally ready to spend a few hundred bucks, if necessary, for a dedicated camera to get them. I'd say one of the Canon Powershots would be an excellent fit for him. Going with a cheap SLR, by contrast, just adds complexity and a need for separate lenses which I don't think he's really going to need or want.
Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.
Sure, there are times when it's convenient or even necessary to print something out - but ANY respectable printer attached to your computer can do that. HP has been trying to sell printers with built-in LCD displays that connect directly to the Internet and allow all sorts of interaction with websites without any host system even being attached first. When you get over the initial "cool factor" that your printer can, say, print up your airline flight schedule right from its front panel? You realize this is just a gimmick to encourage you to use as much HP ink as possible. (If you looked the same thing up on your computer, you might simply read it on the screen, or even print only a selected part that didn't use as much paper or ink.)
Honestly, the one thing I'd like to see HP do with their "all in one" line of printers is create more reliable, less bloated drivers for them! If webOS somehow helps them accomplish that task, it would be worth it (but I'm really not thinking that's the goal for it). Just the other day, my boss spent hours on the phone with tech support at HP, all because of their drivers making a confused mess out of things when you own several of their products and move your laptop between them regularly. (He had an older 7600 at his house which became his wife's main printer downstairs. Then he bought a new 8500 Pro model to use upstairs via their wireless network. He bought a second 8500 Pro for his vacation home. Practically every time he travels between his vacation home and regular house, something winds up getting screwed up so the "HP Director" software decides he can only select his 7600 for scanning, or one/both of the 8500's decide to stop taking any print jobs, or ??)
Yes, computers have reached a level of maturity today, to where they're taken for granted. It feels like everyone owns one (or more), and they don't make for a really interesting hobby anymore, in and of themselves.
But that can just as easily lead a person to broadening their horizons in a computer-centric way as it could lead a person away from computing. For example, 3D printing is still in its infancy. A computer system is at the heart of such a thing, but the real challenges lie in improving the machine that does the printing and experimenting with different materials as the "ink". I don't think too many people would get into creating their own 3 dimensional components or works if they weren't already into computers, though. By extension, the 3D printing interest also leads to exploration in the idea of replication.... building systems that can build more of themselves.
There are also plenty of avenues to explore related to expanding communications with computers. For example, some people have modified off-the-shelf wireless routers or access points, attaching them to the old 8 foot diameter satellite dishes as antennas, and successfully created wireless networks spanning many miles. Others with common interests of computers and music are working with software allowing real-time collaboration on recording projects via broadband connections.
We're past the stage where it's especially exciting to assemble one's own PC from parts (although that's still a lot of fun for some people who haven't ever tried it yet) -- but the trick is in expanding what can be done using the computer as the base or core of the project.
I'd say one of the reasons those other hobbies died off in the 80's was due to paranoia and govt. interference. In the state of Texas, last I checked, you have to obtain a govt. license just to legally own the pyrex GLASSWARE for chemistry experiments! Model rocketry could get you accused of being a terrorist these days
Some of the other things? Well, they just evolved and became extensions of computer tech. Stage lighting for example? Last I looked it it, the "state of the art" was mainly about glorified DLP projectors in motorized housings that projected whatever you created on a computer to the stage floor. Very cool effects too -- but turns the whole thing back over to essentially designing computer graphics.
IMO, it's not even the "information gathering" that's necessarily the real problem here. As soon as I started using Facebook and realized they were giving me unlimited access to the service for free, plus coding mobile applications to make it even more convenient to use (which were, again, free), I knew there were "catches" involved. Obviously, Facebook is no charity, and they're not making enough money on the little banner ads to pay for the whole infrastructure and bandwidth it uses.
So sure, they're "data mining" and selling the user info they collect up. You'd be rather foolish to believe otherwise. Before the days of Facebook, if you wanted a site that made it easy to hunt down old friends and connections and "catch up" with them again, you had to pay for a membership on something like Classmates.com.
I think it's arguable that more disclosure is needed, to warn new users of these practices. (I like "truth in advertising" and "truth in labeling" related laws, because I do think the consumer has a right to be well informed when he/she is conducting a transaction.) But again, this might be more of a gray area since Facebook is providing the website free of charge.
The part I have the biggest problem with is inability to truly delete the data you entered or uploaded yourself, should you wish to terminate your account. If you're no longer actively USING Facebook, then you're no longer receiving any of the benefits they're essentially exchanging in return for your contributed information.
The concerns over the data you can't control because someone else contributed it, by way of tagging you in their photos or mentioning you in their comments, etc.? I don't think you have much of a case for doing anything about that. That's second-hand info anyway, not first-hand, so should be considered of lesser value to start with. Humans are social creatures by nature. Unless you want to resist your own nature and live like a hermit with absolutely no friends or contacts, you're going to leave behind that "second-hand trail" of info others opt to provide about you. Even with no social networking site, the same thing has gone on throughout history in the real world. Why do you think when the govt. conducts background checks for a security clearance, they send agents out to talk to people they believe you knew or communicated with regularly? They ask them questions and chat with them to pick up some second-hand info about you. You can't force all your friends to shut up about you.
As long as it feels enough like writing with a real pen and doesn't fall apart, I think this could work great combined with software like Note Taker HD:
You have to realize though, too,that GM is essentially "Government Motors" today. Sure, it ostensibly remains a private company, but it's one that was supposed to have failed already due to its inefficiency and inability to produce quality products the consumers wanted. Federal government gave them a loan that no private bank was willing to give them under the circumstances, and that clearly came with some catches -- including a mandate to bring on the all electric car, per Obama's wishes to jump-start the use of "alternative energy" in the U.S.
This isn't really their first go-around at it either. The Volt is the second serious attempt to build such a thing, if you consider the failed EV-1 project (again essentially mandated by Federal govt. under Clinton's watch).
I think this particular "post crash" incident doesn't speak so much to the safety of the technology as it does the need to stress the differences it brings. When a gasoline powered car is in a crash and the gas tank is damaged, fuel dripping out of it is a very clear sign there's a danger present. (It's also one that usually happens pretty quickly - since you can't really puncture a tank and have the fuel take a week or two to decide to start spilling out of the hole.)
Given most people's experiences with the products they're familiar with in their daily lives, they'd have no reason to suspect a punctured battery that seemed to still work ok or at least be sitting quietly afterwards would constitute a "ticking time bomb" that could explode 2 weeks later.
I used to work for a mid-sized company where quite a few people in middle management were ex-military. Therefore, I guess it goes almost without saying that when I.T. or Engineering staff was needed, they selected a fair number of them who shared former military backgrounds.
Since I worked in the I.T. department, and not over in Engineering, I can't speak with quite as much accuracy about their situation. I know the ex-military I.T. types we hired were not the individuals I would have chosen as my co-workers, if I was given the choice. Just as the parent poster said, they tend to have that "Yes sir!" attitude to anyone above them in the corporate structure, even when doing so is counter-productive to your own team or seems to be counter-productive to the company as a whole.
Something I didn't suspect would be the case, but has proven to be true both at that job and with other jobs I'd had since is the tendency for the ex-military folks to "backstab" you in the workplace. What I mean is, to your face, they may be perfectly friendly and co-operative, and thank you for any assistance you gave them on a project. But they're more likely to turn around later and speak poorly of you to upper management after the fact. I suppose this is all part of their ingrained concept of the "right way to get ahead" (never show your hand to let the "enemy" know what's on your mind, but report everything to higher-ups).
Purely looking at the I.T. skills and training that a former military person brings to the table? I haven't been particularly impressed in that area either, but I wouldn't want to judge everyone by the relatively few folks I've had personal experiences with. I'm sure there's much to be said for the military giving people opportunities to work with large-scale systems and high-end networking technologies. On the other hand, I don't know if some of their skills translate to anything practical in the private sector.
I remember, for example, an ex-Marine who told me how they had to learn everything there was to know about the disassembly, repair, and reassembly of certain models of HP LaserJet printers. The reason? They relied on certain ones out in the field, and if one broke in the middle of the desert or something, it wasn't really an option to just go to the store and pick up a replacement. So this guy could tell you exactly how to replace a 10 cent spring that had broken off inside one, vs. obtaining a replacement "assembly", or how to test for improper voltages on a power board inside and troubleshoot it at the component level if it quit feeding paper.... Impressive, actually -- but not real practical in corporate I.T. Heck, if an old laser printer breaks down in most businesses, they'd rather write it off as depreciated and go buy a new, faster model rather than pay you for hours of time to tear the thing apart on your desk.
In a word, no.... What it *will* lead to is more and more regulation, until only big corporations or govt. related agencies can send/receive international traffic. You forget, the people with all the money and power (multinational corporations and government + govt. contractors) still find the Internet very useful for communications among their own entities. They won't allow it to be disassembled into small national networks, unless they're granted exceptions.
The thing with PCI compliance is, some of the businesses having to wrestle with it AREN'T storing the credit card information in any way, shape or them on their systems. If they use a web based card processor and don't ever keep any paper copies of anything with the card info printed on it, I fail to see why it's much of an issue for them to comply with PCI regulations at all? The ways the card info might get compromised from their side of the equation, at that point, come down to things like a 3rd. party intercepting the data (say, with a key-logger they installed on the PC they sign into the web to enter the cards on?), or employees stealing the info they're entrusted with when they accept a customer's card in the first place.
Yet as I understand it, they still DO have to maintain a certain class of PCI compliance in these scenarios. Seems like it really is there just to serve as a threat, hanging over their heads.
I'd long heard the advice about Credit Unions being a better bet than a bank, but honestly, I felt switching might be more hassle than it was worth. I knew Credit Unions had membership restrictions, for starters. (For instance, Navy Federal Credit Union pretty much requires you're either in the armed forces, or a family member of someone who is. That doesn't help me.)
I always tried to bank with smaller, local banks though, instead of any of the "mega banks". That strategy worked pretty well for me when the bigger ones went through a phase of eliminating "totally free checking" accounts, some years ago.
However, I tried to get refinanced on my car loan a couple years ago and found none of the banks were willing to help me at all -- even the one I have direct deposit with from my work, and hold both a checking and a savings account with. My rate was WAY too high and I wasn't asking the world... just an opportunity to get a sane interest rate. That's when I decided to take a closer look at Credit Unions. I discovered one of the bigger ones had 2 convenient branches near my house AND was partnered up with most of the others in town, so you could use ATM machines belonging to ANY of them free of charge. Their only rules for becoming a member seemed to be based on you living in a zip code somewhat geographically close to their branches. A day later (since they had to have the bank manager review my situation and he was out for the day), I had my loan refinanced at a rate a full 10 percentage points lower than I was paying!
I switched my checking account over to a second Credit Union not long after that, and was paid over $100 in bonuses just to switch!
I'm sorry, but I don't believe you until I see this in action for myself. Did the Galaxy S II add some new speech processing app that no other Android phone has?
Otherwise, which app are you running with it, and does your phone have a dedicated button on it you can press to make it listen for a voice command? That's been a big issue with my HTC EVO.... Considering I have a PIN security code set on my phone, the act of telling it to listen for my voice command involves waking up the phone, dragging the slider down, keying in my PIN and pressing OK to confirm, and then tapping on the appropriate app on the screen. That's pretty much pointless if I'm hoping to use it hands-free, like while driving. The bluetooth system integrated into my car stereo doesn't provide a way to send the phone my voice commands either. It only knows to "go live" with the phone and communicate with it when I'm pressing a button on my steering wheel to make a phone call, or when a call comes in and it latches onto it.
I love the desperate comments from the Android-faithful and general anti-smartphone or anti-Mac crowd.... "It'll make you look like an IDIOT if you talk to your phone!" "Nobody will want to use THAT!"
Yep.... and it was crazy to think it was possible to build some kind of rocket ship that could go all the way to the moon. Nobody would want to sit around for hours at a time on their couch and watch things happen on a little glass screen (TV). Or take Howard Aiken's quote back in 1952; "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country." More directly relevant? Look how many people claimed nobody would ever walk around in public with those goofy bluetooth headsets on with blinking blue lights. Makes you look like you're going to a Star Trek convention!
People ARE going to use Siri, a *lot*. They're ALREADY doing so. One of the problems with the iPhone 4S right now is that often, Siri's servers are too busy with requests to handle all the load so you have to ask Siri a question a couple of times before it goes through!
Before you write me off as another rabid iPhone fanboi, you probably should know I'm using an HTC EVO 4g right now myself. I can tell you why Android users didn't use the speech capabilities that were "there for years". The implementation stinks! The "Google Voice" app is one of the few that actually understands me when I speak to it with really good accuracy, but it can't even respond with speech! That alone makes it nothing like the Siri experience. If I'm trying to give my phone voice commands, it's very likely because I'm not in a situation where staring at the screen is convenient. Maybe the phone is buried deep in a coat pocket and I'm using a headset, or maybe I'm driving, or ?? Some of the other apps I tried have serious integration flaws that makes them worthless. For example, one of them I used was able to figure out how to open the "Messages" app on my phone to send out an SMS if I told it to "send sms", but wasn't able to pass the "Messages" app any actual data, so it I said "Send SMS to 3142212121", it'd just open the app and it'd sit there, empty, waiting for me to key in a new text!
See, I guess I don't agree with analogies of this sort (yours and one posted earlier about a gas leak in the home). In those cases, it's abundantly clear that stopping it right away has immediate beneficial effects (even slowing a car down 20MPH makes the crash more survivable, and if you stop a gas leak, it's not like it'll take hundreds of years to measure a decrease in the natural gas levels in the structure).
It's also really trivial to take action in those cases.
Not only that, but these scenarios make the assumption that failure to act results in death. The climate change situation results in things like flooding as temperatures SLOWLY rise 1 degree at a time over YEARS. If we're talking 200 years to see temperatures start falling if we act NOW, that means we'll already have many of these consequences to deal with anyway -- except we just banned ourselves from creating a lot of the energy/power we might actually need to do constructive things to better our situation!
Personally, I look at it this way. If flooding is, indeed going to happen and we lose much of our coastlines as a result? Ok... that's not a *good* thing, but it's certainly manageable. We need to look at rebuilding further in-land and making better use of some of the sparsely populated land we've got today.
Well, actually, it *is* kind of a big deal, only because the hard disk makers have undergone a lot of consolidation over the years, and the few that remain all chose to put at least a couple of their major facilities in the same location.
I know Seagate said they're NOT affected directly, as they have no flooded plants - BUT they're having problems sourcing components because one of the largest manufacturers of the spindle motors for drives is located there and was flooded out. I believe the same goes for another component maker that supplied at least one other part needed to make drives.
The fact that the "Global Warming" (oh sorry, now it's "Climate Change" since Al Gore's P.R. folks sat around and came up with that as a more palatable term to use instead when speaking in public) crowd wants to call everyone else a "denialist" shows the amount of polarization on this topic.
I don't consider myself a "denialist" at all, yet I've never gone along with the propaganda coming from the camp advocating serious changes be made NOW to fix this "crisis".
I'm actually glad to read that Muller proved himself to be a legitimate scientist, willing to question the popular opinion of the present time until he could gather enough evidence of his own to make a decision -- and then wound up deciding he agreed with the popular opinion, despite that not being where his initial suspicions fell.
That's what science is all about!
There are really TWO things left to argue about here. One is, like the original poster said, "How much do we contribute?", and the second is, "What, if anything, makes logical sense for us to change if we want to turn this situation around?" The studies I've read about recently (albeit mostly summarized in articles in magazines like Newsweek) seemed to indicate that even if we could somehow stop ALL of our CO2 emissions tomorrow, we'd be looking at many hundreds of years before we'd see temperatures fall back into the "normal" range, globally. That tells me it's pretty illogical to make costly changes in our behavior in a hurry. How about continuing to develop better and more efficient forms of alternative energy, while not blowing billions of dollars on government mandated changes prematurely? Today's solar panel of cost X and efficiency Y will surely cost much less than X with more efficiency than Y if we hang on another 5-10 years to let technology advance. (When the latest, greatest CPU comes out, do you recommend that all computer users rush out and buy one? Or to perhaps make a closer analogy to our Federal govt. and its energy policies -- Do you make a law requiring all computer users to upgrade immediately, since this new CPU uses less wattage per line of code processed? No! You let the early adopters and "edge case" customers buy it at full price, and everyone else waits a little while for it to trickle down to a more sensible price-point for them!)
Fair answer... but I'd say truthfully, the SALES department isn't really the group you want to rely on if you need an honest answer. It's their job to maximize sales, so you can expect them to sugar-coat a lot of things and exaggerate the usefulness and capabilities of whatever they're hawking.
They're not bad if YOU already know you want the product and want some more ideas to make a good case for it. But what I'm seeing here is a guy who seems concerned that businesses the size of the one he's in are "supposed" to be buying Red Hat to help support the project, yet they're opting out because they feel they can get by fine with a free alternative that wasn't necessarily made available with intentions of companies like his using it to bypass paying for Red Hat.
To that, I'd say -- no, Red Hat is a commercial business like any other. They're not a charity. The CIO may be the smart one here. I haven't had to work with Red Hat support before, but my workplace pays a lot of money out in support contracts that generally get very little real use. I think they pay for them primarily as a form of insurance, out of FEAR of what might go wrong in the future. Regardless, if I looked back for the last 5-6 years at all the maintenance/support agreements we own and tried to actually cost justify them based on incidents where we used them? Wow... that would easily average out to several thousands dollars for each hour of time spent on the phone for support!
Sure, there's a lot of FUD out there about vaccines. You've got everything from the folks still convinced something in the vaccines causes Autism (despite lots of recent research trying to find such a link and failing to do so), to people convinced getting vaccinated for anything means exposing oneself to risk of mercury poisoning.
But I wouldn't be so quick to brush off accusations that the HPV vaccines out here have potential serious risks, either. It's one thing to vaccinate against childhood diseases known to be highly contagious killers of millions, and another to vaccinate against an STD that many people will contract at some point in their lives and never even realize they have it, and practically nobody contracts at all for as long as they abstain from having sex. I'm not saying such a thing is a BAD idea, but I'm saying it rightfully deserves a higher barrier to acceptance than a vaccine proven to help wipe out a major killer of small children through no fault of their own.
Just do a random Google search on the brand-name of one of these vaccines, Guardasil, and look how many pages come up discussing the risk of death, paralysis and other issues.
For example, here's a recent article on it in "Natural News", a certainly biased source, but one that uses results of legitimately run studies and other facts to form their conclusions: http://www.naturalnews.com/031454_Gardasil_risks.html
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I *just* got back home from a trip to Memphis from St. Louis, and drove through a lot of small towns down I-55 in the process. I stopped at a few along the way, too, for food and gas. (Thanks to apps like "Gas Buddy" for my phone, I quickly learned that it's easy to save at least 10-15 cents per gallon on gas by driving a few miles into town, vs. stopping at any of the gas stations right off the exits.)
I won't argue your assertion that the jails are among the "nicest buildings" in some of these towns. As many people as we imprison in the U.S. today, that would certainly not be a surprise, unfortunately.
I'd say the most immediately noticeable "big/nice structures" in the places I visited were mid-sized businesses. For example, one place I stopped had a couple of big buildings in a row, right off the exit. One was a spark plug manufacturer and the other a plastic molding company.
Interestingly, another trend I noticed in the small farm towns was a tax prep service having a nice, new building (H&R Block, for example). I suppose all the complexities of doing Federal and State taxes when you're involved in farming makes that a lucrative business.
Yes, there were often big Wal-Mart stores to be found too -- but that's been the case for as long as I can remember (especially since that WAS the entire point of Wal-Mart's original business model - to go to all the small towns and outlying areas). What I *also* noticed, though, was a tendency for those big Wal-Mart stores to draw in other retailers, forming a whole shopping center with a shared parking lot. The stand-alone Wal-Mart in the middle of nowhere doesn't seem as prevalent as it once was. There seems to be a synergy effect, where places like restaurants or home improvement stores do well next to a Wal-Mart, for example.
All in all, yeah - you can drive through one of these towns and get "super depressed" by what you see. But it's also easy to forget how few people actually live in many of these places. Only so much industry is sustainable when your total population is only several thousand. You actually get a little bit better picture of how much business is really taking place in some of these towns with a look through their local phone book (although even that is becoming less useful as people turn to the internet more and more). Still, you'll usually see everything from on-site computer services to hair stylists running business out of their homes, even when a drive down the street gives an impression that it's nothing but collapsing structures that once were businesses.
While I agree with much your sentiment, I think it's also true that small businesses that manage to become/stay profitable are often "brass rings" in their own right, for their owners. Sure, they don't make the kind of money the big guys do. But there's a lot of wisdom to the old recommendation to pursue work that you truly enjoy, vs. working "to make money". Most of the time, profits will result as a byproduct. If and when they do, you've found yourself in a great situation, where you're getting paid to do something you actually like doing. You may not get truly rich off of it, but you very well may be living a richer lifestyle in the process, with less stress and more gratification.
The OWS 99% problem is a problem, but I don't think it's quite as much of one as the protestors make it out to be. That's why you have FAR fewer than 99% of the general population out there joining them in protesting. The aspects of their protest I can easily get behind include such topics as the U.S. Federal Reserve cheating all of us out of the "buying power" our currency should otherwise have with fractional reserve banking methods and their insistence on "billing" the government interest on the money it elects to print. The argument that "big businesses are evil because they crush all the small guys who try to get started" is far less accurate, IMO. How many of the protestors actually gave running their own business an honest try? If they haven't, I don't think they're even experienced enough to argue the topic.
That's true, but how often are you really encountering this?
I'm wondering because where I work, I saw a little bit of this when I first took over as network manager, 5 or 6 years ago. Within the first year or two though, it seemed to diminish. These days, software requests tend to take the form of, "Could you possibly recommend a program for me that would do X, Y, and Z?"
I can't really take all the credit for that change... some of it, I'm at a loss to even explain. I think it did help, though, that in some cases, I helped people install 30 day trial versions of software they were interested in. I found that 3 out of 4 times when I did this? They wound up deciding the program wasn't such a great fit for them after all, and no longer wanted it.
I also made sure that our I.T. budget allocated a little bit of money each year for misc. software purchasing. (Basically, it's allocated so each division of our company gets $200 per month or something like that. It's not a lot, but it's perfect for those random situations like a new office assistant who really, really wants a copy of MS Publisher so she can create office schedules or phone directories or what-not, to print out.) It's not going to be a big I.T. crisis when the random person starts using a package that doesn't integrate with everything else.... The trick is, you only buy one or two software licenses for those situations and let them do their thing with it. Eventually, that employee is either going to leave, or decide to change software on their own accord. When that happens, the old (incompatible) documents they created sit out there, unused, until they reach an age where everyone involved can agree they're safe to purge - OR, they just sit there indefinitely. If someone actually decides to use them again, you dig that software license back out and say, "Well, you gotta install this thing to open those files."
Ultimately, no user is an island, but they ARE individuals who may have different preferred workflows to get tasks accomplished in the most efficient ways. I'd rather see a happy employee being productive with an app that's not really on my "preferred" list of company standards than see an unhappy employee being unproductive and frustrated with the standard issued package.
I've worked in I.T. for about 20 years and still do.
The secret to keeping my sanity, though, has been sticking with only smaller businesses where I had more say-so. I think when you look at larger companies, I.T. becomes another big department tasked with implementing the whims of upper management. That puts I.T. workers right in the line of fire when a change is unpopular, yet they're not even able to articulate a good reason for the change to the upset employees challenging them. All they can say is, "Just doing what we were told." which comes across as a cop-out, or at the very least, a reason to express disapproval at them, hoping they'll report it to their superiors who CAN do something about it.
Where I work, I'm the only person doing the I.T. full-time. Sure, we have outside consultants we bring in on a case-by-case basis, since I can't do everything (or at least, do it efficiently) by myself. But all in all, I get to run the environment the way I see fit. That means I have to explain myself to the owners occasionally, and we do hold regular meetings to catch everyone up on the future plans and make sure they don't have reasons to veto them. As long as I keep in mind their budgetary limitations and don't propose changes that aren't cost justifiable though, they usually go with what I suggest.
I can't speak for everyone working there, but overall I get the idea that people are satisfied with the way our I.T. is managed. I'm always amazed when my friends tell me stories of new employees needing wait days just to get their Windows account or email mailbox activated. I've made sure to always get a new hire up and running with their PC and phone on their desk in a matter of 30 minutes or less after they start. We're small enough that when people call with problems, I can usually just go over to their desk in person and get it fixed for them while they wait, too. I think the personal interaction helps a lot, so I.T. isn't viewed as some faceless division of the company that you leave voicemails with when you have issues. I do run an automated web site filter and proxy, but it's configured to only block sites in a few categories we simply can't let people surf while "on the clock" (such as porn or sites known to distribute viruses and spyware). I let them use anything else freely, and tried my best to get management to understand that THEY are the ones empowered to handle problems in that area, not me. (EG. If your employee is constantly on Facebook and not getting work done, you should take note of that as their manager and discipline them accordingly. Blocking Facebook for everybody doesn't fix the problem, because that's a passive "fix" for the problem employee. He/she never gets called to the carpet for their own actions, so he/she winds up wasting company time in some other manner, like Facebook from their own mobile phone.)
Well, actually, let me explain my reasoning, because your idea is perfectly good *if* you're advising someone who really has an intent to get into photography as a serious hobby,
I think the original poster is merely saying that he's someone who finally decided the snapshots he was getting from cellphone cameras and the like weren't satisfactory. He went his whole life without ever owning a single-purpose camera, so it doesn't sound to me like he's expressing an interest in learning all about interchanging lenses and carrying a lot of gear around.
He just wants to take a more presentable photo and is finally ready to spend a few hundred bucks, if necessary, for a dedicated camera to get them. I'd say one of the Canon Powershots would be an excellent fit for him. Going with a cheap SLR, by contrast, just adds complexity and a need for separate lenses which I don't think he's really going to need or want.
Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.
Sure, there are times when it's convenient or even necessary to print something out - but ANY respectable printer attached to your computer can do that. HP has been trying to sell printers with built-in LCD displays that connect directly to the Internet and allow all sorts of interaction with websites without any host system even being attached first. When you get over the initial "cool factor" that your printer can, say, print up your airline flight schedule right from its front panel? You realize this is just a gimmick to encourage you to use as much HP ink as possible. (If you looked the same thing up on your computer, you might simply read it on the screen, or even print only a selected part that didn't use as much paper or ink.)
Honestly, the one thing I'd like to see HP do with their "all in one" line of printers is create more reliable, less bloated drivers for them! If webOS somehow helps them accomplish that task, it would be worth it (but I'm really not thinking that's the goal for it). Just the other day, my boss spent hours on the phone with tech support at HP, all because of their drivers making a confused mess out of things when you own several of their products and move your laptop between them regularly. (He had an older 7600 at his house which became his wife's main printer downstairs. Then he bought a new 8500 Pro model to use upstairs via their wireless network. He bought a second 8500 Pro for his vacation home. Practically every time he travels between his vacation home and regular house, something winds up getting screwed up so the "HP Director" software decides he can only select his 7600 for scanning, or one/both of the 8500's decide to stop taking any print jobs, or ??)
I only partially agree.
Yes, computers have reached a level of maturity today, to where they're taken for granted. It feels like everyone owns one (or more), and they don't make for a really interesting hobby anymore, in and of themselves.
But that can just as easily lead a person to broadening their horizons in a computer-centric way as it could lead a person away from computing. For example, 3D printing is still in its infancy. A computer system is at the heart of such a thing, but the real challenges lie in improving the machine that does the printing and experimenting with different materials as the "ink". I don't think too many people would get into creating their own 3 dimensional components or works if they weren't already into computers, though. By extension, the 3D printing interest also leads to exploration in the idea of replication .... building systems that can build more of themselves.
There are also plenty of avenues to explore related to expanding communications with computers. For example, some people have modified off-the-shelf wireless routers or access points, attaching them to the old 8 foot diameter satellite dishes as antennas, and successfully created wireless networks spanning many miles. Others with common interests of computers and music are working with software allowing real-time collaboration on recording projects via broadband connections.
We're past the stage where it's especially exciting to assemble one's own PC from parts (although that's still a lot of fun for some people who haven't ever tried it yet) -- but the trick is in expanding what can be done using the computer as the base or core of the project.
I'd say one of the reasons those other hobbies died off in the 80's was due to paranoia and govt. interference. In the state of Texas, last I checked, you have to obtain a govt. license just to legally own the pyrex GLASSWARE for chemistry experiments! Model rocketry could get you accused of being a terrorist these days
Some of the other things? Well, they just evolved and became extensions of computer tech. Stage lighting for example? Last I looked it it, the "state of the art" was mainly about glorified DLP projectors in motorized housings that projected whatever you created on a computer to the stage floor. Very cool effects too -- but turns the whole thing back over to essentially designing computer graphics.
IMO, it's not even the "information gathering" that's necessarily the real problem here. As soon as I started using Facebook and realized they were giving me unlimited access to the service for free, plus coding mobile applications to make it even more convenient to use (which were, again, free), I knew there were "catches" involved. Obviously, Facebook is no charity, and they're not making enough money on the little banner ads to pay for the whole infrastructure and bandwidth it uses.
So sure, they're "data mining" and selling the user info they collect up. You'd be rather foolish to believe otherwise. Before the days of Facebook, if you wanted a site that made it easy to hunt down old friends and connections and "catch up" with them again, you had to pay for a membership on something like Classmates.com.
I think it's arguable that more disclosure is needed, to warn new users of these practices. (I like "truth in advertising" and "truth in labeling" related laws, because I do think the consumer has a right to be well informed when he/she is conducting a transaction.) But again, this might be more of a gray area since Facebook is providing the website free of charge.
The part I have the biggest problem with is inability to truly delete the data you entered or uploaded yourself, should you wish to terminate your account. If you're no longer actively USING Facebook, then you're no longer receiving any of the benefits they're essentially exchanging in return for your contributed information.
The concerns over the data you can't control because someone else contributed it, by way of tagging you in their photos or mentioning you in their comments, etc.? I don't think you have much of a case for doing anything about that. That's second-hand info anyway, not first-hand, so should be considered of lesser value to start with. Humans are social creatures by nature. Unless you want to resist your own nature and live like a hermit with absolutely no friends or contacts, you're going to leave behind that "second-hand trail" of info others opt to provide about you. Even with no social networking site, the same thing has gone on throughout history in the real world. Why do you think when the govt. conducts background checks for a security clearance, they send agents out to talk to people they believe you knew or communicated with regularly? They ask them questions and chat with them to pick up some second-hand info about you. You can't force all your friends to shut up about you.
A look on Apple's discussion forums revealed a lot of people really liked Wacom's bamboo stylus for the iPad or iPad 2:
http://www.amazon.com/Bamboo-Stylus-for-iPad-CS100K/dp/B004VM0SE6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321380108&sr=8-1
As long as it feels enough like writing with a real pen and doesn't fall apart, I think this could work great combined with software like Note Taker HD:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/note-taker-hd/id366572045?mt=8
Maybe not, but we get a shot at 12-12-12 next year ....
You have to realize though, too ,that GM is essentially "Government Motors" today. Sure, it ostensibly remains a private company, but it's one that was supposed to have failed already due to its inefficiency and inability to produce quality products the consumers wanted. Federal government gave them a loan that no private bank was willing to give them under the circumstances, and that clearly came with some catches -- including a mandate to bring on the all electric car, per Obama's wishes to jump-start the use of "alternative energy" in the U.S.
This isn't really their first go-around at it either. The Volt is the second serious attempt to build such a thing, if you consider the failed EV-1 project (again essentially mandated by Federal govt. under Clinton's watch).
I think this particular "post crash" incident doesn't speak so much to the safety of the technology as it does the need to stress the differences it brings. When a gasoline powered car is in a crash and the gas tank is damaged, fuel dripping out of it is a very clear sign there's a danger present. (It's also one that usually happens pretty quickly - since you can't really puncture a tank and have the fuel take a week or two to decide to start spilling out of the hole.)
Given most people's experiences with the products they're familiar with in their daily lives, they'd have no reason to suspect a punctured battery that seemed to still work ok or at least be sitting quietly afterwards would constitute a "ticking time bomb" that could explode 2 weeks later.
I used to work for a mid-sized company where quite a few people in middle management were ex-military. Therefore, I guess it goes almost without saying that when I.T. or Engineering staff was needed, they selected a fair number of them who shared former military backgrounds.
Since I worked in the I.T. department, and not over in Engineering, I can't speak with quite as much accuracy about their situation. I know the ex-military I.T. types we hired were not the individuals I would have chosen as my co-workers, if I was given the choice. Just as the parent poster said, they tend to have that "Yes sir!" attitude to anyone above them in the corporate structure, even when doing so is counter-productive to your own team or seems to be counter-productive to the company as a whole.
Something I didn't suspect would be the case, but has proven to be true both at that job and with other jobs I'd had since is the tendency for the ex-military folks to "backstab" you in the workplace. What I mean is, to your face, they may be perfectly friendly and co-operative, and thank you for any assistance you gave them on a project. But they're more likely to turn around later and speak poorly of you to upper management after the fact. I suppose this is all part of their ingrained concept of the "right way to get ahead" (never show your hand to let the "enemy" know what's on your mind, but report everything to higher-ups).
Purely looking at the I.T. skills and training that a former military person brings to the table? I haven't been particularly impressed in that area either, but I wouldn't want to judge everyone by the relatively few folks I've had personal experiences with. I'm sure there's much to be said for the military giving people opportunities to work with large-scale systems and high-end networking technologies. On the other hand, I don't know if some of their skills translate to anything practical in the private sector.
I remember, for example, an ex-Marine who told me how they had to learn everything there was to know about the disassembly, repair, and reassembly of certain models of HP LaserJet printers. The reason? They relied on certain ones out in the field, and if one broke in the middle of the desert or something, it wasn't really an option to just go to the store and pick up a replacement. So this guy could tell you exactly how to replace a 10 cent spring that had broken off inside one, vs. obtaining a replacement "assembly", or how to test for improper voltages on a power board inside and troubleshoot it at the component level if it quit feeding paper.... Impressive, actually -- but not real practical in corporate I.T. Heck, if an old laser printer breaks down in most businesses, they'd rather write it off as depreciated and go buy a new, faster model rather than pay you for hours of time to tear the thing apart on your desk.
In a word, no.... What it *will* lead to is more and more regulation, until only big corporations or govt. related agencies can send/receive international traffic. You forget, the people with all the money and power (multinational corporations and government + govt. contractors) still find the Internet very useful for communications among their own entities. They won't allow it to be disassembled into small national networks, unless they're granted exceptions.
Uh, sure.... and then you make sure you go home and wash your hands with hot water from the "hot water heater".
Whatever .... it's just the way people refer to these things. Get over it!
The thing with PCI compliance is, some of the businesses having to wrestle with it AREN'T storing the credit card information in any way, shape or them on their systems. If they use a web based card processor and don't ever keep any paper copies of anything with the card info printed on it, I fail to see why it's much of an issue for them to comply with PCI regulations at all? The ways the card info might get compromised from their side of the equation, at that point, come down to things like a 3rd. party intercepting the data (say, with a key-logger they installed on the PC they sign into the web to enter the cards on?), or employees stealing the info they're entrusted with when they accept a customer's card in the first place.
Yet as I understand it, they still DO have to maintain a certain class of PCI compliance in these scenarios. Seems like it really is there just to serve as a threat, hanging over their heads.
Good... BUSTED!
I'd long heard the advice about Credit Unions being a better bet than a bank, but honestly, I felt switching might be more hassle than it was worth. I knew Credit Unions had membership restrictions, for starters. (For instance, Navy Federal Credit Union pretty much requires you're either in the armed forces, or a family member of someone who is. That doesn't help me.)
I always tried to bank with smaller, local banks though, instead of any of the "mega banks". That strategy worked pretty well for me when the bigger ones went through a phase of eliminating "totally free checking" accounts, some years ago.
However, I tried to get refinanced on my car loan a couple years ago and found none of the banks were willing to help me at all -- even the one I have direct deposit with from my work, and hold both a checking and a savings account with. My rate was WAY too high and I wasn't asking the world ... just an opportunity to get a sane interest rate. That's when I decided to take a closer look at Credit Unions. I discovered one of the bigger ones had 2 convenient branches near my house AND was partnered up with most of the others in town, so you could use ATM machines belonging to ANY of them free of charge. Their only rules for becoming a member seemed to be based on you living in a zip code somewhat geographically close to their branches. A day later (since they had to have the bank manager review my situation and he was out for the day), I had my loan refinanced at a rate a full 10 percentage points lower than I was paying!
I switched my checking account over to a second Credit Union not long after that, and was paid over $100 in bonuses just to switch!
I'm sorry, but I don't believe you until I see this in action for myself. Did the Galaxy S II add some new speech processing app that no other Android phone has?
Otherwise, which app are you running with it, and does your phone have a dedicated button on it you can press to make it listen for a voice command? That's been a big issue with my HTC EVO .... Considering I have a PIN security code set on my phone, the act of telling it to listen for my voice command involves waking up the phone, dragging the slider down, keying in my PIN and pressing OK to confirm, and then tapping on the appropriate app on the screen. That's pretty much pointless if I'm hoping to use it hands-free, like while driving. The bluetooth system integrated into my car stereo doesn't provide a way to send the phone my voice commands either. It only knows to "go live" with the phone and communicate with it when I'm pressing a button on my steering wheel to make a phone call, or when a call comes in and it latches onto it.
I love the desperate comments from the Android-faithful and general anti-smartphone or anti-Mac crowd.... "It'll make you look like an IDIOT if you talk to your phone!" "Nobody will want to use THAT!"
Yep.... and it was crazy to think it was possible to build some kind of rocket ship that could go all the way to the moon. Nobody would want to sit around for hours at a time on their couch and watch things happen on a little glass screen (TV). Or take Howard Aiken's quote back in 1952; "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country." More directly relevant? Look how many people claimed nobody would ever walk around in public with those goofy bluetooth headsets on with blinking blue lights. Makes you look like you're going to a Star Trek convention!
People ARE going to use Siri, a *lot*. They're ALREADY doing so. One of the problems with the iPhone 4S right now is that often, Siri's servers are too busy with requests to handle all the load so you have to ask Siri a question a couple of times before it goes through!
Before you write me off as another rabid iPhone fanboi, you probably should know I'm using an HTC EVO 4g right now myself. I can tell you why Android users didn't use the speech capabilities that were "there for years". The implementation stinks! The "Google Voice" app is one of the few that actually understands me when I speak to it with really good accuracy, but it can't even respond with speech! That alone makes it nothing like the Siri experience. If I'm trying to give my phone voice commands, it's very likely because I'm not in a situation where staring at the screen is convenient. Maybe the phone is buried deep in a coat pocket and I'm using a headset, or maybe I'm driving, or ?? Some of the other apps I tried have serious integration flaws that makes them worthless. For example, one of them I used was able to figure out how to open the "Messages" app on my phone to send out an SMS if I told it to "send sms", but wasn't able to pass the "Messages" app any actual data, so it I said "Send SMS to 3142212121", it'd just open the app and it'd sit there, empty, waiting for me to key in a new text!
See, I guess I don't agree with analogies of this sort (yours and one posted earlier about a gas leak in the home). In those cases, it's abundantly clear that stopping it right away has immediate beneficial effects (even slowing a car down 20MPH makes the crash more survivable, and if you stop a gas leak, it's not like it'll take hundreds of years to measure a decrease in the natural gas levels in the structure).
It's also really trivial to take action in those cases.
Not only that, but these scenarios make the assumption that failure to act results in death. The climate change situation results in things like flooding as temperatures SLOWLY rise 1 degree at a time over YEARS. If we're talking 200 years to see temperatures start falling if we act NOW, that means we'll already have many of these consequences to deal with anyway -- except we just banned ourselves from creating a lot of the energy/power we might actually need to do constructive things to better our situation!
Personally, I look at it this way. If flooding is, indeed going to happen and we lose much of our coastlines as a result? Ok ... that's not a *good* thing, but it's certainly manageable. We need to look at rebuilding further in-land and making better use of some of the sparsely populated land we've got today.
Well, actually, it *is* kind of a big deal, only because the hard disk makers have undergone a lot of consolidation over the years, and the few that remain all chose to put at least a couple of their major facilities in the same location.
I know Seagate said they're NOT affected directly, as they have no flooded plants - BUT they're having problems sourcing components because one of the largest manufacturers of the spindle motors for drives is located there and was flooded out. I believe the same goes for another component maker that supplied at least one other part needed to make drives.
The fact that the "Global Warming" (oh sorry, now it's "Climate Change" since Al Gore's P.R. folks sat around and came up with that as a more palatable term to use instead when speaking in public) crowd wants to call everyone else a "denialist" shows the amount of polarization on this topic.
I don't consider myself a "denialist" at all, yet I've never gone along with the propaganda coming from the camp advocating serious changes be made NOW to fix this "crisis".
I'm actually glad to read that Muller proved himself to be a legitimate scientist, willing to question the popular opinion of the present time until he could gather enough evidence of his own to make a decision -- and then wound up deciding he agreed with the popular opinion, despite that not being where his initial suspicions fell.
That's what science is all about!
There are really TWO things left to argue about here. One is, like the original poster said, "How much do we contribute?", and the second is, "What, if anything, makes logical sense for us to change if we want to turn this situation around?" The studies I've read about recently (albeit mostly summarized in articles in magazines like Newsweek) seemed to indicate that even if we could somehow stop ALL of our CO2 emissions tomorrow, we'd be looking at many hundreds of years before we'd see temperatures fall back into the "normal" range, globally. That tells me it's pretty illogical to make costly changes in our behavior in a hurry. How about continuing to develop better and more efficient forms of alternative energy, while not blowing billions of dollars on government mandated changes prematurely? Today's solar panel of cost X and efficiency Y will surely cost much less than X with more efficiency than Y if we hang on another 5-10 years to let technology advance. (When the latest, greatest CPU comes out, do you recommend that all computer users rush out and buy one? Or to perhaps make a closer analogy to our Federal govt. and its energy policies -- Do you make a law requiring all computer users to upgrade immediately, since this new CPU uses less wattage per line of code processed? No! You let the early adopters and "edge case" customers buy it at full price, and everyone else waits a little while for it to trickle down to a more sensible price-point for them!)
Fair answer... but I'd say truthfully, the SALES department isn't really the group you want to rely on if you need an honest answer. It's their job to maximize sales, so you can expect them to sugar-coat a lot of things and exaggerate the usefulness and capabilities of whatever they're hawking.
They're not bad if YOU already know you want the product and want some more ideas to make a good case for it. But what I'm seeing here is a guy who seems concerned that businesses the size of the one he's in are "supposed" to be buying Red Hat to help support the project, yet they're opting out because they feel they can get by fine with a free alternative that wasn't necessarily made available with intentions of companies like his using it to bypass paying for Red Hat.
To that, I'd say -- no, Red Hat is a commercial business like any other. They're not a charity. The CIO may be the smart one here. I haven't had to work with Red Hat support before, but my workplace pays a lot of money out in support contracts that generally get very little real use. I think they pay for them primarily as a form of insurance, out of FEAR of what might go wrong in the future. Regardless, if I looked back for the last 5-6 years at all the maintenance/support agreements we own and tried to actually cost justify them based on incidents where we used them? Wow ... that would easily average out to several thousands dollars for each hour of time spent on the phone for support!
Sure, there's a lot of FUD out there about vaccines. You've got everything from the folks still convinced something in the vaccines causes Autism (despite lots of recent research trying to find such a link and failing to do so), to people convinced getting vaccinated for anything means exposing oneself to risk of mercury poisoning.
But I wouldn't be so quick to brush off accusations that the HPV vaccines out here have potential serious risks, either. It's one thing to vaccinate against childhood diseases known to be highly contagious killers of millions, and another to vaccinate against an STD that many people will contract at some point in their lives and never even realize they have it, and practically nobody contracts at all for as long as they abstain from having sex. I'm not saying such a thing is a BAD idea, but I'm saying it rightfully deserves a higher barrier to acceptance than a vaccine proven to help wipe out a major killer of small children through no fault of their own.
Just do a random Google search on the brand-name of one of these vaccines, Guardasil, and look how many pages come up discussing the risk of death, paralysis and other issues.
For example, here's a recent article on it in "Natural News", a certainly biased source, but one that uses results of legitimately run studies and other facts to form their conclusions: http://www.naturalnews.com/031454_Gardasil_risks.html
I was thinking, "Kind of late to give Apple a prize for their PPC emulation when OS X Lion already removed it!"