Personally, I'd consider "food and drink" to be pretty essential, but strangely that's not on the list. Of course that could be provided by the airline, but note that the "cheap" airlines (e.g., RyanAir) do not provide this as part of ticket, and charge highly. I would hope they'd make an exception here, rather than taking the opportunity to profit from such an event.
Also, one of the main reasons I have things in hand luggage is to reduce what I have to put in the checked-in luggage. There's both the issue of weight, and in some cases you get charged per bag (RyanAir charge an extra £5 per bag per one-way flight, independent of how much they weigh). So I would seriously hope they are waiving those charges in this time of crisis.
Other people pointed out the risk of fragile or expensive items - according to http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/conditions.php , they are only liable up to £820. Furthermore, they aren't liable at all if they decide the baggage is "defective" - and in my experience, they do that even if the material is slightly worn, in a manner which clearly wouldn't affect the contents.
This article seems yet another "Apple invented it" rubbish, despite the fact that the rest of the industry has been moving onto wireless just fine, and as you point out, the examples don't make sense.
The hardware wasn't eliminated, just consolidated. BTW, the Mac started that consolidation with the Apple Lisa (I had one) and, later, the original Mac (I had one) a long time before iFruit.
Exactly. It was also common for Amigas and other home computers to combine the keyboard into the computer, but if I said they were the first to bring us "wireless", I'd be laughed at.
I mean, he says: "Just when you thought that was incredible enough" - wow, I guess it's incredible that my motherboard talks to my graphics card without them having to be connected by wires! You know, they only have to be physically stuck into each other instead...
Above all, he completely misses the point of wireless. It's not to be free of a *wire* specifically, it's to be free of any physically connection whatsoever. But instead of having a monitor that's tethered by a "cumbersome cord", we now have a monitor that's bolted onto the entire computer - yeah, great improvement.
By his logic, a mouse which is bolted onto the side of a computer should be a "wireless" mouse too...
However, many child molesters (the ones who try to get consent from the children) don't believe they're hurting anyone, and most of those believe that it should be legal for children to be able to consent to sex. A line has to be drawn somewhere.
Presumably those child molesters won't favour such an invasion of privacy either;) But even though we disagree with them on that law, we still agree there are ridiculous laws which this would be used to enforce.
I can see many pros and cons to this "solution", but when you weigh more pot-smokers getting busted against saving more kids from sexual predators, the scales seem to tip very heavily to the right on that one. A lot of child protection laws/rules are ludicrous, and I feel that some hurt more than they help, but not this one.
I disagree that it's a balance. You've yet to show me how this would improve things at all, and catch the people abusing the children, better than if the resources were used elsewhere.
How many people have to have their lives ruined and sent to prison to possibly save one child? Yes, child abuse is terrible, but that isn't excuse for anything that might help. And even if we only care about the children, what about the other consequences, e.g., if Daddy gets sent to prison because he happens to fit a profile which the moral-do-gooders disapprove of (taking certain types of drugs, or liking some kinky sex), then that's one child without a father, which is bad in itself.
And then a new "friend" of the mother moves in - and remember how most child abuse comes from people in or close to the family, not some guy download pictures off the Internet...
Of course, it depends what "invasion of privacy" we're talking about - sensible measures such as notifying if people access a website known to contain child porn, or allowing the police to access everything a person does online?
If this could already be done through taxing the product being sold, why do we need to track what a particular person buys?
As for making VAT progressive - it's an interesting idea, but it seems it would be hard to make it so that an increase in gross income never resulted in a reduction of income after tax. This is easy to do with income tax, but with this system, how much you pay also depends on how much you spend, and what you spend it on.
What kinds of things do we have to hide? What kinds of freedoms are we losing? Are they the legal freedoms or the illegal ones? There was a news story on the radio this morning about a man in our local area getting caught pimping out his daughters (as young as 5) on the Internet. The DJ's were discussing how large the child porn industry is, and asking whether a certain amount of privacy invasion should be allowed to catch guys like that. I have children, ages 6 and 7, and given how many kids get kidnapped/raped/killed each year (many of whom are simply never heard from again), I know what my answer would be.
I agree that corruption and abuse are a problem, and I don't feel that punishments for those crimes are stiff enough, but I still want the police and FBI to have the information they need to find people who do things like that.
If we could trust that invasion of privacy would only be used to search for these particular "very bad crimes", and all data would be destroyed afterwards, then that would be fine. However, experience has shown that this is never the case - from publically accessable sex offender registers brought in "to fight child abuse" which end up including those who commit more minor crimes or even consensual acts, to laws to fight "terrorism" which end up being used to fight drugs.
The more general problem with "nothing to hide" is that some people do have things to hide. Not everyone necessarily agrees with certain laws (e.g., possession of drugs, or also certain consensual acts between adults are still illegal in the UK), nor can we guarantee that a future Government won't bring in draconian laws in future. Now yes, the best strategy is to perhaps fight to overturn those laws - but until that happens, I'm not going to favour giving this Government a tool to put even more people in prison.
And even if I did agree with all the laws, and totally trusted the Government today, can you be sure that some future Government won't be a dictatorship which uses the information to put certain people into prison?
Even if everything is fine today, I don't want the systems put in place so that a future Government could turn the country into a corrupt police state overnight.
Also, how would privacy invasion help matters here? There'd be a massive amount of information to sift through, and resources might be better spent targetting people who access known sites, rather than rummaging through people's houses, for example.
Myspace is to the web as shopping malls are to publicly owned shopping streets:
By that logic, Slashdot is private also. But presumably there's a reason you chose to post your comment in this private shopping mall, rather than hosting your own webserver and posting it there?
It's true that it didn't quite say what I said - but my reasoning is that curvature can be defined and measured without any reference to any higher dimensions. If the properties of a space can be fully defined without any reference to a higher dimension, I would say whether they exist or not seems somewhat philosophical (and untestable).
We tend to think of a curved surface as being embedded in a 3rd dimension - but I'd argue that's how we think of any surface; even with a plane, we can't help thinking of it existing in a 3rd dimension. But if there's no way to move into that 3rd (or 4th) dimension, what meaning is there in saying it "exists"?
A versioning file system on a computer you can buy at the mall is something new. So are virtual desktops.
I'm sure I remember buying my Amiga with virtual desktops at the mall 20 years ago or so...
And I agree with dfghjk's reply - it seems odd to create some arbitrary category of "Macs and only Windows" to somehow then say it's better than anything done before. What you can say, as a Mac user is "Woohoo, they've added this cool new feature to this OS that I like", and sure, that's great. And it's also good for consumers in general when a product adds a new feature.
However, there's nothing original here; and similarly, nor is it wrong for other OSs such as Windows to copy off of others.
Unix had multitasking years before (and Multics and other predecessors did as well), and Unix 680x0 boxes had it as soon as there were 680x0 boxes. f you'd prefer, you could rate it "+1 Well it's about time" instead....
And AmigaOS:) Also worth noting that even then, the classic MacOS only had cooperative multitasking - it wasn't until they ditched it for OS X that they finally got preemptive multitasking.
Actually, I don't see how trying to pin down the age of the universe, which is impossible to do with the data we have, can advance us in other areas.
Well, no one's going to be able to tell you now - otherwise they'd be claiming a nobel prize or something. In general though, it's not obvious at all how discoveries in one area may be useful in another - for example, experiments to prove the aether led us to relativity along with nuclear power and the atomic bomb; research in "useless" pure mathematics gave us public key cryptography. If I were to speculate, the article says their research aims to "one day help with measuring dark energy and other things", and that could be tied into fundamental theories on how the Universe works.
But also, who decides what is important? Personally, even without any other applications, I find knowing answers to the Universe far more interesting than being able to watch the latest Reality TV show in a higher resolution or whatever.
Meanwhile, TV technology could be moving forward to something beyond digital, into the realm of beautiful analog freedom. I jest somewhat, but there is something to be said for the results of focused energy (in the form of thought). We improve our digital processes so that they become more effective than the current analog standards. However, we often do so at the expense of advances in other areas (analog, rottedlog, and ants-on-a-log technologies).
Not at all. Knowledge in one area of science can often help in other areas, and fundamental theories about the way the Universe works are certainly important in advancing our technology, including in the areas you wish for.
I'm sure you're never going to travel at the speed of light or get stuck in a box with a cat either, but let's hope you never need to use GPS, and you can stop using that computer too.
whenever I hear "the universe is expanding, like we thought 2 and 4 times ago, not contracting, like we thought last time and 3 times ago" or "well, the universe is 10 billion, not 8 billion light years wide", that to me comes across as a sort of modern version of "1000, not merely 800 angels can dance on the head of a pin".
It depends on whether it's philosophical conjecture of something which is untestable, or based on observable evidence. The "angels on a pinhead" refers, I believe, to discussions of the former, but the article suggests this is the latter.
So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.
The balloon analogy is a good one, but note that (as far as I know) the Universe does not require a 4th dimension to be expanding into. Mathematically, a surface/space can be curved, without needing a higher dimension to be "curving in".
For example, philips.com and phillips.com are different domains. Neither is typosquatting; the user has to get it right. Top-level country domains are a much clearer case than that.
But both of those are legitimate sites. If one was a spam/ads site, an accusation of typosquatting would be reasonable.
Similarly, no one has a problem with using *.cn for legitimate sites, even if a *.com exists also. The issue is with making every page an ad.
We have absolutely zero evidence for life on planets other than earth. On the other hand, we have considerable evidence [wikipedia.org] that we're alone in the galaxy (other galaxies are too far away to know anything about).
You're arguing against the existence of intelligent space-travelling civilizations. This is no evidence whatsoever against the possibility of life in general elsewhere.
Having said that, I'm curious what the situation is in the UK. For example, I'm sure I remember seeing things like "Crown Copyright" on reproductions in museums, even when the original must surely have been out of copyright.
Although if we're talking about teaching Intelligent Design as science (as opposed to having religious lessons were people learn about religion), then actually I'd even oppose that in "religious-based schools".
Think about it - school is compulsory, so it is already the case that children are forced to attend a particular sort of establishment that fulfils the criterion of correctly educating the child, according to the Government's desire. With this in mind, whilst it might be okay to have optional after-school lessons for religion, I do not see justification for teaching religion as science. At least in the UK, parents can be sent to prison if their child doesn't go to school - it seems odd that at the same time, people think it's perfectly okay to send their child not to a state school, but instead somewhere where they learn evolution isn't true and the earth is only 6,000 years old, and so on...
More generally, there are other arguments against the whole idea of "religion-based schools" in the first place. Why should children be segregated by religion; is that really a good idea for society? In my opinion, if an institution wants to qualify as a school (i.e., that can fulfil the legal requirement of educating a child), it should be open to all, and any religion should be strictly optional and out-of-school-hours for the pupils.
And to take the flip side - I have nothing against teaching about religion in state schools, as long as it's "Here's what some religions believe", and does not focus on only one religion.
Even though it has RFID, the ones coming in October will cost more (£93) and you will be entered into the National Identity Register (read: Be interrogated, DNA-swabbed and fingerprinted like a criminal).
Not quite - the price will go up to £66 in October (see http://www.no2id.net/ ), and it'll be in 2008 that you'll have to pay £93, and be entered into the database (a process which the Labour Government falsely claimed you'd be able to opt out of as a compromise - no, we won't). But yes, renewing sooner rather than later is a good idea.
My point exactly. I love Firefly and B5, and heard many good things about Farscape and Lexx, I live in Brazil, so it is not all shows that get to cross the americas. So, since there are good shows being created in a rather successful manner, there is no reason to make this movies
But that wasn't the point you expressed - you implied that people weren't creating something new, and that this was somehow related to new Star Trek series.
If you agree they are, then what's the problem? No one is forcing you to watch new Star Trek series, so what's the reasoning for saying they shouldn't be made?
Ah, "If you don't agree, get out the country" - for a non-Daily Mail reader, you sure do a good job of duplicating their style of arguments.
Actually I don't read it. But thanks for the typical lefty response ie: to get defensive and start the scattergun ad homenim attacks when faced with the truth.
Well, I'm glad you agree that being associated with the Daily Mail is an insult. And I see that you are trying to use "left" as an insult.
I don't see why you have to lump everyone who disagrees as "left". Yes, I'm left in the sense of liberal, as opposed to being pro-authoritarian or conservative. (Though it's misleading to paint anyone who disagrees with the Daily Mail as "left", since they are far-right.)
But I'm not left in other senses. With reference to your other post: I'm not pro-Marxism, I am pro-capitalist, and pro-democracy (including being in favour of a system which doesn't let a minority elect a majority Government).
However, here's the bit which makes it clear that this issue is nothing to do with a linear left-versus-right scale: Locking children up for playing on trees, and putting their DNA in a database is not a left-wing liberal viewpoint! If anything, it is the sort of thing we associate with right wing authoritarian viewpoints.
So ironically, the Daily Mail are siding with the liberal lefties, in being against the New Labour authoritarian Government. The difference with the Daily Mail point of view is that it isn't about defending individual rights in general (e.g., if you're not white, British, Christian and straight), but they will start whining as soon it's their rights that are being trampled (so their children aren't allowed to vandalise trees, and it's "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!").
Funny , I thought the muesli eating yoghurt knitters like yourself had been running the place for the last 10 years, co-incidentaly when socially its gone right downhill. But hey , maybe its all a dream and I'll wake up from this left wing nightmare soon and find myself in a world where the majority opinion carries weight (thats known as democracy btw, look it up) and arrogant psuedo intellectual marxist know-it-alls like yourself arn't around preaching to us about how we should think.
Yeah, it's all the fault of the liberal-lefties that children aren't allowed to play on trees, and the police have excessive powers to lock people up! If only we lived in a right-wing authoritarian utopia, then we'd never have things like DNA databases!
You know they did go a little over board with the DNA sampling, but how much you wanna bet those three kids will never commit a crime in the future. They go the crap scared outta them and learned their lesson. I say good. Perhaps if in America the cops were to scare a few of these young holligans they may think twice of commiting a crime when they are older.
Perhaps, but like you say, it would be nice if they could do this without making everyone donate to Labour's DNA database.
The problem is, the sort of "hooligan" who is likely to commit crimes is less likely to be scared by this sort of thing anyway, and worse it may diminish any sense of respect for the police they may have had.
The sort of kid on the other hand who is scared by this would have been more than scared by merely a telling off by the police, and the threat of arrest - let alone arrest and being locked up.
Ultimately, getting poeple to behave involves knowing right or wrong. In this case, whether or not we think it was wrong, it's clear that the children and the parents don't think it's wrong. So it's hard to see how that will affect their behaviour in future. Being scared by the police only works when you realise that actually, you were doing something wrong.
If you can't define the crime in a reasonably precise manner, it's total bullshit. That's all there is to it. The fact that your government has gotten you to buy into the insanity doesn't make it right.
Maybe such crimes aren't a good thing, but this isn't anything new. We've always had things like "breach of the peace", for example. Does the US not have anything similar?
It really stuns me that "behavior deviating sharply from the social norm" is illegal in Britain.
Have they NO concept of originality, freedom of speech and expression, individualism, and people seeking out their true happiness in their own unique way?
No, it isn't, and yes, probably at least as much as the US.
I disagree with much of what the Labour Government have been doing, but let's not get silly - antisocial here is used in the context of being harmful to society.
If you can cite an example where someone was locked up for dressing like a banana, or not wanting to go out on a Saturday night, I'd like to hear it.
Slashdot Mirror
On a side note - thank christ for the reduced on board luggage rules. Why the hell does anyone need more than their book & a passport anyway?
I'd be happy with just that, but according to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4778615.stm, you aren't even allowed to take a book.
Personally, I'd consider "food and drink" to be pretty essential, but strangely that's not on the list. Of course that could be provided by the airline, but note that the "cheap" airlines (e.g., RyanAir) do not provide this as part of ticket, and charge highly. I would hope they'd make an exception here, rather than taking the opportunity to profit from such an event.
Also, one of the main reasons I have things in hand luggage is to reduce what I have to put in the checked-in luggage. There's both the issue of weight, and in some cases you get charged per bag (RyanAir charge an extra £5 per bag per one-way flight, independent of how much they weigh). So I would seriously hope they are waiving those charges in this time of crisis.
Other people pointed out the risk of fragile or expensive items - according to http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/conditions.php , they are only liable up to £820. Furthermore, they aren't liable at all if they decide the baggage is "defective" - and in my experience, they do that even if the material is slightly worn, in a manner which clearly wouldn't affect the contents.
This article seems yet another "Apple invented it" rubbish, despite the fact that the rest of the industry has been moving onto wireless just fine, and as you point out, the examples don't make sense.
The hardware wasn't eliminated, just consolidated. BTW, the Mac started that consolidation with the Apple Lisa (I had one) and, later, the original Mac (I had one) a long time before iFruit.
Exactly. It was also common for Amigas and other home computers to combine the keyboard into the computer, but if I said they were the first to bring us "wireless", I'd be laughed at.
I mean, he says: "Just when you thought that was incredible enough" - wow, I guess it's incredible that my motherboard talks to my graphics card without them having to be connected by wires! You know, they only have to be physically stuck into each other instead...
Above all, he completely misses the point of wireless. It's not to be free of a *wire* specifically, it's to be free of any physically connection whatsoever. But instead of having a monitor that's tethered by a "cumbersome cord", we now have a monitor that's bolted onto the entire computer - yeah, great improvement.
By his logic, a mouse which is bolted onto the side of a computer should be a "wireless" mouse too...
However, many child molesters (the ones who try to get consent from the children) don't believe they're hurting anyone, and most of those believe that it should be legal for children to be able to consent to sex. A line has to be drawn somewhere.
;) But even though we disagree with them on that law, we still agree there are ridiculous laws which this would be used to enforce.
Presumably those child molesters won't favour such an invasion of privacy either
I can see many pros and cons to this "solution", but when you weigh more pot-smokers getting busted against saving more kids from sexual predators, the scales seem to tip very heavily to the right on that one. A lot of child protection laws/rules are ludicrous, and I feel that some hurt more than they help, but not this one.
I disagree that it's a balance. You've yet to show me how this would improve things at all, and catch the people abusing the children, better than if the resources were used elsewhere.
How many people have to have their lives ruined and sent to prison to possibly save one child? Yes, child abuse is terrible, but that isn't excuse for anything that might help. And even if we only care about the children, what about the other consequences, e.g., if Daddy gets sent to prison because he happens to fit a profile which the moral-do-gooders disapprove of (taking certain types of drugs, or liking some kinky sex), then that's one child without a father, which is bad in itself.
And then a new "friend" of the mother moves in - and remember how most child abuse comes from people in or close to the family, not some guy download pictures off the Internet...
Of course, it depends what "invasion of privacy" we're talking about - sensible measures such as notifying if people access a website known to contain child porn, or allowing the police to access everything a person does online?
If this could already be done through taxing the product being sold, why do we need to track what a particular person buys?
As for making VAT progressive - it's an interesting idea, but it seems it would be hard to make it so that an increase in gross income never resulted in a reduction of income after tax. This is easy to do with income tax, but with this system, how much you pay also depends on how much you spend, and what you spend it on.
What kinds of things do we have to hide? What kinds of freedoms are we losing? Are they the legal freedoms or the illegal ones? There was a news story on the radio this morning about a man in our local area getting caught pimping out his daughters (as young as 5) on the Internet. The DJ's were discussing how large the child porn industry is, and asking whether a certain amount of privacy invasion should be allowed to catch guys like that. I have children, ages 6 and 7, and given how many kids get kidnapped/raped/killed each year (many of whom are simply never heard from again), I know what my answer would be.
I agree that corruption and abuse are a problem, and I don't feel that punishments for those crimes are stiff enough, but I still want the police and FBI to have the information they need to find people who do things like that.
If we could trust that invasion of privacy would only be used to search for these particular "very bad crimes", and all data would be destroyed afterwards, then that would be fine. However, experience has shown that this is never the case - from publically accessable sex offender registers brought in "to fight child abuse" which end up including those who commit more minor crimes or even consensual acts, to laws to fight "terrorism" which end up being used to fight drugs.
The more general problem with "nothing to hide" is that some people do have things to hide. Not everyone necessarily agrees with certain laws (e.g., possession of drugs, or also certain consensual acts between adults are still illegal in the UK), nor can we guarantee that a future Government won't bring in draconian laws in future. Now yes, the best strategy is to perhaps fight to overturn those laws - but until that happens, I'm not going to favour giving this Government a tool to put even more people in prison.
And even if I did agree with all the laws, and totally trusted the Government today, can you be sure that some future Government won't be a dictatorship which uses the information to put certain people into prison?
Even if everything is fine today, I don't want the systems put in place so that a future Government could turn the country into a corrupt police state overnight.
Also, how would privacy invasion help matters here? There'd be a massive amount of information to sift through, and resources might be better spent targetting people who access known sites, rather than rummaging through people's houses, for example.
Myspace is to the web as shopping malls are to publicly owned shopping streets:
By that logic, Slashdot is private also. But presumably there's a reason you chose to post your comment in this private shopping mall, rather than hosting your own webserver and posting it there?
It's true that it didn't quite say what I said - but my reasoning is that curvature can be defined and measured without any reference to any higher dimensions. If the properties of a space can be fully defined without any reference to a higher dimension, I would say whether they exist or not seems somewhat philosophical (and untestable).
We tend to think of a curved surface as being embedded in a 3rd dimension - but I'd argue that's how we think of any surface; even with a plane, we can't help thinking of it existing in a 3rd dimension. But if there's no way to move into that 3rd (or 4th) dimension, what meaning is there in saying it "exists"?
A versioning file system on a computer you can buy at the mall is something new. So are virtual desktops.
I'm sure I remember buying my Amiga with virtual desktops at the mall 20 years ago or so...
And I agree with dfghjk's reply - it seems odd to create some arbitrary category of "Macs and only Windows" to somehow then say it's better than anything done before. What you can say, as a Mac user is "Woohoo, they've added this cool new feature to this OS that I like", and sure, that's great. And it's also good for consumers in general when a product adds a new feature.
However, there's nothing original here; and similarly, nor is it wrong for other OSs such as Windows to copy off of others.
Unix had multitasking years before (and Multics and other predecessors did as well), and Unix 680x0 boxes had it as soon as there were 680x0 boxes. f you'd prefer, you could rate it "+1 Well it's about time" instead....
:) Also worth noting that even then, the classic MacOS only had cooperative multitasking - it wasn't until they ditched it for OS X that they finally got preemptive multitasking.
And AmigaOS
Actually, I don't see how trying to pin down the age of the universe, which is impossible to do with the data we have, can advance us in other areas.
Well, no one's going to be able to tell you now - otherwise they'd be claiming a nobel prize or something. In general though, it's not obvious at all how discoveries in one area may be useful in another - for example, experiments to prove the aether led us to relativity along with nuclear power and the atomic bomb; research in "useless" pure mathematics gave us public key cryptography. If I were to speculate, the article says their research aims to "one day help with measuring dark energy and other things", and that could be tied into fundamental theories on how the Universe works.
But also, who decides what is important? Personally, even without any other applications, I find knowing answers to the Universe far more interesting than being able to watch the latest Reality TV show in a higher resolution or whatever.
I'm referring to intrinsic curvature (as opposed to extrinsic curvature) - the idea that it's a property of the surface itself, and not how it is bent in a higher dimension. See http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Curvature.html or http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/doyle/mpls/handouts/ node21.html .
Meanwhile, TV technology could be moving forward to something beyond digital, into the realm of beautiful analog freedom. I jest somewhat, but there is something to be said for the results of focused energy (in the form of thought). We improve our digital processes so that they become more effective than the current analog standards. However, we often do so at the expense of advances in other areas (analog, rottedlog, and ants-on-a-log technologies).
Not at all. Knowledge in one area of science can often help in other areas, and fundamental theories about the way the Universe works are certainly important in advancing our technology, including in the areas you wish for.
I'm sure you're never going to travel at the speed of light or get stuck in a box with a cat either, but let's hope you never need to use GPS, and you can stop using that computer too.
whenever I hear "the universe is expanding, like we thought 2 and 4 times ago, not contracting, like we thought last time and 3 times ago" or "well, the universe is 10 billion, not 8 billion light years wide", that to me comes across as a sort of modern version of "1000, not merely 800 angels can dance on the head of a pin".
It depends on whether it's philosophical conjecture of something which is untestable, or based on observable evidence. The "angels on a pinhead" refers, I believe, to discussions of the former, but the article suggests this is the latter.
So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.
The balloon analogy is a good one, but note that (as far as I know) the Universe does not require a 4th dimension to be expanding into. Mathematically, a surface/space can be curved, without needing a higher dimension to be "curving in".
For example, philips.com and phillips.com are different domains. Neither is typosquatting; the user has to get it right. Top-level country domains are a much clearer case than that.
But both of those are legitimate sites. If one was a spam/ads site, an accusation of typosquatting would be reasonable.
Similarly, no one has a problem with using *.cn for legitimate sites, even if a *.com exists also. The issue is with making every page an ad.
We have absolutely zero evidence for life on planets other than earth. On the other hand, we have considerable evidence [wikipedia.org] that we're alone in the galaxy (other galaxies are too far away to know anything about).
You're arguing against the existence of intelligent space-travelling civilizations. This is no evidence whatsoever against the possibility of life in general elsewhere.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library _v._Corel_Corp. - at least in the US, a photograph of a public domain image cannot be copyrighted.
Having said that, I'm curious what the situation is in the UK. For example, I'm sure I remember seeing things like "Crown Copyright" on reproductions in museums, even when the original must surely have been out of copyright.
Religious-based schools, yes.
Although if we're talking about teaching Intelligent Design as science (as opposed to having religious lessons were people learn about religion), then actually I'd even oppose that in "religious-based schools".
Think about it - school is compulsory, so it is already the case that children are forced to attend a particular sort of establishment that fulfils the criterion of correctly educating the child, according to the Government's desire. With this in mind, whilst it might be okay to have optional after-school lessons for religion, I do not see justification for teaching religion as science. At least in the UK, parents can be sent to prison if their child doesn't go to school - it seems odd that at the same time, people think it's perfectly okay to send their child not to a state school, but instead somewhere where they learn evolution isn't true and the earth is only 6,000 years old, and so on...
More generally, there are other arguments against the whole idea of "religion-based schools" in the first place. Why should children be segregated by religion; is that really a good idea for society? In my opinion, if an institution wants to qualify as a school (i.e., that can fulfil the legal requirement of educating a child), it should be open to all, and any religion should be strictly optional and out-of-school-hours for the pupils.
And to take the flip side - I have nothing against teaching about religion in state schools, as long as it's "Here's what some religions believe", and does not focus on only one religion.
Even though it has RFID, the ones coming in October will cost more (£93) and you will be entered into the National Identity Register (read: Be interrogated, DNA-swabbed and fingerprinted like a criminal).
Not quite - the price will go up to £66 in October (see http://www.no2id.net/ ), and it'll be in 2008 that you'll have to pay £93, and be entered into the database (a process which the Labour Government falsely claimed you'd be able to opt out of as a compromise - no, we won't). But yes, renewing sooner rather than later is a good idea.
My point exactly. I love Firefly and B5, and heard many good things about Farscape and Lexx, I live in Brazil, so it is not all shows that get to cross the americas. So, since there are good shows being created in a rather successful manner, there is no reason to make this movies
But that wasn't the point you expressed - you implied that people weren't creating something new, and that this was somehow related to new Star Trek series.
If you agree they are, then what's the problem? No one is forcing you to watch new Star Trek series, so what's the reasoning for saying they shouldn't be made?
Then emigrate. We'll all be happier for it.
Ah, "If you don't agree, get out the country" - for a non-Daily Mail reader, you sure do a good job of duplicating their style of arguments.
Actually I don't read it. But thanks for the typical lefty response ie: to get defensive and start the scattergun ad homenim attacks when faced with the truth.
Well, I'm glad you agree that being associated with the Daily Mail is an insult. And I see that you are trying to use "left" as an insult.
I don't see why you have to lump everyone who disagrees as "left". Yes, I'm left in the sense of liberal, as opposed to being pro-authoritarian or conservative. (Though it's misleading to paint anyone who disagrees with the Daily Mail as "left", since they are far-right.)
But I'm not left in other senses. With reference to your other post: I'm not pro-Marxism, I am pro-capitalist, and pro-democracy (including being in favour of a system which doesn't let a minority elect a majority Government).
However, here's the bit which makes it clear that this issue is nothing to do with a linear left-versus-right scale: Locking children up for playing on trees, and putting their DNA in a database is not a left-wing liberal viewpoint! If anything, it is the sort of thing we associate with right wing authoritarian viewpoints.
So ironically, the Daily Mail are siding with the liberal lefties, in being against the New Labour authoritarian Government. The difference with the Daily Mail point of view is that it isn't about defending individual rights in general (e.g., if you're not white, British, Christian and straight), but they will start whining as soon it's their rights that are being trampled (so their children aren't allowed to vandalise trees, and it's "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!").
Funny , I thought the muesli eating yoghurt knitters like yourself had been running the place for the last 10 years, co-incidentaly when socially its gone right downhill. But hey , maybe its all a dream and I'll wake up from this left wing nightmare soon and find myself in a world where the majority opinion carries weight (thats known as democracy btw, look it up) and arrogant psuedo intellectual marxist know-it-alls like yourself arn't around preaching to us about how we should think.
Yeah, it's all the fault of the liberal-lefties that children aren't allowed to play on trees, and the police have excessive powers to lock people up! If only we lived in a right-wing authoritarian utopia, then we'd never have things like DNA databases!
You know they did go a little over board with the DNA sampling, but how much you wanna bet those three kids will never commit a crime in the future. They go the crap scared outta them and learned their lesson. I say good. Perhaps if in America the cops were to scare a few of these young holligans they may think twice of commiting a crime when they are older.
Perhaps, but like you say, it would be nice if they could do this without making everyone donate to Labour's DNA database.
The problem is, the sort of "hooligan" who is likely to commit crimes is less likely to be scared by this sort of thing anyway, and worse it may diminish any sense of respect for the police they may have had.
The sort of kid on the other hand who is scared by this would have been more than scared by merely a telling off by the police, and the threat of arrest - let alone arrest and being locked up.
Ultimately, getting poeple to behave involves knowing right or wrong. In this case, whether or not we think it was wrong, it's clear that the children and the parents don't think it's wrong. So it's hard to see how that will affect their behaviour in future. Being scared by the police only works when you realise that actually, you were doing something wrong.
If you can't define the crime in a reasonably precise manner, it's total bullshit. That's all there is to it. The fact that your government has gotten you to buy into the insanity doesn't make it right.
Maybe such crimes aren't a good thing, but this isn't anything new. We've always had things like "breach of the peace", for example. Does the US not have anything similar?
It really stuns me that "behavior deviating sharply from the social norm" is illegal in Britain.
Have they NO concept of originality, freedom of speech and expression, individualism, and people seeking out their true happiness in their own unique way?
No, it isn't, and yes, probably at least as much as the US.
I disagree with much of what the Labour Government have been doing, but let's not get silly - antisocial here is used in the context of being harmful to society.
If you can cite an example where someone was locked up for dressing like a banana, or not wanting to go out on a Saturday night, I'd like to hear it.