Evolution is still happening. We have plenty of geological evidence of that as well.
No we don't - we actually have recorded documentation written by humans that evolution is still occurring. The geological record is not accurate at anything close to that resolution. However the process is slow enough that I strongly suspect that we will still be 'humans' no matter how different we end up from what we are now and that our species will be the one renamed as "primitive human".
As for health care costs spiraling out of control, you honestly don't think that's because of out of control insurance, lawsuits, and top-heavy bureaucracy?
Yes, it is because of that too. The medical industry could certainly be more efficient. However the cost to develop and test a new drug is huge and increasing (and not just because of inefficient bureaucracy). If you strip away the bureaucracy you will still have an underlying problem of increasing costs.
We are putting far more money into applying existing technology to medicine (and other fields) than we are in the fundamental science which drives the whole machinery. This means that each new development is a more complex, hard to achieve application of technology we those we already have. You can solve the bureaucracy problem but you cannot solve the underlying problem it obscures without investing in fundamental science.
Really? No wonder you believe the space age nonsense, you've left the planet years ago!
600 years ago you would also have been saying that it was a waste of time to build ocean going vessels and that clearly people who thought it was a good idea had "left the continent already"? I hope even you can see that this was not a waste of time. We clearly do not have the technology yet to go into space in any meaningful fashion but the resources out there mean that we should certainly aim to develop it. As for the need to spread to another planet to maintain our species I'm not the only one with that view but you may have a harder time dismissing his opinion as clearly nonsense.
I dream about the leisure society with basic income and healthcare for all, because we already have the technology and resources to do so. But that makes no sense, we'll live on Mars, that makes sense.
Actually it does make sense to live on some other planet, and eventually other solar system. If an extinction level event occurs on the Earth (and our geological record contains several of these) humans will survive and then there is the longer term problem of the death of the sun but we have quite a while before we need to worry about that.
I would also dispute that we have the technology to provide basic income and healthcare for all. Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control everywhere...partly because of the huge money going into medical research at the expense of other science. As for a basic, living income for all that requires some of us to work to support others who may just choose not to work. I don't think you will get many people signing up for that. The only way I see that changing is that we develop automated technology to provide the resources people need to live comfortably and have healthcare with minimal effort by others. If you want a vision of that then there are the Culture novels by Iain Banks.
If your mum isn't keen on letting you explore history for fun, homeschooling is very wrong for that family.
I did not say that the parent would deny the child the choice - I was very careful to ask whether the parent have a subtle influence on the child's choices e.g. by not being knowledgeable and/or keen about certain subjects.
It's very easy, there are lots of companies that can help put together a very detailed curriculum to follow, which you can use as a core - some also offer testing to make sure you are on track.
Sorry but I regularly look at the educational output of companies at the university level in the form of text books. They often have typos, inaccuracies, errors and/or examples of author bias and this problem gets worse for newer and smaller market materials. If you are blindly trusting the educational materials from a company you are in dangerous territory.
Countless studies show that 1:1 learning
If there are that many studies where are the papers? You keep going on about 'studies' and have not backed this up. I would agree with you may see a spin against homeschooling...just as you may also see a spin for it. Hence my point that I prefer to look at the studies directly and draw my own conclusions rather than trust what someone trying to push their own opinion has to say.
No, it's far better because someone is dedicated to helping you figure out what you need to know
..from someone who may also be desperately trying to figure out what you need to know at the same time. This seems to be a spectacularly good example of the blind leading the blind. It is remarkably easy to think that you understand something until you meet someone who actually does understand it: I've seen this countless times with grad students.
...it teaches you how start from not understanding something to the end goal of understanding a specific topic.
You've just described learning in general. The skill that you need to learn is how to go about understanding and learning something by yourself without having it spoon fed to you. Having someone provide 1:1 teaching does not seem like a particularly good way to go about that.
Of if we do, please televise the battles so that people can choose which side they belong to.
I take it you've not heard of Fox News then? Although sometimes they do switch it around and fight stupidity with ignorance. Best watched in very small doses though.
If you are going to make that daft argument then all babies only have one parent since each parent normally only contributes 50% of the DNA. Please let's not start fighting ignorance with stupidity.
That is *exactly* the most compelling thing about homeschooling. You usually have very little choice...
That's the problem though. Who is this 'you': the parent or the child? I strongly suspect the former either directly or by subtle influence e.g. I'd better not choose history because mum thinks it is a waste of time or because mum knows nothing about it and so the lessons are boring etc.
A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids.
Pretty much any external test says yes, in fact it is.
Are these papers that you have looked at or is this just the usual education spin machine? I've stopped trusting any educational claims that are not backed up by papers I can read because half the time the results of those papers are misrepresented, not relevant to the given situation and/or heavily biased. For example do they compare similar cultural backgrounds? Do they normalize for intelligence by measuring improvement instead of absolute performance? Do they understand statistics? (you'd be amazed how 1 sigma deviations can get claimed as "evidence") etc. etc. It is very hard to accurately measure teaching.
Real teaching is not learning how to force kids to regurgitate facts, which is what public school teachers are by and large trained to do.
Not in Canada they aren't. If anything there is far too little learning of facts are far too much of the "discovery learning" approach. Your description of the state school system is nothing like the one we have...having said that I'm not at all happy with the system we have but I'd still rank it as far better than home schooling.
Real teaching is also about drawing up a good curriculum
...and how are you going to do this if you have no education of your own to rely on? Home would you know to teaching standing waves in physics because they are really important for quantum mechanics later if you have no clue about quantum mechanics? Even if you have a list of topics to choose from is not going to help you. Worse if you don't know e.g. physics yourself how are you going to teach it? You cannot teach what you do not know. This can indeed be a problem with state schools too but it is far, far worse with home schooling.
I'd second this. You have to remember that at some point your kids are going to leave home (you hope) and have to make decisions for themselves about their own education at university and parents can no longer be involved. Indeed this seems to come as a shock for some parents (fortunately very few) when they either call me up or try to visit to discuss their kids performance at university and I have to tell them that privacy laws forbid me from discussing anything about their son or daughter's performance with them. School is a nice way to get both the kid and the parent used to this fact so when they do go to university the gap is not so large.
A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids. I'm sure that you can cram facts into their heads but, as a university prof who has seen students from foreign countries where rote learning is de rigour, this does not turn out well at university when they are required to understand and apply knowledge rather than just regurgitate it. In addition there is the benefit of exposing them to different teacher's points of views and interests: your kids are not you and they need to find out what they like.
Lastly I'd also question whether your wife is really capable of home schooling at all. At school all the teachers have managed to get a degree in something plus training as teachers. Your wife is clearly not well educated and lacks any training in teaching young kids: there is a very good reason why school teachers require special training in educational techniques while university professor do not. Kid's minds do not function the same way as adult's and you need to take account of this to be an effective school teacher, particularly for primary school kids.
That's very clearly the case. We used to have a really useful and highly effective vaccine that gave protection against the root cause of the problem we are discussing here: ignorance. The vaccine was education. Sadly as this has been watered down it has become less effective with the result that we now see increasing outbreaks of ignorance worldwide resulting in new symptoms such as intelligent design and not having your kids vaccinated as well as some old symptoms, like astrology, re-emerging.
Sadly governments have not responded to this by once again strengthening the vaccine, education, that has protected us for so long. Instead they seem to prefer to treat each individual symptom of the disease by passing laws. This is simply not going to work: already new strains of ignorance, such as intelligent design, have proven remarkably resistant to this treatment and have started to attack the education vaccine directly weakening its effectiveness further.
If you don't want to vaccinate your kids you can do that, but maybe you shouldn't be allowed to send those kids to public school.
The problem with that is that you really need the kids of idiots who don't vaccinate to get an education to stop the ignorance spreading. If you keep them out of school then they will end up even more ignorant than their parents and things will rapidly spiral downhill from there one they get to vote.
This is clearly aimed at companies abusing the "Double Irish" system.
Probably but I don't see how it will work. What is to stop companies registering themselves elsewhere so that they are no longer US companies and then only their US operations will get taxed? Even if this strategy does not work they have an army of lawyers using the legal system of every country in the world to figure out workarounds that will work.
Different matter distributions == a universe in which said parallel universe which is inherently different than what we see around us.
I think there is some confusion over what "parallel" universe means. This is generally taken to be a universe which has been an exact parallel of our own universe up to some point after which it diverges i.e. everything is the same up to some point in time. In the quantum multiverse interpretation of QM this happens for each possible result of collapsing the wave function.
I've never heard of this ever being associated with multiple 'universes' from inflation because QM requires that the universes interact before they separate (this is how it explains the self interference of a single particle) whereas inflation requires that the universes be causally disconnected after their creation i.e. inflationary universes are just different universes, not parallel ones. So I think the author of the article got himself rather confused.
Interesting. I was confused by this since I was taught as a kid that The Hague was the capital of the Netherlands and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, that is still where the government sits even though it seems that Dutch law defines Amsterdam as the capital (which was something I'd never heard of until today). So apparently at least in the UK we used to be taught based on the definition of capital, i.e. where the ruling government presides, and not whatever local laws would like to call a capital.
then it is more probable our data point falls around the middle
My point is though that without knowing the width of that distribution you have no idea how wide the 'middle' is: if your average time to evolve intelligence is 30+/-20 billion years we are still well within 2 sigma from the mean. This could make intelligent life sufficiently rare so that we could easily be the first in our galaxy given the age of the universe. With billions of galaxies there could still be more advanced intelligent life in a galaxy far, far away but we would never know about them.
An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.
Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.
Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).
you have to wonder why anyone would put any stock in it.
Especially given that they now track global warming. Nuclear war is a doomsday scenario but global warming is most certainly not. It may cause economic hardship and the displacement of populations as sea levels rise plus the need to alter crops etc. but it is not going to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Since the clock is supposedly set by scientists if they can be so wrong about something scientific then I have little faith they can predict the likelihood of nuclear war either given that this depends on politics.
Fortunately the US is likely to tell Cameron to fuck off, since it would be unconstitutional to ban encryption...
Just like it is unconstitutional to torture prisoners etc. etc.? I expect that you are right in that they will deny his request but the reason will be because it is the request of a foreign power. I also expect that many US politicians will think that it sounds like an excellent idea and after a suitable period so that they can claim it is their own idea there will be an American lead initiative to do the same thing. Why would they listen to some idiotic right wing UK politician when they have plenty of their own to choose from?
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules.
True but there needs to be some definition of what counts as 'we' when it comes to changing the rules. A few ignorant kids posting comments on Twitter and Facebook showing they have no clue what 'literally' means should not be enough to get the meaning changed in a dictionary. Indeed I would guess the way that most people saw the 'new' meaning was through reposts with a comment to the effect of "look what this idiot wrote".
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK. But it's simple in the US.
No, what constitutes a forest is simple everywhere. It is just defined as...er... a...um... ok who who thought dropping 'forest' from the dictionary was a good idea?
C++ might be a well known language but it is generally never though of as a script language. However if you are curious you can have a look at ROOT C++ or as some of us like to call it C+/-...because it is only C++ to within some (wide) margin of error.
The first nuclear bomb test heated a volume of atmosphere to higher temperatures, and reached higher pressures, than any similar volume of atmosphere in the entirety of Earth's history, by natural or artificial means.
What about a meteorite impact? The shockwave from a sufficiently large one (and there is plenty of evidence of these) would presumably be very similar to that of a nuclear device. While the energy density at the core of the explosion might be less than a nuclear bomb presumably it is the shockwave heating which you need to generate the chain reaction since this will create high temperature and pressures rather than just temperature? I'm not a plasma physicist though...
Why should they? When the banking secret was killed by the EU, the banks did not threaten to go elsewhere.
There is a large difference (of almost 400 million people) between the EU and the UK. Large businesses cannot afford to pull out of the EU, much like they cannot afford to pull out of the US. However I imagine they would be far less adverse to moving their HQ from London to Frankfurt, Dublin or some other non-UK, EU location.
The other thing I wondered about is the different expectations. If your instructor still thinks myspace is where the cool kids hangout....
Well having grown up in the UK and been to computer lessons in school (in the 1980s) I'd say that my expectations were that the teachers knew the subject material. When it came to maths, physics, chemistry etc. the teachers I had really knew their stuff and I learnt a heck of a lot from them but with computing it was far more variable.
I almost got into real trouble in one class using BBC Micros. We were told to write a program to add two numbers together which was incredibly trivial so, having the same computer at home, I thought I'd do the assignment in a more challenging way and teach myself assembly to add the numbers using the 'Advanced User Guide' which they had at school but I'd not got at home. I ran into some problems (you had to loop the assembly code through the parser twice to compile it) and when I asked for help and she saw the code she threw a fit. I was threatened with detention for not doing the assignment etc. etc. despite my protestations and explanation.
Fortunately the senior computing teacher walked in before anything got set in stone and she got him to come over to show him how badly I'd been behaving. His response was 'leave him to me' at which point he sat down and proceeded to show me what I was missing and then set me the challenge to figure out how to add two numbers which gave an answer greater than 255 (since it was an 8-bit machine) and how to store negative numbers using 2's complement. I learnt more computing in the 10 minutes he spent with me during one of his free periods than I learnt in the entire rest of the term with the idiot we had who was supposed to be teaching us.
So this is hardly a new problem. Teachers have a duty to make sure that the know what they are teaching and, worse, if their reaction to someone who may know more than they do is anger and hostility then they really have no business at all being a teacher at all. Who cares what they think about "fashion" - that's only relevant to education when it comes to engagement and sometimes being hopelessly out of date can be more engaging than being up to date.
This is why it will fail. Not because it would destroy everyone's privacy but because it will destroy the privacy of large, international companies. They will threaten to move out of the UK, the tories will panic and the bill will disappear until the idiot in charge forgets again and attempts to resurrect it for a third time in a couple of years from now (assuming he survives the general election).
Let's hope he means "the authorities" and not "the government" since the government consists of MPs and if they have to be able to read it they will probably need to outlaw words with more than 3 syllables and writing something in a language other than English will count as use of advanced encryption.
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Evolution is still happening. We have plenty of geological evidence of that as well.
No we don't - we actually have recorded documentation written by humans that evolution is still occurring. The geological record is not accurate at anything close to that resolution. However the process is slow enough that I strongly suspect that we will still be 'humans' no matter how different we end up from what we are now and that our species will be the one renamed as "primitive human".
As for health care costs spiraling out of control, you honestly don't think that's because of out of control insurance, lawsuits, and top-heavy bureaucracy?
Yes, it is because of that too. The medical industry could certainly be more efficient. However the cost to develop and test a new drug is huge and increasing (and not just because of inefficient bureaucracy). If you strip away the bureaucracy you will still have an underlying problem of increasing costs.
We are putting far more money into applying existing technology to medicine (and other fields) than we are in the fundamental science which drives the whole machinery. This means that each new development is a more complex, hard to achieve application of technology we those we already have. You can solve the bureaucracy problem but you cannot solve the underlying problem it obscures without investing in fundamental science.
Really? No wonder you believe the space age nonsense, you've left the planet years ago!
600 years ago you would also have been saying that it was a waste of time to build ocean going vessels and that clearly people who thought it was a good idea had "left the continent already"? I hope even you can see that this was not a waste of time. We clearly do not have the technology yet to go into space in any meaningful fashion but the resources out there mean that we should certainly aim to develop it. As for the need to spread to another planet to maintain our species I'm not the only one with that view but you may have a harder time dismissing his opinion as clearly nonsense.
I dream about the leisure society with basic income and healthcare for all, because we already have the technology and resources to do so. But that makes no sense, we'll live on Mars, that makes sense.
Actually it does make sense to live on some other planet, and eventually other solar system. If an extinction level event occurs on the Earth (and our geological record contains several of these) humans will survive and then there is the longer term problem of the death of the sun but we have quite a while before we need to worry about that.
I would also dispute that we have the technology to provide basic income and healthcare for all. Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control everywhere...partly because of the huge money going into medical research at the expense of other science. As for a basic, living income for all that requires some of us to work to support others who may just choose not to work. I don't think you will get many people signing up for that. The only way I see that changing is that we develop automated technology to provide the resources people need to live comfortably and have healthcare with minimal effort by others. If you want a vision of that then there are the Culture novels by Iain Banks.
Why is the government deciding the requirements for entering degree programs not the respective university?
It's the child of course.
Nice theory. I'm talking about practice.
If your mum isn't keen on letting you explore history for fun, homeschooling is very wrong for that family.
I did not say that the parent would deny the child the choice - I was very careful to ask whether the parent have a subtle influence on the child's choices e.g. by not being knowledgeable and/or keen about certain subjects.
It's very easy, there are lots of companies that can help put together a very detailed curriculum to follow, which you can use as a core - some also offer testing to make sure you are on track.
Sorry but I regularly look at the educational output of companies at the university level in the form of text books. They often have typos, inaccuracies, errors and/or examples of author bias and this problem gets worse for newer and smaller market materials. If you are blindly trusting the educational materials from a company you are in dangerous territory.
Countless studies show that 1:1 learning
If there are that many studies where are the papers? You keep going on about 'studies' and have not backed this up. I would agree with you may see a spin against homeschooling...just as you may also see a spin for it. Hence my point that I prefer to look at the studies directly and draw my own conclusions rather than trust what someone trying to push their own opinion has to say.
No, it's far better because someone is dedicated to helping you figure out what you need to know
You've just described learning in general. The skill that you need to learn is how to go about understanding and learning something by yourself without having it spoon fed to you. Having someone provide 1:1 teaching does not seem like a particularly good way to go about that.
Of if we do, please televise the battles so that people can choose which side they belong to.
I take it you've not heard of Fox News then? Although sometimes they do switch it around and fight stupidity with ignorance. Best watched in very small doses though.
If you are going to make that daft argument then all babies only have one parent since each parent normally only contributes 50% of the DNA. Please let's not start fighting ignorance with stupidity.
That is *exactly* the most compelling thing about homeschooling. You usually have very little choice...
That's the problem though. Who is this 'you': the parent or the child? I strongly suspect the former either directly or by subtle influence e.g. I'd better not choose history because mum thinks it is a waste of time or because mum knows nothing about it and so the lessons are boring etc.
A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids.
Pretty much any external test says yes, in fact it is.
Are these papers that you have looked at or is this just the usual education spin machine? I've stopped trusting any educational claims that are not backed up by papers I can read because half the time the results of those papers are misrepresented, not relevant to the given situation and/or heavily biased. For example do they compare similar cultural backgrounds? Do they normalize for intelligence by measuring improvement instead of absolute performance? Do they understand statistics? (you'd be amazed how 1 sigma deviations can get claimed as "evidence") etc. etc. It is very hard to accurately measure teaching.
Real teaching is not learning how to force kids to regurgitate facts, which is what public school teachers are by and large trained to do.
Not in Canada they aren't. If anything there is far too little learning of facts are far too much of the "discovery learning" approach. Your description of the state school system is nothing like the one we have...having said that I'm not at all happy with the system we have but I'd still rank it as far better than home schooling.
Real teaching is also about drawing up a good curriculum
I'd second this. You have to remember that at some point your kids are going to leave home (you hope) and have to make decisions for themselves about their own education at university and parents can no longer be involved. Indeed this seems to come as a shock for some parents (fortunately very few) when they either call me up or try to visit to discuss their kids performance at university and I have to tell them that privacy laws forbid me from discussing anything about their son or daughter's performance with them. School is a nice way to get both the kid and the parent used to this fact so when they do go to university the gap is not so large.
A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids. I'm sure that you can cram facts into their heads but, as a university prof who has seen students from foreign countries where rote learning is de rigour, this does not turn out well at university when they are required to understand and apply knowledge rather than just regurgitate it. In addition there is the benefit of exposing them to different teacher's points of views and interests: your kids are not you and they need to find out what they like.
Lastly I'd also question whether your wife is really capable of home schooling at all. At school all the teachers have managed to get a degree in something plus training as teachers. Your wife is clearly not well educated and lacks any training in teaching young kids: there is a very good reason why school teachers require special training in educational techniques while university professor do not. Kid's minds do not function the same way as adult's and you need to take account of this to be an effective school teacher, particularly for primary school kids.
No vaccine is 100% effective.
That's very clearly the case. We used to have a really useful and highly effective vaccine that gave protection against the root cause of the problem we are discussing here: ignorance. The vaccine was education. Sadly as this has been watered down it has become less effective with the result that we now see increasing outbreaks of ignorance worldwide resulting in new symptoms such as intelligent design and not having your kids vaccinated as well as some old symptoms, like astrology, re-emerging.
Sadly governments have not responded to this by once again strengthening the vaccine, education, that has protected us for so long. Instead they seem to prefer to treat each individual symptom of the disease by passing laws. This is simply not going to work: already new strains of ignorance, such as intelligent design, have proven remarkably resistant to this treatment and have started to attack the education vaccine directly weakening its effectiveness further.
If you don't want to vaccinate your kids you can do that, but maybe you shouldn't be allowed to send those kids to public school.
The problem with that is that you really need the kids of idiots who don't vaccinate to get an education to stop the ignorance spreading. If you keep them out of school then they will end up even more ignorant than their parents and things will rapidly spiral downhill from there one they get to vote.
This is clearly aimed at companies abusing the "Double Irish" system.
Probably but I don't see how it will work. What is to stop companies registering themselves elsewhere so that they are no longer US companies and then only their US operations will get taxed? Even if this strategy does not work they have an army of lawyers using the legal system of every country in the world to figure out workarounds that will work.
Different matter distributions == a universe in which said parallel universe which is inherently different than what we see around us.
I think there is some confusion over what "parallel" universe means. This is generally taken to be a universe which has been an exact parallel of our own universe up to some point after which it diverges i.e. everything is the same up to some point in time. In the quantum multiverse interpretation of QM this happens for each possible result of collapsing the wave function.
I've never heard of this ever being associated with multiple 'universes' from inflation because QM requires that the universes interact before they separate (this is how it explains the self interference of a single particle) whereas inflation requires that the universes be causally disconnected after their creation i.e. inflationary universes are just different universes, not parallel ones. So I think the author of the article got himself rather confused.
Interesting. I was confused by this since I was taught as a kid that The Hague was the capital of the Netherlands and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, that is still where the government sits even though it seems that Dutch law defines Amsterdam as the capital (which was something I'd never heard of until today). So apparently at least in the UK we used to be taught based on the definition of capital, i.e. where the ruling government presides, and not whatever local laws would like to call a capital.
then it is more probable our data point falls around the middle
My point is though that without knowing the width of that distribution you have no idea how wide the 'middle' is: if your average time to evolve intelligence is 30+/-20 billion years we are still well within 2 sigma from the mean. This could make intelligent life sufficiently rare so that we could easily be the first in our galaxy given the age of the universe. With billions of galaxies there could still be more advanced intelligent life in a galaxy far, far away but we would never know about them.
An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.
Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.
Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).
you have to wonder why anyone would put any stock in it.
Especially given that they now track global warming. Nuclear war is a doomsday scenario but global warming is most certainly not. It may cause economic hardship and the displacement of populations as sea levels rise plus the need to alter crops etc. but it is not going to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Since the clock is supposedly set by scientists if they can be so wrong about something scientific then I have little faith they can predict the likelihood of nuclear war either given that this depends on politics.
Fortunately the US is likely to tell Cameron to fuck off, since it would be unconstitutional to ban encryption...
Just like it is unconstitutional to torture prisoners etc. etc.? I expect that you are right in that they will deny his request but the reason will be because it is the request of a foreign power. I also expect that many US politicians will think that it sounds like an excellent idea and after a suitable period so that they can claim it is their own idea there will be an American lead initiative to do the same thing. Why would they listen to some idiotic right wing UK politician when they have plenty of their own to choose from?
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules.
True but there needs to be some definition of what counts as 'we' when it comes to changing the rules. A few ignorant kids posting comments on Twitter and Facebook showing they have no clue what 'literally' means should not be enough to get the meaning changed in a dictionary. Indeed I would guess the way that most people saw the 'new' meaning was through reposts with a comment to the effect of "look what this idiot wrote".
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK. But it's simple in the US .
No, what constitutes a forest is simple everywhere. It is just defined as ...er... a ...um... ok who who thought dropping 'forest' from the dictionary was a good idea?
C++ might be a well known language but it is generally never though of as a script language. However if you are curious you can have a look at ROOT C++ or as some of us like to call it C+/-...because it is only C++ to within some (wide) margin of error.
The first nuclear bomb test heated a volume of atmosphere to higher temperatures, and reached higher pressures, than any similar volume of atmosphere in the entirety of Earth's history, by natural or artificial means.
What about a meteorite impact? The shockwave from a sufficiently large one (and there is plenty of evidence of these) would presumably be very similar to that of a nuclear device. While the energy density at the core of the explosion might be less than a nuclear bomb presumably it is the shockwave heating which you need to generate the chain reaction since this will create high temperature and pressures rather than just temperature? I'm not a plasma physicist though...
Why should they? When the banking secret was killed by the EU, the banks did not threaten to go elsewhere.
There is a large difference (of almost 400 million people) between the EU and the UK. Large businesses cannot afford to pull out of the EU, much like they cannot afford to pull out of the US. However I imagine they would be far less adverse to moving their HQ from London to Frankfurt, Dublin or some other non-UK, EU location.
The other thing I wondered about is the different expectations. If your instructor still thinks myspace is where the cool kids hangout....
Well having grown up in the UK and been to computer lessons in school (in the 1980s) I'd say that my expectations were that the teachers knew the subject material. When it came to maths, physics, chemistry etc. the teachers I had really knew their stuff and I learnt a heck of a lot from them but with computing it was far more variable.
I almost got into real trouble in one class using BBC Micros. We were told to write a program to add two numbers together which was incredibly trivial so, having the same computer at home, I thought I'd do the assignment in a more challenging way and teach myself assembly to add the numbers using the 'Advanced User Guide' which they had at school but I'd not got at home. I ran into some problems (you had to loop the assembly code through the parser twice to compile it) and when I asked for help and she saw the code she threw a fit. I was threatened with detention for not doing the assignment etc. etc. despite my protestations and explanation.
Fortunately the senior computing teacher walked in before anything got set in stone and she got him to come over to show him how badly I'd been behaving. His response was 'leave him to me' at which point he sat down and proceeded to show me what I was missing and then set me the challenge to figure out how to add two numbers which gave an answer greater than 255 (since it was an 8-bit machine) and how to store negative numbers using 2's complement. I learnt more computing in the 10 minutes he spent with me during one of his free periods than I learnt in the entire rest of the term with the idiot we had who was supposed to be teaching us.
So this is hardly a new problem. Teachers have a duty to make sure that the know what they are teaching and, worse, if their reaction to someone who may know more than they do is anger and hostility then they really have no business at all being a teacher at all. Who cares what they think about "fashion" - that's only relevant to education when it comes to engagement and sometimes being hopelessly out of date can be more engaging than being up to date.
This is why it will fail. Not because it would destroy everyone's privacy but because it will destroy the privacy of large, international companies. They will threaten to move out of the UK, the tories will panic and the bill will disappear until the idiot in charge forgets again and attempts to resurrect it for a third time in a couple of years from now (assuming he survives the general election).
Let's hope he means "the authorities" and not "the government" since the government consists of MPs and if they have to be able to read it they will probably need to outlaw words with more than 3 syllables and writing something in a language other than English will count as use of advanced encryption.