Of course these families are often breaching their childrens rights. If you did the sort of things that go on in these families to anyone else's children, you'd go to prison for a long time (where you can be damn sure there'll be surveillance).
I agree with you; but my response is that if the parents actually need 24 hour supervision to look after their kids properly, then the kids need to be taken away. I can't really see how that's a worse outcome than growing up in such a messed up family.
While that seems like a reasonable position to take, the truth is that going into care is just about the worst outcome for a kid (according to delinquency and suicide rates). It's an absolute fucking disaster. This has a lot to do with the deplorable state of the care system, which is stretched beyond capacity, and has failures so bad and so frequently you might think it's better to abandon the whole thing.
I think it would be a mistake to think that having cameras in their houses will fix these problems. It might result in a lot of kids being taken into care earlier--but guess what, state care is often worse than the original abuse, and is stretched to the max anyway. It's a difficult situation, but I think the money should be spent 1) teaching the parent better parenting skills (this does work, according to studies), and 2) training better foster carers and paying them a lot more.
2. Youngsters don't get into crime because they have a chaotic family life. They do it, because it's cool, they have too much free time, and they live in a neutered society.
I think you'll find this is flat wrong. The number of children from stable families that get involved with crime is dwarfed by the number who do have a "chaotic" family life--or no family life at all. Experiencing neglect or abuse, or worse, going into the care system, dramatically increases your risk of juvenile and adult crime. Something like half of the kids in care will go to prison.
I will find cites if you think I'm wrong. Making stuff up, as I suspect you have, isn't a good way of diagnosing the causes of societies complex problems--yet it seems to be the most common method.
We clearly have very different notions of the "empirical", as well as radically different philosophies of science.
I merely wanted to point out that the notions of atoms, photons, protons, electrons, the processes of biochemistry, disease, ecology, and many others in science are not directly observable. They are all theoretical inferences, which are dependent on other theories. Multiple lines of evidence are needed to support a hypothesis (whether these come from experiment or discovery is not particularly important, epistemologically). Palaeontology is no different from other sciences in that respect.
Have you read much philosophy of science? Because it sure seems like you haven't. The way you're using the the words, all science is "guesses" and "(well supported) assumptions". Which is a strange way of talking about it. Of course any scientific hypothesis could be wrong (that's almost axiomatic), the question is how well supported they are. The ones I mentioned are very well supported by multiple independent lines of evidence.
These are not "guesses" or "assumptions" they are the current scientific interpretation of multiple lines of evidence. The meteor impact is an enormously well supported hypothesis. If you're going to back up one argument with evidence from another field, you should probably find out what the current interpretation of the evidence is. Making shit up doesn't work.
There is, by the way, no "empirical proof" of just about anything you care to think of in science. It's all inference; that's what makes science interesting, instead of just bleeding obvious. But to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "empirical proof" in any case--the notion doesn't seem to be coherent to me.
I disagree with most of what you've said for a variety of reasons, but I'm not a climatologist, so I don't think I'll bother arguing about that. This got me annoyed though:
We are warmblooded mammals. The reason we beat the dinosaurs was the fact that dinosaurs don't do well at all in colder climates. Mammals on the other hand, can live in temperatures as low as -40 degrees celcius on average. At current global temperature, most reptiles are limited to tropical climates. The larger reptiles are even limited to warmer-than-their-surroundings rivers in very warm climates. Not that a 6 degree rise will allow crocodiles to live in Europe, but they might colonize the mediterranean coast and a few other rivers than the nile.
This is a load old old cobblers. For starters, mammals didn't beat "beat the dinosaurs", a fucking big rock from space did. Secondly, dinosaurs were almost certainly warm blooded, and certainly didn't have the metabolisms of living reptiles (in fact, along with being large, having a high metabolic rate was probably made them most vulnerable to the effects of the meteor impact). Thirdly, dinosaurs are known from polar areas, which--although warmer than they are today--were still pretty cold. Fourthly, birds are dinosaurs, so dinosaurs are actually the most successful cold-climate animals.
I'm probably taking this too literally, but you don't get taken to the "loony bin" for talking to voices in your head. You're left to rot on the streets. So back in the day, we might have given the poor bastards a funny look--now we can completely ignore them. That's progress!
On what fucking planet are the Chinese going to INVADE the continental USA (let alone in the next decade or so)? That's just batshit insane crazy talk.
The government's accountability is to the people (all the people). Corporations to their share holders. It is just cynical point-scoring to say these amount to the same thing.
Why do people give a shit which level of government runs things? As soon as the collective pool of voters is larger than I can hope to influence personally (lets say, a few hundred people), it becomes irrelevant to me.
This is a serious question--I am genuinely puzzled by this phenomenon.
It's not just a matter of putting stuff on their websites. If you go to the NHM Libary, they make you sign a form giving them copyright on your own photographs of public domain material. This is a serious problem.
Further to this, the gift-shops are hardly packed to the brim with high-resolution photos of, say, sauropod vertebra or pterosaur specimens. Nor do they, last time I looked, even sell technical volumes where you might find this stuff. Making high-resolution photos of these specimens available would have zero impact on their revenue streams as far as I can tell.
The situation is problematic, I agree. However, I think museums need something of a shakeup on this issue. Natural history museums, in particular, need to make photographs of specimens much more easily available for research. Most of these museums have government funding streams, and should see the digital dissemination of their collections as part of their mission, not merely as revenue. Their collections are all to often jealously guarded, which is what making them public institutions is supposed to avoid.
Who says web pages aren't a fashion show? Maybe that's exactly what some are. Some web pages might be about being beautiful, or conveying a certain style. Proclaiming that WEB PAGES ARE ONLY ABOUT INFORMATION END OF DISCUSSION is a very... ahem... nerdy point of view. Myopic, in my opinion. We are not information consuming machines. We might care about things like aesthetics, which is a good thing!
I think we know that if this was say, Bing! or Hotmail, it would show a link to IE8 but that's it. Well, ok, we don't KNOW that, but most of us assume it. I certainly do.
... and indeed, you're wrong. Hotmail provides links to Safari and Firefox.
I get your point--especially about law enforcement, but you need to recognise than "government" isn't a monolith. Many government officials and employees don't want the crazy surveillance of other people either.
InDesign is heading down the same path of suckitude. The first version was SO nice and snappy on my 500mhz G4. It's getting worse and worse--more than throwing away the hardware speed increases.
I completely disagree. My experience of 9.1 was complete freezes several times day (on different computers, so it wasn't just the one machine). OS X 10.0 crashed just *once* in the first month I used it as my main OS -- on the same computer OS 9.1 had taken to crashing several times a day.
But the crashes are few and far- between with PPC- native apps.
Okay, I'm not sure if Adobe apps were PPC native, but I assume they were. OS 9 crashed on me several times a day using Illustrator and Photoshop (usually with nothing else running). Complete freeze, requiring hard reboot. This was the case with several installs on several computers, so it wasn't just one rig.
OS 9 was about 100x (no exaggeration) less stable that the first OS X on the same computer. It was just fucking awful on the stability front.
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Yes. What's your point, beyond silly hyperbole?
Of course these families are often breaching their childrens rights. If you did the sort of things that go on in these families to anyone else's children, you'd go to prison for a long time (where you can be damn sure there'll be surveillance).
I agree with you; but my response is that if the parents actually need 24 hour supervision to look after their kids properly, then the kids need to be taken away. I can't really see how that's a worse outcome than growing up in such a messed up family.
While that seems like a reasonable position to take, the truth is that going into care is just about the worst outcome for a kid (according to delinquency and suicide rates). It's an absolute fucking disaster. This has a lot to do with the deplorable state of the care system, which is stretched beyond capacity, and has failures so bad and so frequently you might think it's better to abandon the whole thing.
I think it would be a mistake to think that having cameras in their houses will fix these problems. It might result in a lot of kids being taken into care earlier--but guess what, state care is often worse than the original abuse, and is stretched to the max anyway. It's a difficult situation, but I think the money should be spent 1) teaching the parent better parenting skills (this does work, according to studies), and 2) training better foster carers and paying them a lot more.
2. Youngsters don't get into crime because they have a chaotic family life. They do it, because it's cool, they have too much free time, and they live in a neutered society.
I think you'll find this is flat wrong. The number of children from stable families that get involved with crime is dwarfed by the number who do have a "chaotic" family life--or no family life at all. Experiencing neglect or abuse, or worse, going into the care system, dramatically increases your risk of juvenile and adult crime. Something like half of the kids in care will go to prison.
I will find cites if you think I'm wrong. Making stuff up, as I suspect you have, isn't a good way of diagnosing the causes of societies complex problems--yet it seems to be the most common method.
Making kids listen to a music in school is a sure-fire way to make it uncool and unpopular.
We clearly have very different notions of the "empirical", as well as radically different philosophies of science.
I merely wanted to point out that the notions of atoms, photons, protons, electrons, the processes of biochemistry, disease, ecology, and many others in science are not directly observable. They are all theoretical inferences, which are dependent on other theories. Multiple lines of evidence are needed to support a hypothesis (whether these come from experiment or discovery is not particularly important, epistemologically). Palaeontology is no different from other sciences in that respect.
Have you read much philosophy of science? Because it sure seems like you haven't. The way you're using the the words, all science is "guesses" and "(well supported) assumptions". Which is a strange way of talking about it. Of course any scientific hypothesis could be wrong (that's almost axiomatic), the question is how well supported they are. The ones I mentioned are very well supported by multiple independent lines of evidence.
These are not "guesses" or "assumptions" they are the current scientific interpretation of multiple lines of evidence. The meteor impact is an enormously well supported hypothesis. If you're going to back up one argument with evidence from another field, you should probably find out what the current interpretation of the evidence is. Making shit up doesn't work.
There is, by the way, no "empirical proof" of just about anything you care to think of in science. It's all inference; that's what makes science interesting, instead of just bleeding obvious. But to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "empirical proof" in any case--the notion doesn't seem to be coherent to me.
I disagree with most of what you've said for a variety of reasons, but I'm not a climatologist, so I don't think I'll bother arguing about that. This got me annoyed though:
We are warmblooded mammals. The reason we beat the dinosaurs was the fact that dinosaurs don't do well at all in colder climates. Mammals on the other hand, can live in temperatures as low as -40 degrees celcius on average. At current global temperature, most reptiles are limited to tropical climates. The larger reptiles are even limited to warmer-than-their-surroundings rivers in very warm climates. Not that a 6 degree rise will allow crocodiles to live in Europe, but they might colonize the mediterranean coast and a few other rivers than the nile.
This is a load old old cobblers. For starters, mammals didn't beat "beat the dinosaurs", a fucking big rock from space did. Secondly, dinosaurs were almost certainly warm blooded, and certainly didn't have the metabolisms of living reptiles (in fact, along with being large, having a high metabolic rate was probably made them most vulnerable to the effects of the meteor impact). Thirdly, dinosaurs are known from polar areas, which--although warmer than they are today--were still pretty cold. Fourthly, birds are dinosaurs, so dinosaurs are actually the most successful cold-climate animals.
I'm probably taking this too literally, but you don't get taken to the "loony bin" for talking to voices in your head. You're left to rot on the streets. So back in the day, we might have given the poor bastards a funny look--now we can completely ignore them. That's progress!
On what fucking planet are the Chinese going to INVADE the continental USA (let alone in the next decade or so)? That's just batshit insane crazy talk.
The government's accountability is to the people (all the people). Corporations to their share holders. It is just cynical point-scoring to say these amount to the same thing.
Why do people give a shit which level of government runs things? As soon as the collective pool of voters is larger than I can hope to influence personally (lets say, a few hundred people), it becomes irrelevant to me.
This is a serious question--I am genuinely puzzled by this phenomenon.
That's what I do with my palaeontological illustrations. Low res to the Wikipedia, charge for high res commercial use.
This is not in the museum exhibition, but the museum library collections. It was about a year ago.
It's published in Science according to the BBC. Jokes about tabloids aside, Science is a real scientific journal.
It's not just a matter of putting stuff on their websites. If you go to the NHM Libary, they make you sign a form giving them copyright on your own photographs of public domain material. This is a serious problem.
Further to this, the gift-shops are hardly packed to the brim with high-resolution photos of, say, sauropod vertebra or pterosaur specimens. Nor do they, last time I looked, even sell technical volumes where you might find this stuff. Making high-resolution photos of these specimens available would have zero impact on their revenue streams as far as I can tell.
The situation is problematic, I agree. However, I think museums need something of a shakeup on this issue. Natural history museums, in particular, need to make photographs of specimens much more easily available for research. Most of these museums have government funding streams, and should see the digital dissemination of their collections as part of their mission, not merely as revenue. Their collections are all to often jealously guarded, which is what making them public institutions is supposed to avoid.
Who says web pages aren't a fashion show? Maybe that's exactly what some are. Some web pages might be about being beautiful, or conveying a certain style. Proclaiming that WEB PAGES ARE ONLY ABOUT INFORMATION END OF DISCUSSION is a very... ahem... nerdy point of view. Myopic, in my opinion. We are not information consuming machines. We might care about things like aesthetics, which is a good thing!
I think we know that if this was say, Bing! or Hotmail, it would show a link to IE8 but that's it. Well, ok, we don't KNOW that, but most of us assume it. I certainly do.
... and indeed, you're wrong. Hotmail provides links to Safari and Firefox.
It is not a damn myth, it is a moral position. Some people may think it is an obligation, others think it is not.
I get your point--especially about law enforcement, but you need to recognise than "government" isn't a monolith. Many government officials and employees don't want the crazy surveillance of other people either.
InDesign is heading down the same path of suckitude. The first version was SO nice and snappy on my 500mhz G4. It's getting worse and worse--more than throwing away the hardware speed increases.
I completely disagree. My experience of 9.1 was complete freezes several times day (on different computers, so it wasn't just the one machine). OS X 10.0 crashed just *once* in the first month I used it as my main OS -- on the same computer OS 9.1 had taken to crashing several times a day.
But the crashes are few and far- between with PPC- native apps.
Okay, I'm not sure if Adobe apps were PPC native, but I assume they were. OS 9 crashed on me several times a day using Illustrator and Photoshop (usually with nothing else running). Complete freeze, requiring hard reboot. This was the case with several installs on several computers, so it wasn't just one rig.
OS 9 was about 100x (no exaggeration) less stable that the first OS X on the same computer. It was just fucking awful on the stability front.