...how is it irresponsible NOT to teach children and teens to honor promises they make?
There is no problem so long as you aren't forcing them to make promises they don't want to make in which case you're simply teaching them that promises mean nothing and can be broken. If a student wants to join the school sports team because he enjoys the sport and wants to play with his friends they are most likely going to sign any pieces of paper you put in front of them in order to do that.
Morally the school has no right to demand students behave in a certain way outside of school, if the student misses practice because he's drunk or turns up to matches with a hangover or drunk then by all means disipline them because that's unacceptable behaviour. It's perfectly possible to drink responsibly and to play sport at that level and really this sort of responisible behaviour is what should be taught e.g. "John says you were pretty wrecked at that party last week, sounds a good night. A good job there was no training the next day though eh !" or "You're obviously too hungover to train properly, I've told you not to drink before training and matches before so that's a two match ban". Kids need to learn how to make their own choices the right choices and they do that from experience not from being forced to sign pieces of paper with pledges on them they have no intention of keeping.
There is no moral or ethical issue with drinking a beer or a glass of wine.
If you are the coach of a sports team and you have a player who turns up drunk or hungoever or otherwise below his best then you don't play them that day the same as if they had sprained an ankle or turned up late. If someone is constantly turning up in a condition where they can't play then they're going to get dropped from the team and they will have to make their own choice between drinking or playing sport.
Some will choose drinking and some will choose sport but it will be their choice and they will learn for themselves the consequences of their actions. Making people sign pledges in order to join a team is nothing more than holding a gun to their head and forcing them to play lip service to your own moral values and is quite frankly a ridiculous idea and not worth the paper its written on.
If I wanted to join a team and had to sign one of those then sure I'd sign it because I wanted to join the team but there's no way I take the slightest bit of notice of what it said or use it to decide my actions.
Yes but I think what we here about "binge drinking" and the actual state of affairs are two different things. For one thing a lot of people in the UK appear to be labouring under the delusion that countries like France and Spain don't have any problems with drunkeness when in fact the actual situation in France & Spain is largely the same as it is in the UK, as it is more or less throughout Europe.
I'm fairly sure you could go to most English towns and cities on the weekends and the find the pub or area where people are likely to get far too drunk and start fighting each other, throwing up etc. This is almost always the same pub or area where the stupid people go and if they enjoy fighting and throwing up on each other then good luck to them because at least they're all confined in one place which leaves the majority of the cities pubs available for people who simply enjoy socialising and drinking without the moronic stupidity.
So whenever the news or papers want to highlight binge drinking they simply turn up at the pubs where everyone knows by 3AM there are going to be a lot of drunk morons and say "Witness the horror" without bothering to point out that there are far more people who are not doing that. You can quite easily go and do the same thing in France, Spain, Germany or more or less wherever you liked.
They may feel an obligation to forward the disk to the parents of the students involved but that's as far as it should go. They have no responsibility as the students activities anywhere except in school and if this party didn't take place in school then it's got nothing to do with them.
I'm pretty sure most parents of teenagers are well aware they spend a lot of their time drinking in pubs and at parties and most parents are perfectly happy with that ( in the UK at least, perhaps the US is different ) but it's up the students and their parents to decide how the student can behave outside of school and has nothing at all to do with the school.
Why would anyone want to sign a pledge which attempts to control their lives like that, if accepting such a pledge is some sort of pre-requisite to getting on the netball team or whatever then thats clearly a good example of the school abusing it's position and anyone signing the 'pledge' in order to join the team is quite justified to ignore it completely and do what they like. It still doesn't give the school the right to monitor the student or police the students activities outside school. If they insist on having a pledge then simply asking the student "Have you drunk any alcohol" should be all the school is allowed to do. If the student chooses to lie and say "No" when they have been partying all night then the school should have no choice but to accept that regardless of any disks containing copious pictures of the student getting pissed up and vomitting throughout the entire previous day.
By the same lights it's the schools business to educate their students whilst they are attending school. Anything which goes on outside of school is none of the schools business unless the pupil specifically asks for the schools advice about matters in their outside life. If this disk contains evidence of illegal activity then the school should forward it to the police, otherwise they should destroy it. I really can't see where they get the right to take any action based on what people do outside of school.
I think you may be correct, when I was at school we used to drink in the local pub from around age 15 onwards. Since it was the local pub many of our teachers would also drink in the same pub and I suspect they would not have dreamed of taking any action against us in school for what went on in the pub. As to drinking being viewed as highly illegal activity they obviously didn't see it that way as they'd also occasionally buy us drinks.
You seem to be under the impression that dreams are a sort of computer like simulation of things
"How do you account for the chemical processes simulated in dreams - mud dissolving in water - indeed water ripples and the reflections on the water"
Where the mind has to fully understand the processes or mathematics behind something in order to produce it but in fact there is no evidence this is the case at all. You're brain is already the organ which allows you to see ripples so all it needs to do is tell you you're seeing some more ripples rather than bother to going to the trouble of actually generating them for you to look at and it to then tell you you're seeing.
I had a sort of chase dream last night, sort of because in fact I was in a race with my rival. We'd completed the first biking stage and were now running up a rocky hill into what later turned out was some sort of cave. I'd started off in the lead but all of a sudden it became like running through treacle and he overtook me.
An annoying man kept trying to grab me and I had to tell him to get lost because he was slowing me down but he kept say, it's OK I'm helping you to win. I didn't believe him and cursed as he was shouting "It's OK, you're going to be OK" and saw my rival pulling away ahead. Then there was some sort of rock fall ahead which crushed my rival under tons of rock and killed him. Had I actually overtaken him I'd have been killed and not him so the annoying man turned out to be right after all.
I'll certainly no what to do in races through dangerous caves now.
I liked the "DOOM: At the bank" dreams I used to have. I'm at the cash point, it's not giving me any money, I need to find the switch. Swivel, aargh monsters behind me bang bang bang. Sidle along the wall until I hit the door sidle across entrance blasting away trying to spot the enemy etc etc. It was all real people and scenery I saw ( and wasted ) but all the movements were the ones you could do in DOOM.
Gosh yes, this does appear to be a fatal flaw in their plan. Here's what I suggest you do. First of all you need to send the beermat or envelope with your calculations and these general principles of wind dynamics off to the company and include a written warning in the strongest possible terms outlining why their years of planning, development, testing and implementation have been in vain. Doubtless initally they may horrorstruck with your revelations but eventually you'll almost certainly be called in for some well paid and top level consultancy where you can use your years of expertise to get this failing project back on the rails. Why, I imagine you could do this in your spare time without even breaking a sweat. You're so wonderful.
Taking your example of sheep farming. The sheep are very well adapted to the environment they currently find themselves in where they are well protected and looked after but should those environmental conditions change then they're in trouble compared to other animals which do not have such a low genetic variance. It's the same with humans, by keeping as diverse a genetic base as possible we're more likely to have some types of people who are better at adapting to whatever environmental changes come along.
The key is that we don't really know what those future conditions are likely to be so attempting to steer the population in a specific direction may well horribly backfire when the future throws up something we haven't anticipated. Luckily we are such an adaptable species that some of us are likely survive almost any disaster which doesn't completely wipe all life on the planet.
I agree with everyone above it definitely seems as though time slows down in these sort of situations but it's interesting to think whether you are actually percieving things on a slower than normal time frame or you're just processing much more information than normal so when you rationalise it afterwards you assume time must have been slower in order for you to work through the options you did.
I've had two moments in my life like this, once quite recently on a dual carriageway where I was in the outside lane going around a fairly blind corner when I saw a builders truck coming the towards me also in my lane going the wrong way. Very luckily I had been just about to pull in to the inside lane and so had already checked my options before I saw the truck. However there was a period where I rechecked them, looked for signs the moronic truck driver was also thinking of changing lanes and made the manuever. All this could have taken no more than a second before I changed lanes and the truck flashed past me but I crammed in far more observation and thought than I'd normally have fitted in to that time frame.
The first one was when I was a young teenager climbing up some cliffs off a beach in Devon. I'd got to the top of the rock and there was another 5 or 6 metres of loose sand and dune grass to negotiate which I started up and because I was going in a diagonal line moved away from the point I'd climbed up the rocks. Around half way up the sand just gave way like a landslide and taking me with it was headed towards the top of the rock which was now a sheer 100M drop. At that point I thought to myself "oh no, I could well die here if I get carried down over that drop" and it seemed to me I first of all considered every possible course of action to help my chances if I did fall over the edge - try and grab onto a drainpipe I could see half way down, push myself off and jump and hope the rockpool underneath was pretty deep etc etc. I came to the conclusion none of that was very likely to work so just jumped and ran upwards and hope to outpace the sand coming down. Luckily this is what I was able to do and it can only have been 1 or 2 seconds before I made that decision but an incrediable amount of thinking had obviously taken place in those seconds.
I used to get calls like this all the time, luckily I was in the happy situation of being completely justified and totally supported when I simply refused their demands. It was an out of hours helpdesk for companies who had outsourced their IT to us to run. Very few of them bought support contracts which allowed us to do all the things we could do in core hours out of hours so contractually we had no responsibility at all to fix peoples e-mail at 4AM on a Sunday morning.
Consequently we had numerous lengthy arguments where the "most important user in the world" would resort to all sorts of swearing and threats, and in one case crying but since there really was nothing we could do it was great fun.
Natural selection doesn't select for good or bad traits just ones which happen to be useful at the time so whilst you think that being short sighted is a negative trait it's not if it doesn't affect your ability to reproduce.
The trouble with your argument is that you are pre supposing that at some point in the future we may no longer be able to manufacture glasses and therefore being shortsighted will be a disadvantage to those individuals affected. Based on that assumption you could implement your plan to guide evolution and prevent short sighted people from reproducing but then when the future turns out to be very different your meddling may well have artificially reduced genetic diversity and impaired our ability to cope with what may be radically different environmental circumstances.
Perhaps global warming will spiral utterly out of control and somehow wreath the world in dense fog eliminating any disadvantage of short sightedness.
It's still not backwards evolution though. What you're saying is that 3000 years ago or whenever humans were specialised enough to survive the conditions they found themselves in. Now there is more diversity should similar hard times loom on the horizon we will as a species find it easier to adapt because we're starting off with a more diverse population which will find more ways of adpating and surviving.
If you transplanted an indivdual back in time 3000 years ago then yes they may well have a hard time of it but that's nothing to do with evolution.
Basically it's because the Labour government has been traditionally opposed to Nuclear power and whilst they do seem be coming around the realisation that it's actually the only option they also seem to be terrified of actually doing anything about it. Hence these stupid suggestions to build more windfarms.
This is a pity because most of the current nuclear power plants will be decomissioned in the next 10 years along with quite a few of the coal fired ones leaving us with a large gap between the amount of energy we'll need and the amount we can produce. The end of North Sea gas only adds to this problem, with 80 or 90% of the population reliant on gas for cooking and heating at the moment we'll have to either bite the bullet and become dependant on Russias natural gas or switch to electric - further increasing the energy deficit.
Right, so you've bought a very expensive support contract from Microsoft and when you had a problem they came and fixed it. Just like what would happen if you had a very expensive Oracle support contract, or Red Hat support contract or Sage support contract or IBM support contract, or in fact any support contract.
I am beginning to transition over to OO at the moment, AlmostEverythingObject is almost complete now, it certainly does everything the old functions used to do which I think is what the polymorphic bit is all about and I think I've been quite clever to get it all into just the one object.
However a better analogy is to imagine the swiss army knife as a giant multi dimensional universal army knife which exists simultaneously at every size imaginable and is always both clasped and unclasped in every dimension and contains every physical tool known to man. In this scenario every distro ( in an unbroken continuum from the very first to the very last their will ever be ) would form a different polyphasic bladeset comprising a separate macro dimension representing each individual developer there ever will be. Crucially each developer is allowed both retrograde and anterograde movement but the blade will still remain both open and closed and ascend forward in the time dimension in phase with the complete amount of work encapsulated by the sum of developer dimensions. In this scenario a computer can be represented as a geometric qualiphat suspended at the binary root position of the blade space. Clearly a user need not necessarily be a user but it can be easily seen that in order for the pardigm to ring true they are for all intents and purposes encapsulated them very selves in the developer fumblrinian work cube. From there it's simple to prove that any particular blade/distro can be installed on any compatible hardware as many times as you like.
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Yes, it is tricky remembering the long list of countries China has attacked and conquered in the last 1000 years.
There is no problem so long as you aren't forcing them to make promises they don't want to make in which case you're simply teaching them that promises mean nothing and can be broken. If a student wants to join the school sports team because he enjoys the sport and wants to play with his friends they are most likely going to sign any pieces of paper you put in front of them in order to do that.
Morally the school has no right to demand students behave in a certain way outside of school, if the student misses practice because he's drunk or turns up to matches with a hangover or drunk then by all means disipline them because that's unacceptable behaviour. It's perfectly possible to drink responsibly and to play sport at that level and really this sort of responisible behaviour is what should be taught e.g. "John says you were pretty wrecked at that party last week, sounds a good night. A good job there was no training the next day though eh !" or "You're obviously too hungover to train properly, I've told you not to drink before training and matches before so that's a two match ban". Kids need to learn how to make their own choices the right choices and they do that from experience not from being forced to sign pieces of paper with pledges on them they have no intention of keeping.
There is no moral or ethical issue with drinking a beer or a glass of wine.
If you are the coach of a sports team and you have a player who turns up drunk or hungoever or otherwise below his best then you don't play them that day the same as if they had sprained an ankle or turned up late. If someone is constantly turning up in a condition where they can't play then they're going to get dropped from the team and they will have to make their own choice between drinking or playing sport.
Some will choose drinking and some will choose sport but it will be their choice and they will learn for themselves the consequences of their actions. Making people sign pledges in order to join a team is nothing more than holding a gun to their head and forcing them to play lip service to your own moral values and is quite frankly a ridiculous idea and not worth the paper its written on.
If I wanted to join a team and had to sign one of those then sure I'd sign it because I wanted to join the team but there's no way I take the slightest bit of notice of what it said or use it to decide my actions.
Yes but I think what we here about "binge drinking" and the actual state of affairs are two different things. For one thing a lot of people in the UK appear to be labouring under the delusion that countries like France and Spain don't have any problems with drunkeness when in fact the actual situation in France & Spain is largely the same as it is in the UK, as it is more or less throughout Europe.
I'm fairly sure you could go to most English towns and cities on the weekends and the find the pub or area where people are likely to get far too drunk and start fighting each other, throwing up etc. This is almost always the same pub or area where the stupid people go and if they enjoy fighting and throwing up on each other then good luck to them because at least they're all confined in one place which leaves the majority of the cities pubs available for people who simply enjoy socialising and drinking without the moronic stupidity.
So whenever the news or papers want to highlight binge drinking they simply turn up at the pubs where everyone knows by 3AM there are going to be a lot of drunk morons and say "Witness the horror" without bothering to point out that there are far more people who are not doing that. You can quite easily go and do the same thing in France, Spain, Germany or more or less wherever you liked.
They may feel an obligation to forward the disk to the parents of the students involved but that's as far as it should go. They have no responsibility as the students activities anywhere except in school and if this party didn't take place in school then it's got nothing to do with them.
I'm pretty sure most parents of teenagers are well aware they spend a lot of their time drinking in pubs and at parties and most parents are perfectly happy with that ( in the UK at least, perhaps the US is different ) but it's up the students and their parents to decide how the student can behave outside of school and has nothing at all to do with the school.
Why would anyone want to sign a pledge which attempts to control their lives like that, if accepting such a pledge is some sort of pre-requisite to getting on the netball team or whatever then thats clearly a good example of the school abusing it's position and anyone signing the 'pledge' in order to join the team is quite justified to ignore it completely and do what they like. It still doesn't give the school the right to monitor the student or police the students activities outside school. If they insist on having a pledge then simply asking the student "Have you drunk any alcohol" should be all the school is allowed to do. If the student chooses to lie and say "No" when they have been partying all night then the school should have no choice but to accept that regardless of any disks containing copious pictures of the student getting pissed up and vomitting throughout the entire previous day.
By the same lights it's the schools business to educate their students whilst they are attending school. Anything which goes on outside of school is none of the schools business unless the pupil specifically asks for the schools advice about matters in their outside life. If this disk contains evidence of illegal activity then the school should forward it to the police, otherwise they should destroy it. I really can't see where they get the right to take any action based on what people do outside of school.
I think you may be correct, when I was at school we used to drink in the local pub from around age 15 onwards. Since it was the local pub many of our teachers would also drink in the same pub and I suspect they would not have dreamed of taking any action against us in school for what went on in the pub. As to drinking being viewed as highly illegal activity they obviously didn't see it that way as they'd also occasionally buy us drinks.
"...preparing him on how to cope with bad acid trips?"
Thats easy, you just watch Jacobs ladder or if you can't do that take a nice tube ride and think of it a lot.
You seem to be under the impression that dreams are a sort of computer like simulation of things
"How do you account for the chemical processes simulated in dreams - mud dissolving in water - indeed water ripples and the reflections on the water"
Where the mind has to fully understand the processes or mathematics behind something in order to produce it but in fact there is no evidence this is the case at all. You're brain is already the organ which allows you to see ripples so all it needs to do is tell you you're seeing some more ripples rather than bother to going to the trouble of actually generating them for you to look at and it to then tell you you're seeing.
I had a sort of chase dream last night, sort of because in fact I was in a race with my rival. We'd completed the first biking stage and were now running up a rocky hill into what later turned out was some sort of cave. I'd started off in the lead but all of a sudden it became like running through treacle and he overtook me.
An annoying man kept trying to grab me and I had to tell him to get lost because he was slowing me down but he kept say, it's OK I'm helping you to win. I didn't believe him and cursed as he was shouting "It's OK, you're going to be OK" and saw my rival pulling away ahead. Then there was some sort of rock fall ahead which crushed my rival under tons of rock and killed him. Had I actually overtaken him I'd have been killed and not him so the annoying man turned out to be right after all.
I'll certainly no what to do in races through dangerous caves now.
I liked the "DOOM: At the bank" dreams I used to have. I'm at the cash point, it's not giving me any money, I need to find the switch. Swivel, aargh monsters behind me bang bang bang. Sidle along the wall until I hit the door sidle across entrance blasting away trying to spot the enemy etc etc. It was all real people and scenery I saw ( and wasted ) but all the movements were the ones you could do in DOOM.
Gosh yes, this does appear to be a fatal flaw in their plan. Here's what I suggest you do. First of all you need to send the beermat or envelope with your calculations and these general principles of wind dynamics off to the company and include a written warning in the strongest possible terms outlining why their years of planning, development, testing and implementation have been in vain. Doubtless initally they may horrorstruck with your revelations but eventually you'll almost certainly be called in for some well paid and top level consultancy where you can use your years of expertise to get this failing project back on the rails. Why, I imagine you could do this in your spare time without even breaking a sweat. You're so wonderful.
For someone with so much to say it's a shame you're clearly far too stupid to say anything sensible. Shut up, please. You're an idiot.
Taking your example of sheep farming. The sheep are very well adapted to the environment they currently find themselves in where they are well protected and looked after but should those environmental conditions change then they're in trouble compared to other animals which do not have such a low genetic variance. It's the same with humans, by keeping as diverse a genetic base as possible we're more likely to have some types of people who are better at adapting to whatever environmental changes come along.
The key is that we don't really know what those future conditions are likely to be so attempting to steer the population in a specific direction may well horribly backfire when the future throws up something we haven't anticipated. Luckily we are such an adaptable species that some of us are likely survive almost any disaster which doesn't completely wipe all life on the planet.
I agree with everyone above it definitely seems as though time slows down in these sort of situations but it's interesting to think whether you are actually percieving things on a slower than normal time frame or you're just processing much more information than normal so when you rationalise it afterwards you assume time must have been slower in order for you to work through the options you did.
I've had two moments in my life like this, once quite recently on a dual carriageway where I was in the outside lane going around a fairly blind corner when I saw a builders truck coming the towards me also in my lane going the wrong way. Very luckily I had been just about to pull in to the inside lane and so had already checked my options before I saw the truck. However there was a period where I rechecked them, looked for signs the moronic truck driver was also thinking of changing lanes and made the manuever. All this could have taken no more than a second before I changed lanes and the truck flashed past me but I crammed in far more observation and thought than I'd normally have fitted in to that time frame.
The first one was when I was a young teenager climbing up some cliffs off a beach in Devon. I'd got to the top of the rock and there was another 5 or 6 metres of loose sand and dune grass to negotiate which I started up and because I was going in a diagonal line moved away from the point I'd climbed up the rocks. Around half way up the sand just gave way like a landslide and taking me with it was headed towards the top of the rock which was now a sheer 100M drop. At that point I thought to myself "oh no, I could well die here if I get carried down over that drop" and it seemed to me I first of all considered every possible course of action to help my chances if I did fall over the edge - try and grab onto a drainpipe I could see half way down, push myself off and jump and hope the rockpool underneath was pretty deep etc etc. I came to the conclusion none of that was very likely to work so just jumped and ran upwards and hope to outpace the sand coming down. Luckily this is what I was able to do and it can only have been 1 or 2 seconds before I made that decision but an incrediable amount of thinking had obviously taken place in those seconds.
I used to get calls like this all the time, luckily I was in the happy situation of being completely justified and totally supported when I simply refused their demands. It was an out of hours helpdesk for companies who had outsourced their IT to us to run. Very few of them bought support contracts which allowed us to do all the things we could do in core hours out of hours so contractually we had no responsibility at all to fix peoples e-mail at 4AM on a Sunday morning.
Consequently we had numerous lengthy arguments where the "most important user in the world" would resort to all sorts of swearing and threats, and in one case crying but since there really was nothing we could do it was great fun.
Natural selection doesn't select for good or bad traits just ones which happen to be useful at the time so whilst you think that being short sighted is a negative trait it's not if it doesn't affect your ability to reproduce.
The trouble with your argument is that you are pre supposing that at some point in the future we may no longer be able to manufacture glasses and therefore being shortsighted will be a disadvantage to those individuals affected. Based on that assumption you could implement your plan to guide evolution and prevent short sighted people from reproducing but then when the future turns out to be very different your meddling may well have artificially reduced genetic diversity and impaired our ability to cope with what may be radically different environmental circumstances.
Perhaps global warming will spiral utterly out of control and somehow wreath the world in dense fog eliminating any disadvantage of short sightedness.
It's still not backwards evolution though. What you're saying is that 3000 years ago or whenever humans were specialised enough to survive the conditions they found themselves in. Now there is more diversity should similar hard times loom on the horizon we will as a species find it easier to adapt because we're starting off with a more diverse population which will find more ways of adpating and surviving.
If you transplanted an indivdual back in time 3000 years ago then yes they may well have a hard time of it but that's nothing to do with evolution.
No, HE ... SAID ... HORSES !
Greenland !!!! Are you thinking of Iceland perhaps ?
Basically it's because the Labour government has been traditionally opposed to Nuclear power and whilst they do seem be coming around the realisation that it's actually the only option they also seem to be terrified of actually doing anything about it. Hence these stupid suggestions to build more windfarms.
This is a pity because most of the current nuclear power plants will be decomissioned in the next 10 years along with quite a few of the coal fired ones leaving us with a large gap between the amount of energy we'll need and the amount we can produce. The end of North Sea gas only adds to this problem, with 80 or 90% of the population reliant on gas for cooking and heating at the moment we'll have to either bite the bullet and become dependant on Russias natural gas or switch to electric - further increasing the energy deficit.
Right, so you've bought a very expensive support contract from Microsoft and when you had a problem they came and fixed it. Just like what would happen if you had a very expensive Oracle support contract, or Red Hat support contract or Sage support contract or IBM support contract, or in fact any support contract.
I am beginning to transition over to OO at the moment, AlmostEverythingObject is almost complete now, it certainly does everything the old functions used to do which I think is what the polymorphic bit is all about and I think I've been quite clever to get it all into just the one object.
The Swiss army knife has many blades, true.
However a better analogy is to imagine the swiss army knife as a giant multi dimensional universal army knife which exists simultaneously at every size imaginable and is always both clasped and unclasped in every dimension and contains every physical tool known to man. In this scenario every distro ( in an unbroken continuum from the very first to the very last their will ever be ) would form a different polyphasic bladeset comprising a separate macro dimension representing each individual developer there ever will be. Crucially each developer is allowed both retrograde and anterograde movement but the blade will still remain both open and closed and ascend forward in the time dimension in phase with the complete amount of work encapsulated by the sum of developer dimensions. In this scenario a computer can be represented as a geometric qualiphat suspended at the binary root position of the blade space. Clearly a user need not necessarily be a user but it can be easily seen that in order for the pardigm to ring true they are for all intents and purposes encapsulated them very selves in the developer fumblrinian work cube. From there it's simple to prove that any particular blade/distro can be installed on any compatible hardware as many times as you like.