Got to wonder sometimes, when the FIRST message praising CA for this gets moderated Redundant even before anybody else has gotten around to praising CA...
The point is that the BBC is there to provide an alternative to the commercial broadcasters. As such, there's no point in having the BBC producing stuff that the commercial broadcasters does just as well. Especially as the variety of commercial channels has been rapidly increasing. Which is why so much effort is put in to make sure BBC programming is focused on areas where the BBC can either provide an important alternative (news, for instance, by providing an alternative to the viewpoints of the commercial broadcasters) or where the commercial broadcasters aren't going.
This is the foundation of almost all publicly owned broadcasters in Europe - they're there to make sure stuff that isn't commercially viable on the short term still gets a chance at a place in the media, and to aid public information and the development of culture.
Setting guidelines to ensure this is the only way in which parliament "keep the BBC under its thumb". And only indirectly through changes to the charter and by indirectly influencing the BBC's governing structure.
Think of BBC as a corporation owned by the public being given guidelines for how to operate from it's shareholders - represented by Parliament. This is no different than any other media organisation. The only difference is that in the BBC's case power isn't centralised on the hands of small groups of wealthy business people.
The thing is, it is NOT redundant in countries (such as the US and the UK) where labelling requirements for food are so weak that many products do appear to contain things they don't. I've come across plenty of products in the UK with names that make it seems blatantly obvious that the product should include meat, for instance but that on closer inspection turned out to be vegetarian products without a trace of meat in it.
When I first moved to the UK, I'd have assumed that a "pork flavoured sausage" had at least some pork in it, but now I've long since learned the hard way that it might just as well be a soy product with some spices.
In an environment like that it becomes easier for someone to assume that a product doesn't reflect what the label says and overlook something on the ingredients list. Requiring a warning makes mistakes a lot less likely, and avoids having to go into the issue of what is "obvious enough". It's sensible enough when adding the warning has no extra cost and doesn't inconvenience other buyers of the product.
You can't possibly have Sky One... SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis seems to be all over their bloody schedule. But then I might be going crazy from my longstanding dislike for Stargate - it seems to somehow magically always be on whenever I flick through the channels.
2. They get some decent writers. Far too much of Trek in the past few years has been about moralising rather than just telling a good story. I definitely vote for Michael J Straczynski doing some of the writing for the shows.
This complaint always cracks me up. Roddenberry's purpose with Star Trek was to find a setting for social commentary that would let him present his moral agenda without incurring the ire of the studio censors... When fans don't see that in the older series, that's likely more because much of the original moralising was over issues that are now reasonably dated.
For instance, it's hard to see the episode where Kirk and Uhura kiss as having any purpose as social commentary unless you're aware of just how controversial interracial relationships used to be, and that is perhaps one of the most blantant ones.
I can hardly think of ANY episode of any Star Trek series that hasn't been dripping of moralising about at least one issue.
Even the structure of the Star Trek universe is so blatant in it's use of entire species as plot devices to set the scene for morality plays where the individuals involved doesn't need to be well known to the viewer because he or she can either distinguish the role of the people involved from their species, or the very point of the story is why or how a particular individual deviates from the species standard behaviour, and what consequences it has.
Star Trek is about moralising. Deal with it. It's been part of what made it a success, but it's also part of what sometimes makes it extremely obnoxious whenever it gets too in your face and you either completely agree or completely disagree. It's at it's best whenever it hits you with issues you haven't really considered or haven't made your mind up about, where it is what creates a great story because it keeps you thinking.
Getting that balance right might quite possibly require someone other than Berman, though, even if I've never quite understood the raw hatred he is sometimes met with from some people.
No, but the airline in question explicitly told Gilmore it did so because of government regulations. It's the government regulation Gilmore is challenging, not any voluntary policy of a specific airline.
While Gilmore is making a stand on the travel issue, he's really killing two birds with one stone. To me, the larger issue is that Congress have passed laws that allow government departments to issue regulations that effectively have the force of law and affect the general public, but that are allowed to remain secret.
There are plenty of good arguments for requiring ID to travel. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them.
But in challenging this restriction, he's also forcing courts to come to terms with the fact that the US now in effect have secrets laws that people are expected to comply with, yet aren't allowed to read.
So if you don't think the travel issue is worthwhile I hope you at least think secrets laws are worthwhile fighting over.
A law is a democratic country is passed by vote in a country's legislative body. In this case it has not been.
Because it's secret, you can't know if everyone is forced to obey it or if it only applies to certain groups of people, or have all kinds of other "interesting" properties.
After the attack you have a number of charred bodies and burned up ID's and a passenger list. You don't know whether the passenger list matches the actual passengers. How will that be different if showing ID is voluntary? How many people do you think will want to on purpose give fake names when booking the ticket?
I don't see Gilmore, or anyone else, arguing that passenger lists are bad or should be done away with, only that there shouldn't be a requirement to show ID for domestic flights, and more importantly that any regulations that DOES require this shouldn't be secret.
I couldn't care less if someone wants my name. I have no reason not to give it. But I can also think of a long list of perfectly legal reasons to travel where people might prefer not to leave an easy to follow trail - maybe I'll never actually want to travel for any of those reasons, but other people will.
They might include things like participating in meetings of highly controversial but legal political organisations, and for more or less public figures might include a plethora of things where it doesn't matter if random strangers see them, but where it might turn embarassing if the press after the fact can easily follow a paper trail, such as conducting an affair, meeting a friend that don't want to be in the public eye, going for medical treatments etc.
Maybe the reasons for requiring ID are important enough that it's worthwhile to restrict someone from being able to do any of the above without it, but why is the US government not willing to show the regulations in question, allow a proper public debate of the contents of the regulation, and ensure effective public oversight? What can possibly be so important in the language of the regulation itself?
When someone insists on secrecy for something like this, it smells fishy. Either someone has a vastly inflated sense of the importance and sensitivity of their work, someone have, or there is something in the regulation that would prove controversial and spark a discussion they don't want. It's quite possibly it's "only" the former and someone enjoys using their brand new rubber "Top secret" stamp too much just because they can, but it could very well be the latter as well, which is why what Gilmore does matters.
RTFA. The point is that if you try to travel by plane within the US today you need ID. No law states that you need ID. So why? The Airlines claims it is because of the government. The government claims it can't show you the rule that requires airlines to ask you for ID - initially it refused to even confirm whether or not such a regulation existed.
The regulations they claim they can't disclose for "safety reasons" have never been voted on by congress - all of this is possible because the TSA was essentially granted the right to set whatever security related restrictions they want on transport without letting the public know what rules they impose.
(If that is constitutional, does that mean that Congress in effect can hand over law making power to any body that is outside public oversight simply by passing a law that grants that body the right to regulate an area in secrecy?)
While Gilmore says he's against having to show ID to travel inside the US, he's also indicated that his main aim is to make sure any such regulations are openly debated so that the public KNOWS what restrictions the government imposes on it and why.
Why does the reasons for requiring picture id's need to stay secret?
Because most of us are unlikely to use those scales somewhere with a different gravitational constant, seeing as the personal spaceships we've been promised by scifi writers still haven't materialised, so nobody really cares that they're really measuring something else that just happens to be equivalent in all the places they're likely to measure it.
Funny. I'm of the exact same opinion about the practicality of metric over imperial. Do you perhaps think it has to do with the fact that we've been immersed by these systems since birth?
As for the silly example of division: I've never come across it as a problem. First of all, I do know how to use fractions. Secondly, approximations are usually good enough, and "everyone" knows that a third is roughly.33 and 2/3's are approximately.67. If you need to state it precisely, you give the fraction: a third of a kilometre, two thirds of a kilo. It's no harder for me to do that than it is for you to divide up your units. Furthermore, I don't have the faintest idea HOW your units relate to eachother. With the SI units you at least only need to learn the prefixes and you can tell any relation between units of the same type.
As for knowing if people are short, that depends entirely on your point of reference again. To me, at 6'2", people around 5'6" are "short" to me, and I don't consider myself tall anymore - I have lots of taller family members and I see taller people around me wherever I go.
As for temperature, I can't feel the difference between temperatures one degree apart, so it really doesn't matter. Though I've always found it more logical to have 0 as a rough measure of the freezing point of water, and 100 as a rough measure of the boiling point of water (both obviously dependant on pressure, but for daily use it hardly matters)
You can try to rationalise it as much as you want, but it all boils down to one thing: You're used to imperial based units, just as I am used to SI units.
The one advantage of the SI system is the uniform naming and conversion ratios, and the fact that they're the same everywhere.
Even the US government recognises those advantages - the US was one of the original signatories to the treaty of the metre, and all imperial based units in use in the US have been defined in terms of the metric units a century or so. It's just a matter of time before metric takes over in the US as well - in particular as government organisations are now required to use metric.
You could always change to metric, and insist on rounding up to the closest SI base unit. A pint is 0.568 litres, so that would give you a nice increase.
Are you saying that a physical artifact is harder to manipulate than a well defined value? If someone started shaving or adding stuff to the international kilogram artifact it would be easy to afterwards claim that it wasn't the kilogram artifact that changed, but whatever it was compared to. If a kilogram is defined to be a value that is independently measurable by anyone with the appropriate tools that possibility goes away. And this is important because today the kilogram DOES change
The US officially switched to metric a century or so ago, though. It's just that they've taken a much slower approach to switching, by first redefining all the imperial units based on the equivalent metric units and then gradually requiring or allowing metric more places.
I think the Australian approach made more sense, personally.
Except that waters density DOES depend on the pressure, and the SI units to measure pressure depends on the mass. Hence the introduction of the international kilogram prototype to avoid a circular definition.
A gram has always been defined as 1/1000th of a kilogram - kilogram is the base unit, not gram. A kilogram used to be defined almost like you say, but it was changed in the 1880's or so.
You're wrong. 1 gram is defined as a thousandth of a kilogram, and a kilogram is defined as the mass of the kilogram artefact.
The definition was originally that a kilogram was the mass of one litre of pure water at 4 degrees Celsius and standard athmospheric pressure, but that is a circular definition, as the definitions of the SI units for pressure depends on mass.
As a result a kilogram is now the mass of the kilogram artefact - if the artefacts changes mass, it still remains 1 kilogram
I'm sure moderation of submissions could generate a good site (Look at Kuro5hin, for instance), but I'm not sure it would generate the site *I* want. I like Slashdot for what it is. With users picking the stories I might up with a site substantially different.
One alternative would be to have "user picked stories" as a category that you could include or exclude when logged in just like the other categories.
That level of unemployment benefit is common throughout Scandinavia, though usually limited to a set amount of time after which you'd go over to means tested benefits which means most people have a significant incentive not to stay unemployed for too long. But add to that 3 months notice periods being common, public healthcare, shorter average working hours, and it's a pretty nice part of the world to live in.
The funny thing is, as much as people like to think otherwise, unless you earn many times the national average you're likely to not pay much more in tax than you'd do in most US states - and you're likely to pay LESS when you factor in the cost of adequate health insurance to get you the same quality health care in the US.
The main difference from the US is that the US has a ridiculous military expenditure per capita.
Slashdot Mirror
Try using Gaim if you want to access Yahoo! chat from Linux.
And the first use will be for porn, as always.
Downloading is copying, so downloading IS illegal under the copyright laws of most countries.
Pre-emptive strike, perhaps?
Yeah, I'm sure the defendant was very unhappy that the judge dismissed her conviction and let her off the hook.
This is the foundation of almost all publicly owned broadcasters in Europe - they're there to make sure stuff that isn't commercially viable on the short term still gets a chance at a place in the media, and to aid public information and the development of culture.
Setting guidelines to ensure this is the only way in which parliament "keep the BBC under its thumb". And only indirectly through changes to the charter and by indirectly influencing the BBC's governing structure.
Think of BBC as a corporation owned by the public being given guidelines for how to operate from it's shareholders - represented by Parliament. This is no different than any other media organisation. The only difference is that in the BBC's case power isn't centralised on the hands of small groups of wealthy business people.
When I first moved to the UK, I'd have assumed that a "pork flavoured sausage" had at least some pork in it, but now I've long since learned the hard way that it might just as well be a soy product with some spices.
In an environment like that it becomes easier for someone to assume that a product doesn't reflect what the label says and overlook something on the ingredients list. Requiring a warning makes mistakes a lot less likely, and avoids having to go into the issue of what is "obvious enough". It's sensible enough when adding the warning has no extra cost and doesn't inconvenience other buyers of the product.
You can't possibly have Sky One... SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis seems to be all over their bloody schedule. But then I might be going crazy from my longstanding dislike for Stargate - it seems to somehow magically always be on whenever I flick through the channels.
This complaint always cracks me up. Roddenberry's purpose with Star Trek was to find a setting for social commentary that would let him present his moral agenda without incurring the ire of the studio censors... When fans don't see that in the older series, that's likely more because much of the original moralising was over issues that are now reasonably dated.
For instance, it's hard to see the episode where Kirk and Uhura kiss as having any purpose as social commentary unless you're aware of just how controversial interracial relationships used to be, and that is perhaps one of the most blantant ones.
I can hardly think of ANY episode of any Star Trek series that hasn't been dripping of moralising about at least one issue.
Even the structure of the Star Trek universe is so blatant in it's use of entire species as plot devices to set the scene for morality plays where the individuals involved doesn't need to be well known to the viewer because he or she can either distinguish the role of the people involved from their species, or the very point of the story is why or how a particular individual deviates from the species standard behaviour, and what consequences it has.
Star Trek is about moralising. Deal with it. It's been part of what made it a success, but it's also part of what sometimes makes it extremely obnoxious whenever it gets too in your face and you either completely agree or completely disagree. It's at it's best whenever it hits you with issues you haven't really considered or haven't made your mind up about, where it is what creates a great story because it keeps you thinking.
Getting that balance right might quite possibly require someone other than Berman, though, even if I've never quite understood the raw hatred he is sometimes met with from some people.
No, but the airline in question explicitly told Gilmore it did so because of government regulations. It's the government regulation Gilmore is challenging, not any voluntary policy of a specific airline.
There are plenty of good arguments for requiring ID to travel. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them.
But in challenging this restriction, he's also forcing courts to come to terms with the fact that the US now in effect have secrets laws that people are expected to comply with, yet aren't allowed to read.
So if you don't think the travel issue is worthwhile I hope you at least think secrets laws are worthwhile fighting over.
Because it's secret, you can't know if everyone is forced to obey it or if it only applies to certain groups of people, or have all kinds of other "interesting" properties.
I don't see Gilmore, or anyone else, arguing that passenger lists are bad or should be done away with, only that there shouldn't be a requirement to show ID for domestic flights, and more importantly that any regulations that DOES require this shouldn't be secret.
I couldn't care less if someone wants my name. I have no reason not to give it. But I can also think of a long list of perfectly legal reasons to travel where people might prefer not to leave an easy to follow trail - maybe I'll never actually want to travel for any of those reasons, but other people will.
They might include things like participating in meetings of highly controversial but legal political organisations, and for more or less public figures might include a plethora of things where it doesn't matter if random strangers see them, but where it might turn embarassing if the press after the fact can easily follow a paper trail, such as conducting an affair, meeting a friend that don't want to be in the public eye, going for medical treatments etc.
Maybe the reasons for requiring ID are important enough that it's worthwhile to restrict someone from being able to do any of the above without it, but why is the US government not willing to show the regulations in question, allow a proper public debate of the contents of the regulation, and ensure effective public oversight? What can possibly be so important in the language of the regulation itself?
When someone insists on secrecy for something like this, it smells fishy. Either someone has a vastly inflated sense of the importance and sensitivity of their work, someone have, or there is something in the regulation that would prove controversial and spark a discussion they don't want. It's quite possibly it's "only" the former and someone enjoys using their brand new rubber "Top secret" stamp too much just because they can, but it could very well be the latter as well, which is why what Gilmore does matters.
The regulations they claim they can't disclose for "safety reasons" have never been voted on by congress - all of this is possible because the TSA was essentially granted the right to set whatever security related restrictions they want on transport without letting the public know what rules they impose.
(If that is constitutional, does that mean that Congress in effect can hand over law making power to any body that is outside public oversight simply by passing a law that grants that body the right to regulate an area in secrecy?)
While Gilmore says he's against having to show ID to travel inside the US, he's also indicated that his main aim is to make sure any such regulations are openly debated so that the public KNOWS what restrictions the government imposes on it and why.
Why does the reasons for requiring picture id's need to stay secret?
Because most of us are unlikely to use those scales somewhere with a different gravitational constant, seeing as the personal spaceships we've been promised by scifi writers still haven't materialised, so nobody really cares that they're really measuring something else that just happens to be equivalent in all the places they're likely to measure it.
As for the silly example of division: I've never come across it as a problem. First of all, I do know how to use fractions. Secondly, approximations are usually good enough, and "everyone" knows that a third is roughly .33 and 2/3's are approximately .67. If you need to state it precisely, you give the fraction: a third of a kilometre, two thirds of a kilo. It's no harder for me to do that than it is for you to divide up your units. Furthermore, I don't have the faintest idea HOW your units relate to eachother. With the SI units you at least only need to learn the prefixes and you can tell any relation between units of the same type.
As for knowing if people are short, that depends entirely on your point of reference again. To me, at 6'2", people around 5'6" are "short" to me, and I don't consider myself tall anymore - I have lots of taller family members and I see taller people around me wherever I go.
As for temperature, I can't feel the difference between temperatures one degree apart, so it really doesn't matter. Though I've always found it more logical to have 0 as a rough measure of the freezing point of water, and 100 as a rough measure of the boiling point of water (both obviously dependant on pressure, but for daily use it hardly matters)
You can try to rationalise it as much as you want, but it all boils down to one thing: You're used to imperial based units, just as I am used to SI units.
The one advantage of the SI system is the uniform naming and conversion ratios, and the fact that they're the same everywhere.
Even the US government recognises those advantages - the US was one of the original signatories to the treaty of the metre, and all imperial based units in use in the US have been defined in terms of the metric units a century or so. It's just a matter of time before metric takes over in the US as well - in particular as government organisations are now required to use metric.
You could always change to metric, and insist on rounding up to the closest SI base unit. A pint is 0.568 litres, so that would give you a nice increase.
Are you saying that a physical artifact is harder to manipulate than a well defined value? If someone started shaving or adding stuff to the international kilogram artifact it would be easy to afterwards claim that it wasn't the kilogram artifact that changed, but whatever it was compared to. If a kilogram is defined to be a value that is independently measurable by anyone with the appropriate tools that possibility goes away. And this is important because today the kilogram DOES change
I think the Australian approach made more sense, personally.
Except that waters density DOES depend on the pressure, and the SI units to measure pressure depends on the mass. Hence the introduction of the international kilogram prototype to avoid a circular definition.
A gram has always been defined as 1/1000th of a kilogram - kilogram is the base unit, not gram. A kilogram used to be defined almost like you say, but it was changed in the 1880's or so.
The definition was originally that a kilogram was the mass of one litre of pure water at 4 degrees Celsius and standard athmospheric pressure, but that is a circular definition, as the definitions of the SI units for pressure depends on mass.
As a result a kilogram is now the mass of the kilogram artefact - if the artefacts changes mass, it still remains 1 kilogram
One alternative would be to have "user picked stories" as a category that you could include or exclude when logged in just like the other categories.
I thought they'd done that years ago.
The funny thing is, as much as people like to think otherwise, unless you earn many times the national average you're likely to not pay much more in tax than you'd do in most US states - and you're likely to pay LESS when you factor in the cost of adequate health insurance to get you the same quality health care in the US.
The main difference from the US is that the US has a ridiculous military expenditure per capita.