I was never hit by my parents (as far as I recall) and rarely sent to my room. I was not a paragon of virtue, far from it, but when I did something wrong my parents would tell me off. My Mother sometimes lost it and shouted at us but my Father's tactic was usually to tell us that he felt let down and to explain that he expected better from us. It sounds pretty weak written down like this but it certainly didn't seem so at the time. I felt terrible when I knew that my Father disapproved of my actions. This was effective because his moral authority stemmed from the fact that he was asking us to uphold standards that he himself adhered to. Beating someone for fighting (for example) rather undermines your moral authority.
I think that each parent has to work things out for themselves (I have three kids) and I can understand why parents occasionally smack their children (try reasoning with a two year old that tries to throw a baby out of the pram, for example). However, I have to agree with the grandparent here that if you rely on corporal punishment then the situation can escalate out of control.
I worked on a number of Y2K validation projects back in the 90s. We caught a few bugs. The main problem though, was that people didn't know whether there systems would fail or not.
I disagree with your assertion that Star Wars doesn't have a loyal fan base. However, the basic point that it is dependent on the group polled is valid. I and my friends read sci-fi magazines when we were students but no longer do so. If we are typical then this suggests that the sample polled will be biased towards a younger age group for whom Star Wars will not have the same impact as for those who saw it when it came out. Also, a lot of these polls tend to favour relatively recent releases whose impact is still fresh in the mind of the viewers.
According to a recent article in The Economist the future lies in ethanol produced from trees. As far as I recall it said that the ratio of energy required to convert organic material to ethanol and the energy obtainable from the ethanol produced is:
Software patents are a bit of a grey area in the EU. They should be excluded but various national patent bodies have allowed the issue to become blurred and there is a ris k of them creeping in. See here for details.
A lot of nonsence is, indeed, talked about a) speed cameras or b) immigration. However, as far as I have noticed, only the former gets cited as an example of police state behaviour and then rarely. Normally it is seen as a cynical revenue raising tactic.
I don't have a problem with either a) or b). I do have a problem with the proposed ID cards bill, the attempt to limit access to trial by jury and similar initiatives.
Your mixing of several points suggests but does not make explicit, that these are a set of views expressed by a reactionary right wing cabal. Such people do exist but I think placing the blame for the latter, more important points, avoids placing the blame where it belongs: the police and the current government.
In Britain (or England and Wales at any rate as Scotland has a seperate legal code) there is an offence of wasting police time which carries a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison or a hefty fine. I'm not sure how easy it would be to prove though. Surely anyone who abuses this system can just say "They seemed suspicious to me". How could you distinguish between abuse and an honest mistake?
Occasionally the odd peer does nod off during the debates. Who hasn't done this during a dull meeting? In general though, the quality of the debates is vastly greater than that in the Commons. This is partly because the peers do not have to worry about toeing the party line as much and partly because many of the life peers had already got to a very senior position in their field before gaining their peerage, so in that sense it is a meritocracy.
One thing that really annoys me about our current government is that they love to caricature the Lords as being out of touch and undemocratic despite the fact that Tony Blair has created more life peers than any other Prime Minister so he must take a fair share of responsibility for its composition. Also, the government has back pedalled on its plans to make the second chamber more democratic as the more democratic legitamacy it gains, the stronger a challenge it becomes to the primacy of the Commons.
Frontmotion produce an msi file that ca be roled out using active directory. File available here
Features:
* Active Directory deployable and upgradeable.
* Desktop Icon and Shell integration similar to IE.
* Set Default browser as an option (INSTALLLEVEL=1000)
* Macromedia Flash plug-in preinstalled
* Detect and upgrades non-MSI installs.
* Can upgrade 3rd party MSI's from patpaul/MIT, Webheat.co.uk, and ZettaServe.
* Able to properly perform uninstalls and restores system associations
I think you are extrapolating hugely from a tiny sample here. Firstly, there are many countries in Europe, each with different educaton systems. I have been to universities in both the UK and France and their systems differ both from the situatio you are describing and from each other. I studied Mechanical Engineering at Bristol in the UK and there was a big emphasis on practical work each year with a significant amount of the final grade determined by various design projects. In addition to this, most of the subjects required practical lab work to be performed and written up which was also graded. Bristol did not offer work placements as part of its degree but many other universities do and it is often a full year taken as the third year of a four year course.
The French university I attended was an Ecole Nationale. These tend to be very theoretical in outlook, at the one I attended there was hardly any lab work to do and no design projects. However, in the second and third years, the students do a 6 month work placement in industry and this is usually for a very real purpose, not just button pushing.
I dn't know what version of Oracle the people you talk to have been using but I find that the optimizer works very well without hints. The thing I like about it is the power of the PL/SQL language and its support for complex datatypes. I also like the use of packages to group procedures and functions together logically.
I can't say how this compares to PostgreSQL as I haven't really used any open source databases as the organizations I work for have, in the past, been a bit suspicious of Open Source. This is changing a little as we now have quite a few Red Hat boxes and are in the process of deploying Oracle 10g (RAC) on Red Hat.
Check out OpenCroquet
"Users and groups of users can author and publish their individual resources within a persistent 3D knowledge architecture. They may build any number of private or shared "worlds" instantaneously, making them immediately accessible for others to explore by providing spatial portals. These portals function much like hyperlinks do within the World Wide Web. But unlike the Web, Croquet enables the user to find and get to other individual worlds through the larger context of Croquet's persistent common spaces"
I spent a year in France as an engineering student. Many of my friends were North African. They were continually being stopped by the police and asked for ID.
Compulsory ID cards do not automatically take your freedom away but they do make it very easy to do so at some later stage. This is the whole reason why the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is flawed. I think that Martin Niemoller summed it up very well:
"When Hitler attacked the Jews
I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the Catholics,
I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists,
I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.
Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church --
and there was nobody left to be concerned."
Slashdot Mirror
Nice, hadn't heard that one. Still consistent with the quote I cited though.
I was never hit by my parents (as far as I recall) and rarely sent to my room. I was not a paragon of virtue, far from it, but when I did something wrong my parents would tell me off. My Mother sometimes lost it and shouted at us but my Father's tactic was usually to tell us that he felt let down and to explain that he expected better from us. It sounds pretty weak written down like this but it certainly didn't seem so at the time. I felt terrible when I knew that my Father disapproved of my actions. This was effective because his moral authority stemmed from the fact that he was asking us to uphold standards that he himself adhered to. Beating someone for fighting (for example) rather undermines your moral authority. I think that each parent has to work things out for themselves (I have three kids) and I can understand why parents occasionally smack their children (try reasoning with a two year old that tries to throw a baby out of the pram, for example). However, I have to agree with the grandparent here that if you rely on corporal punishment then the situation can escalate out of control.
"democracy isn't really that good a thing" To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Democracy is a bad system, but it is better than the alternatives.
I worked on a number of Y2K validation projects back in the 90s. We caught a few bugs. The main problem though, was that people didn't know whether there systems would fail or not.
I disagree with your assertion that Star Wars doesn't have a loyal fan base. However, the basic point that it is dependent on the group polled is valid. I and my friends read sci-fi magazines when we were students but no longer do so. If we are typical then this suggests that the sample polled will be biased towards a younger age group for whom Star Wars will not have the same impact as for those who saw it when it came out. Also, a lot of these polls tend to favour relatively recent releases whose impact is still fresh in the mind of the viewers.
maize - 1.3
sugar cane - 8.3
Wood - 16
Software patents are a bit of a grey area in the EU. They should be excluded but various national patent bodies have allowed the issue to become blurred and there is a ris k of them creeping in. See here for details.
A lot of nonsence is, indeed, talked about a) speed cameras or b) immigration. However, as far as I have noticed, only the former gets cited as an example of police state behaviour and then rarely. Normally it is seen as a cynical revenue raising tactic. I don't have a problem with either a) or b). I do have a problem with the proposed ID cards bill, the attempt to limit access to trial by jury and similar initiatives. Your mixing of several points suggests but does not make explicit, that these are a set of views expressed by a reactionary right wing cabal. Such people do exist but I think placing the blame for the latter, more important points, avoids placing the blame where it belongs: the police and the current government.
In Britain (or England and Wales at any rate as Scotland has a seperate legal code) there is an offence of wasting police time which carries a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison or a hefty fine. I'm not sure how easy it would be to prove though. Surely anyone who abuses this system can just say "They seemed suspicious to me". How could you distinguish between abuse and an honest mistake?
Occasionally the odd peer does nod off during the debates. Who hasn't done this during a dull meeting? In general though, the quality of the debates is vastly greater than that in the Commons. This is partly because the peers do not have to worry about toeing the party line as much and partly because many of the life peers had already got to a very senior position in their field before gaining their peerage, so in that sense it is a meritocracy. One thing that really annoys me about our current government is that they love to caricature the Lords as being out of touch and undemocratic despite the fact that Tony Blair has created more life peers than any other Prime Minister so he must take a fair share of responsibility for its composition. Also, the government has back pedalled on its plans to make the second chamber more democratic as the more democratic legitamacy it gains, the stronger a challenge it becomes to the primacy of the Commons.
Frontmotion produce an msi file that ca be roled out using active directory. File available here Features: * Active Directory deployable and upgradeable. * Desktop Icon and Shell integration similar to IE. * Set Default browser as an option (INSTALLLEVEL=1000) * Macromedia Flash plug-in preinstalled * Detect and upgrades non-MSI installs. * Can upgrade 3rd party MSI's from patpaul/MIT, Webheat.co.uk, and ZettaServe. * Able to properly perform uninstalls and restores system associations
I think you are extrapolating hugely from a tiny sample here. Firstly, there are many countries in Europe, each with different educaton systems. I have been to universities in both the UK and France and their systems differ both from the situatio you are describing and from each other. I studied Mechanical Engineering at Bristol in the UK and there was a big emphasis on practical work each year with a significant amount of the final grade determined by various design projects. In addition to this, most of the subjects required practical lab work to be performed and written up which was also graded. Bristol did not offer work placements as part of its degree but many other universities do and it is often a full year taken as the third year of a four year course. The French university I attended was an Ecole Nationale. These tend to be very theoretical in outlook, at the one I attended there was hardly any lab work to do and no design projects. However, in the second and third years, the students do a 6 month work placement in industry and this is usually for a very real purpose, not just button pushing.
I dn't know what version of Oracle the people you talk to have been using but I find that the optimizer works very well without hints. The thing I like about it is the power of the PL/SQL language and its support for complex datatypes. I also like the use of packages to group procedures and functions together logically. I can't say how this compares to PostgreSQL as I haven't really used any open source databases as the organizations I work for have, in the past, been a bit suspicious of Open Source. This is changing a little as we now have quite a few Red Hat boxes and are in the process of deploying Oracle 10g (RAC) on Red Hat.
Check out OpenCroquet "Users and groups of users can author and publish their individual resources within a persistent 3D knowledge architecture. They may build any number of private or shared "worlds" instantaneously, making them immediately accessible for others to explore by providing spatial portals. These portals function much like hyperlinks do within the World Wide Web. But unlike the Web, Croquet enables the user to find and get to other individual worlds through the larger context of Croquet's persistent common spaces"
I spent a year in France as an engineering student. Many of my friends were North African. They were continually being stopped by the police and asked for ID. Compulsory ID cards do not automatically take your freedom away but they do make it very easy to do so at some later stage. This is the whole reason why the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is flawed. I think that Martin Niemoller summed it up very well: "When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned."