You either require an additional licence to do something (and must therefore pay for the privilege) or you don't, and therefore don't need to pay for it.
The government can tax anything they feel like, as much as they feel like - air, olive oil, the use of escalators, whatever. In their infinite wisdom, they already charge VAT at 17.5% on blank CDs. So the government is taxing the purchase of CDs. But they are not extracting a levy from those who buy blank CDs, in order to compensate copyright holders.
Charging a levy is a muddled idea. Either an additional licence fee is required, or it isn't. If the levy represented the additional fee required to make the copy legally acceptable, that would be different - but it doesn't. Furthermore, the BPI have publicly stated that consumers should be allowed to legally copy music without fear of prosecution, ie. that the BPI does not consider that copying for personal use requires additional fees to be paid, ie. no levy is required in this scenario.
So the only reason remaining for a levy would be copying outside the realm of personal use, which covers a whole lot of different scenarios and is therefore likely to require a separate licence to be negociated. At one extreme, a few pennies' worth of levy is unlikely to strike the BPI as acceptable compensation for scenarios which are out of the scope of any form of 'fair use' (selling copies of Disney movies at a car-boot sale, for example), and at the other, the entity doing the copying probably shouldn't be paying anything for it at all (there are copyright exceptions in UK law for things like copying for non-commercial research, access for the visually impaired, etc). The obvious scenario in which a levy does apply is downloading of copyrighted material off the Web - but in that case, why put the levy on the CDs? Why not on the connection to the ISP? Per gigabyte download?
But legal copying by its very nature is untaxable - if you in your country have such a concept as fair use (we don't, though, in the UK), enabling you to legally copy then there is no justification to extract a levy for exercising that right. You paid for the original resource, so you already have the right to do with it whatever is legal in your country. Why donate further cash for no reason?
If it weren't for the fact that the government in the UK are utterly without capacity for rational thought, I would suspect that this is one of the reasons why they do not support the idea of taxing blank media. It isn't a very logical step to make.
I don't know where people get the idea that noone has heard of DRM (or that knowing about DRM necessarily relates to knowledge of Free Software).
There is a lot of awareness out there of things like copy-protected CDs, or DRM on digital tracks. Although relatively few people know precisely what 'DRM' is, it is increasingly common knowledge that some CDs/DVDs won't rip and some tracks won't play on some devices. That sort of experience is widespread in the general public.
It may be that knowing about 'Free Software and DRM' isn't actually the necessary metric here - what good is served by trying to teach 'most people' to use RMS's vocabulary or get into the philosophy of Free Software? Never mind sanity, what about relevance? Gaining the attention of different types of people probably means using a different type of rhetoric.
Regarding sleep/hibernate on Linux, I have no idea if this is useful information from your perspective but the Thinkwiki provides a lot of material on how to get it to work. I wouldn't know if it works for everyone, but I did get it to work on my T41 (it did take a kernel recompile, but as these things go it was fairly painless - at least, it did not involve any patching or bios fiddling or whatever). Now that it is working I use both modes on a regular basis with no problems.
Sleep mode also used to work on my old laptop (a bizarre bit of kit from Advent). Hibernate, however, did not - only fairly recent kernels seem to support it to an acceptable level.
I remember saying the same thing about hard disk space at some point.
I used to seriously believe that there was no real reason that anyone would want more than a few hundred megabytes of space. One of my friends, who was working on his PhD at the time, told me that he had several gigs of data for the purpose, and frankly at the time I didn't really believe him.
Now, I am working on my own PhD, and I find your comment pretty amusing. We write code in C, we count every metaphorical ounce of system resources, and we are still maxing out server capabilities. Why? Because with today's computers, functionality that was previously impossible has now become merely difficult.
Sometimes it is a question of how big you dream...
I know one Belgian guy who speaks English, French, Flemish, and Russian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian (after a few beers). Given his level of education the chances are that he also spoke Latin, but this is not something you can easily test in the pub because even in a university environment your chances of coming across a chatty Roman legionary are fairly low.
He is uncommon enough even in Belgium:-) but there are many countries where there is a good reason to be multilingual. You mentioned Scandinavia... As a further example, a significant percentage of the Czech republic (used to) speak not only Czech but also German and/or French and definitely Russian, due to the USSR; now they learn English.
The real finding here provides dramatic support to the Nature side of the debate. Students that end up being identified as the most intelligent are those whose cortices (the site of higher cognitive thought) continue to develop for longer...
But why does the cortex continue to develop for longer in these students? Why assume that this is heavily determined by genetics, or conclude that it is not? Presumably someone has looked into the genetics of cortex development in the past, but according to that article:
The NIMH researchers are following-up with a search for gene variants that might be linked to the newly discovered trajectories. However, Shaw notes mounting evidence suggesting that the effects of genes often depends on interactions with environmental events, so the determinants of intelligence will likely prove to be a very complex mix of nature and nurture.
This would seem to me to imply that they don't actually know why said development occurs, and are hedging their bets until such a time as they feel confident to speculate further. Which is the way it should be, and I congratulate them for being that rare thing, a research group who do not take advantage of inaccurate press releases to gain instant notoriety at the expense of science.
Yeah, I expect that 'Psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University' is definitely a male scientist:)
You are right, though; reading TFA is bad form and could lead us all into terrible habits. If we start getting all hung up on details, anything could happen...
The researchers said one possible explanation is what has been dubbed the "cognitive reserve" theory.
This holds that highly educated people either have a greater number of nerve connections in their brains, or the nerve connections that they have are more efficient.
Therefore, when the damaging changes associated with Alzheimer's - such as the deposition of toxic protein clumps - start to take place, educated people are better placed to resist their effect at first.
However, the subsequent impact is likely to be greater than it would be in less educated brains, because of the higher levels of accumulated damage.
In other words (I think), educated people simply don't show the effects of Alzheimers as fast. By the time anybody notices that anything is wrong, a great deal of damage already exists. So since it is already at a later stage when you first notice it, it looks from the outside as though the person has very quickly reached an advanced stage of Alzheimers. Instead, they have been resisting Alzheimers for ages.
Thanks, as a non-TV watching VCR owner I have been through this in exhaustive and disgusting levels of detail with TV licencing on a number of occasions.
Rest assured that, easy reading as it may be, the web site is nonetheless accurate. If you watch broadcast TV, you need a licence. If you merely own a TV, you don't. This is in contrast to other countries in Europe where merely owning a TV means that you have to get a licence. Here, it is *using* it that counts - the act of watching TV without a licence. Not the (f)act of owning a TV without a licence.
I don't watch broadcast TV, therefore I do not have a licence. As suggested, I detune the TV, plug in only the VCR, and TV licencing turn up to inspect it and then subsequently leave me in peace.
Someone gets this wrong every single time the issue of TV licencing turns up on slashdot. Don't ask me why. I can only assume that TV licencing are doing a very good job of propaganda. But according to the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949 and its amendments, which is the relevant statute, the licence fee constitutes permission to receive or record TV. Therefore, the TV licencing only need to know whether you intend to receive or record TV, since ownership of an unlicenced TV just plain isn't in the Act (which simply doesn't say anything at all about how you receive or record the broadcasts, which is why it applies to internet and mobile phone TV and all that). You will find that the Act is quite clear: it states, 'such apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving television program services'. Thus, apparatus installed or used for other purposes, like use with a VCR or DVD setup or for playing Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum, does not require licencing.
-
If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one.
Well as it already stands, a license fee isn't payable on owning a TV. It's payable on use of a TV to view broadcast TV.
So no, I don't think that all owners of computers wired up and capable of whatever should pay anything; those who are using it to view BBC content should. And intriguingly, this reduces the BBC tax collection problem to mere implementation of a perfectly simple subscription service. This should improve the moods of all those who don't have TVs and still have to suffer the TV licencing goons - but in fact, what will happen is simply that said goons will now add 'You gotta PC so you gotta pay' to their slogan list. As a matter of fact I personally am of the opinion that this is the reason why TV licencing have not implemented a nice simple unique access code printed on the TV licence already - it is because they far prefer to have an excuse to extend the reach of their "you gotta pay" spiel across the entire computer-using public, than to implement a fair system.
Sigh.
Incidentally, I notice that you didn't put any geographic limits on that belief of yours - will computers wired up and capable of decoding and displaying BBC content in, say, France, USA or Sweden also attract that license fee? If not, why not?
Ah, well, I personally would hold that there is a difference between the concept of an 'opinion' and the concept of a 'belief', in this context at least. I don't see them as synonymous - opinion to me is the considered result of your current weighing up of fact, theory and so forth, whereas afaik belief frequently transcends details like fact, theory, etc. Thus the post.
I'm aware that this set of definitions is probably very out of date, but what can I say? I was educated as a physicist...
The idea of believing in gravity or evolution reminds me of that Terry Pratchett quote about 'Oh, Great Table, Without Whom We Are As Naught'. In full, the quote goes:
Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying, "O great table, without whom we are as naught."
Anyway, I'm courting the danger of approaching philosophy so I think I'll stop there.
Personally, I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot. I simply disagree with the theory. Just as the Theory of Gravity has some problems and needs to be understood better/differently, I believe the Theory of Evolution needs to be understood better/differently
So what are you saying? That you don't believe in gravity, because the theory has problems?
How do you rationalise the whole butts-on-seats feet-sticking-to-floor coffee-cup-not-floating thing, then? Friction?:-)
Seriously: The whole point of theories is that there is absolutely no need to go about believing in them whatsoever. The moment you start attempting to apply belief to a theory is the moment your ability as a scientist goes right out the window.
As a scientist, you always have to be prepared to be proven wrong. That means emotionally investing with some wisdom; trust your results, not your pet explanation.
Is it too much to expect that you make no more than one typo a week-one more than BBC News seems to make?
From this I conclude that you do not read BBC News particularly closely.
Grammar errors and mistakes are frequent (though, having practiced on Slashdot, I can imagine they fade into relative obscurity). Usually, I don't bother writing to them about errors, but occasionally it's just unavoidable - for example, I once read an article there about a bomb threat in Bath (near Bristol, which is to say in the south-west of England), which they had mistakenly described as being in the north of England. Small grammar and spelling errors happen frequently and can sometimes be very detrimental to the legibility of the entire article. Unlike factual errors, they are not always quickly corrected.
You can see the BBC's response to this on From the Editor's Desktop (scroll down to SPILLCHUCKER). An editor friend of mine who proofreads for a living quit reading the site entirely, apparently because it did bad things for his blood pressure. It is true that they have improved a lot in the last year, but at one point reading the BBC news was actually painful for those of us who can't take the odd error.
As they have now installed a spell checker, most of the problems are more to do with grammar, poor sentence construction or results of incomplete reformulation, such as "something something, and had was something something".
I regret to say that the copyright on Mein Kampf is still very much alive. Outside English and Dutch, copyright is owned by the state of Bavaria, until 2015.
In Germany and I believe also in the Netherlands, the copyright is used entirely to ensure that nobody copies the book.
This is disputed here and there... other countries get away with publishing translations. I'm not sure by what authority the state has seized copyright.
Frankly, I'd rather be dependent on buying uranium from any of a large variety of foreign countries, than dependent on buying my gas from Russia. Uranium has the advantage of relative portability, meaning that at least you have a choice of vendor.
Well... when they said that Stephen Pinker suggested discussing 'dangerous ideas', I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Pinker was planning to use it as a platform for glorifying his 'controversial' stance on EP. Again. As in fact he did.
Pinker is currently as near as social science gets to being a rock star; all image.
That said, many of the articles don't represent that sort of shameless self-promotion. Many are pretty interesting stuff; for me, some that stood out were Michael Shermer, Haim Harari, Timothy Tailor, Sherry Turkle and Diane Halpern.
But yeah, more physics would have been nice, maybe Burt Rutan would have had an interesting opinion or two to share. It seemed like there was a lot more psychology, philosophy, biology and art in there than the hard sciences. Of course, this may have a squishy-science explanation in and of itself, such as 'those who work in the hard sciences are less likely to seek glory in controversy', but this sounds unlikely - perhaps dangerous ideas belonging to hard-science types just don't lend themselves so well to the soundbite format?
I think that idea got fairly extensively tested in the past, such as when Enterprise (yeah yeah I know) was cancelled, when Futurama was cancelled, and so forth. People suggest it periodically, yet it goes nowhere.
It seems plausible that one ought to be able to make episodes on the basis of presales, but apparently the industry has better things to do with its time than test out that sort of theory. Which isn't really very surprising. Aside from everything else, doing work-for-hire for a large, distributed group of pre-sale clients represents a risk. What happens if you make the show, it disappoints them because, oh, they kill off the fans' favourite character, and some idiot starts a class-action lawsuit?
It would be great if some studio decided to get a grip and actually give the idea a sporting chance. However, the attitude of the industry towards new business practices is famously conservative, so I'm not holding my breath.
two different markets, to be honest. 16 is nothing like 25 in this case, and that's what makes this a pretty ineffective tech fix.
However, here are a few hopefully illuminating details from a UK perspective (I ran a store for a while):
1) Kids below 16 have a real urge to smoke, but can't buy cigarettes. So they tend to hang out outside shops that sell them, waylaying customers on the way in and promising improbable cash rewards if said customer will buy them cigarettes. Should the customer agree to do so, this would put the shopkeeper and the customer into legal trouble (they committed the illegal act - supplying cigarettes to minors - not the minor). Shopkeepers do not wish to be caught this way.
2) Same scenario as above, only this time with alcohol and a different age limit (18).
3) This is a Spar convenience store. They do not typically sell much of interest to the 16-18 demographic aside from alcohol and cigarettes. 16-18s generally still live with their parents, which is usually why they're outside hanging out in front of a convenience store in the first place. Sure, they have money, but they don't want to buy jam or frozen chicken wings or paper towel with it, so their spending power hardly matters in this instance since Spar typically do not sell computer games, cds, and so forth. We banned under-18s completely - our sales actually went up.
4) You mentioned it: "no responsibility". The little details that (hopefully) stop you and I from disruptive and pointless activities have not yet become relevant to these kids. If they steal a packet of crisps, it isn't because they want crisps and can't afford them. If they steal cigarettes, it's not down to a honest enjoyment of the odour of Benson and Hedges or whatever. It's because they're bored. This is forbidden, and therefore cool. Successfully stealing something is one-up on the shop owner, who presumably deserves it for being part of that pathetically boring adult world.
Shop owners generally don't want to be part of this sort of thing. Who can blame them?
Note: you do get adult shoplifters, so it's not as though this thing would be a solution to shoplifting. You do get occasional disruptive adults, too, although it's relatively rare. But the whole gangs hassling you and your customers act is pretty specifically a youth problem, which is incredibly tiresome for shopkeepers to deal with day-in, day-out. He's actually picked a rather peaceful solution... I used to know one guy who'd wait until they'd gathered outside the store then sprint out, grab some kid or other (male, though), twist the kid's arm behind his back, push him down on a car bonnet and explain the error of his ways. Not a recommended solution, but I could understand his frustration.
I've been in the position of this store owner - way back when the dot com thing stopped, I did a six month stint in an off-licence.
We had a lot of theft, from smash and grab to stealthy shoplifting to the safety-in-numbers crowd the shop, intimidate the cashier, threaten violence, everybody grab something and run for it, approach. We'd call the police, show them the videos, they'd do absolutely sweet fanny adams about it. It was before the era of the ASBO, and the police really didn't have many options apart from waiting until the little bastards reached the sainted age of adulthood, whereupon their next offence would lead to prosecution. The situation isn't unusual - every shop in the area with stock of any interest to teenagers had similar problems, and some had worse.
So we did a number of things. Firstly, we banned under-18s from the shop altogether, which was surprisingly effective, especially given that we had no real means of enforcing it other than yelling at the kids. It made almost no difference to the bottom line, as the teens never bought anything but cheap crisps anyway. Secondly, we identified the parents of brats caught on camera and provided them with the video evidence, a step which ought to have worked but generally didn't - many proud parents are actually proud of their repellent spawn's initiative. Some go so far as to threaten violence against anybody attempting to curtail their child's right to commit crime on demand.
I don't know if we'd have used a device like this had it been around - I suspect not. It's not really specific enough, it's not really necessary, and in fact the blanket-ban approach was effective enough for us as it was. We did have a problem with kids hanging around outside, but I'm not sure we'd have bothered with techie measures to fix that, although it was a problem on a number of levels. First, they tended to upset the customers, if not put them off visiting the shop at all (why bother with all that, if you can just drive to the nice quiet supermarket in the industrial estate?). Second, we had to watch carefully to ensure that they didn't persuade any adults to buy them cigarettes, etc, as supplying cigarettes/alcohol to minors even indirectly is, if knowingly done, a criminal offence in its own right.
However, I have a problem with the assertion that "we have problems with teens because of the attitude that we can herd them like animals and treat them as such." As far as my experience goes, troubled teens often have troubled/troubling parents, or are suffering from hanging out in bad company; creating social change by treating teenagers as responsible individuals may work in Sister Act or something, but it's not an approach which works well in the real world. Shop owners don't generally get much quality time with troublemaking brats, nor do they have the position or authority to fix anything. If it's a choice between accepting shoplifting and disruptive behaviour, or "herding kids like animals", which in practice it is, thank you very much but I'll go with the herding. Most people here do - the local store refuses to serve school-age kids during school hours, the local post office allows a maximum of two school-age kids into the store on the (accurate) principle that teenagers act up in large groups, and so on. Pragmatic, simple and effective.
Au contraire, as they say (assuming you weren't being tongue-in-cheek about the very few terrorist attacks by the French in recent decades on anyone - if you were, I apologise).
The French in their incarnation as wine-drinking, gourmet-cooking inhabitants of Provence and so forth do not have much of a terrorist tendancy, unless you count certain elements in Corsica and Brittany I guess. On the other hand, France has a pretty large population, including a decent number of various varieties of immigrant, meaning that I wouldn't find (say) "French-accented, poss. of [whatever] descent" to be a surprising profile for a suspected terrorist. You don't have to be second-generation French to sound it, after all - you just have to have lived there for a while.
Accents are beginning to sound like lousy indicators of terrorism quotient; some Sept 11 terrorists hung out in Hamburg, so it wouldn't even be all that surprising if you met the odd Al Qaeda terrorist with a German accent now and then (Ziad Samir Jarrah, arguably). Anyhow, Mohammad Sidique Khan spoilt all the fun for me. I can't think of anything more ridiculous than a terrorist with a Yorkshire accent - that's pretty much as Monty Python as real life gets.
Slashdot Mirror
Senseless.
You either require an additional licence to do something (and must therefore pay for the privilege) or you don't, and therefore don't need to pay for it.
The government can tax anything they feel like, as much as they feel like - air, olive oil, the use of escalators, whatever. In their infinite wisdom, they already charge VAT at 17.5% on blank CDs. So the government is taxing the purchase of CDs. But they are not extracting a levy from those who buy blank CDs, in order to compensate copyright holders.
Charging a levy is a muddled idea. Either an additional licence fee is required, or it isn't. If the levy represented the additional fee required to make the copy legally acceptable, that would be different - but it doesn't. Furthermore, the BPI have publicly stated that consumers should be allowed to legally copy music without fear of prosecution, ie. that the BPI does not consider that copying for personal use requires additional fees to be paid, ie. no levy is required in this scenario.
So the only reason remaining for a levy would be copying outside the realm of personal use, which covers a whole lot of different scenarios and is therefore likely to require a separate licence to be negociated. At one extreme, a few pennies' worth of levy is unlikely to strike the BPI as acceptable compensation for scenarios which are out of the scope of any form of 'fair use' (selling copies of Disney movies at a car-boot sale, for example), and at the other, the entity doing the copying probably shouldn't be paying anything for it at all (there are copyright exceptions in UK law for things like copying for non-commercial research, access for the visually impaired, etc). The obvious scenario in which a levy does apply is downloading of copyrighted material off the Web - but in that case, why put the levy on the CDs? Why not on the connection to the ISP? Per gigabyte download?
But legal copying by its very nature is untaxable - if you in your country have such a concept as fair use (we don't, though, in the UK), enabling you to legally copy then there is no justification to extract a levy for exercising that right. You paid for the original resource, so you already have the right to do with it whatever is legal in your country. Why donate further cash for no reason?
If it weren't for the fact that the government in the UK are utterly without capacity for rational thought, I would suspect that this is one of the reasons why they do not support the idea of taxing blank media. It isn't a very logical step to make.
I don't know where people get the idea that noone has heard of DRM (or that knowing about DRM necessarily relates to knowledge of Free Software).
There is a lot of awareness out there of things like copy-protected CDs, or DRM on digital tracks. Although relatively few people know precisely what 'DRM' is, it is increasingly common knowledge that some CDs/DVDs won't rip and some tracks won't play on some devices. That sort of experience is widespread in the general public.
It may be that knowing about 'Free Software and DRM' isn't actually the necessary metric here - what good is served by trying to teach 'most people' to use RMS's vocabulary or get into the philosophy of Free Software? Never mind sanity, what about relevance? Gaining the attention of different types of people probably means using a different type of rhetoric.
Regarding sleep/hibernate on Linux, I have no idea if this is useful information from your perspective but the Thinkwiki provides a lot of material on how to get it to work. I wouldn't know if it works for everyone, but I did get it to work on my T41 (it did take a kernel recompile, but as these things go it was fairly painless - at least, it did not involve any patching or bios fiddling or whatever). Now that it is working I use both modes on a regular basis with no problems.
Sleep mode also used to work on my old laptop (a bizarre bit of kit from Advent). Hibernate, however, did not - only fairly recent kernels seem to support it to an acceptable level.
I remember saying the same thing about hard disk space at some point.
I used to seriously believe that there was no real reason that anyone would want more than a few hundred megabytes of space. One of my friends, who was working on his PhD at the time, told me that he had several gigs of data for the purpose, and frankly at the time I didn't really believe him.
Now, I am working on my own PhD, and I find your comment pretty amusing. We write code in C, we count every metaphorical ounce of system resources, and we are still maxing out server capabilities. Why? Because with today's computers, functionality that was previously impossible has now become merely difficult.
Sometimes it is a question of how big you dream...
I know one Belgian guy who speaks English, French, Flemish, and Russian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian (after a few beers). Given his level of education the chances are that he also spoke Latin, but this is not something you can easily test in the pub because even in a university environment your chances of coming across a chatty Roman legionary are fairly low.
:-) but there are many countries where there is a good reason to be multilingual. You mentioned Scandinavia... As a further example, a significant percentage of the Czech republic (used to) speak not only Czech but also German and/or French and definitely Russian, due to the USSR; now they learn English.
He is uncommon enough even in Belgium
Good :-)
Grief.
Amazed
at how much
time some people have...
The real finding here provides dramatic support to the Nature side of the debate. Students that end up being identified as the most intelligent are those whose cortices (the site of higher cognitive thought) continue to develop for longer...
But why does the cortex continue to develop for longer in these students? Why assume that this is heavily determined by genetics, or conclude that it is not? Presumably someone has looked into the genetics of cortex development in the past, but according to that article:
The NIMH researchers are following-up with a search for gene variants that might be linked to the newly discovered trajectories. However, Shaw notes mounting evidence suggesting that the effects of genes often depends on interactions with environmental events, so the determinants of intelligence will likely prove to be a very complex mix of nature and nurture.
This would seem to me to imply that they don't actually know why said development occurs, and are hedging their bets until such a time as they feel confident to speculate further. Which is the way it should be, and I congratulate them for being that rare thing, a research group who do not take advantage of inaccurate press releases to gain instant notoriety at the expense of science.
Yeah, I expect that 'Psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University' is definitely a male scientist :)
You are right, though; reading TFA is bad form and could lead us all into terrible habits. If we start getting all hung up on details, anything could happen...
On the comic side, this 'Islamic inventions' angle reminds me of Chekov in Star Trek.
"Is Russian inwention!"
Actually it seems to be a little weirder than that.
The researchers said one possible explanation is what has been dubbed the "cognitive reserve" theory.
This holds that highly educated people either have a greater number of nerve connections in their brains, or the nerve connections that they have are more efficient.
Therefore, when the damaging changes associated with Alzheimer's - such as the deposition of toxic protein clumps - start to take place, educated people are better placed to resist their effect at first.
However, the subsequent impact is likely to be greater than it would be in less educated brains, because of the higher levels of accumulated damage.
In other words (I think), educated people simply don't show the effects of Alzheimers as fast. By the time anybody notices that anything is wrong, a great deal of damage already exists. So since it is already at a later stage when you first notice it, it looks from the outside as though the person has very quickly reached an advanced stage of Alzheimers. Instead, they have been resisting Alzheimers for ages.
There was a New Scientist article about this...
Thanks, as a non-TV watching VCR owner I have been through this in exhaustive and disgusting levels of detail with TV licencing on a number of occasions.
Rest assured that, easy reading as it may be, the web site is nonetheless accurate. If you watch broadcast TV, you need a licence. If you merely own a TV, you don't. This is in contrast to other countries in Europe where merely owning a TV means that you have to get a licence. Here, it is *using* it that counts - the act of watching TV without a licence. Not the (f)act of owning a TV without a licence.
I don't watch broadcast TV, therefore I do not have a licence. As suggested, I detune the TV, plug in only the VCR, and TV licencing turn up to inspect it and then subsequently leave me in peace.
Someone gets this wrong every single time the issue of TV licencing turns up on slashdot. Don't ask me why. I can only assume that TV licencing are doing a very good job of propaganda. But according to the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949 and its amendments, which is the relevant statute, the licence fee constitutes permission to receive or record TV. Therefore, the TV licencing only need to know whether you intend to receive or record TV, since ownership of an unlicenced TV just plain isn't in the Act (which simply doesn't say anything at all about how you receive or record the broadcasts, which is why it applies to internet and mobile phone TV and all that). You will find that the Act is quite clear: it states, 'such apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving television program services'. Thus, apparatus installed or used for other purposes, like use with a VCR or DVD setup or for playing Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum, does not require licencing.
Bollocks it is.
Go read the web site.
Do I need a licence?
-
If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one.
Yeah?
Well as it already stands, a license fee isn't payable on owning a TV. It's payable on use of a TV to view broadcast TV.
So no, I don't think that all owners of computers wired up and capable of whatever should pay anything; those who are using it to view BBC content should. And intriguingly, this reduces the BBC tax collection problem to mere implementation of a perfectly simple subscription service. This should improve the moods of all those who don't have TVs and still have to suffer the TV licencing goons - but in fact, what will happen is simply that said goons will now add 'You gotta PC so you gotta pay' to their slogan list. As a matter of fact I personally am of the opinion that this is the reason why TV licencing have not implemented a nice simple unique access code printed on the TV licence already - it is because they far prefer to have an excuse to extend the reach of their "you gotta pay" spiel across the entire computer-using public, than to implement a fair system.
Sigh.
Incidentally, I notice that you didn't put any geographic limits on that belief of yours - will computers wired up and capable of decoding and displaying BBC content in, say, France, USA or Sweden also attract that license fee? If not, why not?
I'm aware that this set of definitions is probably very out of date, but what can I say? I was educated as a physicist...
The idea of believing in gravity or evolution reminds me of that Terry Pratchett quote about 'Oh, Great Table, Without Whom We Are As Naught'. In full, the quote goes:
Anyway, I'm courting the danger of approaching philosophy so I think I'll stop there.
Personally, I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot. I simply disagree with the theory. Just as the Theory of Gravity has some problems and needs to be understood better/differently, I believe the Theory of Evolution needs to be understood better/differently
:-)
So what are you saying? That you don't believe in gravity, because the theory has problems?
How do you rationalise the whole butts-on-seats feet-sticking-to-floor coffee-cup-not-floating thing, then? Friction?
Seriously: The whole point of theories is that there is absolutely no need to go about believing in them whatsoever. The moment you start attempting to apply belief to a theory is the moment your ability as a scientist goes right out the window.
As a scientist, you always have to be prepared to be proven wrong. That means emotionally investing with some wisdom; trust your results, not your pet explanation.
I'm not sure they did it on purpose :)
Is it too much to expect that you make no more than one typo a week-one more than BBC News seems to make?
From this I conclude that you do not read BBC News particularly closely.
Grammar errors and mistakes are frequent (though, having practiced on Slashdot, I can imagine they fade into relative obscurity). Usually, I don't bother writing to them about errors, but occasionally it's just unavoidable - for example, I once read an article there about a bomb threat in Bath (near Bristol, which is to say in the south-west of England), which they had mistakenly described as being in the north of England. Small grammar and spelling errors happen frequently and can sometimes be very detrimental to the legibility of the entire article. Unlike factual errors, they are not always quickly corrected.
You can see the BBC's response to this on From the Editor's Desktop (scroll down to SPILLCHUCKER). An editor friend of mine who proofreads for a living quit reading the site entirely, apparently because it did bad things for his blood pressure. It is true that they have improved a lot in the last year, but at one point reading the BBC news was actually painful for those of us who can't take the odd error.
As they have now installed a spell checker, most of the problems are more to do with grammar, poor sentence construction or results of incomplete reformulation, such as "something something, and had was something something".
I regret to say that the copyright on Mein Kampf is still very much alive. Outside English and Dutch, copyright is owned by the state of Bavaria, until 2015.
In Germany and I believe also in the Netherlands, the copyright is used entirely to ensure that nobody copies the book.
This is disputed here and there... other countries get away with publishing translations. I'm not sure by what authority the state has seized copyright.
Sorry.
Er.
As compared to buying your gas from Russia?
Frankly, I'd rather be dependent on buying uranium from any of a large variety of foreign countries, than dependent on buying my gas from Russia. Uranium has the advantage of relative portability, meaning that at least you have a choice of vendor.
Well... when they said that Stephen Pinker suggested discussing 'dangerous ideas', I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Pinker was planning to use it as a platform for glorifying his 'controversial' stance on EP. Again. As in fact he did.
Pinker is currently as near as social science gets to being a rock star; all image.
That said, many of the articles don't represent that sort of shameless self-promotion. Many are pretty interesting stuff; for me, some that stood out were Michael Shermer, Haim Harari, Timothy Tailor, Sherry Turkle and Diane Halpern.
But yeah, more physics would have been nice, maybe Burt Rutan would have had an interesting opinion or two to share. It seemed like there was a lot more psychology, philosophy, biology and art in there than the hard sciences. Of course, this may have a squishy-science explanation in and of itself, such as 'those who work in the hard sciences are less likely to seek glory in controversy', but this sounds unlikely - perhaps dangerous ideas belonging to hard-science types just don't lend themselves so well to the soundbite format?
I think that idea got fairly extensively tested in the past, such as when Enterprise (yeah yeah I know) was cancelled, when Futurama was cancelled, and so forth. People suggest it periodically, yet it goes nowhere.
It seems plausible that one ought to be able to make episodes on the basis of presales, but apparently the industry has better things to do with its time than test out that sort of theory. Which isn't really very surprising. Aside from everything else, doing work-for-hire for a large, distributed group of pre-sale clients represents a risk. What happens if you make the show, it disappoints them because, oh, they kill off the fans' favourite character, and some idiot starts a class-action lawsuit?
It would be great if some studio decided to get a grip and actually give the idea a sporting chance. However, the attitude of the industry towards new business practices is famously conservative, so I'm not holding my breath.
Hm...
two different markets, to be honest. 16 is nothing like 25 in this case, and that's what makes this a pretty ineffective tech fix.
However, here are a few hopefully illuminating details from a UK perspective (I ran a store for a while):
1) Kids below 16 have a real urge to smoke, but can't buy cigarettes. So they tend to hang out outside shops that sell them, waylaying customers on the way in and promising improbable cash rewards if said customer will buy them cigarettes. Should the customer agree to do so, this would put the shopkeeper and the customer into legal trouble (they committed the illegal act - supplying cigarettes to minors - not the minor). Shopkeepers do not wish to be caught this way.
2) Same scenario as above, only this time with alcohol and a different age limit (18).
3) This is a Spar convenience store. They do not typically sell much of interest to the 16-18 demographic aside from alcohol and cigarettes. 16-18s generally still live with their parents, which is usually why they're outside hanging out in front of a convenience store in the first place. Sure, they have money, but they don't want to buy jam or frozen chicken wings or paper towel with it, so their spending power hardly matters in this instance since Spar typically do not sell computer games, cds, and so forth. We banned under-18s completely - our sales actually went up.
4) You mentioned it: "no responsibility". The little details that (hopefully) stop you and I from disruptive and pointless activities have not yet become relevant to these kids. If they steal a packet of crisps, it isn't because they want crisps and can't afford them. If they steal cigarettes, it's not down to a honest enjoyment of the odour of Benson and Hedges or whatever. It's because they're bored. This is forbidden, and therefore cool. Successfully stealing something is one-up on the shop owner, who presumably deserves it for being part of that pathetically boring adult world.
Shop owners generally don't want to be part of this sort of thing. Who can blame them?
Note: you do get adult shoplifters, so it's not as though this thing would be a solution to shoplifting. You do get occasional disruptive adults, too, although it's relatively rare. But the whole gangs hassling you and your customers act is pretty specifically a youth problem, which is incredibly tiresome for shopkeepers to deal with day-in, day-out. He's actually picked a rather peaceful solution... I used to know one guy who'd wait until they'd gathered outside the store then sprint out, grab some kid or other (male, though), twist the kid's arm behind his back, push him down on a car bonnet and explain the error of his ways. Not a recommended solution, but I could understand his frustration.
*ahem*
I've been in the position of this store owner - way back when the dot com thing stopped, I did a six month stint in an off-licence.
We had a lot of theft, from smash and grab to stealthy shoplifting to the safety-in-numbers crowd the shop, intimidate the cashier, threaten violence, everybody grab something and run for it, approach. We'd call the police, show them the videos, they'd do absolutely sweet fanny adams about it. It was before the era of the ASBO, and the police really didn't have many options apart from waiting until the little bastards reached the sainted age of adulthood, whereupon their next offence would lead to prosecution. The situation isn't unusual - every shop in the area with stock of any interest to teenagers had similar problems, and some had worse.
So we did a number of things. Firstly, we banned under-18s from the shop altogether, which was surprisingly effective, especially given that we had no real means of enforcing it other than yelling at the kids. It made almost no difference to the bottom line, as the teens never bought anything but cheap crisps anyway. Secondly, we identified the parents of brats caught on camera and provided them with the video evidence, a step which ought to have worked but generally didn't - many proud parents are actually proud of their repellent spawn's initiative. Some go so far as to threaten violence against anybody attempting to curtail their child's right to commit crime on demand.
I don't know if we'd have used a device like this had it been around - I suspect not. It's not really specific enough, it's not really necessary, and in fact the blanket-ban approach was effective enough for us as it was. We did have a problem with kids hanging around outside, but I'm not sure we'd have bothered with techie measures to fix that, although it was a problem on a number of levels. First, they tended to upset the customers, if not put them off visiting the shop at all (why bother with all that, if you can just drive to the nice quiet supermarket in the industrial estate?). Second, we had to watch carefully to ensure that they didn't persuade any adults to buy them cigarettes, etc, as supplying cigarettes/alcohol to minors even indirectly is, if knowingly done, a criminal offence in its own right.
However, I have a problem with the assertion that "we have problems with teens because of the attitude that we can herd them like animals and treat them as such." As far as my experience goes, troubled teens often have troubled/troubling parents, or are suffering from hanging out in bad company; creating social change by treating teenagers as responsible individuals may work in Sister Act or something, but it's not an approach which works well in the real world. Shop owners don't generally get much quality time with troublemaking brats, nor do they have the position or authority to fix anything. If it's a choice between accepting shoplifting and disruptive behaviour, or "herding kids like animals", which in practice it is, thank you very much but I'll go with the herding. Most people here do - the local store refuses to serve school-age kids during school hours, the local post office allows a maximum of two school-age kids into the store on the (accurate) principle that teenagers act up in large groups, and so on. Pragmatic, simple and effective.
Au contraire, as they say (assuming you weren't being tongue-in-cheek about the very few terrorist attacks by the French in recent decades on anyone - if you were, I apologise).
The French in their incarnation as wine-drinking, gourmet-cooking inhabitants of Provence and so forth do not have much of a terrorist tendancy, unless you count certain elements in Corsica and Brittany I guess. On the other hand, France has a pretty large population, including a decent number of various varieties of immigrant, meaning that I wouldn't find (say) "French-accented, poss. of [whatever] descent" to be a surprising profile for a suspected terrorist. You don't have to be second-generation French to sound it, after all - you just have to have lived there for a while.
Accents are beginning to sound like lousy indicators of terrorism quotient; some Sept 11 terrorists hung out in Hamburg, so it wouldn't even be all that surprising if you met the odd Al Qaeda terrorist with a German accent now and then (Ziad Samir Jarrah, arguably). Anyhow, Mohammad Sidique Khan spoilt all the fun for me. I can't think of anything more ridiculous than a terrorist with a Yorkshire accent - that's pretty much as Monty Python as real life gets.