yes, let's hope they do. There's only one problem - when the lords smack down a piece of insanely stupid legislation (like this) which would increase the power of the commons (by making more people into criminals), the commons starts screeching that the UNELECTED (their emphasis, not mine) house of lords is usurping the authority of the elected commons to do anything they damn well please. Which is then used as an excuse for another round of trying to pound the lords back into the stone age, and so the commons gets away with more stupid stuff.
Basically the lords have to weigh up doing their jobs of protecting us from bad legislation against their future ability to do the job.
It all started back about a century ago when the lords turned the (liberal) budget down (it was a tradition that the lords just rubber-stamped pieces of 'money' legislation). This set off two things - first, the king appointed more (liberal) lords so that the conservatives no longer had the majority and secondly resulted in the 1911 parliament act, which means that even if the lords did stand up to the commons and keep throwing the legislation out, once the commons had passed it three separate times it just bypassed the lords. In the 1940's this was changed to 2 separate times.
Basically the lords is just a toothless house which can only stall legislation, but the commons will always win by attrition if they can be bothered.
Another trend which will be noted is things get passed with every labour MP voting for, and every conservative & lib dem MP voting against. Why? Whips (not physical whips, they're people), even if you write to your Labour MP and tell them in the strongest of terms that this is a very bad piece of legislation and you want them to vote against it, they'll most likely just ignore you and follow the party line - just like in any 'democratic' system, representatives are under no obligation to vote the way that the people who they represent want.
So, right now, the Labour government can do basically anything that it wants because they can force any piece of legislation through twice and get it enacted without anyone being able to oppose them.
The last line of defence is the Queen, who could refuse to sign something into law. Which she's technically not allowed to do but there's not much that anyone can do about it if she doesn't.
Don't get yourself involved in UK constitutional affairs, it WILL give you a headache. (because we don't need a nice clear-cut written constitution, because that might make life difficult for bliar)
$5 per kilowatt hour?
aka a 'unit'. I just looked up one of our local electricity suppliers prices and 'leccy costs about 10p per unit. You're more than an order of magnitude out.
I live in the UK, I was under the impression that, relative to the US, our electricity was expensive.
best to worst:
New Zealand...France...Zimbabwe...PRC...Germany...USA. ..UK
Germany may seem out of place, but I was talking with a German about civil liberties/free speech/ID cards the other day and he felt they were a marvellous idea because the government was the most trustworthy organisation in the country. He isn't a stupid person, anywhere where non-stupid people think that the government is the most trustworthy organisation about and will trust them with anything is just ripe for a government to do anything it pleases.
Racket? no.
It's buying up a limited resource which you think will be valuable to someone - it's just supply and demand with total supply set at 1 (allowing the seller to name their price).
If there were no trademarks it wouldn't be a problem.
People deliberately buy up or stockpile limited resources to push the price up so they can sell it on at massive profit - as I understand the major diamond dealers do it, governments do it with gold, several governments do it with currency. The United States did it with Helium in the 1930s (but only against Germany, and look what happened, the Hindenburg Disaster).
If someone bought up the number plate '5C OGP' (SCO GrouP) or somesuch similar (I can't think of a good example, can you tell?) and the CEO of SCO wanted the number plate for their company car, would you feel it was unreasonable for whoever bought the plate up to turn themselves a tidy profit on it? What about those guys who bought HN51 FLU, should they not be allowed to sell it on to a pharma company at a profit?
1) enter a photocopy (or just the answers on filepaper)
2)a if it's accepted, no problem
2)b if it's rejected complain to exam board that you got zero marks on an assignment for not owning a specific textbook rather than not doing the work (hand a copy of your answers in to your tutor when you hand them in to the lecturer so they have a record that you did the work and did it by the deadline)
3)a if the exam board agrees watch your marks get reinstated and the lecturer get a rollocking
3)b if the exam board supports the lecturer, sue.
As another poster said, lecturers have no business requiring you to use original perforated sheets which are only available in expensive textbooks.
They also have no business setting problems from the textbook as assessed questions (not least because it means that the answers are freely available either in the solution book, the back of the textbook that the questions are in, or from a student from last year who has the model solutions)
some are already doing it
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Apogee (now going by 3D Realms) have released a bunch of their old game for free:
Here
I'm now going to suggest something that I suggested at least a year ago and is even more feasible now:
CD burning stations in game stores. It need not be bigger than any of those displays which have a working playstation or whatever in them for people to use, so wouldn't take up more sales space than stores as used to giving up with those machines.
It would basically be a computer with a huge wad of storage space filled with game disc.iso s and a CD-R drive. Take your own disc (or buy one from the desk) put it in, put a few pounds/dollars in, choose your disc and burn away - it could even have a lightscribe drive to put a line-art version of the original disc art onto it. (or it could have a printer to print a sticky label and a copy of the license agreement).
All it needs from the game companies is their consent, the.iso of a disc and a pdf file of the manual (which would be included in the disc image). With the beauty of broadband internet, or just DVD discs to be copied onto the machine, it wouldn't be all that hard to keep updating the catalogue available in the machine.
Easy as pie.
This story was covered in this months (last months now? the next issue is due soon) National Geographic. Definately one of the better featured pieces of the last few months
I was under the impression that we weren't allowed to build new nukes anyway, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, only maintain old ones. Or is the plan to have new warhead designs, computationally tested, ready to be built in time of war, when all treaties go out of the window?
well, if you lose it, that'll be £1000 down the drain (or somesuch similar). That might change your life a bit, especially if you do it a few times.
Also, right now, as a law abiding citizien, being tracked probably isn't a concern. What happens in a decade when for whatever reason (totally corrupt government, etc.) you have to stop being a law abiding citizien. Will you then be so happy to have your every movement tracked? A record kept of everywhere you go and everyone you talk to?
What if you want to just disappear? Start afresh somewhere else? since you won't be able to shake off your old ID and won't be able to get anything under a new clean one you'll be a bit scuppered.
The 'alphabet agencies' were set up to provide work for the millions left unemployed after the 1929 stock market crash, stuff like building roads. They weren't in the business of spying on 'commies' or dealing with 'unamerican' elements. Most (if not all) of them don't exist anymore.
Firstly, I would like to thank my staff for their thorough work of destroying all copies of the memo I sent out asking them to this. I would also like to congratulate them on their exemplary performance in carrying out my instructions to spread my campaign propaganda throughout the wikipedia with such totality, clarity and speed. There will be a token superficial investigation of the case after which we will conclude that it was infact a justified action to combat the ever-present terrorist threat. I will therefore shortly introduce new legislation outlawing all negative points of view of congresspeople (on the condition that they're from my party) as unpatriotic - this will be billed as an entirely appropriate reaction through careful manipulation of the wikipedia articles on 'terrorists' and '1984_(book)'. Now bow down, you snivelling peasants!
Or, indeed, ever watched Dr. Strangelove.
"Mr President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"
Ok, not the best quote on the topic, but I can't remember any of the others word-for-word and they're not on wikiquote, but in general you need 10 females for every male, and the females need to be picked partially on how attractive they are as, 'with little else to do, they would breed prodigiously'.
see, 13 episodes is a very good number - it means that at one episode per week, the series will run for exactly quarter of a year - in a few years time when they try to flog it to a foreign network, they can buy 4 seasons of that length and have exactly one year worth of telly.
Programs which start small (6 episodes) and explode then, only get 7 episodes in their next season so that the first two season make 13 episodes, and then they start getting 13 epsiode seasons. 26 is also a popular number for really popular programmes.
Unfortunately, their method for getting cars without tax off the road are flawed. Instead they now send out automated fines to people who don't have tax unless they tell them that their car isn't on the road.
In the old days your car had to be seen on the road without tax. Now you just have to not have tax and unfortunately the defence of 'it wasn't on the road' no longer counts, because not telling them that it's not on the road is a new offence in itself.
To recap:
Not having road tax is against the law
You now have to tell them that you're not breaking the law
Not telling them that you're not breaking the law is itself now against the law.
This particular law does nothing but fine people for being forgetful - human error should not normally be a criminal offence.
To prevent the contestants catching on to the obvious inconsistencies, they've had to discount anyone with military training, physics education and anyone with even a cursory interest in space science.
It's basically taking the thickest 3 people they could find - I'd be suprised if any of the contestants even had any A-levels.
Either that or the most gullible 3 people they could find, who, blinded by their desire to become famous, are willing to believe anything, however nonsensical it sounds, just to get on the telly.
And since the entire idea of the show is to laugh at stupid/gullible people I see little point in it. I do wonder how they explained away the huge smoke cloud visible across large swathes of England at the moment though.
Where do channel 4 get the idea that this is good entertainment?
Yes, it is, but over the last fortnight I've found myself handing in 3 pieces of work with wikipedia as the primary reference. It's simply a lot more possible to data-mine than any other source. When you're doing degree level physics (don't laugh at my incompetence at research) the amount of sources that will explain what you want to know in an understandable format rapidly approaches zero. What you use is wikipedia, because it's the only thing you can understand - you either reference wikipedia (allowing whoever is marking to take those references with as big a shovel of salt as they want), or you lie and reference the papers that relate to the topic but that you didn't read because you didn't understand them.
I go with honesty
er, so if there isn't a teacher about to disable it they actually can't work? Seems like a pretty dumb piece of software to me. If it only works when someone is watching then can't the person watching deal with at the source.
How do you tell them difference between a pupil who is supposed to be working and who is on free time (which was the problem in my situation)?
And most importantly, would you mind if the kids could do this to your computer? and if you're not comfortable with that why do you do it to them?
do you disable the reboot button as well?
"Why is your computer rebooting"?
"It crashed"
"ah, carry on"
On a similar note, when I was in school I was browsing a gaming realted site on a computer in the library, not during a lesson, but during my own free period. Suddenly my mouse stopped responding and the cursor magically moved to the X at the top right and closed the window. I should've gone and had butts kicked but as a pupil (in the sixth form, mind you) there's not much you can do about it. (and it took me a while to realise what had happened)
This leads me to conclude that software that allows remote control of a computer without the users permission is just evil, needs to go, and it's inventors high on the list of 'first up against the wall when the revolution comes'.
I though bioneural gel packs were a joke, a science fiction fantasy, if you will. A ridiculous invention in Voyager to be ridiculed by the scientific community.
Apparently I was wrong
So;
Let me be the first to say that I welcome our new bioneural gel pack overlords.
yes, yes there were.
Since Blizz had no control over what people did on their home computers and there was no CD-Key system in D1 people could do anything they wanted, and they did.
90% of D1 players cheated, 9% were liars, 1% were foaming-at-the-mouth elitist-legit zealots.
can we get computers to do things that they haven't been programmed to do? No, to do something they have to have been programmed to do it. But what about 'self learning' programs? how do they 'self learn'? oh, yes, they were programmed to do it.
An 'AI' can't decide to take over the world unless it knows about 'take over the world' as a possible end result, how does it find that?
In light of this can we say that true AI can ever exist?
No.
Slashdot Mirror
yes, let's hope they do. There's only one problem - when the lords smack down a piece of insanely stupid legislation (like this) which would increase the power of the commons (by making more people into criminals), the commons starts screeching that the UNELECTED (their emphasis, not mine) house of lords is usurping the authority of the elected commons to do anything they damn well please. Which is then used as an excuse for another round of trying to pound the lords back into the stone age, and so the commons gets away with more stupid stuff.
Basically the lords have to weigh up doing their jobs of protecting us from bad legislation against their future ability to do the job.
It all started back about a century ago when the lords turned the (liberal) budget down (it was a tradition that the lords just rubber-stamped pieces of 'money' legislation). This set off two things - first, the king appointed more (liberal) lords so that the conservatives no longer had the majority and secondly resulted in the 1911 parliament act, which means that even if the lords did stand up to the commons and keep throwing the legislation out, once the commons had passed it three separate times it just bypassed the lords. In the 1940's this was changed to 2 separate times.
Basically the lords is just a toothless house which can only stall legislation, but the commons will always win by attrition if they can be bothered.
Another trend which will be noted is things get passed with every labour MP voting for, and every conservative & lib dem MP voting against. Why? Whips (not physical whips, they're people), even if you write to your Labour MP and tell them in the strongest of terms that this is a very bad piece of legislation and you want them to vote against it, they'll most likely just ignore you and follow the party line - just like in any 'democratic' system, representatives are under no obligation to vote the way that the people who they represent want.
So, right now, the Labour government can do basically anything that it wants because they can force any piece of legislation through twice and get it enacted without anyone being able to oppose them.
The last line of defence is the Queen, who could refuse to sign something into law. Which she's technically not allowed to do but there's not much that anyone can do about it if she doesn't.
Don't get yourself involved in UK constitutional affairs, it WILL give you a headache. (because we don't need a nice clear-cut written constitution, because that might make life difficult for bliar)
the Guardian article alluded to:
here
$5 per kilowatt hour?
aka a 'unit'. I just looked up one of our local electricity suppliers prices and 'leccy costs about 10p per unit. You're more than an order of magnitude out.
I live in the UK, I was under the impression that, relative to the US, our electricity was expensive.
best to worst:. ..UK
New Zealand...France...Zimbabwe...PRC...Germany...USA
Germany may seem out of place, but I was talking with a German about civil liberties/free speech/ID cards the other day and he felt they were a marvellous idea because the government was the most trustworthy organisation in the country. He isn't a stupid person, anywhere where non-stupid people think that the government is the most trustworthy organisation about and will trust them with anything is just ripe for a government to do anything it pleases.
Racket? no.
It's buying up a limited resource which you think will be valuable to someone - it's just supply and demand with total supply set at 1 (allowing the seller to name their price).
If there were no trademarks it wouldn't be a problem.
People deliberately buy up or stockpile limited resources to push the price up so they can sell it on at massive profit - as I understand the major diamond dealers do it, governments do it with gold, several governments do it with currency. The United States did it with Helium in the 1930s (but only against Germany, and look what happened, the Hindenburg Disaster).
If someone bought up the number plate '5C OGP' (SCO GrouP) or somesuch similar (I can't think of a good example, can you tell?) and the CEO of SCO wanted the number plate for their company car, would you feel it was unreasonable for whoever bought the plate up to turn themselves a tidy profit on it? What about those guys who bought HN51 FLU, should they not be allowed to sell it on to a pharma company at a profit?
correction:
Not until Reiserfs for windows makes some more progress, anyway.
On that subject, are there any third party drivers allowing you to access reiser (and other) file systems from within windows?
1) enter a photocopy (or just the answers on filepaper) 2)a if it's accepted, no problem 2)b if it's rejected complain to exam board that you got zero marks on an assignment for not owning a specific textbook rather than not doing the work (hand a copy of your answers in to your tutor when you hand them in to the lecturer so they have a record that you did the work and did it by the deadline) 3)a if the exam board agrees watch your marks get reinstated and the lecturer get a rollocking 3)b if the exam board supports the lecturer, sue. As another poster said, lecturers have no business requiring you to use original perforated sheets which are only available in expensive textbooks. They also have no business setting problems from the textbook as assessed questions (not least because it means that the answers are freely available either in the solution book, the back of the textbook that the questions are in, or from a student from last year who has the model solutions)
Apogee (now going by 3D Realms) have released a bunch of their old game for free: Here
.iso s and a CD-R drive. Take your own disc (or buy one from the desk) put it in, put a few pounds/dollars in, choose your disc and burn away - it could even have a lightscribe drive to put a line-art version of the original disc art onto it. (or it could have a printer to print a sticky label and a copy of the license agreement).
.iso of a disc and a pdf file of the manual (which would be included in the disc image). With the beauty of broadband internet, or just DVD discs to be copied onto the machine, it wouldn't be all that hard to keep updating the catalogue available in the machine.
I'm now going to suggest something that I suggested at least a year ago and is even more feasible now:
CD burning stations in game stores. It need not be bigger than any of those displays which have a working playstation or whatever in them for people to use, so wouldn't take up more sales space than stores as used to giving up with those machines.
It would basically be a computer with a huge wad of storage space filled with game disc
All it needs from the game companies is their consent, the
Easy as pie.
This story was covered in this months (last months now? the next issue is due soon) National Geographic. Definately one of the better featured pieces of the last few months
I was under the impression that we weren't allowed to build new nukes anyway, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, only maintain old ones. Or is the plan to have new warhead designs, computationally tested, ready to be built in time of war, when all treaties go out of the window?
well, if you lose it, that'll be £1000 down the drain (or somesuch similar). That might change your life a bit, especially if you do it a few times. Also, right now, as a law abiding citizien, being tracked probably isn't a concern. What happens in a decade when for whatever reason (totally corrupt government, etc.) you have to stop being a law abiding citizien. Will you then be so happy to have your every movement tracked? A record kept of everywhere you go and everyone you talk to? What if you want to just disappear? Start afresh somewhere else? since you won't be able to shake off your old ID and won't be able to get anything under a new clean one you'll be a bit scuppered.
The 'alphabet agencies' were set up to provide work for the millions left unemployed after the 1929 stock market crash, stuff like building roads. They weren't in the business of spying on 'commies' or dealing with 'unamerican' elements. Most (if not all) of them don't exist anymore.
*takes the pedant-points and runs*
Firstly, I would like to thank my staff for their thorough work of destroying all copies of the memo I sent out asking them to this. I would also like to congratulate them on their exemplary performance in carrying out my instructions to spread my campaign propaganda throughout the wikipedia with such totality, clarity and speed.
There will be a token superficial investigation of the case after which we will conclude that it was infact a justified action to combat the ever-present terrorist threat. I will therefore shortly introduce new legislation outlawing all negative points of view of congresspeople (on the condition that they're from my party) as unpatriotic - this will be billed as an entirely appropriate reaction through careful manipulation of the wikipedia articles on 'terrorists' and '1984_(book)'.
Now bow down, you snivelling peasants!
Or, indeed, ever watched Dr. Strangelove. "Mr President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!" Ok, not the best quote on the topic, but I can't remember any of the others word-for-word and they're not on wikiquote, but in general you need 10 females for every male, and the females need to be picked partially on how attractive they are as, 'with little else to do, they would breed prodigiously'.
see, 13 episodes is a very good number - it means that at one episode per week, the series will run for exactly quarter of a year - in a few years time when they try to flog it to a foreign network, they can buy 4 seasons of that length and have exactly one year worth of telly.
Programs which start small (6 episodes) and explode then, only get 7 episodes in their next season so that the first two season make 13 episodes, and then they start getting 13 epsiode seasons. 26 is also a popular number for really popular programmes.
Unfortunately, their method for getting cars without tax off the road are flawed. Instead they now send out automated fines to people who don't have tax unless they tell them that their car isn't on the road.
In the old days your car had to be seen on the road without tax. Now you just have to not have tax and unfortunately the defence of 'it wasn't on the road' no longer counts, because not telling them that it's not on the road is a new offence in itself.
To recap:
Not having road tax is against the law
You now have to tell them that you're not breaking the law
Not telling them that you're not breaking the law is itself now against the law.
This particular law does nothing but fine people for being forgetful - human error should not normally be a criminal offence.
program DetermineHit :: isRIAA
implicit none
logical
write(6,*) "Is this track published by a corporation which is a member of the RIAA?"
read(5,*) isRIAA
if (isRIAA) then
write(6,*) "Track will flop"
else
write(6,*) "Track will be a hit"
end if
stop
end program DetermineHit
!what's so hard about that?
To prevent the contestants catching on to the obvious inconsistencies, they've had to discount anyone with military training, physics education and anyone with even a cursory interest in space science.
It's basically taking the thickest 3 people they could find - I'd be suprised if any of the contestants even had any A-levels.
Either that or the most gullible 3 people they could find, who, blinded by their desire to become famous, are willing to believe anything, however nonsensical it sounds, just to get on the telly.
And since the entire idea of the show is to laugh at stupid/gullible people I see little point in it. I do wonder how they explained away the huge smoke cloud visible across large swathes of England at the moment though.
Where do channel 4 get the idea that this is good entertainment?
Yes, it is, but over the last fortnight I've found myself handing in 3 pieces of work with wikipedia as the primary reference. It's simply a lot more possible to data-mine than any other source. When you're doing degree level physics (don't laugh at my incompetence at research) the amount of sources that will explain what you want to know in an understandable format rapidly approaches zero. What you use is wikipedia, because it's the only thing you can understand - you either reference wikipedia (allowing whoever is marking to take those references with as big a shovel of salt as they want), or you lie and reference the papers that relate to the topic but that you didn't read because you didn't understand them.
I go with honesty
er, so if there isn't a teacher about to disable it they actually can't work?
Seems like a pretty dumb piece of software to me. If it only works when someone is watching then can't the person watching deal with at the source.
How do you tell them difference between a pupil who is supposed to be working and who is on free time (which was the problem in my situation)?
And most importantly, would you mind if the kids could do this to your computer? and if you're not comfortable with that why do you do it to them?
do you disable the reboot button as well?
"Why is your computer rebooting"?
"It crashed"
"ah, carry on"
On a similar note, when I was in school I was browsing a gaming realted site on a computer in the library, not during a lesson, but during my own free period. Suddenly my mouse stopped responding and the cursor magically moved to the X at the top right and closed the window. I should've gone and had butts kicked but as a pupil (in the sixth form, mind you) there's not much you can do about it. (and it took me a while to realise what had happened)
This leads me to conclude that software that allows remote control of a computer without the users permission is just evil, needs to go, and it's inventors high on the list of 'first up against the wall when the revolution comes'.
I though bioneural gel packs were a joke, a science fiction fantasy, if you will. A ridiculous invention in Voyager to be ridiculed by the scientific community.
Apparently I was wrong
So;
Let me be the first to say that I welcome our new bioneural gel pack overlords.
yes, yes there were.
Since Blizz had no control over what people did on their home computers and there was no CD-Key system in D1 people could do anything they wanted, and they did.
90% of D1 players cheated, 9% were liars, 1% were foaming-at-the-mouth elitist-legit zealots.
UK copyright law calls it "fair dealing".
I'll take my pedant-points now, if that's ok.
can we get computers to do things that they haven't been programmed to do? No, to do something they have to have been programmed to do it. But what about 'self learning' programs? how do they 'self learn'? oh, yes, they were programmed to do it.
An 'AI' can't decide to take over the world unless it knows about 'take over the world' as a possible end result, how does it find that?
In light of this can we say that true AI can ever exist?
No.