I don't know about the original poster but I am not affiliated with the OU nor have I taken any of their courses but I would reiterate the point that they are successful and fulfil a very useful educational niche. I would certainly not rank their degrees as being as good as an established UK university but I would take them as at least equivalent to a degree from the polytechnic-Universities. They have some very clever solutions to the distance problem and actively develop Open Source software - particularly Moodle.
The simulation always works the way it says in the book.
Exactly: supposing the physics in the book happens to be wrong? How are you ever going to discover anything new without doing real experiments? Simulations are a useful educational tool but learning how to do real experiments is essential. If we relied on simulations we would never have discovered relativity or quantum mechanics because every simulation would have been made to agree with Newtonian mechanics.
Perhaps not those things but certainly you should not be allowed to get a physics degree without knowing how to operate an oscilloscope, measure e/m for an electron and perform other classic experiments. All of these require expensive or delicate (or both) equipment that would add thousands of dollars onto a University education.
There are solutions: the Open University in the UK holds lab sessions in local universities. This takes several weeks of the student's time: effectively they do all the lab work at once. However a University education is far more than just sitting in a course and learning about a subject. It's about learning how to take responsibility for your own education, learning how to live your own life away from your parents, learning what subjects really interest you and being exposed to new ideas and different people. You will not get that stuck at home behind your monitor doing online courses!
It is learning all this, as well as your subject, that is what makes university graduates more successful, on average, that those who skip university. Unless you are taking a job training course that is a requirement for a specific career I see little value in these purely, online universities because you miss half of what university teaches you.
...but otherwise you (sic) manager can fire you just because he or she feels like it.
Perhaps in the US this is true but elsewhere many countries have laws that prevent this. They can choose not to renew your contract but otherwise they can only fire you for a valid reasons, like failure to do your job, company downsizing etc. If you sack them without a valid reason you can get sued for unfair dismissal.
In a well run courtroom, the legalese will be reserved for arguing points of law in front of the judge - points that the jury isn't supposed to be concerned with.
Exactly - and what are the jury supposed to be doing while all this legal wrangling is going on then? Just sitting their patiently bored out of their skulls? My guess is that the motivating factor for googling etc. is sheer boredom.
There is not a "huge difference". IANAL but my understanding is that the plaintiff first has to prove that they have been damaged (otherwise there is no libel) but that a defence against this is that it is the truth. It is hard to argue that it is not a writer's responsibility to ensure that what they write is the truth if they are passing it off as fact. If they are not sure that they can prove it then they can always qualify statements with things like: "it is my opinion that this is bogus science". If it makes journalists more careful write accurately and differentiate between their opinions and fact then isn't that a good thing? Sure a few idiots may cause trouble like this but it is hard to imagine that they will win and I'd rather have that than give journalists free reign to write what they like and only get sued if you can prove they were lying.
Having said that I certainly think that Chiropractic treatments are bogus and I hope Singh wins - especially since we both got our PhDs from the same research group, though his was a few years before mine. However that is my opinion and not based on careful research.
How do you verify a police report? Should amazon then call to verify the report is really over a kindle?
The police report should be required to list the kindle as one of the stolen items. If someone fakes a police report they will get into trouble which should be enough of a deterrent for common pranks. It won't stop more serious attempts but there should be far fewer of those.
I know this is Slashdot so you are not expected to have RTFA but could you at least read the summary?
After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his account so that nobody could charge books to his credit card.
They did not stop him unlinking the device from his finances which is something they should be (and probably are) required to do. Beyond that it might be nice if they helped him further but there is certainly no responsibility for them to do so.
If there's an issue with whoever wants to use it, it's between the other user and him, not him and Amazon.
Supposing it happened the other way around. He left his Kindle in a coffee shop and the person who found it, rather than steal it, decided to note down the serial number and call Amazon to have the Kindle bricked as a mean-spirited prank. Amazon should require some level of "proof" of theft but a police report of the device being stolen should be enough to discourage any prank calls since falsifying one will land you in trouble. They should not need direct police involvement and a court subpoena.
how would you prove the device was really stolen an no sold used
You do what they do for passports: you require a police record indicating that you have reported it stolen. That way if the person you track down did not steal it the person who lied to you can end up in hot water for lying to the police, wasting police time etc. plus you have a reasonable defence.
Of course the better way to do it is the way that Apple does with the iPhone: you let the user trace their own device without company intervention. That way the end-user is directly responsible provided that the mechanism is appropriately secure.
GPS will almost completely replace maps and mapreading skills, as it is easier, safer, and more convenient.
Easier and more convenient yes, but safer?. I am less convinced of that. There was even one idiot who got as far as the cliff and since the track was so narrow got one wheel of their car over the edge. The problem is that some people blindly trust the GPS over their own common sense and it can lead these idiots into dangerous situations. Arguably perhaps not a significant loss to the gene pool but nevertheless if they were constrained to reading a map they might not make it to the end of their driveway and so be a lot safer.
...at least you only get sunburnt up top. The rest of us have to contend with the dangers of electric shocks on a sunny day. It's amazing that nobody has died yet.
Social engineering. They want to change the way in which we understand data.
If that is the case then they are doomed to failure. A basic understanding of how easy it is to copy data is now ingrained in just about everyone: both by 70 year old parents and my 4 year old son understand it. They can restrict that copying - which is exactly what this is - but it will be an artificial technological restriction placed on the data. The only time that those are successful are when the public at large do not know that this is what is being done and so accept it as a technological limitation. Without that acceptance it will either get cracked or will cause the product to fail e.g Sony Minidisc.
So as distribution costs for data approach zero...
The problem isn't entirely that the distribution costs have reduced it is that the manner of distribution has radically changed. Instead of buying prefilled packets of data we now just hook up to the net and download what we want. The media companies are like battery manufacturers in a world that has just discovered power transmission lines. Even if buying batteries were as cheap as electricity from the mains why would anyone want to be continuously shovelling batteries into all their appliances?
The more matter that is added to it the larger the gravitational/financial attraction.
The laws governing each of them are so complex that nobody quite understands how either works.
When an object falls into a Black Hole you never see it cross the event horizon because time slows down the closer it gets to it. When an object falls under copyright you never quite see it leave copyright because as it nears the exit horizon the term gets extended.
A Black Hole is the corpse of a star that once shone brightly and warmed any planets that it supported. Copyright Law is the corpse of an idea that once warmed the culture that it created it.
There are lots of things that you can do of Earth that you cannot do on Mars - breathe being the most obvious. Mars also has far more useful resources for a colony than the Moon - water and an atmosphere being the two obvious ones. This means that you don't need buildings that have to be quite as strong, you have some protection from solar radiation and you might be able to engineer organisms to live in it. You can't do that on the Moon.
You can simulate some of these conditions on Earth but never perfectly and certainly never psychologically.
They could be accused of poor judgement only if there is a real danger from AM transmissions. The fact that there is no such danger means that they are guilty of gross ignorance, not lack of judgment.
If the effect of the pressure difference is negligible then how can there be a difference between zero-g and normal-g? i.e. why do the cells divide in one case and not the other? The only physical difference is the pressure difference so, somehow, this must cause the effect they claim to observe.
My point is that gravity is insignificant if you're in free-fall (weightless).
Do you know what weight is? Weight is the gravitational force acting on a body. You CANNOT be weightless in free-fall because otherwise you would not be falling! Yes - I know the common description given by astronauts in orbit is that they are "weightless" but that is factually incorrect - it is actually called apparent weightlessnes. You cannot argue that gravity is "insignificant" in freefall and "significant" when standing on the ground because it has not changed! I know that biologists find physics hard but when a physicist is trying to explain physics to you would you at least do the courtesy of not trying to tell him that he is wrong and that, just maybe, the problem lies in you not understanding the physics?
That's the point. It causes no discernible effect.
Acceleration is a discernable effect. Very discernable in fact.
...and how can we develop that technology if we don't have an initial colony to find out want works and what does not? It is completely unrealistic to expect the first mission to Mars to include a fully functional self-sustaining colony when we have never done that before.
NO! That is NOT a threat at all. Where do you think all the carbon that we are releasing came from? It was originally in the atmosphere where it was captured by living organisms and converted into limestone or fossil fuels. Hence, even if we burnt ALL the fossil fuel on the planet we would never produce a runaway greenhouse effect - in fact there would still be less CO2 in the past because of that which remains trapped in limestone.
The danger with the greenhouse effect is that the change to the climate may reduce the number of humans that the planet can support leading to famine, floods and probably wars. It will not - directly - lead to humanities extinction.
First of all, if you're not experiencing the usual normal force, you're not being affected. That was sort of my point.
...and your point is wrong! You ARE being affected by gravity, your are not being affected by a normal force. The only way you can stop being affected by gravity is to go a long, long way from the Earth and any other mass.
Secondly, you can't claim we feel one force and not the other.
Yes I can because what we feel is not the same as what is there. What we feel are pressure differences. Since the force of gravity is proportional to mass it generates a uniform acceleration over the entire body hence no pressure difference and no feeling. The normal force acts on your backside and then has to be transmitted throughout your body. The force on your backside has to support all of you, the force at the base of your neck only has to support your head and so is far less. This produces a pressure difference and so we feel a force. This effect is why water pressure increases in the ocean with increasing depth.
So, although two forces are acting on us we only feel one of them because the normal force acts on only a small area of our skin whereas gravity acts on every particle of our body. This does NOT mean that gravity does not act on us it just means that we do not feel it. Just like we do not feel atmospheric pressure which is exerting a huge force on the outside of our bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the original poster but I am not affiliated with the OU nor have I taken any of their courses but I would reiterate the point that they are successful and fulfil a very useful educational niche. I would certainly not rank their degrees as being as good as an established UK university but I would take them as at least equivalent to a degree from the polytechnic-Universities. They have some very clever solutions to the distance problem and actively develop Open Source software - particularly Moodle.
The simulation always works the way it says in the book.
Exactly: supposing the physics in the book happens to be wrong? How are you ever going to discover anything new without doing real experiments? Simulations are a useful educational tool but learning how to do real experiments is essential. If we relied on simulations we would never have discovered relativity or quantum mechanics because every simulation would have been made to agree with Newtonian mechanics.
And how many undergrad classes use those things?
Perhaps not those things but certainly you should not be allowed to get a physics degree without knowing how to operate an oscilloscope, measure e/m for an electron and perform other classic experiments. All of these require expensive or delicate (or both) equipment that would add thousands of dollars onto a University education.
There are solutions: the Open University in the UK holds lab sessions in local universities. This takes several weeks of the student's time: effectively they do all the lab work at once. However a University education is far more than just sitting in a course and learning about a subject. It's about learning how to take responsibility for your own education, learning how to live your own life away from your parents, learning what subjects really interest you and being exposed to new ideas and different people. You will not get that stuck at home behind your monitor doing online courses!
It is learning all this, as well as your subject, that is what makes university graduates more successful, on average, that those who skip university. Unless you are taking a job training course that is a requirement for a specific career I see little value in these purely, online universities because you miss half of what university teaches you.
...but otherwise you (sic) manager can fire you just because he or she feels like it.
Perhaps in the US this is true but elsewhere many countries have laws that prevent this. They can choose not to renew your contract but otherwise they can only fire you for a valid reasons, like failure to do your job, company downsizing etc. If you sack them without a valid reason you can get sued for unfair dismissal.
...to be tried by other Lords rather than by whomsoever it pleased the King to appoint.
In a well run courtroom, the legalese will be reserved for arguing points of law in front of the judge - points that the jury isn't supposed to be concerned with.
Exactly - and what are the jury supposed to be doing while all this legal wrangling is going on then? Just sitting their patiently bored out of their skulls? My guess is that the motivating factor for googling etc. is sheer boredom.
Not if the first two digits are zeroes.
Why the huge difference for libel?
There is not a "huge difference". IANAL but my understanding is that the plaintiff first has to prove that they have been damaged (otherwise there is no libel) but that a defence against this is that it is the truth. It is hard to argue that it is not a writer's responsibility to ensure that what they write is the truth if they are passing it off as fact. If they are not sure that they can prove it then they can always qualify statements with things like: "it is my opinion that this is bogus science". If it makes journalists more careful write accurately and differentiate between their opinions and fact then isn't that a good thing? Sure a few idiots may cause trouble like this but it is hard to imagine that they will win and I'd rather have that than give journalists free reign to write what they like and only get sued if you can prove they were lying.
Having said that I certainly think that Chiropractic treatments are bogus and I hope Singh wins - especially since we both got our PhDs from the same research group, though his was a few years before mine. However that is my opinion and not based on careful research.
How do you verify a police report? Should amazon then call to verify the report is really over a kindle?
The police report should be required to list the kindle as one of the stolen items. If someone fakes a police report they will get into trouble which should be enough of a deterrent for common pranks. It won't stop more serious attempts but there should be far fewer of those.
After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his account so that nobody could charge books to his credit card.
They did not stop him unlinking the device from his finances which is something they should be (and probably are) required to do. Beyond that it might be nice if they helped him further but there is certainly no responsibility for them to do so.
If there's an issue with whoever wants to use it, it's between the other user and him, not him and Amazon.
Supposing it happened the other way around. He left his Kindle in a coffee shop and the person who found it, rather than steal it, decided to note down the serial number and call Amazon to have the Kindle bricked as a mean-spirited prank. Amazon should require some level of "proof" of theft but a police report of the device being stolen should be enough to discourage any prank calls since falsifying one will land you in trouble. They should not need direct police involvement and a court subpoena.
how would you prove the device was really stolen an no sold used
You do what they do for passports: you require a police record indicating that you have reported it stolen. That way if the person you track down did not steal it the person who lied to you can end up in hot water for lying to the police, wasting police time etc. plus you have a reasonable defence.
Of course the better way to do it is the way that Apple does with the iPhone: you let the user trace their own device without company intervention. That way the end-user is directly responsible provided that the mechanism is appropriately secure.
GPS will almost completely replace maps and mapreading skills, as it is easier, safer, and more convenient.
Easier and more convenient yes, but safer?. I am less convinced of that. There was even one idiot who got as far as the cliff and since the track was so narrow got one wheel of their car over the edge. The problem is that some people blindly trust the GPS over their own common sense and it can lead these idiots into dangerous situations. Arguably perhaps not a significant loss to the gene pool but nevertheless if they were constrained to reading a map they might not make it to the end of their driveway and so be a lot safer.
(4) It's an article in the Daily Mail.
...at least you only get sunburnt up top. The rest of us have to contend with the dangers of electric shocks on a sunny day. It's amazing that nobody has died yet.
Social engineering. They want to change the way in which we understand data.
If that is the case then they are doomed to failure. A basic understanding of how easy it is to copy data is now ingrained in just about everyone: both by 70 year old parents and my 4 year old son understand it. They can restrict that copying - which is exactly what this is - but it will be an artificial technological restriction placed on the data. The only time that those are successful are when the public at large do not know that this is what is being done and so accept it as a technological limitation. Without that acceptance it will either get cracked or will cause the product to fail e.g Sony Minidisc.
So as distribution costs for data approach zero...
The problem isn't entirely that the distribution costs have reduced it is that the manner of distribution has radically changed. Instead of buying prefilled packets of data we now just hook up to the net and download what we want. The media companies are like battery manufacturers in a world that has just discovered power transmission lines. Even if buying batteries were as cheap as electricity from the mains why would anyone want to be continuously shovelling batteries into all their appliances?
Wow, copyright law really is a Black Hole!
There are lots of things that you can do of Earth that you cannot do on Mars - breathe being the most obvious. Mars also has far more useful resources for a colony than the Moon - water and an atmosphere being the two obvious ones. This means that you don't need buildings that have to be quite as strong, you have some protection from solar radiation and you might be able to engineer organisms to live in it. You can't do that on the Moon.
You can simulate some of these conditions on Earth but never perfectly and certainly never psychologically.
They could be accused of poor judgement only if there is a real danger from AM transmissions. The fact that there is no such danger means that they are guilty of gross ignorance, not lack of judgment.
I thought a lot of eco-terrorists were rich bored college students.
If that applies to this lot then they should demand a refund on their tuition because they clearly aren't well educated!
If the effect of the pressure difference is negligible then how can there be a difference between zero-g and normal-g? i.e. why do the cells divide in one case and not the other? The only physical difference is the pressure difference so, somehow, this must cause the effect they claim to observe.
My point is that gravity is insignificant if you're in free-fall (weightless).
Do you know what weight is? Weight is the gravitational force acting on a body. You CANNOT be weightless in free-fall because otherwise you would not be falling! Yes - I know the common description given by astronauts in orbit is that they are "weightless" but that is factually incorrect - it is actually called apparent weightlessnes. You cannot argue that gravity is "insignificant" in freefall and "significant" when standing on the ground because it has not changed! I know that biologists find physics hard but when a physicist is trying to explain physics to you would you at least do the courtesy of not trying to tell him that he is wrong and that, just maybe, the problem lies in you not understanding the physics?
That's the point. It causes no discernible effect.
Acceleration is a discernable effect. Very discernable in fact.
...and how can we develop that technology if we don't have an initial colony to find out want works and what does not? It is completely unrealistic to expect the first mission to Mars to include a fully functional self-sustaining colony when we have never done that before.
Run-away greenhouse effect.
NO! That is NOT a threat at all. Where do you think all the carbon that we are releasing came from? It was originally in the atmosphere where it was captured by living organisms and converted into limestone or fossil fuels. Hence, even if we burnt ALL the fossil fuel on the planet we would never produce a runaway greenhouse effect - in fact there would still be less CO2 in the past because of that which remains trapped in limestone.
The danger with the greenhouse effect is that the change to the climate may reduce the number of humans that the planet can support leading to famine, floods and probably wars. It will not - directly - lead to humanities extinction.
First of all, if you're not experiencing the usual normal force, you're not being affected. That was sort of my point.
Secondly, you can't claim we feel one force and not the other.
Yes I can because what we feel is not the same as what is there. What we feel are pressure differences. Since the force of gravity is proportional to mass it generates a uniform acceleration over the entire body hence no pressure difference and no feeling. The normal force acts on your backside and then has to be transmitted throughout your body. The force on your backside has to support all of you, the force at the base of your neck only has to support your head and so is far less. This produces a pressure difference and so we feel a force. This effect is why water pressure increases in the ocean with increasing depth.
So, although two forces are acting on us we only feel one of them because the normal force acts on only a small area of our skin whereas gravity acts on every particle of our body. This does NOT mean that gravity does not act on us it just means that we do not feel it. Just like we do not feel atmospheric pressure which is exerting a huge force on the outside of our bodies.