It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort. Problem is, since much of the rest of the world learns English in school, Americans don't feel the need to bother with other languages.
I think that's precisely it. It requires motivation, and thats lacking in much of the USA.
Being motivated to learn other languages requires thinking that the rest of the world *matters* that there's something to be had from better understanding it and communicating with it. If you consider yourself on top-of-the-world and everyone else as merely more or less civilized depending on how close to you they are culturally, then there's no point.
Speaking a "small" language natively helps. As a Norwegian, for example, you don't have the luxury of being able to travel everywhere in the west and make do with your native language. So anyone who wants to travel knows that they *have* to learn atleast one world-language.
As an American, it's too easy to think: "English works everywhere, so why bother?"
OK, so speaking 2 or more languages natively tends to require having parents from different cultures and/or living in an area with a heavy mixup. But just about everyone learns atleast 2 or more languages in their childhood where I come from.
Infact, you start learning your second language at age 6 at the latest, and most start learning their third when they're like 12-13, there's been suggestions of making that mandatory as part of compulsory school, but this far it's voluntarily. Those with an interest in languages speak 4 languages before leaving high-school.
True, not everyone is fluent in all their languages, but it's rare to meet someone who doesn't have good communication-skills in atleast 2 languages. (the 3rd is often weaker).
I speak Norwegian, English and German fluently, and have basic understanding of French, Icelandic and Dutch (that is ignoring Swedish and Danish since they're very similiar to Norwegian so are understood with little effort by most Norwegians even without training) My wife speaks Polish and German natively, Russian, English and Norwegian fluently and have basic understanding of French and Japanese.
And here's the thing: None of us are language-nerds or consider ourselves out of the ordinary. Infact I'm a computer-programmer that always took the *minimum* amount of language-classes, and my wife studied finance and administration.
America, on the other hand is downrigth shocking. I know intelligent educated people over there with an above average interest in the world around them that nevertheless speaks english only.
It's not lazyness. It's just that passwords are no longer useful for high-security stuff.
To be secure, passwords should:
Not be shared between sites.
Be atleast 8-10 characters long.
Consist of random characters/numbers/symbols
Be changed regularily.
At the same time, the number of situations where the average person needs a password increases strongly.
The human brain just ain't suited for that kind of thing. It gets worse too, because the largest password easily crackable goes up over time. Used to be 6 character letters-and-numbers was reasonable.
Fingerprint-scanners utterly suck. The basic problem is that their mode of operation requires leaving tons of copies of the "password" near the "password-entry" field. Which ain't clever.
It's possible to make them less sucky, but most of the time that results in a higher false-negative rate which ain't that user-friendly at all. Plus, it's a large practical problem, you can't change your biometrics if they're somehow compromised.
That doesn't work because you cannot trust the PC. (it could be trojaned or whatever)
However, if the check was in the dongle itself it could work. The dongle could require the pushing of a on-dongle-button before it'd sign a single transfer.
For added paranoia, the dongle could have a display: "Press the button to transfer [dollar-amount] to [account-number]".
That's not true, allthough it may be true for some relations.
How many horsepower do you need to do 1 ftlbf of work in 1 second ? How many calories is that anyway ? And how does that work if you want to use inches, yards or miles rather than feet ?
Yeah, I know it's possible. I'm just saying, it's not as simple as with a system designed from the ground up to be "compatible".
The *length* of the meter is arbitrary. Same for the length of the second and most other basic units in the metric system.
What is, however, *not* arbitrary, and where the large win lies is in making the derived units straigthforward combinations of the basic units, and the different scale units factors of 10^x larger/smaller.
There's an exception for time. The larger units of time aren't 10^x larger than the smallest one. 60,60,24,7,365.24 is a mess. The latter can't be helped: There really *are* 365.24 (or thereabouts) days in a year. But we could've split the day a lot more sensibly than 24/60/60. For example we could have 10 seconds to the minute, 10 minutes to the hour, 10 hours to the day. That'd be kinda disruptive, but it would simplify some stuff further.
So, a foot makes exactly as much sense as a basic unit of length as a meter. Agreed.
However, once we've set the basic units, the connections are extremely straigthforward:
If I travel 1 meter in 1 second I travel at 1m/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1m/s^2. If I weigh 1kg, then this required a force of 1N. If this force 1N work over a distance of 1m, it does 1J of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1W. If this was provided by electricity, then that is for example 1V and 1A. 1A means 1C electrons pro 1s flows trough the conductor. Now you do that, using only imperial units.:-) How many hogheads *are* there to a fluid-oz anyway ?
Sure there's MUCH better examples of "something you have".
The basic problem with emails, tan-numbers etc is that they can be easily copied. So, the fact that you have the item/information does nothing to ensure that noone else has it too. You're much more likely to notice having *lost* something than you are of noticing that someone has *copied* something you posess.
If you could be certain people wouldn't leave them plugged in (many would, despite strict instructions to the contrary) the ideal something-i-have item would be a usb-key that has tamper-proof hardware set up to do one thing, and one thing only: digitally sign any message that is already signed by the bank (or whomever issuer), with a secret key embedded in it.
When the bank wants to ensure you have the item, it sends you a large random number, signed with its secret key. The usb-thingie verifies the number comes from the bank (by verifying the signature) and if yes, signs the number with its own secret key.
*IF* users could be trusted not to leave the thing plugged in, this would be quite secure. To use the bank: insert your bank-key in the usb-port and type your password. There's no need to type your username/userid, the usb-gadget can take care of that part too. So the experience for the user is much simpler than what is currently common.
Someone somehow learning your password (trough phishing say) would be screwed since they don't have the gadget. And someone stealing the gadget would be screwed since they don't know your password. (plus, you're more likely to notice a missing gadget since that'll stop you from using the bank yourself)
Since users, unfortunately, *cannot* be trusted not to leave the thing plugged in, we get calculator-like gadgets where the user must manually read the one-time-password from a display and enter it into a webform. Which acomplishes more or less the same thing, but is significantly less convenient.
I didn't mean to claim 6MB is in *general* the slowest speed available in Norway today. It certianly ain't. The slowest, if we ignore dialup-modems is 256kbps adsl, but there's few adsl-subscribers with less than 756kbps.
6Mbps is however the lowest speed offered by Lyse, which is the current provider for my neighbourhood (not in Oslo by the way), they offer 6, 20 and 50 Mbps over fiber to neighbourhoods, and over adsl2 to individual households. Those with fiber get symetric capacity, those with adsl2 get asymetric capacity and an order of magnitude less upload than download.
Being big is no defence against piracy, and working less and less all the time.
Once upon a time, the industry thougth nooone would pirate CDs because they're 700 freaking MBs HUGE.
Fast-forward a few years, and people use mp3 to compress them to like 60MB, which degrades quality, but people don't care. A 128kbps mp3 is "good enough" for most consumers, despite being markedly worse than the original.
Fast-forward a few more years, and downloading 700MB is trivial, so people start sharing full, uncompressed (or FLAC-compressed) cds in full quality. At the same time they also start sharing movies in compressed quality since those are similarily large.
Already, there is a lot of DVD-quality (4-10GB) movie-sharing going on, despite them not being all that much better than a well-compressed 1GB version of the same films.
If future movies are 100GB/movie, people will either compress them until they're small enough to be reasonably shared, a 10GB version of a 100GB movie is going to be "good enough" for most people even if it ain't like the original. Or, a few years later, they trivially share the 100GB.
Bandwith and storage goes up more than movie-storage-requirements do. When DVDs where introduced, around 1995 most people hadn't ever tried the internet. 5 years after the introduction many had modem-dialups to the internet. Capable of 20MB/hour or 250 hours for a single-layer DVD. Obviously impractical.
Now, 10 years later (give or take) Blue-Ray and HD-DVD are being introduced with around 10 times the capacity. The typical bandwith of a home-user is in the range of 3-20Mb/s, which means a 50GB blueray disc is downloadable in 5-30 hours.
So, basic line: *TODAY* at the *START* of the HD-DVD and blueray introduction, downloading them is already more practical than it was to download a DVD-movie 5 years *after* the DVD-introduction. I predict in 5 years 100Mb/s will be common at home, so by that time you'll be able to download a 50GB blueray-disc in original quality in an hour, or alternatively, stream it live. (and a 10GB compressed version of a 50GB original in 10 minutes, which'll be good enough for most people)
Ok, so maybe it'll take somewhat longer in the USA. I understand you guys still live in the stone-age when home-networking is concerned. Where I live we just decided to install fiber-to-the-home in the entire neighbourhood (converted to GB ethernet in the basement of each house), and this is an old neighbourhood with lots of old people, not a young hip and trendy one. The *slowest* speed available today is 6Mb/s (symetrical), the fastest 100Mb, but the latter is limited basically only by demand. (i.e. noone is interested in paying for more than 100Mb to the home presently)
Anyone who thinks 50-100GB size will deter piracy is in for the shock of their lives.
For music it's even more obvious.
People have stopped downloading songs. Too much hassle.
Some people have stopped downloading albums. Too much hassle.
More popular are stuff like: "Rolling Stones - complete discography.flac.zip"
I'm even starting to see this in movies (porn first offcourse!) people are sharing stuff like: "Devon - complete filmography" rather than individual films.
In a few years, you're gonna get Star_wars_complete.blueray.zip (1.5TB) and noone will even flinch.
Just do it. Books will only get you so far. You need to build a lot of stuff that doesn't work, then eventually some stuff that does work to get a grasp for this stuff. Start by trying to build a project after a plan. When that works, dare to change the plan to make the project work a bit differently. When that fails to work (it will!) figure out why. Once you can reliably change plans, and have the result work you're ready to try your hand at making a plan from scratch yourself.
Also, decide early on if you want to get into analogue circuitry or if you're more interested in digital. It's two different worlds which ain't got much in common. The trend is that more and more circuits are digital. Even if the end-output or the inputs are analogue, that's often converted to/from digital and the rest done digitally.
If someone spesifically ask, we migth point out the area where the person is weakest. But in 9 out of 10 cases it's going to be simply. "We regret having to inform you that the announced position was given to someone else. We wish you luck with your continued job-search." or something of the sort.
Age of consent is lower than 18 just about everywhere except USA. The average is something like 16.
Comically, the child-porn laws are not. So, you get absurd situations like the one you have in Norway:
Fucking a 16 year old is perfectly legal. (assuming consent offcourse!)
Infact, if the partners are "similar in age or development" then they can legally have sex at any age. (So a 16 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend is going to be OK, but a 25 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend can get into trouble.)
But posessing an image of the act is illegal as child-porn is defined to be porn where actors are, or appear to be, under 18.
To add insult to injury: it makes no difference to the law if the person is yourself. Take a snapshot of yourself masturbating at 17, and mere *posession* of this snapshot is a crime. Which is very very obviously bullshit.
Are you ashamed of being the person you infact are ?
Do you feel you *should* be ashamed if you're the kind of person that enjoys looking at porn ?
Do you pretend to be someone else than you actually are, in effect carrying a mask even for your closes, loved ones ?
You even wish to preserve this mask in death -- prefering that people think of you as the person you pretended to be your entire life, rather than as the person you actually where ? (And let's be frank: most people close to you probably saw trough the mask decades ago. But offcourse, they're gonna play a farse too and pretend they didn't.)
Why ?
Isn't that a horribly sad way to live your life ?
Alone, hidden behind a mask, ashamed, allowing noone to see the real you ?
Here's a tip: You're not that bad. Stop being ashamed for being a normal human being. Your sexuality is part of that. Just because thousands of years old religious crap says it's a sin to be human, doesn't mean you should fall for it.
"voluntary" alone won't do it. People are creatures of habit.
What the government should do, assuming they actually want the many advantages of metric is to start using it exclusively themselves. There's no need to force anyone.
Building-codes should give all specifications in metric. Same for car-safety-codes, pollution-codes. All buildings built for the government should use metric units. Information that is required by law already (such as nutrition-info on food) should be required to be in metric.
That's basically the way it works in most of Europe. There's no law saying you can't use whatever system of measurements you like for your own stuff. But when you're applying for a building-permit from the government (for example), they expect all measurements to be given in metric. All specifications in laws and other codes are metric.
It's a gentle push really. But sufficient. Most new buildings, for example, need a building-permit. If that means you need drawings in metric, the only sensible choice is to use metric only. (sure, you could make drawings in metric *AND* imperial at your cost, if that's like your hobby or something....)
I dunno. But one alternative is to use the API of some toolkit, and let the toolkit deal with the specifics of any one platform.
For example, you could program your app using the API provided by QT, and have QT deal with the rest. This would give you the added benefit that your application would work cross-platform.
The waste is in using 3 tons of metal and 5 gallons of petrol for a job that could just as well be done by 1 ton of metal and 2 gallons of petrol.
Part of the cost of this waste is carried not by you, but by those people inconvenienced or harmed as a result of your added pollution. (which means all of us, basically)
Most people on/. are actually more logical and have more common sense than the average human being. It's just that most are also American -- which has no influence at all on logics or common sense -- but which in my experience corresponds strongly with what with my eyes is a perversely warped view of human sexuality and the harmfulness thereof.
I've got many good friends in the USA. Most of them are unable to rigthly comprehend the *CHASM* between especially southern bible-belt mentality and say the mentality common in Norway.
The parents of my first serious girlfriend, then 15, reacted to the two of us becoming intimate in precisely 2 ways. First, by smiling, and removing the extra mattress I had until then been given when I slept over, commenting that it obviously won't be needed any more. Second, by asking her if she wanted them to arrange a doctors-visit so she could get a prescription for the pill.
For the US, the norm seems more like in-secret, away-from-home (perhaps at a party or in the back of some car), parents-pretend-they-dont-know, children-pretend-they-believe-the-parents-dont-kno w, frequently-drunk, sexuality-a-taboo, parents-cant-be-asked-when-questions.
Security. Openness. Confidence. Adults-one-can-talk-to. Contraception. Non-drunkenness. Acceptance. Even pride. These all are, in my opinion, a much better fundament for a enjoyable *AND* safe sexuality than the oposite.
The US method sounds much more dangerous to me. US kids don't actually have less or later sex than Norwegian ones. (infact the average age of first intercourse is sligthly lower in the US, and teenage-pregnancies are like 10 times higher) It's just, like everybody decided to pretend it's not happening and silence it to death rather than actually dealing with it. Human sexuality, however, doesn't magically just go away just because you decide not to talk about it.
I know I know, not every US parent is like that. I don't mean to imply everyone is. Just that the general trend seems to be quite a bit more in this direction.
First of all, his primary question is: Do citizens currently need to show ID in order to travel in their own country?
The answer is a resounding "no". He is free to travel by foot, bike, motorcycle, car, boat, or other device himself while not violating applicable pedestrian or traffic laws, or by bus or train, entirely anonymously.
While I agree with some of what you write -- that particular argument ain't very convincing.
If the government is correct that it can demand that anyone that wants to fly show ID, then by the same logic they could do the same thing for anyone wanting to travel, for example, by train. That there still exist some mode of transportation not covered by the id-requirement is unconvincing. If that was sufficient, the government could issue laws sayins anyone traveling by any means, other than ox-cart, need to show ID. At that point you *effectively* have to show ID if you want to travel -- despite the fact that in principle you could make all your travels by ox-cart.
Planes are the only practical means of transportation for long distances. Claiming that "one can always walk" is unconvincing because in the real world one could never -- realistically speaking -- have for example a gathering of a nation-wide organization without using planes. (the rigths of free organization and gatherings is *also* enshrined in the constitution btw)
These types of taxes are fine but they really don't affect the affluent. Folks that can buy a $40K SUV and pay for the gas aren't going to be turned off by extra taxes. (Aren't they already taxed extra by virtue of the gas tax?)
True. There will always be people who are willing and able to pay whatever price we demand, and continue as before. I think we just have to accept that for behaviour that is simply undesirable. Its supposed to be a free country afterall. If the behaviour is so bad that we *cannot* or *will-no* tolerate this, we have to outlaw it. (we *do* outlaw some sorts of polluting)
In my case the extra tax might have an unintended consequence. We've got a couple cars. One is a truck to haul trailers. Raise flat rate taxes on the truck and I'll sell one of my small cars and drive the truck full time.
There's unintended consequences to all actions. What matters though is the *average* consequence. If the *average* car starts polluting less as a result of a tax-regime that taxes more polluting vehicles higher, then that is what counts. Looking at the average US car compared to the average Norwegian car, its hard to argue this isn't -- infact -- the case.
One of the ways a free market is inefficient is that it fails to consider factors that are external to the ones involved in the trade.
For example, if I sell you something for a price such that the sale benefits both of us, the sale will happen even if there's external people who are harmed (more than our profits) from the sale.
Pollution is a classical externality. The *cost* of the extra pollution is carried by everyone in your community (and to some degree, everyone on earth) but the benefits (mobility, comfort, penis-compensation) are yours alone.
It's sorta like SPAM. It happens because it gives a profit to the *spammers* -- despite the fact that overall its a huge resource-drain. Give one person $10K profit. Give a *million* people $1 loss -- and absent any way for the million to demand compensation from the one the spam will happen.
Thus, it makes perfect sense to tax behaviour that has negative externalities.
For example - nearly every car nowdays has an alarm.
Maybe in the USA -- not here in Norway. Car theft is rare enough that it simply doesn't make any sense to have an alarm, the alarm would cost substantially more than you'd save on insurance-premiums over the useful lifespan of the car.
Very expensive cars do have alarms, but 95% of normal everyday cars don't.
I dont know whats more sad the notion that creating a red light district for the internet could somehow be seen repressing sexuality
It works something like this:
Open new.XXX TLD.
Suggest "pornographic" sites should go there.
*DEMAND* that now that a.XXX tld exists, pornographic sites should be removed from other (mainly.com) tlds.
Pass laws that say you're "endangering minors" if you put pornographic content anywhere else than.xxx
Insist that your definition of pornography is the only One True one, thus rendering my schoolbooks from when I was 12 pornographic.
Insist that schools, libraries and public institutions block.xxx
Separation is the first step towards discrimination and censorship. After you've collected the "bad stuff" in one place under one convenient label, it's much easier to take action against it.
or just the idea that for many pornography=sexuality.
Pornography is obviously a subset of human sexuality. Whats one persons porn is another persons art anyway. (the courts in norway, for example, recently granted VAT-excemption for strip-shows for the reason that they're not principally different from other kinds of stage-performances.(and there's no VAT on culture in Norway))
Most would object to an adult bookstore moving in next door to their house so why should the internet be any different.
If *ANY* bookstore opens where the zoning-rules say "residential housing" people will protest. If the zoning-rules allow normal bookstores, they should certainly allow adult bookstores in the exact same location. Indeed that is the case where I live -- "adult" shops of all kinds are found exactly where other "non-adult" shops are. (The Mall, main shopping-streets in town, shopping-centres etc)
Besides, the argument is stupid. You run into your neighbours in RL. It's immediately obvious to everyone who visits you that there's a trash-incinerator next to your house. This has a real negative impact.
It doesn't have much of any impact to know that your domain coolstuff.com shares a TLD with trashincinerator.com or stripclub.com, the 3 names aren't "neighbours" in any reasonable sense of the word -- certainly the parallells to RL are absent.
In real life we create zoning laws to keep that stuff where its both easily accessed by those that want it and easily avoided by those who dont, on the internet we can do that with a top level domain if its done properly.
Where I live there *IS* no zone for "shops-but-no-adult-ones-please", nor should there be, and if there where I would indeed protest it loudly. (but it'd be unconstitutional anyway, so I doubt it'd happen)
Secondly, you make the elemental mistake of assuming there *exists* a simple clearly-delimiting line as to what is ".xxx" and what isn't. Who is to decide ?
Third, why the singling out of sexuality ? I object to this on principal grounds. Where is.violence ? How about.racism ? Are we gonna get a.religious or.republicans anytime soon ?
I fail to see what is bad about it. If your internet provider is planning to block content at the ISP level and you dont want them to...switch providers. Frankly the idea of not having to worry that mispelling a url is going to end up with something on the screen that neither I nor my kids need to see is appealing. I would imagine many parents as well as those whose sexuality has expanded beyond jerking off to the playboy channel would agree.
I don't see how it's relevant, but I am indeed a parent (3 kids, actually). I would *NOT* feel "comfortable" knowing that some US-based (lets be frank here!) likely religious-dominated "focus-group" decides what is and what isn't "agreeable". I'll like it even less once schools, libraries etc start filtering (
Sure you could, in principle. In practice the personal car is close enough to a holy cow in American politics that any suggestions of in any way limiting the God-Given-Rigth to drive 3MPG super-SUVs alone to work is akin to political suicide.
In much of Europe we've got this kind of thing for a long while already. For example, in Norway you pay taxes on a new vehicle according to weigth, engine-volume and horsepower (though it's recently been suggested to replace this with CO2-emmision/km). In Germany you pay a yearly "road-tax" that is scaled by the volume of your engine and the emission-class of the vehicle. (i.e. a car that pollutes less will pay a lower tax)
That said, I agree that it's a bit ugly the possibility of asserting IP rights just to get rid of something you don't like. In this case I'm not ready to get bent all out of shape, despite being a huge proponent of free speech, because there's a reasonable explanation.
It's not in the *least* reasonable.
If you wear a designer-dress at a press-conference, and some photographer take a photo of you, it's completely ridicolous to claim that posting those photos violates the *copyrigths* that the dressdesigner has. It's not like Mercedes can stop pictures from crashed mercedeses from being printed by claiming they own the copyrigth on the design.
So, the argument is patently ridicolous in the real world. I don't see a single reason why a few pixels on a screen *representing* a dress should enjoy stronger protection than the *real* dress does.
The ideal situation would be that online harassment such as what was experienced in the photos/videos would be illegal.
Harassment *is* illegal. The laws dealing with it are not technology-specific. Exactly where the limits of legally prohibited harassment goes varies by jurisdiction, but typically it's something along the lines of "repetitive, persistent and untruthful threatening or disturbing speech or behaviour".
It makes no difference if the harassment is made by use of soundwaves, dead cats, postal letters, SMS, email, SL-polygons or any other method. What matters is the actual *content* of the speech or behaviour.
Claiming that someone is harassing you in SL is not nessecarily ridicolous.
Claiming that posting a screenshot that includes your SL-avatar violates your copyrigth *IS* patently ridicolous.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's precisely it. It requires motivation, and thats lacking in much of the USA.
Being motivated to learn other languages requires thinking that the rest of the world *matters* that there's something to be had from better understanding it and communicating with it. If you consider yourself on top-of-the-world and everyone else as merely more or less civilized depending on how close to you they are culturally, then there's no point.
Speaking a "small" language natively helps. As a Norwegian, for example, you don't have the luxury of being able to travel everywhere in the west and make do with your native language. So anyone who wants to travel knows that they *have* to learn atleast one world-language.
As an American, it's too easy to think: "English works everywhere, so why bother?"
OK, so speaking 2 or more languages natively tends to require having parents from different cultures and/or living in an area with a heavy mixup. But just about everyone learns atleast 2 or more languages in their childhood where I come from.
Infact, you start learning your second language at age 6 at the latest, and most start learning their third when they're like 12-13, there's been suggestions of making that mandatory as part of compulsory school, but this far it's voluntarily. Those with an interest in languages speak 4 languages before leaving high-school.
True, not everyone is fluent in all their languages, but it's rare to meet someone who doesn't have good communication-skills in atleast 2 languages. (the 3rd is often weaker).
I speak Norwegian, English and German fluently, and have basic understanding of French, Icelandic and Dutch (that is ignoring Swedish and Danish since they're very similiar to Norwegian so are understood with little effort by most Norwegians even without training) My wife speaks Polish and German natively, Russian, English and Norwegian fluently and have basic understanding of French and Japanese.
And here's the thing: None of us are language-nerds or consider ourselves out of the ordinary. Infact I'm a computer-programmer that always took the *minimum* amount of language-classes, and my wife studied finance and administration.
America, on the other hand is downrigth shocking. I know intelligent educated people over there with an above average interest in the world around them that nevertheless speaks english only.
To be secure, passwords should:
At the same time, the number of situations where the average person needs a password increases strongly.
The human brain just ain't suited for that kind of thing. It gets worse too, because the largest password easily crackable goes up over time. Used to be 6 character letters-and-numbers was reasonable.
It's possible to make them less sucky, but most of the time that results in a higher false-negative rate which ain't that user-friendly at all. Plus, it's a large practical problem, you can't change your biometrics if they're somehow compromised.
However, if the check was in the dongle itself it could work. The dongle could require the pushing of a on-dongle-button before it'd sign a single transfer.
For added paranoia, the dongle could have a display: "Press the button to transfer [dollar-amount] to [account-number]".
How many horsepower do you need to do 1 ftlbf of work in 1 second ? How many calories is that anyway ? And how does that work if you want to use inches, yards or miles rather than feet ?
Yeah, I know it's possible. I'm just saying, it's not as simple as with a system designed from the ground up to be "compatible".
The *length* of the meter is arbitrary. Same for the length of the second and most other basic units in the metric system.
What is, however, *not* arbitrary, and where the large win lies is in making the derived units straigthforward combinations of the basic units, and the different scale units factors of 10^x larger/smaller.
There's an exception for time. The larger units of time aren't 10^x larger than the smallest one. 60,60,24,7,365.24 is a mess. The latter can't be helped: There really *are* 365.24 (or thereabouts) days in a year. But we could've split the day a lot more sensibly than 24/60/60. For example we could have 10 seconds to the minute, 10 minutes to the hour, 10 hours to the day. That'd be kinda disruptive, but it would simplify some stuff further. So, a foot makes exactly as much sense as a basic unit of length as a meter. Agreed.
However, once we've set the basic units, the connections are extremely straigthforward:
If I travel 1 meter in 1 second I travel at 1m/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1m/s^2. If I weigh 1kg, then this required a force of 1N. If this force 1N work over a distance of 1m, it does 1J of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1W. If this was provided by electricity, then that is for example 1V and 1A. 1A means 1C electrons pro 1s flows trough the conductor. Now you do that, using only imperial units. :-) How many hogheads *are* there to a fluid-oz anyway ?
The basic problem with emails, tan-numbers etc is that they can be easily copied. So, the fact that you have the item/information does nothing to ensure that noone else has it too. You're much more likely to notice having *lost* something than you are of noticing that someone has *copied* something you posess.
If you could be certain people wouldn't leave them plugged in (many would, despite strict instructions to the contrary) the ideal something-i-have item would be a usb-key that has tamper-proof hardware set up to do one thing, and one thing only: digitally sign any message that is already signed by the bank (or whomever issuer), with a secret key embedded in it.
When the bank wants to ensure you have the item, it sends you a large random number, signed with its secret key. The usb-thingie verifies the number comes from the bank (by verifying the signature) and if yes, signs the number with its own secret key.
*IF* users could be trusted not to leave the thing plugged in, this would be quite secure. To use the bank: insert your bank-key in the usb-port and type your password. There's no need to type your username/userid, the usb-gadget can take care of that part too. So the experience for the user is much simpler than what is currently common.
Someone somehow learning your password (trough phishing say) would be screwed since they don't have the gadget. And someone stealing the gadget would be screwed since they don't know your password. (plus, you're more likely to notice a missing gadget since that'll stop you from using the bank yourself) Since users, unfortunately, *cannot* be trusted not to leave the thing plugged in, we get calculator-like gadgets where the user must manually read the one-time-password from a display and enter it into a webform. Which acomplishes more or less the same thing, but is significantly less convenient.
6Mbps is however the lowest speed offered by Lyse, which is the current provider for my neighbourhood (not in Oslo by the way), they offer 6, 20 and 50 Mbps over fiber to neighbourhoods, and over adsl2 to individual households. Those with fiber get symetric capacity, those with adsl2 get asymetric capacity and an order of magnitude less upload than download.
Once upon a time, the industry thougth nooone would pirate CDs because they're 700 freaking MBs HUGE.
Fast-forward a few years, and people use mp3 to compress them to like 60MB, which degrades quality, but people don't care. A 128kbps mp3 is "good enough" for most consumers, despite being markedly worse than the original.
Fast-forward a few more years, and downloading 700MB is trivial, so people start sharing full, uncompressed (or FLAC-compressed) cds in full quality. At the same time they also start sharing movies in compressed quality since those are similarily large.
Already, there is a lot of DVD-quality (4-10GB) movie-sharing going on, despite them not being all that much better than a well-compressed 1GB version of the same films.
If future movies are 100GB/movie, people will either compress them until they're small enough to be reasonably shared, a 10GB version of a 100GB movie is going to be "good enough" for most people even if it ain't like the original. Or, a few years later, they trivially share the 100GB.
Bandwith and storage goes up more than movie-storage-requirements do. When DVDs where introduced, around 1995 most people hadn't ever tried the internet. 5 years after the introduction many had modem-dialups to the internet. Capable of 20MB/hour or 250 hours for a single-layer DVD. Obviously impractical.
Now, 10 years later (give or take) Blue-Ray and HD-DVD are being introduced with around 10 times the capacity. The typical bandwith of a home-user is in the range of 3-20Mb/s, which means a 50GB blueray disc is downloadable in 5-30 hours.
So, basic line: *TODAY* at the *START* of the HD-DVD and blueray introduction, downloading them is already more practical than it was to download a DVD-movie 5 years *after* the DVD-introduction. I predict in 5 years 100Mb/s will be common at home, so by that time you'll be able to download a 50GB blueray-disc in original quality in an hour, or alternatively, stream it live. (and a 10GB compressed version of a 50GB original in 10 minutes, which'll be good enough for most people)
Ok, so maybe it'll take somewhat longer in the USA. I understand you guys still live in the stone-age when home-networking is concerned. Where I live we just decided to install fiber-to-the-home in the entire neighbourhood (converted to GB ethernet in the basement of each house), and this is an old neighbourhood with lots of old people, not a young hip and trendy one. The *slowest* speed available today is 6Mb/s (symetrical), the fastest 100Mb, but the latter is limited basically only by demand. (i.e. noone is interested in paying for more than 100Mb to the home presently)
Anyone who thinks 50-100GB size will deter piracy is in for the shock of their lives.
For music it's even more obvious.
In a few years, you're gonna get Star_wars_complete.blueray.zip (1.5TB) and noone will even flinch.
Also, decide early on if you want to get into analogue circuitry or if you're more interested in digital. It's two different worlds which ain't got much in common. The trend is that more and more circuits are digital. Even if the end-output or the inputs are analogue, that's often converted to/from digital and the rest done digitally.
If someone spesifically ask, we migth point out the area where the person is weakest. But in 9 out of 10 cases it's going to be simply. "We regret having to inform you that the announced position was given to someone else. We wish you luck with your continued job-search." or something of the sort.
Comically, the child-porn laws are not. So, you get absurd situations like the one you have in Norway:
Fucking a 16 year old is perfectly legal. (assuming consent offcourse!)
Infact, if the partners are "similar in age or development" then they can legally have sex at any age. (So a 16 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend is going to be OK, but a 25 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend can get into trouble.)
But posessing an image of the act is illegal as child-porn is defined to be porn where actors are, or appear to be, under 18.
To add insult to injury: it makes no difference to the law if the person is yourself. Take a snapshot of yourself masturbating at 17, and mere *posession* of this snapshot is a crime. Which is very very obviously bullshit.
Yeah -- it's a witchhunt.
Are you ashamed of being the person you infact are ?
Do you feel you *should* be ashamed if you're the kind of person that enjoys looking at porn ?
Do you pretend to be someone else than you actually are, in effect carrying a mask even for your closes, loved ones ?
You even wish to preserve this mask in death -- prefering that people think of you as the person you pretended to be your entire life, rather than as the person you actually where ? (And let's be frank: most people close to you probably saw trough the mask decades ago. But offcourse, they're gonna play a farse too and pretend they didn't.) Why ?
Isn't that a horribly sad way to live your life ?
Alone, hidden behind a mask, ashamed, allowing noone to see the real you ?
Here's a tip: You're not that bad. Stop being ashamed for being a normal human being. Your sexuality is part of that. Just because thousands of years old religious crap says it's a sin to be human, doesn't mean you should fall for it.
What the government should do, assuming they actually want the many advantages of metric is to start using it exclusively themselves. There's no need to force anyone.
Building-codes should give all specifications in metric. Same for car-safety-codes, pollution-codes. All buildings built for the government should use metric units. Information that is required by law already (such as nutrition-info on food) should be required to be in metric.
That's basically the way it works in most of Europe. There's no law saying you can't use whatever system of measurements you like for your own stuff. But when you're applying for a building-permit from the government (for example), they expect all measurements to be given in metric. All specifications in laws and other codes are metric.
It's a gentle push really. But sufficient. Most new buildings, for example, need a building-permit. If that means you need drawings in metric, the only sensible choice is to use metric only. (sure, you could make drawings in metric *AND* imperial at your cost, if that's like your hobby or something....)
For example, you could program your app using the API provided by QT, and have QT deal with the rest. This would give you the added benefit that your application would work cross-platform.
Part of the cost of this waste is carried not by you, but by those people inconvenienced or harmed as a result of your added pollution. (which means all of us, basically)
I've got many good friends in the USA. Most of them are unable to rigthly comprehend the *CHASM* between especially southern bible-belt mentality and say the mentality common in Norway.
The parents of my first serious girlfriend, then 15, reacted to the two of us becoming intimate in precisely 2 ways. First, by smiling, and removing the extra mattress I had until then been given when I slept over, commenting that it obviously won't be needed any more. Second, by asking her if she wanted them to arrange a doctors-visit so she could get a prescription for the pill.
For the US, the norm seems more like in-secret, away-from-home (perhaps at a party or in the back of some car), parents-pretend-they-dont-know, children-pretend-they-believe-the-parents-dont-kno w, frequently-drunk, sexuality-a-taboo, parents-cant-be-asked-when-questions.
Security. Openness. Confidence. Adults-one-can-talk-to. Contraception. Non-drunkenness. Acceptance. Even pride. These all are, in my opinion, a much better fundament for a enjoyable *AND* safe sexuality than the oposite.
The US method sounds much more dangerous to me. US kids don't actually have less or later sex than Norwegian ones. (infact the average age of first intercourse is sligthly lower in the US, and teenage-pregnancies are like 10 times higher) It's just, like everybody decided to pretend it's not happening and silence it to death rather than actually dealing with it. Human sexuality, however, doesn't magically just go away just because you decide not to talk about it.
I know I know, not every US parent is like that. I don't mean to imply everyone is. Just that the general trend seems to be quite a bit more in this direction.
While I agree with some of what you write -- that particular argument ain't very convincing.
If the government is correct that it can demand that anyone that wants to fly show ID, then by the same logic they could do the same thing for anyone wanting to travel, for example, by train. That there still exist some mode of transportation not covered by the id-requirement is unconvincing. If that was sufficient, the government could issue laws sayins anyone traveling by any means, other than ox-cart, need to show ID. At that point you *effectively* have to show ID if you want to travel -- despite the fact that in principle you could make all your travels by ox-cart.
Planes are the only practical means of transportation for long distances. Claiming that "one can always walk" is unconvincing because in the real world one could never -- realistically speaking -- have for example a gathering of a nation-wide organization without using planes. (the rigths of free organization and gatherings is *also* enshrined in the constitution btw)
True. There will always be people who are willing and able to pay whatever price we demand, and continue as before. I think we just have to accept that for behaviour that is simply undesirable. Its supposed to be a free country afterall. If the behaviour is so bad that we *cannot* or *will-no* tolerate this, we have to outlaw it. (we *do* outlaw some sorts of polluting)
In my case the extra tax might have an unintended consequence. We've got a couple cars. One is a truck to haul trailers. Raise flat rate taxes on the truck and I'll sell one of my small cars and drive the truck full time.
There's unintended consequences to all actions. What matters though is the *average* consequence. If the *average* car starts polluting less as a result of a tax-regime that taxes more polluting vehicles higher, then that is what counts. Looking at the average US car compared to the average Norwegian car, its hard to argue this isn't -- infact -- the case.
One of the ways a free market is inefficient is that it fails to consider factors that are external to the ones involved in the trade.
For example, if I sell you something for a price such that the sale benefits both of us, the sale will happen even if there's external people who are harmed (more than our profits) from the sale.
Pollution is a classical externality. The *cost* of the extra pollution is carried by everyone in your community (and to some degree, everyone on earth) but the benefits (mobility, comfort, penis-compensation) are yours alone.
It's sorta like SPAM. It happens because it gives a profit to the *spammers* -- despite the fact that overall its a huge resource-drain. Give one person $10K profit. Give a *million* people $1 loss -- and absent any way for the million to demand compensation from the one the spam will happen.
Thus, it makes perfect sense to tax behaviour that has negative externalities.
Maybe in the USA -- not here in Norway. Car theft is rare enough that it simply doesn't make any sense to have an alarm, the alarm would cost substantially more than you'd save on insurance-premiums over the useful lifespan of the car.
Very expensive cars do have alarms, but 95% of normal everyday cars don't.
It works something like this:
Separation is the first step towards discrimination and censorship. After you've collected the "bad stuff" in one place under one convenient label, it's much easier to take action against it.
or just the idea that for many pornography=sexuality.
Pornography is obviously a subset of human sexuality. Whats one persons porn is another persons art anyway. (the courts in norway, for example, recently granted VAT-excemption for strip-shows for the reason that they're not principally different from other kinds of stage-performances.(and there's no VAT on culture in Norway))
Most would object to an adult bookstore moving in next door to their house so why should the internet be any different.
If *ANY* bookstore opens where the zoning-rules say "residential housing" people will protest. If the zoning-rules allow normal bookstores, they should certainly allow adult bookstores in the exact same location. Indeed that is the case where I live -- "adult" shops of all kinds are found exactly where other "non-adult" shops are. (The Mall, main shopping-streets in town, shopping-centres etc)
Besides, the argument is stupid. You run into your neighbours in RL. It's immediately obvious to everyone who visits you that there's a trash-incinerator next to your house. This has a real negative impact.
It doesn't have much of any impact to know that your domain coolstuff.com shares a TLD with trashincinerator.com or stripclub.com, the 3 names aren't "neighbours" in any reasonable sense of the word -- certainly the parallells to RL are absent.
In real life we create zoning laws to keep that stuff where its both easily accessed by those that want it and easily avoided by those who dont, on the internet we can do that with a top level domain if its done properly.
Where I live there *IS* no zone for "shops-but-no-adult-ones-please", nor should there be, and if there where I would indeed protest it loudly. (but it'd be unconstitutional anyway, so I doubt it'd happen)
Secondly, you make the elemental mistake of assuming there *exists* a simple clearly-delimiting line as to what is ".xxx" and what isn't. Who is to decide ?
Third, why the singling out of sexuality ? I object to this on principal grounds. Where is .violence ? How about .racism ? Are we gonna get a .religious or .republicans anytime soon ?
I fail to see what is bad about it. If your internet provider is planning to block content at the ISP level and you dont want them to...switch providers. Frankly the idea of not having to worry that mispelling a url is going to end up with something on the screen that neither I nor my kids need to see is appealing. I would imagine many parents as well as those whose sexuality has expanded beyond jerking off to the playboy channel would agree.
I don't see how it's relevant, but I am indeed a parent (3 kids, actually). I would *NOT* feel "comfortable" knowing that some US-based (lets be frank here!) likely religious-dominated "focus-group" decides what is and what isn't "agreeable". I'll like it even less once schools, libraries etc start filtering (
In much of Europe we've got this kind of thing for a long while already. For example, in Norway you pay taxes on a new vehicle according to weigth, engine-volume and horsepower (though it's recently been suggested to replace this with CO2-emmision/km). In Germany you pay a yearly "road-tax" that is scaled by the volume of your engine and the emission-class of the vehicle. (i.e. a car that pollutes less will pay a lower tax)
It's not in the *least* reasonable.
If you wear a designer-dress at a press-conference, and some photographer take a photo of you, it's completely ridicolous to claim that posting those photos violates the *copyrigths* that the dressdesigner has. It's not like Mercedes can stop pictures from crashed mercedeses from being printed by claiming they own the copyrigth on the design.
So, the argument is patently ridicolous in the real world. I don't see a single reason why a few pixels on a screen *representing* a dress should enjoy stronger protection than the *real* dress does.
The ideal situation would be that online harassment such as what was experienced in the photos/videos would be illegal.
Harassment *is* illegal. The laws dealing with it are not technology-specific. Exactly where the limits of legally prohibited harassment goes varies by jurisdiction, but typically it's something along the lines of "repetitive, persistent and untruthful threatening or disturbing speech or behaviour".
It makes no difference if the harassment is made by use of soundwaves, dead cats, postal letters, SMS, email, SL-polygons or any other method. What matters is the actual *content* of the speech or behaviour.
Claiming that someone is harassing you in SL is not nessecarily ridicolous.
Claiming that posting a screenshot that includes your SL-avatar violates your copyrigth *IS* patently ridicolous.