I guess priests would make good security-auditors as they are not obliged to disclose anything brought to them in confidence...
Granted, my knowledge comes to me from episodes of "Law & Order", but my undersanding is that these yptes of confidentiality agreements are only applicable when they involve information that comes up while caring out pristly (or doctor or lawyer) duties. Hiring a priest to perform an audit is not going to get you the same level of privledge as if you went to one for absolution and talked about whatever crimes you did.
I guess "does not work" means different things to different people. The volume of junk faxes is much smaller that it would be absent the federal prohibition.
I too am interested in seeing how the national DNC list is going to impact this sort of thing.
I certainly agree with you that it is doubtfull that any similar anti-spam legislation in the USA like the anti-fax law will have even as great an effect that the anti-junk-fax law has had. However I have no concerns about the constitutionality and think that it could make the purchasers of spam email services a bit more warry.
I think you are wrong. While the cost of a single spam email might be much less than that of a single spam fax, the cost of a single spam fax is also relatively minimal. The junk fax law was enacted when the aggregate costs of the junk faxes was seen to be unacceptable. That point has surely been reached in the area of spam email.
Additionally, I think that the current USA laws governing junk fax and junk phone calls have been quite effective. The amount of junk faxes that are sent is greatly decreased from before the junk fax laws were instituted, and with a little work remembering to say "Please put me on your do-not-call list", most people can reduce their junk phone call level to practically zero. Try it, it's fun.
Now, the question of the effectiveness of similar national legislation for junk email is certainly legitimate, but I wouldn't mind at least the attempt at legislation similar to the one banning junk faxes....
Well, they SHOULD be spending more resources on curriculum design and testing, but as you have stated, few do.
However, the ability to "do your own thing" varies quite greatly from institution to institution and department to department. In some places the instructor is given almost no ability to deviate from the sylabus that is handed to them. In others they are almost completely free to do what they want.
And of course, we don't even want to get into the whole idea that university profs are hired on the basis of their research ability with little attention paid to their teaching experience, aptitude, or training...
I graduated in physics, magna cum laude, from Harvard, and I assure you it was no cakewalk.
It may not have been a cakewalk, but it probably was not a very comprehensive physics education.
This isn't really the fault of Harvard, but more a result of the general USA undergraduate degree philosophy, which Harvard tends to follow pretty well. The relatively large number of required general education courses leave relativly little time available for math and physics courses.
In comparison, undergraduate physics degrees in Europe and Canada, tend to have significantly more math and physics courses required for graduation.
This does not imply that one system is better than the other, but they do tend to result in graduates with significant differences in their understanding of their "major" fields, and of course signigicant differences in their understanding of the wider accademic world outside of that field.
This does not go into the issues surronding the value of "cakewalkness" or lack thereof. Ideally, the point of instruction isn't to be "hard" but to be "effective". How much was learned and how well the student succeeds in future endevours is probably more important than how tough a time it was. The "tough it out" philosophy is what gives us medical residence programs that ruin lives and health and yet have little or no benifit compared to more humane methods of medical education. BUt I digress even farther from the Gore/Bush bashing...
Well, with all the other crap in the link, it is pretty obvious that it was just a cut and past from the browser location window, which contains all sorts of extraneous information beyond the minimal necessary needed, but I suppose that someone could have tried to slip in a referral link (does slashdot have a UK referral id?)
In your particular case, I think that what you are probably seeing is not "next day" sales, but "same day" sales. As stated at
the US website:
You may earn a referral fee for any qualifying items placed in a customer's shopping cart during a 24-hour window. This window begins at the time a visitor clicks through your Associates link. However, the 24-hour window will close if the customer submits his/her order or reenters Amazon.com through another Associate's link. Once the window is closed, any additional purchases will not earn referral fees for your Associates account. If the customer returns to Amazon.com through your Associates link, this will generate a new 24-hour window.
Please note that a customer may follow your Associates link, add an item to his/her shopping cart and then leave Amazon.com without completing an order. As long as the item was added to the shopping cart during the 24-hour window, you will earn a referral fee on this item even if the actual order is placed several weeks later. "
If you are a USA associate, it might be valuable for you to joint the UK and Canadian programs to increase your referrasl for other english-language patrons. I get a few bits of money from them in addition to US referrals on my site.
I don't know about the little league and the prom, but the education thing is probably pretty useful. When all of us are old and grey, it is pretty useful to have a large number of younger well educated citizens to be working and moving the ecconomy along. At least in the USA and Canada, we can probably make up the shortfall by way of immigration, but there are a number of places (Japan for example) where I think it is going to be a big problem finding enough people to support all the old farts.
As a use of tax dollars, spending it on the kiddies' educations, health care, and daycare is probably one of the best "investments" that the society can make. If there were actually probems with having too many kids born, then it might be worthwhile to come up with disincentives, but the demmographics are that if anything, the "first world" has too low a birthrate rather tahn too high.
I don't buy it. How hard is it to put a plug together that will not make contact until after some insulating safety sheild is in place? Not very. What level of safety is required? Desiging some circuitry so that no current can flow unless the "pump" can confirm that the plug is properly connected is not a huge challenge either.
A plug system is not significantly more prone to "human error" either. Sure, sticking a screwdriver into the plug might make some big sparks, but that is about as likely as someone messing around with the paddle in an unperscribed manner.
You can't make something foolproof since fools are so ingeneous...
No matter what the size of the current, you still need some sort of power cord to bring it to the car. That power cord can end in either a conductive plug or an inductive paddle - it wasn't like the EV1 system was magically transmitting the power through many meters of air.
It seems to me that putting together a safe and secure mechanical locking system would not be particularly difficult for a conductive plug if one had concerns about people frying themselves.
I think the first thing to do before trying to explain how ESP works, would be to find evidence that ESP works. Otherwise you are pretty much wasting your time with your theories. No repeatable ESP evidence has yet been brought forward.
With that said, the sort of entanglement we are talking about with EPR might work for a few photons or maybe a few tens of photons or atoms, but thinking that such an effect would scale up to the macroscopic seems about as likely as all of the bits of the broken glass just randomly jumping back up to the shelf.
So if I throw a dead cat (that died yesterday) in a well and it caves in you know the rock on top of the cat is younger than the cat. Or if I throw it in a cave and the cave collapses the cat is younger than the rock of the cave? Are you serious?
I suppose that such a thing is possible, however one might notice the various signs that a collapsing cave would leave in the stratta above the cat bones, and get a clue that something not normal was going on.
I think that one of the key ideas in strata dating is the consistency of the types of stratta formation in various places and across geological timelines. If all the evidence that we had was a couple of cat bones beneith cave-ins I might be more critical of palentological dating methods. However we do seem to have a pretty large amount of consistent evidence for the most generally accepted conclusions.
This is not to say that we have warehouses full of T Rex skeletons however. I suppose it is possible that any day now a few significant fossel finds could turn up in a few significant locations and cause all older data to need to be re-evaluated. I am not holding my breath.
... that there is no God and that the bible somehow is without contradiction on a very well-thought-out level, and I'll throw away my faith...
I am not sure what this means. You want someone to should you that "the bible is without contradiction on a very well-thought-out level"?
If you want somone to show you contradictions in the bible, they certainly are not hard to find. It is a long text, written by many different authors, at many different times. Theologists have had to work for many years interpreting differnt parts, trying to come to a consistent understanding of the work as a whole. A literal reading of the bible, I would hope you can see, is inconsistent with our understanding of how the world works, and the natural history of the planet. Thus one is forced to conclude that the bible is not literal history, the evidence we have for the history of the planet is somehow completely wrong, the bible recounts a spritual truth seperate from physical history, or God has really done some weird stuff between then and now.
Personally, I like beleiving in mutually contridictory things. It is good exercise. Just because we might not be able to understand how mutually contridictory things can possibly be, does not mean that they cannot possibly be, you know? Particle or wave? 1/2 c + 1/2 c
Consumer Reports had a little side-bar article a few months back tracking prices of phone service, airlines, cable TV and something else? in the years befor and after deregulation.
There were definite kinks in the graphs of each service in the year that deregulation was introduced. However, the kinks were all the "wrong way". Prices in each of these areas were falling before deregulation, and falling after deregulation, but there were falling faster before the deregulation occurred.
The conclusion was that is is not as easy to say "deregulation always works to the benifit of consumers" as one might think if one just looks at prices immediately before and some time after deregulation.
"Here are the sports winners, lotto mumbers, and stock market trends for the next 20 years - make lots and lots and lots of money. Here are some important dates and events and bad things that happened to lots of innocent people (floods, fires, famines, shuttle explosinons, etc. With the amount of money you should be able to generate from the first pile of information - maybe you can try to help address some of the second? Heck - I bet you could affort to secretly hire a bunch of people to at a minimum set off a couple of smoke bombs in the early morning of September 11, 2001 to cause the World Trade Centre to be closed that day. Maybe you can work to get out the vote in Florida? Or tell John-John to practice his instrument flying a bit more? Maybe a bit more attention in Rwanda by big media might help? And some publicity for this AIDS thing a bit earlier - especially in Africa? Land mines, global warming, the US embasy in Iran, all sorts of foreign policy issues might be subtlyy infleuenced by a filthy righ young person in the right place at the right time you know."
Hopefully, with the wealth of a couple of Bill Gates, I will be able to find the generosity to do something interesting with it as David Brin suggests.
You want to spend money to protect your CAR from a nuclear attack? Where do you live that you fear such an event, the Pakistan/India border region?
With the enlightened political leadership we enjoy in the "western world", there seems like there should be little fear that we would be involved in some sort of conflict of this nature. Unless people were crazy enough to try to undermine the UN and other international organizations, agressivley go against world opinion, and threaten their own citizens and others around the world with unreasonable exercise of military and police powers. Come on, it is the 21st century! Those things are never going to happen.
Take a look at the yahoo.groups mailing lists with "prius" and "hybrid" in their names - the "toyota-prius" group has extensive information about incentives and tax breaks in various states, countries, and provinces in their online resources web pages.
I would tend to disagree that the Prius is particularly "quirky". As a frequent renter of many different types of cars, the Prius is not much different than any of them. The Prius certainly seems just like any other "real" car, whatever that mean. I have not driven a HCH so I can't make any direct comparisons, but the Prius drives quite normally, and unlike the Honda models had the nifty ability to run on just the electric motor under certain conditions.
In fact, the Prius has some sort of fancy "planetary gear" system which in some sense isn't even a transmission, though it is effectively a CVT - so getting a "manual" version wouldn't really be possible.
I don't know the motivations of the original poster, but it seems obvious that the 17% came from the fact that 20/24 = 0.83333...
This type of problem crops up whenever people quote "percentage more than" or "percentage less than", when A is 100% more than B, B is 50% less than A. Thus 2400 is 20% more than 2000, but 2000 is about 17% less than 2400.
I don't know if you listed federal US holidays or not (in which case the Postal System and federal offices will be shut down), but many of the listed holidays are not recognized as state holidays and are thus not "days off" for state institutions and schools.
these folk say: "Most companies designate the following as nonworking holidays: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day." and "Local custom and state law affect the decision about which holidays will be designated as nonworking days. For example, Martin Luther King's Birthday is a holiday celebrated by schools but not by many employers. In addition, government offices observe holidays, such as election days, that private employers do not.
The states may also designate particular holidays."
Thus, depending on your employer or your state, you may end up with more or less than 8 holiday days. Federal labor laws do not require any employers to give any days off or to pay premium rates ("time and a half" or similar) on any holidays - though many employers do.
But this link seems to indicate that in the UK, most of these holidays are not guaranteed by legislation either and are only given by the generosity of employers. The link also indicates that most European countries have much greater numbers of statutory holidays.
Personally I am of the opinion that since we have not made any real advances in labour laws since the 1920's that it is about time to move from the 40 hour work week down to the 32 hour one. Haven't we increased our productivity enough over the last 80 years to give us a bit more time off?
I think that the Toyota Prius hybrid and maybe the Honda hybrids (Insight and Civic Hybrid models) are also exempt from this chagre - presumably because of their very low (ULEV or SULEV) emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, my knowledge comes to me from episodes of "Law & Order", but my undersanding is that these yptes of confidentiality agreements are only applicable when they involve information that comes up while caring out pristly (or doctor or lawyer) duties. Hiring a priest to perform an audit is not going to get you the same level of privledge as if you went to one for absolution and talked about whatever crimes you did.
"You crossed my line of death!" BOOM! Play global war with the whole family!
I too am interested in seeing how the national DNC list is going to impact this sort of thing.
I certainly agree with you that it is doubtfull that any similar anti-spam legislation in the USA like the anti-fax law will have even as great an effect that the anti-junk-fax law has had. However I have no concerns about the constitutionality and think that it could make the purchasers of spam email services a bit more warry.
Additionally, I think that the current USA laws governing junk fax and junk phone calls have been quite effective. The amount of junk faxes that are sent is greatly decreased from before the junk fax laws were instituted, and with a little work remembering to say "Please put me on your do-not-call list", most people can reduce their junk phone call level to practically zero. Try it, it's fun.
Now, the question of the effectiveness of similar national legislation for junk email is certainly legitimate, but I wouldn't mind at least the attempt at legislation similar to the one banning junk faxes....
However, the ability to "do your own thing" varies quite greatly from institution to institution and department to department. In some places the instructor is given almost no ability to deviate from the sylabus that is handed to them. In others they are almost completely free to do what they want.
And of course, we don't even want to get into the whole idea that university profs are hired on the basis of their research ability with little attention paid to their teaching experience, aptitude, or training...
It may not have been a cakewalk, but it probably was not a very comprehensive physics education.
This isn't really the fault of Harvard, but more a result of the general USA undergraduate degree philosophy, which Harvard tends to follow pretty well. The relatively large number of required general education courses leave relativly little time available for math and physics courses.
In comparison, undergraduate physics degrees in Europe and Canada, tend to have significantly more math and physics courses required for graduation.
This does not imply that one system is better than the other, but they do tend to result in graduates with significant differences in their understanding of their "major" fields, and of course signigicant differences in their understanding of the wider accademic world outside of that field.
This does not go into the issues surronding the value of "cakewalkness" or lack thereof. Ideally, the point of instruction isn't to be "hard" but to be "effective". How much was learned and how well the student succeeds in future endevours is probably more important than how tough a time it was. The "tough it out" philosophy is what gives us medical residence programs that ruin lives and health and yet have little or no benifit compared to more humane methods of medical education. BUt I digress even farther from the Gore/Bush bashing...
In your particular case, I think that what you are probably seeing is not "next day" sales, but "same day" sales. As stated at the US website:
You may earn a referral fee for any qualifying items placed in a customer's shopping cart during a 24-hour window. This window begins at the time a visitor clicks through your Associates link. However, the 24-hour window will close if the customer submits his/her order or reenters Amazon.com through another Associate's link. Once the window is closed, any additional purchases will not earn referral fees for your Associates account. If the customer returns to Amazon.com through your Associates link, this will generate a new 24-hour window.
Please note that a customer may follow your Associates link, add an item to his/her shopping cart and then leave Amazon.com without completing an order. As long as the item was added to the shopping cart during the 24-hour window, you will earn a referral fee on this item even if the actual order is placed several weeks later. "
If you are a USA associate, it might be valuable for you to joint the UK and Canadian programs to increase your referrasl for other english-language patrons. I get a few bits of money from them in addition to US referrals on my site.
I don't think so - that looks more like information about what category the item is in (electronics in this case). The referral URL's look more like: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000065UO O/johansbooksparto/ for a particular item (a Sony DVD player in this case), or http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home/ johansbooksparto/ for the home page. And I am not sure if there is significant (or any) referral fees paid for "next day" browsing.
As a use of tax dollars, spending it on the kiddies' educations, health care, and daycare is probably one of the best "investments" that the society can make. If there were actually probems with having too many kids born, then it might be worthwhile to come up with disincentives, but the demmographics are that if anything, the "first world" has too low a birthrate rather tahn too high.
A plug system is not significantly more prone to "human error" either. Sure, sticking a screwdriver into the plug might make some big sparks, but that is about as likely as someone messing around with the paddle in an unperscribed manner.
You can't make something foolproof since fools are so ingeneous...
It seems to me that putting together a safe and secure mechanical locking system would not be particularly difficult for a conductive plug if one had concerns about people frying themselves.
With that said, the sort of entanglement we are talking about with EPR might work for a few photons or maybe a few tens of photons or atoms, but thinking that such an effect would scale up to the macroscopic seems about as likely as all of the bits of the broken glass just randomly jumping back up to the shelf.
I suppose that such a thing is possible, however one might notice the various signs that a collapsing cave would leave in the stratta above the cat bones, and get a clue that something not normal was going on.
I think that one of the key ideas in strata dating is the consistency of the types of stratta formation in various places and across geological timelines. If all the evidence that we had was a couple of cat bones beneith cave-ins I might be more critical of palentological dating methods. However we do seem to have a pretty large amount of consistent evidence for the most generally accepted conclusions.
This is not to say that we have warehouses full of T Rex skeletons however. I suppose it is possible that any day now a few significant fossel finds could turn up in a few significant locations and cause all older data to need to be re-evaluated. I am not holding my breath.
I am not sure what this means. You want someone to should you that "the bible is without contradiction on a very well-thought-out level"?
If you want somone to show you contradictions in the bible, they certainly are not hard to find. It is a long text, written by many different authors, at many different times. Theologists have had to work for many years interpreting differnt parts, trying to come to a consistent understanding of the work as a whole. A literal reading of the bible, I would hope you can see, is inconsistent with our understanding of how the world works, and the natural history of the planet. Thus one is forced to conclude that the bible is not literal history, the evidence we have for the history of the planet is somehow completely wrong, the bible recounts a spritual truth seperate from physical history, or God has really done some weird stuff between then and now.
Personally, I like beleiving in mutually contridictory things. It is good exercise. Just because we might not be able to understand how mutually contridictory things can possibly be, does not mean that they cannot possibly be, you know? Particle or wave? 1/2 c + 1/2 c
There were definite kinks in the graphs of each service in the year that deregulation was introduced. However, the kinks were all the "wrong way". Prices in each of these areas were falling before deregulation, and falling after deregulation, but there were falling faster before the deregulation occurred.
The conclusion was that is is not as easy to say "deregulation always works to the benifit of consumers" as one might think if one just looks at prices immediately before and some time after deregulation.
Hopefully, with the wealth of a couple of Bill Gates, I will be able to find the generosity to do something interesting with it as David Brin suggests.
With the enlightened political leadership we enjoy in the "western world", there seems like there should be little fear that we would be involved in some sort of conflict of this nature. Unless people were crazy enough to try to undermine the UN and other international organizations, agressivley go against world opinion, and threaten their own citizens and others around the world with unreasonable exercise of military and police powers. Come on, it is the 21st century! Those things are never going to happen.
See here for details.
This type of problem crops up whenever people quote "percentage more than" or "percentage less than", when A is 100% more than B, B is 50% less than A. Thus 2400 is 20% more than 2000, but 2000 is about 17% less than 2400.
these folk say: "Most companies designate the following as nonworking holidays: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day." and "Local custom and state law affect the decision about which holidays will be designated as nonworking days. For example, Martin Luther King's Birthday is a holiday celebrated by schools but not by many employers. In addition, government offices observe holidays, such as election days, that private employers do not. The states may also designate particular holidays."
Thus, depending on your employer or your state, you may end up with more or less than 8 holiday days. Federal labor laws do not require any employers to give any days off or to pay premium rates ("time and a half" or similar) on any holidays - though many employers do.
But this link seems to indicate that in the UK, most of these holidays are not guaranteed by legislation either and are only given by the generosity of employers. The link also indicates that most European countries have much greater numbers of statutory holidays.
Personally I am of the opinion that since we have not made any real advances in labour laws since the 1920's that it is about time to move from the 40 hour work week down to the 32 hour one. Haven't we increased our productivity enough over the last 80 years to give us a bit more time off?
I think that the Toyota Prius hybrid and maybe the Honda hybrids (Insight and Civic Hybrid models) are also exempt from this chagre - presumably because of their very low (ULEV or SULEV) emissions.