BBC English in those days was very prim and proper, I don't know if anyone on the street spoke like that but we see a lot of it in the old TV and films of the day. Only the Queen comes close to sounding like that nowadays.
As they are here also, if the damage is caused by the lessee outside of "normal conditions of usage".
Lessors are responsible for repair/replacement of "normal wear and tear". If the vehicle fails during the lease period under conditions of normal usage, then the lessor would be expected to provide repairs or replacement. The same is true here of residential rental accomodation - periodic replacement of things like paint and carpet and repair of plumbing and electrical faults is the landlord's (lessor's) repsonsibility - they factor the cost of those things into the rental charged for the property.
Mind you, I'm not sure Australian law would even allow a 20 year lease on something like a car.
But it's a lease. If for any reason the vehicle fails during that time, the owner (not the lessee) would be obligated to provide a vehicle that does work, either by repair or replacement. I don't know how leases work in the US, but that's how they'd work in Australia.
I don't think they're expecting that people will commit to a single vehicle for 20 years, merely that they will commit to lease a vehicle for 20 years, that will likely be upgraded several times during that period. Committing to a 20 year lease means you are committing to the lease, not to the specific object being leased.
How is expulsion going to correct or rehabilitate this student?
Other than giving him time to reflect, probably nothing.
Schools have limited resources, and often those resources (particularly in staffing) are disproportionately directed at students for whom the potential postitive outcomes are limited, meaning those students who do the right thing get screwed. Everybody deserves a go at school, but there have to be limits.
Governments are rarely prepared to cough up the extra money required to ensure that everybody has maximum opportunity to succeed, so it ends up as a bit of an "educational triage" situation quite often, and you really do need to work in a school on a day to day basis to appreciate the extent of this.
I have no qualification to speak to your schooling experience, but I teach in Australia rather than the US, where the educational climate is quite different. While not as well-resourced as we would like, is sounds like our school system functions quite a bit better than yours does.
A lot of people on this thread are saying things along the line of "how is suspending the kid for a semester going to help him?"
I'm a teacher, and regardless of the merits of this particular case, when a student is suspended for a length of time like a term or a semester, it generally ceases to be about the student in question. It becomes about maintaining the integrity of the learning environment for everyone else, including staff.
There are students who can become so disruptive to the learning environment in a variety of ways that those students need to be removed so everyone can continue learning. Some kids have to be written off so everyone else can get on with it.
Getting to the merits of the case itself, this was not a general phrase uttered in the heat of the moment like "I wish teachers would die" - this was something premeditated (he had to create the icon, and made it available for three weeks), directed at particular individual. The extent to which the school overreacted is arguable, but the principle is sound. This is not an issue of free speech, since with any speech context is everything.
It's very hard to convince patients that they need Pimozide, and not a can of "Raid" to spray on themselves.
This is another interesting point, since one of the characteristics/symptoms of psychosis is lack of insight. My partner is a social worker who works closely with the mentally ill, and this can be one of the largest barriers to assisting a psychotic person to function relatively normally with their illness, as the psychosis literally prevents the sufferer from recognising the nature of their illness.
Disclaimer: She is not a clinician and does not attempt to diagnose or medically treat illness, but her role is to support clients in functioning in the community; an awareness of the pathology of psychosis does support her in her work.
As you say, this complicates any potential treatment since it become necessary to persuade the patient of the need for a particular kind of treatment that they believe is not appropriate to their symptomology, to which the disease they suffer serves as a barrier.
The earth should be in a warming phase starting with the end of the last ice age 10K years ago.
The last Ice Age has not ended - we're still in it. The point 10,000 years ago that you are talking about is only the start of the current interglacial period, which is supposed to be ending anytime now.
Ah, wrong - Apple spun Claris off as a separate company in 1987, still wholly owned by Apple - Claris developed FileMaker and ClarisWorks. ClarisWorks later became Appleworks, still wholly owned by Apple. At about the same time, Claris became Filemaker Inc.,which focussed on developing only the FileMaker products.
Not sure where you got the idea that these products were acquired by Apple - they were Apple products from the get-go, corporate organisation notwithstanding.
Even a empathetic person could make a mistake and negatively affect people around them. Should we start refusing people jobs at random, becayse they might, at some later date, make a bad decision?
We're not talking about occasional mistakes here - we're talking about an identifiable pattern of pathologically destructive behaviour, that is likely to continue as the individuals in question are unable/unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and thereby modify their poisonous behaviours.
...Just like you could shun a person if you didn't like working with someone who way gay, or black, or had diffrent political beliefs. All of which are things that cannot be changed with medication/counciling, and can affect how a person acts. A lot like being a sociopath, I suppose....
...Saying a sociopath should be denied a job is like saying someone who is into BSDM shouldn't be hired, or someone who is homosexual shouldn't be hired...
Conflating sociopathy with sexuality or ethnicity is an extremely flimsy metaphor - sociopathy is an identifiable pattern of selfish and destructive behaviour, which almost by its definition is going to affect others negatively.
Ethnicity or sexuality are not characteristics of an individual that of themselves are going to generally produce negative effects on people around them.
I don't know about you, but for me the difference couldn't be clearer.
This might be surprising to some of you, but being a sociopath is not illegal. Nor should it be grounds for not getting hired into a job. Being a sociopath does not mean you will become a serial killer either, despite what hollywood tells you. 3% of all men, and 1% of women are sociopaths.
You're quite right, they only very rarely become killers. But it's also worth remembering that Sociopathy is also known as Anti-Social Personality Disorder for a reason. Very rarely do people with this personality type leave others around them negatively unaffected. The more power they have, the more people are likely to get burnt by their disorder.
If someone has the intellegence and ability to do the job, who cares if they won't cry when someone else gets burned? As long as they are a law abiding citizen, they should be able to live a normal life.
Well, I care - just because particular types of behaviour are not legally constrained, does not mean that they should be tolerated. Using a lighter example, a work colleague who persistently and interminably bores you with tales of his boring weekend should not be legally sanctioned, but neither is he going to be your first choice to invite around for dinner. You would shun this person socially, and quite rightly.
The law is not the ultimate gauge of whether behaviour is acceptable or not, just a gauge of behaviour that is so outrageously unacceptable as to require some kind of agreed official constraint. Human being operate socially by principles other that The Law alone - this isn't Mega City One.
Conversely, the legal but socially destructive behaviour of sociopaths should ultimately result in their being shunned by all right thinking people, thereby limiting the number of people their disorder can negatively affect. However, in order to do this, people need to be aware of how to identify these personality types in order to steer clear of them.
I know it might seem OT on the face of it, but I play both the guitar and the banjo. They're strung differently and tuned differently, but most of the fundamental parts of playing both instruments (like fretting) are the same.
Having said this, there is no sense of not being aware of which instrument you're playing, and even though there are procedures that apply to both (like fretting), you just instantly flick between instruction sets, so you never accidentally start playing 'the banjo' while you're holding a guitar.
This is only a metaphor, of course, and it may not apply to keyboards as well, but my gut feeling tells me it should be fine.
Also, as an educator, I can tell you that they skills that stay with you the longest are physical skills, like riding a bike, using a keyboard or playing an instrument. Even after very long periods of disuse, these skills generally return in a very short amount of time.
In many ways, this law is not dissimilar from what is required of teachers, nurses, police, social workers and a couple of other allied professions in Australia already. This policy is known as Mandatory Notification.
If you are a member of the professions above, and you have a reasonable suspicion that a child is being abused or neglected, then you are legally bound to report that abuse to the authorities, under threat of a $2500 fine. You are only bound legally while you are discharging your professional duties (if you see something on the weekend there is no legal obligation).
Also, you can only get into trouble if you suspect abuse and fail to report it, not if you simply failed to notice it - in this way, the policy is similar to this law.
The key point of all this, of course, is that despite all the legal mumbo-jumbo I've just detailed above, there are certain moral obligations incumbent on people. If, as a teacher, I failed to report suspected abuse I observed outside of school hours, I may not be legally culpable, but I would be morally culpable.
So it is with this law, at least on the face of it. This simply presents ISPs with a reasonable and not especially onerous obligation to report kiddie porn as they find it, which frankly anyone more moral than Hannibal Lecter should be pretty happy to do anyway.
There will be inevitable arguments about "but what constitutes kiddie porn" and "who decides what is moral". The bottom line is (and as mandatory notifiers, we get taught the same thing): if you're not sure, report it. If it's deemed to be kiddie porn, then you've done a good thing. If it isn't then no harm done.
Don't mistake me for one of those "Won't somebody pleeeeeeease think of the children??" types. I am in favour of moderate, reasonable obligations that give people an extra incentive to keep their basic priorities straight. In no way should ISPs, or indeed anyone other than law enforcement, be required to have an active role in pursuing and apprehending offenders.
Laws do not serve to give people a heart, but they can restrain the heartless. Any ISP that places their financial and business obligations above their basic moral obligations to the society in which they live will now have to wear a similar burden to those members of other professions listed above.
It is your job to protect them but also to get them ready for an adult life.
I just have to challenge this, since it is one of my personal bugbears. Kids are kids, legitimate people in their own right, not "adults-in-training". They are not people-in-progress, they are people right now.
One of the reasons I think that children should avoid computers until high school (see my post in this thread) is that they should spend their precious and brief childhoods just being children, and doing kid stuff, not spending their childhoods as some kind of waystation as they prepare for adulthood.
I realise that you may not have meant it in quite such stark terms, but the phraseology you used suggests that there is a modicum of this implicit and insidious viewpoint present in your thinking, as it seems to be in the thinking of many others in Western society.
Based on the other comments in this thread, I have a feeling I'm going to be flamed to death, but here goes:
I'm a professional educator, who teaches Design & Technology at a secondary level (before this I was a web designer for almost a decade), and I'm fairly strongly of the opinion that students really have no business being given any significant exposure to computers before high school.
Some have made the argument about "computers are part of the world" and "get them used to them as early as possible". The first statement is true, but in no way justifies the second.
Firstly, learning in the primary years has a very strong social component, where students are not primarily learning facts and "how-to's", but are fundamentally learning how to interact and communicate with others and the natural environment. Computers can impair this in subtle ways, since they are not fundamentally interactive, but only give the illusion of being so - no matter how many choices a computer program gives you, they are still finite in number, and have been decided upon by someone else (i.e. a program designer). A bucket of sand is more interactive and valuable for a child than a computer. Even interpersonal interaction via computer (i.e. IM, email, etc.) have been stripped of key interpersonal cues (facial expression, voice tone, gesture, etc.) vital to a mature understanding of meaning in communication. Once children become more mature in the fundamentals of social interaction, then we can consider introducing them to computers, as they are in a better position to be aware of their limitations.
Secondly, unexposed children's computer knowledge appears to catch up quite quickly with those who were exposed early if they are exposed in adolescence, with the added benefit that they are more likely not to have had any social skills compromised through excessive computer use (and less face it, children's computer use is far more likely to have been relatively uncontrolled by parents, rather than carefully monitored).
I could also talk about the role of handwriting in effective language formation (as opposed to keyboard use), but what I've written is a good preliminary argument - I may expand in reply to the reponses of others if it seems to need it.
In summary - computers are a tool, not a way of life. They have good applications and bad ones. Adolescents are better equipped than young children to be able to distinguish the benign from the harmful.
Cars are a part of life too, but we don't teach young children how to drive - we wait until they have the necessary maturity to be able to use that tool effectively, and even then we are frequently disappointed.
Computers are not as physically dangerous as cars, granted, but there should be a recognition that they are a powerful tool nonetheless, that can shape people in important ways. As with cars and any other powerful tool, we should attempt to impart the maturity to deal with and use them effectively before handing over the keys.
the general unwillingnes to learn is not the problem of the education system.
I'm unsure what you mean by this - if you mean that the problem is not caused by the education system, then the answer is both yes and no. There are many factors both inside and outside of the education systems that can affect motivation to learn.
If, however, you mean that the problem is not the responsibility of the education system to solve, then I disagree most emphatically, though I did hold similar misunderstandings about the learning process and the role of motivation before I became a professional educator.
It is not merely the teacher's job to shoehorn knowledge into the eager waiting brains of their students - this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how people learn. Students need to construct their own knowledge, with the aid of the teacher - this requires that the learning process be engaging and motivating. Providing learning experiences of this kind is most definitely the responsibility of the education system.
I strongly disagree about the geniuses though. Geniuses are the ones who move the mankind forward, not the average Joes. You can have hundred million plumbers, but for a scientific breakthrough you need a scientist and funds to sponsor his research. The US education system creates plenty of scientists, and when it doesn't, it imports them pretty successfully. And this makes it overwhelmingly and ultimately good, even though most kids don't know what hyperbolic sine is.
I agree with you. I made no claim that gifted individuals (I dislike the word 'genius' - it has overtones that their giftedness is innate, and not hard fought) are unnecessary or undesirable. Rather, I made the claim that a education system that churns out a few geniuses and nothing else is ultimately far less productive than a society that produces predominantly competent or average individuals - there are no examples of educational systems that produce *no* gifted individuals, so it is pointless to compare the former situation to this.
By eliminating arithmetic from 'maths', you eliminate the vast majority of the human experience of maths.
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
You've just outlined precisely the attitude that spells out why the U.S. is languishing in maths, and countries like Australia (where I teach) are doing quite well. The purpose of any education system is most certainly not to churn out 'a few geniuses', leaving everyone else to languish in uneducated stupor. Societies composed of the majority being of acceptable skill are far more productive and desirable than the scenario you describe. The occasional exceptionally gifted individual is certainly desirable, but we should not exaggerate their overall usefulness to society to demigodlike proportions.
Also, as adults, we recognise the value of learning. Children, unsuprisingly due to their limited life experience, may not immediately recognise this value (i.e. they may not 'want' to learn). It is our role as parents and educators to motivate and instill a love of learning consistently throughout schooling, and provide learning experiences that are enjoyable and likely to encourage students of the value of lifelong learning.
The scenario of giving up on every student who doesn't display orgasmic joy at the thought of doing algebra condemns a society to mediocrity - so given your nation's current maths education status, it seems that many of your countrymen agree with your philosophy.
Let's face it, you don't need math to flip hamburgers or to do plumbing work. Heck, many programmers in the company where I work are puzzled by the most trivial math formulae. Despite of this they do their jobs fairly well.
Yes, you do - you need maths for all of that stuff, and you use it too. Jeez, even a burger-flipper needs to be able to count how many burgers he's flipping, and how many patties he needs to make X burgers. Plumbers use maths constantly - do you think pipes just miraculously appear at the correct size? Plumbers are highly skilled professionals, and they and other trades are too frequently disdained by those of us with a University education - the amount of knowledge they need and apply daily is considerable. There are also a lot fewer unemployed plumbers than computer programmers around ATM, so maybe that's telling you something too? Who contributes more to the society in which they live - these maths 'geniuses', or the plumbers whose level of knowledge you scorn?
The thing with this kind of math usage is that since people do it 'without feeling it', people who don't know better assume that no mathematics usage is taking place. In fact, frequently, this is precisely the way that most maths in put into practice on a daily basis, but somehow this kind of arithmetic is viewed as unworthy because it doesn't involve formulae and 'higher maths'.
99% of the maths that people do in their daily lives falls into the categories you have just described as 'mathsless'.
Family First as a political party sit only slightly to the right of the Taliban.
Re:Ohio is a mess...
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The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Flat taxes, of course, are not "rigged against the poor" at all. All citizens pay precisely the same fraction of their income in taxes.
Flat taxes *are* rigged against the poor, since any given fixed percentage of a person's income in going to mean a lot more to a poor person than a rich one. Let's pretend the rate is 15% - A person who only earns $10,000 a year is going to be hurt a lot more losing $1500 a year, than some who earns $100,000 losing $15,000. The rich guy still has $85,000, the the poor guy now only has $8500.
Oh yeah, I'm conservative, but I am more compassionate than most liberals. The DIFFERENCE IS I DON'T NEED FUCKING GOVERNMENT TO TELL ME TO BE COMPASSIONATE!
I think it was Gandhi who said something like "Enacting laws cannot give people a heart, but they can restrain the heartless".
A very minor off-topic correction here - the timeline in the Dune Encyclopedia (a brilliant suplementary resource to the books themselves, and a work of art in itself) actually places the time of the events of Dune at around 30,000 years or so after the present. The year 10,191 we hear bandied about is 10,191 AG (or After Guild).
I mention this as it actually gives a whole new perspective to the stories, as the birth of Christ does not necessarily persist as the yardstick against which time is measured.
You know, we are, at some point, going to need to wean ourselves off of mineral oil, Middle Eastern or otherwise. It will get more expensive.
Many people have raised the quite legitimate concern about changing over to new automotive technologies, and I've got to tell you, biodiesel is looking better and better.
There's no significant change that needs to be implemented to current diesel automotive technology.
There's no significant change that needs to be implemented to current fuel distribution infrastructure.
Burning biodiesel is carbon-neutral i.e. all the carbon being released by it is carbon that was trapped by living plants in the first place, not carbon that was sucked out of the atmosphere and trapped millions of years ago when the climate and ecosystem was completely different. And we can start to use up a bunch of carbon that's already in the atmosphere causing problems.
It mean we can actually use huge areas of unusably salinated land again - certain types of oil-rich algae grow amazingly in shallow super-salty water.
You can make it yourself if you want (unless you live in Australia, where they have just declared that biodiesel attracts fuel excise, so by making your own you basically become a tax evader).
It won't replace the use of mineral oil for some time, but would be an important step on the way, by reducing the environmental, technological (combustion technology is still fairly inefficient, now well over a century old, with no significant changes in the basic principle in that time) and economic urgency for finding other energy alternatives. If we started talking about diesel electric hybrids, then we might be getting somewhere!
My guess is that objects do expand, but since even the biggest objects are infinitesimally small compared to the massive distances between them, we are not going to be talking about objects expanding in the same way we talk about space expanding, since the detectable expansion of objects is likely to be fairly negligible.
I'm not a scientist either, so I'm just making a complete stab-in-the-dark guess, and I'm very happy to be corrected by anyone with a more researched answer.:)
Slashdot Mirror
BBC English in those days was very prim and proper, I don't know if anyone on the street spoke like that but we see a lot of it in the old TV and films of the day. Only the Queen comes close to sounding like that nowadays.
That's Received Pronunciation (aka the King's/Queen's English) you're describing. More common now is Estuary English.
Seriously - why isn't the header for this story "Some Guy says something outrageous".
Since this guy is no-one in any position to implement this sort of policy, leave him to his distasteful opinion.
I saw this. The designers claim it works out about 10% cheaper than conventional PCBs.
As they are here also, if the damage is caused by the lessee outside of "normal conditions of usage".
Lessors are responsible for repair/replacement of "normal wear and tear". If the vehicle fails during the lease period under conditions of normal usage, then the lessor would be expected to provide repairs or replacement. The same is true here of residential rental accomodation - periodic replacement of things like paint and carpet and repair of plumbing and electrical faults is the landlord's (lessor's) repsonsibility - they factor the cost of those things into the rental charged for the property.
Mind you, I'm not sure Australian law would even allow a 20 year lease on something like a car.
But it's a lease. If for any reason the vehicle fails during that time, the owner (not the lessee) would be obligated to provide a vehicle that does work, either by repair or replacement. I don't know how leases work in the US, but that's how they'd work in Australia.
I don't think they're expecting that people will commit to a single vehicle for 20 years, merely that they will commit to lease a vehicle for 20 years, that will likely be upgraded several times during that period. Committing to a 20 year lease means you are committing to the lease, not to the specific object being leased.
How is expulsion going to correct or rehabilitate this student?
Other than giving him time to reflect, probably nothing.
Schools have limited resources, and often those resources (particularly in staffing) are disproportionately directed at students for whom the potential postitive outcomes are limited, meaning those students who do the right thing get screwed. Everybody deserves a go at school, but there have to be limits.
Governments are rarely prepared to cough up the extra money required to ensure that everybody has maximum opportunity to succeed, so it ends up as a bit of an "educational triage" situation quite often, and you really do need to work in a school on a day to day basis to appreciate the extent of this.
I have no qualification to speak to your schooling experience, but I teach in Australia rather than the US, where the educational climate is quite different. While not as well-resourced as we would like, is sounds like our school system functions quite a bit better than yours does.
A lot of people on this thread are saying things along the line of "how is suspending the kid for a semester going to help him?"
I'm a teacher, and regardless of the merits of this particular case, when a student is suspended for a length of time like a term or a semester, it generally ceases to be about the student in question. It becomes about maintaining the integrity of the learning environment for everyone else, including staff.
There are students who can become so disruptive to the learning environment in a variety of ways that those students need to be removed so everyone can continue learning. Some kids have to be written off so everyone else can get on with it.
Getting to the merits of the case itself, this was not a general phrase uttered in the heat of the moment like "I wish teachers would die" - this was something premeditated (he had to create the icon, and made it available for three weeks), directed at particular individual. The extent to which the school overreacted is arguable, but the principle is sound. This is not an issue of free speech, since with any speech context is everything.
It's very hard to convince patients that they need Pimozide, and not a can of "Raid" to spray on themselves.
This is another interesting point, since one of the characteristics/symptoms of psychosis is lack of insight. My partner is a social worker who works closely with the mentally ill, and this can be one of the largest barriers to assisting a psychotic person to function relatively normally with their illness, as the psychosis literally prevents the sufferer from recognising the nature of their illness.
Disclaimer: She is not a clinician and does not attempt to diagnose or medically treat illness, but her role is to support clients in functioning in the community; an awareness of the pathology of psychosis does support her in her work.
As you say, this complicates any potential treatment since it become necessary to persuade the patient of the need for a particular kind of treatment that they believe is not appropriate to their symptomology, to which the disease they suffer serves as a barrier.
The earth should be in a warming phase starting with the end of the last ice age 10K years ago.
The last Ice Age has not ended - we're still in it. The point 10,000 years ago that you are talking about is only the start of the current interglacial period, which is supposed to be ending anytime now.
+ AppleWorks
+ FileMaker
Ah, wrong - Apple spun Claris off as a separate company in 1987, still wholly owned by Apple - Claris developed FileMaker and ClarisWorks. ClarisWorks later became Appleworks, still wholly owned by Apple. At about the same time, Claris became Filemaker Inc.,which focussed on developing only the FileMaker products.
Not sure where you got the idea that these products were acquired by Apple - they were Apple products from the get-go, corporate organisation notwithstanding.
Even a empathetic person could make a mistake and negatively affect people around them. Should we start refusing people jobs at random, becayse they might, at some later date, make a bad decision?
...Just like you could shun a person if you didn't like working with someone who way gay, or black, or had diffrent political beliefs. All of which are things that cannot be changed with medication/counciling, and can affect how a person acts. A lot like being a sociopath, I suppose....
...Saying a sociopath should be denied a job is like saying someone who is into BSDM shouldn't be hired, or someone who is homosexual shouldn't be hired...
We're not talking about occasional mistakes here - we're talking about an identifiable pattern of pathologically destructive behaviour, that is likely to continue as the individuals in question are unable/unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and thereby modify their poisonous behaviours.
Conflating sociopathy with sexuality or ethnicity is an extremely flimsy metaphor - sociopathy is an identifiable pattern of selfish and destructive behaviour, which almost by its definition is going to affect others negatively.
Ethnicity or sexuality are not characteristics of an individual that of themselves are going to generally produce negative effects on people around them.
I don't know about you, but for me the difference couldn't be clearer.
This might be surprising to some of you, but being a sociopath is not illegal. Nor should it be grounds for not getting hired into a job. Being a sociopath does not mean you will become a serial killer either, despite what hollywood tells you. 3% of all men, and 1% of women are sociopaths.
You're quite right, they only very rarely become killers. But it's also worth remembering that Sociopathy is also known as Anti-Social Personality Disorder for a reason. Very rarely do people with this personality type leave others around them negatively unaffected. The more power they have, the more people are likely to get burnt by their disorder.
If someone has the intellegence and ability to do the job, who cares if they won't cry when someone else gets burned? As long as they are a law abiding citizen, they should be able to live a normal life.
Well, I care - just because particular types of behaviour are not legally constrained, does not mean that they should be tolerated. Using a lighter example, a work colleague who persistently and interminably bores you with tales of his boring weekend should not be legally sanctioned, but neither is he going to be your first choice to invite around for dinner. You would shun this person socially, and quite rightly.
The law is not the ultimate gauge of whether behaviour is acceptable or not, just a gauge of behaviour that is so outrageously unacceptable as to require some kind of agreed official constraint. Human being operate socially by principles other that The Law alone - this isn't Mega City One.
Conversely, the legal but socially destructive behaviour of sociopaths should ultimately result in their being shunned by all right thinking people, thereby limiting the number of people their disorder can negatively affect. However, in order to do this, people need to be aware of how to identify these personality types in order to steer clear of them.
I know it might seem OT on the face of it, but I play both the guitar and the banjo. They're strung differently and tuned differently, but most of the fundamental parts of playing both instruments (like fretting) are the same.
Having said this, there is no sense of not being aware of which instrument you're playing, and even though there are procedures that apply to both (like fretting), you just instantly flick between instruction sets, so you never accidentally start playing 'the banjo' while you're holding a guitar.
This is only a metaphor, of course, and it may not apply to keyboards as well, but my gut feeling tells me it should be fine.
Also, as an educator, I can tell you that they skills that stay with you the longest are physical skills, like riding a bike, using a keyboard or playing an instrument. Even after very long periods of disuse, these skills generally return in a very short amount of time.
In many ways, this law is not dissimilar from what is required of teachers, nurses, police, social workers and a couple of other allied professions in Australia already. This policy is known as Mandatory Notification.
If you are a member of the professions above, and you have a reasonable suspicion that a child is being abused or neglected, then you are legally bound to report that abuse to the authorities, under threat of a $2500 fine. You are only bound legally while you are discharging your professional duties (if you see something on the weekend there is no legal obligation).
Also, you can only get into trouble if you suspect abuse and fail to report it, not if you simply failed to notice it - in this way, the policy is similar to this law.
The key point of all this, of course, is that despite all the legal mumbo-jumbo I've just detailed above, there are certain moral obligations incumbent on people. If, as a teacher, I failed to report suspected abuse I observed outside of school hours, I may not be legally culpable, but I would be morally culpable.
So it is with this law, at least on the face of it. This simply presents ISPs with a reasonable and not especially onerous obligation to report kiddie porn as they find it, which frankly anyone more moral than Hannibal Lecter should be pretty happy to do anyway.
There will be inevitable arguments about "but what constitutes kiddie porn" and "who decides what is moral". The bottom line is (and as mandatory notifiers, we get taught the same thing): if you're not sure, report it. If it's deemed to be kiddie porn, then you've done a good thing. If it isn't then no harm done.
Don't mistake me for one of those "Won't somebody pleeeeeeease think of the children??" types. I am in favour of moderate, reasonable obligations that give people an extra incentive to keep their basic priorities straight. In no way should ISPs, or indeed anyone other than law enforcement, be required to have an active role in pursuing and apprehending offenders.
Laws do not serve to give people a heart, but they can restrain the heartless. Any ISP that places their financial and business obligations above their basic moral obligations to the society in which they live will now have to wear a similar burden to those members of other professions listed above.
It is your job to protect them but also to get them ready for an adult life.
I just have to challenge this, since it is one of my personal bugbears. Kids are kids, legitimate people in their own right, not "adults-in-training". They are not people-in-progress, they are people right now.
One of the reasons I think that children should avoid computers until high school (see my post in this thread) is that they should spend their precious and brief childhoods just being children, and doing kid stuff, not spending their childhoods as some kind of waystation as they prepare for adulthood.
I realise that you may not have meant it in quite such stark terms, but the phraseology you used suggests that there is a modicum of this implicit and insidious viewpoint present in your thinking, as it seems to be in the thinking of many others in Western society.
Based on the other comments in this thread, I have a feeling I'm going to be flamed to death, but here goes:
I'm a professional educator, who teaches Design & Technology at a secondary level (before this I was a web designer for almost a decade), and I'm fairly strongly of the opinion that students really have no business being given any significant exposure to computers before high school.
Some have made the argument about "computers are part of the world" and "get them used to them as early as possible". The first statement is true, but in no way justifies the second.
Firstly, learning in the primary years has a very strong social component, where students are not primarily learning facts and "how-to's", but are fundamentally learning how to interact and communicate with others and the natural environment. Computers can impair this in subtle ways, since they are not fundamentally interactive, but only give the illusion of being so - no matter how many choices a computer program gives you, they are still finite in number, and have been decided upon by someone else (i.e. a program designer). A bucket of sand is more interactive and valuable for a child than a computer. Even interpersonal interaction via computer (i.e. IM, email, etc.) have been stripped of key interpersonal cues (facial expression, voice tone, gesture, etc.) vital to a mature understanding of meaning in communication. Once children become more mature in the fundamentals of social interaction, then we can consider introducing them to computers, as they are in a better position to be aware of their limitations.
Secondly, unexposed children's computer knowledge appears to catch up quite quickly with those who were exposed early if they are exposed in adolescence, with the added benefit that they are more likely not to have had any social skills compromised through excessive computer use (and less face it, children's computer use is far more likely to have been relatively uncontrolled by parents, rather than carefully monitored).
I could also talk about the role of handwriting in effective language formation (as opposed to keyboard use), but what I've written is a good preliminary argument - I may expand in reply to the reponses of others if it seems to need it.
In summary - computers are a tool, not a way of life. They have good applications and bad ones. Adolescents are better equipped than young children to be able to distinguish the benign from the harmful.
Cars are a part of life too, but we don't teach young children how to drive - we wait until they have the necessary maturity to be able to use that tool effectively, and even then we are frequently disappointed.
Computers are not as physically dangerous as cars, granted, but there should be a recognition that they are a powerful tool nonetheless, that can shape people in important ways. As with cars and any other powerful tool, we should attempt to impart the maturity to deal with and use them effectively before handing over the keys.
the general unwillingnes to learn is not the problem of the education system.
I'm unsure what you mean by this - if you mean that the problem is not caused by the education system, then the answer is both yes and no. There are many factors both inside and outside of the education systems that can affect motivation to learn.
If, however, you mean that the problem is not the responsibility of the education system to solve, then I disagree most emphatically, though I did hold similar misunderstandings about the learning process and the role of motivation before I became a professional educator.
It is not merely the teacher's job to shoehorn knowledge into the eager waiting brains of their students - this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how people learn. Students need to construct their own knowledge, with the aid of the teacher - this requires that the learning process be engaging and motivating. Providing learning experiences of this kind is most definitely the responsibility of the education system.
I strongly disagree about the geniuses though. Geniuses are the ones who move the mankind forward, not the average Joes. You can have hundred million plumbers, but for a scientific breakthrough you need a scientist and funds to sponsor his research. The US education system creates plenty of scientists, and when it doesn't, it imports them pretty successfully. And this makes it overwhelmingly and ultimately good, even though most kids don't know what hyperbolic sine is.
I agree with you. I made no claim that gifted individuals (I dislike the word 'genius' - it has overtones that their giftedness is innate, and not hard fought) are unnecessary or undesirable. Rather, I made the claim that a education system that churns out a few geniuses and nothing else is ultimately far less productive than a society that produces predominantly competent or average individuals - there are no examples of educational systems that produce *no* gifted individuals, so it is pointless to compare the former situation to this.
By eliminating arithmetic from 'maths', you eliminate the vast majority of the human experience of maths.
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
You've just outlined precisely the attitude that spells out why the U.S. is languishing in maths, and countries like Australia (where I teach) are doing quite well. The purpose of any education system is most certainly not to churn out 'a few geniuses', leaving everyone else to languish in uneducated stupor. Societies composed of the majority being of acceptable skill are far more productive and desirable than the scenario you describe. The occasional exceptionally gifted individual is certainly desirable, but we should not exaggerate their overall usefulness to society to demigodlike proportions.
Also, as adults, we recognise the value of learning. Children, unsuprisingly due to their limited life experience, may not immediately recognise this value (i.e. they may not 'want' to learn). It is our role as parents and educators to motivate and instill a love of learning consistently throughout schooling, and provide learning experiences that are enjoyable and likely to encourage students of the value of lifelong learning.
The scenario of giving up on every student who doesn't display orgasmic joy at the thought of doing algebra condemns a society to mediocrity - so given your nation's current maths education status, it seems that many of your countrymen agree with your philosophy.
Let's face it, you don't need math to flip hamburgers or to do plumbing work. Heck, many programmers in the company where I work are puzzled by the most trivial math formulae. Despite of this they do their jobs fairly well.
Yes, you do - you need maths for all of that stuff, and you use it too. Jeez, even a burger-flipper needs to be able to count how many burgers he's flipping, and how many patties he needs to make X burgers. Plumbers use maths constantly - do you think pipes just miraculously appear at the correct size? Plumbers are highly skilled professionals, and they and other trades are too frequently disdained by those of us with a University education - the amount of knowledge they need and apply daily is considerable. There are also a lot fewer unemployed plumbers than computer programmers around ATM, so maybe that's telling you something too? Who contributes more to the society in which they live - these maths 'geniuses', or the plumbers whose level of knowledge you scorn?
The thing with this kind of math usage is that since people do it 'without feeling it', people who don't know better assume that no mathematics usage is taking place. In fact, frequently, this is precisely the way that most maths in put into practice on a daily basis, but somehow this kind of arithmetic is viewed as unworthy because it doesn't involve formulae and 'higher maths'.
99% of the maths that people do in their daily lives falls into the categories you have just described as 'mathsless'.
Family First as a political party sit only slightly to the right of the Taliban.
Flat taxes, of course, are not "rigged against the poor" at all. All citizens pay precisely the same fraction of their income in taxes.
Flat taxes *are* rigged against the poor, since any given fixed percentage of a person's income in going to mean a lot more to a poor person than a rich one. Let's pretend the rate is 15% - A person who only earns $10,000 a year is going to be hurt a lot more losing $1500 a year, than some who earns $100,000 losing $15,000. The rich guy still has $85,000, the the poor guy now only has $8500.
Oh yeah, I'm conservative, but I am more compassionate than most liberals. The DIFFERENCE IS I DON'T NEED FUCKING GOVERNMENT TO TELL ME TO BE COMPASSIONATE!
I think it was Gandhi who said something like "Enacting laws cannot give people a heart, but they can restrain the heartless".
Dune - set 10,000 years into our future
A very minor off-topic correction here - the timeline in the Dune Encyclopedia (a brilliant suplementary resource to the books themselves, and a work of art in itself) actually places the time of the events of Dune at around 30,000 years or so after the present. The year 10,191 we hear bandied about is 10,191 AG (or After Guild).
I mention this as it actually gives a whole new perspective to the stories, as the birth of Christ does not necessarily persist as the yardstick against which time is measured.
Many people have raised the quite legitimate concern about changing over to new automotive technologies, and I've got to tell you, biodiesel is looking better and better.
It won't replace the use of mineral oil for some time, but would be an important step on the way, by reducing the environmental, technological (combustion technology is still fairly inefficient, now well over a century old, with no significant changes in the basic principle in that time) and economic urgency for finding other energy alternatives. If we started talking about diesel electric hybrids, then we might be getting somewhere!
My guess is that objects do expand, but since even the biggest objects are infinitesimally small compared to the massive distances between them, we are not going to be talking about objects expanding in the same way we talk about space expanding, since the detectable expansion of objects is likely to be fairly negligible.
:)
I'm not a scientist either, so I'm just making a complete stab-in-the-dark guess, and I'm very happy to be corrected by anyone with a more researched answer.