This is my favorite quote from the article: “I’ve been the principal who’s stood there and said ‘Oy, kid! Get off your bike! You’ve got to walk your bike!’ Then I’d go away and think ‘Why the hell did I say that?’”
As a teacher in an after-school program myself, I find myself thinking this or something similar nearly every day.
What upsets me is that more often than not, the answer to "Why the hell did I say that?" is not the children's safety, it's that it's what I'm expected to say or that I want to look responsible around other teachers or parents.
The fact is, a principal is in a far better position than a teacher to change a school's culture, and indeed, a cultural shift is what is necessary for kids to have greater freedom on playgrounds. As a teacher, I have to weigh not only what I value (kids' freedom and developing understanding of social/physical interactions) but also what the school (administration and other teachers) and parents value.
I think this article does an OK job of outlining parts of the decision tree for cloud vs. self-hosted (while ignoring other options like traditional hosting providers). The other things to consider are staffing and materials costs if maintaining servers in house, DR/business continuity, time value of money depending on how the servers are financed, replacement of aging hardware and operating environments, and differences of how the infrastructure would be built (clustered, load balanced, geographic load balanced, etc.). The reality is cloud providers provide a lot of building blocks for you to use to design infrastructure in a more robust manner but that doesn't mean that other options should be ignored - it’s another decision that depends on the factors laid out in the article and a lot of others that are specific to each organization.
Same thing happened to me except for the bitcoin magically reappearing. Since this is now Coinbase's unofficial support forum - issue 52050 - 4 weeks and counting....
I wholeheartedly agree with this - it's been 3 weeks since bitcoin "disappeared" from my account and still no response from Coinbase despite multiple requests from me.
I use the devil's advocate approach to gathering software requirements. I argue against what I feel are good ideas and argue for what are seemingly not so good ideas. As long as you don't get too far off track the discussion is often very enlightening about what your customers actually want to build. The downside is that you either end up feeling like or looking like an idiot because you're seemingly on the wrong side of idea (BTW I'm not claiming that I'm not an idiot). Letting everyone know that this is your approach doesn't have much, if any, downside and alleviates this problem. Having another person to tag team with makes it less exhausting. It works for the same reason that Stern's approach works - people love to tell you how you are wrong.
This is a good point and one that I considered and wish I followed up on. I'm in the "support queue" with Coinbase right now because they absconded with 10% of my bitcoin holdings for no discernible reason. In case you're concerned, I'm not the one with $150M in bitcoin - it was 1 btc that went missing (greatly appreciated in value from when I acquired it).
Absolutely. But I think there might even be a little more nuance to this. The classic quote is "people don't want drills, they want holes" that's why they buy drills.
But I think you could get a lot more out of asking why they want the hole to begin with. Are they trying to build a house to help raise their family better, or to become a better investor. Or are they trying to become better at being a contractor, which is the business they run? When you ask Why a few more times about the problem they think they have, you come up with all sorts of useful things you can help them with.
There seems to be a common fallacy that is propagated by media that bitcoin is untraceable. A visit to blockchain.info pretty easily dispels this myth. Bitcoin is anonymous (in the same way that cash is) but it is not untraceable. If money being exchanged to/from bitcoin is coupled with the same money transfer regulations as standard currency it ends up being more traceable than standard currency because there is a log of all transactions. This is likely why there won't be much resistance to bitcoin from regulators as long as they can control the endpoints.
Yes, the opportunities for forensic analysis on BitCoin are much greater than in a traditional currency where money can disappear into the void and re-enter the economy somewhere else without any word on what happened in between. In some ways I wonder if criminals of the future won't prefer the dollar to conduct their illegal activity.
“My interest in Henry had always been primarily intellectual; how else would I explain why I had stood on a chair in the basement of Mass. General, ecstatic to see his brain removed expertly from his skull? My role as a scientist had always been perfectly clear to me.” This was no time for sentiment or reflection.
How terrible that a man who had been so wronged by "science" had a caretaker that viewed him more as an intellectual pursuit than a person who had just passed without anyone by his side that truly loved him. While I understand the remarkable learning that came about as a result of this man volunteering his life to science, you would hope that there is another part of the story that wasn't written about the people around him that truly mourned his passing.
I guess you could argue after a few hours he wouldn't care any more either because he didn't remember it. I was hoping that ultimately he wasn't just a science experiment to the people that surrounded him and that he was treated accordingly.
No it wasn't the end result he was going for. But to say that the patient was wronged because of it is a grave injustice to the doctor who worked hard to get it right. Firstly, the patient must have been described the possible risks. Even back then, we knew that messing with the brain could screw up a lot. Secondly, it is tough to ascertain whether his life would have been any better with the pain of those seizures. His ability to live a normal life was already impaired.
