Didn't I hear something about "Gulf War Syndrome" recently, or wasn't it the families of ex-soldiers who died while sueing about being used as crash radiation dummies in atom-bomb tests?
"Check" on that one.
troopers could run afoul of international law, potentially sparking a diplomatic crisis every time the U.S. deploys troops overseas.;
Haven't I been awake and aware since the late 1970s? Yes. so there's a "check" on that one too.
(But - doesn't the US decry "international law", except when it suits them (copyright, one direction of intellectual property law, etc)? So, which way do they want it?)
enhancements [] provoke disproportionate responses by [] enemies, resulting in a potentially devastating arms race
What were those foreign nuclear weapons deployed 20 miles east of the house I grew up in, as well as 30 miles SW? Oh yes - a thoroughly non-devastating (for Americans) arms race that was likely to turn me into radioactive powder.
... but does that imply that no-way, no-how will a "Surface" be allowed to run any non-Microsoft software?
Not my problem - I'm not even sure if it might possibly have been a viable solution to my interests in "tablettery", which are purely personal and that flat out excluded Microsoft from consideration.
If Microsoft "Surface" won't run anything non-Microsoft... won't Apple be jealous? Indeed, don't Apple have this patented already?
Your "here" is most likely different to my "here".
Yes, this is a "modest proposal" (I think you're referring to Dean Swift's cook book?) which I have as much expectation of being taken up as Dean Swift did for his proposal.
Guns are too dangerous to put in the hands of the general public. Because the general public includes significant number of people with personal problems, or rapidly escalating crises. If you're not confident enough of the maturity of your "here"'s democracy to withstand erosion from the inside, then it might be worthwhile to address that problem.
There is probably a different system for every manufacturer. There is probably a different system for every manufacturer's different year and model and trim level. Part of which may be deliberate design by the manufacturers, but mostly I suspect it is that capabilities of equipment (at a price point) keep on changing. And with things changing so fast, there hasn't been time for consumers to really work out for themselves what they really want, and for that information to get back to the manufacturers.
So... solutions? I guess the only real solution would be for more stuff to be implemented in software, so that people can configure it for themselves. But that would require people to RTFM. Impasse.
Or the house buying lots of alcohol that your car insurer might like to know about?
They should be happy that I'm drinking at home, versus driving to a bar...
Your building insurance provider, on the other hand, might be very interested to know about the apparent use of your residential premises as a commercial bar.
Maybe it was written in asm then there would not really be any source...
Most likely it was. The programmers who wrote the code were sacked during the next slump - and re-hired in the next boom when updates were needed and no-one could find anything resembling source code, programming notes, or anything. That happened several times over boom-bust cycles until I left (and stopped caring), but I believe that the programmers simply didn't bring their (putative) notes back into the country they were being employed in, having learned to screw the corporation for every penny they could get. "Want something fixed... that'll be X for the first test version, then Y for each revision cycle afterwards."
Which is the way to treat a bunch of corporate back-stabbers, once they've demonstrated unequivocally what a bunch of scum-suckers they are.
Unfortunately, corporate entities are probably smarter about ownership of code and contracts these days.
Ah ; essentially a hobby system rather than a mission-critical system. Fun enough for Saturday between lunch and pub.
Try some industrial back-plane computers running ROM-installed software (no source code available) on 8088s. They still do the DAQ job... but one day the last will fry and my former employer will have to build a new system. S.E.P. : someone else's problem.
People have been laughing and pointing fingers at the idiots who buy into such developments for a lot more than a decade. Since I started to study geology (late 1970s) I've been vocally and publicly berating the idiots in the local council who permit such developments, and then the idiots who buy into them. It hasn't had any effect apart from to give me some belly laughs, and a few people a sick-in-the-belly feeling of fear, uncertainty and doubt at the geologist laughing at them. Doesn't make me terribly popular, but since I've got more self-respect than the shit heads who go into politics (OK ; I'll be fair : the overwhelming majority of people who go into politics are thieving shit head morons, but there are rare exceptions), I don't care about that.
New house has 15m freeboard from bank-full state and 10m from credible (historical) tsunami run-up. These issues are now Someone Else's Problem, unless we get 15m of sea level rise in my lifetime (which is (1) not plausible and (2) will result in so much work that I'll be able to afford to move again).
Who would have guessed that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment?
Darwin?
Otzi, the "ice man"?
Or at around the same time, a good proportion of the Egyptian and Babylonian gods who were devoted to the relationships between flooding and next year's food. Or... well pretty much everyone apart from the last couple of centuries of westerners who have got away from the habit of starving to death every time the environment had a little wobble, like the 1783 Laki eruption or the 1815 "year without a summer", with many thousands or millions of deaths around the world.
Who'd have thought it. People can continue to die if they fuck up their environment. Film at 11, assuming that the machines continue to work.
Hmm, yes, 2.5in IDE drives could be a problem. There are antique companies that deal with flint-knappping and semaphore flag stitching too, I'm sure. And yes, I've had to nurse along antique hardware too. Not fun. Something to be done for as long as necessary to recover data from the machine and then replace it with something more maintainable. There are times when a bullet in the back of the head really is the kindest thing.
And if your Boss doesn't understand that, it's time to give him the task of fixing the problem himself, or of finding a replacement for you.
A 500 tonne asteroid. Sounds impressively big, doesn't it?
To provide radiation shielding roughly equivalent to our atmosphere, you need around 10 tonnes of material above each square metre of the spacecraft. (Minor corrections for photo-electric factor and other cross-section issues ; this is a first approximation.) So, 500 tonnes would suffice for shielding around 50 sq.m of spacecraft surface.
That's a sphere of about 2m in radius.
Proof of concept - yes. Workable spacecraft for a working crew? No. Radiation shielded chamber for solar storms... just possibly.
Taking on board the warning about it being a Daily Flail article - the most useful thing is exercising the back-of-an-envelope calculations.
getting a 2.5" IDE drive is not that easy or fast, so it will have to do until then).
What? Which benighted pert of the world are you stuck in that you can't readily find a 2.5" hard drive? Without more than 3 words of the local language, I could find a laptop hard drive in Dar es Salaam within 4 hours of starting to look, on a Sunday, fresh off a plane.
Or are you just extremely poor? (Nothing wrong with that, but it does impose it's own constraints which have nothing to do with the general availability of hardware in your region.)
... specifically for an Apple phone. They're obliged to provide a micro-USB connector, or an adaptor to that fitting. So... what's the problem.
I must admit that I've not actually picked up an Apple phone for... well, I'm not sure if I've ever picked up an Apple phone. Do they have any interesting characteristics?
It sounds down to the level of scummish behaviour that I'd expect from a person of religion. Pretty much any religion, but Xtianity is very firmly in the middle of the pack there.
GP was suggesting that since Canada is on the American continent,
That's strange ; I thought that America was on the Canadian continent.
No, seriously.
Canada has an area of 10 million sq.km ; the USA is 9.8 million.
Canada consists of the Laurentian craton with a Grenvillian-age margin attached on the SE side , a smaller Caledonian-age margin SE of that , and a Cenozoic mountain belt attaching to the W ; the US has a hidden sub-structure which is an extension of the Laurentian craton, sweeping arcs of Grenville and Caledonian rocks, and a similar western mountain range. I.e. the structures from the Canadian core continue to form the basis of the USA. But with the cratonic core very firmly in Canada, I'd say that America is on the Canadian continent, not vice versa.
Otherwise, how do you separate people with plans in motion to go there from those who are merely being 'patent trolls' by claiming something and doing nothing with it?
Claims to a particular piece of real estate shouldn't be valid until physical contact has been made with the body in question, at the site in question.
You could have a moderately interesting conversation about how big an area each "touch down marker" ("stake", whatever you call it) covers. Whether it would be simpler to define it as a radius around the "marker". Maybe minor below a certain diameter would only need one stake to secure the whole object.
( I just went off on an excursion to try to find the distribution of minor planet diameters. From http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/plot/OrbEls10.gif I get a distribution of absolute magnitudes, and from http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/Sizes.html I get an approximate converter for absolute magnitude to diameter. Combining the two, I get that the commonest brightness for minor planets is around 16.5, corresponding to a diameter of around 1300-3000 m. So a 10 km sphere around a "marker" would cover most asteroids and a little over 300sq.km of a larger object's surface. Meanwhile, landing accuracy ellipses for landers are already comparable to that, and are getting better. )
Speaking as a geologist, I can assure you that the major effects will be reversible. On a time scale of one to two hundred thousand years. Minor, stochastic effects (e.g. the extinction of particular species of organism) will not, of course be reversible, in the same way that the cream doesn't normally separate out of stirred coffee.
1) Install gun shop owner behind entry door to gun shop.
2) When a customer comes in, do not bother to ask them if they're wishing to buy a weapon, or or buy ammunition.
3) Shoot customer in the back with a weapon on full-auto. If there are children alongside, shoot them too, just to be safe.
Soon enough all the gun owners and wanna-be gun owners are properly dead, and the world is a safer place. The gun-shop owners can now shoot themselves and their family and children. Send their estates to the victims of gun crime.
Simple gun safety!
What? Are you protesting that it's your constitutional right to bear arms? So fucking what - it's too fucking dangerous to let civilians have guns. Sheesh, don't you get it yet?
A student intent on both studying and working wouldn't generally work full time, and there are weekends still.
And how precisely do you tell the difference between
those who are coming into the country with the intention of studying for their qualification, and
those who are coming into the country on the only visa that they can get with the intention of working for (cash) wages (at least some of which they send back to the home country)
?The problem is not immigrant students wishing to study ; the problem is people immigrating by posing as students. Anatomically the two groups are indistinguishable. In terms of their visas they are indistinguishable (one was obtained by deception, but you can't tell that until after the event and trial). Unless you can think of something different, then the only way of distinguishing the two groups is by their behaviour in diligence at their studies.
A reminder : this is not targeted at tracking EU citizens studying in Britain (who have the right to work, and the right of residence, and the option of studying), it is targeted at tracking non-EU citizens (who do not have the right to work, who do not have the right of residence except on the absolute condition that they are genuinely pursuing a course of study in the UK, and who have the option of remaining in the country only while they are actively studying).
The problem is that, without tattooing immigrants on the forehead as they enter the country, there is no simple way to distinguish the two classes of people.
At my work there are two classes of employee : those who take drugs to the worksite (2 that I've met in 25 years in the profession) and the rest (around 40,000 people) who do not. However every one of us is subject to random piss-testing at the worksite and breathalyser when getting on the transport to the site. Those of us who don't take drugs (at work) do feel aggrieved at being tarred with the same brush as the few who do. The same problem of distinguishing the two classes applies ; and a similarly broad brush solution is applied. Your better suggestions would be appreciated, because I don't like pissing in the pot, nor having my personal freedom to have a joint inhibited by the fact that I might have to piss in the pot in the next 6 months.
and there are weekends still.
Not if you don't have a work permit there aren't. If you are not an EU citizen and do not have a work permit, you are not permitted to work. That is why the phrase "work permit" includes the noun "work" and the verb "permit". Citizen's rights (or subject's rights, if you're British as well as EU) do not apply, because, by definition, you are not a citizen (or subject). Your human rights to obtain paid work in your country of origin are not infringed ; don't let the door hit you on the arse as you leave.
FYI, voluntary (i.e. unpaid) work is also frowned upon ; strictly you should get the written permission of an immigration officer working in his/her formal capacity before doing voluntary work which could potentially displace a citizen (subject) from employment. People have been deported for this error. Probably, getting a work permit for limited classes of unpaid work is possible as an immigrant student, but I bet it would be a struggle.
I mean, dealing with dirty pieces of shit like Westboro is really going to stink up under your fingernails and everywhere. It'll take ages to get the smell of the contact out of your skin.
And checking their school attendance would prevent that...exactly how?
OK : some basic maths. There are (to a close approximation) 24 hours in a day. Most people spend about 8 hours a day in sleeping, eating, and picking their noses, leaving 16 hours potentially available for what we can loosely classify as "work". If you require people to be physically present at a location for 8 hours a day where they have to do something we can loosely call "study", then there remains only 8 hours in a day when "work" can possibly be done. A reduction of hours potentially available for "work" from 16 hours/day to 8 hours/day is going to make it harder (not impossible, just harder) to perform "work" for 16 hours a day. It depends on how little sleep time you actually do need.
One of my lab lecturers would lock the lab door about 10 minutes after the nominal start time (preventing anyone else from getting in), and "take the register" (in the form of completed and signed worksheets) in the last quarter hour of the laboratory (he wasn't unreasonable - he knew how long it took to get back to the accommodation before the kitchens closed) ; you could leave any time you want, but you wouldn't get your work considered in your marking if you left early. You did your time in the labs, and you did your homework time too, at least as many hours again at the microscope. Those who put their hours in at the eyepiece, got better ; 25 years later it still shows in who is better at their work.
I've known plenty of people who are full time students by staying at home reading all the apropiate bibliography.
I've known such people too. And it's not relevant.
There are some that are really good at learning by reading and suck at having this taught to them. It's stupid to make them go to class if they don't need to.
The terms and conditions of the course and university you're signing up to are "do this", "do that", and "paint your belly button with woad". If you don't like it, go to a different course in a different country. That is the choice that is being presented. If you don't like the terms of the contract you're looking at, don't sign it.
There is a case to be made for existing students, who have effectively had the terms and conditions of their contract changed under them. They have got grounds for complaint - and contract law etc gives them the opportunity to do it. But new students - not a hope in hell. If the university goes bust over this... tough. It would be a shame (I considered Newcastle myself, and I've friends who did go there ; good university. The month I spent working in Newcastle was a fun time.), but that is clearly a gamble that the Senatus have decided to take.
(Incidentally, my degree course required an average of 6 hours a week in the laboratory, handling physical specimens and expensive equipment. Non-attendance at laboratories was grounds for being dumped from the course. There is nothing new here to me. Not all courses can be passed by book-learning alone.)
If you're at the university on a visa, there's an expectation you're attending the university.
You can easily prove that by passing exams (or by failing to pass them in any other way than being absent).
The point is not about passing or failing courses. It's about people who get a visa to ENTER the country on the basis that they will be FULL TIME students supporting themselves out of their own funds and doing NO WORK in the country because the DO NOT HAVE A WORK PERMIT. (FYI : being a student is not considered "work" in this country.)
What has long been a significant problem has been people FALSELY applying for a student visa, granted on the conditions above, then violating the visa conditions by WORKING WITHOUT A WORK PERMIT, then frequently stopping attending their courses, then continuing to WORK WITHOUT A WORK PERMIT, then overstaying their visa after it has been rescinded because of the failure to abide by the CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH THE VISA WAS ISSUED.
An analogy : I allow you to rent a room in my lodging house under the contractual conditions that you pay your rent and don't shit in the hallway. Soon, I start seeing turds in the hallway (non-attendance at the course), and then you stop paying your rent (disappear into the illegal immigrants underworld). I then want to take action to evict you from my house. Under this analogy, checking attendance at courses (on a lecture by lecture basis) is comparable to checking the hallway for turds several times a day.
There is a complicating factor that anti-discrimination legislation means that either everyone has their attendance checked, or no-one does. In the analogy, I'd need to patrol all the hallways looking for turds, not just those hallways where I'd rented rooms to people with green skin.
There are other ways this could be done, but they'd probably require more time and effort on the behalf of administrative staff.
Yes, this sort of thing does make life more difficult for legal immigrants, and legal foreign students too. Which with the common petty racism of British people and officialdom (I speak as a Briton, with a non-British wife), makes life significantly more difficult than it needs to be. And it is a right pain in the arse. But in this case, both sides of the argument have got reasonable cases to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't I hear something about "Gulf War Syndrome" recently, or wasn't it the families of ex-soldiers who died while sueing about being used as crash radiation dummies in atom-bomb tests?
"Check" on that one.
Haven't I been awake and aware since the late 1970s? Yes. so there's a "check" on that one too.
(But - doesn't the US decry "international law", except when it suits them (copyright, one direction of intellectual property law, etc)? So, which way do they want it?)
What were those foreign nuclear weapons deployed 20 miles east of the house I grew up in, as well as 30 miles SW? Oh yes - a thoroughly non-devastating (for Americans) arms race that was likely to turn me into radioactive powder.
"Check" on that one too.
Situation normal : all fucked up.
Not my problem - I'm not even sure if it might possibly have been a viable solution to my interests in "tablettery", which are purely personal and that flat out excluded Microsoft from consideration.
If Microsoft "Surface" won't run anything non-Microsoft ... won't Apple be jealous? Indeed, don't Apple have this patented already?
Yes, this is a "modest proposal" (I think you're referring to Dean Swift's cook book?) which I have as much expectation of being taken up as Dean Swift did for his proposal.
Guns are too dangerous to put in the hands of the general public. Because the general public includes significant number of people with personal problems, or rapidly escalating crises. If you're not confident enough of the maturity of your "here"'s democracy to withstand erosion from the inside, then it might be worthwhile to address that problem.
So ... solutions? I guess the only real solution would be for more stuff to be implemented in software, so that people can configure it for themselves. But that would require people to RTFM. Impasse.
Memo to self : re-set Slashdot's mail to use my goatse.cx email account.
Your building insurance provider, on the other hand, might be very interested to know about the apparent use of your residential premises as a commercial bar.
Most likely it was. The programmers who wrote the code were sacked during the next slump - and re-hired in the next boom when updates were needed and no-one could find anything resembling source code, programming notes, or anything. That happened several times over boom-bust cycles until I left (and stopped caring), but I believe that the programmers simply didn't bring their (putative) notes back into the country they were being employed in, having learned to screw the corporation for every penny they could get. "Want something fixed ... that'll be X for the first test version, then Y for each revision cycle afterwards."
Which is the way to treat a bunch of corporate back-stabbers, once they've demonstrated unequivocally what a bunch of scum-suckers they are.
Unfortunately, corporate entities are probably smarter about ownership of code and contracts these days.
Try some industrial back-plane computers running ROM-installed software (no source code available) on 8088s. They still do the DAQ job ... but one day the last will fry and my former employer will have to build a new system. S.E.P. : someone else's problem.
New house has 15m freeboard from bank-full state and 10m from credible (historical) tsunami run-up. These issues are now Someone Else's Problem, unless we get 15m of sea level rise in my lifetime (which is (1) not plausible and (2) will result in so much work that I'll be able to afford to move again).
Otzi, the "ice man"?
Or at around the same time, a good proportion of the Egyptian and Babylonian gods who were devoted to the relationships between flooding and next year's food. Or ... well pretty much everyone apart from the last couple of centuries of westerners who have got away from the habit of starving to death every time the environment had a little wobble, like the 1783 Laki eruption or the 1815 "year without a summer", with many thousands or millions of deaths around the world.
Who'd have thought it. People can continue to die if they fuck up their environment. Film at 11, assuming that the machines continue to work.
Hmm, yes, 2.5in IDE drives could be a problem. There are antique companies that deal with flint-knappping and semaphore flag stitching too, I'm sure. And yes, I've had to nurse along antique hardware too. Not fun. Something to be done for as long as necessary to recover data from the machine and then replace it with something more maintainable. There are times when a bullet in the back of the head really is the kindest thing.
And if your Boss doesn't understand that, it's time to give him the task of fixing the problem himself, or of finding a replacement for you.
To provide radiation shielding roughly equivalent to our atmosphere, you need around 10 tonnes of material above each square metre of the spacecraft. (Minor corrections for photo-electric factor and other cross-section issues ; this is a first approximation.) So, 500 tonnes would suffice for shielding around 50 sq.m of spacecraft surface.
That's a sphere of about 2m in radius.
Proof of concept - yes. Workable spacecraft for a working crew? No. Radiation shielded chamber for solar storms ... just possibly.
Taking on board the warning about it being a Daily Flail article - the most useful thing is exercising the back-of-an-envelope calculations.
What? Which benighted pert of the world are you stuck in that you can't readily find a 2.5" hard drive? Without more than 3 words of the local language, I could find a laptop hard drive in Dar es Salaam within 4 hours of starting to look, on a Sunday, fresh off a plane.
Or are you just extremely poor? (Nothing wrong with that, but it does impose it's own constraints which have nothing to do with the general availability of hardware in your region.)
I must admit that I've not actually picked up an Apple phone for ... well, I'm not sure if I've ever picked up an Apple phone. Do they have any interesting characteristics?
It sounds down to the level of scummish behaviour that I'd expect from a person of religion. Pretty much any religion, but Xtianity is very firmly in the middle of the pack there.
That's strange ; I thought that America was on the Canadian continent.
No, seriously.
Canada has an area of 10 million sq.km ; the USA is 9.8 million.
Canada consists of the Laurentian craton with a Grenvillian-age margin attached on the SE side , a smaller Caledonian-age margin SE of that , and a Cenozoic mountain belt attaching to the W ; the US has a hidden sub-structure which is an extension of the Laurentian craton, sweeping arcs of Grenville and Caledonian rocks, and a similar western mountain range. I.e. the structures from the Canadian core continue to form the basis of the USA. But with the cratonic core very firmly in Canada, I'd say that America is on the Canadian continent, not vice versa.
Claims to a particular piece of real estate shouldn't be valid until physical contact has been made with the body in question, at the site in question.
You could have a moderately interesting conversation about how big an area each "touch down marker" ("stake", whatever you call it) covers. Whether it would be simpler to define it as a radius around the "marker". Maybe minor below a certain diameter would only need one stake to secure the whole object.
( I just went off on an excursion to try to find the distribution of minor planet diameters. From http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/plot/OrbEls10.gif I get a distribution of absolute magnitudes, and from http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/Sizes.html I get an approximate converter for absolute magnitude to diameter. Combining the two, I get that the commonest brightness for minor planets is around 16.5, corresponding to a diameter of around 1300-3000 m. So a 10 km sphere around a "marker" would cover most asteroids and a little over 300sq.km of a larger object's surface. Meanwhile, landing accuracy ellipses for landers are already comparable to that, and are getting better. )
Speaking as a geologist, I can assure you that the major effects will be reversible. On a time scale of one to two hundred thousand years. Minor, stochastic effects (e.g. the extinction of particular species of organism) will not, of course be reversible, in the same way that the cream doesn't normally separate out of stirred coffee.
Soon enough all the gun owners and wanna-be gun owners are properly dead, and the world is a safer place. The gun-shop owners can now shoot themselves and their family and children. Send their estates to the victims of gun crime.
Simple gun safety!
What? Are you protesting that it's your constitutional right to bear arms? So fucking what - it's too fucking dangerous to let civilians have guns. Sheesh, don't you get it yet?
Same thing happened to John Smith.
And how precisely do you tell the difference between
?The problem is not immigrant students wishing to study ; the problem is people immigrating by posing as students. Anatomically the two groups are indistinguishable. In terms of their visas they are indistinguishable (one was obtained by deception, but you can't tell that until after the event and trial). Unless you can think of something different, then the only way of distinguishing the two groups is by their behaviour in diligence at their studies.
A reminder : this is not targeted at tracking EU citizens studying in Britain (who have the right to work, and the right of residence, and the option of studying), it is targeted at tracking non-EU citizens (who do not have the right to work, who do not have the right of residence except on the absolute condition that they are genuinely pursuing a course of study in the UK, and who have the option of remaining in the country only while they are actively studying).
The problem is that, without tattooing immigrants on the forehead as they enter the country, there is no simple way to distinguish the two classes of people.
At my work there are two classes of employee : those who take drugs to the worksite (2 that I've met in 25 years in the profession) and the rest (around 40,000 people) who do not. However every one of us is subject to random piss-testing at the worksite and breathalyser when getting on the transport to the site. Those of us who don't take drugs (at work) do feel aggrieved at being tarred with the same brush as the few who do. The same problem of distinguishing the two classes applies ; and a similarly broad brush solution is applied. Your better suggestions would be appreciated, because I don't like pissing in the pot, nor having my personal freedom to have a joint inhibited by the fact that I might have to piss in the pot in the next 6 months.
Not if you don't have a work permit there aren't. If you are not an EU citizen and do not have a work permit, you are not permitted to work. That is why the phrase "work permit" includes the noun "work" and the verb "permit". Citizen's rights (or subject's rights, if you're British as well as EU) do not apply, because, by definition, you are not a citizen (or subject). Your human rights to obtain paid work in your country of origin are not infringed ; don't let the door hit you on the arse as you leave.
FYI, voluntary (i.e. unpaid) work is also frowned upon ; strictly you should get the written permission of an immigration officer working in his/her formal capacity before doing voluntary work which could potentially displace a citizen (subject) from employment. People have been deported for this error. Probably, getting a work permit for limited classes of unpaid work is possible as an immigrant student, but I bet it would be a struggle.
I mean, dealing with dirty pieces of shit like Westboro is really going to stink up under your fingernails and everywhere. It'll take ages to get the smell of the contact out of your skin.
OK : some basic maths. There are (to a close approximation) 24 hours in a day. Most people spend about 8 hours a day in sleeping, eating, and picking their noses, leaving 16 hours potentially available for what we can loosely classify as "work". If you require people to be physically present at a location for 8 hours a day where they have to do something we can loosely call "study", then there remains only 8 hours in a day when "work" can possibly be done. A reduction of hours potentially available for "work" from 16 hours/day to 8 hours/day is going to make it harder (not impossible, just harder) to perform "work" for 16 hours a day. It depends on how little sleep time you actually do need.
One of my lab lecturers would lock the lab door about 10 minutes after the nominal start time (preventing anyone else from getting in), and "take the register" (in the form of completed and signed worksheets) in the last quarter hour of the laboratory (he wasn't unreasonable - he knew how long it took to get back to the accommodation before the kitchens closed) ; you could leave any time you want, but you wouldn't get your work considered in your marking if you left early. You did your time in the labs, and you did your homework time too, at least as many hours again at the microscope. Those who put their hours in at the eyepiece, got better ; 25 years later it still shows in who is better at their work.
I've known such people too. And it's not relevant.
The terms and conditions of the course and university you're signing up to are "do this", "do that", and "paint your belly button with woad". If you don't like it, go to a different course in a different country. That is the choice that is being presented. If you don't like the terms of the contract you're looking at, don't sign it.
There is a case to be made for existing students, who have effectively had the terms and conditions of their contract changed under them. They have got grounds for complaint - and contract law etc gives them the opportunity to do it. But new students - not a hope in hell. If the university goes bust over this ... tough. It would be a shame (I considered Newcastle myself, and I've friends who did go there ; good university. The month I spent working in Newcastle was a fun time.), but that is clearly a gamble that the Senatus have decided to take.
(Incidentally, my degree course required an average of 6 hours a week in the laboratory, handling physical specimens and expensive equipment. Non-attendance at laboratories was grounds for being dumped from the course. There is nothing new here to me. Not all courses can be passed by book-learning alone.)
The point is not about passing or failing courses. It's about people who get a visa to ENTER the country on the basis that they will be FULL TIME students supporting themselves out of their own funds and doing NO WORK in the country because the DO NOT HAVE A WORK PERMIT. (FYI : being a student is not considered "work" in this country.)
What has long been a significant problem has been people FALSELY applying for a student visa, granted on the conditions above, then violating the visa conditions by WORKING WITHOUT A WORK PERMIT, then frequently stopping attending their courses, then continuing to WORK WITHOUT A WORK PERMIT, then overstaying their visa after it has been rescinded because of the failure to abide by the CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH THE VISA WAS ISSUED.
An analogy : I allow you to rent a room in my lodging house under the contractual conditions that you pay your rent and don't shit in the hallway. Soon, I start seeing turds in the hallway (non-attendance at the course), and then you stop paying your rent (disappear into the illegal immigrants underworld). I then want to take action to evict you from my house. Under this analogy, checking attendance at courses (on a lecture by lecture basis) is comparable to checking the hallway for turds several times a day.
There is a complicating factor that anti-discrimination legislation means that either everyone has their attendance checked, or no-one does. In the analogy, I'd need to patrol all the hallways looking for turds, not just those hallways where I'd rented rooms to people with green skin.
There are other ways this could be done, but they'd probably require more time and effort on the behalf of administrative staff.
Yes, this sort of thing does make life more difficult for legal immigrants, and legal foreign students too. Which with the common petty racism of British people and officialdom (I speak as a Briton, with a non-British wife), makes life significantly more difficult than it needs to be. And it is a right pain in the arse. But in this case, both sides of the argument have got reasonable cases to make.