What about the rest of the world? If the US publisher of a particular book says 'no' and the British publisher says 'yes' does the book get scanned or not? Does it get scanned but censored in the US? What about books with no US publisher?
...a lot of education research is barely research, relying as it does on very small sample sizes.
Actually I think the problem with sample size is not really solvable. If you increase the sample size of students you then must typically introduce more instructors. At this point you now have a new sample size problem: the instructor sample. Ironically MOOCs are really good at addressing this: one instructor can teach 160k students which is a large enough sample size that you can divide it randomly into several groups to act as control samples. So while I have strong doubts about the quality of the educational offerings of the current courses they do at least have the tools now to do real, scientifically meaningful, studies on the best way to teach so I have hope for significant improvements over time.
If you are given the answer you can move backwards to fill in gaps in your knowledge, and if you're given the steps you will see exactly what was done and understand why.
I disagree. It is very easy to fool yourself into thinking that you understand something when you have been provided the answer. You may feel that you understand why something is correct - and indeed you may even be right - but that is a dangerous way to learn. Since you already know that the answer provided is correct you can take shortcuts in understanding which are not available to you if you have to come up with the answer yourself.
So no amount of students thrashing around with no closure will help if at the end of the day the instructor-team doesn't produce the right answer.
That "thrashing around" as you put it is extremely educational. If you are the asker you have to think carefully and logically about the problem in order to phrase exactly what it is that you do not understand and for those answering they have to do the same to be able to make a rational argument as to why they are correct. This has been shown to lead to better understanding for everyone involved. In fact it is a recognised teaching technique called "peer instruction".
You do still need an instructor to provide the correct answers and explanation at the end to ensure that everyone knows what the correct answer is but it is not necessary for them to be involved all the time in the discussion. Essentially it boils down to the fact that you learn a lot more if you can reason out for yourself your own answers. The instructor acts more like training wheels to stop you falling over. Eventually, if you become a scientist, you use the same technique - thrashing it out in journals - but since nobody knows the answer there is no instructor to come it and tell you the answer at the end...which is what makes it so much more fun!
You are missing the point - I explicitly excluded "shrink-wrapped software for the public". While Adobe might be at the upper end of that scale Photoshop etc. is still mass market software where the price is fixed in advanced (unless you are negotiating a site license discount in which case the box price is still an upper bound on cost). "Industrial" software is not limited in that regard e.g. Oracle DB or Blackboard LMS etc. In these cases the software is not made available to the mass market for a fixed price but instead the cost is a negotiation between the seller and purchaser.
The result is something like a drug pushing operation: low initial prices to get you hooked and then a rapid increase because migration is expensive and costly. I make no judgement about whether Open source is better or worse than proprietary simply that with Open Source you know exactly where you stand because companies providing support do so in open competition (or if you are large enough you can just hire programmers to provide your own support). Frankly whether or not open source is cheaper or more expensive depends primarily on how the company selling the proprietary software behaves which, with changing management, is impossible to predict and not under your control. So proprietary software introduces a cost risk which open source does not have so if you want to get me to take that risk you had better have something more than open source to make it worthwhile.
Even if they start successfully predicting individuals careers
That's a very big 'if'. For example in experimental particle physics we publish in large collaborations. My h-index score is better than Dirac's but Dirac was a far greater scientist than I! (and that is just the theory/experiment difference in the same field!) Similarly I have papers in a large variety of journals but so have the majority of us in the field. In fact to accurately assess experimental particle physicists you need to rely more on what they do inside their collaborations than the publishing record so it is hard to see how any system which relies on publication record will work.
Some of the companies I worked for have use proprietary solutions AND save money in the process.
Really? Over the long term? What I have noticed with commercial vs. open source is that initially the commercial software seems a far better deal. They cut you a great price on the licence, support is included and you get very polished software (usually). However when the licence comes up for renewal the price goes up by well over the cost of inflation - but you got a good deal initial so it's still not bad. However after the 3rd of 4th renewal you realize that you are spending far more than you really should be on the software but the cost of migration is large enough that you decide to continue anyway for another 1-2 renewal until your budget literally cannot support the cost anymore and you are forced to switch to something else.
Compare that with Open Source where you purchase support. The company cannot stick up prices well above inflation because there is competition - if they charge too much it is easy to switch to a different company for support. In many ways, and perhaps somewhat ironically, open source seems to produce a far more open market, capitalist system than proprietary. Of course this is for commercial software aimed at institutes/companies, not shrink-wrapped software for the public where personal budgets are far smaller and the price cannot be negotiated with everyone purchasing the software.
...while in the USA the most successful are giving special privilege.
That's not quite true - only the most wealthy are given special privilege because US society defines success as wealth. Regardless of what the average US teacher is like there are undoubtedly some truly excellent and successful teachers in the US. However these would never be regarded as successful individual's there because teacher's pay is so low that they never make enough money to become successful by their society's standards. Valuing education and societal contributions over wealth achieves a far better balance because in many respects wealth is its own reward - society does not need to reward wealthy individual further just because they are wealthy.
The people who previously voted for the 3rd place candidate or lower would probably end up giving one of the top two a definitive lead.
That may also be true in other constituencies where the initial vote was not as close. For example candidates A, B and C get 45%, 30% and 25% of the vote respectively but the 25% who voted for C would all prefer B over A. So if only close constituencies get a runoff then you are being incredibly unfair to others. This would also make it incredibly hard to define "close".
The problem as we saw with the "hanging chad' mess is that too many of the voting machines are simply badly designed...
Actually I would argue that it is your elections that are badly designed. I was astounded when my wife showed me the number of things she had to vote for on her postal ballot. In the UK you vote for one thing: who you want to represent your constituency. All other positions are then filled by the government and they are held accountable if they appoint an incompetent idiot. Since (if my wife is anything to go by) nobody has a clue what half the jobs even are (county clerk?) it is ludicrous to think that there is any sort of informed voting going on, especially since the form she had included a "vote all democrat" and "vote all republican" box options. If people cannot be bothered to vote for all these different jobs then it is a clear sign that the system needs fixing.
In the UK (and I believe in Canada too - although I have not yet got my citizenship yet so I can't be sure!) you get a piece of paper with the names of the candidates and a box next to each. The first time I voted they did not even have the party names on the ballot just the candidate names although that has changed. You put an X in the box next to the name. If there is any other mark on the paper or the X goes outside the box then the vote is invalid. Its easy to check yourself when voting and you can show a spoiled ballot to the officials and get another if you mess up. The votes are then counted by hand - usually by local bank clerks - with volunteers from all candidates in the election present to ensure fairness. The system has worked well for a century or so and seems to work far faster with fewer controversies than voting machines. Of course it would not work in the US though unless you can overcome the need to vote for the local dog catcher!
If online teaching gets big and the price per student goes down by 10-100x, this is going to fundamentally disrupt how all university funding works.
I doubt the price per student will drop that much if you want a good quality online course. You still have to fund someone to set and grade exams. I know of no way to do this online securely and even if there was you need to set different questions each time. Then there is providing guidance for students who need help with certain concepts. Both of these have effort which scales with the number of students and then there is the continuous updating of the course material which is more of a chore for online courses since the underlying technology changes rapidly. However this is a once-per-course effort. So for a high quality online course (of comparable quality to a good 'traditional' course) the savings are a lot less than a factor of 10.
As a result I see online technology currently being used to enhance the student experience in introductory, massive enrolment courses. Of course in response to the continuing cutbacks in education (and research) spending it is likely that we will start using online technology to help survive those cuts but I would argue that the cuts are coming regardless of whether or not we use online teaching.
If you lose your student base, you cease being a university.
Who said anything about losing your student base? I'm talking about teaching them differently and probably more efficiently. Just because they will no longer be required to frantically run around campus between lectures, labs and the library does not mean they will stop being students!
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.
Online courses are not a job threat to faculty at research universities. We only spend a fraction of our time teaching and the rest on research and service. If online courses reduced our teaching load this would mean more time for research (which is a motivation for teaching online!). Opposition to online teaching primarily comes from the position that the quality and/or diversity of teaching will suffer. This is not an unreasonable concern.
Personally I am all in favour of online teaching but I think it is still in its infancy and we need better tools before jumping into wholesale online courses. For example a good solution for exams as well as labs needs to be found. My concern is that in the rush to go online important things like quality seem to have been forgotten. There is also the issue of interactivity. For higher level courses it is not enough to just present students with material for them to learn often complicated concepts e.g. Quantum Mechanics, require discussions with students to ensure that they understand. Yes, technically these can be done online but you loose the non-verbal communication and it is frequently the case that I will explain a concept to a student for them to say "yes I understand it now" while their body language indicates far less certainty. I can then either re-explain or test them by asking a question to see whether they really do.
No need to depend on a coin flip or residual randomness: just have a runoff between the two tied candidates.
Why - you already have the votes recount them until you get consistency. This is not some physical measurement which has some inherent uncertainty. In the UK if the votes are within a certain margin the candidates can ask for a recount. I seem to remember in one recent election the vote difference in one constituency was single digits and there were several recounts (in this case demanded by the returning officer) until the result was consistent.
Of course this does mean that you need to be able to count votes quickly. There are no partial results in UK elections - each MP's constituency will only report when all the votes are counted with the first ones reporting within a couple of hours of the close of the polls. While projections of the next government are made early in the evening based on the early reporting constituencies nobody concedes defeat or claims victory until they actually, legally have it i.e. they have won enough MPs to form the next government. It was quite a shock the first time I saw a US election to see that politicians were making decisions on projections of who had won instead of waiting until they actually knew. Perhaps if they did that some effort might be made to increase the speed and accuracy of your counting.
neither portable GPS nor intercoms nor timing devices nor "PCATD-lite" things nor any of the other portable gadgets that go in an aircraft have to be "certified" by the FAA.
I'm curious but the article discusses wiring the "portable" device into buttons on the control stick. If so then at what point does this stop being a portable device? It seems a truly bizarre set of rules that requires certification of any permanently mounted device but will let a mechanic "hack" what is effectively a docking port into the aircraft. Doesn't the docking port need to be certified too because that is not portable and will be hard mounted to the aircraft.
The safety freaks will say people will start going 95-105mph if you raise the speed limit to 85, and people listen to them.
However it is a modern toll road so there is an easy solution: time the entry and exit. If this is faster than allowed by the speed limit then you have a hefty fine added to the toll. Some roads, such as the A14 in the UK, even have average speed limit cameras. They read your number plate as you pass the cameras and, if you exceed the speed limit on average between them, you get a ticket. It really works - I've never seen a road so full of drivers carefully following the speed limit!
What you want is a standard "all rights reserved" copyright, then. NOT CC.
No that is not what I want. I want others to be able to use, copy and expand upon the work. However I do not want some commercial entity to come and stick it in a textbook which they then charge students exorbitant prices for. So no it is not free as in "you can do whatever you want with it" but neither is CC-BY-SA - there are restrictions on having to share and having to attribute. If you want really free just release you work into the public domain if not then you have to accept that you have made a choice to place certain restrictions on your work. Hence it not unreasonable to expect that others will do this albeit with different restrictions.
CC gives you more rights than a standard copyright.
I don't think you have a clue how this works. CC is a license which derives its power from copyright law. It cannot give you more rights than that law allows for.
They are different machines, made to examine different pieces of the universe and by adding the findings we learn more than if we had only one or two accelerators.
Actually in the case of the Tevatron and the LHC that is not true. Once the LHC started up there was very little that the Tevatron could do that the LHC could not do a lot better. The two machines have a huge overlap in their physics programs. I am not sure whether that is true for RHIC as well since I am not a heavy ion guy but it would not surprise me. While it is true that electron-positron colliders have different physics programs we are comparing hadron colliders to other hadron colliders so the overlap is huge.
Typically what happens with older accelerators which lose the "highest energy" crown, and attendant research program, is that they convert into going into extremely high luminosity machines which can be used for neutrino beams and/or high intensity meson or muon beams for precision fixed target experiments. So while it might be tough for the US to lose its accelerators and hand the lead over to Europe just providing funding for the existing accelerators without some program to repurpose them would be an exercise in flag waving and not much to do with science.
If the US wants to compete it needs to build the next generation of machines (e.g. International Linear Collider) or develop serious plans to redevelop existing accelerators to function at the precision frontier....which is a decision I hope it will make. If not there will probably be a slow down in the field while other countries take up the slack but the march of science will continue with, or without, the US in the vanguard.
The recommendations are retarded. 1 in 1,000,000 vs. 3 in 1,000,000 chance of cancer.
Sorry but without statistical and systematic errors those numbers are meaningless and, for all the information presented, could be the same within errors. Even if those were included the incredible rarity and complexity of accounting for all non-circumcision related effects probably mean that there is no meaningful way to determine whether there is a significant difference. For example the US has a far higher circumcision rate than Europe but a lower rate of penile cancer there might be due to any one of a number of as-yet-uninvestigated causes given the differences in lifestyle and diet.
This is part of the problem: the science so far is contradictory and inconclusive. The fact that different medical associations come up with opinions in line with their cultural beliefs is clear evidence of this. However, in general if there is no clear, obvious evidence of a medical benefit to a procedure you would not have it done. If this procedure was not being pushed by two major world religions and the culture of a large first world country there would be no controversy and nobody would be arguing that it should be carried out.
One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?
That is an excellent question and one that directly relates to my use of the 'NC' licence. When releasing educational materials I'm happy with everyone getting to use them for free and sharing them with others but I do not want to see them get incorporated into a text book or used as supporting material for a textbook which publishers are charging students obscene prices for (especially as those prices are one of the primary motivations for making the material in the first place!).
While you might be able to argue that a textbook which incorporates pages of text and/or questions is a derivative work many publishers now offer flexible publishing options where you can pick and choose what chapters and sections of a book are included for your course. In such a case does all the book count as a derivative work or just the sections or chapters where they use CC content adapted to the book?
While the term 'non-commercial' might be ambiguous so is the term 'derivative works' so if ambiguity is an argument to drop the term both should be dropped. Personally I thing the argument for dropping the 'NC' clause is more to do with the author's political persuasions than any other argument given. I think keeping the option to give us a choice is important. Looking at open source there is clear support for both BSD-like and GPL-like licences. What is nice with CC is that it accommodates both camps under one umbrella. If they drop the 'NC' I predict a licence fork to fix the omission.
But limited lifespan because of boredom? I mean, have you *seen* this world we live in?....about to last you thousands of years
Ok, what do you do after 10 thousands years then, or 1 million, 1 billion? Unlimited is longer than you seem to think. The question really becomes will the world produce enough new interesting people/places/things to see to stop you from getting bored. This will depend strongly on how many different things you find interesting. Some people seem to get bored within their current allotment of years others could probably go far longer...but if you live forever it is the rate of production of new things that is the important factor.
Yeah, just keep on fighting in court. After spending the last few years fighting in court.
Yes but that was on the defensive, by suing for defamation of character (which this clearly is if not true) you go on the attack. The accusers now have something to lose and their only defence is to prove that what they are saying is true. If you win then you will get damages and presumably costs from the defendants. In addition if you start suing, and winning - assuming it is not true - accusers will soon stop showing up.
There will certainly be risks of both time and money in defending himself this way but letting these accusations stand unchallenged will tarnish his reputation and damage, if not outright destroy, his income. So is the risk any worse that what will happen without it?
Slashdot Mirror
so U.S. publishers can choose...
What about the rest of the world? If the US publisher of a particular book says 'no' and the British publisher says 'yes' does the book get scanned or not? Does it get scanned but censored in the US? What about books with no US publisher?
US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources.
Really? When did you surrender and become part of Canada then?
We're in London, after all.
Yes, capital of a country which, except for miles and pints, went metric around 1970.
...a lot of education research is barely research, relying as it does on very small sample sizes.
Actually I think the problem with sample size is not really solvable. If you increase the sample size of students you then must typically introduce more instructors. At this point you now have a new sample size problem: the instructor sample. Ironically MOOCs are really good at addressing this: one instructor can teach 160k students which is a large enough sample size that you can divide it randomly into several groups to act as control samples. So while I have strong doubts about the quality of the educational offerings of the current courses they do at least have the tools now to do real, scientifically meaningful, studies on the best way to teach so I have hope for significant improvements over time.
If you are given the answer you can move backwards to fill in gaps in your knowledge, and if you're given the steps you will see exactly what was done and understand why.
I disagree. It is very easy to fool yourself into thinking that you understand something when you have been provided the answer. You may feel that you understand why something is correct - and indeed you may even be right - but that is a dangerous way to learn. Since you already know that the answer provided is correct you can take shortcuts in understanding which are not available to you if you have to come up with the answer yourself.
So no amount of students thrashing around with no closure will help if at the end of the day the instructor-team doesn't produce the right answer.
That "thrashing around" as you put it is extremely educational. If you are the asker you have to think carefully and logically about the problem in order to phrase exactly what it is that you do not understand and for those answering they have to do the same to be able to make a rational argument as to why they are correct. This has been shown to lead to better understanding for everyone involved. In fact it is a recognised teaching technique called "peer instruction".
You do still need an instructor to provide the correct answers and explanation at the end to ensure that everyone knows what the correct answer is but it is not necessary for them to be involved all the time in the discussion. Essentially it boils down to the fact that you learn a lot more if you can reason out for yourself your own answers. The instructor acts more like training wheels to stop you falling over. Eventually, if you become a scientist, you use the same technique - thrashing it out in journals - but since nobody knows the answer there is no instructor to come it and tell you the answer at the end...which is what makes it so much more fun!
...but take any adobe application for instance...
You are missing the point - I explicitly excluded "shrink-wrapped software for the public". While Adobe might be at the upper end of that scale Photoshop etc. is still mass market software where the price is fixed in advanced (unless you are negotiating a site license discount in which case the box price is still an upper bound on cost). "Industrial" software is not limited in that regard e.g. Oracle DB or Blackboard LMS etc. In these cases the software is not made available to the mass market for a fixed price but instead the cost is a negotiation between the seller and purchaser.
The result is something like a drug pushing operation: low initial prices to get you hooked and then a rapid increase because migration is expensive and costly. I make no judgement about whether Open source is better or worse than proprietary simply that with Open Source you know exactly where you stand because companies providing support do so in open competition (or if you are large enough you can just hire programmers to provide your own support). Frankly whether or not open source is cheaper or more expensive depends primarily on how the company selling the proprietary software behaves which, with changing management, is impossible to predict and not under your control. So proprietary software introduces a cost risk which open source does not have so if you want to get me to take that risk you had better have something more than open source to make it worthwhile.
Even if they start successfully predicting individuals careers
That's a very big 'if'. For example in experimental particle physics we publish in large collaborations. My h-index score is better than Dirac's but Dirac was a far greater scientist than I! (and that is just the theory/experiment difference in the same field!) Similarly I have papers in a large variety of journals but so have the majority of us in the field. In fact to accurately assess experimental particle physicists you need to rely more on what they do inside their collaborations than the publishing record so it is hard to see how any system which relies on publication record will work.
Some of the companies I worked for have use proprietary solutions AND save money in the process.
Really? Over the long term? What I have noticed with commercial vs. open source is that initially the commercial software seems a far better deal. They cut you a great price on the licence, support is included and you get very polished software (usually). However when the licence comes up for renewal the price goes up by well over the cost of inflation - but you got a good deal initial so it's still not bad. However after the 3rd of 4th renewal you realize that you are spending far more than you really should be on the software but the cost of migration is large enough that you decide to continue anyway for another 1-2 renewal until your budget literally cannot support the cost anymore and you are forced to switch to something else.
Compare that with Open Source where you purchase support. The company cannot stick up prices well above inflation because there is competition - if they charge too much it is easy to switch to a different company for support. In many ways, and perhaps somewhat ironically, open source seems to produce a far more open market, capitalist system than proprietary. Of course this is for commercial software aimed at institutes/companies, not shrink-wrapped software for the public where personal budgets are far smaller and the price cannot be negotiated with everyone purchasing the software.
...while in the USA the most successful are giving special privilege.
That's not quite true - only the most wealthy are given special privilege because US society defines success as wealth. Regardless of what the average US teacher is like there are undoubtedly some truly excellent and successful teachers in the US. However these would never be regarded as successful individual's there because teacher's pay is so low that they never make enough money to become successful by their society's standards. Valuing education and societal contributions over wealth achieves a far better balance because in many respects wealth is its own reward - society does not need to reward wealthy individual further just because they are wealthy.
Will it be able to cheat? :-)
Given that most of the maths department courses where I work ban the use of all electronic calculation devices it will be cheating by taking the exam.
The people who previously voted for the 3rd place candidate or lower would probably end up giving one of the top two a definitive lead.
That may also be true in other constituencies where the initial vote was not as close. For example candidates A, B and C get 45%, 30% and 25% of the vote respectively but the 25% who voted for C would all prefer B over A. So if only close constituencies get a runoff then you are being incredibly unfair to others. This would also make it incredibly hard to define "close".
The problem as we saw with the "hanging chad' mess is that too many of the voting machines are simply badly designed...
Actually I would argue that it is your elections that are badly designed. I was astounded when my wife showed me the number of things she had to vote for on her postal ballot. In the UK you vote for one thing: who you want to represent your constituency. All other positions are then filled by the government and they are held accountable if they appoint an incompetent idiot. Since (if my wife is anything to go by) nobody has a clue what half the jobs even are (county clerk?) it is ludicrous to think that there is any sort of informed voting going on, especially since the form she had included a "vote all democrat" and "vote all republican" box options. If people cannot be bothered to vote for all these different jobs then it is a clear sign that the system needs fixing.
In the UK (and I believe in Canada too - although I have not yet got my citizenship yet so I can't be sure!) you get a piece of paper with the names of the candidates and a box next to each. The first time I voted they did not even have the party names on the ballot just the candidate names although that has changed. You put an X in the box next to the name. If there is any other mark on the paper or the X goes outside the box then the vote is invalid. Its easy to check yourself when voting and you can show a spoiled ballot to the officials and get another if you mess up. The votes are then counted by hand - usually by local bank clerks - with volunteers from all candidates in the election present to ensure fairness. The system has worked well for a century or so and seems to work far faster with fewer controversies than voting machines. Of course it would not work in the US though unless you can overcome the need to vote for the local dog catcher!
If online teaching gets big and the price per student goes down by 10-100x, this is going to fundamentally disrupt how all university funding works.
I doubt the price per student will drop that much if you want a good quality online course. You still have to fund someone to set and grade exams. I know of no way to do this online securely and even if there was you need to set different questions each time. Then there is providing guidance for students who need help with certain concepts. Both of these have effort which scales with the number of students and then there is the continuous updating of the course material which is more of a chore for online courses since the underlying technology changes rapidly. However this is a once-per-course effort. So for a high quality online course (of comparable quality to a good 'traditional' course) the savings are a lot less than a factor of 10.
As a result I see online technology currently being used to enhance the student experience in introductory, massive enrolment courses. Of course in response to the continuing cutbacks in education (and research) spending it is likely that we will start using online technology to help survive those cuts but I would argue that the cuts are coming regardless of whether or not we use online teaching.
If you lose your student base, you cease being a university.
Who said anything about losing your student base? I'm talking about teaching them differently and probably more efficiently. Just because they will no longer be required to frantically run around campus between lectures, labs and the library does not mean they will stop being students!
Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.
Online courses are not a job threat to faculty at research universities. We only spend a fraction of our time teaching and the rest on research and service. If online courses reduced our teaching load this would mean more time for research (which is a motivation for teaching online!). Opposition to online teaching primarily comes from the position that the quality and/or diversity of teaching will suffer. This is not an unreasonable concern.
Personally I am all in favour of online teaching but I think it is still in its infancy and we need better tools before jumping into wholesale online courses. For example a good solution for exams as well as labs needs to be found. My concern is that in the rush to go online important things like quality seem to have been forgotten. There is also the issue of interactivity. For higher level courses it is not enough to just present students with material for them to learn often complicated concepts e.g. Quantum Mechanics, require discussions with students to ensure that they understand. Yes, technically these can be done online but you loose the non-verbal communication and it is frequently the case that I will explain a concept to a student for them to say "yes I understand it now" while their body language indicates far less certainty. I can then either re-explain or test them by asking a question to see whether they really do.
No need to depend on a coin flip or residual randomness: just have a runoff between the two tied candidates.
Why - you already have the votes recount them until you get consistency. This is not some physical measurement which has some inherent uncertainty. In the UK if the votes are within a certain margin the candidates can ask for a recount. I seem to remember in one recent election the vote difference in one constituency was single digits and there were several recounts (in this case demanded by the returning officer) until the result was consistent.
Of course this does mean that you need to be able to count votes quickly. There are no partial results in UK elections - each MP's constituency will only report when all the votes are counted with the first ones reporting within a couple of hours of the close of the polls. While projections of the next government are made early in the evening based on the early reporting constituencies nobody concedes defeat or claims victory until they actually, legally have it i.e. they have won enough MPs to form the next government. It was quite a shock the first time I saw a US election to see that politicians were making decisions on projections of who had won instead of waiting until they actually knew. Perhaps if they did that some effort might be made to increase the speed and accuracy of your counting.
neither portable GPS nor intercoms nor timing devices nor "PCATD-lite" things nor any of the other portable gadgets that go in an aircraft have to be "certified" by the FAA.
I'm curious but the article discusses wiring the "portable" device into buttons on the control stick. If so then at what point does this stop being a portable device? It seems a truly bizarre set of rules that requires certification of any permanently mounted device but will let a mechanic "hack" what is effectively a docking port into the aircraft. Doesn't the docking port need to be certified too because that is not portable and will be hard mounted to the aircraft.
The safety freaks will say people will start going 95-105mph if you raise the speed limit to 85, and people listen to them.
However it is a modern toll road so there is an easy solution: time the entry and exit. If this is faster than allowed by the speed limit then you have a hefty fine added to the toll. Some roads, such as the A14 in the UK, even have average speed limit cameras. They read your number plate as you pass the cameras and, if you exceed the speed limit on average between them, you get a ticket. It really works - I've never seen a road so full of drivers carefully following the speed limit!
What you want is a standard "all rights reserved" copyright, then. NOT CC.
No that is not what I want. I want others to be able to use, copy and expand upon the work. However I do not want some commercial entity to come and stick it in a textbook which they then charge students exorbitant prices for. So no it is not free as in "you can do whatever you want with it" but neither is CC-BY-SA - there are restrictions on having to share and having to attribute. If you want really free just release you work into the public domain if not then you have to accept that you have made a choice to place certain restrictions on your work. Hence it not unreasonable to expect that others will do this albeit with different restrictions.
CC gives you more rights than a standard copyright.
I don't think you have a clue how this works. CC is a license which derives its power from copyright law. It cannot give you more rights than that law allows for.
They are different machines, made to examine different pieces of the universe and by adding the findings we learn more than if we had only one or two accelerators.
Actually in the case of the Tevatron and the LHC that is not true. Once the LHC started up there was very little that the Tevatron could do that the LHC could not do a lot better. The two machines have a huge overlap in their physics programs. I am not sure whether that is true for RHIC as well since I am not a heavy ion guy but it would not surprise me. While it is true that electron-positron colliders have different physics programs we are comparing hadron colliders to other hadron colliders so the overlap is huge.
Typically what happens with older accelerators which lose the "highest energy" crown, and attendant research program, is that they convert into going into extremely high luminosity machines which can be used for neutrino beams and/or high intensity meson or muon beams for precision fixed target experiments. So while it might be tough for the US to lose its accelerators and hand the lead over to Europe just providing funding for the existing accelerators without some program to repurpose them would be an exercise in flag waving and not much to do with science.
If the US wants to compete it needs to build the next generation of machines (e.g. International Linear Collider) or develop serious plans to redevelop existing accelerators to function at the precision frontier....which is a decision I hope it will make. If not there will probably be a slow down in the field while other countries take up the slack but the march of science will continue with, or without, the US in the vanguard.
The recommendations are retarded. 1 in 1,000,000 vs. 3 in 1,000,000 chance of cancer.
Sorry but without statistical and systematic errors those numbers are meaningless and, for all the information presented, could be the same within errors. Even if those were included the incredible rarity and complexity of accounting for all non-circumcision related effects probably mean that there is no meaningful way to determine whether there is a significant difference. For example the US has a far higher circumcision rate than Europe but a lower rate of penile cancer there might be due to any one of a number of as-yet-uninvestigated causes given the differences in lifestyle and diet.
This is part of the problem: the science so far is contradictory and inconclusive. The fact that different medical associations come up with opinions in line with their cultural beliefs is clear evidence of this. However, in general if there is no clear, obvious evidence of a medical benefit to a procedure you would not have it done. If this procedure was not being pushed by two major world religions and the culture of a large first world country there would be no controversy and nobody would be arguing that it should be carried out.
One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?
That is an excellent question and one that directly relates to my use of the 'NC' licence. When releasing educational materials I'm happy with everyone getting to use them for free and sharing them with others but I do not want to see them get incorporated into a text book or used as supporting material for a textbook which publishers are charging students obscene prices for (especially as those prices are one of the primary motivations for making the material in the first place!).
While you might be able to argue that a textbook which incorporates pages of text and/or questions is a derivative work many publishers now offer flexible publishing options where you can pick and choose what chapters and sections of a book are included for your course. In such a case does all the book count as a derivative work or just the sections or chapters where they use CC content adapted to the book?
While the term 'non-commercial' might be ambiguous so is the term 'derivative works' so if ambiguity is an argument to drop the term both should be dropped. Personally I thing the argument for dropping the 'NC' clause is more to do with the author's political persuasions than any other argument given. I think keeping the option to give us a choice is important. Looking at open source there is clear support for both BSD-like and GPL-like licences. What is nice with CC is that it accommodates both camps under one umbrella. If they drop the 'NC' I predict a licence fork to fix the omission.
But limited lifespan because of boredom? I mean, have you *seen* this world we live in? ....about to last you thousands of years
Ok, what do you do after 10 thousands years then, or 1 million, 1 billion? Unlimited is longer than you seem to think. The question really becomes will the world produce enough new interesting people/places/things to see to stop you from getting bored. This will depend strongly on how many different things you find interesting. Some people seem to get bored within their current allotment of years others could probably go far longer...but if you live forever it is the rate of production of new things that is the important factor.
Yeah, just keep on fighting in court. After spending the last few years fighting in court.
Yes but that was on the defensive, by suing for defamation of character (which this clearly is if not true) you go on the attack. The accusers now have something to lose and their only defence is to prove that what they are saying is true. If you win then you will get damages and presumably costs from the defendants. In addition if you start suing, and winning - assuming it is not true - accusers will soon stop showing up.
There will certainly be risks of both time and money in defending himself this way but letting these accusations stand unchallenged will tarnish his reputation and damage, if not outright destroy, his income. So is the risk any worse that what will happen without it?