One last (supporting) comment: IIRC, the reason there was no containment building was that the Soviets wanted to be able to easily crane out plutonium for weapons manufacture. The whole thing was a deathtrap waiting to happen.
As an American, I'm curious about your response, because my perception IS generally that it is an American problem. I mean, obviously aside from despotic regimes like Iran or North Korea, where curiosity is dangerous. If you have a more international perspective on the subject, I'd like to hear it.
So, if these companies are making obscene profits, why are said profits not drawing competitors in to bid down the price? Like the guy said, if it's such a sure thing, then start a business doing it and cash in, dude! Chances are, and I think you realize this in your heart of hearts, that putting together a business to do this is a lot more complicated than bitching about it on Slashdot.
I think you misunderstand the original point. The reason you shouldn't choose a career for money is that it's confusing cause and effect...people make a lot of money in computing because they love it and eat, breathe and sleep it and pay out of their own pocket to go to classes on it. At least that's how me and the other six figure per year computer guys I know do it. We make a lot of money, but we add under our breath "for all the time, money and effort I've put into my skillset, I'd damn well better make a lot of money".
So you're just vastly more likely to be successful in any way, including financially, doing something where taking time and effort beyond the regular work day isn't going to be utter misery. Of course, realism has to enter into somewhere - you're not likely to make a good living getting drunk and playing XBox, no matter how much you love it - but if you choose a career that fits with your natural talents and strengths, you're more likely to be successful.
Is it possible to make a lot of money doing something you hate? I suppose so, but what profiteth a man if he wins the world and loses his soul?
All these things are probably good (some, very good) ideas, but they will not happen for one simple reason.
Americans are no longer philosophically equipped to deal with the reality that different people have different capabilities.
We live in an age that Charles Murray refers to "Educational Romanticisim", whereby the Left ponders that every child would be an Einstein, if not for insufficient funding, and the Right ponders that every child would be an Einstein if only we had school choice.
Whatever the merits of each proposal, the indisputable reality is that human ability occurs in a distribution from one end to another (hence "The Bell Curve"). As a fairly radically egalitarian society, we obsess about the left side of the curve.
Can schools be made better, in general? Probably. Can they be made dramatically better, in general, by any approach? I doubt it. Will they be made significantly better by simply spending more time doing what they do now? I'm certain that they cannot.
One last quote, from Thomas Sowell:
A man is not even equal to himself on different days.
I think the scrounging idea is a good one...you'll be able to pull resistors off of anything, and everybody will learn the codes quickly. Have them bring in something simple in their house that doesn't work - have them troubleshoot and repair it (permission, obviously...).
Have them bring in an annoying electronic toy and have them wire a volume control into it. For that matter, have them bend circuits on all the electronic crap that surrounds us today.
Finally, talk to your later Radio Shack / Fry's / whatever, and see if you can get them to sponsor the class with some free gear and projects.
If you end up with some more coin, try a TV-B-Gone:
AdaFruit has a lot of good stuff. One thing I saw at a Make Faire was a project where you quickly build an oscillator using a paper circuit board and a pencil line drawn on a paper to have a quickie musical instrument.
Wow...you want to talk about the difference in culture between America and Europe...I knew you were European even before the BBC mention.
Want to know how?
Telling people that they shouldn't live 200 miles from where they work?
Maybe people should be free to make their own #$*$&^% decisions about where they work as long as they are willing to face the consequences of their choices?
I think the thing that distinguishes the Manhattan Project from (nearly) all subsequent calls for one was the specificity of the goal. At the inception of the Manhattan Project, everyone agreed that the device was theoretically possible, and that was a limited number of practical paths which could be pursued to produce it. So project start-to-end was a straightforward (if not simple) matter of pursuing the paths to their practical limits. I don't remotely intend to belittle the staggering historical achievement of the men involved, but it is important to consider that they had an extremely specific purpose in mind, and one in which not only was it impossible for private research firms to pursue, but it would be expressly (and wisely) forbidden.
We have the opposite situation with energy production...we have a tremendous number of possible avenues to pursue, and it's impossible to know at the outset which one will produce the most fruit. For the most part, there's no security reason to not pursue any one of them.
With energy prices as high as they've risen, the potential bounty for solving these problems is enormous. There are a lot of greedy investors out there after that bounty, and the investment dollars are flowing fast and furious. An investor is looking at a five year window at the most long term. You might argue that that's not long enough for certain technologies, but I think maybe that if that is not long enough, the tech is not cooked yet, compared to other things that are nearing maturity like solar and wind, which are now producing actual, sustainable and even thriving businesses.
Alternative power is like alternative music in 1995...it's quickly becoming mainstream. As someone who invests in this stuff, maybe I'm unduly optimistic, but I see all of the boring, conservative people whose idea of green is money responding to market forces and doing the dull, boring work of turning solar and wind into actual power driving your AC's and computers. If we were to have a Manhattan Project for alternative energy....well, practically speaking, it would have to pick high hanging fruit, because all of the low hanging fruit has VC.
In whatever "free" economy you wish to conjure, there are still going to be goods and services which are scarce (in the economics sense), and hence rationed, and hence have a non-zero price. Here are a few quick examples:
real estate
medical services (assuming that it's not performed by robots)
live artistic performances
Furthermore, I can imagine a series of fabrication technologies, for example, that make mp3 players so cheap as to be essentially free. There's no imaginable (currently) technology which could make the power so cheap as to be free, not even fusion.
"Curriculae Vitae" is close to being Latin for "courses of life", but because "curriculum" is a second declension neuter, the proper plural would be "curricula", so that would be "curricula vitae", "life courses".
You're right about the improper usage, tho...C.V. generally refers to something more extensive than a resume.
Really? That low...that makes the trade-off even better. I was going off of numbers I heard years ago regarding the inherent inefficiency of AC, giving it numbers of like 50% loss over power lines.
Well, between my vague recollection and your paper, I tend to trust your paper. Either way, the study I saw (I saw it cited in Make magazine) indicated that whatever the inefficiencies are, they're swamped by the gain of economies of scale.
Seriously, though, there have been studies done...I can't cite them offhand, but the conclusion I recall is that while you have the inefficiency of conversion and distribution (which is enormous), it is still swamped by the economies of scale you reap by producing them at plants rather than in-engine.
Now that is strictly an analysis of the energy consumed, without regard to the environmental impact. That aspect is going to depend on the local method of production, which varies. I would say that electric cars are a net gain even if your local method is filthy for the following reasons:
The power generation method for transport is fungible, i.e., it can change in response to varying economic and environmental pressures. Currently, we're trapped in the single solution of petroleum due to the nature of internal combustion engines.
Power generation methods are not necessarily filthy everywhere, and the environmental is both local and global.
Once we get on the technology train of electric cars, and corporate research dollars flow towards improving that particular technology stack rather than the relatively mature tech of ICE's, we will see further gains. Ditto the power distribution network as it expands in scale.
So there's the analysis of electric cars from a power consumption perspective. The question of production of electric cars, disposal of all those toxic batteries, etc. is another question entirely. I read a report a while back that demonstrated that, given the substantially shorter lifetimes and the fact that they required entirely new lines of production, a Prius actually is more environmentally impactful than a Hummer H3. Nevertheless, we can stay invested in a century old technology that is unlikely to see any radical improvements, or we can pursue the distributed, decentralized solution of the electric car.
While I realize the futility of opening a religious discussion on Slashdot...
The Buddhist view here would be an inaccurate perception of the Christian worldview. In the Christian worldview, God creates everything good, indeed, your ability to perceive things as good and not good (as opposed to merely pleasurable and not pleasurable, like an animal) is the gift of God. Consignment to hell is the choice of the being out of right relationship with God, i.e., God respects the choice of the individual to reject the authority of God. In order to respect this choice, the chooser is isolated utterly from the influence of God, which is hell. Hell is hell because it is bereft of contact with God, and by extension everything good in life.
Why are long term trends not taken into account in these reports, for example. It is rubbish to say that we cannot accurately predict climate that far into the future because our short-term predictions are not very good. After all, we cannot predict the little ups & downs in next month's weather, but we can predict that winter will follow summer and autumn, and we know what the trends are in each of those seasons. The long-term trends in global weather can be predicted as well.
I've got to disagree with you from both sides of the political aisle. I will argue that we cannot make accurate climate predictions (at least within the range that is relevant to the anthroprogenic global warming debate) because we have utterly failed to do so in the past. That data that the IPCC use show no warming after 1999, which doesn't even fit the past of the model, let alone the future.
I think really what the whole problem is with the debate is that there's a huge difference between the approaches of the typical person and the scientist to uncertainty. A scientist eats, drinks and bathes in uncertainty, and is comfortable with saying, "Gee, we just don't know. Maybe we'll know more in the future, but this is our best understanding currently, and it is almost certainly at least partially wrong." The typical person deals with decisions made on imperfect information in their daily life, and regards uncertainty as incompletion, or at worst, weakness. That's why we have people who believe in UFO's, ghosts, or fricking Sasquatch rather than saying, "I just don't know what the hell that was. I probably never will."
As the previous poster pointed out, the whole debate is INCREDIBLY useful to authoritarians, as is any crisis which justifies sweeping powers and changes to society.
Also, anybody who says we can avoid the need of nuclear power by just riding bikes, using a more efficient furnace, and holding hands while singing "Kum Ba Ya" is simply not looking at the real numbers of what our future power needs are, even after you account for a radical scaling back of elective consumption.
For some reason, I heard that in my head as read by John C. McGinley from Scrubs.
I've dealt a lot with this sort of circumstance. The best approach is to begin implementing a facade pattern, function by function, until the whole amorphous mess is inside it. At this point, some stuff is pointed at Sql, some is pointed at Access, or what have you.
Next, you get everything pointed at Sql. Once that is done, take some time and get unit tests around the functions; this will help you in the next step. Document the functions while you write the tests. Finally, break the facade back into multiple layers and objects, and refactor like mad until you've got good, testable, documented code.
Vital healthcare software running on Access...that's scary.
In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven't been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.
Yeah, really arguably. Slashdot posting statistics interpreted by Wired is s like having your Mother help your Grandmother get DSL working. Okay, right off the bat: you can't be only part of the MySpace community, so your risk from your real community is implicit in your risk as a member of MySpace. Second, I have absolutely zero confidence in MySpace tracking the sexual assaults of its members...that's simply not their job. Conversely, it's not the job of the people who keep statistics in the real world to figure out whether the members were on MySpace, unless MySpace was involved in the assault.
Some quickies:
MySpace users are a subset of computer users. Computer users are disproportionately male (especially the teenage segment). Males are far less likely to be victims of statutory rape. Males are also far less likely to report cases of statutory rape (duh).
Anything that increases contact with other people increases the risk of bad things happening. The question is whether it is a good tradeoff; is the increased risk balanced by some benefit? I think that in most cases, with a little common sense caution and some perfunctory parental supervision, MySpace is a great deal. Wired is asking the wrong questions, and coming up with the wrong answers. But you can't really blame them; people in this country are only willing to make zero risk propositions these days.
The reason why the costs are negigible is that while the fixed costs required to create the elevator may be (and probably will be) enormous, the marginal cost of using it will be quite small. Those costs will probably be composed primarily of labor to maintain it and power to the climber.
There may be some lurking marginal cost nobody has considered, or on the other hand the operational lifetime of an elevator might be so short that the fixed costs never get amortized that well, but barring those possibilities, it's reasonable to assume that with a space elevator, getting into space will be pretty cheap.
Bring it closer to home. My company has a standard of x bugs in y lines of code. One month I am having some problems and go over. Do they have a right to demand that I do 100 hours of community service as penance? Or stand outside at 8.00 with a sign around my neck saying that I sinned? Or wear scarlet overalls for a week? Or not use the cafeteria?
I'd say that they have the "right", insofar as they can say, "Unless you do this your ass is canned." No company in their right mind would do this because you'd quite rightly just go find another fricking job.
So while I think that requiring counseling as a prereq for continuing at the U is a little Orwellian, they're well within their rights; a school has the right to determine who goes there (though accepting confiscated tax dollars muddies the waters a bit). The language with "community service" shows that the U is confused about itself, tho. I think it's probably just a case of the board being so full of itself as to think of itself as akin to the government.
Amen! What bugs me about commercials is not that I'm being pitched to, but that it's a waste of both of our time! There's no point in showing me an ad for Massengil.
Show me an ad for Arturo Fuente, a book by Berkely linguistics professor John McWhorter, or a program about the 80's British comedy Yes, Prime Minister, and I'm very likely to bite. At the very least, I will be actively interested in the ad. This level of granularity should make it possible.
I'm a YIMBY for this (Yes, In My BackYard). I have no problem, repeat, no problem having ads targeted to my interests given that I will be presented with ads regardless.
The flipside of this is privacy, I suppose. That may be the relevancy-killer.
Slashdot Mirror
One last (supporting) comment: IIRC, the reason there was no containment building was that the Soviets wanted to be able to easily crane out plutonium for weapons manufacture. The whole thing was a deathtrap waiting to happen.
As an American, I'm curious about your response, because my perception IS generally that it is an American problem. I mean, obviously aside from despotic regimes like Iran or North Korea, where curiosity is dangerous. If you have a more international perspective on the subject, I'd like to hear it.
So, if these companies are making obscene profits, why are said profits not drawing competitors in to bid down the price? Like the guy said, if it's such a sure thing, then start a business doing it and cash in, dude! Chances are, and I think you realize this in your heart of hearts, that putting together a business to do this is a lot more complicated than bitching about it on Slashdot.
I think you misunderstand the original point. The reason you shouldn't choose a career for money is that it's confusing cause and effect...people make a lot of money in computing because they love it and eat, breathe and sleep it and pay out of their own pocket to go to classes on it. At least that's how me and the other six figure per year computer guys I know do it. We make a lot of money, but we add under our breath "for all the time, money and effort I've put into my skillset, I'd damn well better make a lot of money".
So you're just vastly more likely to be successful in any way, including financially, doing something where taking time and effort beyond the regular work day isn't going to be utter misery. Of course, realism has to enter into somewhere - you're not likely to make a good living getting drunk and playing XBox, no matter how much you love it - but if you choose a career that fits with your natural talents and strengths, you're more likely to be successful.
Is it possible to make a lot of money doing something you hate? I suppose so, but what profiteth a man if he wins the world and loses his soul?
All these things are probably good (some, very good) ideas, but they will not happen for one simple reason.
Americans are no longer philosophically equipped to deal with the reality that different people have different capabilities.
We live in an age that Charles Murray refers to "Educational Romanticisim", whereby the Left ponders that every child would be an Einstein, if not for insufficient funding, and the Right ponders that every child would be an Einstein if only we had school choice.
Whatever the merits of each proposal, the indisputable reality is that human ability occurs in a distribution from one end to another (hence "The Bell Curve"). As a fairly radically egalitarian society, we obsess about the left side of the curve.
Can schools be made better, in general? Probably. Can they be made dramatically better, in general, by any approach? I doubt it. Will they be made significantly better by simply spending more time doing what they do now? I'm certain that they cannot.
One last quote, from Thomas Sowell:
A man is not even equal to himself on different days.
I wish I could mod this higher than 5...
I think the scrounging idea is a good one...you'll be able to pull resistors off of anything, and everybody will learn the codes quickly. Have them bring in something simple in their house that doesn't work - have them troubleshoot and repair it (permission, obviously...).
Have them bring in an annoying electronic toy and have them wire a volume control into it. For that matter, have them bend circuits on all the electronic crap that surrounds us today.
Finally, talk to your later Radio Shack / Fry's / whatever, and see if you can get them to sponsor the class with some free gear and projects.
If you end up with some more coin, try a TV-B-Gone:
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=20&sessid=5bf624d376f9c6c44a119200f35c990d
AdaFruit has a lot of good stuff. One thing I saw at a Make Faire was a project where you quickly build an oscillator using a paper circuit board and a pencil line drawn on a paper to have a quickie musical instrument.
Wow...you want to talk about the difference in culture between America and Europe...I knew you were European even before the BBC mention.
Want to know how?
Telling people that they shouldn't live 200 miles from where they work?
Maybe people should be free to make their own #$*$&^% decisions about where they work as long as they are willing to face the consequences of their choices?
I think the thing that distinguishes the Manhattan Project from (nearly) all subsequent calls for one was the specificity of the goal. At the inception of the Manhattan Project, everyone agreed that the device was theoretically possible, and that was a limited number of practical paths which could be pursued to produce it. So project start-to-end was a straightforward (if not simple) matter of pursuing the paths to their practical limits. I don't remotely intend to belittle the staggering historical achievement of the men involved, but it is important to consider that they had an extremely specific purpose in mind, and one in which not only was it impossible for private research firms to pursue, but it would be expressly (and wisely) forbidden.
We have the opposite situation with energy production...we have a tremendous number of possible avenues to pursue, and it's impossible to know at the outset which one will produce the most fruit. For the most part, there's no security reason to not pursue any one of them.
With energy prices as high as they've risen, the potential bounty for solving these problems is enormous. There are a lot of greedy investors out there after that bounty, and the investment dollars are flowing fast and furious. An investor is looking at a five year window at the most long term. You might argue that that's not long enough for certain technologies, but I think maybe that if that is not long enough, the tech is not cooked yet, compared to other things that are nearing maturity like solar and wind, which are now producing actual, sustainable and even thriving businesses.
Alternative power is like alternative music in 1995...it's quickly becoming mainstream. As someone who invests in this stuff, maybe I'm unduly optimistic, but I see all of the boring, conservative people whose idea of green is money responding to market forces and doing the dull, boring work of turning solar and wind into actual power driving your AC's and computers. If we were to have a Manhattan Project for alternative energy....well, practically speaking, it would have to pick high hanging fruit, because all of the low hanging fruit has VC.
Furthermore, I can imagine a series of fabrication technologies, for example, that make mp3 players so cheap as to be essentially free. There's no imaginable (currently) technology which could make the power so cheap as to be free, not even fusion.
Ahem, Latin geek here.
CV == "Curriculum Vitae".
"Curriculae Vitae" is close to being Latin for "courses of life", but because "curriculum" is a second declension neuter, the proper plural would be "curricula", so that would be "curricula vitae", "life courses".
You're right about the improper usage, tho...C.V. generally refers to something more extensive than a resume.
Really? That low...that makes the trade-off even better. I was going off of numbers I heard years ago regarding the inherent inefficiency of AC, giving it numbers of like 50% loss over power lines.
Well, between my vague recollection and your paper, I tend to trust your paper. Either way, the study I saw (I saw it cited in Make magazine) indicated that whatever the inefficiencies are, they're swamped by the gain of economies of scale.
Seriously, though, there have been studies done...I can't cite them offhand, but the conclusion I recall is that while you have the inefficiency of conversion and distribution (which is enormous), it is still swamped by the economies of scale you reap by producing them at plants rather than in-engine.
Now that is strictly an analysis of the energy consumed, without regard to the environmental impact. That aspect is going to depend on the local method of production, which varies. I would say that electric cars are a net gain even if your local method is filthy for the following reasons:
- The power generation method for transport is fungible, i.e., it can change in response to varying economic and environmental pressures. Currently, we're trapped in the single solution of petroleum due to the nature of internal combustion engines.
- Power generation methods are not necessarily filthy everywhere, and the environmental is both local and global.
- Once we get on the technology train of electric cars, and corporate research dollars flow towards improving that particular technology stack rather than the relatively mature tech of ICE's, we will see further gains. Ditto the power distribution network as it expands in scale.
So there's the analysis of electric cars from a power consumption perspective. The question of production of electric cars, disposal of all those toxic batteries, etc. is another question entirely. I read a report a while back that demonstrated that, given the substantially shorter lifetimes and the fact that they required entirely new lines of production, a Prius actually is more environmentally impactful than a Hummer H3. Nevertheless, we can stay invested in a century old technology that is unlikely to see any radical improvements, or we can pursue the distributed, decentralized solution of the electric car.While I realize the futility of opening a religious discussion on Slashdot...
The Buddhist view here would be an inaccurate perception of the Christian worldview. In the Christian worldview, God creates everything good, indeed, your ability to perceive things as good and not good (as opposed to merely pleasurable and not pleasurable, like an animal) is the gift of God. Consignment to hell is the choice of the being out of right relationship with God, i.e., God respects the choice of the individual to reject the authority of God. In order to respect this choice, the chooser is isolated utterly from the influence of God, which is hell. Hell is hell because it is bereft of contact with God, and by extension everything good in life.
Let the bigoted responses fly.
Why are long term trends not taken into account in these reports, for example. It is rubbish to say that we cannot accurately predict climate that far into the future because our short-term predictions are not very good. After all, we cannot predict the little ups & downs in next month's weather, but we can predict that winter will follow summer and autumn, and we know what the trends are in each of those seasons. The long-term trends in global weather can be predicted as well.
I've got to disagree with you from both sides of the political aisle. I will argue that we cannot make accurate climate predictions (at least within the range that is relevant to the anthroprogenic global warming debate) because we have utterly failed to do so in the past. That data that the IPCC use show no warming after 1999, which doesn't even fit the past of the model, let alone the future.
I think really what the whole problem is with the debate is that there's a huge difference between the approaches of the typical person and the scientist to uncertainty. A scientist eats, drinks and bathes in uncertainty, and is comfortable with saying, "Gee, we just don't know. Maybe we'll know more in the future, but this is our best understanding currently, and it is almost certainly at least partially wrong." The typical person deals with decisions made on imperfect information in their daily life, and regards uncertainty as incompletion, or at worst, weakness. That's why we have people who believe in UFO's, ghosts, or fricking Sasquatch rather than saying, "I just don't know what the hell that was. I probably never will."
As the previous poster pointed out, the whole debate is INCREDIBLY useful to authoritarians, as is any crisis which justifies sweeping powers and changes to society.
Also, anybody who says we can avoid the need of nuclear power by just riding bikes, using a more efficient furnace, and holding hands while singing "Kum Ba Ya" is simply not looking at the real numbers of what our future power needs are, even after you account for a radical scaling back of elective consumption.
For some reason, I heard that in my head as read by John C. McGinley from Scrubs.
I've dealt a lot with this sort of circumstance. The best approach is to begin implementing a facade pattern, function by function, until the whole amorphous mess is inside it. At this point, some stuff is pointed at Sql, some is pointed at Access, or what have you.
Next, you get everything pointed at Sql. Once that is done, take some time and get unit tests around the functions; this will help you in the next step. Document the functions while you write the tests. Finally, break the facade back into multiple layers and objects, and refactor like mad until you've got good, testable, documented code.
Vital healthcare software running on Access...that's scary.
In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven't been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million. Yeah, really arguably. Slashdot posting statistics interpreted by Wired is s like having your Mother help your Grandmother get DSL working. Okay, right off the bat: you can't be only part of the MySpace community, so your risk from your real community is implicit in your risk as a member of MySpace. Second, I have absolutely zero confidence in MySpace tracking the sexual assaults of its members...that's simply not their job. Conversely, it's not the job of the people who keep statistics in the real world to figure out whether the members were on MySpace, unless MySpace was involved in the assault.
Some quickies:
MySpace users are a subset of computer users. Computer users are disproportionately male (especially the teenage segment). Males are far less likely to be victims of statutory rape. Males are also far less likely to report cases of statutory rape (duh).
Anything that increases contact with other people increases the risk of bad things happening. The question is whether it is a good tradeoff; is the increased risk balanced by some benefit? I think that in most cases, with a little common sense caution and some perfunctory parental supervision, MySpace is a great deal. Wired is asking the wrong questions, and coming up with the wrong answers. But you can't really blame them; people in this country are only willing to make zero risk propositions these days.
The reason why the costs are negigible is that while the fixed costs required to create the elevator may be (and probably will be) enormous, the marginal cost of using it will be quite small. Those costs will probably be composed primarily of labor to maintain it and power to the climber.
.
There may be some lurking marginal cost nobody has considered, or on the other hand the operational lifetime of an elevator might be so short that the fixed costs never get amortized that well, but barring those possibilities, it's reasonable to assume that with a space elevator, getting into space will be pretty cheap.
BTW: geosync orbit is 22,000 miles, not 62,000 miles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit
Neilsen familys need to volenterr, and
Google can give *actual real* dmeographic infromatio, because
Google would mak ethe Neilsen ratings obsolete
Dude, did you type this on a blackberry while skiing?
Bring it closer to home. My company has a standard of x bugs in y lines of code. One month I am having some problems and go over. Do they have a right to demand that I do 100 hours of community service as penance? Or stand outside at 8.00 with a sign around my neck saying that I sinned? Or wear scarlet overalls for a week? Or not use the cafeteria?
I'd say that they have the "right", insofar as they can say, "Unless you do this your ass is canned." No company in their right mind would do this because you'd quite rightly just go find another fricking job.
So while I think that requiring counseling as a prereq for continuing at the U is a little Orwellian, they're well within their rights; a school has the right to determine who goes there (though accepting confiscated tax dollars muddies the waters a bit). The language with "community service" shows that the U is confused about itself, tho. I think it's probably just a case of the board being so full of itself as to think of itself as akin to the government.
Let me point out that the potential alternative here is a broken nuclear sub, which probably ain't so great for the dolphins either.
And having the suit change colors in respond to temperature (hot-white, cold, black) would help ameliorate the temperature problem.
Nope, my mistake: Berkeley. Mea culpa; you can't be a linguistics fan and then say that spelling doesn't matter :).
Amen! What bugs me about commercials is not that I'm being pitched to, but that it's a waste of both of our time! There's no point in showing me an ad for Massengil.
Show me an ad for Arturo Fuente, a book by Berkely linguistics professor John McWhorter, or a program about the 80's British comedy Yes, Prime Minister, and I'm very likely to bite. At the very least, I will be actively interested in the ad. This level of granularity should make it possible.
I'm a YIMBY for this (Yes, In My BackYard). I have no problem, repeat, no problem having ads targeted to my interests given that I will be presented with ads regardless.
The flipside of this is privacy, I suppose. That may be the relevancy-killer.