So leave the alarm registration out of it. Point is by publishing one list you make it possible to cross reference. While you are at it cross reference the addresses without guns with Zillow so you can let robbers make educated evaluations of the most valuable defenseless addresses.
But yea, you have to register your alarm with the police department, therefore, it's publicly available via FOI request...just like gun registrations. With and FOI request there is a record of who has accessed the information and it can be denied. When you just publish it you take that entire process out of the equation and make any level of data mining available.
The point is that there need to be FOI limits on data for private citizens especially where it could be used to put people in danger. Publishing any of this stuff is completely irresponsible but people only support it because they aren't even considering the cross reference possibilities.
Alarm permits have to be filed with the police department too. So just get a list of all of the names and addresses of everybody in New York and then filter out anybody who has a gun or has an alarm. Publish the map and call it "defenseless homes" and be clear that it's only possible to make such a map because citizens privacy isn't respected with respect to FOI requests. See how much people like that out there and then watch the political fireworks.
I've had managers that constantly try to shift my priorities to whatever has their attention that day. They want me to drop whatever I'm to focus on the most recent urgent pet project.
When it affects cash flow, I fully understand. We need to take care of a big advertiser or something like that, totally understandable. Pretty much everything that doesn't fit in that particular realm though, forces me to tell my boss it will have to wait so I can finish my other 10 urgent projects. The line "everything is top priority" also fits in this realm.
Pivotal Tracker is actually really helpful in this regard because there aren't task lists, there's a queue and something is at the top of it. That is what you work on. If a manager wants you to do something else you force them to de-prioritize your other tasks. It's fantastic in that regard because it forces managers to acknowledge they are slowing down their own requests.
There's nothing wrong with Ruby. I love Ruby. For production deployments I'm also finding that jRuby fixes the bulk of Ruby's issues under load.
The problem is the dependency on Active Record without the slightest understanding of how the database behind it works, focussing on writing all of your code in ruby and not take the slightest advantage in letting your database do what it's specifically BUILT to do. If you wanted to say, get 20,000 of 500,000 records from a database in a certain order would you pull all of them into ruby just so you could use an array sort function on them or would you sort and filter them at the database level? You'd filter them at the database level. The people I'm referring to, would go the other route.
The search results page of this site used to run 2,000 queries to show 100 results. That's not hobos, that's morons.
As stated, I love Postgres and there's many reasons to select it as a database. Nobody in charge of selecting it knew any of those reasons, which was shocking.
It is a solid solution for this, but the level of inefficiency in the code this particular crew was putting out was appalling.
Just a couple of "off the top of my head examples:
There was a user dashboard system that showed users a list of buying, bought, sold, selling, and expired listings. Rather figure out what constituted any of these relationships existing and storing it somewhere each was figured out on the fly through a series of model relationships that checked against when they started, if any offers had been accepted, etc. So when listing things out they were retrieving all of this data (some long time users have as many as 18,000 listings), using ruby to go through and figure out whether it constituted sold/selling/buying/bought, which in and of itself was triggering hundreds of one-off queries behind the scenes to get the data from adjoining tables. All of that data, once aggregated into a RUNNING WEB PROCESS, was then sorted in an array in the web process. In many cases this crashed the server or put us so far over our RAM limits that we started using swap.
We started running into duplicate listing URLs because they were depending on the uniqueness check in a ruby model, not even one they wrote btw one from a gem. At some point the gem was updated and redeployed with instructions to add a unique check to the field on the database. A) That should have been done in the first place because otherwise you're open to a race condition and B) since the gem update couldn't automatically do it and people don't generally read the change log when they pull updates for all of these gems we were left with duplicate url's all over the place.
The stuff I just described happens when you have people writing code for a database that have no knowledge of what a database is doing, how it works, etc. It's just amateurish and those are only a couple of examples of the stuff I've been cleaning up in this code base since I took over the project.
Regarding who they are, I'm not going to name them in a public forum. We don't work with them anymore. It's just like any other contract programming firm (I used to own one), the people at the top who started the company usually know what they're doing very well - that's why they started the company. Vouching for everybody else you hire to take on projects is a much harder task. 4 of their programmers worked on this project 2 of their top guys and 2 other guys. The top guys did a great job. I've only found a couple of minor detail issues with the work from them. The other 2 guys work was so shoddy it nearly killed the company I work for.
The root of the problem is this: The company is an agile shop and has a development process that works very smoothly for from-scratch projects where you can correct scaling issues as the site traffic grows. It's an utter disaster of a process for rebuilding a system that is already a high traffic site and is effectively "at scale" when launched.
Totally agree with you. I was a long time Java, PHP developer and learned Rails to take over a project from a big firm in Atlanta. The level of BS these guys spew is insane. They chose Postgres as the database simply because its what Heroku says to do. I love Postgres, but if you are a major shop doing an application rewrite and not one person can articulate a reason for why you chose the backbone tech for the site...that is not good.
They cared more about the code being "beautiful" than making sure it was functional, stable, efficient, and handled errors. To their credit they were big on writing unit tests and documenting things, but the level of inexperience that shows through from being framework dependent for so long is astounding.
Does this model actually work, or does it put you further back?
"We lose a little on every sale, but we make up for it in volume."
Depends how cheaply the children can be cared for. Some of the children my wife worked with in the school system told her horrible stories in such a matter-of-fact manner it would chill you. She saw one child that was 5 years old who came to school sick after sleeping outside the trailer because "mommy had a friend stay over".
When you hear about people revolted by the idea of welfare programs, these people are what goes through their minds. Not people like the above poster who was actually using the programs like politicians sell them to the public. There's a huge disconnect with regard to these types of programs by people who see the programs used as intended and people who see them abused by the literal scum of society that doesn't think twice about making a five year old sleep outside all night by themselves.
People like you are who those benefits are intended for. You are using the system as life support while you prepare to contribute back long term. There are a lot of people, especially in parts of the country where the cost of living is lower, who are perfectly content to simply leach.
I applaud you and I would happily pay my chunk of taxes every paycheck if I really believed that it was going towards helping people stay on their feet while they were going through job training or otherwise trying to get to a point where they were no longer dependent on the system. Glady and happily!
The problem is that isn't the case. There are quite literally millions of people out there content to live cheap and leach. Make babies for a bigger check. Have kids that grow up with that being their "normal" and repeating the cycle.
I've always wondered if part of the reason you see people in more densely populated areas tend to vote democrat is because the cost of living in those areas is high enough to drive out the would be leaches of society. In the south east, they are everywhere and in the south east cost of living is significantly lower too. It's something I'd love to see studied.
In the mean time though, know that I for one am happy to pay taxes to help you get through a financially tough point in your life. A charity can easily see if it's being abused and take action. For government programs, you either qualify or you don't which leads to abuse. Everytime taxes goes up, it makes it harder to donate to those charities too. There is one called United Ministries near where I live that I wish would serve as a model for government programs. The provide food, clothing, shelter, and child care while assisting people with completing their GED, learning a trade, going through an internship, and even do scholarships for college. They provide assistance for anybody in dire circumstances who is willing to try to escape them.
Those should be optional. People have different reasons for wanting them, especially the loaded indicator. I know people that want to carry an unloaded gun just so that they can brandish it in case of emergency, but they know they wouldn't be willing to pull the trigger and they aren't comfortable carrying a loaded gun. If indicators for chambered rounds were required, even standardized, then you'd never be able to do that.
I believe that having a responsible adult there with a gun would have ensured somebody was able to respond immediately, rather than allow enough time for 27 people to die. If you are a responsible man with a gun, who knows how to use it, and somebody starts killing children around you - you will act.
Almost every mass shooting that we have in this country happens at a location where even federally background checked and licensed CWP holders are not allowed to possess a gun.
At the very least, school administrators who are willing to should have fingerprint scanning safes with a gun in them in their offices. Stock them with police issue handguns, require them to go through at least the same level of checks that a CWP holder must go through, provide them with additional training along the same level as that of a police officer provided by the police department. People volunteer to be firemen outside of their normal jobs. Why can't people volunteer to be security guards outside of their normal duties as well? Fire extinguishers are required in buildings so that people can respond without having to wait on the fire department. This would be along the same lines. Take it a step further and rig those gun safes up to automatically call the police department if they are opened!
You ensure that there is SOMEBODY on site who is able to respond if the need arises without having to wait for somebody to call 9-1-1, describe the problem, dispatch the police, and then the drive time for them to get there.
These are reasonable precautionary steps to take to stop insanity like this from happening or at the very least, to minimize the scope of the tragedy.
And that's exactly why there's know way I'll be able to convince you and I fully understand that. All I can tell you is that I was as fully rooted in anti-religious attitudes as you are today, for all the reasons that you anybody would be and what happened was drastic enough, shocking enough, that it left me with no doubt.
Imagine exactly where you are mentally, with your views on religion, God, etc and then picture what it would take to convince you. That's the level of convincing I got. I went from exactly where you are to tithing 10% of my gross paycheck without hesitation and volunteering at a local church (non-denominational). Imagine how convinced you'd have to be to do that 180 - that's how convinced I am.
It doesn't ask people to forego critical thinking on any level. Most of the strongest people of faith that I have ever met strongly questioned every ounce of it. Coming full circle made them stronger in their faith.
I was basically a card carrying atheist for 6 years for exactly the reasons that you describe. Logically, you can't prove God exists and it's easy to feel like people who believe in God are just these mindless creatures walking about who shouldn't be allowed to vote. When you get your life directly changed in a manner that is completely unexplainable by anything short of God...you re-evaluate. That's what happened to me. I struggled with something that I couldn't control for 2 years to the point that I was consumed by it and couldn't do anything about it on my own. I've never felt so helpless against myself. My wife asked me if I'd ever asked God for help and of course I hadn't but I thought "sure, what the heck." What happened next was unreal. I had a dream that the pain was just pulled out of me and when I woke up the next morning...it was gone. Permanently. Something I'd struggled with for 2 years was gone like the flip of a light switch.
I have no explanation for that. You don't know me so you have no reason to believe that story and I fully understand that. I couldn't prove it if you paid me, any more than I could prove a stranger on the street stopped me an asked me a question. It happened though, my life changed. I started reading the Bible after that and in it Paul talks specifically on multiple occasions about exactly what happened to me. It's erie and amazing. It wasn't the last time it happened either and I've become a better person for each occurrence.
I'm a logical guy with a master's degree and a very successful programming career. I'm used to things that I can control, understand and make sense. This was completely out of that realm. If it had just been some random hallucination it would have been easy to write off. The lasting effect is what makes it impossible to ignore (for me, I'm sure other people will be able to ignore it without fail).
Because religion isn't dangerous. Crazy people that use religion as an excuse for their actions are dangerous. If anything, we need more Christians that are actually Christians in this country. The kind that understand "judge not lest ye be judged" means something. The kind that understand gossip and gluttony are on the same level as sodomy in the Bible meaning a fat guy has no business being critical of somebody who is gay.
Christians SHOULD be people that everybody on earth is happy to see because we are supposed to strive to be humble, helpful, loving, charitable and self controlled. Instead there is a large group of people in this country that have never even read the Bible and wish to try to legislate a person's character.
If more Christians focused on acting like Christians they'd be setting an example that others would respect rather than becoming some imaginary force that is trying to control people's lives. If somebody locks you in a box where you can't do anything wrong, it doesn't make you a better person. You have to choose it. The Bible is playbook to being a better person (New Testament) but it's so often twisted in public that most people have no clue what it actually says about anything.
Then absolutely, SELL. Bank it. If you're brilliant enough to set data density records at 19 years old you're going to be able to do a lot of interesting things. Once you've successfully sold a single company, investors open their pockets. You'll have a lot easier time starting FUTURE companies and innovating for the rest of your life if you never have to worry about earning a living distracting you. The older you get, the more you'll find the the biggest barrier to entrepreneurship is time. If you're need to earn a living is out of the way, you've just banked yourself a ton of time.
And that's why they created DMARC. DMARC allows you to specify exactly how mail servers should treat your SPF and DKIM policies. Additionally, you'll get reports from the providers processing it what the origin IPs claiming to deliver email from you are and whether or not they were allowed.
There's also one little note that the entire linked "why not spf" article is based on too...the DMARC reports also include whether or not the mail was forwarded so that mail servers know how to handle it.
The three techniques combined have been extremely effective in phishing spoofing against our domain, which was very heavy until we implemented all three. We've also been tracking deliverability with no issues.
You are talking about outsourcing the core focus of your business. That is a big fat no. If you have a store and you want to sell things online, contract, outsource, whatever. You make your money on the margins of your merchandise.
If your business is making software, you are outsourcing your core business model. That is a recipe for disaster.
South Carolina doesn't recognize clinical nutritionists as licensed practitioners. Apparently, the only state that doesn't too. In this case though, it creates a loophole by proximity for this guy.
My Volt is pretty much awesome. Gives great acceleration, range and plenty of space. My family uses it for everything after I get home and it literally paid for itself in gas savings. Granted, I went from an Expedition to a Volt...but still I could have a payment on 2 Volts for what I was spending in gas. Power bill will go up less than $15 / month too. I was paying between $400-600 a month on gas alone.
We were actually trying to design the interface in such a way that all of the relevant information could be extracted quickly from the teacher's lesson plans. We wanted to change the way lesson plans were written down so that we'd change the way a teacher did something rather than add a new one. Making sure the system reduced workload for teachers rather than added to it was a HUGE part of the overall design.
We designed a system to do everything the original poster mentioned and a whole lot more. Presented it across 5 states, had great buy in and 2 million dollars worth of funding tentatively committed. The whole thing eventually fell through due mainly to unforeseen costs of variable types of regulation on a district by district basis. Even had a very long conversation with the CEO of the nations largest private school software company that said he'd never touch the public school market for exactly that reason. The only players in public schools are people like Microsoft that can do very little other than provide tools for district IT people to create their own solutions.
Through all of that, one of the first questions I got asked was "what about people that don't have internet access or can't afford a computer?" It was such a common response that I started leaving the answer out of the initial presentation so that I could pull up that information when the people I was presenting to asked about it.
The answer is pretty simple: there are a lot of others ways to deliver information to people when it's already organized in a database.
At the time that I was setting this up, there weren't tools like Twilio available but we still had several solutions:
1. The obvious, public libraries have free computer access for everybody. 2. Using a customized PBX, setup a call in phone number with a parent code where parents can dial lin and then listen to their child's homework assignments / upcoming schedules. 3. With the same PBX, allow parents to request an automated phone call at a certain time every day with their child's homework assignments / other important notes. 4. Send an automated fax on a daily basis with the homework schedule (if the parent would like). A fax could be sent to a place of business or a home if available. 5. Somewhat more involved, but for parents that request it monthly or weekly letters could be sent with the same type of information. 6. Text messaging wasn't nearly as common back then but certainly, it would be included now. The PBX solution could be dramatically simplified with Twilio's infrastructure too.
None of those provide the same level of access a computer + internet would provide, but certainly...it's a start. In conjunction with a public library's computer access it makes all of the tools that a parent who wanted to be involved available at no charge. The idea was to help make it easier for parents that wanted to be involved in their children's education able to be involved. To find out if there's a problem in a class after the first bad grade and not after half of the class is over.
The core poverty issue in schools isn't that lack of access puts people at a huge disadvantage. If you've got a parent who really cares, they can get involved. The bigger issue is when you have kids going home at night and not knowing if they're going to be sleeping inside or outside because their deadbeat parents need to use the trailer for a "sleepover". Some of the stuff I heard about like that while my wife was in the school system were appalling. Being poor isn't the problem. Parent's that don't give a damn are the problem and those are certainly not a reason to avoid putting better tools in the hands of everybody else.
It seems like this could get pretty broad. Is Photoshop a derivative work of MS Paint? Is Pixelmator or GIMP a derivative work of Photoshop? Is Open Office a derivative work of MS Office? Is MS Office a derivative work of Lotus Notes?
If you're doing work for a company and being paid for it, you're working under "work for hire" terms and they will in fact, own the application. Whether you excelled in your job and created a lot of downtime is irrelevant because it really breaks down to this: there are X number of hours in a day and they're paying you for 8 of them, 5 days a week. During time when you're being paid by somebody else to do work, they own that work unless specific terms have been spelled out otherwise.
Now, this isn't to say that you can't negotiate other terms for such a system. The biggest thing though, if you're doing this for the challenge, with a moderate hobbyist skill set and the company can see some benefit that's great. If there are comparable systems out there that can do the job you're proposing building the system for, evaluate them, price them, and put together an estimate for the cost of your time vs the cost of having those systems implemented and maintained for a price comparison. If there's a system out there that costs $100,000 / year in licensing fees and you think you can build something in 1-3 months time, based on your expertise in your employer's needs they'll probably be willing to let you give it a shot and let you keep the rights to the system as long as they get to use it at no extra cost. They'll most likely want some percentage of the sales if you decide to sell it, because after all, they're funding you. That would be a pretty reasonable trade off though.
The downside to something like that is that you create the system, you're moderate skill set creates unforeseen problems that have to be fixed by somebody with more expertise, you end up getting all of your time sucked up by maintaining and fixing this system until your employer to either buy a piece of software or hire somebody else to fix your code. Just sayin.:-)
This is one area that a lot of programmers lose sight of though. If somebody is paying you to do work, the work is theirs, not yours under the terms of "work for hire". Just like if you're in construction and your team is building a house, then you decide to go build an outhouse while you're at work....they own that $h!t.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't there laws which invalidate contracts signed under duress anyway? I thought I remembered reading that somewhere.
So leave the alarm registration out of it. Point is by publishing one list you make it possible to cross reference. While you are at it cross reference the addresses without guns with Zillow so you can let robbers make educated evaluations of the most valuable defenseless addresses.
But yea, you have to register your alarm with the police department, therefore, it's publicly available via FOI request...just like gun registrations. With and FOI request there is a record of who has accessed the information and it can be denied. When you just publish it you take that entire process out of the equation and make any level of data mining available.
The point is that there need to be FOI limits on data for private citizens especially where it could be used to put people in danger. Publishing any of this stuff is completely irresponsible but people only support it because they aren't even considering the cross reference possibilities.
Really? Such as say...publishing a list of gun owners?
Make sure this never happens again:
Alarm permits have to be filed with the police department too. So just get a list of all of the names and addresses of everybody in New York and then filter out anybody who has a gun or has an alarm. Publish the map and call it "defenseless homes" and be clear that it's only possible to make such a map because citizens privacy isn't respected with respect to FOI requests. See how much people like that out there and then watch the political fireworks.
I've had managers that constantly try to shift my priorities to whatever has their attention that day. They want me to drop whatever I'm to focus on the most recent urgent pet project.
When it affects cash flow, I fully understand. We need to take care of a big advertiser or something like that, totally understandable. Pretty much everything that doesn't fit in that particular realm though, forces me to tell my boss it will have to wait so I can finish my other 10 urgent projects. The line "everything is top priority" also fits in this realm.
Pivotal Tracker is actually really helpful in this regard because there aren't task lists, there's a queue and something is at the top of it. That is what you work on. If a manager wants you to do something else you force them to de-prioritize your other tasks. It's fantastic in that regard because it forces managers to acknowledge they are slowing down their own requests.
The idea of unions vs the reality of unions just end up being very different things in the US.
There's nothing wrong with Ruby. I love Ruby. For production deployments I'm also finding that jRuby fixes the bulk of Ruby's issues under load.
The problem is the dependency on Active Record without the slightest understanding of how the database behind it works, focussing on writing all of your code in ruby and not take the slightest advantage in letting your database do what it's specifically BUILT to do. If you wanted to say, get 20,000 of 500,000 records from a database in a certain order would you pull all of them into ruby just so you could use an array sort function on them or would you sort and filter them at the database level? You'd filter them at the database level. The people I'm referring to, would go the other route.
The search results page of this site used to run 2,000 queries to show 100 results. That's not hobos, that's morons.
As stated, I love Postgres and there's many reasons to select it as a database. Nobody in charge of selecting it knew any of those reasons, which was shocking.
It is a solid solution for this, but the level of inefficiency in the code this particular crew was putting out was appalling.
Just a couple of "off the top of my head examples:
There was a user dashboard system that showed users a list of buying, bought, sold, selling, and expired listings. Rather figure out what constituted any of these relationships existing and storing it somewhere each was figured out on the fly through a series of model relationships that checked against when they started, if any offers had been accepted, etc. So when listing things out they were retrieving all of this data (some long time users have as many as 18,000 listings), using ruby to go through and figure out whether it constituted sold/selling/buying/bought, which in and of itself was triggering hundreds of one-off queries behind the scenes to get the data from adjoining tables. All of that data, once aggregated into a RUNNING WEB PROCESS, was then sorted in an array in the web process. In many cases this crashed the server or put us so far over our RAM limits that we started using swap.
We started running into duplicate listing URLs because they were depending on the uniqueness check in a ruby model, not even one they wrote btw one from a gem. At some point the gem was updated and redeployed with instructions to add a unique check to the field on the database. A) That should have been done in the first place because otherwise you're open to a race condition and B) since the gem update couldn't automatically do it and people don't generally read the change log when they pull updates for all of these gems we were left with duplicate url's all over the place.
The stuff I just described happens when you have people writing code for a database that have no knowledge of what a database is doing, how it works, etc. It's just amateurish and those are only a couple of examples of the stuff I've been cleaning up in this code base since I took over the project.
Regarding who they are, I'm not going to name them in a public forum. We don't work with them anymore. It's just like any other contract programming firm (I used to own one), the people at the top who started the company usually know what they're doing very well - that's why they started the company. Vouching for everybody else you hire to take on projects is a much harder task. 4 of their programmers worked on this project 2 of their top guys and 2 other guys. The top guys did a great job. I've only found a couple of minor detail issues with the work from them. The other 2 guys work was so shoddy it nearly killed the company I work for.
The root of the problem is this: The company is an agile shop and has a development process that works very smoothly for from-scratch projects where you can correct scaling issues as the site traffic grows. It's an utter disaster of a process for rebuilding a system that is already a high traffic site and is effectively "at scale" when launched.
Totally agree with you. I was a long time Java, PHP developer and learned Rails to take over a project from a big firm in Atlanta. The level of BS these guys spew is insane. They chose Postgres as the database simply because its what Heroku says to do. I love Postgres, but if you are a major shop doing an application rewrite and not one person can articulate a reason for why you chose the backbone tech for the site...that is not good.
They cared more about the code being "beautiful" than making sure it was functional, stable, efficient, and handled errors. To their credit they were big on writing unit tests and documenting things, but the level of inexperience that shows through from being framework dependent for so long is astounding.
Make babies for a bigger check.
Does this model actually work, or does it put you further back?
"We lose a little on every sale, but we make up for it in volume."
Depends how cheaply the children can be cared for. Some of the children my wife worked with in the school system told her horrible stories in such a matter-of-fact manner it would chill you. She saw one child that was 5 years old who came to school sick after sleeping outside the trailer because "mommy had a friend stay over".
When you hear about people revolted by the idea of welfare programs, these people are what goes through their minds. Not people like the above poster who was actually using the programs like politicians sell them to the public. There's a huge disconnect with regard to these types of programs by people who see the programs used as intended and people who see them abused by the literal scum of society that doesn't think twice about making a five year old sleep outside all night by themselves.
People like you are who those benefits are intended for. You are using the system as life support while you prepare to contribute back long term. There are a lot of people, especially in parts of the country where the cost of living is lower, who are perfectly content to simply leach.
I applaud you and I would happily pay my chunk of taxes every paycheck if I really believed that it was going towards helping people stay on their feet while they were going through job training or otherwise trying to get to a point where they were no longer dependent on the system. Glady and happily!
The problem is that isn't the case. There are quite literally millions of people out there content to live cheap and leach. Make babies for a bigger check. Have kids that grow up with that being their "normal" and repeating the cycle.
I've always wondered if part of the reason you see people in more densely populated areas tend to vote democrat is because the cost of living in those areas is high enough to drive out the would be leaches of society. In the south east, they are everywhere and in the south east cost of living is significantly lower too. It's something I'd love to see studied.
In the mean time though, know that I for one am happy to pay taxes to help you get through a financially tough point in your life. A charity can easily see if it's being abused and take action. For government programs, you either qualify or you don't which leads to abuse. Everytime taxes goes up, it makes it harder to donate to those charities too. There is one called United Ministries near where I live that I wish would serve as a model for government programs. The provide food, clothing, shelter, and child care while assisting people with completing their GED, learning a trade, going through an internship, and even do scholarships for college. They provide assistance for anybody in dire circumstances who is willing to try to escape them.
Those should be optional. People have different reasons for wanting them, especially the loaded indicator. I know people that want to carry an unloaded gun just so that they can brandish it in case of emergency, but they know they wouldn't be willing to pull the trigger and they aren't comfortable carrying a loaded gun. If indicators for chambered rounds were required, even standardized, then you'd never be able to do that.
I believe that having a responsible adult there with a gun would have ensured somebody was able to respond immediately, rather than allow enough time for 27 people to die. If you are a responsible man with a gun, who knows how to use it, and somebody starts killing children around you - you will act.
Almost every mass shooting that we have in this country happens at a location where even federally background checked and licensed CWP holders are not allowed to possess a gun.
At the very least, school administrators who are willing to should have fingerprint scanning safes with a gun in them in their offices. Stock them with police issue handguns, require them to go through at least the same level of checks that a CWP holder must go through, provide them with additional training along the same level as that of a police officer provided by the police department. People volunteer to be firemen outside of their normal jobs. Why can't people volunteer to be security guards outside of their normal duties as well? Fire extinguishers are required in buildings so that people can respond without having to wait on the fire department. This would be along the same lines. Take it a step further and rig those gun safes up to automatically call the police department if they are opened!
You ensure that there is SOMEBODY on site who is able to respond if the need arises without having to wait for somebody to call 9-1-1, describe the problem, dispatch the police, and then the drive time for them to get there.
These are reasonable precautionary steps to take to stop insanity like this from happening or at the very least, to minimize the scope of the tragedy.
And that's exactly why there's know way I'll be able to convince you and I fully understand that. All I can tell you is that I was as fully rooted in anti-religious attitudes as you are today, for all the reasons that you anybody would be and what happened was drastic enough, shocking enough, that it left me with no doubt.
Imagine exactly where you are mentally, with your views on religion, God, etc and then picture what it would take to convince you. That's the level of convincing I got. I went from exactly where you are to tithing 10% of my gross paycheck without hesitation and volunteering at a local church (non-denominational). Imagine how convinced you'd have to be to do that 180 - that's how convinced I am.
It doesn't ask people to forego critical thinking on any level. Most of the strongest people of faith that I have ever met strongly questioned every ounce of it. Coming full circle made them stronger in their faith.
I was basically a card carrying atheist for 6 years for exactly the reasons that you describe. Logically, you can't prove God exists and it's easy to feel like people who believe in God are just these mindless creatures walking about who shouldn't be allowed to vote. When you get your life directly changed in a manner that is completely unexplainable by anything short of God...you re-evaluate. That's what happened to me. I struggled with something that I couldn't control for 2 years to the point that I was consumed by it and couldn't do anything about it on my own. I've never felt so helpless against myself. My wife asked me if I'd ever asked God for help and of course I hadn't but I thought "sure, what the heck." What happened next was unreal. I had a dream that the pain was just pulled out of me and when I woke up the next morning...it was gone. Permanently. Something I'd struggled with for 2 years was gone like the flip of a light switch.
I have no explanation for that. You don't know me so you have no reason to believe that story and I fully understand that. I couldn't prove it if you paid me, any more than I could prove a stranger on the street stopped me an asked me a question. It happened though, my life changed. I started reading the Bible after that and in it Paul talks specifically on multiple occasions about exactly what happened to me. It's erie and amazing. It wasn't the last time it happened either and I've become a better person for each occurrence.
I'm a logical guy with a master's degree and a very successful programming career. I'm used to things that I can control, understand and make sense. This was completely out of that realm. If it had just been some random hallucination it would have been easy to write off. The lasting effect is what makes it impossible to ignore (for me, I'm sure other people will be able to ignore it without fail).
Because religion isn't dangerous. Crazy people that use religion as an excuse for their actions are dangerous. If anything, we need more Christians that are actually Christians in this country. The kind that understand "judge not lest ye be judged" means something. The kind that understand gossip and gluttony are on the same level as sodomy in the Bible meaning a fat guy has no business being critical of somebody who is gay.
Christians SHOULD be people that everybody on earth is happy to see because we are supposed to strive to be humble, helpful, loving, charitable and self controlled. Instead there is a large group of people in this country that have never even read the Bible and wish to try to legislate a person's character.
If more Christians focused on acting like Christians they'd be setting an example that others would respect rather than becoming some imaginary force that is trying to control people's lives. If somebody locks you in a box where you can't do anything wrong, it doesn't make you a better person. You have to choose it. The Bible is playbook to being a better person (New Testament) but it's so often twisted in public that most people have no clue what it actually says about anything.
Then absolutely, SELL. Bank it. If you're brilliant enough to set data density records at 19 years old you're going to be able to do a lot of interesting things. Once you've successfully sold a single company, investors open their pockets. You'll have a lot easier time starting FUTURE companies and innovating for the rest of your life if you never have to worry about earning a living distracting you. The older you get, the more you'll find the the biggest barrier to entrepreneurship is time. If you're need to earn a living is out of the way, you've just banked yourself a ton of time.
And that's why they created DMARC. DMARC allows you to specify exactly how mail servers should treat your SPF and DKIM policies. Additionally, you'll get reports from the providers processing it what the origin IPs claiming to deliver email from you are and whether or not they were allowed.
There's also one little note that the entire linked "why not spf" article is based on too...the DMARC reports also include whether or not the mail was forwarded so that mail servers know how to handle it.
The three techniques combined have been extremely effective in phishing spoofing against our domain, which was very heavy until we implemented all three. We've also been tracking deliverability with no issues.
http://www.dmarc.org/
You are talking about outsourcing the core focus of your business. That is a big fat no. If you have a store and you want to sell things online, contract, outsource, whatever. You make your money on the margins of your merchandise.
If your business is making software, you are outsourcing your core business model. That is a recipe for disaster.
South Carolina doesn't recognize clinical nutritionists as licensed practitioners. Apparently, the only state that doesn't too. In this case though, it creates a loophole by proximity for this guy.
My Volt is pretty much awesome. Gives great acceleration, range and plenty of space. My family uses it for everything after I get home and it literally paid for itself in gas savings. Granted, I went from an Expedition to a Volt...but still I could have a payment on 2 Volts for what I was spending in gas. Power bill will go up less than $15 / month too. I was paying between $400-600 a month on gas alone.
We were actually trying to design the interface in such a way that all of the relevant information could be extracted quickly from the teacher's lesson plans. We wanted to change the way lesson plans were written down so that we'd change the way a teacher did something rather than add a new one. Making sure the system reduced workload for teachers rather than added to it was a HUGE part of the overall design.
We designed a system to do everything the original poster mentioned and a whole lot more. Presented it across 5 states, had great buy in and 2 million dollars worth of funding tentatively committed. The whole thing eventually fell through due mainly to unforeseen costs of variable types of regulation on a district by district basis. Even had a very long conversation with the CEO of the nations largest private school software company that said he'd never touch the public school market for exactly that reason. The only players in public schools are people like Microsoft that can do very little other than provide tools for district IT people to create their own solutions.
Through all of that, one of the first questions I got asked was "what about people that don't have internet access or can't afford a computer?" It was such a common response that I started leaving the answer out of the initial presentation so that I could pull up that information when the people I was presenting to asked about it.
The answer is pretty simple: there are a lot of others ways to deliver information to people when it's already organized in a database.
At the time that I was setting this up, there weren't tools like Twilio available but we still had several solutions:
1. The obvious, public libraries have free computer access for everybody.
2. Using a customized PBX, setup a call in phone number with a parent code where parents can dial lin and then listen to their child's homework assignments / upcoming schedules.
3. With the same PBX, allow parents to request an automated phone call at a certain time every day with their child's homework assignments / other important notes.
4. Send an automated fax on a daily basis with the homework schedule (if the parent would like). A fax could be sent to a place of business or a home if available.
5. Somewhat more involved, but for parents that request it monthly or weekly letters could be sent with the same type of information.
6. Text messaging wasn't nearly as common back then but certainly, it would be included now. The PBX solution could be dramatically simplified with Twilio's infrastructure too.
None of those provide the same level of access a computer + internet would provide, but certainly...it's a start. In conjunction with a public library's computer access it makes all of the tools that a parent who wanted to be involved available at no charge. The idea was to help make it easier for parents that wanted to be involved in their children's education able to be involved. To find out if there's a problem in a class after the first bad grade and not after half of the class is over.
The core poverty issue in schools isn't that lack of access puts people at a huge disadvantage. If you've got a parent who really cares, they can get involved. The bigger issue is when you have kids going home at night and not knowing if they're going to be sleeping inside or outside because their deadbeat parents need to use the trailer for a "sleepover". Some of the stuff I heard about like that while my wife was in the school system were appalling. Being poor isn't the problem. Parent's that don't give a damn are the problem and those are certainly not a reason to avoid putting better tools in the hands of everybody else.
It seems like this could get pretty broad. Is Photoshop a derivative work of MS Paint? Is Pixelmator or GIMP a derivative work of Photoshop? Is Open Office a derivative work of MS Office? Is MS Office a derivative work of Lotus Notes?
If you're doing work for a company and being paid for it, you're working under "work for hire" terms and they will in fact, own the application. Whether you excelled in your job and created a lot of downtime is irrelevant because it really breaks down to this: there are X number of hours in a day and they're paying you for 8 of them, 5 days a week. During time when you're being paid by somebody else to do work, they own that work unless specific terms have been spelled out otherwise.
Now, this isn't to say that you can't negotiate other terms for such a system. The biggest thing though, if you're doing this for the challenge, with a moderate hobbyist skill set and the company can see some benefit that's great. If there are comparable systems out there that can do the job you're proposing building the system for, evaluate them, price them, and put together an estimate for the cost of your time vs the cost of having those systems implemented and maintained for a price comparison. If there's a system out there that costs $100,000 / year in licensing fees and you think you can build something in 1-3 months time, based on your expertise in your employer's needs they'll probably be willing to let you give it a shot and let you keep the rights to the system as long as they get to use it at no extra cost. They'll most likely want some percentage of the sales if you decide to sell it, because after all, they're funding you. That would be a pretty reasonable trade off though.
The downside to something like that is that you create the system, you're moderate skill set creates unforeseen problems that have to be fixed by somebody with more expertise, you end up getting all of your time sucked up by maintaining and fixing this system until your employer to either buy a piece of software or hire somebody else to fix your code. Just sayin. :-)
This is one area that a lot of programmers lose sight of though. If somebody is paying you to do work, the work is theirs, not yours under the terms of "work for hire". Just like if you're in construction and your team is building a house, then you decide to go build an outhouse while you're at work....they own that $h!t.