Posts Tagged ‘internet’
Why Must We Have To Pick Between Children And Bus Drivers
The time has come for school bus drivers to let go of their personal privacy. This is so the well being of their passengers will be assured. They need to reveal mental and physical health issues to their company. They also have to agree to undergo random drug testing and register the medications they are on. These recommendations were written by Judge Bruce Fraser in the fatal accident investigation report on the death a young person in 2007.
The nine-year-old schoolgirl was killed in a school bus accident on October 18, 2007. The school bus driven by Louise Rogers swerved into a parked gravel truck then slammed into a power pole. This event killed the girl and critically harmed three additional children including her sister. All four are studying at Mountain View Academy but shared a bus with Third Academy at the time.
In his report, John Fraser also wrote that there was no suggestion that the driver did it on purpose. It cannot be explained why the bus driver drifted onto the shoulder where the truck was broken down. Later on it was known that Ms. Rogers had recently been hospitalized for mental health problems. To aid with her condition she was prescribed sleeping pills and antidepressants. However, tests revealed that the level of these drug treatments had been low in her system on that day.
The design of the school bus involved might have also aggravated the accident. Judge Fraser wrote that the bus was designed so that the passenger portion extends past the cab or engine section. This adds to the danger of the passengers because their bodies are exposed outside the motor of the vehicle, consequently escalating the danger. This is a design error that is frequently found in smaller buses which has to be given consideration.
The recommendations presented by the judge received positive responses. Aside from those that were formerly described, he included an additional suggestion. Bus drivers who went on leave due to mental or physical issues must be required to present a report. This has to be issued by a health professional, stating therein whether the person is in shape to resume work.
There are proposals that encourage bus drivers not to use hand-held devices. This includes, but not restricted to, cellphones and musical devices while on duty, especially while driving. News has spread that there is already a draft of a new legislation banning all hand-held devices behind the wheel.
The incident taught a lesson that all schools ought to establish stricter standards in the hiring of school bus drivers. There should be a method for assessing the mental health of potential drivers. It is very vital to establish whether these problems will affect their driving. The safety of children under their charge while on the bus should be protected.
We try to protect our kids. We let them out of our view at school. But we must not let them out of our view on the Internet. Keep them safe by using an Anonymous Proxy to hide where they live.
How Browser Cookies Harm Your Computer Privacy and Anonymity
A cookie is a piece of text file composed of letters and numbers that are stored on a user’s computer when he or she accesses a website. It is also known as a browser cookie, web cookie, or HTTP cookie. This file is used by the browser to navigate the website more effortlessly. The browser can use the cookie for confirmation preferences, language settings, shopping cart contents, themes and more features that use text data.
Certain cookies have dates of expiry. These may be stored by the browser and deleted as the expiration date passes. Other cookies do not have expiry dates. They are automatically deleted as the browser is terminated. Cookies help a website to deliver better services, although cookies in themselves do not hold information.
Most cookies are stored in the browser’s cookie file. These contain the name of the server, its duration and the cookie value. The cookie value is a randomly created number that makes the cookie distinctive. This cookie value is used by the server that created the cookie to recall the user when he or she comes back to the site, or to navigate through pages.
A cookie is not an executable file, meaning that it cannot duplicate itself. It is distinctive from a virus, but it can be a danger to privacy in some situations. Because a browser has a means that sets and reads cookies, a cookie can be used as spyware. The most usual cookie that can function like this is the “zombie cookie”. A cookie that is used as spyware can trace computer activity. That is why it is up to the user if he or she will or will not allow cookies.
A cookie just helps the website to recognize the user and keeps a record of his or her information. It cannot do damage to the computer by itself because it cannot access the user’s hard drive. For example, a user does not need to key in his or her name every time he or she visits the same site. The website may ask the user to key in his or her name the initial time he or she visits the site and the next time he or she visits the site, the cookie tells the server who he or she is. Automatically, as the website opens, it already includes his or her name.
Privacy threats can be an issue in the use of cookies. All personal information uploaded by a user will be remembered by the cookie. This can expose the user to the possibilities of identity theft or computer hacking. This is one of the reasons why some users would want to erase cookies saved in their computers.
Cookies can be deleted in various ways, depending on the user’s browser. However, there are three general steps involved in doing such an action:
First, on the browser, go to “Tools”.
Second, select “Internet Options” or “Options”.
Third, under the “General” tab, choose “Delete Cookies”. The rest may be a combination with other functions. The user may opt to delete all cookies or just select which ones to delete.
Click here for more information on deleting cookies.
It is not just about cookies! Online privacy can be compromised by a number of issues. One issue is IP addresses. Mask your IP address by using an encrypted Proxy system to mask your IP address and protect your Internet identity. For more information about using a Private Proxy please visit our blog.
The Disadvantages With Cell Phones
Cell phones are a boon to contemporary society, there is no question of that. They have made it simpler for parents to keep in contact with their children; they have released proprietors and bosses from the office and they give optimism to anyone who is stranded. It has been said that owning a cell phone is the single biggest step to increasing self-employed earnings in the Third World.
But it is not all great news, is it? Being constantly accessible to everybody can be a real nuisance. This is one of the drawbacks of cell phones. However, you may like to be available to some individuals, do you not, just not to everybody. So what can you do about it? There are a few methods to reduce your availability to everyone but the ones you want.
The first way to reduce your availability to every Tom, Dick or Harry is to assign ringtones. Who do you want to be allowed to contact you? Let us presume: family 24 hours; friends 16 hours; office 8 hours everybody else 8 hours. That is four different ringtones and once you have learned them, you have effectively freed up a lot of your availability.
One point here, do not put your cell phone number on your business card, but when you leave the office each night have the office phone redirected to your cell phone. That way, your office phone’s ringtone will permit you to recognize work-related calls.
The second method to limit availability is to employ profiles. Most cell phones allow you to put different profiles on timers. This means that you could run in silent mode for a third of the day, in loud mode for a third of the day and standard mode for a third of the day.
Different phones have profiles with different features, so you might be able to go even further than this. Read your cell phone instruction booklet to find out more. You might be able to turn voice mail on for some ringtones, say, office phone, in certain profiles, say, silent mode, but always ring loud for others, perhaps, for family.
Another one of the drawbacks of cell phones is annoyance caused by lack of cell phone etiquette. Some people are downright rude in the manner they conduct themselves on their cell phones. In Britain a cell phone is known as a mobile, which is useful advice: if you are in company and your phone rings, get up and become mobile to somewhere where you will not bother those around you. Lack of cell phone etiquette annoys people everyday on public transport, in restaurants and in cinemas.
There are two other things that owners of cell phones should bear in mind: firstly, a ringing phone is only a signal that someone is asking to speak to you, you do not have to behave like a trained animal and drop everything that you are doing to answer it (ringtones can help here as well); and secondly, cell phones can be turned off or put in silent mode with the vibrator switched on, if necessary.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with looking for free ringtones for mobile phones. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at Family Plans For Cell Phones.
PDA’s Can Be Used As MP3 Players For Music
A PDA is a personal digital assistant, but is also known as a palmtop computer. They were first brought out by Apple in 1992, but they have come a long way since then. At first they were not much more than electronic organizers. Later a browser was added and then wi-fi capability. These days, a lot of them have the ability to play MP3 files as well.
The MP3 files are normally replayed through a player like Windows Media Player, which could be a feature of the suite of programmes that came with Internet Explorer. The playing of music files when you are working, or multi-tasking, may slow the PDA down, but that actually depends on the speed of your PDA’s Central Processing Unit (CPU) and the amount of random access memory (RAM) it has available.
These are restrictions that apply to all other kinds of computer too. Storage of your MP3 tracks is achieved normally by the use of a flash memory card. You download the music to the card and then access that folder and its tracks from the PDA’s screen. The MP3 files are called from the flash card into RAM and played as they would be on any other computer.
You can listen to the music through the built-in stereo speakers, but they are usually pretty tinny, you can attach headphones or you could connect mini external speakers, which give a astonishingly good sound, as do the headphones. In headphone mode they behave likewise to a Walkman.
If you are familiar with Windows on a laptop or desktop, you will recognize Windows Media Player (WMP). It is very adaptable and will play back most types of audio and visual media. If you have WMP on screen whilst you are listening to music and the PDA can go on line, it will automatically download interesting information about that track from the Net, if you have set that option in the Options Menu.
Most PDA’s are Touch-Screen, so tapping the screen ceases the music and retapping it fires it up again. If you feel that your PDA is rather slow or if you have lots of music on your desktop computer, you could load that music onto your flashcard and plug it into your PDA instead.
WMP is a very practical tool. It will allow you to organize and categorize all your music files and keep them in lists called libraries or Play Lists. You have total freedom to organize these play lists as you see fit: say, by music sort, by artist, by album, by date, by genre or by country or by all of them. These lists can then be played one after the other or at random or only searched for as individual tracks.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with looking for free online ringtones. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at Family Plans For Cell Phones.
Effective Ways To Start Blogging
Everybody has something to say and most individuals are passionate about something that they would like to talk on. Individuals would like to take this desire to talk a few stages further – they want to tell the world about it. That was impossible less that twenty years ago, unless you managed to be on TV or were syndicated in the world’s press. Now, of course, anyone can do it.
The Internet makes it possible for everybody to have their say. The young and the old, the rich and the poor can talk about what they like on the Internet. You can use a web site as your soap box or you could use a specialized website known as a blog. If you cannot have your own website for any reason, you could open a free blog at one of the numerous web sites that offer free blogs.
The word ‘blog’ is short for ‘web log’ and adding an piece to your blog is called blogging. Blogs have become a very effective means of spreading one’s point of view. The latest form of blogging is micro-blogging, which is the generic description for Twitter.
Blogging has been used successfully by peoples of countries where the provision of human rights is not a government priority. Only recently, dissidents in Iran, Iraq and Myanmar have kept the world up-to-date about repression in their countries through blogs. The blogs were often reprinted in the world press and reported on the International news.
If you would like to blog for free, search Google for ‘free blogs’ and take a look around. There are dozens of free blog sites about and they all offer different functions. Blogger by Google is one of the better ones, but there really are loads of different types of free blogs.
One consideration is whether you want your blog to be open or closed. That is, do you want anyone to be able to read it or do you want only a closed user group (CUG), which could include your friends, your family or your colleagues.
It ought to not take longer that thirty minutes to set up your blog. Some providers like to approve new blogs, but others do not. You could be blogging within the hour, so compose an piece welcoming visitors to your blog and post it to the blog. Make it ’sticky’ if you can, so that it is always the first post that people read when they arrive at your blog.
Make your posts informative and attempt to keep them topical. They should neither be so short that it is not worth coming to read them nor so long that they get boring – 400 to 500 is judged to be about right.
You will have to advertise your blog or no-one will know that it is there. Do this by posting your articles (with your blog address attached) to a couple of article directories. It is free and will give your blog a real boost in circulation. You can give up doing this when your blog is self-sustaining.
Allow all visitors to leave comments on the blog, because it encourages them to come back, but check regularly for spam comments and delete them because a blog full of spam looks neglected.
If you are keen on trying Effective Blogging, please visit our web site on Blogging For Beginners.