I did not use the term "most" at all, this is your word not mine. I do not speak for everyone, I'm simply relating my own experiences. There IS only one simple point to my post; home schooling works for MY kid and MY family.
You have an idea in your head and you have bent my words to fit your assumptions, don't read things into my words that are not there to begin with.
We had many trips to the school, visits and phone calls with teachers, heads of departments and the principal, this took place over nearly two years until we finally decided that we would take matters into our own hands and teach our child ourselves. We made the best decision possible for our child after carefully considering the options available to us.
You don't know me or my child. Your post jumps to uninformed conclusions. You have warped my words to fit your preconceived idea of who I am and what motivates me. You even filled in the gaps in your argument with your own words where mine won't do. Contrary to your belief my child was quite capable of doing the work he was given at school, he had (and continues to have) an active social circle. I took action because he was not reaching his potential, he was just doing "very well" by the school's standards but alas these standards are significantly lower than what my child is capable of. That was the crux of the problem, I didn't want him to quietly read a book at the back of the class to keep him content, I wanted him to use his brain and get stretched, challenged and tested by his educators. They were not capable of this as individuals or as an institution.
Hopefully this clarifies my post and my reasons for posting it for you
I agree, homeschooling is not a general solution, I don't think education has a general solution. I do think it's the best I can do for my kid with the resources I have available though.
I've met some odd-ball home schooling parents who choose to not teach their kids much of anything I regard as useful. While I think they are crack-pots and that they're hampering their kids development I also respect their choice to teach their kids the things they value (even if that is knitting sandals and howling at the moon in the woods). It's not my place to judge what is right for their kids.
My kid has an active social life with a mix of people including adults, kids his age, younger kids and older ones. As I said in my earlier post we worried about this most, but it turns out it's just not a problem as far as we can tell.
I am compelled to play devil's advocate and ask however, why is it so important to bond with people in your own age group? What is the sound scientific principle that indicates this to be "better" and "preferential" to simply forming a social relationship with ANY other human regardless of age?
I was bored with school work. I was not bored AT school... I got into all kinds of trouble, I also did well in sport (it was mandatory where I was schooled) had plenty of friends and pretty much buggered about all the time I was there because everything was so easy. As it happens, I turned out OK, got my act together when I left school and grew up a bit, decided what I wanted to do and went for it on my own terms at my own pace using my own hard earned money. However, I often wonder how much more I could have achieved if I had been challenged and encouraged by the system rather than being an educational square peg in a round hole.
When I started to see the same patterns repeating with my kid I decided to try something different and give him an opportunity to mentally grow at HIS pace rather than at some artificially slow one dictated by a school system designed for the average. So far it seems to be working out great for him, I suppose only time will tell if this was the best thing we could do for him.
The trouble with "peers" is that they are few and far between. My kid interacts too intellectually for a lot of kids, that's one of the problems with being at the edge of the bell curve, he starts wittering on about the latest crazy-assed thing he made his raspberry pi do and a lot of kids just look at him like he's got a tentacle growing out of his head.
That said however, he does interact with a wide range of people including both adults (family and friends) and kids (other home ed kids we meet with regularly) as well as his friends who live in our street etc
He doesn't have any social hang-ups and he can get along with other kids OK, he just often finds pleasure in one or two high quality friends who "get him" rather than having a swathe of less meaningful relationships
The "social education" is the most often-cited reason for preferring regular school and it was our most serious concern before we opted to home educate. I think we over-thought and worried about this far too much to be honest, I've done a lot of research since however and for healthy psychological development kids need lots of love to build confidence along with opportunities to communicate to build social skills, it does not matter whether these are with adults or children for the most part simply that they are taking place. Needless to say, I'm a lot less worried about this now than I was when we started out.
I don't suggest that homeschooling is right or even possible for a lot of families out there; my only point is that home schooling was and is right for my kids because we have a "better product" to offer than the schools in our area.
In school, my child was actively excluded by his teacher for being too questioning and he was actively refused the extra work he requested having finished the work he was given. Additionally, he was scolded for finding other things for his active imagination to occupy itself with after his teacher had failed to provide him with something/anything to learn. It got to the point that he became withdrawn and sullen, sat at the back of the class doing the bare minimum to avoid trouble. While he would have muddled through school and gone on to the world of work by cruising on IQ that would be a massive waste of the kids talents, so we chose to do something about it.
We don't pander to our kids whims, he has a rigorous regime of work that challenges him and makes him use his talents. When we have break days my son fills his time working on one or more of his projects or spending valuable time with friends and family, he's an all round well adjusted and hard working kid who makes me very proud
Having spent pretty much my entire school life bored out of my mind and unchallenged by uninterested and uninteresting teachers, I recognized this starting to happen in my own son's life. After some initial reluctance and self-doubt, my wife and I removed him from mainstream education and started to home school. We're fortunate that my wife is a stay-home mum dedicated and intellectual enough to do a fantastic job teaching our kids. I help out with the sciences, maths and programming lessons in evenings and on weekends.
In short our choice to home school is the best thing we could have done for our kid, he's significantly happier, learning much more and crucially he's capable of much more than he would be at school because we're prepared to teach him at HIS pace.
We periodically test our son to check how he compares to other students in core subjects like english, maths etc. The last time we did this was a couple of months ago and he was comfortably working at GCSE level in these core subjects. He's well beyond GCSE level in the fields that interest him. He's eight years old.
His teachers could not sufficiently challenge him or make the most of his talents so he was side-lined and ignored at school. My wife and I are now quite confident of our abillity to impart knowledge to our son so we've decided to do the same thing with his little sister.
I don't think mainstream education makes the most of our kids and I don't think it makes great employees either. Having recently tried to hire new junior programmers for my team I was astounded by how weak the candidates were even though they had CS degrees from good universities. Like lots of things in life if you want them doing well you're probably best doing them yourself. Homeschool for the win!
M2M cellular contracts are really simple these days. You can buy embedded SIM cards that are "cold" and cost free (in terms of air time expenses) until you need them, you can remotely enable/disable them thereby switching air time costs on and off as required. The hardware required to put a simple GSM MODEM in place that phones home and checks for updates if it's SIM goes hot is fairly small.
Not to mention that ALL new cars in Europe will soon be fitted with MODEMs designed to phone the authorities if the car has a crash http://ec.europa.eu/digital-ag... so the lack of hardware in the car won't be a factor in Europe at least.
All-in-all this is not technically difficult to do, but my experience of the motor industry is that they are a bunch of cyber-peasants with very little will to implement any standard communication interfaces into their vehicles, they prefer brand-differentiating home grown solutions for in-car gadgetry and they're very slow to change.
I work on dual screen 1920x1200 at work and I use a 27" higher res monitor at home. Mousing to the top left of the screen in MATE doesn't require more than an inch of mouse movement with my settings on any of these machines. (medium sensitivity and a tiny amount of acceleration).
What is your mouse sensitivity set to? I'm genuinely interested rather than trying to troll you. Perhaps the aversion people feel to a global menu is something related to personal mouse sensitivity preferences and those of us who need to physically move the mouse over large distances detest the global menu.
As I said earlier, the global menu is the least of my problems with Unity, it's the fact that it keeps dissappearing to be replaced with a fairly useless window title that bugs me more
Diclaimer: I use Linux every day for work. I use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I don't use Unity.
The usability problem with Unity menus is not that they are either local or global, it's the fact they they disappear every time you take your mouse away from them, please don't make me have to mouse over the window title to get the menu to appear. While this sounds simple enough to do, it causes you to haltingly mouse over the general area of the menu bar, then wait for the thing to render, then visually locate what you want, then mouse over it and click. In the good old days, one could just mouse over to the precise menu location and click-it in a single move
Unity now provides the user with a choice as to whether they would like to break your menu in either a local way or a global way, sadly the problem still exists. Please stop breaking user interfaces with stupid design!
For the record, I use MATE as my desktop because all this new fangled sausage-finger friendly crap is simply not a productive place to work
Perhaps we could look at some examples from history and apply your ideas; The Rwandan civil war was arguably started by a leader being removed from power (his plane was shot down). The "remove the leader" method is one of your proposed solutions to war in general. The act of assassinating this bloke sparked off a genocide wherein around 800,000 people were killed. How do you decide who has the right to rule in this situation. Both sides had legitimate grievances (at least in their own minds) and both sides did terrible things (though one more than the other in terms of a body count). Who do you strip of their rights and punish with "trade embargoes"? how do you punish the "bad guys" when they are living in the same country as the "good guys"? Even if you decide who's right and who's wrong, you cannot selectively punish one side or the other without putting boots on the ground; doing so will put your personnel in the line of fire. This will lead to you having to chose between using force or ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.
Consider Germany in the 1930's it was the application of sanctions and internationally enforced laws (treaty of Versailles) on the German nation that provided an ideal breeding ground for the sort of hatred that lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler. In fact it was precisely this treaty that gave Hitler a strong point of fact to rally his followers around. The only thing that stopped Hitler was gratuitous use of force, he was intent on military domination of all who opposed him.
In summary, I think that in some cases war is unavoidable; however, war should be avoided at all costs. I don't think we'll see an end to war until we have a world government and paradoxically I don't think this will ever come about except by way of war (at least in some part)
You are quite right, however most people don't even know those problems exist and for those people, their shiny new iWotsit is the best thing since sliced bread. They're not wrong they just happen to not need or want the things you speak of and as such really quite like the products they choose and tell all their non-geeky buddies about them and so they go buy them as well.
Sounds a lot like excel is changing it's name. I'm not sure that this programming technique is anything other than the brackety crap you type into the tiny text box at the top of an excel worksheet... you know, that thing that leaves you wanting a programming language for anything more complex than summing a column or sticking two bits of text together.
The Apple iDevices and game consoles draw that line too high to be useful for anything.
Clearly that statement is erm... rubbish. The millions of people who own consoles and iWotsits are doing something they find USEFUL with them. The fact that these products offend some people does not make them useless in general. I love open source stuff as much as the next geek but come on people, most humans out there couldn't give a rats ass about how open their console is, they just want to play games, or, more to the point, their kids do.
I think Valve is more interested in selling content at a price that makes consumers consume rather than trying to win a pissing contest with Sony and MS over who's got the best console. They have concerns however that Windows is heading the way of the Apple walled garden, so they're trying to provide alternatives to that garden and they're hoping that developers will jump on board. With a bit luck steam boxes will take off enough to get Sony, MS and Nintendo to at least drop the price of their games a bit. Console gaming is after all under significant price pressure from the £0.69 iOS or Android game at one end of the spectrum and now they are comming under similar pressure from Valve at the other. Compettition rocks!
Then again, I've been puzzled all my adult life by people who just don't care enough to learn anything about something new before they form an (often utterly stupid) opinion, it's way easier for sheeple to just believe marketing spin (or any other source of convenient bullshit i.e. religious leaders, politicians, the daily mail). So I suspect that the people with the marketing team best able to lie to the most people will win no matter which is actually technically better than the other.
Yeah, when I was working on healthcare software here in the UK my proposal was to simply store historic patient data in HTML as it was a jumbled mix of test results and notes in no particular format from a variety of software vendors. We had really good success in making simple plug-ins to eat data from a vendor and spit HTML that could be archived on web servers running on an intra-net accessible by all hospitals and gp's in a single health authority rather than a public website (for obvious reasons) this made finding stuff really easy for 99% of the people who needed the data because we indexed the pages google-style. Single search box to find everything by patient id or name or all the diabetics or similar. It was really cool. No managers or decision-makers wanted it because they didn't understand how it solved their problem, they were to intensly involved in modelling reality in paper-based forms and letters to GPs.
The people with the access control hang-ups and long list of other irrelevant requirements were suits representing patients rights and/or the government of the day, not actual patients or doctors, but theorists with no practical understanding of the NHS or the real world requirements for a healthcare system. They wanted to scrape all the data into a massive central national system designed by a committee that became the list of common factors from all the vendors i.e. crap with only the barest whiff of useful data, none of the good stuff that made the hospitals buy the software from the small vendors in the first place
While I feel the same as you on this point I am forced to acknowledge my experience of living in a country with no state benfits, the up-shot is this. The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high in our country are the same type of people that turn to (often violent) crime in countries where an effective benefit system does not exist. The simple truth of the matter is that having good social welfare systems in place keeps crime down.
Go live in Johannesburg for a few months and tell me which you would rather have
Think of it as modern Danegeld. Either the state buys Joe Schmoes new flat screen TV or he's comming to take yours:)
it wasn't just a database. It was a database that had to incorporate and interoperate with a vast array of existing legacy software written in every language you can possibly imagine. Not only this, it was a stupid idea to start with, because MOST patients don't move around the country and a series of smaller regional systems would have made a lot more sense for MOST of the problems in communication that could be solved by interfacing computer systems.
The project was hampered by problems of patient confidentiallity, and who was reasonably allowed to access patient records at any given time. Data needed to be tied to locations that the patient was frequenting e.g. my GP is allowed to see my records, the doctor in the A&E I've just been admitted to is allowed to see my records but a doctor at the other end of the country doing a bit of record-surfing is not allowed to see my records. except when he is?!?!
The hospitals themselves pretty much (quite rightly) tried to keep the national system at arms length because it was not clearly understood or believed to be core to their day-to-day activities.
All-in-all the government of the day would have done much better to define a minimum data set and standards for interoperation rather than interferring and trying to control everything centrally. Given a decent interface and data set spec the miriad of small (cheap) software vendors already supplying the NHS would have all been motivated to implement it so they could interoperate with each others systems in a more uniform (read cost effective) manner. Communicating between hospital departments and between the hospital and the patients GP then would have been a much more simple affair and this would have solved most of the communication delay problems that happen in the real world on a day-to-day basis.
The only "law of war" that we need is one that states that war is not allowed, period. If you're an aggressor, you are breaking the "law of war". Seriously, we've come too far as a civilized society to still condone such a barbaric practice as war. If you do anything more than to defend yourself, then you become an aggressor.
Fantastic idea, but you speak about "an aggressor" as if he/she was easy to identify, nations go to war, not individuals. It's really hard to sort out the good guys from the bad in this situation. Their is no single aggressor in any war, their is only a tangled web of politics and agendas of the nations involved and a load of soldiers from both sides either paid to fight or deluded/damaged/desperate enough to resort to wholesale violence as a way to solve problems. Also the only way to make your "law" meaningful would be to enforce it and to do so would require you to have a standing army that you could bring to war should the need arise. The downside here of course is that as soon as you have an army, you give anyone who disagrees with you a reason to fear you and recruit a bunch of dimwits to wage war on you.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're an aggressor you forfeit all "rights" to your own safety as you are attempting to deprive others of similar rights, thus making pretty much everything against you fair game.
I think this attitude makes you an aggressor (to use your own phrase). You are advocating wholesale genocide of an enemy nation because their leaders are warmongering retards? You have masterfully over-simplified and compartmentalized the complexity of why nations go to war into the classical good vs bad scenario except, you have defined your own rules about why the bad guy is bad. I would offer... this is EXACTLY how people find themselves at war in the first place; people over-simplify and compartmentalize their understanding of the world and these people are easily manipulated into going to war because they'd rather jump to their familiar conclusions than try to cope with the real complexities of life.
Don't get me wrong I agree with your sentiment, war is bad and should be stopped, but I don't believe that their are ANY simple answers like the one you suggest. Indeed I think the only thing your "final solution" to war would achieve is more war and hatred. We are not going to end all war quickly or easily by declaring a free for all on any aggressor nation. We will only manage to see the end of war one small painful step at a time.
I think you'll find that this is why he and Mandela were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize for the efforts to end apartheid, but poor guy is all but forgotten, hell I've even heard some folks demonizing him as the head of the oppressive white regime. Even though he headed up a movement within his party (that got him elected as party leader) to bring an end to institutional racism and legalize the ANC
Sanctions did not hurt the ruling class in South Africa. They were a futile gesture at best. Having grown up in SA during the period when the sanctions were in full swing, I speak from first hand experience. The only people (if any) that sanctions hurt were the poor!
I think imposing sanctions was a voter-freindly alternative to actually __doing__ something for western politicians
Nelson was no angel, but he was no demon either, I think he did a good job when he came to power. But I would temper that by saying his methods (and those of the organisations he was part of) were openly "terrorist" earlier in his life and also later after he was arrested. I think it is fair to say that Nelson realised in prison that his actions as a youth did not and would not get the changes he wanted for his country. Diplomacy and level-headed statemanship were his most powerful weapons, these were the things that finally managed to start South Africa heading down the right path.
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I did not use the term "most" at all, this is your word not mine. I do not speak for everyone, I'm simply relating my own experiences. There IS only one simple point to my post; home schooling works for MY kid and MY family.
You have an idea in your head and you have bent my words to fit your assumptions, don't read things into my words that are not there to begin with.
We had many trips to the school, visits and phone calls with teachers, heads of departments and the principal, this took place over nearly two years until we finally decided that we would take matters into our own hands and teach our child ourselves. We made the best decision possible for our child after carefully considering the options available to us.
You don't know me or my child. Your post jumps to uninformed conclusions. You have warped my words to fit your preconceived idea of who I am and what motivates me. You even filled in the gaps in your argument with your own words where mine won't do. Contrary to your belief my child was quite capable of doing the work he was given at school, he had (and continues to have) an active social circle. I took action because he was not reaching his potential, he was just doing "very well" by the school's standards but alas these standards are significantly lower than what my child is capable of. That was the crux of the problem, I didn't want him to quietly read a book at the back of the class to keep him content, I wanted him to use his brain and get stretched, challenged and tested by his educators. They were not capable of this as individuals or as an institution.
Hopefully this clarifies my post and my reasons for posting it for you
I agree, homeschooling is not a general solution, I don't think education has a general solution. I do think it's the best I can do for my kid with the resources I have available though.
I've met some odd-ball home schooling parents who choose to not teach their kids much of anything I regard as useful. While I think they are crack-pots and that they're hampering their kids development I also respect their choice to teach their kids the things they value (even if that is knitting sandals and howling at the moon in the woods). It's not my place to judge what is right for their kids.
My kid has an active social life with a mix of people including adults, kids his age, younger kids and older ones. As I said in my earlier post we worried about this most, but it turns out it's just not a problem as far as we can tell.
I am compelled to play devil's advocate and ask however, why is it so important to bond with people in your own age group? What is the sound scientific principle that indicates this to be "better" and "preferential" to simply forming a social relationship with ANY other human regardless of age?
I was bored with school work. I was not bored AT school... I got into all kinds of trouble, I also did well in sport (it was mandatory where I was schooled) had plenty of friends and pretty much buggered about all the time I was there because everything was so easy. As it happens, I turned out OK, got my act together when I left school and grew up a bit, decided what I wanted to do and went for it on my own terms at my own pace using my own hard earned money. However, I often wonder how much more I could have achieved if I had been challenged and encouraged by the system rather than being an educational square peg in a round hole.
When I started to see the same patterns repeating with my kid I decided to try something different and give him an opportunity to mentally grow at HIS pace rather than at some artificially slow one dictated by a school system designed for the average. So far it seems to be working out great for him, I suppose only time will tell if this was the best thing we could do for him.
The trouble with "peers" is that they are few and far between. My kid interacts too intellectually for a lot of kids, that's one of the problems with being at the edge of the bell curve, he starts wittering on about the latest crazy-assed thing he made his raspberry pi do and a lot of kids just look at him like he's got a tentacle growing out of his head.
That said however, he does interact with a wide range of people including both adults (family and friends) and kids (other home ed kids we meet with regularly) as well as his friends who live in our street etc
He doesn't have any social hang-ups and he can get along with other kids OK, he just often finds pleasure in one or two high quality friends who "get him" rather than having a swathe of less meaningful relationships
The "social education" is the most often-cited reason for preferring regular school and it was our most serious concern before we opted to home educate. I think we over-thought and worried about this far too much to be honest, I've done a lot of research since however and for healthy psychological development kids need lots of love to build confidence along with opportunities to communicate to build social skills, it does not matter whether these are with adults or children for the most part simply that they are taking place. Needless to say, I'm a lot less worried about this now than I was when we started out.
I don't suggest that homeschooling is right or even possible for a lot of families out there; my only point is that home schooling was and is right for my kids because we have a "better product" to offer than the schools in our area.
In school, my child was actively excluded by his teacher for being too questioning and he was actively refused the extra work he requested having finished the work he was given. Additionally, he was scolded for finding other things for his active imagination to occupy itself with after his teacher had failed to provide him with something/anything to learn. It got to the point that he became withdrawn and sullen, sat at the back of the class doing the bare minimum to avoid trouble. While he would have muddled through school and gone on to the world of work by cruising on IQ that would be a massive waste of the kids talents, so we chose to do something about it.
We don't pander to our kids whims, he has a rigorous regime of work that challenges him and makes him use his talents. When we have break days my son fills his time working on one or more of his projects or spending valuable time with friends and family, he's an all round well adjusted and hard working kid who makes me very proud
Having spent pretty much my entire school life bored out of my mind and unchallenged by uninterested and uninteresting teachers, I recognized this starting to happen in my own son's life. After some initial reluctance and self-doubt, my wife and I removed him from mainstream education and started to home school. We're fortunate that my wife is a stay-home mum dedicated and intellectual enough to do a fantastic job teaching our kids. I help out with the sciences, maths and programming lessons in evenings and on weekends.
In short our choice to home school is the best thing we could have done for our kid, he's significantly happier, learning much more and crucially he's capable of much more than he would be at school because we're prepared to teach him at HIS pace.
We periodically test our son to check how he compares to other students in core subjects like english, maths etc. The last time we did this was a couple of months ago and he was comfortably working at GCSE level in these core subjects. He's well beyond GCSE level in the fields that interest him. He's eight years old.
His teachers could not sufficiently challenge him or make the most of his talents so he was side-lined and ignored at school. My wife and I are now quite confident of our abillity to impart knowledge to our son so we've decided to do the same thing with his little sister.
I don't think mainstream education makes the most of our kids and I don't think it makes great employees either. Having recently tried to hire new junior programmers for my team I was astounded by how weak the candidates were even though they had CS degrees from good universities. Like lots of things in life if you want them doing well you're probably best doing them yourself. Homeschool for the win!
Once upon a time WoW was worthy of the gaming geek... now it's watered down drivel complete with kung-fu pandas... who even plays this any more?
M2M cellular contracts are really simple these days. You can buy embedded SIM cards that are "cold" and cost free (in terms of air time expenses) until you need them, you can remotely enable/disable them thereby switching air time costs on and off as required. The hardware required to put a simple GSM MODEM in place that phones home and checks for updates if it's SIM goes hot is fairly small.
Not to mention that ALL new cars in Europe will soon be fitted with MODEMs designed to phone the authorities if the car has a crash http://ec.europa.eu/digital-ag... so the lack of hardware in the car won't be a factor in Europe at least.
All-in-all this is not technically difficult to do, but my experience of the motor industry is that they are a bunch of cyber-peasants with very little will to implement any standard communication interfaces into their vehicles, they prefer brand-differentiating home grown solutions for in-car gadgetry and they're very slow to change.
I work on dual screen 1920x1200 at work and I use a 27" higher res monitor at home. Mousing to the top left of the screen in MATE doesn't require more than an inch of mouse movement with my settings on any of these machines. (medium sensitivity and a tiny amount of acceleration).
What is your mouse sensitivity set to? I'm genuinely interested rather than trying to troll you. Perhaps the aversion people feel to a global menu is something related to personal mouse sensitivity preferences and those of us who need to physically move the mouse over large distances detest the global menu.
As I said earlier, the global menu is the least of my problems with Unity, it's the fact that it keeps dissappearing to be replaced with a fairly useless window title that bugs me more
indeed they were so well hidden, EvanED never found them even after using Windows for "quite some time"
Well said. If I had mod points I'd mod you up for this.
Diclaimer: I use Linux every day for work. I use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I don't use Unity.
The usability problem with Unity menus is not that they are either local or global, it's the fact they they disappear every time you take your mouse away from them, please don't make me have to mouse over the window title to get the menu to appear. While this sounds simple enough to do, it causes you to haltingly mouse over the general area of the menu bar, then wait for the thing to render, then visually locate what you want, then mouse over it and click. In the good old days, one could just mouse over to the precise menu location and click-it in a single move
Unity now provides the user with a choice as to whether they would like to break your menu in either a local way or a global way, sadly the problem still exists. Please stop breaking user interfaces with stupid design!
For the record, I use MATE as my desktop because all this new fangled sausage-finger friendly crap is simply not a productive place to work
meh
Perhaps we could look at some examples from history and apply your ideas; The Rwandan civil war was arguably started by a leader being removed from power (his plane was shot down). The "remove the leader" method is one of your proposed solutions to war in general. The act of assassinating this bloke sparked off a genocide wherein around 800,000 people were killed. How do you decide who has the right to rule in this situation. Both sides had legitimate grievances (at least in their own minds) and both sides did terrible things (though one more than the other in terms of a body count). Who do you strip of their rights and punish with "trade embargoes"? how do you punish the "bad guys" when they are living in the same country as the "good guys"? Even if you decide who's right and who's wrong, you cannot selectively punish one side or the other without putting boots on the ground; doing so will put your personnel in the line of fire. This will lead to you having to chose between using force or ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.
Consider Germany in the 1930's it was the application of sanctions and internationally enforced laws (treaty of Versailles) on the German nation that provided an ideal breeding ground for the sort of hatred that lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler. In fact it was precisely this treaty that gave Hitler a strong point of fact to rally his followers around. The only thing that stopped Hitler was gratuitous use of force, he was intent on military domination of all who opposed him.
In summary, I think that in some cases war is unavoidable; however, war should be avoided at all costs. I don't think we'll see an end to war until we have a world government and paradoxically I don't think this will ever come about except by way of war (at least in some part)
You are quite right, however most people don't even know those problems exist and for those people, their shiny new iWotsit is the best thing since sliced bread. They're not wrong they just happen to not need or want the things you speak of and as such really quite like the products they choose and tell all their non-geeky buddies about them and so they go buy them as well.
Sounds a lot like excel is changing it's name. I'm not sure that this programming technique is anything other than the brackety crap you type into the tiny text box at the top of an excel worksheet... you know, that thing that leaves you wanting a programming language for anything more complex than summing a column or sticking two bits of text together.
The Apple iDevices and game consoles draw that line too high to be useful for anything.
Clearly that statement is erm... rubbish. The millions of people who own consoles and iWotsits are doing something they find USEFUL with them. The fact that these products offend some people does not make them useless in general. I love open source stuff as much as the next geek but come on people, most humans out there couldn't give a rats ass about how open their console is, they just want to play games, or, more to the point, their kids do.
I think Valve is more interested in selling content at a price that makes consumers consume rather than trying to win a pissing contest with Sony and MS over who's got the best console. They have concerns however that Windows is heading the way of the Apple walled garden, so they're trying to provide alternatives to that garden and they're hoping that developers will jump on board. With a bit luck steam boxes will take off enough to get Sony, MS and Nintendo to at least drop the price of their games a bit. Console gaming is after all under significant price pressure from the £0.69 iOS or Android game at one end of the spectrum and now they are comming under similar pressure from Valve at the other. Compettition rocks!
Then again, I've been puzzled all my adult life by people who just don't care enough to learn anything about something new before they form an (often utterly stupid) opinion, it's way easier for sheeple to just believe marketing spin (or any other source of convenient bullshit i.e. religious leaders, politicians, the daily mail). So I suspect that the people with the marketing team best able to lie to the most people will win no matter which is actually technically better than the other.
Yeah, when I was working on healthcare software here in the UK my proposal was to simply store historic patient data in HTML as it was a jumbled mix of test results and notes in no particular format from a variety of software vendors. We had really good success in making simple plug-ins to eat data from a vendor and spit HTML that could be archived on web servers running on an intra-net accessible by all hospitals and gp's in a single health authority rather than a public website (for obvious reasons) this made finding stuff really easy for 99% of the people who needed the data because we indexed the pages google-style. Single search box to find everything by patient id or name or all the diabetics or similar. It was really cool. No managers or decision-makers wanted it because they didn't understand how it solved their problem, they were to intensly involved in modelling reality in paper-based forms and letters to GPs.
The people with the access control hang-ups and long list of other irrelevant requirements were suits representing patients rights and/or the government of the day, not actual patients or doctors, but theorists with no practical understanding of the NHS or the real world requirements for a healthcare system. They wanted to scrape all the data into a massive central national system designed by a committee that became the list of common factors from all the vendors i.e. crap with only the barest whiff of useful data, none of the good stuff that made the hospitals buy the software from the small vendors in the first place
While I feel the same as you on this point I am forced to acknowledge my experience of living in a country with no state benfits, the up-shot is this. The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high in our country are the same type of people that turn to (often violent) crime in countries where an effective benefit system does not exist. The simple truth of the matter is that having good social welfare systems in place keeps crime down.
Go live in Johannesburg for a few months and tell me which you would rather have
Think of it as modern Danegeld. Either the state buys Joe Schmoes new flat screen TV or he's comming to take yours :)
it wasn't just a database. It was a database that had to incorporate and interoperate with a vast array of existing legacy software written in every language you can possibly imagine. Not only this, it was a stupid idea to start with, because MOST patients don't move around the country and a series of smaller regional systems would have made a lot more sense for MOST of the problems in communication that could be solved by interfacing computer systems.
The project was hampered by problems of patient confidentiallity, and who was reasonably allowed to access patient records at any given time. Data needed to be tied to locations that the patient was frequenting e.g. my GP is allowed to see my records, the doctor in the A&E I've just been admitted to is allowed to see my records but a doctor at the other end of the country doing a bit of record-surfing is not allowed to see my records. except when he is?!?!
The hospitals themselves pretty much (quite rightly) tried to keep the national system at arms length because it was not clearly understood or believed to be core to their day-to-day activities.
All-in-all the government of the day would have done much better to define a minimum data set and standards for interoperation rather than interferring and trying to control everything centrally. Given a decent interface and data set spec the miriad of small (cheap) software vendors already supplying the NHS would have all been motivated to implement it so they could interoperate with each others systems in a more uniform (read cost effective) manner. Communicating between hospital departments and between the hospital and the patients GP then would have been a much more simple affair and this would have solved most of the communication delay problems that happen in the real world on a day-to-day basis.
...unknown untity...
is this some sort of mysterious zombie boob?
well said sir, if I had mod points you would be getting some
The only "law of war" that we need is one that states that war is not allowed, period. If you're an aggressor, you are breaking the "law of war". Seriously, we've come too far as a civilized society to still condone such a barbaric practice as war. If you do anything more than to defend yourself, then you become an aggressor.
Fantastic idea, but you speak about "an aggressor" as if he/she was easy to identify, nations go to war, not individuals. It's really hard to sort out the good guys from the bad in this situation. Their is no single aggressor in any war, their is only a tangled web of politics and agendas of the nations involved and a load of soldiers from both sides either paid to fight or deluded/damaged/desperate enough to resort to wholesale violence as a way to solve problems. Also the only way to make your "law" meaningful would be to enforce it and to do so would require you to have a standing army that you could bring to war should the need arise. The downside here of course is that as soon as you have an army, you give anyone who disagrees with you a reason to fear you and recruit a bunch of dimwits to wage war on you.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're an aggressor you forfeit all "rights" to your own safety as you are attempting to deprive others of similar rights, thus making pretty much everything against you fair game.
I think this attitude makes you an aggressor (to use your own phrase). You are advocating wholesale genocide of an enemy nation because their leaders are warmongering retards? You have masterfully over-simplified and compartmentalized the complexity of why nations go to war into the classical good vs bad scenario except, you have defined your own rules about why the bad guy is bad. I would offer... this is EXACTLY how people find themselves at war in the first place; people over-simplify and compartmentalize their understanding of the world and these people are easily manipulated into going to war because they'd rather jump to their familiar conclusions than try to cope with the real complexities of life.
Don't get me wrong I agree with your sentiment, war is bad and should be stopped, but I don't believe that their are ANY simple answers like the one you suggest. Indeed I think the only thing your "final solution" to war would achieve is more war and hatred. We are not going to end all war quickly or easily by declaring a free for all on any aggressor nation. We will only manage to see the end of war one small painful step at a time.
I think you'll find that this is why he and Mandela were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize for the efforts to end apartheid, but poor guy is all but forgotten, hell I've even heard some folks demonizing him as the head of the oppressive white regime. Even though he headed up a movement within his party (that got him elected as party leader) to bring an end to institutional racism and legalize the ANC
Sanctions did not hurt the ruling class in South Africa. They were a futile gesture at best. Having grown up in SA during the period when the sanctions were in full swing, I speak from first hand experience. The only people (if any) that sanctions hurt were the poor!
I think imposing sanctions was a voter-freindly alternative to actually __doing__ something for western politicians
Nelson was no angel, but he was no demon either, I think he did a good job when he came to power. But I would temper that by saying his methods (and those of the organisations he was part of) were openly "terrorist" earlier in his life and also later after he was arrested. I think it is fair to say that Nelson realised in prison that his actions as a youth did not and would not get the changes he wanted for his country. Diplomacy and level-headed statemanship were his most powerful weapons, these were the things that finally managed to start South Africa heading down the right path.