Why solve a social problem with a technical solution?
It's not, it's replacing one technical solution, of having the teacher fill in a register at the start of every lesson, with another technical solution, which does that task automatically.
The benefit is obviously the elimination of a task which often takes up the first several minutes of lessons!
I agree the distopian-1984 take on this story is definitely the more interesting & exciting. It just doesn't make much sense considering the government will already have access to most people's facial features via their passports anyway, whilst there is a clear practical use for the system by the college in student registration.
The standard procedure at most schools & colleges is for the teacher to either call out everyone's name for them to respond or if it's a smallish class maybe check around the room for absentees. This task is performed in every first lesson of the morning and afternoon by every teacher, so the task obviously impacts on the teaching of a lot of lessons, not just the support staffer who correlates the registers.
You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency. That automated system is NO GOOD for that purpose - and you're relying on it with little to no manual backup.
Why? At the vast majority of colleges, there is no manual system it's replacing (registers don't tend to get collated till the end of the lesson or day). Besides, I don't see why this prevents escape during a fire, surely the college will have emergency exits!
you WILL get students with photocopies of their friend's faces
The system uses infa-red to examine facial features making doing such near-impossible.
Besides it's already been in use for some time by a number of businesses who obviously haven't had too many problems with it; and most businesses care far more about whether or not their employees are present at work!
No, you're just displaying a lack of intelligence.
The world is full of billions of people all with different opinions and ideas. There tend to be people both for and against basically anything imaginable, whether itâ(TM)s civil infrastructure or football tactics. Making generalized statements like yours just signifies a distinct lack of analytical ability.
"is the creation of this "green" paper from wombat poo actually any better than using renewable tree resources?"
Whilst I have no figures, I would have thought a most definite yes when considering the enormous amount of effort usually required to produce paper from trees (which require a lot of labour, land and fertilizer to plant, harvest and transport). That's before all the effort then required to convert the wood first into woodchips and then into pulp.
Whether or not paper from poo could be carried out on an industrial level is another matter though.
As a final note, I'd like to point out tree farms aren't actually a very renewable resouce either, at least no more than any other intensly farmed crop anyway. Good yields often requires years of applying fertilizers and forest management. It's not just a case of sprinkling a few seeds and coming back 20 years later expecting to see a shiny new forest, in those cases you tend to get mixed forest & shrubland with limited pulp value.
If I understand the article and the previous poster correctly, Kookaburra paper would be far more difficult to create due to Kookaburra's being carnivorous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra#Behavior), which would mean their dung is far less fiberous than the previously mentioned animals.
Which also invalidates much of the compliance with Freedom of Information concerns since nearly all communication between constituents and their MP isn't covered by Freedom of Information laws anyway. Nor should it be anymore than consultations with your lawyer or doctor.
Many of us here don't take kindly to people like you who advocating violation of the Temporal Accords. As a pre-verteran of the temporal cold war I still carry the scars that conflict will inflict on me.
I would be interested to know what research you base that on.
Whilst smoking it with tobacco has been shown in several studies to have many of the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoking in general, I've never heard of any decent research showing specifically that Cannabis is carcinogenic and a couple of studies have shown it not to have some of the dangers of tobacco (mainly due to the absence of nicotine and that chemical's effects on blood pressure).
Although many strains do contain significant quantities of tar and several other carcinogenic chemicals, but that's still some way from proving that smoking it moderately (as this study examined) is a cause of cancer.
Of course. The reason it's illegal is all down to some conspiracy between Big Pharma and the government; it doesn't have anything to do with the morale outrage tens of millions of older folks in particular display when someone caught smoking Cannabis isn't jailed for life.
Regardless of the facts, a sizable proportion of the public see Cannabis as being pretty much the same as heroin and other hard drugs. Any politician who says he/she would legalize Cannabis has absolutely no chance of being elected in all but a handful of places in the USA.
I would say the mainstream churches have far more to do with Cannabis being illegal than the Pharmaceutical industry. Besdies, chronic pain isn't even that big a market anyway and as there are already generic versions of most painkillers anyway, the arguement really doesn't stack up.
"There are lots of options, this is simply the easiest."
I suspect the main reason is because YouTube's "channel" service which they wish to utilize is an extremely good one at the forefront of the market. They couldn't hope to create such a level of functionality, especially all the features which ties in to YouTube's wider video sharing community.
"Meanwhile the Wikipedia article probably cites the most relevant and recent papers, and maybe even has a link to a PDF of it or another relevant website."
Occasionally yes, most of the time the "citations" are simply news stories or other sources which rely blindly on the factuality of the article. Wikipedia articles with citations to actual peer-reviewed journal articles are rare indeed, far rarer than on Britannica.
"Even if Britannica does pop up in Google's search results I usually don't bother looking, because I know it probably won't tell me anything I don't already know"
"Businesses have to answer to the customer EVERY DAMN DAY"
They do? The 12-month contract documents most people have with their utility & service providers say otherwise. Regardless of technicalities of election and payment cycles, the implication you're making that commercial organizations are somehow the most accountable to the public is flawed. Many commercial service/utility providers are deeply resented by their customers, but at the end of the day, the customers want electric/gas/internet.
The fundamental issue is that if, as you say (and I don't dispute) people in general are rubbish at choosing elected officials, why would they be any better at choosing the businesses they give their money to?
Especially when hundreds of billions is spent by companies to entice people to purchase their particular product; this certainly isn't done out of companiesâ(TM) desire to see an efficiently operating society!
The argument isn't nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
"You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector."
That's utter rubbish. Publicly funded capital projects often bring about massive improvements to economies. Las Vegas's economy has certainly improved since the building of the Hoover Dam, to name but a single example.
Having read many Economics books I know that there are countless contradictory economic eheories out there, some encourage the use of public financing, some encourage the use of private financing; neither belief has been objectively proven as superior.
What you say here and in other posts is your opinion, not some sort of economic fact (as there is no such thing)!
Even in militaries, application availability is a principle concern when purchasing systems. Keeping in mind these were admin networks (rather than operational networks) it's not hard to see why - like most organizations - they choose a more widely supported OS over a more sercure one.
Except that the fact these infected computers are owned by the military is pretty inconsequential as they are on admin networks, not operations networks. Payroll computers are hardly running top-secret, mission-critical applications.
Heck, most the people using them probably aren't even military personnel.
Although Galileo didn't incur the wrath of the Church for making his moon-map, that was for the entirely different achievment of proving earth wasn't the center of the universe.
Except that by using such logic you could equally call any scientific theory a religion. Especially ones not simply & immediately demonstrable.
The only difference between scientific theory and religious belief (or belief in general) is that scientific theory is based solely on observed evidence and logical derivation. As soon as you claim a scientific theory isn't based solely on said "observed evidence and logical derivation" then you are thereby claiming it is a belief rather than a theory.
Assigning "sins" or any other facet of religion (or any other belief system for that matter) is then just a simple creative exercise. One could equally claim evolution is a religion and Darwin it's Messiah for example, or Stephen Hawkings the Pope of the Black Hole Theory religion...
Rabbits weren't intentionally introduced to Australia, they were imported as a live food source and escaped (rabbits were popular on long sea voyages as they don't need much room and are quite hardy). You're probably thinking of the cane toad which was introduced to Australia to stop insects eating crops in the early 1900's and has desimated native wildlife in some parts.
This disasterous introduction is often held up as an example of the unintended consequences 'helping' the natural enviroment can cause. However, with the cane toad it wasn't so much an 'unintended' consequence, as they always knew it was a danger to wildlife but this was ignored as little regard was given to ecological consequences in general in back then (and they didn't realise just quite how bad it would be).
Generally intentional introductions of species have gone well, in Australia, the Dung Beetle and the Cactoblastis Moth have both helped combat their respective enviromental problems without significant problems. The real problems for native enviroments have normally comes from unintentional introductions, where imported animals escape and over time establish wild populations.
So athletes shouldn't be honored then? After all, they have only been able to get their gold medals thanks to being born with a good physique (training aside, you still need to be born with natural physical talent).
Similarly, Einstein and other prominent scientists shouldn't be honored, they didn't "earn" their smart brains, did they? Obviously, anyone from a good family shouldn't be honored, their success has inevitably been helped by their happening to be born into loving & caring families.
A few years down this route and what do you know, you've got a new Pol Pot in charge killing off anyone who achieves success if they're not of the right background.
Britain's Queen has achieved something (something history shows is very difficult): she's kept her house in order and not done anything unpopular enough to sway public support against her. As long as she has public support, who she chooses to honor will no doubt matter to the British people.
You post would be modded a troll because it is a troll. If Britain wants to have a monarch, who are you to tell them they shouldn't be able to have one?
I've been to England several times and the Queen is very popular there. Heck, a few centuries back the country brought back the monarchy after being a republic for a few decades, so the situation is obviously one that's right for them.
Aside from the democratic questions, I can see the appeal, I really wouldn't want a corrupt political swine like Bush awarding me an honor like this!
"ICBMs don't have the energy to achieve earth orbit -- let alone escape velocity.
Yes they do. Most modern ICBM's might not, but the older generations certainly can do both. Remember, the Russians used a modified ICBM to put Sputnik in orbit!
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It's not, it's replacing one technical solution, of having the teacher fill in a register at the start of every lesson, with another technical solution, which does that task automatically.
The benefit is obviously the elimination of a task which often takes up the first several minutes of lessons!
I agree the distopian-1984 take on this story is definitely the more interesting & exciting. It just doesn't make much sense considering the government will already have access to most people's facial features via their passports anyway, whilst there is a clear practical use for the system by the college in student registration.
The standard procedure at most schools & colleges is for the teacher to either call out everyone's name for them to respond or if it's a smallish class maybe check around the room for absentees. This task is performed in every first lesson of the morning and afternoon by every teacher, so the task obviously impacts on the teaching of a lot of lessons, not just the support staffer who correlates the registers.
Why? At the vast majority of colleges, there is no manual system it's replacing (registers don't tend to get collated till the end of the lesson or day). Besides, I don't see why this prevents escape during a fire, surely the college will have emergency exits!
The system uses infa-red to examine facial features making doing such near-impossible.
Besides it's already been in use for some time by a number of businesses who obviously haven't had too many problems with it; and most businesses care far more about whether or not their employees are present at work!
"Think I'm being overly cynical?"
No, you're just displaying a lack of intelligence.
The world is full of billions of people all with different opinions and ideas. There tend to be people both for and against basically anything imaginable, whether itâ(TM)s civil infrastructure or football tactics. Making generalized statements like yours just signifies a distinct lack of analytical ability.
"is the creation of this "green" paper from wombat poo actually any better than using renewable tree resources?"
Whilst I have no figures, I would have thought a most definite yes when considering the enormous amount of effort usually required to produce paper from trees (which require a lot of labour, land and fertilizer to plant, harvest and transport). That's before all the effort then required to convert the wood first into woodchips and then into pulp.
Whether or not paper from poo could be carried out on an industrial level is another matter though.
As a final note, I'd like to point out tree farms aren't actually a very renewable resouce either, at least no more than any other intensly farmed crop anyway. Good yields often requires years of applying fertilizers and forest management. It's not just a case of sprinkling a few seeds and coming back 20 years later expecting to see a shiny new forest, in those cases you tend to get mixed forest & shrubland with limited pulp value.
If I understand the article and the previous poster correctly, Kookaburra paper would be far more difficult to create due to Kookaburra's being carnivorous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra#Behavior), which would mean their dung is far less fiberous than the previously mentioned animals.
Which also invalidates much of the compliance with Freedom of Information concerns since nearly all communication between constituents and their MP isn't covered by Freedom of Information laws anyway. Nor should it be anymore than consultations with your lawyer or doctor.
Disgusting.
Many of us here don't take kindly to people like you who advocating violation of the Temporal Accords. As a pre-verteran of the temporal cold war I still carry the scars that conflict will inflict on me.
I've found that to be so true.
People don't read things like newspapers to learn about the world, they read them to confirm their already held assumptions.
My already held assupmtion is that it all ties back to the fact noone likes to hear that they are wrong, whilst everyone likes to hear they are right!
"Cannabis/Marijuana is carcinogenic"
I would be interested to know what research you base that on.
Whilst smoking it with tobacco has been shown in several studies to have many of the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoking in general, I've never heard of any decent research showing specifically that Cannabis is carcinogenic and a couple of studies have shown it not to have some of the dangers of tobacco (mainly due to the absence of nicotine and that chemical's effects on blood pressure).
Although many strains do contain significant quantities of tar and several other carcinogenic chemicals, but that's still some way from proving that smoking it moderately (as this study examined) is a cause of cancer.
Of course. The reason it's illegal is all down to some conspiracy between Big Pharma and the government; it doesn't have anything to do with the morale outrage tens of millions of older folks in particular display when someone caught smoking Cannabis isn't jailed for life.
Regardless of the facts, a sizable proportion of the public see Cannabis as being pretty much the same as heroin and other hard drugs. Any politician who says he/she would legalize Cannabis has absolutely no chance of being elected in all but a handful of places in the USA.
I would say the mainstream churches have far more to do with Cannabis being illegal than the Pharmaceutical industry. Besdies, chronic pain isn't even that big a market anyway and as there are already generic versions of most painkillers anyway, the arguement really doesn't stack up.
"There are lots of options, this is simply the easiest."
I suspect the main reason is because YouTube's "channel" service which they wish to utilize is an extremely good one at the forefront of the market. They couldn't hope to create such a level of functionality, especially all the features which ties in to YouTube's wider video sharing community.
"Meanwhile the Wikipedia article probably cites the most relevant and recent papers, and maybe even has a link to a PDF of it or another relevant website."
Occasionally yes, most of the time the "citations" are simply news stories or other sources which rely blindly on the factuality of the article. Wikipedia articles with citations to actual peer-reviewed journal articles are rare indeed, far rarer than on Britannica.
"Even if Britannica does pop up in Google's search results I usually don't bother looking, because I know it probably won't tell me anything I don't already know"
That's arrogance for you.
"Businesses have to answer to the customer EVERY DAMN DAY"
They do? The 12-month contract documents most people have with their utility & service providers say otherwise. Regardless of technicalities of election and payment cycles, the implication you're making that commercial organizations are somehow the most accountable to the public is flawed. Many commercial service/utility providers are deeply resented by their customers, but at the end of the day, the customers want electric/gas/internet.
The fundamental issue is that if, as you say (and I don't dispute) people in general are rubbish at choosing elected officials, why would they be any better at choosing the businesses they give their money to?
Especially when hundreds of billions is spent by companies to entice people to purchase their particular product; this certainly isn't done out of companiesâ(TM) desire to see an efficiently operating society!
The argument isn't nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
"You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector."
That's utter rubbish. Publicly funded capital projects often bring about massive improvements to economies. Las Vegas's economy has certainly improved since the building of the Hoover Dam, to name but a single example.
Having read many Economics books I know that there are countless contradictory economic eheories out there, some encourage the use of public financing, some encourage the use of private financing; neither belief has been objectively proven as superior.
What you say here and in other posts is your opinion, not some sort of economic fact (as there is no such thing)!
Well, in a sense yes.
Even in militaries, application availability is a principle concern when purchasing systems. Keeping in mind these were admin networks (rather than operational networks) it's not hard to see why - like most organizations - they choose a more widely supported OS over a more sercure one.
Except that the fact these infected computers are owned by the military is pretty inconsequential as they are on admin networks, not operations networks. Payroll computers are hardly running top-secret, mission-critical applications.
Heck, most the people using them probably aren't even military personnel.
You should try studying for a Computer Science degree, you get 3 years of "is 0 or 1 the first number" fun.
'Slippery Slope' arguments are always flawed and are usually an admission of not having a proper arguement.
Although Galileo didn't incur the wrath of the Church for making his moon-map, that was for the entirely different achievment of proving earth wasn't the center of the universe.
I'm sorry but your daughter doesn't sound like the sharpest knife in the draw.
Also, making widespread assumptions ("the youth of today" is a pretty big group) based on the response of one individual is extremely naive.
Except that by using such logic you could equally call any scientific theory a religion. Especially ones not simply & immediately demonstrable.
The only difference between scientific theory and religious belief (or belief in general) is that scientific theory is based solely on observed evidence and logical derivation. As soon as you claim a scientific theory isn't based solely on said "observed evidence and logical derivation" then you are thereby claiming it is a belief rather than a theory.
Assigning "sins" or any other facet of religion (or any other belief system for that matter) is then just a simple creative exercise. One could equally claim evolution is a religion and Darwin it's Messiah for example, or Stephen Hawkings the Pope of the Black Hole Theory religion...
Rabbits weren't intentionally introduced to Australia, they were imported as a live food source and escaped (rabbits were popular on long sea voyages as they don't need much room and are quite hardy). You're probably thinking of the cane toad which was introduced to Australia to stop insects eating crops in the early 1900's and has desimated native wildlife in some parts.
This disasterous introduction is often held up as an example of the unintended consequences 'helping' the natural enviroment can cause. However, with the cane toad it wasn't so much an 'unintended' consequence, as they always knew it was a danger to wildlife but this was ignored as little regard was given to ecological consequences in general in back then (and they didn't realise just quite how bad it would be).
Generally intentional introductions of species have gone well, in Australia, the Dung Beetle and the Cactoblastis Moth have both helped combat their respective enviromental problems without significant problems. The real problems for native enviroments have normally comes from unintentional introductions, where imported animals escape and over time establish wild populations.
So athletes shouldn't be honored then? After all, they have only been able to get their gold medals thanks to being born with a good physique (training aside, you still need to be born with natural physical talent).
Similarly, Einstein and other prominent scientists shouldn't be honored, they didn't "earn" their smart brains, did they? Obviously, anyone from a good family shouldn't be honored, their success has inevitably been helped by their happening to be born into loving & caring families.
A few years down this route and what do you know, you've got a new Pol Pot in charge killing off anyone who achieves success if they're not of the right background.
Britain's Queen has achieved something (something history shows is very difficult): she's kept her house in order and not done anything unpopular enough to sway public support against her. As long as she has public support, who she chooses to honor will no doubt matter to the British people.
You post would be modded a troll because it is a troll. If Britain wants to have a monarch, who are you to tell them they shouldn't be able to have one?
I've been to England several times and the Queen is very popular there. Heck, a few centuries back the country brought back the monarchy after being a republic for a few decades, so the situation is obviously one that's right for them.
Aside from the democratic questions, I can see the appeal, I really wouldn't want a corrupt political swine like Bush awarding me an honor like this!
"ICBMs don't have the energy to achieve earth orbit -- let alone escape velocity.
Yes they do. Most modern ICBM's might not, but the older generations certainly can do both. Remember, the Russians used a modified ICBM to put Sputnik in orbit!