I'm quite sure this violates the separation of church and state...
What "seperation of church and state" are you talking about? The US constitution says something about the gov not making religious laws, but Canada has no similar prohibition that I know of.
Personally I think that neither the Catholics nor the non-Catholics are being that well served by having up to four publicly funded school boards in a region (French/English and Catholic/Non-Catholic), but I agree that changing things would be a heck of a tough thing to do. Other provinces have done so in the not-too-distant-past however.
PS I know of several PhD professors from UofT who retired from the university to become high school teachers -- equivalent pay, better benefits, fewer hours. Only detriment was less notoriety.
Well, having done a lot of teaching at the university level, I will attest that a typical professor's teaching load is SIGNIFICANTLY less than that of an elementary or high school teacher. Two or three univeristy classes combined take up at MOST 12 contact hours per week. The Ontario university schedule is typically about 13 weeks per term, 26 for the year. An elementary school class meets for at least 5 contact hours per day, with a minimum of 195 school days according to the ministry. That gives 312 hours of contact versus 975 hours.
I also note that locally at least (Peterborough region), there seemed to me many more proffs listed in the paper as earning more that $100,000 than school teachers last year (puplic employees earning above $100,000 are disclosed on a yearly basis in Ontario under some legal requirement).
Anyone entering the teaching profession without a true enjoyment of the work and working conditions is doomed for early burn-out. If it was such a "cushy" job we probably would not have as big of a problem as we have with teacher retention.
Doctors may get paid quite a bit in Ontario (and elsewhere) but there is still a big shortage of them. They also get no employment insurance (maybe not a problem with the great demand), but that also leaves them without maternity/paternity leave. Unless saleried at a hospital, the vast majority of doctors are independant businesspeople who have to pay for staff and office space and insurance and supplies and all of that fun stuff. As any independant self-employed person can do, they can work as little or as much as they want - but for most other professions, taking a week off does not dramatically effect your customers - they can easily call another plumber - with the shrtage of doctors in most communities that is much less of an option. Medical school also is not cheap.
If you are going to remove a worker's right to collective bargaining, then you also have to ensure that they are given fair working conditions and pay through some other mechanism. I do not have any problem with specifying some services as "essential" and proof against strikes, but there does need to be some method of resolving employer/employee grievences. If you run your "vital infrastructure" by offering the contracts to the company who does the lowest bid, without any sort of protectios for the workers who actually do the jobs, I think you are leading yourself to ruin.
"IN-KIND" means "TAX WRITE-OFF." Since he was doing this under the auspices of a business and the in-kind agreement was for publicity, you bet your ass this guy has claimed a $107,530 write-off each year for this.
It doesn't really matter how much he claims as an "in-kind" donation or expense, because for it to be legitimate, he also needs to claim an equal amount as income from that activity. As I understand the various tax laws covering small business/self employment, if I do work for someone for free, in exchange for advertising or just as a donation, the only expenses that I can even hope to legitimately claim are those directly related to running my buinsess (equipment costs, office costs, bandwitdth costs, etc.). If you say "I donated $100 of my time", then you also have to count that as $100 of income. (Basically they give you a virtual $100 for your work and you turn around and donate it right back to them.) Thus "in-kind" donations of labour do not do a business any good from a tax purpose.
The reason businesses often try to donate old EQUIPMENT is in order to get it off of their books and to take advantage (or not be damaged) by various depreciation rules for various capitol expenses. In general there are few legitimate tax writeoffs that have any advantage to a business.
Now I understand that there are all sorts of weird cross-leasing arrangements that can do some magic for the really big businesses...
They shine a laser through a chamber of water (which is being 'vibrated' or something, by this machined part that keanu makes at the start. big whoop) Anyway, this laser supposedly separates the water into hydrogen, and oxygen, which they burn for power.
It is based on a real effect called "sonoluminescence" (that was the first link I could find, there are many others). When you send the proper type of sound waves through water (and other fluids?) with the proper type of bubbles in it, the bubbles give off flashes of light. I do not know what the current understanding of the effect is, but it has been theorized that very strange things are going on. The type of light flashes indicate, how long they last and what frequencies of light they contain are quite unexpected. There are indications that the tiny tiny bubbles get very very very very hot, very very very quickly. Some have talked about high enough temperatures to start nuclear effects. Otheres have researched possible medical applications, using the bubbles in people's blood system to blast clogs or somehow deliver drugs (or maybe I am confusing it with something else...)
Anyhow, in "Chain Reaction", it was fun seeing Keanu Reeves as some supposedly brilliant grad student on a motorcycle.
I was at a sonoluminescence physics lecture at UIUC in which the speaker mentioned that the Chain Reaction people had used some of the old equipment from their labs for the movie set so all the people from the lab took the afternoon off to see the movie. He said that they were glad that they did not recieve any written credit for their equipment since the movie science was so bad, but it was nice to get some $$ for the university for some useless lab materials.
Here is a link to an article about "working with Hollywood". UIUC's K.S.Suslick says "The movie is about a Nobel laureate professor and his graduate student who discover the use of sonoluminescence to produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen (the ultimate clean fuel) from water, catalytically. (Minor technical errors -- such as violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics -- are obviously no problem for Hollywood.) "
Oh yeah, that was the one where the "scientist" had equations on a sheet of paper divided into six pieces and was trying to figure out what order they should be put in so that they would "work". At a glance, each piece of the paper had about 3 equations with about 20 characters in each. The claim was that this idea was worth a bizzillion dollars and nobody thought to just try out all the possible combinations? Like 6x5x4x3x2=6!=720 experiments would be too hard to run? With the promise of a bizzillion bucks you couldn't find a few colleagues to do some lab work for you?
And then this scientist loses the fiddley bits of papers (stuffed in her bra as I recall?) and she never made copies? Can't recreate the work? Can't recall what the equations were? Had no other notes about her calculations?
With all that said, it was fun to see Val Kilmer do a bunch of different disguises.
I cringe when I see people pretending it's somehow scientific to call an unproved hypothesis an 'explanation' just because it fits the current materialist paradigms, and to dismiss wholesale the whole realm of new age thinking, lots of which has been experimentally validated (obviously positive thinking strengthens the immune system, obviously lots of natural remedies have a biochemical basis).
I am not certain what you mean by "lots of which has been experimentally validated". There have been, to my knowledge, no replicable experimental validation of any "paranormal" phenonoma that go against the widely accepted understanding in the physical sciences. Any "alternative medicine" effects that were testable and more effective than "regular medicine" would not be called "alternative medicine", but rather we would call them "medicine" and use them in standard treatments. Perhaps we should change the terminology from "alternative medicine" to "untested medicine", or for those that have been tested and found wanting to "ineffecitive medicine", but that might mean the bottom would drop out of the "AM" marketplace - and there is a lot of money in that market.
If you know of any repeatable experiments that are not "explained" by "conventional" science, not only is the Nobel Prize possible, you could quite quickly pick up a million bucks from the JREF.
As for rants that various "scientific" public policy decisions have been bad, I do not dispute that. However many other "scientific" public policy decisions have been good. To deny that increased scientific knowledge has made it possible for more people to safely live healthy lives would be folly. In fact the only reason we know the errors we have made are actually errors is because of our continued improvement in understanding of the sciences. And many of the "errors" we have made from a public policy point of view were made over the objections of many "experts" in the first place - so I don't know that one can blame "science" for all the troubles of mankind. It is probably easier to blame selfish, short-sighted, greedy human nature present in us all to a variety of levels.
"Reinventing Comics"
talks alot about comics in the modern electronic world, and the changing nature of creation and delivery, but it isn't as fundamentally interesting in my opinion as "Understanding Comics".
White walls can make a world of difference. We have a number of rooms lit with a 15W (about 900 lumens light output?) compact fluorescent globe bulbs which are noticibly brighter than the one tan room with the same bulb. Yeah, the bulbs were a bit expensive (about $25 CDN) but compared to incandescent plus a light fixture (up to multiple hundreds for various "designer" designs), they are not bad.
In the areas where they are hard to replace (12 foot ceilings for example) they are really nice knowing that a 10,000 hour lifetime might mean they won't need replacing for many many many years.
Now if I can just find a local supplier of CF torchier lamps for the rooms without ciling sockets, we'll be set.
Rental places and libraries often lend out CDs, DVDs, and even video games which might help you "try before you buy". Donating your old stuff to the library is also a great idea - it either improves their collection or generates cash when they have their annual "book sale" type of event.
If I sing a song I uniquely composed and wrote once in public, I have copyright on that song and that performance.
I think you actually have to first fix it in "tangable form" to get copyright. Thus the professor's lecture is not copyright until it is on tape or transcribed, and I think that the transcriber is the one who get's the copyright. Thus the univeristy copyright office tells profs that if they want to prevent "joe's house of lecture notes" from selling copies of their lectures created by members of their audience, the professor needs to record and retain (usually on audio tape) copies of their lecures. I assume that in the event of multiple people making notes, the professor has precidence when it comes to a legal battle, but the prof needs to fix it in permanent form first.
The defining characteristic of this country is the orderly transfer of power. When someone starts calling people "fascists" - intimating that they are dictators -- they are trashing the fundamental principle of this country.
Regardless of how you dislike the embattled outcome of the last election it was *orderely*. There was no military coup, there was no mass unrest. It was orderly. A process was followed.
You mean that the only time one can criticise how things are is when there are riots in the streets? Making extreme statements about our leaders is as American as Apple Pie (is AP really "American" or do they make better pies in Mexico?)
Regardless, calling into question the leadership of a country does not necessary attack the "fundamental principles of the country." Certainly I would argue that satements like those experssed in fact rely on a great respect for those principles for their effect. If people didn't desire some great egalitarian democracy, calling someone a fascist wouldn't have any impact.
While "fascist" probably is over the top, most would agree that recent USA history has a lot of troubling stuff with regards to personal freedoms, effective representation, and physical security, both domestically and internationally. Not all of these can be blamed on the Prez, but as the one at the top, he gets the heat.
More like: Make a right on Main Street, and travel for about half a mile, then a left at the Texaco station, a right onto Maple Lane and then a quick left onto 45th Avenue, we're the yellow house on the left, number 456. If you want to use your car's nave system, our mailing address is H7RWW BP9YT.
Certainly H7RWW BP9YT is easier to type than the above driving directions. And if you wanted to give location information for each intersection, they would probably be all the same except for the last few digits, just like all the zip codes are similar in regions that are close together - after a while you would proably get used to knowing the general region just from the location code, just like today people know that "02134" is in Boston, MASS, and "90210" in in Beverly Hills, CA.
The article is interesting, and raises some good points, but does not refute the fact that the USA falls far short of many other nations (including Sweden) in a variety of "quality of life" indexes. In fact it points out this information.
I agree with the conclusion of the article that "we can charitably conclude that it isn't altogether clear that increasing inequality has brought with it pronounced deleterious consequences", however I would not go so far as to support the completely opposite thesis.
Even if we grant the idea that the most "efficient" economies would be the result of the elimination of all "social safety net" types of services, I think that there are strong arguments for maintining or in some cases expanding them. How much growth is "enough"? When can we try to "share the wealth"? It is much too easy to goo too far in one direction or the other in my opinion.
If you mean "better" for the economy by increasing wealth production, raising the general standard of living, or inciting "growth". Then his statement is obviously false.
"raising the general standard of living" could certainly be the result of an increased "social safety net". At the simplest, if you take some money from the richest and give it to the poorest, the average family income would be increased.
This does not mean that such a system is necessarily a good thing based purely on the overall ecconomic benchmarks, but it certainly is welcomed by the recipients.
One must always remember however that the pure ecconomic theories of perfect markets, rational buyers and sellers, and perfect information and the like are almost never in place in the real world. "Socialized" systems like unemployment insurance, minimum wages, working conditions, health and safety, enviornmental legislation, socialized health care, welfare, social security, etc. certainly have an effect on the ecconomy, but their actual impact can and is debated by well informed, intelligent learned individuals.
For some of these types of programs, beyond immediate ecconomic impact, the effect of longer term stability can have great positive national benifit. For example, the rise of the "middle class" over the past 100 years in the USA has generally been seen as a positive thing ecconomically, yet that growth was largely fueled by things that are generally viewed as "bad for the ecconomy" (labour laws, unions, etc.)
It is kind of sad however when we always seem to cast everything in terms of ecconomics. As nations in the "western world" we have levels of productivity unheard of even fifty years ago. By any measure, we are as nations more wealthy than ever. When will we be able to afford to minimally feed, house, educate and provide medical service to all of the members of our society?
They may look similar on the outside, but I doubt very much that the '77 engine bits fit the '92 bits. If naught else, all of the emmissions stuff is probably radically different.
Assuming the time traveler had the knowledge, how is anyone going to build a case against them? Basing the prosecution on "I tell you he's from the future!", seem to be a bit risky.
Similarly, I wonder how they would manage to convict a mind reader of similar breaches of SEC rules.
If you menat to say that you really hate the nags to buy QT Pro, you can limit them (at least on the Mac) by changing the system date to a few years in the future, running QT Player and dismissing the nag, then resetting the date to the correct one. I think the software stores the "last nag" date and doesn't create another one until a few days or weeks have passed. Changing the date moves the "next nag" date so far into the future that it isn't a bother.
Slashdot Mirror
What "seperation of church and state" are you talking about? The US constitution says something about the gov not making religious laws, but Canada has no similar prohibition that I know of.
Personally I think that neither the Catholics nor the non-Catholics are being that well served by having up to four publicly funded school boards in a region (French/English and Catholic/Non-Catholic), but I agree that changing things would be a heck of a tough thing to do. Other provinces have done so in the not-too-distant-past however.
Well, having done a lot of teaching at the university level, I will attest that a typical professor's teaching load is SIGNIFICANTLY less than that of an elementary or high school teacher. Two or three univeristy classes combined take up at MOST 12 contact hours per week. The Ontario university schedule is typically about 13 weeks per term, 26 for the year. An elementary school class meets for at least 5 contact hours per day, with a minimum of 195 school days according to the ministry. That gives 312 hours of contact versus 975 hours.
I also note that locally at least (Peterborough region), there seemed to me many more proffs listed in the paper as earning more that $100,000 than school teachers last year (puplic employees earning above $100,000 are disclosed on a yearly basis in Ontario under some legal requirement).
Anyone entering the teaching profession without a true enjoyment of the work and working conditions is doomed for early burn-out. If it was such a "cushy" job we probably would not have as big of a problem as we have with teacher retention.
Doctors may get paid quite a bit in Ontario (and elsewhere) but there is still a big shortage of them. They also get no employment insurance (maybe not a problem with the great demand), but that also leaves them without maternity/paternity leave. Unless saleried at a hospital, the vast majority of doctors are independant businesspeople who have to pay for staff and office space and insurance and supplies and all of that fun stuff. As any independant self-employed person can do, they can work as little or as much as they want - but for most other professions, taking a week off does not dramatically effect your customers - they can easily call another plumber - with the shrtage of doctors in most communities that is much less of an option. Medical school also is not cheap.
And people complain that they are afraid of the viral nature of the GPL - this would really scare them!
If you are going to remove a worker's right to collective bargaining, then you also have to ensure that they are given fair working conditions and pay through some other mechanism. I do not have any problem with specifying some services as "essential" and proof against strikes, but there does need to be some method of resolving employer/employee grievences. If you run your "vital infrastructure" by offering the contracts to the company who does the lowest bid, without any sort of protectios for the workers who actually do the jobs, I think you are leading yourself to ruin.
It doesn't really matter how much he claims as an "in-kind" donation or expense, because for it to be legitimate, he also needs to claim an equal amount as income from that activity. As I understand the various tax laws covering small business/self employment, if I do work for someone for free, in exchange for advertising or just as a donation, the only expenses that I can even hope to legitimately claim are those directly related to running my buinsess (equipment costs, office costs, bandwitdth costs, etc.). If you say "I donated $100 of my time", then you also have to count that as $100 of income. (Basically they give you a virtual $100 for your work and you turn around and donate it right back to them.) Thus "in-kind" donations of labour do not do a business any good from a tax purpose.
The reason businesses often try to donate old EQUIPMENT is in order to get it off of their books and to take advantage (or not be damaged) by various depreciation rules for various capitol expenses. In general there are few legitimate tax writeoffs that have any advantage to a business.
Now I understand that there are all sorts of weird cross-leasing arrangements that can do some magic for the really big businesses...
It is based on a real effect called "sonoluminescence" (that was the first link I could find, there are many others). When you send the proper type of sound waves through water (and other fluids?) with the proper type of bubbles in it, the bubbles give off flashes of light. I do not know what the current understanding of the effect is, but it has been theorized that very strange things are going on. The type of light flashes indicate, how long they last and what frequencies of light they contain are quite unexpected. There are indications that the tiny tiny bubbles get very very very very hot, very very very quickly. Some have talked about high enough temperatures to start nuclear effects. Otheres have researched possible medical applications, using the bubbles in people's blood system to blast clogs or somehow deliver drugs (or maybe I am confusing it with something else...)
Anyhow, in "Chain Reaction", it was fun seeing Keanu Reeves as some supposedly brilliant grad student on a motorcycle.
I was at a sonoluminescence physics lecture at UIUC in which the speaker mentioned that the Chain Reaction people had used some of the old equipment from their labs for the movie set so all the people from the lab took the afternoon off to see the movie. He said that they were glad that they did not recieve any written credit for their equipment since the movie science was so bad, but it was nice to get some $$ for the university for some useless lab materials.
Here is a link to an article about "working with Hollywood". UIUC's K.S.Suslick says "The movie is about a Nobel laureate professor and his graduate student who discover the use of sonoluminescence to produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen (the ultimate clean fuel) from water, catalytically. (Minor technical errors -- such as violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics -- are obviously no problem for Hollywood.) "
And then this scientist loses the fiddley bits of papers (stuffed in her bra as I recall?) and she never made copies? Can't recreate the work? Can't recall what the equations were? Had no other notes about her calculations?
With all that said, it was fun to see Val Kilmer do a bunch of different disguises.
I am not certain what you mean by "lots of which has been experimentally validated". There have been, to my knowledge, no replicable experimental validation of any "paranormal" phenonoma that go against the widely accepted understanding in the physical sciences. Any "alternative medicine" effects that were testable and more effective than "regular medicine" would not be called "alternative medicine", but rather we would call them "medicine" and use them in standard treatments. Perhaps we should change the terminology from "alternative medicine" to "untested medicine", or for those that have been tested and found wanting to "ineffecitive medicine", but that might mean the bottom would drop out of the "AM" marketplace - and there is a lot of money in that market.
If you know of any repeatable experiments that are not "explained" by "conventional" science, not only is the Nobel Prize possible, you could quite quickly pick up a million bucks from the JREF.
As for rants that various "scientific" public policy decisions have been bad, I do not dispute that. However many other "scientific" public policy decisions have been good. To deny that increased scientific knowledge has made it possible for more people to safely live healthy lives would be folly. In fact the only reason we know the errors we have made are actually errors is because of our continued improvement in understanding of the sciences. And many of the "errors" we have made from a public policy point of view were made over the objections of many "experts" in the first place - so I don't know that one can blame "science" for all the troubles of mankind. It is probably easier to blame selfish, short-sighted, greedy human nature present in us all to a variety of levels.
I also would highly recommend "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud.
I like McCloud's a bit better than Eisners, but both are pretty good.
They each have other works as well that touch on similar topics: "Graphic Storytelling" by Will Eisner, and "Reinventing Comics" by Scott McCloud.
"Reinventing Comics" talks alot about comics in the modern electronic world, and the changing nature of creation and delivery, but it isn't as fundamentally interesting in my opinion as "Understanding Comics".
In the areas where they are hard to replace (12 foot ceilings for example) they are really nice knowing that a 10,000 hour lifetime might mean they won't need replacing for many many many years.
Now if I can just find a local supplier of CF torchier lamps for the rooms without ciling sockets, we'll be set.
Rental places and libraries often lend out CDs, DVDs, and even video games which might help you "try before you buy". Donating your old stuff to the library is also a great idea - it either improves their collection or generates cash when they have their annual "book sale" type of event.
I think you actually have to first fix it in "tangable form" to get copyright. Thus the professor's lecture is not copyright until it is on tape or transcribed, and I think that the transcriber is the one who get's the copyright. Thus the univeristy copyright office tells profs that if they want to prevent "joe's house of lecture notes" from selling copies of their lectures created by members of their audience, the professor needs to record and retain (usually on audio tape) copies of their lecures. I assume that in the event of multiple people making notes, the professor has precidence when it comes to a legal battle, but the prof needs to fix it in permanent form first.
Regardless of how you dislike the embattled outcome of the last election it was *orderely*. There was no military coup, there was no mass unrest. It was orderly. A process was followed.
You mean that the only time one can criticise how things are is when there are riots in the streets? Making extreme statements about our leaders is as American as Apple Pie (is AP really "American" or do they make better pies in Mexico?)
Regardless, calling into question the leadership of a country does not necessary attack the "fundamental principles of the country." Certainly I would argue that satements like those experssed in fact rely on a great respect for those principles for their effect. If people didn't desire some great egalitarian democracy, calling someone a fascist wouldn't have any impact.
While "fascist" probably is over the top, most would agree that recent USA history has a lot of troubling stuff with regards to personal freedoms, effective representation, and physical security, both domestically and internationally. Not all of these can be blamed on the Prez, but as the one at the top, he gets the heat.
That's cool - where can I find out what ZIP+4 codes the Canadian addresses in my address book are? Or even just the ZIP codes without the +4?
Certainly H7RWW BP9YT is easier to type than the above driving directions. And if you wanted to give location information for each intersection, they would probably be all the same except for the last few digits, just like all the zip codes are similar in regions that are close together - after a while you would proably get used to knowing the general region just from the location code, just like today people know that "02134" is in Boston, MASS, and "90210" in in Beverly Hills, CA.
I agree with the conclusion of the article that "we can charitably conclude that it isn't altogether clear that increasing inequality has brought with it pronounced deleterious consequences", however I would not go so far as to support the completely opposite thesis.
Even if we grant the idea that the most "efficient" economies would be the result of the elimination of all "social safety net" types of services, I think that there are strong arguments for maintining or in some cases expanding them. How much growth is "enough"? When can we try to "share the wealth"? It is much too easy to goo too far in one direction or the other in my opinion.
"raising the general standard of living" could certainly be the result of an increased "social safety net". At the simplest, if you take some money from the richest and give it to the poorest, the average family income would be increased.
This does not mean that such a system is necessarily a good thing based purely on the overall ecconomic benchmarks, but it certainly is welcomed by the recipients.
One must always remember however that the pure ecconomic theories of perfect markets, rational buyers and sellers, and perfect information and the like are almost never in place in the real world. "Socialized" systems like unemployment insurance, minimum wages, working conditions, health and safety, enviornmental legislation, socialized health care, welfare, social security, etc. certainly have an effect on the ecconomy, but their actual impact can and is debated by well informed, intelligent learned individuals.
For some of these types of programs, beyond immediate ecconomic impact, the effect of longer term stability can have great positive national benifit. For example, the rise of the "middle class" over the past 100 years in the USA has generally been seen as a positive thing ecconomically, yet that growth was largely fueled by things that are generally viewed as "bad for the ecconomy" (labour laws, unions, etc.)
It is kind of sad however when we always seem to cast everything in terms of ecconomics. As nations in the "western world" we have levels of productivity unheard of even fifty years ago. By any measure, we are as nations more wealthy than ever. When will we be able to afford to minimally feed, house, educate and provide medical service to all of the members of our society?
They may look similar on the outside, but I doubt very much that the '77 engine bits fit the '92 bits. If naught else, all of the emmissions stuff is probably radically different.
Similarly, I wonder how they would manage to convict a mind reader of similar breaches of SEC rules.
You thought wrong. He's a comp sci prof, and his CV doesn't list any legal trainging, just physics, comp sci and engineering.
I think the EFF has online donations ability.
There was a discussion about OS web education systems a few days back on slashdot that might be worth searching for.
If you menat to say that you really hate the nags to buy QT Pro, you can limit them (at least on the Mac) by changing the system date to a few years in the future, running QT Player and dismissing the nag, then resetting the date to the correct one. I think the software stores the "last nag" date and doesn't create another one until a few days or weeks have passed. Changing the date moves the "next nag" date so far into the future that it isn't a bother.