And so does WINE -- at least as a smooth migration path from MS Windows, although it can be excellent if one has already made the migration and need to get the occasional MS Windows app working.
Not only is it hard to read (and legal texts don't have to be hard to read), it is putting restrictions upon anyone using the work that I find unacceptable.
Well, tough luck. It's up to the author what restrictions to place on the user, not up to you. The author is giving rights away for nothing that he'd be perfectly entitled to keep; why should he give a flying f--- what is acceptable to you?
Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics are good in that regard, too. For example, he starts his lecture on planetary motion by describing the medieval myth that planets were pushed around by invisible angels. He finishes by pointing out that because we don't really understand what gravity is, all we've really done is turn the invisible angel through 90 degrees and say how hard it pushes.
The problem is with the league tables that put schools under enormous pressure to raise their headline figures. This has all sorts of unfortunate consequences such as the concentration of resources on borderline students to the detriment of the strongest and weakest students.
The league tables are indeed a problem, but my experience is that the problem is the opposite of the one you describe. The day before one of my daughter's exams we got a phone call from her teacher, who asked us not to send her in to the exam, because it was possible she might not pass and that would hit their league table (whereas a no-show wouldn't). We told her where she could put her league table (a place famous for lack of solar illumination) and sent our daughter to the exam anyway. She passed. But the strategy was clearly to exclude marginal pupils, and that's something we've seen across a lot of schools. If a pupil might not get the grades, they don't get to take the exam.
Now look at all the stuff you did at O Level that's only in the further extension modules : matrix manipulation, composition of matrices of transformation leap out at me, but there's other stuff. The calculus I did at O Level extended out to volume of rotation and area of volume of rotation, for example.
Wow, standards must have gone up since the 1970s, then, because none of that was in my 1971 Maths O-level, or in my 1971 Additional Maths O-level. Or, come to that, in my 1973 Maths A-level -- we only covered it in my 1973 Further Maths A-level.
Odd thing is, I know a lot of kids, and the all work hard at their studies, help out on community programmes and generally behave very well. I don't suppose your view of kids might be based on the kids you notice rather than on the actual majority?
fuck all this learning must be fun horse shit, making learning fun hasn't helped anyone actually learn.
Back in the 1960's I had a maths teacher who made maths fun. He left me with a lifelong love of maths, that has served me incredibly well in my engineering career. Which I think means that for all the insightful moderation you might get, you don't actually have a clue what you're writing about.
This has not been the case since the last Conservative government
I don't understand your point -- nothing you write seems to contradict the message to which you're replying.
who changed the rules so state schools other than your closest one had to accept you. This distorted things even more, since the more affluent parents could afford to drive their children to more distant schools with better results, while the poorer parents had no choice but the nearest school.
Whereas before that change the parent who wanted their children to go to good schools hat to move house to get into the right catchment area. And having a car is so obviously much less achievable for the poor than moving into a prestige neighbourhood was under the old system. Er...
Anyway, the rule about having to take kids from further away is a joke when there's barely adequate provision. There has to be some basis to decide who goes to which school (otherwise what would be the basis for any appeal) and they still all have locality as a selection criterion, and the good schools are all oversubscribed, so it's still down to where you live. When we were applying to secondary schools for my daughter we went around the schools, filled in all the forms, and the local authority said, in effect "Tough. You can't have any of the schools you wanted. This is the school she will go to." The whole thing about "choice" is that there can only be meaningful choice if there is over-provision, and there isn't over-provision in the UK state education system.
That means a perfectly flat desert is teeming with alien life.
Damn, you've discovered our secret! Quarg, ready the ship to take us back to Alpha Centuri -- yes, we might as well take the secret of making perfect banoffee pie with us!
Maybe. I don't know exactly how Newton presented gravitation, but he would have known about systems that changed mass as they moved (I understand that ancient Greek long-jumpers were allowed to carry weigths that they threw backwards whilst jumping...) so it makes sense that he wrote his laws of mechanics in a way that accounted for changing mass, but the subtleties of gravitation don't map so well onto already-understood phenomena.
Would you count gravitation as part of Newtonian mechanics, though?
There are already lawyers and judges stripping the Patriot Act and disabling the law as unconstitutional. Whereas in the UK, no constitution means the Patriot Act would be held in force indefinitely.
Why do people persist in spreading this myth? The UK does have a constitution, it just isn't written in a single document. And government legislation in the UK does get challenged and ruled illegal.
And freedom of speech is as easy to overturn in the UK Parliament as a 50%+1 vote. To overturn the Constitution's guarantee is much tougher (50%+1 in Congress, the president's signature, AND 3/4 of the State Legislatures' agreeing to same... the last provision being very difficult to attain).
You could argue that the requirements in the UK are the same (queen's signature rather than presidents). But as the UK remains a single State (devolution hasn't gone so far as to change that) the 3/4 of state legislatures turns into an all-or nothing and is the same thing as the original 50%+1. In other words, the better protection that the USA has is not a result of the constitution -- we both have one of those -- but a result of the USA being a federation.
then the government may be in violation of its own laws.
They're not.
Too bad the U.K. doesn't have some "supreme law of the land" to act as a contract which the government must follow
It does.
and provides guarantees such as free speech which cannot be over-ruled by a politician.
It does. It could be over-ruled by a whole lot of politicians working together, of course. Can you say "constitutional amendment"? Or maybe "Patriot Act" is easier (at least, it was for the politicians).
Newtonian Mechanics as it's taught in schools is wrong at any scale. Newtonian Mechanics as Newton stated it is still valid when relativity is taken into account. Newton didn't state "F = MA", he said that "force is proportional to the rate of change of momentum". A 1kg mass accelerated by 10 neutons for 1 second from stationary will not be traveling at 10 m/s, but it will no longer be a 1kg mass either. The momentum will still be 10 newton seconds, though, just as Newton said it would be.
"Beyond reasonable doubt" is not the same as certainty, so yes, people are convicted of crimes because it's statistically likely (in a Bayesian sense) that they did it.
Well, I would certainly hope NASA isn't dumb enough to send poisonous spiders into space into small, confined quarters with a few humans. That could end poorly, to say the least.
All spiders are venomous (I doubt the humans up there plan to eat the thing, so whether they're poisonous is irrelevant). The important thing is whether they're big and strong enough to inject the venom into a human.
Pretty much. But the original article seems to have been addressing the SAP, and was met with a whole raft of replies complaining that the scientists need to learn some basic logic because the anthropic principle was obviously true, missing the fact that it's the weakanthropic principle that's obvious, and that wasn't the one being talked about.
Translation is never so simple. The connotations of Band Dessine are not the same as those of comic, nor those of graphic novel. Translating it either way subtly changes the meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
And so does WINE -- at least as a smooth migration path from MS Windows, although it can be excellent if one has already made the migration and need to get the occasional MS Windows app working.
Not only is it hard to read (and legal texts don't have to be hard to read), it is putting restrictions upon anyone using the work that I find unacceptable.
Well, tough luck. It's up to the author what restrictions to place on the user, not up to you. The author is giving rights away for nothing that he'd be perfectly entitled to keep; why should he give a flying f--- what is acceptable to you?
Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics are good in that regard, too. For example, he starts his lecture on planetary motion by describing the medieval myth that planets were pushed around by invisible angels. He finishes by pointing out that because we don't really understand what gravity is, all we've really done is turn the invisible angel through 90 degrees and say how hard it pushes.
wine?
Why, thank you. A glass of Chablis, please.
Or, if you mean Windows emulation, my experience is that it still breaks more than Vista does. But maybe it won't by the time MS withdraw XP support.
The problem is with the league tables that put schools under enormous pressure to raise their headline figures. This has all sorts of unfortunate consequences such as the concentration of resources on borderline students to the detriment of the strongest and weakest students.
The league tables are indeed a problem, but my experience is that the problem is the opposite of the one you describe. The day before one of my daughter's exams we got a phone call from her teacher, who asked us not to send her in to the exam, because it was possible she might not pass and that would hit their league table (whereas a no-show wouldn't). We told her where she could put her league table (a place famous for lack of solar illumination) and sent our daughter to the exam anyway. She passed. But the strategy was clearly to exclude marginal pupils, and that's something we've seen across a lot of schools. If a pupil might not get the grades, they don't get to take the exam.
Now look at all the stuff you did at O Level that's only in the further extension modules : matrix manipulation, composition of matrices of transformation leap out at me, but there's other stuff. The calculus I did at O Level extended out to volume of rotation and area of volume of rotation, for example.
Wow, standards must have gone up since the 1970s, then, because none of that was in my 1971 Maths O-level, or in my 1971 Additional Maths O-level. Or, come to that, in my 1973 Maths A-level -- we only covered it in my 1973 Further Maths A-level.
Odd thing is, I know a lot of kids, and the all work hard at their studies, help out on community programmes and generally behave very well. I don't suppose your view of kids might be based on the kids you notice rather than on the actual majority?
fuck all this learning must be fun horse shit, making learning fun hasn't helped anyone actually learn.
Back in the 1960's I had a maths teacher who made maths fun. He left me with a lifelong love of maths, that has served me incredibly well in my engineering career. Which I think means that for all the insightful moderation you might get, you don't actually have a clue what you're writing about.
This has not been the case since the last Conservative government
I don't understand your point -- nothing you write seems to contradict the message to which you're replying.
who changed the rules so state schools other than your closest one had to accept you. This distorted things even more, since the more affluent parents could afford to drive their children to more distant schools with better results, while the poorer parents had no choice but the nearest school.
Whereas before that change the parent who wanted their children to go to good schools hat to move house to get into the right catchment area. And having a car is so obviously much less achievable for the poor than moving into a prestige neighbourhood was under the old system. Er...
Anyway, the rule about having to take kids from further away is a joke when there's barely adequate provision. There has to be some basis to decide who goes to which school (otherwise what would be the basis for any appeal) and they still all have locality as a selection criterion, and the good schools are all oversubscribed, so it's still down to where you live. When we were applying to secondary schools for my daughter we went around the schools, filled in all the forms, and the local authority said, in effect "Tough. You can't have any of the schools you wanted. This is the school she will go to." The whole thing about "choice" is that there can only be meaningful choice if there is over-provision, and there isn't over-provision in the UK state education system.
That means a perfectly flat desert is teeming with alien life.
Damn, you've discovered our secret! Quarg, ready the ship to take us back to Alpha Centuri -- yes, we might as well take the secret of making perfect banoffee pie with us!
Nobody. But you've got to admit, the advice is still sound.
What is wrong, is Newton's gravitation theory.
Maybe. I don't know exactly how Newton presented gravitation, but he would have known about systems that changed mass as they moved (I understand that ancient Greek long-jumpers were allowed to carry weigths that they threw backwards whilst jumping...) so it makes sense that he wrote his laws of mechanics in a way that accounted for changing mass, but the subtleties of gravitation don't map so well onto already-understood phenomena.
Would you count gravitation as part of Newtonian mechanics, though?
Lynx even more so.
GP is also obviously not aware of how long it takes for the food to turn up in some restaurants...
There are already lawyers and judges stripping the Patriot Act and disabling the law as unconstitutional. Whereas in the UK, no constitution means the Patriot Act would be held in force indefinitely.
Why do people persist in spreading this myth? The UK does have a constitution, it just isn't written in a single document. And government legislation in the UK does get challenged and ruled illegal.
And freedom of speech is as easy to overturn in the UK Parliament as a 50%+1 vote. To overturn the Constitution's guarantee is much tougher (50%+1 in Congress, the president's signature, AND 3/4 of the State Legislatures' agreeing to same... the last provision being very difficult to attain).
You could argue that the requirements in the UK are the same (queen's signature rather than presidents). But as the UK remains a single State (devolution hasn't gone so far as to change that) the 3/4 of state legislatures turns into an all-or nothing and is the same thing as the original 50%+1. In other words, the better protection that the USA has is not a result of the constitution -- we both have one of those -- but a result of the USA being a federation.
That was rather my point. a "supreme law of the land" doesn't provide the protection that theaveng seems to think it does.
If BT is a government-owned company
It isn't.
then the government may be in violation of its own laws.
They're not.
Too bad the U.K. doesn't have some "supreme law of the land" to act as a contract which the government must follow
It does.
and provides guarantees such as free speech which cannot be over-ruled by a politician.
It does. It could be over-ruled by a whole lot of politicians working together, of course. Can you say "constitutional amendment"? Or maybe "Patriot Act" is easier (at least, it was for the politicians).
Newtonian Mechanics as it's taught in schools is wrong at any scale. Newtonian Mechanics as Newton stated it is still valid when relativity is taken into account. Newton didn't state "F = MA", he said that "force is proportional to the rate of change of momentum". A 1kg mass accelerated by 10 neutons for 1 second from stationary will not be traveling at 10 m/s, but it will no longer be a 1kg mass either. The momentum will still be 10 newton seconds, though, just as Newton said it would be.
In fact one doesn't have to worry about larger animals either
[snip]
one of the few things our army snipers have had to do
Well, I for one would be careful around those army snipers. I'd sooner take on a spider any day.
"Beyond reasonable doubt" is not the same as certainty, so yes, people are convicted of crimes because it's statistically likely (in a Bayesian sense) that they did it.
Well, I would certainly hope NASA isn't dumb enough to send poisonous spiders into space into small, confined quarters with a few humans. That could end poorly, to say the least.
All spiders are venomous (I doubt the humans up there plan to eat the thing, so whether they're poisonous is irrelevant). The important thing is whether they're big and strong enough to inject the venom into a human.
Or The Netherlands, in my experience of driving (and trying to use satnav) there.
If by "fingerprint" you mean something giving you access, you're talking about DRM, which is unacceptable.
Unacceptable to whom? Not to most of the music-listening public.
Pretty much. But the original article seems to have been addressing the SAP, and was met with a whole raft of replies complaining that the scientists need to learn some basic logic because the anthropic principle was obviously true, missing the fact that it's the weakanthropic principle that's obvious, and that wasn't the one being talked about.
Translation is never so simple. The connotations of Band Dessine are not the same as those of comic, nor those of graphic novel. Translating it either way subtly changes the meaning.