When I first became a parent I was all for old-fashioned discipline having seen the mess that most parents seemed to have made of their kids. But although I was always careful to keep control of myself when applying discipline it wasn't long before I realised that the "harmless clip round the ear" and the "bend over you're going to get a smack" routines, whether applied coldly, sadly or with apparent anger, were only terrifying and confusing my toddler son. If I'd kept it up I honestly can't say whether it would have succeeded in making him obedient, but I do know it would have caused him a lot of suffering and emotional torment and driven a wedge between us. So I abandoned this approach and began using calm reasoned explanation backed up with nonviolent sanctions.
That son is now 15, a grammar school student at the top of his class. He has a polite and friendly nature, a wide and diverse circle of friends, and he is a credit to himself and to his family.
My 13 year old daughter, whom I've never smacked at all, is a balanced and well-mannered young lady with a kind and loving nature and many talents including stage acting and music. She picks her friends carefully. She's quite happy just being 13 and doesn't get up to any of the disgusting nonsense that so many of her cohort do who dress like tarts and can't seem to wait to get boozed up and lose their virginity.
My 4-year old daughter, also never ever smacked, and almost never even even shouted at, is brighter than either of them. When she gets upset or naughty all I have to do is speak to her quietly, she always gives me her full attention, and then she is calm. And why? Because the most important thing to her is that her Daddy is so very, very proud of her.
As time has gone on, experience has made me a better father. Just about the very first thing I learned was that smacking is counterproductive, at best. Since then I have concentrated on learning what *does* work. Positive reinforcement, sympathy, understanding, and most of all, love.
Beating infants is a symptom of a primitive society in which children are merely another resource to be controlled and exploited. But as we all know, child abuse has a tendency to repeat from generation to generation. STOP AND THINK WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
OK so what do we learn from this? That the Old Testament was just plain wrong, and attempts to retcon its meaning are nothing more than sad acts of self-deception.
I've always favoured orangey-yellow text on a dark midnight blue background. Warm and restful. The same golden yellow on a dark green background isn't bad either. The yellow text is fairly important as the human eye is most sensitive to that part of the spectrum so it's less demanding of your brightness and contrast settings.
Let me put it this way: the last time I tried to play a DRM'ed WMV on Linux, about a couple of years ago, there was no way to do it, at least not directly via a native Linux player equipped with W32 codecs.
I haven't heard of any breakthrough in the meantime.
The TV licence fee is collected aggressively. Since as long ago as I can remember they have had TV detector vans roaming the streets. I believe these work by picking up the resonance in your TV tuner's RF coil. More recently they implemented a computer database of every household in the country, and any household that doesn't have a TV licence is automatically under suspicion.
The penalty for owning a TV receiver and not paying your licence fee is fairly harsh - a thousand pounds these days I think. Plus a criminal record, for Christ's sake!
There are billboard adverts everywhere reminding you of these things in no uncertain terms.
I believe this was one the very first appearances of Orwellianism in British culture. It began before anybody really became sensitive to this kind of shit, and by now everybody is used to it.
Microsoft DRM has been around for a good few years now and whereas the earliest versions were cracked in due course, the later versions are still fairly solid. I don't believe it's yet possible, for example, to watch DRM-protected WMV files on Linux, even if you have the W32 codecs pack installed.
I did see one sort of hack for MS DRM but it was limited in what it could do...if you had a valid DRM "licence" for the protected file you could use the hack tool to create a non-DRM copy of the file. But it couldn't unlock a file for which you didn't have a valid key.
I suppose this type of hack could theoretically be used to unlock MS-DRM protected videos on BBC *if* they use the current form of DRM which relies on you downloading a key and *if* you use the tool to unlock it before the seven days expires.
It's hardly ideal.
OTOH, a much bigger worry is this response from the BBC that "iPlayer will be available for Mac" - it's implausible that they haven't heard of Linux, so this is tantamount to a deliberate slap in the face for Linux users. And checking on progress every SIX MONTHS!? What kind of project management it that? The "don't care" kind.
Common sense prevailed at the BBC while Greg Dyke was around. Since he was pushed out it's all turning to shit again. With people like these at the wheel, television's days are surely numbered. I don't know about you lot but the only thing I watch on TV these days is Dr Who and it wouldn't kill me to give that up. Fuck 'em.
Forget all the so-called "improvements". I just want a standards-compliant rendering engine that means I don't have to jump through hoops in order to get web pages to work in the two most popular browsers.
This lack of focus on standards in such a critical area is just stupid, the worst sort of corporate nonsense - and when the Microsoft executives who told Wilson he couldn't fix these issues in IE7, they effectively made themselves the enemies of progress.
Well right of course, that's just where the listening gear is. It doesn't really matter where the computing cores are, that's what fiberoptic cable is for.
the govt. are highly motivated to make this work. This is, after all, the machine they need to process all of the data that their ID card scheme will generate (and run face recognition software on live video feeds from thousands of surveillance cams, and decrypt and analyze internet traffic and PSTN voice data, and run sophisticated prediction algorithms on the lot). With approx. 50 milion adults who can now *all* be monitored 24/7 in terms of where they go who they talk to and what they talk about, that's surely going to need an order of magnitude more computing capacity than they have at GCHQ Cheltenham now.
I'm pretty sure EDS will be gagging to get a slice of that.
"USAian" is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek term frequently used on Slashdot to denote US citizens. America is a pair of continental landmasses and "Americans" would therefore include Canadians, Mexicans, Chileans, Argentinians and everybody in between. Or so it has been said.
> Americans are hated because we heppily allow our government to screw everyone else on the planet for our own gains.
A small correction: the US government is screwing everyone on the planet for their own _short_term_ gains. Ultimately USAians are screwing themselves too, because all the big problems today are global problems.
You're looking in the wrong place. There won't have been all that much evolution over the past four hundred years.
There has been some natural selections though, as noted, in that nations which fought too many wars (eg the French and Italians in the Napoleonic wars) tend now to have smaller males as the genes coding for more physically impressive males were severely thinned out on the battlefield.
Forgive me, but the rest of your response seems like the typically hostile reaction of the politically correct. The fact is that evolutionary psychology, a branch of evolutionary biology, is a well developed science with much careful research behind it and can't be dismissed in a couple of hundred words of selected anecdotes, vague pronouncements and general hand waving masquerading as "counter examples".
Evolutionary Biology's most famous proponent in terms of explaining it to the lay public - the field's "Richard Dawkins", if you like - is Professor Steven Pinker (now at Harvard). I must thoroughly recommend two of his books "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" which thoroughly investigate the balance between culture and biology in determining human social behaviour. Whatever your current beliefs you can't fail to be impressed by the clear headed arguments in these books which are careful to present all sides of the argument and then test each to destruction. One of Pinker's main missions is to debunk myth and he is careful not to infer any more than is reasonable from each experimental conclusion - you'll find no theories of racial superiority here - but you are bound to develop a sense that although we are more than the sum of our parts, we now have a clear idea of just how much of what we do and how we do it, has been shaped through evolution. Anybody who reads these books will finish up smarter than they were.
Global climate is not stable or unstable, but metastable. That means at any particular time it will inhabit an equilibrium that is stable for a fairly wide range of conditions on either side of the mean.
If you then interfere with some of the variables - such as greenhouse gas concentration, or solar output - that moves the system to the edge of the current equilibrium from where it can fall into a different equilibrium state with a different mean temperature, ice cover, sea level etc. The new equilibrium will also be stable and perhaps even resist change more robustly than the current one.
The question is, can human activity impact the climate to a sufficient degree to rock the climate out of its current equilibrium and into the unstable region from where other stable states are reachable? The evidence so far suggests it can.
It won't be much consolation to those killed by climate change, or to those of us struggling to survive in what's left, to know that sea levels might return to "normal" after a few thousand years. The problem we have to deal with is the one facing us now. And rising ocean temperature is the problem.
> This would be a lot more motivating and captivating than scanning the heavens for shapes of creatures from mythology
That's not what astronomers do. That's not even what amateur astronomers do.
The constellation-based naming system is just a convenient way of finding your way around the sky because it leverages the human mind's facility for pattern recognition and it's a billion times easier than trying to remember thousands of ascension and declination co-ordinates which change every minute.
The constellations themselves only hold significance for astrologers, of which the less said the better.
> the Chinese, who had been to these places 75 years earlier...and pulled back, because the mandarin bureacracy had decided to stop funding these expeditions on the basis that they had little practical value, while there were problems at home of more pressing concern to be dealt with.
Ha ha, well it's a given that Stalin, Hitler*, Pol Pot etc would have been furiously scribbling notes while reading the book but if you'll forgive me for saying so, they are a little outside the scope of this conversation since we were talking about readers in general, the proverbial man in the street. Thay are statistical outliers, you might say, and not indicative of the mien or mindset of the average human being. Not to say that the average human being isn't capable of evil, just that the average human being generally isn't hell bent on it.
In any case no I don't think they would have empathized with the O'Brien character, or with anyone else for that matter. The thing about most of the people you mentioned** is that they were all psychopaths. The defining characteristic of a psychopath is that he utterly lacks the ability to empathize.
*Of course Hitler and Stalin would not have had a chance to read the book because it was published after their deaths. Had it been written earlier I am sure they would have made time for it. I am sure it's very popular as a "howto" with some of the South American despots whose regimes were installed or propped up from time to time by the US government over the past half century.
**Possible exceptions being Mao Zedong and George Bush. Mao at least had some rationale identifiable with the public good (a nation of over half a billion people living in medieval conditions that needed to catch up with the rest of the world as quickly as possible) and his reign wasn't as purely characterized by brutality as the others. As for Bush, he's nothing - just a puppet of the establishment. And gone in a couple of years. I only list these because I don't think there is a general consensus that they are psychopaths and I don't intend to get into an argument with anyone about this paragraph.
I don't buy into the "war on terror" either. It's a complete sham. I wasn't talking about that nonsense at all. I was referring to the inevitable bloodbath in the near future when every nation will be struggling to fend off food water and fuel shortages and takes up arms against its neighbours. When all is said and done, the political correctness of the late 20th/early 21st century can be rapidly dispensed with when your children have nothing to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
"Kids are brighter than you think". Exactly.
I have three kids, ages 15, 13 and 4.
When I first became a parent I was all for old-fashioned discipline having seen the mess that most parents seemed to have made of their kids. But although I was always careful to keep control of myself when applying discipline it wasn't long before I realised that the "harmless clip round the ear" and the "bend over you're going to get a smack" routines, whether applied coldly, sadly or with apparent anger, were only terrifying and confusing my toddler son. If I'd kept it up I honestly can't say whether it would have succeeded in making him obedient, but I do know it would have caused him a lot of suffering and emotional torment and driven a wedge between us. So I abandoned this approach and began using calm reasoned explanation backed up with nonviolent sanctions.
That son is now 15, a grammar school student at the top of his class. He has a polite and friendly nature, a wide and diverse circle of friends, and he is a credit to himself and to his family.
My 13 year old daughter, whom I've never smacked at all, is a balanced and well-mannered young lady with a kind and loving nature and many talents including stage acting and music. She picks her friends carefully. She's quite happy just being 13 and doesn't get up to any of the disgusting nonsense that so many of her cohort do who dress like tarts and can't seem to wait to get boozed up and lose their virginity.
My 4-year old daughter, also never ever smacked, and almost never even even shouted at, is brighter than either of them. When she gets upset or naughty all I have to do is speak to her quietly, she always gives me her full attention, and then she is calm. And why? Because the most important thing to her is that her Daddy is so very, very proud of her.
As time has gone on, experience has made me a better father. Just about the very first thing I learned was that smacking is counterproductive, at best. Since then I have concentrated on learning what *does* work. Positive reinforcement, sympathy, understanding, and most of all, love.
Beating infants is a symptom of a primitive society in which children are merely another resource to be controlled and exploited. But as we all know, child abuse has a tendency to repeat from generation to generation. STOP AND THINK WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
OK so what do we learn from this? That the Old Testament was just plain wrong, and attempts to retcon its meaning are nothing more than sad acts of self-deception.
FUD, FUD, FUD
yup, that's the exact noise those giant fan blades make.
I've always favoured orangey-yellow text on a dark midnight blue background. Warm and restful. The same golden yellow on a dark green background isn't bad either. The yellow text is fairly important as the human eye is most sensitive to that part of the spectrum so it's less demanding of your brightness and contrast settings.
> I'm sure they've also heard of many other operating systems,
Not on the desktop. After Windows, Mac and Linux if there is anything else left at all, it must be down to literally a handful of people.
> No matter how much of a fanboy you are
Judging by your username, your "homepage" and your posting history, it's fairly self-evident who the rabid "fanboy" is.
>Your phrasing means you don't know
I'm not making this up.
Let me put it this way: the last time I tried to play a DRM'ed WMV on Linux, about a couple of years ago, there was no way to do it, at least not directly via a native Linux player equipped with W32 codecs.
I haven't heard of any breakthrough in the meantime.
The TV licence fee is collected aggressively. Since as long ago as I can remember they have had TV detector vans roaming the streets. I believe these work by picking up the resonance in your TV tuner's RF coil. More recently they implemented a computer database of every household in the country, and any household that doesn't have a TV licence is automatically under suspicion.
The penalty for owning a TV receiver and not paying your licence fee is fairly harsh - a thousand pounds these days I think. Plus a criminal record, for Christ's sake!
There are billboard adverts everywhere reminding you of these things in no uncertain terms.
I believe this was one the very first appearances of Orwellianism in British culture. It began before anybody really became sensitive to this kind of shit, and by now everybody is used to it.
Maybe, maybe not.
Microsoft DRM has been around for a good few years now and whereas the earliest versions were cracked in due course, the later versions are still fairly solid. I don't believe it's yet possible, for example, to watch DRM-protected WMV files on Linux, even if you have the W32 codecs pack installed.
I did see one sort of hack for MS DRM but it was limited in what it could do...if you had a valid DRM "licence" for the protected file you could use the hack tool to create a non-DRM copy of the file. But it couldn't unlock a file for which you didn't have a valid key.
I suppose this type of hack could theoretically be used to unlock MS-DRM protected videos on BBC *if* they use the current form of DRM which relies on you downloading a key and *if* you use the tool to unlock it before the seven days expires.
It's hardly ideal.
OTOH, a much bigger worry is this response from the BBC that "iPlayer will be available for Mac" - it's implausible that they haven't heard of Linux, so this is tantamount to a deliberate slap in the face for Linux users. And checking on progress every SIX MONTHS!? What kind of project management it that? The "don't care" kind.
Common sense prevailed at the BBC while Greg Dyke was around. Since he was pushed out it's all turning to shit again. With people like these at the wheel, television's days are surely numbered. I don't know about you lot but the only thing I watch on TV these days is Dr Who and it wouldn't kill me to give that up. Fuck 'em.
Forget all the so-called "improvements". I just want a standards-compliant rendering engine that means I don't have to jump through hoops in order to get web pages to work in the two most popular browsers.
This lack of focus on standards in such a critical area is just stupid, the worst sort of corporate nonsense - and when the Microsoft executives who told Wilson he couldn't fix these issues in IE7, they effectively made themselves the enemies of progress.
Well right of course, that's just where the listening gear is. It doesn't really matter where the computing cores are, that's what fiberoptic cable is for.
the govt. are highly motivated to make this work. This is, after all, the machine they need to process all of the data that their ID card scheme will generate (and run face recognition software on live video feeds from thousands of surveillance cams, and decrypt and analyze internet traffic and PSTN voice data, and run sophisticated prediction algorithms on the lot). With approx. 50 milion adults who can now *all* be monitored 24/7 in terms of where they go who they talk to and what they talk about, that's surely going to need an order of magnitude more computing capacity than they have at GCHQ Cheltenham now.
I'm pretty sure EDS will be gagging to get a slice of that.
"USAian" is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek term frequently used on Slashdot to denote US citizens. America is a pair of continental landmasses and "Americans" would therefore include Canadians, Mexicans, Chileans, Argentinians and everybody in between. Or so it has been said.
> Americans are hated because we heppily allow our government to screw everyone else on the planet for our own gains.
A small correction: the US government is screwing everyone on the planet for their own _short_term_ gains. Ultimately USAians are screwing themselves too, because all the big problems today are global problems.
You're looking in the wrong place. There won't have been all that much evolution over the past four hundred years.
There has been some natural selections though, as noted, in that nations which fought too many wars (eg the French and Italians in the Napoleonic wars) tend now to have smaller males as the genes coding for more physically impressive males were severely thinned out on the battlefield.
Forgive me, but the rest of your response seems like the typically hostile reaction of the politically correct. The fact is that evolutionary psychology, a branch of evolutionary biology, is a well developed science with much careful research behind it and can't be dismissed in a couple of hundred words of selected anecdotes, vague pronouncements and general hand waving masquerading as "counter examples".
Evolutionary Biology's most famous proponent in terms of explaining it to the lay public - the field's "Richard Dawkins", if you like - is Professor Steven Pinker (now at Harvard). I must thoroughly recommend two of his books "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" which thoroughly investigate the balance between culture and biology in determining human social behaviour. Whatever your current beliefs you can't fail to be impressed by the clear headed arguments in these books which are careful to present all sides of the argument and then test each to destruction. One of Pinker's main missions is to debunk myth and he is careful not to infer any more than is reasonable from each experimental conclusion - you'll find no theories of racial superiority here - but you are bound to develop a sense that although we are more than the sum of our parts, we now have a clear idea of just how much of what we do and how we do it, has been shaped through evolution. Anybody who reads these books will finish up smarter than they were.
> NCR's general manager thinks few people in the general community will care about the plight of the palest workforce,
What, they won't care about the _slightly_darker_ workforce?
I agree. But that's art folks for you. They're never satisfied to just give you what you WANTED.
Don't know about continental Europem but concurrent sentencing *is* used in the UK
Global climate is not stable or unstable, but metastable. That means at any particular time it will inhabit an equilibrium that is stable for a fairly wide range of conditions on either side of the mean.
If you then interfere with some of the variables - such as greenhouse gas concentration, or solar output - that moves the system to the edge of the current equilibrium from where it can fall into a different equilibrium state with a different mean temperature, ice cover, sea level etc. The new equilibrium will also be stable and perhaps even resist change more robustly than the current one.
The question is, can human activity impact the climate to a sufficient degree to rock the climate out of its current equilibrium and into the unstable region from where other stable states are reachable? The evidence so far suggests it can.
It won't be much consolation to those killed by climate change, or to those of us struggling to survive in what's left, to know that sea levels might return to "normal" after a few thousand years. The problem we have to deal with is the one facing us now. And rising ocean temperature is the problem.
I recognize those two! It's Rebo and Zooty!
> This would be a lot more motivating and captivating than scanning the heavens for shapes of creatures from mythology
That's not what astronomers do. That's not even what amateur astronomers do.
The constellation-based naming system is just a convenient way of finding your way around the sky because it leverages the human mind's facility for pattern recognition and it's a billion times easier than trying to remember thousands of ascension and declination co-ordinates which change every minute.
The constellations themselves only hold significance for astrologers, of which the less said the better.
> the Chinese, who had been to these places 75 years earlier ...and pulled back, because the mandarin bureacracy had decided to stop funding these expeditions on the basis that they had little practical value, while there were problems at home of more pressing concern to be dealt with.
A lesson for our times, indeed.
Ha ha, well it's a given that Stalin, Hitler*, Pol Pot etc would have been furiously scribbling notes while reading the book but if you'll forgive me for saying so, they are a little outside the scope of this conversation since we were talking about readers in general, the proverbial man in the street. Thay are statistical outliers, you might say, and not indicative of the mien or mindset of the average human being. Not to say that the average human being isn't capable of evil, just that the average human being generally isn't hell bent on it.
In any case no I don't think they would have empathized with the O'Brien character, or with anyone else for that matter. The thing about most of the people you mentioned** is that they were all psychopaths. The defining characteristic of a psychopath is that he utterly lacks the ability to empathize.
*Of course Hitler and Stalin would not have had a chance to read the book because it was published after their deaths. Had it been written earlier I am sure they would have made time for it. I am sure it's very popular as a "howto" with some of the South American despots whose regimes were installed or propped up from time to time by the US government over the past half century.
**Possible exceptions being Mao Zedong and George Bush. Mao at least had some rationale identifiable with the public good (a nation of over half a billion people living in medieval conditions that needed to catch up with the rest of the world as quickly as possible) and his reign wasn't as purely characterized by brutality as the others. As for Bush, he's nothing - just a puppet of the establishment. And gone in a couple of years. I only list these because I don't think there is a general consensus that they are psychopaths and I don't intend to get into an argument with anyone about this paragraph.
I don't buy into the "war on terror" either. It's a complete sham. I wasn't talking about that nonsense at all. I was referring to the inevitable bloodbath in the near future when every nation will be struggling to fend off food water and fuel shortages and takes up arms against its neighbours. When all is said and done, the political correctness of the late 20th/early 21st century can be rapidly dispensed with when your children have nothing to eat.
Sorry to be impolite, but I call bullshit! I defy you to find one single person who read 1984 and empathized with O'Brien rather than Smith.