Fuck. You get someone to brew a swimming pool full of beer - I'll bring some copper pipe, hammers, axes and wood blocks and TEACH people how to build distilleries!
(To actually brew the wort from yeast and seed-potatoes would probably make for a pretty long party. As would maturing the distillate. Though I can take the rough edges off the "first" bucketful.)
they can't start suing people for patent infringement on code that they made publicly available under a license that encourages reuse.
Isn't the "made publicly available" bit an example of "prior art". At least, when I dealt with (European) patent law, that would have been grounds for denying a patent application. Once we'd FILED the application, then we could use our ideas to beat shit out of our competitors (different, but not directly comparable because they did different things) product adverts. These days, I just castigate the competition for sending out operators with their equipment, who don't even have 'technician' level of understanding of it, let alone 'developer' level (about where I'd put myself) or 'theoretician' (whose conversations I can at least understand).
Sorry, the "former competition". I guess I have to think of Scumburger as potential employers now. And they don't like people who know where intermediate-level management have bodies buried from upper-level's sight.
If I'm going to let them go to someone who's going to profit on them then I might as well get all that I can out of them. If they're going to a passionate collector then I'm not too worried about the value. Not sure if that makes much sense.
Makes reasonable sense to me. s/ comics/ "fossils or minerals" I've given people specimens worth hundreds of pounds on field trips which I'd spotted, then "guided" the novice towards. Let them have the joy of discovery - I've got the pleasure of another interested and enthusiastic student/ pupil/ friend/ relative. A new mind in "this game" is almost incalculable in value, particularly if attached to educated eyes.
it can often be difficult to impossible for an outsider to distinguish between a device whose sole purpose is for legitimate health reasons and one that may be superficially designed to appear as such
Who is this "outsider"?
For most important exams - the ones you've spent multiple years at the institution - well, this isn't your first encounter with the authorities in that institution.
Otherwise, you've probably been living with your problem for... well, much of your life. So you know that you need to contact the invigilators well before the event to manage problems like this. At which point, where are the "outsiders" again?
Oh, and I'd doubt that you're the first user user of this device to experience this problem with this device. So there's very likely a reminder in the Friendly Manual about such confusion - likely next to warnings about TSA fondlings. You do RTFM, don't you? Seriously, you do, don't you?
right cochlear implant bluetooth paired to a smartphone outside the class room (but still within range) used by an acomplice to transmit informations.
How does the accomplice get to know what the questions are?
With national/ international exams, you might have a chance. But for exams cooked up on site for a particular school's particular course... much harder.
s/ professor/ invigilator. Or if you're American, "proctor"?
[SHRUG] If your hearing is bad enough to get a doctor's note explaining why you need to keep your hearing aids (if it's one aid, then you just use your working ear), then the exam administrators know you have bad hearing and provide you with the script of instructions that the invigilator works from.
What - you think they don't have notes? The fuck they don't. Very often the notes ARE the front page of the exam paper. But there are things they MUST mention, and they're in a script of some sort. You get the script. If it's not on the exam cover page. Printed. In high contrast (black on white, normally). And if you need it, IN LARGE PRINT.
Your excuse might work for the first exam in a series. Or, for my finals, maybe the first day (2 exams, 4 hours each). But when you get to the second day, there will be your information. (Actually, it would only have worked for one day in my first year exams. Of four years.)
To be honest, people that rich hire proper doctors and proper civil engineers. They put what little intelligence they have into choosing which politician/ bureaucrat to bribe/ honey-trap or otherwise co-opt and which laws to ignore.
What are the odds that learning the exam questions (and answers), or developing and memorising the "tap-code" would be a harder solution than actually learning the fucking subject?
I remember reading - I think it was the original Frank Herbert "Dune" - where they talked about a "battle language" which I deduced to be a private sign-language. That's good - as a fairly arbitrary encoding it has elements of information hiding that provide a degree of security (as long as the Other Side don't have access to a substantial corpus of messages)
Some years later, I started working in "high noise" environments, where the wearing of ear-defenders is (1) just common sense, (2) company policy, and (3) backed-up by criminal law. and the idea of teaching people to use a sign language in high-noise environments would get trotted out on occasions. It never flew ("I'm an Merkin ; I ain'n't gonna leern no stinking British Sign Language when there are as many Merkin Sign Languages as there are schools for the deaf." encapsulates several problems), but I tried. In the last 5 years, combinations of ear defenders, VHF radios (which are Explosion-Proof to acceptable standards - 2 faults), and earphones/ microphones have become available and dropped in price below about a kilo-dollar each... and the need has just died.
Similarly, there is a debate - vicious and of varying quality - over the "preservation" of Sign Languages, as general education becomes more integrated, and cochlear implants can greatly reduce deafness itself. Improving technology is changing the question, and the range of potential solutions.
To put KGIII's comment into a different context...
My wife used to work with archiving medical records. When she went into work, she took her phone (not a smart one) out of her pocket, put it in her locker, locked the locker, and went from the changing room to the office to do her work.
Failure to do so was an instant sacking offence. Similarly with a camera (defined as "anything capable of storing an image).
Enjoy your time in the blow torch flame, Snowflake. I don't think you'll last very long.
I'd have to find and then read my exam certificates to find out the names of the exams I took.
When I read "O-levels", I think "15-16 year old", and for "A-levels" I think 17-18 year olds." I don't get hung up over the details of particular courses, since you only see them filtered through the shifting changeable mask of (relatively small) numbers of individual's responses to them. Unless you're an educational professional, or perhaps a recruitment professional.
Just wait until augmented reality hits in undetectable wearables such as contacts that have network capacity and OCR.
Then exams will be conducted in the nude. Or, failing that, in school-supplied surgical gowns, after the examinees are ordered to strip themselves nude, leave their clothes and gadgets in lockers, and walk slowly through a seawater shower before gowning-up.
I'd start to put these contingencies into the school rules about now, so that when the next exam cycle comes through in 3, 4 or 7 years (depending on the length of your course ; does it go up to 11 years for architects in your country?), the option is in the tuition contracts and has been for the duration of the student's enrolment in the system.
I'd include a provision : for a generation or two, the names and photographs of the first student caught using $CHEATING_TECHNIQUE$ will be posted as part of the exam regulations, every year, so that the person who is responsible for such expensive and (moderately) invasive regulations being enacted. Blame where blame is due. For all $CHEATING_TECHNIQUE$ .
There are ways of dealing with "appropriate reference books" e.g., in my practical microscopic mineralogy and petrology exams, we were permitted our individual copies of DH&Z on the desks, though if the invigilator thought that you'd stuck too many post-its and annotations, he might swap your copy for one from the Department library. (It should be pointed out that one was encouraged to own, and annotate, one's copy through one's student career. The Department copies were for people who forgot their copy, the dog ate it, it was soaked in driving rain...) How to deal with that in the digital age is a harder question. I'd suspect that issuing a sealed tablet in the exam room with (say) reference books, PDFs of the lecturer's notes and permitted apps would be a starting line.
Not just the AIs. I don't know how restricted your social circles are, but I've known at least one person who has been through male-to female gender re-assignment surgery, and may know more (how would one know without asking, and what possible grounds would one have for asking?). I also know people who consider their anatomical and identity genders unimportant, and would really prefer to have a neuter grammatical gender.
There is, of course, "one", but that's a bit contrived for some uses.
For ages it's been assumed that "he" and "man"/"mankind" may be used in a generic sense to refer to everyone
The operative word in that is, of course, "may". At other times, it may NOT be assumed that (etc). In other words, you don't know.
So I assume that I don't know, whereas if I see someone who writes "he/ she/ it/ they" then I do know that it's someone who does think that it's a significant point they're making.
Elementary failure of physics (or history) knowledge : Quantum computers were only seriously proposed in the early 1980s. Fiction authors may have used the term earlier, but without meaning.
For 15 or so years the impactor was the leading theory, but there was always a significant minority of researchers who saw that there were data that didn't necessarily support the impact hypothesis. These days, you'd be hard put to find a geologist who would say anything other than "it appears to have been a complex event".
Yes, there was an impactor. Around (i.e. both before and after) the same time, there was major volcanism. And how either would have seriously affected some marine orders but not others remains unclear.
More specifically, comprehensive collection efforts across samples on the K-T boundary are not inconsistent with dinosaur populations maintaining both abundance and diversity up to the extinction event. There is some evidence that the Chixulub impact occurred well after the start of the Deccan Traps volcanism (200-300 kyr), but dating and fossil collection within the Deccan isn't up to tracking extinctions within their million-yr or so duration.
While no-one (creation-cretins and Expanding-Earthers excepted) seriously doubts the K-Pg extinctions, the Deccan traps, or the Chixulub impactor, getting the precise relative dating of the three events (at least two of which were likely extended over decades to hundreds of thousands of years), is still a matter for debate and acquisition of evidence.
Agreed. By the definition of the question, the machine in question is still working and doing it's job appropriately, so it does not need replacing.
Yes, in the event of a hardware failure, it may be a bitch to repair or replace, so appropriate substitution plans should be in place. If the business in question needs a disaster-recovery plan, it should certainly be included (possibly as a "service to be replaced with an equivalent"). That's planning for future events. but until something happens, the machine/ service does not need to be "upgraded" because, by definition, it is working.
Do you go around your house changing your light switches every few years as a preventive measure?
Maybe not the best example. If I had to go and find a 20ft step ladder - or worse, a 20ft scaffold tower - to get up to the level needed to change the lights in the living room roof, then I would indeed consider doing a preventative bulb-change, because the cost wouldn't be in the bulbs, but in the hire of the access tools. (I don't have a lobby like that at home, but I've seen people who do have. The house in question being Victorian, when killing a servant wasn't a big problem.)
But what I'd really do would be to re-design the lighting system to be more maintainable (whether that be lighting suspended to a more convenient altitude, or lighting which can be lowered to floor level... whatever).
It is very US-centric. I just write about thing in my country and make occasional reference to "foreigners like Americans". Not many of them even notice, because they simply don't think of themselves as being foreigners.
My flight training for getting to work includes the usual stuff of underwater escape training, evacuating the aircraft in darkness and smoke, and the usual entertainments. I'm all with you on the hazards of these these behaviours. Not because I think people are particularly likely to deliberately put people at risk (e.g. amateurs being carried on planes, and people who fly on the things for a wage like you and I), but because most people are congenitally too fucking stupid to think through the consequences of their actions before actually doing them.
The person who copy-pasted the summary (and/ or the "original" article) didn't think through what the terminal velocity of a light drone with a significant amount of drag (dead rotors, bodywork, etc). In the event of a drone at 5km failing, and one at 500m hitting the ground form their failure altitudes, they'll almost certainly hit the ground at the same speed. I don't know what their fall-to-terminal-velocity distances are, but I doubt it would be anything like as far as a human skydiver (square-cube scaling law) - several hundred metres or so, only.
They're BALPA (known affectionately in their column in my Trade Union newspaper as "Those Magnificent Men in Our Flying Machines," as they're the guys who get us to our work ; we share a lot of hazards) ; they're not prone to exaggeration. Runway incursions are a once or twice per decade problem (this in not America, where they swap gun ownership for any pretence of security), and close approaches are barely more frequent. If BALPA are concerned, then I'd be concerned (I'll ask their rep next time I see one at a Union branch meeting.)
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Fuck. You get someone to brew a swimming pool full of beer - I'll bring some copper pipe, hammers, axes and wood blocks and TEACH people how to build distilleries!
(To actually brew the wort from yeast and seed-potatoes would probably make for a pretty long party. As would maturing the distillate. Though I can take the rough edges off the "first" bucketful.)
Isn't the "made publicly available" bit an example of "prior art". At least, when I dealt with (European) patent law, that would have been grounds for denying a patent application. Once we'd FILED the application, then we could use our ideas to beat shit out of our competitors (different, but not directly comparable because they did different things) product adverts. These days, I just castigate the competition for sending out operators with their equipment, who don't even have 'technician' level of understanding of it, let alone 'developer' level (about where I'd put myself) or 'theoretician' (whose conversations I can at least understand).
Sorry, the "former competition". I guess I have to think of Scumburger as potential employers now. And they don't like people who know where intermediate-level management have bodies buried from upper-level's sight.
Makes reasonable sense to me.
s/ comics/ "fossils or minerals"
I've given people specimens worth hundreds of pounds on field trips which I'd spotted, then "guided" the novice towards. Let them have the joy of discovery - I've got the pleasure of another interested and enthusiastic student/ pupil/ friend/ relative. A new mind in "this game" is almost incalculable in value, particularly if attached to educated eyes.
Who is this "outsider"?
For most important exams - the ones you've spent multiple years at the institution - well, this isn't your first encounter with the authorities in that institution.
Otherwise, you've probably been living with your problem for ... well, much of your life. So you know that you need to contact the invigilators well before the event to manage problems like this. At which point, where are the "outsiders" again?
Oh, and I'd doubt that you're the first user user of this device to experience this problem with this device. So there's very likely a reminder in the Friendly Manual about such confusion - likely next to warnings about TSA fondlings. You do RTFM, don't you? Seriously, you do, don't you?
How does the accomplice get to know what the questions are?
With national/ international exams, you might have a chance. But for exams cooked up on site for a particular school's particular course ... much harder.
s/ professor/ invigilator. Or if you're American, "proctor"?
[SHRUG] If your hearing is bad enough to get a doctor's note explaining why you need to keep your hearing aids (if it's one aid, then you just use your working ear), then the exam administrators know you have bad hearing and provide you with the script of instructions that the invigilator works from.
What - you think they don't have notes? The fuck they don't. Very often the notes ARE the front page of the exam paper. But there are things they MUST mention, and they're in a script of some sort. You get the script. If it's not on the exam cover page. Printed. In high contrast (black on white, normally). And if you need it, IN LARGE PRINT.
Your excuse might work for the first exam in a series. Or, for my finals, maybe the first day (2 exams, 4 hours each). But when you get to the second day, there will be your information. (Actually, it would only have worked for one day in my first year exams. Of four years.)
To be honest, people that rich hire proper doctors and proper civil engineers. They put what little intelligence they have into choosing which politician/ bureaucrat to bribe/ honey-trap or otherwise co-opt and which laws to ignore.
I remember reading - I think it was the original Frank Herbert "Dune" - where they talked about a "battle language" which I deduced to be a private sign-language. That's good - as a fairly arbitrary encoding it has elements of information hiding that provide a degree of security (as long as the Other Side don't have access to a substantial corpus of messages)
Some years later, I started working in "high noise" environments, where the wearing of ear-defenders is (1) just common sense, (2) company policy, and (3) backed-up by criminal law. and the idea of teaching people to use a sign language in high-noise environments would get trotted out on occasions. It never flew ("I'm an Merkin ; I ain'n't gonna leern no stinking British Sign Language when there are as many Merkin Sign Languages as there are schools for the deaf." encapsulates several problems), but I tried. ... and the need has just died.
In the last 5 years, combinations of ear defenders, VHF radios (which are Explosion-Proof to acceptable standards - 2 faults), and earphones/ microphones have become available and dropped in price below about a kilo-dollar each
Similarly, there is a debate - vicious and of varying quality - over the "preservation" of Sign Languages, as general education becomes more integrated, and cochlear implants can greatly reduce deafness itself. Improving technology is changing the question, and the range of potential solutions.
My wife used to work with archiving medical records. When she went into work, she took her phone (not a smart one) out of her pocket, put it in her locker, locked the locker, and went from the changing room to the office to do her work.
Failure to do so was an instant sacking offence. Similarly with a camera (defined as "anything capable of storing an image).
Enjoy your time in the blow torch flame, Snowflake. I don't think you'll last very long.
When I read "O-levels", I think "15-16 year old", and for "A-levels" I think 17-18 year olds." I don't get hung up over the details of particular courses, since you only see them filtered through the shifting changeable mask of (relatively small) numbers of individual's responses to them. Unless you're an educational professional, or perhaps a recruitment professional.
Then exams will be conducted in the nude. Or, failing that, in school-supplied surgical gowns, after the examinees are ordered to strip themselves nude, leave their clothes and gadgets in lockers, and walk slowly through a seawater shower before gowning-up.
I'd start to put these contingencies into the school rules about now, so that when the next exam cycle comes through in 3, 4 or 7 years (depending on the length of your course ; does it go up to 11 years for architects in your country?), the option is in the tuition contracts and has been for the duration of the student's enrolment in the system.
I'd include a provision : for a generation or two, the names and photographs of the first student caught using $CHEATING_TECHNIQUE$ will be posted as part of the exam regulations, every year, so that the person who is responsible for such expensive and (moderately) invasive regulations being enacted. Blame where blame is due. For all $CHEATING_TECHNIQUE$ .
There are ways of dealing with "appropriate reference books" e.g., in my practical microscopic mineralogy and petrology exams, we were permitted our individual copies of DH&Z on the desks, though if the invigilator thought that you'd stuck too many post-its and annotations, he might swap your copy for one from the Department library. (It should be pointed out that one was encouraged to own, and annotate, one's copy through one's student career. The Department copies were for people who forgot their copy, the dog ate it, it was soaked in driving rain ...) How to deal with that in the digital age is a harder question. I'd suspect that issuing a sealed tablet in the exam room with (say) reference books, PDFs of the lecturer's notes and permitted apps would be a starting line.
Who the fuck are you kidding? All countries in the civilised world have maternity leave for fathers as well as mothers.
Or do you not live in the civilised world? You poor, unprivileged bastard.
There is, of course, "one", but that's a bit contrived for some uses.
The operative word in that is, of course, "may". At other times, it may NOT be assumed that (etc). In other words, you don't know.
So I assume that I don't know, whereas if I see someone who writes "he/ she/ it/ they" then I do know that it's someone who does think that it's a significant point they're making.
Part of the point is that it does take an effort.
Sure do. Just hop on a plane to Tokyo.
Elementary failure of physics (or history) knowledge : Quantum computers were only seriously proposed in the early 1980s. Fiction authors may have used the term earlier, but without meaning.
And the Darwin award aspirant said to himself "I'm an American, not 'anything foreign', so clearly this does not apply to me."
The rest is history.
In a "pumped storage" system (e.g. Dinorwyg, Cruachan), yes they do. But it's not magic, its engineering.
Yes, there was an impactor. Around (i.e. both before and after) the same time, there was major volcanism. And how either would have seriously affected some marine orders but not others remains unclear.
While no-one (creation-cretins and Expanding-Earthers excepted) seriously doubts the K-Pg extinctions, the Deccan traps, or the Chixulub impactor, getting the precise relative dating of the three events (at least two of which were likely extended over decades to hundreds of thousands of years), is still a matter for debate and acquisition of evidence.
Yes, in the event of a hardware failure, it may be a bitch to repair or replace, so appropriate substitution plans should be in place. If the business in question needs a disaster-recovery plan, it should certainly be included (possibly as a "service to be replaced with an equivalent"). That's planning for future events. but until something happens, the machine/ service does not need to be "upgraded" because, by definition, it is working.
Maybe not the best example. If I had to go and find a 20ft step ladder - or worse, a 20ft scaffold tower - to get up to the level needed to change the lights in the living room roof, then I would indeed consider doing a preventative bulb-change, because the cost wouldn't be in the bulbs, but in the hire of the access tools. (I don't have a lobby like that at home, but I've seen people who do have. The house in question being Victorian, when killing a servant wasn't a big problem.)
But what I'd really do would be to re-design the lighting system to be more maintainable (whether that be lighting suspended to a more convenient altitude, or lighting which can be lowered to floor level ... whatever).
It is very US-centric. I just write about thing in my country and make occasional reference to "foreigners like Americans". Not many of them even notice, because they simply don't think of themselves as being foreigners.
My flight training for getting to work includes the usual stuff of underwater escape training, evacuating the aircraft in darkness and smoke, and the usual entertainments. I'm all with you on the hazards of these these behaviours. Not because I think people are particularly likely to deliberately put people at risk (e.g. amateurs being carried on planes, and people who fly on the things for a wage like you and I), but because most people are congenitally too fucking stupid to think through the consequences of their actions before actually doing them.
The person who copy-pasted the summary (and/ or the "original" article) didn't think through what the terminal velocity of a light drone with a significant amount of drag (dead rotors, bodywork, etc). In the event of a drone at 5km failing, and one at 500m hitting the ground form their failure altitudes, they'll almost certainly hit the ground at the same speed. I don't know what their fall-to-terminal-velocity distances are, but I doubt it would be anything like as far as a human skydiver (square-cube scaling law) - several hundred metres or so, only.
They're BALPA (known affectionately in their column in my Trade Union newspaper as "Those Magnificent Men in Our Flying Machines," as they're the guys who get us to our work ; we share a lot of hazards) ; they're not prone to exaggeration. Runway incursions are a once or twice per decade problem (this in not America, where they swap gun ownership for any pretence of security), and close approaches are barely more frequent. If BALPA are concerned, then I'd be concerned (I'll ask their rep next time I see one at a Union branch meeting.)