Package managers work on Linux because all (or nearly all) of the software that distros support is open source; They have control over the compilation and packaging of the binaries they provide, and so can ensure that an update to one piece of software doesn't break something else. The few pieces of proprietary software that a distro might support, such as Adobe reader or Skype, are treated with caution and are typically well tested before updates are made available. Microsoft can't replicate this on Windows. So much of the software that makes Windows useful is proprietary or is in competition with Microsoft's own products and there are enough examples of apparently respectable software vendors producing user-hostile software that there just isn't enough mutual trust to make it work.
The BBC may own the copyright to the programmes but that doesn't mean they have the right to make them available in any format. A few bars of music or a few seconds of sports coverage in a news or current affairs programme will bring the rights-holding industries and their lawyers into play. It's easier (and cheaper) just to have a uniform 7 day limit rather than pay copyright lawyers to vet the 400 hours per week of iPlayer content.
It's also used by some of the best sites on the web, such as BBC iPlayer and Fora.tv because it is the only sensible way to deliver no-fuss cross-platform online video. It's also a lightweight and better looking alternative to java or ajax for all sorts of entertaining and educational applets. Non-assholes use flash too because it just works. Blocking all flash because it is sometimes used in ads is as sensible as blocking jpegs because they are sometimes used in ads. If the only flash you've come across is in ads then it is your taste is web sites, rather than flash, that is at fault.
The asymmetric extradition arrangements are of course wrong, but what he is alleged to have done is a crime in the UK too, and even if the extradition arrangements were fairer he would probably have ended up on a plane to the USA eventually. The injustice in this case is more to do with the behaviour of the US authorities -- they attempted to coerce him into giving up his legal rights in the UK to fight extradition by threatening him with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. That's wrong regardless of the deficiencies of the extradition process.
These are not mutually exclusive concepts. An adaptation is a characteristic of an organism that increases its fitness (or increased its fitness at some point in the past). Evolution is the change in the relative frequencies of alleles (different varieties of a gene) over time. The theory of natural selection predicts that alleles that are expressed in beneficial adaptations will become more frequent in the population over time, and that is exactly what has been found in studies of the peppered moth. The main point of the peppered moth example is that the rapid change in populations in a a short space of time rules out other evolutionary mechanisms, such as genetic drift, in favour of natural selection as the mechanism for this change.
These days even the most hardcore creationists grudgingly accept natural selection and speciation. They can hardly do otherwise since there is such abundant experimental evidence confirming the reality of these processes. Instead they take refuge in proposing invisible barriers between ill-defined 'kinds' through which it is impossible for evolution to operate in order to deny common descent. This argument was lost by the creationists in the 19th century when the tree of life was developed based on examination of the actual characteristics of organisms and the available fossil evidence. Since then new fossil evidence and the development of genetics continues to confirm the view that all organisms that have lived on the earth are related. There is simply no good scientific reason to suppose that the mechanisms of evolution suddenly stop working at the points where they conflict with religious doctrine. Creationism was busted as a scientific theory a long time ago and it only continues today because there are people who desperately want it to be true, regardless of where the evidence points.
I'm sure they would love to do this,and they mostly turn a blind eye to bittorrent at the moment, but there are all sorts of obstacles preventing the BBC from sanctioning free distribution of their programmes -- co-production deals, repeat fees for actors, loss of income from overseas sales, and the whole constellation of rights holders who want a piece of the action when the briefest snippet of music is used. They have also been slapped down in the past when they have allowed free distribution of content that has been perceived as undermining the commercial sector.
The slippery slope argument doesn't really work here. Censorship of child pornography doesn't necessarily lead to a totalitarian state, and in fact the push towards censoring child pornography has coincided with a greater tolerance of other types of pornography in established democracies. Freedom of expression is a fundamental principle of liberal democracy, but it is not absolute since there are other important principles that sometimes come into conflict with it, such as protection of minorities, the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial. It is these areas of conflict that lead to the many exceptions from unfettered free speech. Just because it is difficult to balance these principles doesn't mean that you shouldn't try; If the case can be made that censoring something is a lesser evil that not doing so, and there are sufficient safeguards to prevent abuse, then it is not wrong.
Exit polls are not perfect -- in the past they have been a long way out in the UK and Germany when there has been no suspicion of significant fraud. Non-response and selection bias can be more important than sampling error.
The tightening of British gun laws in recent decades was in response to two particular incidents. The first was the Hungerford massacre in 1987 where the perpetrator went on a rampage with an arsenal of legally-held semi-automatic weapons. The government was forced, under intense public pressure, to ban private ownership of most semi-automatic rifles. The second incident was the Dunblane massacre of 1996 which led to the ban of most handguns. Neither measure was aimed at reducing gun crime in general (which is low by any reasonable standard) but rather at reducing the risk of these types of spree killing. It is not a case of authoritarian government forcing gun control on an unwilling population; It is a result of government responding to the thrust of public opinion which views the benefits of allowing the ownership of these weapons to be outweighed by the costs.
The standard in English law (and many other common law systems) is 'tends to reduce the reputation of the claimant in the minds of right thinking members of the public'. This doesn't give carte blanche to publish lies about someone who is held in low regard; There was a case recently in New Zealand where a newspaper settled with a convicted murderer over false allegations that he was a rapist.
I wasn't being completely facetious when I said that British newspapers were more concerned about being sued than telling the truth. Until very recently libel actions were out of the reach of people of ordinary means and newspapers regularly told lies safe in the knowledge that their victims had no effective remedy. The introduction of contingency fees has given access to the system to more people and some newspapers have been slow to adapt to the need to take due care in checking the facts.
If four years of business computer classes leave students helpless when faced an unfamiliar interface or slightly different functionality than used in the classes then those four years have already been wasted.
Interestingly, televisions without inbuilt digital decoding are still on the market today - though I can't think why
Because they are often cheaper than TVs with digital decoders, and just as good for those of us who live in areas that won't be getting DTT for many years yet.
On it's own plurality voting doesn't inevitably lead to a strict two party system. The USA has ended up with such a system because of several additional factors that make it difficult for smaller parties to gain representation:
Very large electoral districts (about 600,000 voters per seat in congress) create a high threshold for representation.
A lack of strong regionalism.
Many areas have ballot access laws that impose significant burdens on parties before voters have a chance to vote on them.
Constitutional constraints that prevent experimentation and change in the form of voting systems whilst providing little restraint on the ability of the major parties to manipulate the existing implementations to their own benefit.
As a math teacher, I'd say you're better off getting help from someone competent than going it alone.
As a fellow maths teacher I would, of course, agree. There isn't really any great mystery to effective learning; There are three key ingredients:
(1) Motivation, either intrinsic or extrinsic.
(2) A sufficient level of aptitude.
(3) A good feedback mechanism that enables you to gauge progress towards your goal.
The OP seems to have both (1) and (2). (3) would normally be supplied by a competent teacher who would be able to assess your progress, tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong and suggest different approaches to overcoming difficulties. It is this feedback mechanism that you will be missing if you go it alone. If you don't want to join a class or hire a private tutor then you might consider distance learning. If you were in the UK then the Open University would be the obvious choice, but I'm sure similar organisations exist in your area.
Whilst it's true that in practice Australian teachers will be unable to stop the defamation, it does illustrate a problem directly caused by the growth of the internet. Australia is a liberal democracy and it's defamation laws are rightly a matter for Australians. Internet freedom has the benefit of allowing people to circumvent some of the restrictions imposed by repressive governments, but at the cost of undermining the legitimate interests of sovereign democracies. On balance this is a good thing, but the cost should be acknowledged.
There's a scientific consensus that GM foods are safe
Which is probably true for those GM varieties that have been developed so far. However there are many other issues involved with the GM industry that are not so clear cut e.g. the long-term impact of introducing herbicide resistance, terminator genes and gene patents. Labelling GM food helps people who care about these issues to make informed choices and doesn't harm those who don't care.
Please read TFA. The programme director said that more activity in school was balanced by less activity out of school, so there was no net increase. It's a little surprising but doesn't break any laws of physics.
We are reaping what we have sown. Rather a lot of schools in England latched onto the 'GNVQ scam' whereby they could get a boost in the league tables by funnelling large numbers of 14-16 year olds into vocational GNVQ courses where success is ensured by generating large amounts of coursework without a great emphasis on conceptual understanding. These courses are deeply unsatisfactory for the sort of people who would be interested in traditional computer science and there has been a steep decline in the number 16-18 year old students studying academic Computing and ICT A levels. Taken together with the decline in Maths and physical sciences this means there isn't a huge number of people who are both able and willing to study computer science at undergraduate level.
I doubt whether there is much enthusiasm for DRM within the BBC. They have shown little interest in stopping the existing sharing of their programming over P2P networks but it's difficult for them to officially endorse it. They have trialled unprotected downloads in the past, but in order to avoid legal complications with the rights-holding industries they have been restricted to current affairs and wildlife documentaries - no actors and no music.
Thus the picture that emerges is that Northern Europe and Canada are particularly mobile and that Britain and the US have the lowest intergenerational mobility across the European and North American countries studied here. The USA is seen by some as a place with particularly high social mobility. In part this is a consequence of using measures of class to estimate mobility (these will be affected by changes in the class structure over time). However, the idea of the US as 'the land of opportunity' persists; and clearly seems misplaced.
I do not understand why this is bothering the teachers so much. One of the most important tools that teachers (and parents) use to manage the behaviour of children inclined towards this sort of thing is to maintain the perception that they will be caught and disciplined.
The reality is that the guilty party will not effectively disciplined -he's got away with it and widespread publication of this video makes teachers' jobs a little bit harder by making that bluff a little harder to maintain.
This particular incident isn't such a big deal, but there have been a series of incidents in which YouTube has been used to publish videos of attacks on teachers - e.g. http://tinyurl.com/yh4uhf. The comment from a school governor, "To abuse the scriptures like this is totally unacceptable," should give you some idea of the environment that many teachers have to deal with.
The principle of the BBC having an independent and reliable source of funding is important in maintaining its independence from government, and it is certainly more independently minded than most commercial broadcasters.
Slashdot Mirror
Package managers work on Linux because all (or nearly all) of the software that distros support is open source; They have control over the compilation and packaging of the binaries they provide, and so can ensure that an update to one piece of software doesn't break something else. The few pieces of proprietary software that a distro might support, such as Adobe reader or Skype, are treated with caution and are typically well tested before updates are made available. Microsoft can't replicate this on Windows. So much of the software that makes Windows useful is proprietary or is in competition with Microsoft's own products and there are enough examples of apparently respectable software vendors producing user-hostile software that there just isn't enough mutual trust to make it work.
The BBC may own the copyright to the programmes but that doesn't mean they have the right to make them available in any format. A few bars of music or a few seconds of sports coverage in a news or current affairs programme will bring the rights-holding industries and their lawyers into play. It's easier (and cheaper) just to have a uniform 7 day limit rather than pay copyright lawyers to vet the 400 hours per week of iPlayer content.
It's also used by some of the best sites on the web, such as BBC iPlayer and Fora.tv because it is the only sensible way to deliver no-fuss cross-platform online video. It's also a lightweight and better looking alternative to java or ajax for all sorts of entertaining and educational applets. Non-assholes use flash too because it just works. Blocking all flash because it is sometimes used in ads is as sensible as blocking jpegs because they are sometimes used in ads. If the only flash you've come across is in ads then it is your taste is web sites, rather than flash, that is at fault.
The asymmetric extradition arrangements are of course wrong, but what he is alleged to have done is a crime in the UK too, and even if the extradition arrangements were fairer he would probably have ended up on a plane to the USA eventually. The injustice in this case is more to do with the behaviour of the US authorities -- they attempted to coerce him into giving up his legal rights in the UK to fight extradition by threatening him with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. That's wrong regardless of the deficiencies of the extradition process.
These are not mutually exclusive concepts. An adaptation is a characteristic of an organism that increases its fitness (or increased its fitness at some point in the past). Evolution is the change in the relative frequencies of alleles (different varieties of a gene) over time. The theory of natural selection predicts that alleles that are expressed in beneficial adaptations will become more frequent in the population over time, and that is exactly what has been found in studies of the peppered moth. The main point of the peppered moth example is that the rapid change in populations in a a short space of time rules out other evolutionary mechanisms, such as genetic drift, in favour of natural selection as the mechanism for this change.
These days even the most hardcore creationists grudgingly accept natural selection and speciation. They can hardly do otherwise since there is such abundant experimental evidence confirming the reality of these processes. Instead they take refuge in proposing invisible barriers between ill-defined 'kinds' through which it is impossible for evolution to operate in order to deny common descent. This argument was lost by the creationists in the 19th century when the tree of life was developed based on examination of the actual characteristics of organisms and the available fossil evidence. Since then new fossil evidence and the development of genetics continues to confirm the view that all organisms that have lived on the earth are related. There is simply no good scientific reason to suppose that the mechanisms of evolution suddenly stop working at the points where they conflict with religious doctrine. Creationism was busted as a scientific theory a long time ago and it only continues today because there are people who desperately want it to be true, regardless of where the evidence points.
I'm sure they would love to do this,and they mostly turn a blind eye to bittorrent at the moment, but there are all sorts of obstacles preventing the BBC from sanctioning free distribution of their programmes -- co-production deals, repeat fees for actors, loss of income from overseas sales, and the whole constellation of rights holders who want a piece of the action when the briefest snippet of music is used. They have also been slapped down in the past when they have allowed free distribution of content that has been perceived as undermining the commercial sector.
The slippery slope argument doesn't really work here. Censorship of child pornography doesn't necessarily lead to a totalitarian state, and in fact the push towards censoring child pornography has coincided with a greater tolerance of other types of pornography in established democracies. Freedom of expression is a fundamental principle of liberal democracy, but it is not absolute since there are other important principles that sometimes come into conflict with it, such as protection of minorities, the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial. It is these areas of conflict that lead to the many exceptions from unfettered free speech. Just because it is difficult to balance these principles doesn't mean that you shouldn't try; If the case can be made that censoring something is a lesser evil that not doing so, and there are sufficient safeguards to prevent abuse, then it is not wrong.
Exit polls are not perfect -- in the past they have been a long way out in the UK and Germany when there has been no suspicion of significant fraud. Non-response and selection bias can be more important than sampling error.
The tightening of British gun laws in recent decades was in response to two particular incidents. The first was the Hungerford massacre in 1987 where the perpetrator went on a rampage with an arsenal of legally-held semi-automatic weapons. The government was forced, under intense public pressure, to ban private ownership of most semi-automatic rifles. The second incident was the Dunblane massacre of 1996 which led to the ban of most handguns. Neither measure was aimed at reducing gun crime in general (which is low by any reasonable standard) but rather at reducing the risk of these types of spree killing. It is not a case of authoritarian government forcing gun control on an unwilling population; It is a result of government responding to the thrust of public opinion which views the benefits of allowing the ownership of these weapons to be outweighed by the costs.
The standard in English law (and many other common law systems) is 'tends to reduce the reputation of the claimant in the minds of right thinking members of the public'. This doesn't give carte blanche to publish lies about someone who is held in low regard; There was a case recently in New Zealand where a newspaper settled with a convicted murderer over false allegations that he was a rapist. I wasn't being completely facetious when I said that British newspapers were more concerned about being sued than telling the truth. Until very recently libel actions were out of the reach of people of ordinary means and newspapers regularly told lies safe in the knowledge that their victims had no effective remedy. The introduction of contingency fees has given access to the system to more people and some newspapers have been slow to adapt to the need to take due care in checking the facts.
This is the British press we're talking about. Instead of "Is it true?" the question they ask is "Will they sue?"
If four years of business computer classes leave students helpless when faced an unfamiliar interface or slightly different functionality than used in the classes then those four years have already been wasted.
Please re-check that you understand the difference between England and The United Kingdom.
(1) Motivation, either intrinsic or extrinsic.
(2) A sufficient level of aptitude.
(3) A good feedback mechanism that enables you to gauge progress towards your goal.
The OP seems to have both (1) and (2). (3) would normally be supplied by a competent teacher who would be able to assess your progress, tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong and suggest different approaches to overcoming difficulties. It is this feedback mechanism that you will be missing if you go it alone. If you don't want to join a class or hire a private tutor then you might consider distance learning. If you were in the UK then the Open University would be the obvious choice, but I'm sure similar organisations exist in your area.
Whilst it's true that in practice Australian teachers will be unable to stop the defamation, it does illustrate a problem directly caused by the growth of the internet. Australia is a liberal democracy and it's defamation laws are rightly a matter for Australians. Internet freedom has the benefit of allowing people to circumvent some of the restrictions imposed by repressive governments, but at the cost of undermining the legitimate interests of sovereign democracies. On balance this is a good thing, but the cost should be acknowledged.
Please read TFA. The programme director said that more activity in school was balanced by less activity out of school, so there was no net increase. It's a little surprising but doesn't break any laws of physics.
We are reaping what we have sown. Rather a lot of schools in England latched onto the 'GNVQ scam' whereby they could get a boost in the league tables by funnelling large numbers of 14-16 year olds into vocational GNVQ courses where success is ensured by generating large amounts of coursework without a great emphasis on conceptual understanding. These courses are deeply unsatisfactory for the sort of people who would be interested in traditional computer science and there has been a steep decline in the number 16-18 year old students studying academic Computing and ICT A levels. Taken together with the decline in Maths and physical sciences this means there isn't a huge number of people who are both able and willing to study computer science at undergraduate level.
I doubt whether there is much enthusiasm for DRM within the BBC. They have shown little interest in stopping the existing sharing of their programming over P2P networks but it's difficult for them to officially endorse it. They have trialled unprotected downloads in the past, but in order to avoid legal complications with the rights-holding industries they have been restricted to current affairs and wildlife documentaries - no actors and no music.
The BBC is a public corporation established by royal charter. It is part of the state but not part of the governement.
The principle of the BBC having an independent and reliable source of funding is important in maintaining its independence from government, and it is certainly more independently minded than most commercial broadcasters.