Because your entire argument is based on abstract principles that have jack-squat to do with reality. 18-year-olds are not mature adults. Period. They have quite the legal responsibilities of adults, but nobody is surprised when they check a criminal record which includes a lot of stupid shit prior to the age of 21 and is clean thereafter. Just ask Jenna Bush. Her father took even longer to grow up.
The education strategy appropriate for them is not at all similar to the one you;d use with adults. Moreover, this story is not about 18-year-olds. It is about 16-year-olds. They have even less maturity. They have fewer legal responsibilities. If you give them rifles and send them to Afghanistan you get dinged by War Crimes Tribunals.
What happens when you give a class of 20 of them Lenna is quite simple: A couple of them (95% of this groups will be boys) go crazy. They are so happy to be working with porn they barely contain their glee. As soon as teacher is out of the room they boast about it. All their friends/enemies/frenemies/random people walking the same hallway know about it. Within minutes everyone knows that if they, too, take this class next year they, too, will get to work with porn. Note that these boys are not mature or discerning enough to care that the actual bit of Lena that gets used is a headshot, all they care about is !!PORN!!*
Which really pisses off a couple of their classmates (probably majority girls, but committed religious boys would be here too). They did not go to a taxpayer-funded High School and take an Advanced Placement class in Computer Science because they wanted to have a deep discussion about contemporary sexual mores. They did not go because they wanted to listen to some juvenile gloat because this one time his mom can't yell at him for looking at Playboy. They went to learn about computers. And now everyone knows that a) they're in the porn class, and b) they had to work with porn. They, too, do not particularly care that it's a headshot with the actual porn removed.
If you're lucky you don't get in huge trouble for pissing off people who vote (ie: the religious boys I mentioned), and next year your class is full of bright young boys eager to work with porn and precisely nobody else. Thus the brogrammer problem.
What happened when this particular CompSci teacher tried it? A bunch of the boys went around boasting about porn which made at least one girl so uncomfortable that she went to her principle and got the entire class changed. And then she got the whole story written up in the national media because everyone more mature then a 16-year-old-boy could not believe some idiot teacher had tried to impose this on a class of 16-year-olds of both genders.
Would have to be Heads of Government. Lee's a Prime Minister, so he's not Head of State. Singapore's Head of State is Tony Tan.
Under Singapore's Constitution President Tan has very few powers, but he still technically outranks the PM who has powers. It's similar to the system in Britain/Canada/etc. where the Queen's Head of State,* but the Prime Minister is the one who actually does everything interesting.
And yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. I spent the week Netanyahu addressed Congress in constant nerd-rage because the entire US media kept calling him a "Head of State" when he isn't.
*Altho many Canadians argue the Queen isn't their Head of State, her representative in Canada is (the Governor-General). The fact no Court's ruled on this definitively shows how important the title "Head of State" is in a Parliamentary system. Most legal scholars seem to think that the Queen is Head of State, but there is a minority that disagrees and their Constitution is not helpful on this question. But mostly nobody cares.
In the long-term there just isn't that big a market for foreign hunters(particularly since anyone who actually pays for this shit and gets outed on social media becomes a pariah in the US/Europe), and the acres per calorie is too high to accommodate double the population.
What's gonna happen is that the local hunters will need more and more game to eat, so the animals will be under significant population pressure. Their families will need land to farm, so the animals will run low on places to live. Eventually somebody will say "these damn elephants are eating my crops" and organize elephant genocide similar to the Buffalo genocide of the late 19th. Elephants won't go extinct, and it probably won't be as bad as the extinction of the Buffalo because those communities protecting hunters exist as do zoos and national parks, but the conservationists ain't gonna be happy.
Africa's population is projected to double by 2050. that means they'll need either a) lots of great agricultural technology to double their yield per acre, or b) double the acres. If they're also improving their diets, they'll need meat, which means increasing the proportion of acres devoted to cattle, and cattle take up a lot more acres per calorie then wheat does. Every acre devoted to crops cannot be used by elephants/rhinoceri/etc. and has to be protected from elephants/rhinoceri/etc; so hunting those elephants/etc. to local extinction becomes very smart policy...
And the elephants/rhinoceri/etc. are most of the large herbivores this study is talking about.
BTW, I personally am somewhat skeptical of the doubling (recent trends have world-wide have been towards much smaller family sizes, and if Africa can get it's act together on pension systems and health care it's likely that families of six will become rare there, too), but it's not gonna shrink, and they will need lots land for cattle.
What was the largest large mammal, that existed in high population densities, in most of the landmass of the lower 48 in 1850?
Probably the Buffalo. There were others of course -- we had a presence everywhere, and high population density East of the Mississippi, there was a scattering of bears and other large carnivores, there are some pretty big herbivores as well -- but the one you'd have to mention is the Buffalo. Now there's very few Buffalo, and very very very many Home Sapiens.
Same with most of the other large mammals. In Ohio or Michigan it's very unusual to see anything larger then a white-tail deer (lighter then us, averaging 100 lb.). Yeah you can find animals like Black Bears, or Moose, or Elk; but you really have to go looking for the damn things. Even in more rural/wild areas if you're just going down the highway the largest mammal you're likely to see is a fat guy whose having car trouble. The Ecosystem only has room for so many large mammals, and we crowd them out.
Now what's the one region of the world where large herds of wild mammals (who are bigger then us) roam free? Africa, particularly Central and Southern Africa. What's the continent with both very low population density (Congo, for example, has a population comparable to Germany and land area comparable to Western Europe, it's northern neighbor has a population comparable to a third of the Paris Metro area and more land then all of France), and extreme population growth? Africa.
So it's quite predictable that the Rhinos, Elephants, and Lions are under pressure. The people who live in Africa need the land for agriculture, and there's no cheap way to solve the problem of feeding said African people except destroying the ecosystem that supports those animals.
A Presidential candidate is trying to look like a young man, a virile man, a man with great energy to do great things. He's probably in his late 40s or early 50s. He may have some gray, but if it's a lot he's probably dying it the fuck away (you'll note most of the GOP field has no gray at all, despite the fact they're all in their late 40s at least, back in '08 the Dem field was just as non-gray). If he's a she of course she's dying the gray away (I love you Hillary, but we all know your hair today is not precisely the same shade it was back when you personally murdered Vince Foster and then arranged for the paperwork to say "suicide" back when I was 12).
OTOH, as his term goes on a) non-gray hair becomes less socially acceptable (just imagine what Jon Stewart would have done with the tidbit that Dubya was dying), b) it's harder to claim that you actually aren't dying (Obama will leave office at 55, and he's on the young side), and c) he wants to look like the Alpha Male Silverback Gorilla who has Already Accomplished Great Things. So you remember a 50-year-old from the campaign with no gray, then he gets on HD TV at 57 with the normal level of gray for a 57-year-old, and you think:"Gee the past seven years have really aged our President," when in fact all that's happened is he's stopped using Just For Men.
So you could have gone down to the plant, gotten a good-paying job, and then earned a very good wage for your hard work; but you're arguing that it was not trivial to get a good-paying job in your generation? Sounds pretty trivial to me. A lot more trivial then this generation has it. Hell, even a minimum wage job in your generation paid more then many full-time jobs do in this generation.
And this generation to get more you can't just show up at the plant with a High School Equivalency Certificate, you either need very good business skills, or you need a degree. Generally the degree is pretty advanced and it costs you a lot of money.
In my experience the correlation between hard work and compensation is non-existant. In many cases the worst-compensated work hardest because you don't give the guy with nothing to offer but his back a good wage. At the top you'll get people who work long hours, but they aren't actually working harder then anyone else. They're working smarter, and they're working longer. But they ain't working harder the guy loading a half-ton of mulch into a van by hand.
Xerox willingly invited Apple representatives to visit its PARC think tank after signing an agreement that invested $1 million into the computer maker in the hopes that Apple could take PARC's raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market, using mass manufacturing, product development and marketing expertise that the academic computer scientists and engineers at Xerox lacked.
It's kinda hard to "take PARC's raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market" if you don't have a signed agreement stating that Apple can use PARC's technologies.
Kindall was bitter because he screwed up. IBM approached him first and wanted to buy CP/M, but Kindall didn't make the sale. Why that happened is lost in the mists of time, but Gates saw the value in the deal and made it happen.
You could actually buy an IBM PC with CP/M on it from the factory from about six months after IBM PCs were introduced.
But Kindall fucked that up, to. He charged more ($240 according to wikipedia) then Bill Gates ($40) did, not understanding the huge advantage MS-DOS would get from being the dominant OS on an open platform.
They were subject of a long, draining, anti-trust investigation from '69-'82; so being in full control of their platform could have caused legal problems.
They also had very little tech that could be quickly turned into a PC, because they'd sat out the Minicomputer revolution of the 70s. It would have taken them five years to make a product from scratch. And by then they'd be five years further behind. Which would have been really bad. They started development of their non-GUI PC in mid-1980, and Apple came out with the GUI Mac in April of '84. They would have hit the market right when the Amiga came out.
So they decided to make a computer from easily available parts (ie: Intel's chips), and already viable software (ie: DOS was a clone of CP/M, which ran on Intel chips already). They offered a variety of OSes (CP/M, PC-DOS/MS-DOS, and p-System). It took them roughly a year to get from plan to market.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS was most popular because it was cheapest and Bill Gates made sure it was branded as "PC." Nobody got fired for buying IBM, and buying the PC-Disk Operating System for an IBM PC made sense. As part of IBM's attempt to ape the then-dominent Apple II, the architecture was supposed to be open, and in the accelerated timeframe of getting the machine out the door agreeing that Bill Gates could sell his own MS-DOS on other machines probably seemed like a) part of the open architecture they were going for, and b) not a battle worth fighting; not to mention c) proof for the Justice Department that we aren;t an evil monopoly bullying poor little Billy Gates and you should stop investigating us.
GEM went on. It was doomed more because it's business model was obsolete then the lawsuit. The days in which computer geeks were the main market for an OS were over, and they apparently never bothered to negotiate a licensing deal with XEROX.
MS also got sued, but apparently they had a license agreement from John Sculley which covered most of it, and the rest was either uncopyrightable, XEROX';s copyright, or so trivial nobody cared (ie: codefendent HP had a "trash can" icon) they were able to win. Apple dragged out the case until Steve Jobs came back and negotiated that famous cease-fire with Bill Gates in '97.
XEROX actually licensed it's technology to Apple in hopes that Steve Jobs could successfully bring products to market, because XEROX had no ability to turn it's bluesky tech into things people wanted. Their mouse cost hundreds (in 1981 dollars), and was not terribly reliable. Apple had to redesign everything, write their own code, etc.
The licensing deal was basically Apple sold them $1 Million in stock, at $10 a share, prior to IPO, Apple gets everything they want from the PARC portfolio. That stock would have to be worth 9 figures today so (assuming they were smart enough to not sell) they got paid.
So nobody stole code. Apple got extremely annoyed that they'd given XEROX all this money for GUIs and Mouses and things and MS just went in and copied it themselves without paying XEROX anything.
The connection is that your memory is biased by your economic success. You were not more mature then us, and you cover it by a combination of rationalizations and the fact it was trivial to get a good job in 1970.
Let me put it to you this way: according to your parents you were much less mature then they were, spoiled as children, and failures as adults. According to their parents your parents generation was much less spoiled then their (the grandparent's) generation. And on and on and on. One of two things is going on: either every generation of old people forgets precisely how pathetic they were at 18, or back in 1750 8-year-olds had the emotional maturity of our 60-year-olds.
OTOH, that was the Revolution generation, and you are probably in your 60s, so you may just have proven your case.
Your parents freaked out at things that most people today would think of as just part of High School, like losing your virginity and using any mind-altering substance. Can you imagine what they would have done if you'd said "yes Mom, this picture from Playboy is part of my class's assignment?"
And it's not because she's a stick-in-the-mud-no-fun-prissy-pants, it's because your Mom knows what being a 16-year-old-girl is like, and your Mom doesn't want you to make your classmates cry.
But, through your stoner-haze, you vaguely remember that most of your friends were claiming to do all that shit, and you're quite confident that you would have been fine if you had actually succeeded; and you have no experience whatsoever being a 16-year-old-girl you're whining because you don't want the boys to be denied the dubious pleasure of talking about their playboy-picture-using class.
There's no jobs that pay for high school educated kids. You need at least an Associate's, or you're in retail. If you're in retail you really can't be a parent because the scheduling is so fucked up I work one of these places, and they insist that all their employees should be able to be their, and chipper, with 7.5 hours between shifts, even the poor motherfuckers who have a half-hour commute and happen to be your fucking age).
OTOH, when you were 18 you could get a job that paid the equivalent of $20 an hour (it actually would have been more like $3 or $4, but inflation), with a set schedule, and good benefits, just by being a US Citizen who showed at work every day. With that much money, and no commitments, emotional maturity is a side-issue. As long as you were emotionally mature enough to avoid the legal system and show up at 9 AM you were fine. If weren't quite that mature you got to go to Vietnam.
But today you not only need to be mature enough to avoid the cops, you also have to be good enough academically to get into a real college (a two-year-program that has a track record of getting people jobs counts), if you're working your way through college you have to maintain a job with a terrible schedule plus school, which costs at least $10k a year (in the 70s, even after adjusting for inflation, most schools were under $5k), etc.
Heritage has Denmark as 0.1 points higher then the US. The Norwegians, Swedes, and Icelanders are all about 4 points lower. Finland (which swears it's not Scandinavia) is 2.8 points lower. Cato has us 12th, the Danes 19th, and those Finns (who will really be pissed that I called them Scandinavian twice in one posts) 10th.
As a left-winger I obviously don't think these rankings are very good, and I think that the freedom to quit your job and not go bankrupt is a pretty good economic freedom; but to the Americans who think "economic freedom" is more then a BS talking point Scandinavia is worse then us. Why? higher taxes, used to pay for that welfare state.
These people actually found somebody to sue Obama because he didn't want subsidized health insurance. They are not kidding when they tell you that the number one predictor of whether a President will become Hitler is how much of GDP his budget consumes.
On Canada's version of what you call "corruption," that's never been what I'm talking about. It's your pet strawman. I'm talking about the ease with which the wealthy can manipulate the system legally to gain an advantage on the working class.
Sometimes this is widely considered corrupt (ie: campaign donations), but most of the time it's just how it is. If Matty Moroun knows precisely which locally elected official to go to to advance his agenda, then that's not corruption. It's smart politics. In the US he can dance around the system like a pro, manipulating people for months or years until they are a) jailed (Kwame Kilpatrick was always a Morounie), b) lose an election, or c) wise up. n Canada he did that a few years, then the big bosses heard of his activities.
State-side most of the elected officials don't care that he's a destructive asshole because there's no doctrine of Responsible Government forcing rural, out-state, pols to care what happens in Detroit. But in Canada the PM and Premier are both responsible to the people of Windsor, ON; which means that when the people of Windsor make a credible case that a local businessman is a huge dick who should only get his extra bridge if he promises to be really good in an enforceable way, the PM/Premier will hear that case (probably at Question Period, on national TV, where he can't dodge), and the Bruce County MP/MLA will get marching orders to not touch that businessman.
On Republic, I actually took two years of Latin in college. Res, rei is an irregular pronoun that has meaning so broad it cannot be truly translated to English. "Thing" is the closest you can get, but iot';s a very broad view of "Thing" that no English-speaker would consider. Publica, -us, -um is an adjective loosely meaning "Public." It is res publica because irregular res is nominative feminine, and publica thus takes the -a rather then an -us (masculine) or an -um (neuter). The Republic, therefore, is the "Public Thing." You're the one whose basing his Latin on wikipedia and poorly remembered propaganda.
BTW, you wouldn't like the Roman version of the Law. The Decemviri turned an action movie plot into real life*, with a side of daughter-slaying because it's Rome and this shit happened. "Dictator" was actually an official job in the Roman Republic, which existed because the normal guys who ran things (the Consuls) came in pairs and occasionally had a tendency to veto each-other (in an extreme case the Army marched West on one Consul's orders, then the next day it would march East on the other Consul's orders, and repeat). In emergencies they'd just say "fuck it, this guy's got all the power until the emergency is over."
*One of them arranged for a pretty woman to be ruled as highly in debt to him, which meant she was a slave, and thus a sex slave. Her father was a retired Centurion, who restored the pre-decemvir-regime. But, of course, he had to kill her to restore the family honor.
This is High School, not PhD-level research. There is no point in comparing the tools a 16-year-old kid in 2015 makes to one made by ComSci PhDs in 1975. It is a waste of time.
Moreover, this is a high school class. It includes 16-year-old-boys who revel in excessive male horseplay, and have not mastered the fine art of turning it down because it's incredibly dickish. It also includes 16-year-old girls who have not mastered the fine art of dealing with excessive male horseplay/dickishness. By telling the kids they are using porn you will increase the excessive male horse-play by roughly infinity, which will in turn increase the misery of the poor 16-year-old girls by a similar amount. Your defense of this picture's use in the specific place this article is about (High School) is simply cruel, and the actual High School stopped using it for precisely this reason.
Most importantly this is a High School class. The boss isn't some wizened old PhD who thinks deeply about the abstract concept of Academic Freedom, it is an elected school board. The School Board consists of (in my experience) precisely two kinds of people: religious conservatives striving to Jesusify the country via the education system, and union shills striving to prevent the religious conservatives business allies from gutting their pensions. If the Jesusify people find out you used part of a pornographic photo in your class you get fired and call you evil because you probably believe in evolution, and your entire program gets cancelled., If the feminists go crying to the union about your misogyny for using part of said pornographic photo to teach your class, you get fired and your program, they will call you evil for threatening their campaign donations, the entire program gets cancelled, but at least they make sure you retain your equity in the pension plan.
So, in conclusion read the fucking summary. This is about High School, not a Post-Doc research symposium. The kids are not 20-something adults who can deal with porn in a mature and non-dickish manner. They are immature 16-year-old-kids who (as you probably remember) specialize in making each-other miserable, and you are advocating that they have yet another opportunity to do so.
So the French Socialist Party isn't Socialist? I'll bet it's news to them.
People really have trouble understanding that over time the goals of political movements change, so finding the 'true meaning' of a word like Socialist or Republican or any of a half-dozen other terms used by hundreds of different political factions in hundreds of countries in response to hundreds of different sets of social conditions is stupid.
In the US Today Socialist is used by people who want to signal a) they prefer the significantly less free market system of Scandinavia to our current economic system, and b) they do not give a shit that most Americans think that label is evil.
Sanders would actually fit into almost either big Swedish political party better then he fits the Dems.
They are "economic conservatives." That means the thing they most want from government is that it be very very cheap, and not pay for nice things for the middle class. Bernie agrees with them on some foreign policy issues (particularly the ones where they can bitch about Obama for Unconstitutional power-grabs), but he disagrees with them on others (partricularly the ones where they bitch about how Obama's weakness is hurting America).
They ain't voting Bernie. Might give him money in hopes of being able to run a campaign against an avowed Socialist, but they ain't voting for him.
Ahh engineers. Such strong fans of extreme precision. I could've sworn I put an at least in there.
Given the tenuous nature of the data (a guy on slashdot told me ain't gonna hold up in Court), and that I wasn't sure I'd remembered the numbers exactly right, but I did know they were high enough that the 248 thing would not come up in the real world, going with a high-end ballpark estimate seemed sensible. Worst-case scenario somebody does the math and say "Dude, you said this is fine because 14 days is less then 248, but your actual evidence is that it's 9.92 or 9.53 days, which rounds down to one week." That guys is you.
Which changes the math, and if we were using this thread to actually design an aircraft it would change everything, but it does not actually affect the conclusion.
BTW, I did remember the numbers wrong. It was 23-25, so I'm assuming he thinks they're on an overhaul schedule that is almost exactly every 10 days:
If it ever happened on a plane, then it means that the maintenance was intentionally skipped. If they reach 248 days of continuous operation then a number of significant maintenance cycles have been skipped (some 23-25 inspection / maintenance cycles that generally require shutting down the electrical system). The generators in question are attached to the engines. The engines have a overhaul schedule that is shorter than 248 days of continuous operation. If they managed to reach this point, then the major maintenance cycles have been skipped and the engines are long overdue for a tear down inspection and overhaul. Any plane which could reach this point, 248 days of continuous operation missing all of the required maintenance; this is not a plane (or an airline for that matter) which anyone should be flying on.
And no, I'm neither a programmer nor an engineer, so I won;t be doing any of that kind of work for you.
I have never said there's no way for elites to manipulate a Parliamentary system. I've said there are fewer ways then in the US. And you have presented no evidence that any method the elites of Canada use to manipulate their system are not present in the US.
On theology: you;re still arguing theology. You hasve no examples of how the actual system works in the real world, you just repeat the theories (now raised to theological precepts in what non-Americans call our:"Civic Religion") that the Founders believed centuries ago.
Your Latin is shaky. "Rule by Law" would be something closing to "Rex Lege" then "Republic," "Republic" is actually derived from "Res Publicus," or "Public Affairs."
If your definition of corruption is that it's how the wealthy gain power secretly, how can Canada equal a country where we have a) secret political campaigns with unlimited donations, b) numerous elected officials who can all owe favors, etc.? Your argument is perfect theology, but has no relation to reality.
If you think you've got my political affiliation pegged from this thread you;re remarkably dumb. OTOH, you did just claim that the well know "Res Publica" actually meant "Rule of Law" so brains clearly ain;t your forte. I listed some things that would be in the majorities best interest. Quite a few of them would win referendums, yet the government doesn't do them. Why? Because the wealthy elites have numerous veto points, an ideological predisposition to oppose all spending that is not tax breaks, and a strong material interest in thew current system.
As for moderates, to quote you: "The issue is you want to make it hard for anyone to do anything extreme or anything quickly. If actions are kept moderate and everyone has time to respond to it then they can't really get that out of control."
There are times to tell the offended to go away, and there are times where you live with it.
In this case, since it is actually high school, you're much better off living with it because there are precisely zero school boards in the history of the universe who would defend a teacher from a) the feminists, and b) the Evangelicals. And using a vaguely porn-related photo as official class materials (when you could use fucking jelly beans) is gonna get you in trouble with both.
At higher levels you can get away with it, but since most CompSci departments are actively trying to recruit female students and a small (but significant proportion) of the female population will decide that CompSci clearly isn't for them if their assignments are about Playboy pictures (and be honest: if the class figures out where the Lena picture came from one of the 19-year-old-boys is gonna make a juvenile crack about how cool it is to work with PORN), so using it for undergrad is probably not a wise choice either.
The big problem is it's easily replaced, and not terribly professional. Better pictures are available. Better pictures are easily found. If you're a grad student writing an academic paper you can make a case that you need it to compare your tool with the ones other people have written papers about, but if you're not a grad student you really don't need it.
OTOH, the lady your prof brought in was not being unprofessional, and was not easily replaced. Thus your female classmate was easily dissuaded from making a big deal out of a little deal.
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Have you ever dealt with actual High Schoolers?
Because your entire argument is based on abstract principles that have jack-squat to do with reality. 18-year-olds are not mature adults. Period. They have quite the legal responsibilities of adults, but nobody is surprised when they check a criminal record which includes a lot of stupid shit prior to the age of 21 and is clean thereafter. Just ask Jenna Bush. Her father took even longer to grow up.
The education strategy appropriate for them is not at all similar to the one you;d use with adults. Moreover, this story is not about 18-year-olds. It is about 16-year-olds. They have even less maturity. They have fewer legal responsibilities. If you give them rifles and send them to Afghanistan you get dinged by War Crimes Tribunals.
What happens when you give a class of 20 of them Lenna is quite simple:
A couple of them (95% of this groups will be boys) go crazy. They are so happy to be working with porn they barely contain their glee. As soon as teacher is out of the room they boast about it. All their friends/enemies/frenemies/random people walking the same hallway know about it. Within minutes everyone knows that if they, too, take this class next year they, too, will get to work with porn. Note that these boys are not mature or discerning enough to care that the actual bit of Lena that gets used is a headshot, all they care about is !!PORN!!*
Which really pisses off a couple of their classmates (probably majority girls, but committed religious boys would be here too). They did not go to a taxpayer-funded High School and take an Advanced Placement class in Computer Science because they wanted to have a deep discussion about contemporary sexual mores. They did not go because they wanted to listen to some juvenile gloat because this one time his mom can't yell at him for looking at Playboy. They went to learn about computers. And now everyone knows that a) they're in the porn class, and b) they had to work with porn. They, too, do not particularly care that it's a headshot with the actual porn removed.
If you're lucky you don't get in huge trouble for pissing off people who vote (ie: the religious boys I mentioned), and next year your class is full of bright young boys eager to work with porn and precisely nobody else. Thus the brogrammer problem.
What happened when this particular CompSci teacher tried it? A bunch of the boys went around boasting about porn which made at least one girl so uncomfortable that she went to her principle and got the entire class changed. And then she got the whole story written up in the national media because everyone more mature then a 16-year-old-boy could not believe some idiot teacher had tried to impose this on a class of 16-year-olds of both genders.
*Dwarf Fortress reference intentional.
Would have to be Heads of Government. Lee's a Prime Minister, so he's not Head of State. Singapore's Head of State is Tony Tan.
Under Singapore's Constitution President Tan has very few powers, but he still technically outranks the PM who has powers. It's similar to the system in Britain/Canada/etc. where the Queen's Head of State,* but the Prime Minister is the one who actually does everything interesting.
And yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. I spent the week Netanyahu addressed Congress in constant nerd-rage because the entire US media kept calling him a "Head of State" when he isn't.
*Altho many Canadians argue the Queen isn't their Head of State, her representative in Canada is (the Governor-General). The fact no Court's ruled on this definitively shows how important the title "Head of State" is in a Parliamentary system. Most legal scholars seem to think that the Queen is Head of State, but there is a minority that disagrees and their Constitution is not helpful on this question. But mostly nobody cares.
In the shorty term in some areas? Yup.
Long term, for all areas?
In the long-term there just isn't that big a market for foreign hunters(particularly since anyone who actually pays for this shit and gets outed on social media becomes a pariah in the US/Europe), and the acres per calorie is too high to accommodate double the population.
What's gonna happen is that the local hunters will need more and more game to eat, so the animals will be under significant population pressure. Their families will need land to farm, so the animals will run low on places to live. Eventually somebody will say "these damn elephants are eating my crops" and organize elephant genocide similar to the Buffalo genocide of the late 19th. Elephants won't go extinct, and it probably won't be as bad as the extinction of the Buffalo because those communities protecting hunters exist as do zoos and national parks, but the conservationists ain't gonna be happy.
What more do I need? Fellow Slashdotters who can detect a joke. That's what more I need.
Nobody who thinks the Starr investigation was a whitewash is going to start that sentence with "I love Hillary but..."
This one you really don't have to wait.
Africa's population is projected to double by 2050. that means they'll need either a) lots of great agricultural technology to double their yield per acre, or b) double the acres. If they're also improving their diets, they'll need meat, which means increasing the proportion of acres devoted to cattle, and cattle take up a lot more acres per calorie then wheat does. Every acre devoted to crops cannot be used by elephants/rhinoceri/etc. and has to be protected from elephants/rhinoceri/etc; so hunting those elephants/etc. to local extinction becomes very smart policy...
And the elephants/rhinoceri/etc. are most of the large herbivores this study is talking about.
BTW, I personally am somewhat skeptical of the doubling (recent trends have world-wide have been towards much smaller family sizes, and if Africa can get it's act together on pension systems and health care it's likely that families of six will become rare there, too), but it's not gonna shrink, and they will need lots land for cattle.
That's what happened here.
What was the largest large mammal, that existed in high population densities, in most of the landmass of the lower 48 in 1850?
Probably the Buffalo. There were others of course -- we had a presence everywhere, and high population density East of the Mississippi, there was a scattering of bears and other large carnivores, there are some pretty big herbivores as well -- but the one you'd have to mention is the Buffalo. Now there's very few Buffalo, and very very very many Home Sapiens.
Same with most of the other large mammals. In Ohio or Michigan it's very unusual to see anything larger then a white-tail deer (lighter then us, averaging 100 lb.). Yeah you can find animals like Black Bears, or Moose, or Elk; but you really have to go looking for the damn things. Even in more rural/wild areas if you're just going down the highway the largest mammal you're likely to see is a fat guy whose having car trouble. The Ecosystem only has room for so many large mammals, and we crowd them out.
Now what's the one region of the world where large herds of wild mammals (who are bigger then us) roam free? Africa, particularly Central and Southern Africa. What's the continent with both very low population density (Congo, for example, has a population comparable to Germany and land area comparable to Western Europe, it's northern neighbor has a population comparable to a third of the Paris Metro area and more land then all of France), and extreme population growth? Africa.
So it's quite predictable that the Rhinos, Elephants, and Lions are under pressure. The people who live in Africa need the land for agriculture, and there's no cheap way to solve the problem of feeding said African people except destroying the ecosystem that supports those animals.
I think it's mostly hair.
A Presidential candidate is trying to look like a young man, a virile man, a man with great energy to do great things. He's probably in his late 40s or early 50s. He may have some gray, but if it's a lot he's probably dying it the fuck away (you'll note most of the GOP field has no gray at all, despite the fact they're all in their late 40s at least, back in '08 the Dem field was just as non-gray). If he's a she of course she's dying the gray away (I love you Hillary, but we all know your hair today is not precisely the same shade it was back when you personally murdered Vince Foster and then arranged for the paperwork to say "suicide" back when I was 12).
OTOH, as his term goes on a) non-gray hair becomes less socially acceptable (just imagine what Jon Stewart would have done with the tidbit that Dubya was dying), b) it's harder to claim that you actually aren't dying (Obama will leave office at 55, and he's on the young side), and c) he wants to look like the Alpha Male Silverback Gorilla who has Already Accomplished Great Things. So you remember a 50-year-old from the campaign with no gray, then he gets on HD TV at 57 with the normal level of gray for a 57-year-old, and you think :"Gee the past seven years have really aged our President," when in fact all that's happened is he's stopped using Just For Men.
So you could have gone down to the plant, gotten a good-paying job, and then earned a very good wage for your hard work; but you're arguing that it was not trivial to get a good-paying job in your generation? Sounds pretty trivial to me. A lot more trivial then this generation has it. Hell, even a minimum wage job in your generation paid more then many full-time jobs do in this generation.
And this generation to get more you can't just show up at the plant with a High School Equivalency Certificate, you either need very good business skills, or you need a degree. Generally the degree is pretty advanced and it costs you a lot of money.
In my experience the correlation between hard work and compensation is non-existant. In many cases the worst-compensated work hardest because you don't give the guy with nothing to offer but his back a good wage. At the top you'll get people who work long hours, but they aren't actually working harder then anyone else. They're working smarter, and they're working longer. But they ain't working harder the guy loading a half-ton of mulch into a van by hand.
Your literacy leaves something to be desired.
From the link:
Xerox willingly invited Apple representatives to visit its PARC think tank after signing an agreement that invested $1 million into the computer maker in the hopes that Apple could take PARC's raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market, using mass manufacturing, product development and marketing expertise that the academic computer scientists and engineers at Xerox lacked.
It's kinda hard to "take PARC's raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market" if you don't have a signed agreement stating that Apple can use PARC's technologies.
Kindall was bitter because he screwed up. IBM approached him first and wanted to buy CP/M, but Kindall didn't make the sale. Why that happened is lost in the mists of time, but Gates saw the value in the deal and made it happen.
You could actually buy an IBM PC with CP/M on it from the factory from about six months after IBM PCs were introduced.
But Kindall fucked that up, to. He charged more ($240 according to wikipedia) then Bill Gates ($40) did, not understanding the huge advantage MS-DOS would get from being the dominant OS on an open platform.
Why did IBM sign the contract with Gates?
They were subject of a long, draining, anti-trust investigation from '69-'82; so being in full control of their platform could have caused legal problems.
They also had very little tech that could be quickly turned into a PC, because they'd sat out the Minicomputer revolution of the 70s. It would have taken them five years to make a product from scratch. And by then they'd be five years further behind. Which would have been really bad. They started development of their non-GUI PC in mid-1980, and Apple came out with the GUI Mac in April of '84. They would have hit the market right when the Amiga came out.
So they decided to make a computer from easily available parts (ie: Intel's chips), and already viable software (ie: DOS was a clone of CP/M, which ran on Intel chips already). They offered a variety of OSes (CP/M, PC-DOS/MS-DOS, and p-System). It took them roughly a year to get from plan to market.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS was most popular because it was cheapest and Bill Gates made sure it was branded as "PC." Nobody got fired for buying IBM, and buying the PC-Disk Operating System for an IBM PC made sense. As part of IBM's attempt to ape the then-dominent Apple II, the architecture was supposed to be open, and in the accelerated timeframe of getting the machine out the door agreeing that Bill Gates could sell his own MS-DOS on other machines probably seemed like a) part of the open architecture they were going for, and b) not a battle worth fighting; not to mention c) proof for the Justice Department that we aren;t an evil monopoly bullying poor little Billy Gates and you should stop investigating us.
GEM went on. It was doomed more because it's business model was obsolete then the lawsuit. The days in which computer geeks were the main market for an OS were over, and they apparently never bothered to negotiate a licensing deal with XEROX.
MS also got sued, but apparently they had a license agreement from John Sculley which covered most of it, and the rest was either uncopyrightable, XEROX';s copyright, or so trivial nobody cared (ie: codefendent HP had a "trash can" icon) they were able to win. Apple dragged out the case until Steve Jobs came back and negotiated that famous cease-fire with Bill Gates in '97.
XEROX actually licensed it's technology to Apple in hopes that Steve Jobs could successfully bring products to market, because XEROX had no ability to turn it's bluesky tech into things people wanted. Their mouse cost hundreds (in 1981 dollars), and was not terribly reliable. Apple had to redesign everything, write their own code, etc.
The licensing deal was basically Apple sold them $1 Million in stock, at $10 a share, prior to IPO, Apple gets everything they want from the PARC portfolio. That stock would have to be worth 9 figures today so (assuming they were smart enough to not sell) they got paid.
So nobody stole code. Apple got extremely annoyed that they'd given XEROX all this money for GUIs and Mouses and things and MS just went in and copied it themselves without paying XEROX anything.
The connection is that your memory is biased by your economic success. You were not more mature then us, and you cover it by a combination of rationalizations and the fact it was trivial to get a good job in 1970.
Let me put it to you this way: according to your parents you were much less mature then they were, spoiled as children, and failures as adults. According to their parents your parents generation was much less spoiled then their (the grandparent's) generation. And on and on and on. One of two things is going on: either every generation of old people forgets precisely how pathetic they were at 18, or back in 1750 8-year-olds had the emotional maturity of our 60-year-olds.
OTOH, that was the Revolution generation, and you are probably in your 60s, so you may just have proven your case.
Baby boomers.
Your parents freaked out at things that most people today would think of as just part of High School, like losing your virginity and using any mind-altering substance. Can you imagine what they would have done if you'd said "yes Mom, this picture from Playboy is part of my class's assignment?"
And it's not because she's a stick-in-the-mud-no-fun-prissy-pants, it's because your Mom knows what being a 16-year-old-girl is like, and your Mom doesn't want you to make your classmates cry.
But, through your stoner-haze, you vaguely remember that most of your friends were claiming to do all that shit, and you're quite confident that you would have been fine if you had actually succeeded; and you have no experience whatsoever being a 16-year-old-girl you're whining because you don't want the boys to be denied the dubious pleasure of talking about their playboy-picture-using class.
WTF has happened?
There's no jobs that pay for high school educated kids. You need at least an Associate's, or you're in retail. If you're in retail you really can't be a parent because the scheduling is so fucked up I work one of these places, and they insist that all their employees should be able to be their, and chipper, with 7.5 hours between shifts, even the poor motherfuckers who have a half-hour commute and happen to be your fucking age).
OTOH, when you were 18 you could get a job that paid the equivalent of $20 an hour (it actually would have been more like $3 or $4, but inflation), with a set schedule, and good benefits, just by being a US Citizen who showed at work every day. With that much money, and no commitments, emotional maturity is a side-issue. As long as you were emotionally mature enough to avoid the legal system and show up at 9 AM you were fine. If weren't quite that mature you got to go to Vietnam.
But today you not only need to be mature enough to avoid the cops, you also have to be good enough academically to get into a real college (a two-year-program that has a track record of getting people jobs counts), if you're working your way through college you have to maintain a job with a terrible schedule plus school, which costs at least $10k a year (in the 70s, even after adjusting for inflation, most schools were under $5k), etc.
High School is not about growing up.
It's about surviving long enough to make it to college. You can grow up in college.
Countries plural?
Heritage has Denmark as 0.1 points higher then the US. The Norwegians, Swedes, and Icelanders are all about 4 points lower. Finland (which swears it's not Scandinavia) is 2.8 points lower. Cato has us 12th, the Danes 19th, and those Finns (who will really be pissed that I called them Scandinavian twice in one posts) 10th.
As a left-winger I obviously don't think these rankings are very good, and I think that the freedom to quit your job and not go bankrupt is a pretty good economic freedom; but to the Americans who think "economic freedom" is more then a BS talking point Scandinavia is worse then us. Why? higher taxes, used to pay for that welfare state.
These people actually found somebody to sue Obama because he didn't want subsidized health insurance. They are not kidding when they tell you that the number one predictor of whether a President will become Hitler is how much of GDP his budget consumes.
On Canada's version of what you call "corruption," that's never been what I'm talking about. It's your pet strawman. I'm talking about the ease with which the wealthy can manipulate the system legally to gain an advantage on the working class.
Sometimes this is widely considered corrupt (ie: campaign donations), but most of the time it's just how it is. If Matty Moroun knows precisely which locally elected official to go to to advance his agenda, then that's not corruption. It's smart politics. In the US he can dance around the system like a pro, manipulating people for months or years until they are a) jailed (Kwame Kilpatrick was always a Morounie), b) lose an election, or c) wise up. n Canada he did that a few years, then the big bosses heard of his activities.
State-side most of the elected officials don't care that he's a destructive asshole because there's no doctrine of Responsible Government forcing rural, out-state, pols to care what happens in Detroit. But in Canada the PM and Premier are both responsible to the people of Windsor, ON; which means that when the people of Windsor make a credible case that a local businessman is a huge dick who should only get his extra bridge if he promises to be really good in an enforceable way, the PM/Premier will hear that case (probably at Question Period, on national TV, where he can't dodge), and the Bruce County MP/MLA will get marching orders to not touch that businessman.
On Republic, I actually took two years of Latin in college. Res, rei is an irregular pronoun that has meaning so broad it cannot be truly translated to English. "Thing" is the closest you can get, but iot';s a very broad view of "Thing" that no English-speaker would consider. Publica, -us, -um is an adjective loosely meaning "Public." It is res publica because irregular res is nominative feminine, and publica thus takes the -a rather then an -us (masculine) or an -um (neuter). The Republic, therefore, is the "Public Thing." You're the one whose basing his Latin on wikipedia and poorly remembered propaganda.
BTW, you wouldn't like the Roman version of the Law. The Decemviri turned an action movie plot into real life*, with a side of daughter-slaying because it's Rome and this shit happened. "Dictator" was actually an official job in the Roman Republic, which existed because the normal guys who ran things (the Consuls) came in pairs and occasionally had a tendency to veto each-other (in an extreme case the Army marched West on one Consul's orders, then the next day it would march East on the other Consul's orders, and repeat). In emergencies they'd just say "fuck it, this guy's got all the power until the emergency is over."
*One of them arranged for a pretty woman to be ruled as highly in debt to him, which meant she was a slave, and thus a sex slave. Her father was a retired Centurion, who restored the pre-decemvir-regime. But, of course, he had to kill her to restore the family honor.
This is High School, not PhD-level research. There is no point in comparing the tools a 16-year-old kid in 2015 makes to one made by ComSci PhDs in 1975. It is a waste of time.
Moreover, this is a high school class. It includes 16-year-old-boys who revel in excessive male horseplay, and have not mastered the fine art of turning it down because it's incredibly dickish. It also includes 16-year-old girls who have not mastered the fine art of dealing with excessive male horseplay/dickishness. By telling the kids they are using porn you will increase the excessive male horse-play by roughly infinity, which will in turn increase the misery of the poor 16-year-old girls by a similar amount. Your defense of this picture's use in the specific place this article is about (High School) is simply cruel, and the actual High School stopped using it for precisely this reason.
Most importantly this is a High School class. The boss isn't some wizened old PhD who thinks deeply about the abstract concept of Academic Freedom, it is an elected school board. The School Board consists of (in my experience) precisely two kinds of people: religious conservatives striving to Jesusify the country via the education system, and union shills striving to prevent the religious conservatives business allies from gutting their pensions. If the Jesusify people find out you used part of a pornographic photo in your class you get fired and call you evil because you probably believe in evolution, and your entire program gets cancelled., If the feminists go crying to the union about your misogyny for using part of said pornographic photo to teach your class, you get fired and your program, they will call you evil for threatening their campaign donations, the entire program gets cancelled, but at least they make sure you retain your equity in the pension plan.
So, in conclusion read the fucking summary. This is about High School, not a Post-Doc research symposium. The kids are not 20-something adults who can deal with porn in a mature and non-dickish manner. They are immature 16-year-old-kids who (as you probably remember) specialize in making each-other miserable, and you are advocating that they have yet another opportunity to do so.
So the French Socialist Party isn't Socialist? I'll bet it's news to them.
People really have trouble understanding that over time the goals of political movements change, so finding the 'true meaning' of a word like Socialist or Republican or any of a half-dozen other terms used by hundreds of different political factions in hundreds of countries in response to hundreds of different sets of social conditions is stupid.
In the US Today Socialist is used by people who want to signal a) they prefer the significantly less free market system of Scandinavia to our current economic system, and b) they do not give a shit that most Americans think that label is evil.
Sanders would actually fit into almost either big Swedish political party better then he fits the Dems.
Don't be silly.
They are "economic conservatives." That means the thing they most want from government is that it be very very cheap, and not pay for nice things for the middle class. Bernie agrees with them on some foreign policy issues (particularly the ones where they can bitch about Obama for Unconstitutional power-grabs), but he disagrees with them on others (partricularly the ones where they bitch about how Obama's weakness is hurting America).
They ain't voting Bernie. Might give him money in hopes of being able to run a campaign against an avowed Socialist, but they ain't voting for him.
Ahh engineers. Such strong fans of extreme precision. I could've sworn I put an at least in there.
Given the tenuous nature of the data (a guy on slashdot told me ain't gonna hold up in Court), and that I wasn't sure I'd remembered the numbers exactly right, but I did know they were high enough that the 248 thing would not come up in the real world, going with a high-end ballpark estimate seemed sensible. Worst-case scenario somebody does the math and say "Dude, you said this is fine because 14 days is less then 248, but your actual evidence is that it's 9.92 or 9.53 days, which rounds down to one week." That guys is you.
Which changes the math, and if we were using this thread to actually design an aircraft it would change everything, but it does not actually affect the conclusion.
BTW, I did remember the numbers wrong. It was 23-25, so I'm assuming he thinks they're on an overhaul schedule that is almost exactly every 10 days:
If it ever happened on a plane, then it means that the maintenance was intentionally skipped. If they reach 248 days of continuous operation then a number of significant maintenance cycles have been skipped (some 23-25 inspection / maintenance cycles that generally require shutting down the electrical system). The generators in question are attached to the engines. The engines have a overhaul schedule that is shorter than 248 days of continuous operation. If they managed to reach this point, then the major maintenance cycles have been skipped and the engines are long overdue for a tear down inspection and overhaul. Any plane which could reach this point, 248 days of continuous operation missing all of the required maintenance; this is not a plane (or an airline for that matter) which anyone should be flying on.
And no, I'm neither a programmer nor an engineer, so I won;t be doing any of that kind of work for you.
Dude,
I have never said there's no way for elites to manipulate a Parliamentary system. I've said there are fewer ways then in the US. And you have presented no evidence that any method the elites of Canada use to manipulate their system are not present in the US.
On theology: you;re still arguing theology. You hasve no examples of how the actual system works in the real world, you just repeat the theories (now raised to theological precepts in what non-Americans call our :"Civic Religion") that the Founders believed centuries ago.
Your Latin is shaky. "Rule by Law" would be something closing to "Rex Lege" then "Republic," "Republic" is actually derived from "Res Publicus," or "Public Affairs."
If your definition of corruption is that it's how the wealthy gain power secretly, how can Canada equal a country where we have a) secret political campaigns with unlimited donations, b) numerous elected officials who can all owe favors, etc.? Your argument is perfect theology, but has no relation to reality.
If you think you've got my political affiliation pegged from this thread you;re remarkably dumb. OTOH, you did just claim that the well know "Res Publica" actually meant "Rule of Law" so brains clearly ain;t your forte. I listed some things that would be in the majorities best interest. Quite a few of them would win referendums, yet the government doesn't do them. Why? Because the wealthy elites have numerous veto points, an ideological predisposition to oppose all spending that is not tax breaks, and a strong material interest in thew current system.
As for moderates, to quote you: "The issue is you want to make it hard for anyone to do anything extreme or anything quickly. If actions are kept moderate and everyone has time to respond to it then they can't really get that out of control."
Your entire case is a defense of moderation.
There are times to tell the offended to go away, and there are times where you live with it.
In this case, since it is actually high school, you're much better off living with it because there are precisely zero school boards in the history of the universe who would defend a teacher from a) the feminists, and b) the Evangelicals. And using a vaguely porn-related photo as official class materials (when you could use fucking jelly beans) is gonna get you in trouble with both.
At higher levels you can get away with it, but since most CompSci departments are actively trying to recruit female students and a small (but significant proportion) of the female population will decide that CompSci clearly isn't for them if their assignments are about Playboy pictures (and be honest: if the class figures out where the Lena picture came from one of the 19-year-old-boys is gonna make a juvenile crack about how cool it is to work with PORN), so using it for undergrad is probably not a wise choice either.
The big problem is it's easily replaced, and not terribly professional. Better pictures are available. Better pictures are easily found. If you're a grad student writing an academic paper you can make a case that you need it to compare your tool with the ones other people have written papers about, but if you're not a grad student you really don't need it.
OTOH, the lady your prof brought in was not being unprofessional, and was not easily replaced. Thus your female classmate was easily dissuaded from making a big deal out of a little deal.