Since vandalism is a criminal matter, and most buses here are GOCOs, putting beat police in plain clothes on buses would be the obvious solution to vandalism. They already have occasional plain-clothes patrols here to enforce jaywalking at tram stops (although they are often in half-uniform, so you can see their trousers and the bulges at their hips), so there would be no new issues with the concept. Vandalism really isn't too bad here on buses, even when one would have plenty of anonymity, partly because of cameras and mostly social pressure: it just isn't done to vandalise buses except with small tags on the seat backs (even those are rare), for some reason.
The problem with that is that you still get third parties running their own ads in support of a candidate or party, and it is much harder to stop those without banning legitimate 3rd-party political action (which I am sure many of the powers that be would love even more), and it would be even harder to ban adverts which are embedded into programmes as opinion pieces or slanted news articles.
It would be good if it could be made to work, but I wouldn't trust any bill which claimed to implement it.
I should have said *sexual* pictures, although that does also include pictures of a sexual scene which incidentally has a person who appears underage in it.
It doesn't help that hardly anyone speaks with the accent they're aiming for anyway. The only people I know who speak live that are from up in the far north. Personally, my favourite Australian accent is the one used in old ABC documentaries (like A Big Country), which would be relatively easy for English actors to imitate, and my least favourite is the Melburnian accent, with its ghastly short vowels (a dislike which has nothing to do with state predjudice), although AIUI some northeastern US accents are somewhat similar, so it might not be too hard for US actors to get right. The Adelaide accent would be really easy for foreigners to get right, but it would be fairly pointless because most non-Australians would think you were using an English accent with only the heaps good local slang to give it away.
When you've created a top-10 language, come back and tell us all how clever you are. Java isn't meant to be a theoretically good language, and some of its design decisions I don't like, especially the horrible way you have to pass functions, and the lack of multiple inheritance, but it is popular. The hard research is important, but it is not much use without the people who actually make it into a useful product, and both groups deserve proper recognition for what they do. Certainly, Gosling's work is probably more directly useful to MS or Google than a pure researcher's especially since a researcher is more likely to publish his work openly.
I think you've grabbed the wrong end of the stick here, GP is probably talking about the QT toolkit, the one used for KDE (and the VLC GUI), not quicktime.
'.' as a thousands or decimal separator is always distinguishable from an end-of-sentence marker, except in poorly handwritten text, because it is never followed by whitespace in the former case but always is in the latter. The same applies to ','.
It is obviously a bad idea to use '.' as the thousands separator in English text because we expect it to mean a decimal point, but French, German, Italian (which is where this number was copied from, so it was probably a simple copy/paste mistake) and many other European languages use the opposite convention, so if you are writing in those languages, it would be stupid to use the English convention. That's what I meant by "so long as one follows the convention for the surrounding text's language, neither is better or worse," that neither convention had any particular superiority, but you should follow the convention of the language of whatever text surrounds the number, making it easy to parse, say 1.234,5 appropriately. Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear, it is rather late here.
I already explained my own personal practice, in the GP.
That isn't much help in some countries, where they ban images of persons who are *or who appear to be* under the age of 18, as is the case in Australia, for example.
The car seemed pretty good at avoiding a pedestrian steeping out from behind a car, and since its reaction time is probably faster than a human's, it isn't very likely to cause an accident.
This is an area which needs to be sorted out, because given how fast this field has developed recently, it seems likely that these sorts of cars will be ready for use on roads in a decade or so, and it would be a shame if their use was blocked by out-o-date laws.
One car has a driver in it to handle navigation and regulatory requirements, and there are two large support vehicles following with camera crews, engineers, and so on.
Where I am, the gangs of men hanging off the back of trucks have long gone, they now have one man per dustcart with an arm which reaches out to the kerb, grabs a wheelie bin and dumps it in the top. The old-style, rear-loading dustcarts are only common for things like municipal bins and at the universities where bins are often in awkward locations (and even there, they usually use wheelie bins).
Since a wheelie bin is a standard size and shape (and usually colour, although you do see painted ones now and then), automating the process of picking up the rubbish would be pretty trivial as CV projects go. I would not at all be surprised if these become automated within 5 years of this technology becoming mainstream.
Pizza delivery and postmen would still be important because ensuring deliveries go the the right house is still too hard for AI to manage reliably. Bus drivers would probably be moved to being ticket inspectors/conductors, since you still need someone to deter fare evasion (although social pressure does a reasonable job on my normal route) and safely operate the disabled ramp on suitably-equipped buses. There is also a hard-AI problem of spotting potential passengers running for the bus.
Elsewhere in this discussion someone has said that jez had a difference of opinion about some of is posts on their forums: what he called robust debate everyone else called flaming; and he got into a major argument about who should have control of their main IRC channel (him, or the party officials). I was hoping he would show some evidence to support his position, because he was whining a lot, but it seems he has none, so I'm inclined to ignore him.
There is a fairly long history of using ',' as the decimal separator and '.' as the thousands separator, and so long as one follows the convention for the surrounding text's language, neither is better or worse. Personally, I use ' ' for thousands and '.' for decimal, but it's not as though anything else is hard to understand, especially when context makes the order of magnitude so obvious.
If there is no driver, there might not be anyone breaking the law, or at worst someone is hauled up for leaving the brake off of a parked car and letting it roll onto the road.
Actually, they would have made sure they had permission, but the first is funnier.
That is why you need standardised final exams (which the universities will want anyway).
Personally, I like the voucher idea, which is that a child is allocated a sum of money for their education each year, with extra if they are remote (more than so far from the nearest school) or have relevant disabilities, which they can then "spend" at any school they like. There needs to be state schools with no extra fees which will take anyone, but if the child goes to a private or religious school (which may charge extra fees, as decided by its governing council), the same amount of government funding is paid there instead. Here, independent schools receive less funding per student than state schools and typically produce better results than the state schools with the same catchment, but the fees at many are not much more than the gap in funding. This suggests that the private schools are using their money more effectively (since most independent schools are religious, academic merit is not a significant barrier to entry), although it must be admitted that parents who are spending a few thousand dollars each year in fees are likely to be more involved in their child's education. In turn, this suggests that if more people could go to independent schools the overall level of achievement would be higher.
This is roughly what is done at my university. Maths and the hard sciences all have a subject aimed at those who didn't study the top-level high-school course in it, both as a bridging course for those who didn't do it (or didn't do well enough) and as the introduction for non-specialists in that field, and CS have been talking about doing that with the "programming for utter noobs" section of the course, which is taught before any real CS (since you can't do any practical CS until you've got at least a basic grasp of programming, and it does seem to help concepts "click" if students can go away and try to implement them) and always bores half the cohort senseless.
Getting a visit from a truancy officer is likely to encourage parents to make sure their children actually attend school and don't just lurk in the streets and shopping centres making a nuisance of themselves, especially once they get fined for their child's non-attendance. Here this appears to work where it has been tried, but with only a handful (literally) of truancy officers in a state of 2M people most of the effort has been focused on country areas with extremely bad attendance, not on the urban poor, although police on the beat do stop and question people of school age during the school day, especially if they are out of uniform (virtually all schools have at least a nominal uniform, from a polo shirt and maybe fixed colour trousers/jumpers to a complete blazer/shirt/tie uniform).
I think part of the problem with pouring more money into education is that it ends up getting pissed away by the bureaucracy without ever getting to the schools.
Here, teachers are very poorly paid: the heads of subjects in a state or catholic school doesn't get much above the average salary for a fresh-out-of-uni undergrad, and will typically work 70-hour weeks for 35 weeks per year, and even more for the last few weeks of each semester. Even in the holidays, teachers have to work normal hours to do lesson preparation, admin, and professional development work. They then get their requests for pay rises mocked and denigrated by the local newspaper (which is happy to support senior doctors and surgeons who were seeking a *pay rise* of more than a teacher's starting salary). Small wonder, then, that recruitment of teachers is below the replacement rate even though the school-age population is rising.
But the minimal amount of effort required combined with the number of free beers I got probably made the effective hourly pay rate of getting taken advantage of like that better than that of a proper tutor. After all, you've just done the work and can just say "use so and so's law, then apply rule #3 from the lecture slides last week and the rest is just plodding" and do that for a whole paper for a few people (taking less then five minutes of extra work), and there's not a bad chance for a couple of pints next time you're in the bar.
Everyone wins, and in my department the staff usually got to hear about who was doing that (not least because some of the junior staff do it too), and it helps students to get actual prac supervision jobs.
It would seem better to me to simply teach uni-level subjects at schools during the normal 13 or so years (depending on precisely what you count), as well as offtering scholarships based on entrance rank or whatever to the top students who apply to university (which my country does, although they means test them in a rather flawed way). At my school there were quite a few students who did final-year subjects a year or two ahead of their other subjects (for example, about 1/6 did biology a year early) and for people like them it would make sense if they could do university-level courses and count the grades towards their high-school result, and for university entrance. (Obviously, a scaling factor would need to be applied to the grades when using them for university entrance, to take into account that they are harder than ordinary high-school subjects, buy my state's system does this already so that a comparison between grades in, say, easy maths for non-uni or future humanities student and pre-uni advanced maths is fair.) With careful planning and execution, students would also be able to use their prior study towards their degree.
Except this isn't about paywalls and whether they are good or bad in any sense, it is about trying to prohibit people pointing links at your pages without permission. You can refuse t serve up a page if you like, or redirect people to a different page, but you can't object to someone pointing a hyperlink at anything they like. If your paywall is broken, that's your problem, not the rest of the world's.
Slashdot Mirror
Since vandalism is a criminal matter, and most buses here are GOCOs, putting beat police in plain clothes on buses would be the obvious solution to vandalism. They already have occasional plain-clothes patrols here to enforce jaywalking at tram stops (although they are often in half-uniform, so you can see their trousers and the bulges at their hips), so there would be no new issues with the concept. Vandalism really isn't too bad here on buses, even when one would have plenty of anonymity, partly because of cameras and mostly social pressure: it just isn't done to vandalise buses except with small tags on the seat backs (even those are rare), for some reason.
The problem with that is that you still get third parties running their own ads in support of a candidate or party, and it is much harder to stop those without banning legitimate 3rd-party political action (which I am sure many of the powers that be would love even more), and it would be even harder to ban adverts which are embedded into programmes as opinion pieces or slanted news articles.
It would be good if it could be made to work, but I wouldn't trust any bill which claimed to implement it.
Between the launch of Mosaic and the start of the Eternal September.
/me hits himself.
I should have said *sexual* pictures, although that does also include pictures of a sexual scene which incidentally has a person who appears underage in it.
It doesn't help that hardly anyone speaks with the accent they're aiming for anyway. The only people I know who speak live that are from up in the far north. Personally, my favourite Australian accent is the one used in old ABC documentaries (like A Big Country), which would be relatively easy for English actors to imitate, and my least favourite is the Melburnian accent, with its ghastly short vowels (a dislike which has nothing to do with state predjudice), although AIUI some northeastern US accents are somewhat similar, so it might not be too hard for US actors to get right. The Adelaide accent would be really easy for foreigners to get right, but it would be fairly pointless because most non-Australians would think you were using an English accent with only the heaps good local slang to give it away.
When you've created a top-10 language, come back and tell us all how clever you are. Java isn't meant to be a theoretically good language, and some of its design decisions I don't like, especially the horrible way you have to pass functions, and the lack of multiple inheritance, but it is popular. The hard research is important, but it is not much use without the people who actually make it into a useful product, and both groups deserve proper recognition for what they do. Certainly, Gosling's work is probably more directly useful to MS or Google than a pure researcher's especially since a researcher is more likely to publish his work openly.
GP
If Microsoft suddenly decided to ban likes of QT
PP
...Quicktime...
I think you've grabbed the wrong end of the stick here, GP is probably talking about the QT toolkit, the one used for KDE (and the VLC GUI), not quicktime.
'.' as a thousands or decimal separator is always distinguishable from an end-of-sentence marker, except in poorly handwritten text, because it is never followed by whitespace in the former case but always is in the latter. The same applies to ','.
It is obviously a bad idea to use '.' as the thousands separator in English text because we expect it to mean a decimal point, but French, German, Italian (which is where this number was copied from, so it was probably a simple copy/paste mistake) and many other European languages use the opposite convention, so if you are writing in those languages, it would be stupid to use the English convention. That's what I meant by "so long as one follows the convention for the surrounding text's language, neither is better or worse," that neither convention had any particular superiority, but you should follow the convention of the language of whatever text surrounds the number, making it easy to parse, say 1.234,5 appropriately. Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear, it is rather late here.
I already explained my own personal practice, in the GP.
I've never tried it myself, but I've heard from several reliable sources that, done right, it is highly enjoyable.
That isn't much help in some countries, where they ban images of persons who are *or who appear to be* under the age of 18, as is the case in Australia, for example.
The car seemed pretty good at avoiding a pedestrian steeping out from behind a car, and since its reaction time is probably faster than a human's, it isn't very likely to cause an accident.
This is an area which needs to be sorted out, because given how fast this field has developed recently, it seems likely that these sorts of cars will be ready for use on roads in a decade or so, and it would be a shame if their use was blocked by out-o-date laws.
Thanks. Of course, you really deserve an Informative upmod, but you probably won;t get it since this is a fairly old thread.
One car has a driver in it to handle navigation and regulatory requirements, and there are two large support vehicles following with camera crews, engineers, and so on.
Where I am, the gangs of men hanging off the back of trucks have long gone, they now have one man per dustcart with an arm which reaches out to the kerb, grabs a wheelie bin and dumps it in the top. The old-style, rear-loading dustcarts are only common for things like municipal bins and at the universities where bins are often in awkward locations (and even there, they usually use wheelie bins).
Since a wheelie bin is a standard size and shape (and usually colour, although you do see painted ones now and then), automating the process of picking up the rubbish would be pretty trivial as CV projects go. I would not at all be surprised if these become automated within 5 years of this technology becoming mainstream.
Pizza delivery and postmen would still be important because ensuring deliveries go the the right house is still too hard for AI to manage reliably. Bus drivers would probably be moved to being ticket inspectors/conductors, since you still need someone to deter fare evasion (although social pressure does a reasonable job on my normal route) and safely operate the disabled ramp on suitably-equipped buses. There is also a hard-AI problem of spotting potential passengers running for the bus.
Elsewhere in this discussion someone has said that jez had a difference of opinion about some of is posts on their forums: what he called robust debate everyone else called flaming; and he got into a major argument about who should have control of their main IRC channel (him, or the party officials). I was hoping he would show some evidence to support his position, because he was whining a lot, but it seems he has none, so I'm inclined to ignore him.
There is a fairly long history of using ',' as the decimal separator and '.' as the thousands separator, and so long as one follows the convention for the surrounding text's language, neither is better or worse. Personally, I use ' ' for thousands and '.' for decimal, but it's not as though anything else is hard to understand, especially when context makes the order of magnitude so obvious.
If there is no driver, there might not be anyone breaking the law, or at worst someone is hauled up for leaving the brake off of a parked car and letting it roll onto the road.
Actually, they would have made sure they had permission, but the first is funnier.
In before some anti-gun person says that's because their brains are already mush :)
But does it explode if you shoot it with a lasgun?
That is why you need standardised final exams (which the universities will want anyway).
Personally, I like the voucher idea, which is that a child is allocated a sum of money for their education each year, with extra if they are remote (more than so far from the nearest school) or have relevant disabilities, which they can then "spend" at any school they like. There needs to be state schools with no extra fees which will take anyone, but if the child goes to a private or religious school (which may charge extra fees, as decided by its governing council), the same amount of government funding is paid there instead. Here, independent schools receive less funding per student than state schools and typically produce better results than the state schools with the same catchment, but the fees at many are not much more than the gap in funding. This suggests that the private schools are using their money more effectively (since most independent schools are religious, academic merit is not a significant barrier to entry), although it must be admitted that parents who are spending a few thousand dollars each year in fees are likely to be more involved in their child's education. In turn, this suggests that if more people could go to independent schools the overall level of achievement would be higher.
This is roughly what is done at my university. Maths and the hard sciences all have a subject aimed at those who didn't study the top-level high-school course in it, both as a bridging course for those who didn't do it (or didn't do well enough) and as the introduction for non-specialists in that field, and CS have been talking about doing that with the "programming for utter noobs" section of the course, which is taught before any real CS (since you can't do any practical CS until you've got at least a basic grasp of programming, and it does seem to help concepts "click" if students can go away and try to implement them) and always bores half the cohort senseless.
Getting a visit from a truancy officer is likely to encourage parents to make sure their children actually attend school and don't just lurk in the streets and shopping centres making a nuisance of themselves, especially once they get fined for their child's non-attendance. Here this appears to work where it has been tried, but with only a handful (literally) of truancy officers in a state of 2M people most of the effort has been focused on country areas with extremely bad attendance, not on the urban poor, although police on the beat do stop and question people of school age during the school day, especially if they are out of uniform (virtually all schools have at least a nominal uniform, from a polo shirt and maybe fixed colour trousers/jumpers to a complete blazer/shirt/tie uniform).
I think part of the problem with pouring more money into education is that it ends up getting pissed away by the bureaucracy without ever getting to the schools.
Here, teachers are very poorly paid: the heads of subjects in a state or catholic school doesn't get much above the average salary for a fresh-out-of-uni undergrad, and will typically work 70-hour weeks for 35 weeks per year, and even more for the last few weeks of each semester. Even in the holidays, teachers have to work normal hours to do lesson preparation, admin, and professional development work. They then get their requests for pay rises mocked and denigrated by the local newspaper (which is happy to support senior doctors and surgeons who were seeking a *pay rise* of more than a teacher's starting salary). Small wonder, then, that recruitment of teachers is below the replacement rate even though the school-age population is rising.
But the minimal amount of effort required combined with the number of free beers I got probably made the effective hourly pay rate of getting taken advantage of like that better than that of a proper tutor. After all, you've just done the work and can just say "use so and so's law, then apply rule #3 from the lecture slides last week and the rest is just plodding" and do that for a whole paper for a few people (taking less then five minutes of extra work), and there's not a bad chance for a couple of pints next time you're in the bar.
Everyone wins, and in my department the staff usually got to hear about who was doing that (not least because some of the junior staff do it too), and it helps students to get actual prac supervision jobs.
It would seem better to me to simply teach uni-level subjects at schools during the normal 13 or so years (depending on precisely what you count), as well as offtering scholarships based on entrance rank or whatever to the top students who apply to university (which my country does, although they means test them in a rather flawed way).
At my school there were quite a few students who did final-year subjects a year or two ahead of their other subjects (for example, about 1/6 did biology a year early) and for people like them it would make sense if they could do university-level courses and count the grades towards their high-school result, and for university entrance. (Obviously, a scaling factor would need to be applied to the grades when using them for university entrance, to take into account that they are harder than ordinary high-school subjects, buy my state's system does this already so that a comparison between grades in, say, easy maths for non-uni or future humanities student and pre-uni advanced maths is fair.) With careful planning and execution, students would also be able to use their prior study towards their degree.
Except this isn't about paywalls and whether they are good or bad in any sense, it is about trying to prohibit people pointing links at your pages without permission. You can refuse t serve up a page if you like, or redirect people to a different page, but you can't object to someone pointing a hyperlink at anything they like. If your paywall is broken, that's your problem, not the rest of the world's.