What you are arguing for here is not reparations for slavery, and it is not affirmative action. What you are arguing for here is Communist revolution and the abolition of personal wealth.
Interesting. Has there been any documented case where this knowledge has been particularly useful or of great consequence?
I doubt such a thing ever would be documented. Policy is made collectively by the Cabinet, who take joint responsibility, and the minutes will show only that the Prime Minister said this and that the Minister of Defence said that and that the Minister of Health said the other, and whether or not the Queen's advice had influenced things would go quite unrecorded. So far as I know the Prime Minister's meetings with the Queen are entirely private and unminuted.
The main advantage I imagine is not so much that the Queen's advice may influence policy - the Prime Minister has any number of specialist advisers who are better informed on their topic of expertise than the Queen. No, it's probably more that the Prime Minister can explain himself to someone whose security clearance is infinite, whose reliability is axiomatic, and who has in all probability heard it all before half a dozen times. Often in explaining a problem completely and openly to somebody else, things become a good deal clearer. A secular confessional for a person who by the nature of his work likely has a whole lot to confess.
Her power comes not from the fact that she directly makes laws (I could be wrong on this, of course), but that if she said, "We should do X", her nation will take steps to do it.
This is entirely true, so long as she never actually does. The Queen is carefully and studiously apolitical; I mean, she's rich and traditionalist and surely she is personally a conservative, but she never makes statements of any kind that side with one party over another. Simply not the done thing. The Queen is supposed to be above all that. Governments come and governments go, but the Queen remains and so do the institutions of the state which govern in her name. It's about continuity, and it's a big part of why it's possible for an election to be held on Thursday and a new Prime Minister to begin work in Downing Street on Friday morning: all the Sir Humphreys in the back rooms who arrange for things to actually happen work for the Crown, not for the ministers of government who have the executive power.
I think the only real power the Queen has is the power to name a Prime Minister and invite him to form a government. Normally she will choose whichever MP is leader of the majority party in the House of Commons. Occasionally there is no majority party, and it is unclear which of the competing leaders has the ability to form a majority coalition: in this case the Queen chooses.
There's also the weekly meeting with the Prime Minister which others here have mentioned, at which she can advise the leader of her government. It's these meetings that any rival power would dearly love to eavesdrop. What is discussed is private, except for what little various Prime Ministers have revealed long afterwards over the years; the Queen herself has never to my knowledge breathed a word of any of it.
In 1783 the war of independence wrought control of America away from the Empire. The empire then wasn't getting any economic perks from slavery, and the states had pushed the empire out of the americas.
How strange, then, that the plantations in the West Indies that supplied Britain's vast appetite for sugar and rum were even more reliant on slave labour than those on the mainland. And how strange that the Caribbean colonies did not become independent, nor did the newly-formed United States take any action to free them from the Empire. And how strange that even so, the British Empire did indeed abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself, and command the Royal Navy to seize all slavers wherever they might be found.
Britain has yet to seriously discuss reparations for the damage done to Africa from the profits they made in the slave trade.
Britain has already paid Africa for the slave trade, at a fair price agreeable to both parties. Who do you think the British bought all those slaves from in the first place?
I think Obama's inability to give decent gifts is pretty indicative of general inexperience to me. This isn't necessarily a bad thing considering why he was elected (as a force of change) but it will certainly result in a few bumps in the road like this.
Isn't there a standing diplomatic corps with experience in these matters? I don't know how it's done in America but in the UK, governments come and governments go, and the identity of the Foreign Minister changes with the wind, but there's always a number of grey gentlemen in the Foreign Office who've been there many a long year and would have a quiet word in the Minister's ear if they thought he was about to do anything foolish.
Is there no Sir Humphrey Appleby in the White House to advise on such things? I gather there's less tradition there of an apolitical civil service, but surely they can't replace the entire organisation with their own people? It would be chaos.
The GANNET was employed to protect British interests and suppress the slave market among the Islamic and African kingdoms, guaranteeing British prices and control of the market.
She was launched in 1878. Britain had been out of the slave business since 1807, in which year the trade was banned throughout the Empire, and since 1827 had considered any slave ship of any nation to be a pirate and hence fair game for the Royal Navy.
But for some reason we're still supposed to look at the ACLU as evil?
As I understand the argument put forward by our more reactionary friends, they would like the ACLU more if they also duplicated the work of the NRA. Presumably that organisation doesn't fulfill its remit to their satisfaction, and they'd like the ACLU to lend a hand?
If you are one of those accounting types with 100000 lines in an excel file then
you should be sent on a training course for how to use a spreadsheet.
I cursed the day I heard the new version of Excel would let people go to a million rows. The kind of atrocities people create already, they're only ever forced to stop and think about what they're doing when they hit that 65,000 row limit and say hey, maybe I'm duplicating too much here, maybe I should rethink my design and organise my data better.
The more people get the new Excel, the more they'll continue eternally down the screen, copy and paste and edit, copy and paste and edit, and they'll email a million-row monstrosity to everyone in the company and kill the email system for hours. What's to stop them? Why should they ever rethink if they never hit the bottom? They'll just keep on as they are, generating more and more unnecessary work through sheer ignorance.
You often hear nerds flaming Access. Reasonably enough too: people create awful half-arsed relational databases using that app, which we then end up having to tidy up. But I tell you what, they're creating awful half-arsed relational databases in Excel too, and they're far worse. When all you have is a VLOOKUP(), everything starts to look like yet another $AF$210:$AH$409,3,FALSE. Give me a left join created in a click-and-drool GUI any day.
As far as spreadsheets go: 65 thousand rows should be enough for anybody.
Maybe it might make a little more sense to explore "the moon, Mars, and beyond" with an actual goddamn spaceship?!?! You know, one that isn't going to take a goddamn year just to get to another planet that's practically right next door, considering just how big "space" is.
Yeah, you retards. It's not rocket science.
Oh, wait, it is. I'd mis-identified the retards involved here.
For the record, there are ways of getting to Mars in substantially less time. However, they're not going to happen, because people don't like hearing the N-word.
She had never read the passage before (the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet)
Er... what?... You know, explorers have established contact with previously undiscovered tribes in the Amazon who already know the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet word for word. Where in the world did you find someone who'd never read it?
This is a terrible question. The guys "problem" is that women are coming up to him and talking to him? Here is your witty response: ask for their number.
Too fucking right. I've got a hell of a lot of free time right now, the economy being what it is, and I've just been hacking away at Project Euler to keep my brain warmed up and learn some Python in the meantime. I'm going to quit doing that at home. I'm going to go down to a suitable bar - not one of my usual shithole boozers either, with deafening punk rock or the football match on, but somewhere with actual women in it - or perhaps the coffee shop in a bookstore. The kind of place that has buns and Wi-Fi. And I'm going to do them there, not on my homebuilt monster big black manly multicore beast of a machine but on my Eee 901.
And if women comment on my cute little computer I'm not going to take it as an insult. Message from this thread received and understood at this station: CUTE NETBOOKS ARE A CONVERSATON STARTER WITH WOMEN. And since a COMPUTER was what got them to comment, the odds are way better than average that they are in fact GEEK GIRLS. Yes, that mythical beast we all tell tall tales of but never seem to meet.
Even my mother commented on how lovely this thing is. So did my sister's friends - and she herself keeps pinching it off me whenever I visit home. I should have caught on to this shit a lot sooner. Girls dig netbooks, got it. I'm going to be doing all my stuff on this thing somewhere much more visible from tomorrow. And I'm going to make damn sure I lay out my windows in such a way that I have a good pretext to spin my eye-catching Compiz cube on a very frequent basis...
An amendment to the Earth and space sciences curriculum requires the teaching of different theories of the origin, age and history of the universe. The board voted to remove from the standards the statement that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old.
Fine by me. I mean, it's only been in the last few years that the age of the universe has had a decimal point (I remember being absolutely amazed when WMAP returned a figure of 13.7 billion, when previous estimates had been of the '12 to 15 billion, ish' character). We still don't know what most of the dark matter is, we haven't a clue what the dark energy is. There's no reason that we shouldn't at least explain about the three different Friedmann models, the history of the cosmological constant (from Einstein's greatest mistake, to its current central importance in the accelerating universe), and the history of Big Bang versus Steady State. As for the age of the earth, one could mention the late nineteenth-century quarrel between astronomers and geologists, between those who said the Sun could be no older than a few tens of millions of years and those who said life on Earth had existed for orders of magnitude longer than that.
Similarly there's no reason why the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives to Darwinian evolution should not be discussed. There's Lamarckianism, for instance. And Lysenkoism, and a cautionary tale of its dire practical consequences for the Soviet Union.
Even the fundamental Newtonian physics could be handled in this way. Newton's theories contradict our instinctive ideas of how things work, which are closer to Aristotelian mechanics - or physics according to Wile E. Coyote. The point of it all is to develop an understanding of how science is actually done, how theories compete and how we judge between them, and why we now think this to be true, when once many people reasonably thought this instead: an understanding of science as a process by which we improve our understanding of the universe, not a list of facts that must be memorised.
He might have predicted that $500 dual core laptops with 4GB of memory would have been in your future, but he might have been just as correct predicting flying cars.
In 1991, Moore's Law had long been a well-established rule of thumb, and we all had a good idea of the sort of rate at which numbers inside computers inflate. Ten years earlier, the first IBM PC had been released. It had a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 CPU and 16k of memory - expandable to 256k.
Come 1991, and a typical PC might have 4MiB of memory, and, what - a 486 running at 33MHz or so? So something like 7 times the CPU clock rate, and 256 times the RAM.
Scale up to 2001, by the same proportions, naively assuming that one 486 MHz is equivalent to one 8088 MHz, and you'd estimate a CPU running at 233MHz or so and 1GB of memory. You'd be a bit off - in fact a PC in 2001 might have had anything up to about a 1GHz CPU - but it's not such a bad guess. And you'd predict the 4GB memory barrier to be hit a few years later.
Seriously, in 1991, everyone already knew and laughed about Bill Gates' supposed remark about the 640k limit. Nobody should have been going around claiming that 4GiB should have been enough for anybody; it really was just asking for it.
Have fun with your monster of a daughter. I'd flip out if I heard a kid so young say something like that.
City boy, are we?
Because while I can't swear to having said that kind of thing myself (having spent most of my very young days in a smallish town), I certainly remember hearing very similar comments from my little sister growing up in a village of maybe a thousand. A herd of cows would be taken right past the house twice every day on their way to be milked and back, and we'd sometimes walk down the road to where there was a flock of chickens we'd feed breadcrumbs. She knew perfectly well that the ultimate fate of those cows was likely to be hamburger, and I'm quite sure more than once we came back from feeding the chickens to find roast chicken awaiting us on the table at home.
If you've grown up with food animals being a regular part of the landscape, and knowing full well why they're there, well... then you don't consider it monstrous. It's perfectly reasonable and natural, and comments like the above are par for the course and actually kind of cute. What's monstrous is this gulf between a romantic idealisation of farmyard life, and the shrink-wrapped processed meat at the supermarket - the complete categorical disconnect between Babe and bacon.
Are you claiming that there is nothing wrong with listening to a musical recording without compensating the individuals or organizations that created it even if they 1) have not authorized you to do so and 2) are explicitly requiring you to pay for purchasing a recording or a digital stream of the performance?
Absolutely. There may or may not be something wrong with copying and distributing a musical recording without the permission of the creators or their authorised agents - it's certainly illegal, but that's not the same thing as wrong - but with _listening_ to it? Are you serious?
You do understand that consuming music means listening to it and consuming video means watching it, right?
I don't understand that at all. I don't consider either something you 'consume'. I listen to music. I watch videos. I don't consume either of them, any more than I consume a book when I read it, or consume a chair when I sit on it, or consume a table when I eat my dinner off it. To my mind, if you consume something, you use it and use it up entirely in doing so. You consume food, you consume fuel, you consume anything that is necessarily destroyed in the process of its usage. For nondestructive usage, we have all manner of perfectly cromulent verbs that we can use instead.
You do not have a right to consume it in its totality (fair use exists for parts of it) if they do not explicitly allow you to by some kind of license. What part of that don't you understand?
Well, for a start, I don't understand what you mean by 'consume it in its totality'. Normally, once I've finished consuming something, it is destroyed. When I consume a litre of petrol in travelling, that's one litre less petrol in the world. When I consume a loaf of bread, again, one less loaf of bread. What is consumed when - entirely hypothetically of course - I copy a movie? Electricity, I suppose, and bandwidth, but I'm paying for both of those.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are arguing for here is not reparations for slavery, and it is not affirmative action. What you are arguing for here is Communist revolution and the abolition of personal wealth.
I doubt such a thing ever would be documented. Policy is made collectively by the Cabinet, who take joint responsibility, and the minutes will show only that the Prime Minister said this and that the Minister of Defence said that and that the Minister of Health said the other, and whether or not the Queen's advice had influenced things would go quite unrecorded. So far as I know the Prime Minister's meetings with the Queen are entirely private and unminuted.
The main advantage I imagine is not so much that the Queen's advice may influence policy - the Prime Minister has any number of specialist advisers who are better informed on their topic of expertise than the Queen. No, it's probably more that the Prime Minister can explain himself to someone whose security clearance is infinite, whose reliability is axiomatic, and who has in all probability heard it all before half a dozen times. Often in explaining a problem completely and openly to somebody else, things become a good deal clearer. A secular confessional for a person who by the nature of his work likely has a whole lot to confess.
This is entirely true, so long as she never actually does. The Queen is carefully and studiously apolitical; I mean, she's rich and traditionalist and surely she is personally a conservative, but she never makes statements of any kind that side with one party over another. Simply not the done thing. The Queen is supposed to be above all that. Governments come and governments go, but the Queen remains and so do the institutions of the state which govern in her name. It's about continuity, and it's a big part of why it's possible for an election to be held on Thursday and a new Prime Minister to begin work in Downing Street on Friday morning: all the Sir Humphreys in the back rooms who arrange for things to actually happen work for the Crown, not for the ministers of government who have the executive power.
I think the only real power the Queen has is the power to name a Prime Minister and invite him to form a government. Normally she will choose whichever MP is leader of the majority party in the House of Commons. Occasionally there is no majority party, and it is unclear which of the competing leaders has the ability to form a majority coalition: in this case the Queen chooses.
There's also the weekly meeting with the Prime Minister which others here have mentioned, at which she can advise the leader of her government. It's these meetings that any rival power would dearly love to eavesdrop. What is discussed is private, except for what little various Prime Ministers have revealed long afterwards over the years; the Queen herself has never to my knowledge breathed a word of any of it.
How strange, then, that the plantations in the West Indies that supplied Britain's vast appetite for sugar and rum were even more reliant on slave labour than those on the mainland. And how strange that the Caribbean colonies did not become independent, nor did the newly-formed United States take any action to free them from the Empire. And how strange that even so, the British Empire did indeed abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself, and command the Royal Navy to seize all slavers wherever they might be found.
Does that mean should have waited until around 2005 or so before we joined in with Iraq?
Actually, it was the day before D-Day. On D-Day itself, the coverage ran something like 'Thank God, they're all in France now.'
Britain has already paid Africa for the slave trade, at a fair price agreeable to both parties. Who do you think the British bought all those slaves from in the first place?
Isn't there a standing diplomatic corps with experience in these matters? I don't know how it's done in America but in the UK, governments come and governments go, and the identity of the Foreign Minister changes with the wind, but there's always a number of grey gentlemen in the Foreign Office who've been there many a long year and would have a quiet word in the Minister's ear if they thought he was about to do anything foolish.
Is there no Sir Humphrey Appleby in the White House to advise on such things? I gather there's less tradition there of an apolitical civil service, but surely they can't replace the entire organisation with their own people? It would be chaos.
She was launched in 1878. Britain had been out of the slave business since 1807, in which year the trade was banned throughout the Empire, and since 1827 had considered any slave ship of any nation to be a pirate and hence fair game for the Royal Navy.
No, no, no. It's a my Government and iPod.
And yet it seems that nobody's registered usefirefoxinsteadof.ie.
Not sure about that one. How about creamp.ie?
Ah come on now. When have you ever seen the sun in Ireland?
As I understand the argument put forward by our more reactionary friends, they would like the ACLU more if they also duplicated the work of the NRA. Presumably that organisation doesn't fulfill its remit to their satisfaction, and they'd like the ACLU to lend a hand?
you should be sent on a training course for how to use a spreadsheet.
I cursed the day I heard the new version of Excel would let people go to a million rows. The kind of atrocities people create already, they're only ever forced to stop and think about what they're doing when they hit that 65,000 row limit and say hey, maybe I'm duplicating too much here, maybe I should rethink my design and organise my data better.
The more people get the new Excel, the more they'll continue eternally down the screen, copy and paste and edit, copy and paste and edit, and they'll email a million-row monstrosity to everyone in the company and kill the email system for hours. What's to stop them? Why should they ever rethink if they never hit the bottom? They'll just keep on as they are, generating more and more unnecessary work through sheer ignorance.
You often hear nerds flaming Access. Reasonably enough too: people create awful half-arsed relational databases using that app, which we then end up having to tidy up. But I tell you what, they're creating awful half-arsed relational databases in Excel too, and they're far worse. When all you have is a VLOOKUP(), everything starts to look like yet another $AF$210:$AH$409,3,FALSE. Give me a left join created in a click-and-drool GUI any day.
As far as spreadsheets go: 65 thousand rows should be enough for anybody.
Yeah, you retards. It's not rocket science.
Oh, wait, it is. I'd mis-identified the retards involved here.
For the record, there are ways of getting to Mars in substantially less time. However, they're not going to happen, because people don't like hearing the N-word.
Er... what?... You know, explorers have established contact with previously undiscovered tribes in the Amazon who already know the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet word for word. Where in the world did you find someone who'd never read it?
Too fucking right. I've got a hell of a lot of free time right now, the economy being what it is, and I've just been hacking away at Project Euler to keep my brain warmed up and learn some Python in the meantime. I'm going to quit doing that at home. I'm going to go down to a suitable bar - not one of my usual shithole boozers either, with deafening punk rock or the football match on, but somewhere with actual women in it - or perhaps the coffee shop in a bookstore. The kind of place that has buns and Wi-Fi. And I'm going to do them there, not on my homebuilt monster big black manly multicore beast of a machine but on my Eee 901.
And if women comment on my cute little computer I'm not going to take it as an insult. Message from this thread received and understood at this station: CUTE NETBOOKS ARE A CONVERSATON STARTER WITH WOMEN. And since a COMPUTER was what got them to comment, the odds are way better than average that they are in fact GEEK GIRLS. Yes, that mythical beast we all tell tall tales of but never seem to meet.
Even my mother commented on how lovely this thing is. So did my sister's friends - and she herself keeps pinching it off me whenever I visit home. I should have caught on to this shit a lot sooner. Girls dig netbooks, got it. I'm going to be doing all my stuff on this thing somewhere much more visible from tomorrow. And I'm going to make damn sure I lay out my windows in such a way that I have a good pretext to spin my eye-catching Compiz cube on a very frequent basis...
Fine by me. I mean, it's only been in the last few years that the age of the universe has had a decimal point (I remember being absolutely amazed when WMAP returned a figure of 13.7 billion, when previous estimates had been of the '12 to 15 billion, ish' character). We still don't know what most of the dark matter is, we haven't a clue what the dark energy is. There's no reason that we shouldn't at least explain about the three different Friedmann models, the history of the cosmological constant (from Einstein's greatest mistake, to its current central importance in the accelerating universe), and the history of Big Bang versus Steady State. As for the age of the earth, one could mention the late nineteenth-century quarrel between astronomers and geologists, between those who said the Sun could be no older than a few tens of millions of years and those who said life on Earth had existed for orders of magnitude longer than that.
Similarly there's no reason why the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives to Darwinian evolution should not be discussed. There's Lamarckianism, for instance. And Lysenkoism, and a cautionary tale of its dire practical consequences for the Soviet Union.
Even the fundamental Newtonian physics could be handled in this way. Newton's theories contradict our instinctive ideas of how things work, which are closer to Aristotelian mechanics - or physics according to Wile E. Coyote. The point of it all is to develop an understanding of how science is actually done, how theories compete and how we judge between them, and why we now think this to be true, when once many people reasonably thought this instead: an understanding of science as a process by which we improve our understanding of the universe, not a list of facts that must be memorised.
In 1991, Moore's Law had long been a well-established rule of thumb, and we all had a good idea of the sort of rate at which numbers inside computers inflate. Ten years earlier, the first IBM PC had been released. It had a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 CPU and 16k of memory - expandable to 256k.
Come 1991, and a typical PC might have 4MiB of memory, and, what - a 486 running at 33MHz or so? So something like 7 times the CPU clock rate, and 256 times the RAM.
Scale up to 2001, by the same proportions, naively assuming that one 486 MHz is equivalent to one 8088 MHz, and you'd estimate a CPU running at 233MHz or so and 1GB of memory. You'd be a bit off - in fact a PC in 2001 might have had anything up to about a 1GHz CPU - but it's not such a bad guess. And you'd predict the 4GB memory barrier to be hit a few years later.
Seriously, in 1991, everyone already knew and laughed about Bill Gates' supposed remark about the 640k limit. Nobody should have been going around claiming that 4GiB should have been enough for anybody; it really was just asking for it.
Because - at least in most of the jurisdictions derived from English law - it's usually not a crime, but a civil offence?
City boy, are we?
Because while I can't swear to having said that kind of thing myself (having spent most of my very young days in a smallish town), I certainly remember hearing very similar comments from my little sister growing up in a village of maybe a thousand. A herd of cows would be taken right past the house twice every day on their way to be milked and back, and we'd sometimes walk down the road to where there was a flock of chickens we'd feed breadcrumbs. She knew perfectly well that the ultimate fate of those cows was likely to be hamburger, and I'm quite sure more than once we came back from feeding the chickens to find roast chicken awaiting us on the table at home.
If you've grown up with food animals being a regular part of the landscape, and knowing full well why they're there, well... then you don't consider it monstrous. It's perfectly reasonable and natural, and comments like the above are par for the course and actually kind of cute. What's monstrous is this gulf between a romantic idealisation of farmyard life, and the shrink-wrapped processed meat at the supermarket - the complete categorical disconnect between Babe and bacon.
Absolutely. There may or may not be something wrong with copying and distributing a musical recording without the permission of the creators or their authorised agents - it's certainly illegal, but that's not the same thing as wrong - but with _listening_ to it? Are you serious?
I don't understand that at all. I don't consider either something you 'consume'. I listen to music. I watch videos. I don't consume either of them, any more than I consume a book when I read it, or consume a chair when I sit on it, or consume a table when I eat my dinner off it. To my mind, if you consume something, you use it and use it up entirely in doing so. You consume food, you consume fuel, you consume anything that is necessarily destroyed in the process of its usage. For nondestructive usage, we have all manner of perfectly cromulent verbs that we can use instead.
Well, for a start, I don't understand what you mean by 'consume it in its totality'. Normally, once I've finished consuming something, it is destroyed. When I consume a litre of petrol in travelling, that's one litre less petrol in the world. When I consume a loaf of bread, again, one less loaf of bread. What is consumed when - entirely hypothetically of course - I copy a movie? Electricity, I suppose, and bandwidth, but I'm paying for both of those.