You said it: the reason people flew ok in the 40s and 50s but can't now without computers is scale. There's just so much higher volume of air traffic, critical systems depend on computers to track too many things. Random 737s flying around a crowded air space unannounced could be a little dangerous, to say the least.
If you reduced the number of flights to 40s levels probably you could do without computers. I guess this means your regional hub reducing to flying maybe one plane an hour with 20 passenger seats on each?
In the UK you'll need a shotgun licence to own a shotgun. Not so easy to get. You'll have to persuade the police (they do a home visit for each application) that you have a good reason for needing one, and "being prepared for the zombie invasion" probably won't be the winning answer....
College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car
In the US, maybe. This is the model of society you have chosen as a people, that education should cost a lot of money and exclude those who aren't rich or aren't given credit to go into debt.
In some other countries, education is seen as something society should subsidise and doesn't cost as much, and is accessible to all and not just the rich. It depends on your preferred model of society.
First off, fair call by you to post a correction to your original post.
But perhaps a further correction: you note the private/ independent school you went to had fees of $15K. However, I would think it's very unlikely that the school income was solely based on students fees, so the likelihood is that your education may have cost more than $15K. Other factors include: private schools in the UK registered as charities so receiving tax breaks, VAT breaks, donations from alumni, sponsorship from other commercial partners, value of investments (your $15K would likely have been invested rather than just divided amongst the teachers;-) ). Though of course maybe they spent less on you and kept the rest as profit:-)
But you're correct about state schools struggling for money though.
But a serious question for anybody who can help - we know that there's no perfect energy retaining system, there will always be losss through friction etc, what sort of loss might you expect with these fly wheels? Do they return 50%, 80%, other amount back to the grid?
"Obama is coming today to Poland, maybe it has something to do with it..." I am not sure the US government leads the world in its action on opening up its data for the public to see so I am not sure the Polish authorities will be doing this to impress the US - I don't the the US government will necessarily see this as an important step forward by Poland and won't aid trade discussions etc.
Probably this has more to do with impressing the local population, getting re-elected, etc.
Only applies in England and Wales. Scottish newspapers and other media are controlled by Scottish law, different from English law. Not sure about Northern Ireland, don't think it applies there either. Ah Giggsy, looks like your away game needs working on...
I love how you Americans choose these cheesy, forced acronyms to name bills and laws that make it sound as if you are being a traitor or evil if you don't agree with them. You deserve better than this, you really do.
Now 'badly' is a subjective term, and that's where the debate has to occur - why there's this slashdot thread after all.
But if you stand outside my kid's bedroom at 3 in the morning swigging whisky and waving a gun around while shouting obscene comments, then indeed I think coercion is appropriate to remove you from my lawn.
This of course is an extreme example; but if we both agree that this is a situation where the majority of people would feel that person is behaving inappropriately and it's appropriate to remove them from my lawn whether they want to go or not, using coercion, rather than engaging in a measured debate, then we are then into a discussion of where you apply the sliding scales of coercion.
"The whole concept of "disorderly conduct" if about social control and nothing else"
Yup, and what's wrong with some level of social control? If you are going to have a society (a group of people larger than the family unit) , you need mechanisms for agreeing and compromising and deciding on what is appropriate social behaviour. Otherwise there is no way of managing behaviours that are offensive to the majority. There will always be some people who fall outside of the agreements for what is socially acceptable and if a society is to function it needs ways of managing these people and their behaviours. In some societies these social norms are managed by random acts of violence, while in the most part, laws that are agreed by the majority are used to moderate these behaviours. Usually there is a sliding scale from minor tellings-off through to incarceration.
If you don't like your society's opinion over what is appropriate or inappropriate behaviour then you either have to work to change the majority's opinions on the specific issues (assuming you live in a republic or a democracy), be it talking about people in public, not wearing clothes, carrying guns or whatever, or you need to move to another society where your behaviour fits in with the majority view. As you note, it has always been so.
I think the only time in your life you're allowed to do what you want is probably when you're under 3 years old and at home with your parents, and even then there is social control over behaviour, most parents consider it inappropriate at that age when you push food down the front of your shirt rather than in your mouth....
Sounds like this Texas law is about Texans not liking their private areas being touched rather than thinking about the implications for security?
I would have thought laws concerned about security would focus more on what people are carrying? (e.g. limits on volume of liquids, etc).
And if the law is about only letting security touch people where they feel comfortable, aren't you heading into hopeless territory where somebody could tell you that touching their belly, or under their arms (or any other place they might actually hide stuff) is offensive to them? Sounds like a legal nightmare to me judging what is 'inappropriate'. Some cultures might say any contact with a female traveller or an under-18 traveller is inappropriate.
Though if this gets passed in a few US states, will that mean that some states are more attractive than others for people to fly into and out of? I assume this includes international as well as internal flights?
Wasn't it Aristotle or one of the other great Greek thinkers who complained that writing things down was eroding society and people's capacity to be fully fledged thinking beings?
Haven't humans always blamed new technologies and new ways from eroding our abilities, don't people always look back to a mythical Golden Age? (which invariably seems to be set at two generations ago...)
Spoken like a true monarchist. People should know their place and all that. Poor people should clean floors and not aspire to university education.....
Perhaps in the USA your chances are life are judged on the wealth of your parents, but here in Europe we go for a more meritocratic model and the state subsidises education for everybody so poor as well as rich people can go to school and university. It doesn't always work, and there's pressure to move to an American model, but it does even up inequality a little.
As other posters have noted, you have to keep investing in the infrastructure. If you don't it falls apart through use and lack of maintenance. Same for roads, houses, bridges. Railways are no different. That's why we're working on our railways all the time in Europe, keeping them up to date and replacing older worn out parts. Any house owner will tell you there's always a little job to be done on maintaining their house as well, got to check all is good after each winter, etc.
It's always surprised me how little attention the USA pays to its rail infrastructure, but then I think it's a country that operates under different philosophical frameworks from Europe (e.g. more extreme pressure by car makers to run down the rail network, perception that rail is not good for moving people, etc). Only in New York have I seen the attitude that rail travel is useful to have (the metro - I am not sure NYC would vote on closing it down).
Luckily for us here in Europe rail travel is seen as more desirable so gets better funding (sometimes...). My favourite way to travel. Given the choice between sitting behind the wheel of a car and concentrating on grey tarmac for 6 hours or stretching out in a chair, reading, playing on laptop, snoozing, taking a stroll up and down the cabin, having lunch while the world goes by, I prefer the latter (my bias;-) )
"People don't pursue a PhD because they want to "provide water to a growing population." They can go to Mexico and dig wells to accomplish that (as some college friends of mine did)."
I'd suggest people in Mexico are capable of digging wells, not sure somebody needs to fly from another country and spend thousands to do something that would likely be better done by a local worker, and probably better for the local economy if the money went straight to said local worker. I am sure your friends did it with the best of intentions though and they put some money into the local economy, maybe other ways to support developing communities?
However, I am sure the people who need the water and are capable of locally providing labour to dig holes in the ground might welcome additional support from outside their community for more complex tasks like modelling water consumption across urban populations, designing economic models that strengthen the Mexican economy so water pipes can be put in and wells don't need to be dug, and so on. I am sure they'd welcome somebody carrying out research in that area and would be amenable to the argument that their community might not have that expert but this is where some researcher from another country might help them.
Took my PhD in community uses of technology to try and find ways that people can better help themselves with technology provision and community empowerment, working with people in low income and rural communities. Not too bothered about where I end up working (used to work in public libraries).
The clue is in the title: "Scientific American"... it is a journal that believes the scientific method is the best method to use when trying to interpret information.
I guess if you prefer another methodology for resolving diverging points of view, interpreting data or explaining unknown phenomena you need to choose another journal? Something with a title like "Politics weekly" "Sociological review" "Religious opinions" or so forth?
Whether or not the scientific method is the best method to resolve all debates is another issue... but I think it's a fair guess that "Scientific American" probably thinks it's the methodology it will use to approach problems. Probably an American bias there as well I should imagine;-)
...except when nobody understands the analogy! Speaking as a Brit, only by posting my comment have I discovered through feedback that a strike in baseball is when the batsman (or whatever he is called in that game) misses the ball. Weird, new knowledge to me anyway. I'd assumed a strike had something to do with the striking (hitting) of the ball. My ignorance.
So I think you got to pick an analogy that the local public get. Not sure how big a game baseball is in NZ, hence my cheeky suggestion they should go for cricket or rugby analogies instead... Certainly in the UK baseball is very much a minority sport, nobody really plays it, nobody learns it at school. If you go for baseball analogies here people will look at you blankly. The only reason people buy baseball bats here is because they want to hit somebody, if you were walking down the street with one the chances are the police might pull over and have a friendly chat with you to check you're not up to no good (while they wouldn't look twice if you were walking down the street with a cricket bat under your arm).
This "three strikes and you're out" infantile framing of legislation drives me crazy. Since when have the laws of baseball (or any game) been considered a sensible foundation for a nation's legislation?
Seems to me too simplistic to base a country's law on sound bites like "three strikes and you're out".
Anyhow, if we're going for games-based legal systems, surely New Zealand should go for laws based on cricket (or rugby)? How about a financial services industry law based on LBW (leg before wicket)?
Back to the article - the author says students need to learn generalisable skills. I think we're in agreement here - university students should learn some specific skills, but also transferable skills. My first degree was in library studies: I was a librarian for a few years then changed career. But I'd learnt how to be a dogged and thorough researcher, so I could move to another field as I could hunt down knowledge in any domain and make use of it, and also I'd learnt about communicating with people and doing presentations (and dealing with nutty teenagers) so I ended up doing educational research in schools.
Not shocking that you make close to 6 figures without a degree, I noted "predominately" not "all" - but a report in the UK came out today to say UK Grad earnings are higher than non-grads, and generally non-grads will be earning a median of 17K (GBP) compared to 29K (GBP) by grads. A degree, it suggests, leads to higher earnings generally. Of course some people will be earning more or less than that. But I'd maybe question whether all non-grads in your country are earning "close to six figures".
I'd say, reading the F* article, the even more general skills will be useful: public presentation, speaking, teaching, communicating ideas. As the writer says, you have to communicate your great ideas if you want a job / funding / etc. Start with those generalist skills and work outwards. Though I accept it's not in the interest of the PhD system to necessarily spend time teaching students these skills, getting research results, getting the thesis written, and getting published are the key indicators of success. But learning a few networking skills might help the students get jobs afterwards...
Slashdot Mirror
You said it: the reason people flew ok in the 40s and 50s but can't now without computers is scale. There's just so much higher volume of air traffic, critical systems depend on computers to track too many things. Random 737s flying around a crowded air space unannounced could be a little dangerous, to say the least.
If you reduced the number of flights to 40s levels probably you could do without computers. I guess this means your regional hub reducing to flying maybe one plane an hour with 20 passenger seats on each?
In the UK you'll need a shotgun licence to own a shotgun. Not so easy to get. You'll have to persuade the police (they do a home visit for each application) that you have a good reason for needing one, and "being prepared for the zombie invasion" probably won't be the winning answer....
College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car
In the US, maybe. This is the model of society you have chosen as a people, that education should cost a lot of money and exclude those who aren't rich or aren't given credit to go into debt.
In some other countries, education is seen as something society should subsidise and doesn't cost as much, and is accessible to all and not just the rich. It depends on your preferred model of society.
First off, fair call by you to post a correction to your original post.
But perhaps a further correction: you note the private/ independent school you went to had fees of $15K. However, I would think it's very unlikely that the school income was solely based on students fees, so the likelihood is that your education may have cost more than $15K. Other factors include: private schools in the UK registered as charities so receiving tax breaks, VAT breaks, donations from alumni, sponsorship from other commercial partners, value of investments (your $15K would likely have been invested rather than just divided amongst the teachers ;-) ). Though of course maybe they spent less on you and kept the rest as profit :-)
But you're correct about state schools struggling for money though.
haha, +1 for funny posting :-)
But a serious question for anybody who can help - we know that there's no perfect energy retaining system, there will always be losss through friction etc, what sort of loss might you expect with these fly wheels? Do they return 50%, 80%, other amount back to the grid?
"Obama is coming today to Poland, maybe it has something to do with it..."
I am not sure the US government leads the world in its action on opening up its data for the public to see so I am not sure the Polish authorities will be doing this to impress the US - I don't the the US government will necessarily see this as an important step forward by Poland and won't aid trade discussions etc.
Probably this has more to do with impressing the local population, getting re-elected, etc.
He'll probably not thank you for calling him English either.... ;-)
Only applies in England and Wales. Scottish newspapers and other media are controlled by Scottish law, different from English law. Not sure about Northern Ireland, don't think it applies there either. Ah Giggsy, looks like your away game needs working on...
Does this mean you are unpatriotic, citizen?
I love how you Americans choose these cheesy, forced acronyms to name bills and laws that make it sound as if you are being a traitor or evil if you don't agree with them. You deserve better than this, you really do.
You'll find vulnerable and ignorant people everywhere. Wasn't it the Americans who came up with the expression "snake oil salesman"?
Now 'badly' is a subjective term, and that's where the debate has to occur - why there's this slashdot thread after all.
But if you stand outside my kid's bedroom at 3 in the morning swigging whisky and waving a gun around while shouting obscene comments, then indeed I think coercion is appropriate to remove you from my lawn.
This of course is an extreme example; but if we both agree that this is a situation where the majority of people would feel that person is behaving inappropriately and it's appropriate to remove them from my lawn whether they want to go or not, using coercion, rather than engaging in a measured debate, then we are then into a discussion of where you apply the sliding scales of coercion.
"The whole concept of "disorderly conduct" if about social control and nothing else"
Yup, and what's wrong with some level of social control? If you are going to have a society (a group of people larger than the family unit) , you need mechanisms for agreeing and compromising and deciding on what is appropriate social behaviour. Otherwise there is no way of managing behaviours that are offensive to the majority. There will always be some people who fall outside of the agreements for what is socially acceptable and if a society is to function it needs ways of managing these people and their behaviours. In some societies these social norms are managed by random acts of violence, while in the most part, laws that are agreed by the majority are used to moderate these behaviours. Usually there is a sliding scale from minor tellings-off through to incarceration.
If you don't like your society's opinion over what is appropriate or inappropriate behaviour then you either have to work to change the majority's opinions on the specific issues (assuming you live in a republic or a democracy), be it talking about people in public, not wearing clothes, carrying guns or whatever, or you need to move to another society where your behaviour fits in with the majority view. As you note, it has always been so.
I think the only time in your life you're allowed to do what you want is probably when you're under 3 years old and at home with your parents, and even then there is social control over behaviour, most parents consider it inappropriate at that age when you push food down the front of your shirt rather than in your mouth....
He spelt "colonised" with a z, he's an American, AC is talking about the UK and they've never been to the UK, doesn't know anything about it.
Next troll please, try a little harder.
Sounds like this Texas law is about Texans not liking their private areas being touched rather than thinking about the implications for security?
I would have thought laws concerned about security would focus more on what people are carrying? (e.g. limits on volume of liquids, etc).
And if the law is about only letting security touch people where they feel comfortable, aren't you heading into hopeless territory where somebody could tell you that touching their belly, or under their arms (or any other place they might actually hide stuff) is offensive to them? Sounds like a legal nightmare to me judging what is 'inappropriate'. Some cultures might say any contact with a female traveller or an under-18 traveller is inappropriate.
Though if this gets passed in a few US states, will that mean that some states are more attractive than others for people to fly into and out of? I assume this includes international as well as internal flights?
Ekranoplanes don't need perfectly flat surfaces- they were tested and ran mostly on water. Water is not perfectly flat yet the ekranoplanes ran....
Wasn't it Aristotle or one of the other great Greek thinkers who complained that writing things down was eroding society and people's capacity to be fully fledged thinking beings?
Haven't humans always blamed new technologies and new ways from eroding our abilities, don't people always look back to a mythical Golden Age? (which invariably seems to be set at two generations ago...)
Spoken like a true monarchist. People should know their place and all that. Poor people should clean floors and not aspire to university education.....
Perhaps in the USA your chances are life are judged on the wealth of your parents, but here in Europe we go for a more meritocratic model and the state subsidises education for everybody so poor as well as rich people can go to school and university. It doesn't always work, and there's pressure to move to an American model, but it does even up inequality a little.
As other posters have noted, you have to keep investing in the infrastructure. If you don't it falls apart through use and lack of maintenance. Same for roads, houses, bridges. Railways are no different. That's why we're working on our railways all the time in Europe, keeping them up to date and replacing older worn out parts. Any house owner will tell you there's always a little job to be done on maintaining their house as well, got to check all is good after each winter, etc.
It's always surprised me how little attention the USA pays to its rail infrastructure, but then I think it's a country that operates under different philosophical frameworks from Europe (e.g. more extreme pressure by car makers to run down the rail network, perception that rail is not good for moving people, etc). Only in New York have I seen the attitude that rail travel is useful to have (the metro - I am not sure NYC would vote on closing it down).
Luckily for us here in Europe rail travel is seen as more desirable so gets better funding (sometimes...). My favourite way to travel. Given the choice between sitting behind the wheel of a car and concentrating on grey tarmac for 6 hours or stretching out in a chair, reading, playing on laptop, snoozing, taking a stroll up and down the cabin, having lunch while the world goes by, I prefer the latter (my bias ;-) )
"People don't pursue a PhD because they want to "provide water to a growing population." They can go to Mexico and dig wells to accomplish that (as some college friends of mine did)."
I'd suggest people in Mexico are capable of digging wells, not sure somebody needs to fly from another country and spend thousands to do something that would likely be better done by a local worker, and probably better for the local economy if the money went straight to said local worker. I am sure your friends did it with the best of intentions though and they put some money into the local economy, maybe other ways to support developing communities?
However, I am sure the people who need the water and are capable of locally providing labour to dig holes in the ground might welcome additional support from outside their community for more complex tasks like modelling water consumption across urban populations, designing economic models that strengthen the Mexican economy so water pipes can be put in and wells don't need to be dug, and so on. I am sure they'd welcome somebody carrying out research in that area and would be amenable to the argument that their community might not have that expert but this is where some researcher from another country might help them.
Took my PhD in community uses of technology to try and find ways that people can better help themselves with technology provision and community empowerment, working with people in low income and rural communities. Not too bothered about where I end up working (used to work in public libraries).
What was your motivation for taking a PhD?
The clue is in the title: "Scientific American"... it is a journal that believes the scientific method is the best method to use when trying to interpret information.
I guess if you prefer another methodology for resolving diverging points of view, interpreting data or explaining unknown phenomena you need to choose another journal? Something with a title like "Politics weekly" "Sociological review" "Religious opinions" or so forth?
Whether or not the scientific method is the best method to resolve all debates is another issue... but I think it's a fair guess that "Scientific American" probably thinks it's the methodology it will use to approach problems. Probably an American bias there as well I should imagine ;-)
You guys still really believe in all these election slogans a bunch of your politicians came up with a couple of hundred years ago?
...except when nobody understands the analogy! Speaking as a Brit, only by posting my comment have I discovered through feedback that a strike in baseball is when the batsman (or whatever he is called in that game) misses the ball. Weird, new knowledge to me anyway. I'd assumed a strike had something to do with the striking (hitting) of the ball. My ignorance.
So I think you got to pick an analogy that the local public get. Not sure how big a game baseball is in NZ, hence my cheeky suggestion they should go for cricket or rugby analogies instead... Certainly in the UK baseball is very much a minority sport, nobody really plays it, nobody learns it at school. If you go for baseball analogies here people will look at you blankly. The only reason people buy baseball bats here is because they want to hit somebody, if you were walking down the street with one the chances are the police might pull over and have a friendly chat with you to check you're not up to no good (while they wouldn't look twice if you were walking down the street with a cricket bat under your arm).
This "three strikes and you're out" infantile framing of legislation drives me crazy. Since when have the laws of baseball (or any game) been considered a sensible foundation for a nation's legislation?
Seems to me too simplistic to base a country's law on sound bites like "three strikes and you're out".
Anyhow, if we're going for games-based legal systems, surely New Zealand should go for laws based on cricket (or rugby)? How about a financial services industry law based on LBW (leg before wicket)?
Back to the article - the author says students need to learn generalisable skills. I think we're in agreement here - university students should learn some specific skills, but also transferable skills. My first degree was in library studies: I was a librarian for a few years then changed career. But I'd learnt how to be a dogged and thorough researcher, so I could move to another field as I could hunt down knowledge in any domain and make use of it, and also I'd learnt about communicating with people and doing presentations (and dealing with nutty teenagers) so I ended up doing educational research in schools.
Not shocking that you make close to 6 figures without a degree, I noted "predominately" not "all" - but a report in the UK came out today to say UK Grad earnings are higher than non-grads, and generally non-grads will be earning a median of 17K (GBP) compared to 29K (GBP) by grads. A degree, it suggests, leads to higher earnings generally. Of course some people will be earning more or less than that. But I'd maybe question whether all non-grads in your country are earning "close to six figures".
I'd say, reading the F* article, the even more general skills will be useful: public presentation, speaking, teaching, communicating ideas. As the writer says, you have to communicate your great ideas if you want a job / funding / etc. Start with those generalist skills and work outwards. Though I accept it's not in the interest of the PhD system to necessarily spend time teaching students these skills, getting research results, getting the thesis written, and getting published are the key indicators of success. But learning a few networking skills might help the students get jobs afterwards...