Are you aware of what has gone on to result in this regulation? Look it up.
"The Press" in the UK has systematically abused it's position. It has acted as if it were beyond the law and society as a whole. Having been skating on thin ice for more than a decade, hacking of phones of both the weak and the powerful was the final straw.
Alas, this law is the unfortunate consequence of their own actions. I would gladly solicit better suggestions to tackle this issue. How do you reign in a press drunk with power in a free society?
I hate to point this out, but there were not many people in their mid twenties in any position of power in the 1950's.
That and the vast majority of Elizabeth II's generation are very much dead.
Thankfully old men die and attitudes change.
Unfortunately it often takes the old men dying for it happen.
I really do not get this "You must apologise for everything!" mentality that has sprung up over the past 15 years or so.
I'm from the UK. The UK has done some seriously horrible things in both it's distant and recent history.
While Turing is a personal tragedy, his story isn't even a blip on the radar of what has been carried out by my country in the grand scheme of horribleness.
Yes. Outlawing homosexuality is wrong. Leaving India, Ireland etc. to starve is wrong. Conquest at the barrel of a gun is wrong. Slavery is wrong. We get it. But, to be harsh, the current generation isn't really disputing any of that. Your beef is with the generations that have come before, rotting in their graves and if given their lives again, probably would have done the exact same thing.
What meaning does a pardon or an apology have if it is not from those that actually performed the act?
For it just smacks of the worst kind of tokenistic politics.
I for one am sick to death of meaningless apologising for the many and numerous mistakes of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on.
I have enough mistakes of my own to be accountable for.
I've seen far too many friends, far brighter and more talented than I am, become shells of their former selves by a PhD, chemistry in particular.
The academic system in particular seems to take the very best talent and utterly destroy it, with science as a whole suffering as a result.
Babbage was not "a man before his time". He didn't need more money. He didn't need a larger machine shop. He blew it!
He had the money.
The people in 1800's Britain knew a good thing when they saw it. And when small prototypes were demonstrated the British Government committed to build the difference engine. And guess what, they wanted to use it for gunnery on ships! They invested *big*. How much? One fully kited out battleship's worth. One of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warrior_(1860) (more or less). That is a huge amount of money.
The skills were available.
Have a look at a British clock from this period. Very intricate work and at a lot smaller scale than Babbage required. Sure, what he was doing was on a large scale, but the skills and tools were out there. Indeed, Babbage teamed up with them and had the money to do it.
But he committed the cardinal sin. Babbage was forever changing the design. Yes Mr Babbage, your analytical engine idea is nice but we are paying you for the difference engine! He could not stay focused to build what was paid for and required. Falling out with the machinists capable of building it hardly helped maters. He did not deliver. As a result he blew not only his own reputation but that of the whole idea, killing it for the best part of a century. That is how bad he was.
You can be the most talented man in the world, but if you are so disorganised and uncivil that nobody wants to work for you it is all for nothing.
A lesson we can all still learn form.
I'm lucky enough to know a guy now working on the OLPC project in Uruguay. In his opinion and mine it is an ideal country to try this out.
He works at roll out and technical support end with schools, essentially at the coal face of this idea.
What is his biggest day-to-day problem?
Convincing the kids not to use the laptop as a Frisbee.
Projects like this need a *lot* of work. This current idea is positively idiotic and shows just how little feedback there is in the organisation.
Which makes it all the greater same that the Beagle 2 did not land. We need a robotic chemist up there.
While the two NASA rovers have done great work, they are very specialised as robotic geologists. This is great if you wanted pretty pictures of rocks, but does leave you stuffed if you want hard data on potential organic molecules.
For it's many, many flaws, the Beagle 2 did manage to pack in a lot of science (indeed it would have provided much more interesting results IMHO) into a very small space on a shoe string. I can't help but think that if a little of the now obvious considerable redundancy (two rovers for crynout loud) built into the NASA mission had been given up for more science there would not be such a the need to send a rover the size of a car.
Internships are like poison to a meritocracy based society. Unpaid internships doubly so.
They allow richer parents to use both their money and connections to manoeuvre their children into jobs that have wealth, power or both. This comes at the expense of poorer and middle class children who can not bankroll their children in adulthood or do not move in the right social circles.
These sort of actions entrench wealth and power with those who already have them. An internship via connections or unpaid work is a boot in the face of those who can not ride out life on Daddy's coat-tails.
If there was a computing discovery of true importance, it would most likely be granted the mathematics prize. In the same way that biology tends to get lumped in with chemistry every other year.
But for the most part, computing discoveries are just not 'Nobel' important.
Ariane 5, until recently, was the most successful commercial launcher.
However, the rocket is getting a little long in the tooth and things are hotting up with Space X getting into their stride.
While TFA states otherwise, Reaction Engines Ltd are most likely aiming for the forthcoming ESA review and investigation into a replacement for Ariane 5. It would be a long shot, both the UK's dismal track record in funding space flight at a national level and France's well proven track record are major hurdles. But I suspect this would be Skylon's best bet, nobody else has the spare billion or 5 to spend on the project.
I don't think that the issue is weather or not they grow back, but more a case of where or not you can damage them to a point where they will not be recognised by the scanning software.
I know I have picked up a number of scars on my fingers in my line of work which I do not want to result in a 3 hour delay at an airport. Saying that, ears are no better, for I have a chunk out of my left ear from a rugby injury.
One of these days they will come up with a better method of identification, until then, I think it would be better for all if we could learn to start trusting each other again.
I take it you are unemployed.
If you are in full time education or work, in the depths of winter you will get up and be in the office/classroom in the dark before coming home in the dark having not seen natural sunlight all day. This is extremely depressing and has even been even proposed as a reason why people in the far north of a country have comparatively higher suicide rate than those in similar situations and backgrounds in more southerly locations. Anything that can stave this fate off for a few weeks in the year is most welcome.
There is a great difference between somebody who had a great idea, but was overlooked and somebody who blew it.
Babbage was the latter.
When he showed people a small prototype of his difference engine, they knew exactly what kind of potential it had. The TFA even said that the government backed him. I'll stop the press and let that sink in. The British government knew at the time just what a game changer this could have been. What TFA article doesn't say is the extent to which they backed him. In the prices of the day, they invested the equivalent of a fully kitted out and manned battleship in the project. A battleship. What happened?
Babbage squandered the money, fell out with every metal-smith in the country capable of building the difference engine and committed the ultimate crime of changing his mind and plans time and time and time again. Sure, he had a lot of plans for the Analytical engine, but he couldn't stay focused/act civilly enough to build the machine everybody wanted to begin with. After such an investment and nothing to show for it, nobody would give him the time of day, let alone commission him to build an even more complex machine with an unfinished design.
It could be said, rather than a man who had a great idea that wasn't realised. Babbage had a great idea that he killed so badly via his own incompetence, nobody touched it for another 100 years.
There are a few reasons I suspect and not all of them are about how awesome and useful they are as most of the posts above would have you believe. If technical skill was all that was required, why are there not more chemists?
From personal experiences only, I would say it is the fundamental difference in mindset required to practice a science over engineering. Self doubt and questioning are par for the course in the physical sciences, indeed it would be extremely difficult to do the job without the question "Are you sure?" running through your head every 15 min. Engineers on the other hand tend to deal in absolutes, laws carved in stone, it works or it doesn't, black and white. This does appeal to those with a predisposition to ignore shades of gray and are exactly the same traits as those of a fundamentalist of any persuasion, making them the ideal recruiting target.
This can be summed up by saying engineers tend to have a "I'm right. I'm right. I'M FUCKING RIGHT!" attitude to their work and life in general and woe betide anybody who tells them otherwise.
Disclaimer.... I openly accept that there is variability in any population, I made sweeping generalizations etc. This was done to stop the post turning into a monty python sketch listing all the exemptions. But the very fact I'm writing this disclaimer is a dead give-away that I am not an engineer.
As a Scot, I feel the need to explain a few things regarding the al-Megrahi compassionate release.
The Lockerbie bomber was tried and imprisoned under Scots Law. And under Scots law, if you are imprisoned, no longer seen as a threat to the public and in the medical opinion of the Scottish Prison Service 3 months to live you are eligible compassionate for release. In the vast majority of cases this is granted. That is The Law, no if's, no buts, no exemptions. No matter how much sickening it may be to do so.
While I am an Atheist, the laws of my country (like many in the west), have a heavy basis in the Christian Bible. As a result, lots of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth but also the increasing unpopular notions of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. What benefit is there in letting a dying man, no matter how heinous the crime, spend his last days in prison? Is that a desire for justice or is it vengeance? Yes, he denied that fate to so many others. But that is no excuse to compromise these principles, doubly so when the state makes the decision. For if we do not show our values in the face of our enemies, how different are we from them?
It should be pointed out that the Doctor at the center of the "Ten years or more" life expectancy claim was not part of the medical opinion that formed the basis of his compassionate release, and has appeared on the TV saying he was misquoted. This opinion at the time of release was al-Megrahi has a 50% chance of passing away in the next 3 months, with the percentage decreasing to about 1% chance he will live 10 years. http://news.stv.tv/scotland/187126-lockerbie-doctor-speaks-out-over-megrahi-comments/
The Scottish Government has already released all the records (Bar those the US and UK government has asked to with hold) regarding his release long before these senators trying to get themselves re-elected started this. Have a look for yourself.
Maybe, just maybe, the official position is the truth and the conspiracy is just that?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you aware of what has gone on to result in this regulation? Look it up.
"The Press" in the UK has systematically abused it's position. It has acted as if it were beyond the law and society as a whole. Having been skating on thin ice for more than a decade, hacking of phones of both the weak and the powerful was the final straw.
Alas, this law is the unfortunate consequence of their own actions. I would gladly solicit better suggestions to tackle this issue. How do you reign in a press drunk with power in a free society?
I hate to point this out, but there were not many people in their mid twenties in any position of power in the 1950's.
That and the vast majority of Elizabeth II's generation are very much dead.
Thankfully old men die and attitudes change.
Unfortunately it often takes the old men dying for it happen.
I really do not get this "You must apologise for everything!" mentality that has sprung up over the past 15 years or so.
I'm from the UK. The UK has done some seriously horrible things in both it's distant and recent history.
While Turing is a personal tragedy, his story isn't even a blip on the radar of what has been carried out by my country in the grand scheme of horribleness.
Yes. Outlawing homosexuality is wrong. Leaving India, Ireland etc. to starve is wrong. Conquest at the barrel of a gun is wrong. Slavery is wrong. We get it. But, to be harsh, the current generation isn't really disputing any of that. Your beef is with the generations that have come before, rotting in their graves and if given their lives again, probably would have done the exact same thing.
What meaning does a pardon or an apology have if it is not from those that actually performed the act?
For it just smacks of the worst kind of tokenistic politics.
I for one am sick to death of meaningless apologising for the many and numerous mistakes of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on.
I have enough mistakes of my own to be accountable for.
Teach a man to fish and you lose your monopoly on supplying them.
I've seen far too many friends, far brighter and more talented than I am, become shells of their former selves by a PhD, chemistry in particular. The academic system in particular seems to take the very best talent and utterly destroy it, with science as a whole suffering as a result.
Babbage was not "a man before his time". He didn't need more money. He didn't need a larger machine shop. He blew it!
He had the money.
The people in 1800's Britain knew a good thing when they saw it. And when small prototypes were demonstrated the British Government committed to build the difference engine. And guess what, they wanted to use it for gunnery on ships! They invested *big*. How much? One fully kited out battleship's worth. One of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warrior_(1860) (more or less). That is a huge amount of money.
The skills were available.
Have a look at a British clock from this period. Very intricate work and at a lot smaller scale than Babbage required. Sure, what he was doing was on a large scale, but the skills and tools were out there. Indeed, Babbage teamed up with them and had the money to do it.
But he committed the cardinal sin. Babbage was forever changing the design. Yes Mr Babbage, your analytical engine idea is nice but we are paying you for the difference engine! He could not stay focused to build what was paid for and required. Falling out with the machinists capable of building it hardly helped maters. He did not deliver. As a result he blew not only his own reputation but that of the whole idea, killing it for the best part of a century. That is how bad he was.
You can be the most talented man in the world, but if you are so disorganised and uncivil that nobody wants to work for you it is all for nothing. A lesson we can all still learn form.
How long does it take BT to put in an ASDL connection?
You guessed it! A month.
I'm lucky enough to know a guy now working on the OLPC project in Uruguay. In his opinion and mine it is an ideal country to try this out.
He works at roll out and technical support end with schools, essentially at the coal face of this idea.
What is his biggest day-to-day problem?
Convincing the kids not to use the laptop as a Frisbee.
Projects like this need a *lot* of work. This current idea is positively idiotic and shows just how little feedback there is in the organisation.
Which makes it all the greater same that the Beagle 2 did not land. We need a robotic chemist up there.
While the two NASA rovers have done great work, they are very specialised as robotic geologists. This is great if you wanted pretty pictures of rocks, but does leave you stuffed if you want hard data on potential organic molecules.
For it's many, many flaws, the Beagle 2 did manage to pack in a lot of science (indeed it would have provided much more interesting results IMHO) into a very small space on a shoe string. I can't help but think that if a little of the now obvious considerable redundancy (two rovers for crynout loud) built into the NASA mission had been given up for more science there would not be such a the need to send a rover the size of a car.
Internships are like poison to a meritocracy based society. Unpaid internships doubly so.
They allow richer parents to use both their money and connections to manoeuvre their children into jobs that have wealth, power or both. This comes at the expense of poorer and middle class children who can not bankroll their children in adulthood or do not move in the right social circles.
A classic example in my country (UK) was a fund raising event for the Conservative party. Internships at top flight financial and legal firms were auctioned off the party donors to raise funds for the party. No, I did not make this up : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356469/Cash-internships-Tory-backers-pay-2k-time-buy-children-work-experience.html (apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, but credit where it is due, they did break this story).
These sort of actions entrench wealth and power with those who already have them. An internship via connections or unpaid work is a boot in the face of those who can not ride out life on Daddy's coat-tails.
If there was a computing discovery of true importance, it would most likely be granted the mathematics prize. In the same way that biology tends to get lumped in with chemistry every other year.
But for the most part, computing discoveries are just not 'Nobel' important.
Ariane 5, until recently, was the most successful commercial launcher.
However, the rocket is getting a little long in the tooth and things are hotting up with Space X getting into their stride.
While TFA states otherwise, Reaction Engines Ltd are most likely aiming for the forthcoming ESA review and investigation into a replacement for Ariane 5. It would be a long shot, both the UK's dismal track record in funding space flight at a national level and France's well proven track record are major hurdles. But I suspect this would be Skylon's best bet, nobody else has the spare billion or 5 to spend on the project.
I don't think that the issue is weather or not they grow back, but more a case of where or not you can damage them to a point where they will not be recognised by the scanning software.
I know I have picked up a number of scars on my fingers in my line of work which I do not want to result in a 3 hour delay at an airport. Saying that, ears are no better, for I have a chunk out of my left ear from a rugby injury.
One of these days they will come up with a better method of identification, until then, I think it would be better for all if we could learn to start trusting each other again.
I couldn't agree more. I just wish there was an effective way to mock other issues in such a decisive way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Manchester_bombing
Most Mancunians I've spoken to say it was the best thing to happen to their city center.
Why get hot and bothered about something when you can make a mockery of it?
It is usually more effective too.
It won't stop them being defeated by a the burglar wearing a hoodie.
Taking pride on one's work died round about the time that job security and pay that wasn't "How low can we get away with?" did.
I take it you are unemployed. If you are in full time education or work, in the depths of winter you will get up and be in the office/classroom in the dark before coming home in the dark having not seen natural sunlight all day. This is extremely depressing and has even been even proposed as a reason why people in the far north of a country have comparatively higher suicide rate than those in similar situations and backgrounds in more southerly locations. Anything that can stave this fate off for a few weeks in the year is most welcome.
Who most likely doesn't live in the North. I like seeing daylight every now and then.
There is a great difference between somebody who had a great idea, but was overlooked and somebody who blew it.
Babbage was the latter.
When he showed people a small prototype of his difference engine, they knew exactly what kind of potential it had. The TFA even said that the government backed him. I'll stop the press and let that sink in. The British government knew at the time just what a game changer this could have been. What TFA article doesn't say is the extent to which they backed him. In the prices of the day, they invested the equivalent of a fully kitted out and manned battleship in the project. A battleship. What happened?
Babbage squandered the money, fell out with every metal-smith in the country capable of building the difference engine and committed the ultimate crime of changing his mind and plans time and time and time again. Sure, he had a lot of plans for the Analytical engine, but he couldn't stay focused/act civilly enough to build the machine everybody wanted to begin with. After such an investment and nothing to show for it, nobody would give him the time of day, let alone commission him to build an even more complex machine with an unfinished design.
It could be said, rather than a man who had a great idea that wasn't realised. Babbage had a great idea that he killed so badly via his own incompetence, nobody touched it for another 100 years.
There are a few reasons I suspect and not all of them are about how awesome and useful they are as most of the posts above would have you believe. If technical skill was all that was required, why are there not more chemists?
From personal experiences only, I would say it is the fundamental difference in mindset required to practice a science over engineering. Self doubt and questioning are par for the course in the physical sciences, indeed it would be extremely difficult to do the job without the question "Are you sure?" running through your head every 15 min. Engineers on the other hand tend to deal in absolutes, laws carved in stone, it works or it doesn't, black and white. This does appeal to those with a predisposition to ignore shades of gray and are exactly the same traits as those of a fundamentalist of any persuasion, making them the ideal recruiting target.
This can be summed up by saying engineers tend to have a "I'm right. I'm right. I'M FUCKING RIGHT!" attitude to their work and life in general and woe betide anybody who tells them otherwise.
Disclaimer.... I openly accept that there is variability in any population, I made sweeping generalizations etc. This was done to stop the post turning into a monty python sketch listing all the exemptions. But the very fact I'm writing this disclaimer is a dead give-away that I am not an engineer.
As a Scot, I feel the need to explain a few things regarding the al-Megrahi compassionate release.
The Lockerbie bomber was tried and imprisoned under Scots Law. And under Scots law, if you are imprisoned, no longer seen as a threat to the public and in the medical opinion of the Scottish Prison Service 3 months to live you are eligible compassionate for release. In the vast majority of cases this is granted. That is The Law, no if's, no buts, no exemptions. No matter how much sickening it may be to do so.
While I am an Atheist, the laws of my country (like many in the west), have a heavy basis in the Christian Bible. As a result, lots of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth but also the increasing unpopular notions of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. What benefit is there in letting a dying man, no matter how heinous the crime, spend his last days in prison? Is that a desire for justice or is it vengeance? Yes, he denied that fate to so many others. But that is no excuse to compromise these principles, doubly so when the state makes the decision. For if we do not show our values in the face of our enemies, how different are we from them?
It should be pointed out that the Doctor at the center of the "Ten years or more" life expectancy claim was not part of the medical opinion that formed the basis of his compassionate release, and has appeared on the TV saying he was misquoted. This opinion at the time of release was al-Megrahi has a 50% chance of passing away in the next 3 months, with the percentage decreasing to about 1% chance he will live 10 years.
http://news.stv.tv/scotland/187126-lockerbie-doctor-speaks-out-over-megrahi-comments/
The Scottish Government has already released all the records (Bar those the US and UK government has asked to with hold) regarding his release long before these senators trying to get themselves re-elected started this. Have a look for yourself.
Maybe, just maybe, the official position is the truth and the conspiracy is just that?
Could it be that 3 independent enquires came to a conclusion, upon examining the evidence, that did not validate your gut reaction?
"No Buck Rogers, no bucks."
I think that answers your question.