Games will be classified when they receive a complaint from the public. So if nobody else knows about the disgusting filth you are playing, you should be fine.
I teach secondary maths and English is Australia. In English it's common to try to give students an appreciation of the beauty of what you're teaching. I tell them when poetry makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and which novels still make me cry the third time I read them. Sometimes this gets across to students and they become curious enough to be engaged. I certainly try to get them writing stuff that they are emotionally engaged with.
I have some of the same attitudes to some mathematics. But there are two strong forces against me.
First, the curriculum is crammed with gumpf. There is a small set of mathematical knowledge that I think is important for citizens of a developed democracy to know, stuff around finance and statistical reasoning mostly. But I could probably cover this in one semester in Year 10. And there is a small amount of foundational number knowledge that makes it possible to teach much of the rest of mathematics - times tables, an understanding of place value. Again if this were done carefully it could be done in about a semester - I'd prefer if it were done in primary school. But I have to spend an awful lot of my time teaching other stuff that is not in any sense necessary or useful, coordinate geometry, trigonometry, calculus, volumes of complex shapes, multi-variable algebra etc etc etc. Any one of these would be fun to go into in some depth but the necessity of covering them all means that none of them are covered properly and the connections between different areas of mathematics are totally obscured.
Secondly, my students all come to me with a history of mathematics classes. Mostly, this history teaches them that there is a right answer and they are too stupid to find it. They wait to be told, they attempt to memorise formulae and they lack curiosity about how things work. I make attempts to reverse this but when the rubber hits the road and I need to cover content quickly, I reinforce it despite my best intentions.
If someone wants to found a charter school where I can use Godel Escher Bach as my only maths textbook just tell me where - I'll catch the next plane.
In fact it's only other humans that we're likely to want to have a war with as a species. You, like me, are into oxygen rich atmospheres and non-saline water and other humans so we have a lot to compete for. A gas giant dweller from Alpha Centauri has nothing I want or could even use beyond information and giving me that doesn't cost him anything.
Some posts seem to think this is straightforward but editing of quotes is legitimately difficult to get right. You have a tension between preserving the original quote (truth) and rewriting to make some kind of sense to your readers (communication).
In the case of verbal communication things that might make some sense spoken make people sound like gibbering fools when written down (See Don Rumsfeld or Australia's Brendan Nelson - in fact, try just about any politician). This doesn't necessarily mean that they are gibbering fools, when speech is stripped of natural pauses and inflections it is harder to understand.
The use of [sic] is not great because it draws particular attention to the error. It's basically used to make fun of somebody's ignorance. Sometimes this is the writer's purpose but it's not really fair on the person your quoting, particularly for a journalist.
I had to deal with this problem extensively when working in Market Research. There is a responsibility to present quotes verbatim - particularly in a written survey, but also in telephone surveys. But when the respondent's point is unclear in a verbatim quote you don't do the client any great service by leaving complicated sentence structure or ambiguities in when you are able to determine what they really meant.
The best response is somewhere halfway and while we sometimes put in [illegible] or [inaudible] we would never use [sic]. It's disrespectful to the person providing the quote.
Random Breath testing has been a regular thing since (I think) the 70s. Police set up stations where there is traffic (or sometimes on back roads used to avoid the usual locations) and randomly breath test people in general. To any one person it probably happens once a year and doesn't take more than 30 seconds out of your day. Penalties can be fairly steep depending on your level of intoxication and involve fines and potential loss of licence.
Over time people got the message and now DUI has a strong social stigma in Australia (where we are still a nation of pissheads) such that most people have a designated drive or catch the bus home.
It's your civil liberties that are causing the problem - no bill of rights here.
I'm a school teacher and my school (in Australia) has recently banned mobile phones for similar reasons to those cited in the article. The people who are making light of the problem saying 'it's only virtual, it's not real' or that the best solution to bullying is a punch in the face have no idea about the real situation on the ground in schools.
The internet, mobile phone cameras, and social networking sites when added together add an altogether newly dangerous and damaging element to bullying. Students who haven't yet reached anyone's 'age of reason' are now capable of taking photographs and publishing them for the whole world to see along with defaming information and potentially misleading photomanipulation.
There have been cases in Australia of filmed sexual assualts, there have been cases I know about of severe internet libel which makes it easy for bullying to transfer between schools in a local area. Better to be beaten up than to have that beating the most-watched video on youtube. Better to have someone steal your lunch money than to have lies about your sexual conduct sent to every school in your local area so that when the new kid's name gets googled you are prejudged.
Schools have a responsibility to form a safe environment for everyone at them (this includes staff by the way who are also vulnerable to these kinds of reputation attacks). This means that staff can't be bullies in the way they deal with bullying. There has to be a firm line and it has to be understood by the whole school community. It has to apply to staff as well as students. Even with that firm line in place incidents are going to crop up relentlessly and have to be dealt with. Violence can never be endorsed as a solution - some of our worst bullies have been kids who think they were acting righteously against bullies.
This is a complex and difficult issue and requires support from parents and a great deal of professionalism from teachers to change schools into safer places. Here in Australia we have managed to severely reduce the number of playground fights from even when I was at school 12 years ago. Homophobia still needs to be dealt with (everywhere I suspect) in a major way. This internet bullying is new and dangerous and I applaud the UK for doing what they can to stay ahead of it.
This is serious and deserves to be treated as such.
There are some simpler ways to manage power
use and heat in a data centre. Here
they suggest simply putting the power supply above the chips can make a huge
difference.
Give them time to get to Western Australia (they're only about a third of the way there). You have all the ingredients of speciation, geographic separation (the fast ones are a long way away from the slow ones still hanging around the Gold Coast) and a strong physical difference which has the potential to develop into a barrier between inter-species mating (Either, I don't like your wierd long legs - the toads are pretty intelligent. Or what with your grotesque legs we don't seem to be able to get in contact in all the right places).
Ah If only the editors had waited for my, lets face it, vastly superior story submission which took into account these facts (-8. The real story, as the parent pointed out is the slap in the fact to intelligent design advocates and their ilk when a fast reproducing species like the toad (20,000 eggs every few weeks) demonstrates evolution on a human timescale. If God's intelligently designing these faster toads the Kakadu Parks and Wildlife Service probably want a word with him.
No, I'm not the experts but I refer you to the:
Rocky Mountains Insititute . They are a not for profit environmental think tank who work with corporations and governments (Ford, the US Military for example) to increase profits or reduce costs through more efficient environmental practices.
They ran a Design Charrette around this specific question. This is where they take their staff members with general energy efficiency expertise and a whole bunch of industry types (data centre types, power company types etc. and worked at redesigning the entire data centre idea from scratch with energy efficiency in mind. There is a detailed report including return on investment figures and detailed financial breakdowns. The information available is extremely comprehensive and free (as in beer). These guys are excellent and slashdotters might also like to look at similar exercises they have done with cars and energy security.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to change my sig.
Games will be classified when they receive a complaint from the public. So if nobody else knows about the disgusting filth you are playing, you should be fine.
I have some of the same attitudes to some mathematics. But there are two strong forces against me.
First, the curriculum is crammed with gumpf. There is a small set of mathematical knowledge that I think is important for citizens of a developed democracy to know, stuff around finance and statistical reasoning mostly. But I could probably cover this in one semester in Year 10. And there is a small amount of foundational number knowledge that makes it possible to teach much of the rest of mathematics - times tables, an understanding of place value. Again if this were done carefully it could be done in about a semester - I'd prefer if it were done in primary school. But I have to spend an awful lot of my time teaching other stuff that is not in any sense necessary or useful, coordinate geometry, trigonometry, calculus, volumes of complex shapes, multi-variable algebra etc etc etc. Any one of these would be fun to go into in some depth but the necessity of covering them all means that none of them are covered properly and the connections between different areas of mathematics are totally obscured.
Secondly, my students all come to me with a history of mathematics classes. Mostly, this history teaches them that there is a right answer and they are too stupid to find it. They wait to be told, they attempt to memorise formulae and they lack curiosity about how things work. I make attempts to reverse this but when the rubber hits the road and I need to cover content quickly, I reinforce it despite my best intentions.
If someone wants to found a charter school where I can use Godel Escher Bach as my only maths textbook just tell me where - I'll catch the next plane.
In fact it's only other humans that we're likely to want to have a war with as a species. You, like me, are into oxygen rich atmospheres and non-saline water and other humans so we have a lot to compete for. A gas giant dweller from Alpha Centauri has nothing I want or could even use beyond information and giving me that doesn't cost him anything.
Nukes are the best for everything on Slashdot.
In the case of verbal communication things that might make some sense spoken make people sound like gibbering fools when written down (See Don Rumsfeld or Australia's Brendan Nelson - in fact, try just about any politician). This doesn't necessarily mean that they are gibbering fools, when speech is stripped of natural pauses and inflections it is harder to understand.
The use of [sic] is not great because it draws particular attention to the error. It's basically used to make fun of somebody's ignorance. Sometimes this is the writer's purpose but it's not really fair on the person your quoting, particularly for a journalist.
I had to deal with this problem extensively when working in Market Research. There is a responsibility to present quotes verbatim - particularly in a written survey, but also in telephone surveys. But when the respondent's point is unclear in a verbatim quote you don't do the client any great service by leaving complicated sentence structure or ambiguities in when you are able to determine what they really meant.
The best response is somewhere halfway and while we sometimes put in [illegible] or [inaudible] we would never use [sic]. It's disrespectful to the person providing the quote.
Random Breath testing has been a regular thing since (I think) the 70s. Police set up stations where there is traffic (or sometimes on back roads used to avoid the usual locations) and randomly breath test people in general. To any one person it probably happens once a year and doesn't take more than 30 seconds out of your day. Penalties can be fairly steep depending on your level of intoxication and involve fines and potential loss of licence. Over time people got the message and now DUI has a strong social stigma in Australia (where we are still a nation of pissheads) such that most people have a designated drive or catch the bus home. It's your civil liberties that are causing the problem - no bill of rights here.
You're being a tit. Why, it would never work!
Great, so our replicator overlords already have a taste for human muscles. Think ahead people, we want a nice singularity!
My Sig is becoming out of date.
I'm a school teacher and my school (in Australia) has recently banned mobile phones for similar reasons to those cited in the article. The people who are making light of the problem saying 'it's only virtual, it's not real' or that the best solution to bullying is a punch in the face have no idea about the real situation on the ground in schools. The internet, mobile phone cameras, and social networking sites when added together add an altogether newly dangerous and damaging element to bullying. Students who haven't yet reached anyone's 'age of reason' are now capable of taking photographs and publishing them for the whole world to see along with defaming information and potentially misleading photomanipulation. There have been cases in Australia of filmed sexual assualts, there have been cases I know about of severe internet libel which makes it easy for bullying to transfer between schools in a local area. Better to be beaten up than to have that beating the most-watched video on youtube. Better to have someone steal your lunch money than to have lies about your sexual conduct sent to every school in your local area so that when the new kid's name gets googled you are prejudged. Schools have a responsibility to form a safe environment for everyone at them (this includes staff by the way who are also vulnerable to these kinds of reputation attacks). This means that staff can't be bullies in the way they deal with bullying. There has to be a firm line and it has to be understood by the whole school community. It has to apply to staff as well as students. Even with that firm line in place incidents are going to crop up relentlessly and have to be dealt with. Violence can never be endorsed as a solution - some of our worst bullies have been kids who think they were acting righteously against bullies. This is a complex and difficult issue and requires support from parents and a great deal of professionalism from teachers to change schools into safer places. Here in Australia we have managed to severely reduce the number of playground fights from even when I was at school 12 years ago. Homophobia still needs to be dealt with (everywhere I suspect) in a major way. This internet bullying is new and dangerous and I applaud the UK for doing what they can to stay ahead of it. This is serious and deserves to be treated as such.
Factoid: Something which looks like a fact, but isn't. See Android, Diamondoid.
625512 6226 1587 1228 14518 35187712 178015
There are some simpler ways to manage power use and heat in a data centre. Here they suggest simply putting the power supply above the chips can make a huge difference.
Give them time to get to Western Australia (they're only about a third of the way there). You have all the ingredients of speciation, geographic separation (the fast ones are a long way away from the slow ones still hanging around the Gold Coast) and a strong physical difference which has the potential to develop into a barrier between inter-species mating (Either, I don't like your wierd long legs - the toads are pretty intelligent. Or what with your grotesque legs we don't seem to be able to get in contact in all the right places).
Ah If only the editors had waited for my, lets face it, vastly superior story submission which took into account these facts (-8. The real story, as the parent pointed out is the slap in the fact to intelligent design advocates and their ilk when a fast reproducing species like the toad (20,000 eggs every few weeks) demonstrates evolution on a human timescale. If God's intelligently designing these faster toads the Kakadu Parks and Wildlife Service probably want a word with him.
No, I'm not the experts but I refer you to the: Rocky Mountains Insititute . They are a not for profit environmental think tank who work with corporations and governments (Ford, the US Military for example) to increase profits or reduce costs through more efficient environmental practices. They ran a Design Charrette around this specific question. This is where they take their staff members with general energy efficiency expertise and a whole bunch of industry types (data centre types, power company types etc. and worked at redesigning the entire data centre idea from scratch with energy efficiency in mind. There is a detailed report including return on investment figures and detailed financial breakdowns. The information available is extremely comprehensive and free (as in beer). These guys are excellent and slashdotters might also like to look at similar exercises they have done with cars and energy security.