My understanding is that Islam is interpreted in different ways in different places, just like every other world religion. So this is not too surprising. Plus the religious leaders may have different degrees of influence in different countries.
Similar to the view from muslim - dominant countries looking at how different Christian countries consider abortion, contraception, etc I suppose. Different responses in different Christian dominant countries.
"...a new paradigm that they are calling 'curated computing,' where third parties make a lot of choices to simplify things for the end user, reducing user choice but improving reliability and efficiency for a defined set of tasks."
How about "censorship" instead?
Ok, I know I am playing devil's advocate but if the slashdot headline was "China develops computing model where users have reduced choice but increased reliability, with the choices made by the State Education Department", I know the word censorship would be bandied around pretty quickly.
Depends on who you want to make the decisions for you and of course a big question is how much opportunity you have to affect those decisions if you'd like to get involved in the process.
Parents like you are why highly experienced well trained teachers leave the profession and public schools struggle to find decent replacements.
Parents threatening financial and personal ruin on teachers do not encourage 21 year olds to take up this profession, and drive existing teachers out of schools fearing for their own safety. Let's face it, you don't go into teaching to make millions and retire early. You do it because you believe its a great thing to do, you do it for the love of it. Parents threatening violence and abuse will turn such people away from this career and then what are you, the parent, left with?
Now a parent who comes in to have a sensible debate with the principal, and argue that the punishment being set out is too high in a measured voice, open to listening to the principal's point of view and constructively discussing how the school could improve its policies, well those are the kind of parents teachers love to meet. These are the parents schools are desperate to encourage on to their boards of governors. Doesn't sound like you're one of them though.
What do you mean by hair trigger? that it triggers every time somebody breaks the speed limit, or triggers when somebody just breaks the speed limit? If it's the speed limit and you're over it, isn't that still breaking the speed limit?
Exactly, the speed camera is just a machine, there are no fairies inside it (unless you live somewhere that Terry Pratchett invented). It will just trigger if somebody goes faster than the speed set by the service engineers on order from the local or national government.
So I don't understand why people are unhappy with cameras sometimes. As you rightly say, the issue is about the decision on what the speed limit law should be, not whether or not it should be enforced. I think quite a few people against speed cameras confuse these two issues. They actually have an issue with the speed limit that has been set rather than the concept of enforcing law.
Actually I bought 39 when they came out and I've just put in an order for 6 this month, you must be a mind reader!:-)
I work in a university and we do research with local schools on how schoolkids use technology, so we bought a whole class set at the beginning of the project in 2007 - Asus EEE 701s, they work great, totally do what we want them to and the students love them. Now we've got a little more money to do a small scale investigation so we're buying a set to test current generation netbooks. http://www.pi-project.ac.uk/
Or maybe the vast majority of people who wanted a netbook now have one and that's why sales have slowed down. Were people expecting month on month rise in sales of 641% for ever? sounds like a new market plateauing to me.
Early adopters might change their laptop eevery six months but most people will hang on to the same one for 2, 3 or more years. They've bought them and now the market has shrunk to a more mature marketplace shape?
Can anybody tell me about the chemical dispersants? what happens to the 'dispersed' oil plus these chemicals? This is a naive question, please educate me but surely this means you now have oil+chemical in your water rather than just oil in your water - is the dilution level so low that it doesn't affect the sealife that is later caught to eat, does it combine with the oil to something that it relatively innocuous that breaks down in sunlight, or something that sinks to the sea bed etc?
Information welcomed, just curious about what happens to that oil if its not skimmed off the surface or burnt off, but chemically treated and left in the ocean and left there. Maybe it's just so dilute it doesn't matter, I don't know. Any knowledge on this, folks?
Dehumanising the opposition invites your own people to carry out acts of abuse or even war crimes. We've got plenty of historical records from the last 100 years to know when fighters consider the people they oppose to be less than human very bad things happen which are later much regretted.
Probably also when you're younger you undercharge, life is about making sure you've got enough to get through the day or the month at the most. As time goes on you realise you might have to put some money aside for when you're retired, to cover medical emergencies, save a bit for times of unemployment etc. Then you realise minimum wage might get you by in the short term but you need to put some more on top of your rates to cover the long term costs.
I suppose the cleverness would be in working out what that threshold is. Probably higher the older you get.
When I was younger as long as I had enough money to buy food, pay rent, and give me a few quid for beer, a night out and occasional clothes/toys I was happy. No work just meant sleeping at a friend's house and living off rice and beans until more work came in. I could take on a minimum wage job if I needed a bit of cash. Putting aside money for pensions, saving for a mortgage or feeding and clothing kids just didn't come into it. As you get older these things appear on the horizon so the earning threshold goes up....
Greed definitely comes into it and working out what we "need" but we are constrained by the economic environment we live in. Definitely once this is satisfied though intrinsic motivation is likely to provide the best results. If people don't have a pride in what they are doing they are going to mess up whatever the salary.
I visited the US and drove around as a tourist once, got stopped by the police and did what folk in the UK do - I got out of the car to wait by the side of it to show the police that I wasn't going to do a runner. I didn't know that you sit inside the car until the police come to you in the USA, nobody told me this when I got my tourist visa stamped at immigration or when I picked up the hire car.
Things escalated very fast and I found myself surrounding by two or three police cars with people shouting stuff and pointing guns at me. Very scary when you're not quite sure why this is all happening. Fair play to the police officers, after a couple of minutes of me putting my hands in the air and shouting "Sorry, I am a tourist, I don't know what I've done" things calmed down to the point that we could have a chat and sort things out pleasantly (we all shook hands at the end of it and the cops pointed out where a local hotel was, my mission of the moment).
Not sure what the answer is, should foreign nationals have to read the local written driving test / read the handbooks before being allowed to drive a car in another country?
I was pointing out that there are organisations and nations which are not primarily bureaucracies, though on reflections you might argue that all established organisations are bureaucracies so your succinctness was correct.
"The whole issue was that it was untested. That was it. As with any bureaucracy, rules must be obeyed even if in the end the result is the same."
Indeed, though I'd go further than saying it is true of bureaucracies to any organisation or nation. Would the USA trust a device made in China (for example) if the Chinese government said they'd tested it? Probably not. Would a US company (say Ford, or Cisco, or Apple) trust a foreign made device because the Chinese/Italian/Kazakh/whatever makers said they'd tested it? Probably not.
I suppose it's down to a> how much you trust the people who tell you they've tested it and b> how much trouble you'll be in if it goes wrong and you've just taken somebody else's word that it's safe/within correct bounds when it actually proves to not be so.
I should imagine in the USA with the whole run-by-lawyers culture, sue-you-for-anything there's a lot of pressure to do your own testing to make sure devices do actually behave how they are meant to. Not sure what the drive is in Israel but I guess it's perfectly believable similar pressures happen there.
Sorry CmdrTaco, but you need to read up a little on GPS. GPS relies on satellites, you don't need cellphone connectivity to pick it up - for example TomTom and other car satnavs and hikers' Garmin eTrex GPS receivers. GPS would be pretty useless in the world if it only worked within range of 3G enabled cellphone networks.
What you're thinking of is probably the aGPS that's enabled on the iPhone, this uses other networks to help increase accuracy and triangulate position. Wikipedia article here.
Indeed Richard Branson is looking a bit canny right now, he might pick up a few pilots that need little to no training having already been trained by the tax payer. Typical private sector story, get the public sector/tax payers to provide your staff training and then pick up tip-top crew when the public sector has to offload in time of recession. Over here in the UK they say the biggest influence against the public sector being reduced is the parallel private sector, e.g. private hospitals rely on the public sector to pre-train their doctors and nurses, private security rely on the army and police to train their people on the ground. These private companies will privately scream at the government if huge cuts are proposed because they just don't invest in training themselves to the same degree as the public sector, they rely on the government/tax payers to train and employ their staff until they are good enough to head hunt.
So I think Virgin might indeed have timed this one very well - they have a sub-space ship ready to fly and will be looking to hire crew in the next twelve months. Not sure about the other companies though, your Blue Origin people for example. I can imagine if I was a NASA expert checking out prospective companies and I saw that one of the key pictures on the B.O. home page was of their bicycle rack, I might be a bit worried about what technology they have....
I am not American so please educate me. You're saying an individual would be able to sue Exxon and win? Won't Exxon (etc) just throw a million dollars on the table and say "we can afford this for lawyers, how about you?" and win by default? A million (or ten million) to them is just small change and they won't even blink.
I understand that several noble people have stood up to major corporations and won but this seems to usually be at the cost of giving up their job, using all their life time savings, ruining their social and personal lives, spending half a dozen years living on the breadline and learning to be a lawyer in the local public library ten hours a day. Technically it is possible but the odds are loaded in favour of the corporation. They have more power than people. For the vast majority of us this just isn't feasible, we have to go to work 9-5 and raise kids etc. We can't afford to sacrifice our lives and just have to put up with the proverbial bulldozer company pouring waste fluids into our yards when it happens..
You guys are so lucky. Actually I think you have a generally cool country and I think I'd happily try living in Finland if I wasn't so rubbish at languages! - thoroughly enjoyed my visits to Helsinki.
So this junk mail problem. Until recently the post workers had to deliver "unaddressed mail" to houses - junk mail/spam which is addressed "Dear Householder/ To The Owner" etc. Usually this is from insurance companies, double glazing companies etc, people selling us stuff. They don't even know who lives in the house.
Currently, the cap on the number of these items is three per house per day. But with the ratification of the new agreement between the Communications Workers Union (CWU) and the Royal Mail, that cap will be lifted. The postal workers represented by their unions weren't happy about this, they don't like carry the extra weight on their backs every day and know that they aren't popular with house owners for delivering junk mail. If they didn't have to carry so much junk mail they could carry more real mail and get round more houses in the same time.
So already you can get 18 junk mails a week (no Sunday deliveries) but now we might get as many as the junk companies want to post us.
We do have a junk mail opt-out system you can sign up for "Mail Preference Service" but this only stops you from receiving *addressed* mail, stuff with your name on it (so if you joined a competition for a prize and gave them your name and address and they send you junk afterwards). It doesn't stop the *unaddressed* mail.
I think Finland sounds a more civilised country than the UK in this respect.
The problem is our country is short of money so the national services like the post are looking to find ways of making money and being paid to deliver junk mail is something they will do...
You're a lucky man, Here in the UK it's part of the national post service's business model to accept money from spammers to deliver junk mail. So we get loads of junk mail whether we like it or not. The postal workers recently went on strike because they didn't want to deliver junk mail to people but they got told by the employers they have to, and so have had to back down and accept they must deliver it if they want to keep their jobs.
Fair comment. My dad served as a Royal Marines Commando. His stories of his times in the commandos put me off ever wanting to sign up to serve in the military. Sounded like 90% sheer drudgery and following insane and stupid orders, 5% fun and 5% sheer terror. He was taught Kipling by a sergeant major who made his soldiers remember the poems as something to do while they stood practicing parade duties on some windy blighted old airfield at 4 hours at a time, praying they weren't going to faint from standing still that long.
I have every respect for the military and particularly my dad but I have no desire to sign up after the stories my dad has told me. I am aware that I have the luxury of that choice because of the sacrifice of others and my decision has been to take advantage of that choice and try to offer something back to society in a different way (I work in education).
You say my reasoning is stupid. You say that you would prefer a smaller number of collisions, but you would be happy that they are all fatal. I would suggest we'd both prefer no collisions, but if there are to be collisions then it would be better if they were non fatal. This is the theory behind reducing speed limits in urban areas. I am in the UK and there is much debate about reducing the speed limit in residential streets from 30mph to 20mph as this significantly reduces fatal accidents. This is being supported by evidence collected in pilot trials in the UK and from wider adoption in the Netherlands.
One of my arguments is that statistics count for nothing when you are the 1 in a 1000 who gets hit, I'd prefer a broken arm than death! But on a global scale, see above, we have evidence that lower speed equals roads that are safer to pedestrians. I can't speak for your country but in the UK the vast majority of urban roads involve close interactions between pedestrians, cycle riders, and powered vehicles. People cross roads frequently, pavements are alongside the roads, cyclists need to change lanes and move out into the middle of traffic often.
Slashdot Mirror
Half a dialogue = monologue, surely?
My understanding is that Islam is interpreted in different ways in different places, just like every other world religion. So this is not too surprising. Plus the religious leaders may have different degrees of influence in different countries.
Similar to the view from muslim - dominant countries looking at how different Christian countries consider abortion, contraception, etc I suppose. Different responses in different Christian dominant countries.
"...a new paradigm that they are calling 'curated computing,' where third parties make a lot of choices to simplify things for the end user, reducing user choice but improving reliability and efficiency for a defined set of tasks."
How about "censorship" instead?
Ok, I know I am playing devil's advocate but if the slashdot headline was "China develops computing model where users have reduced choice but increased reliability, with the choices made by the State Education Department", I know the word censorship would be bandied around pretty quickly.
Depends on who you want to make the decisions for you and of course a big question is how much opportunity you have to affect those decisions if you'd like to get involved in the process.
Parents like you are why highly experienced well trained teachers leave the profession and public schools struggle to find decent replacements.
Parents threatening financial and personal ruin on teachers do not encourage 21 year olds to take up this profession, and drive existing teachers out of schools fearing for their own safety. Let's face it, you don't go into teaching to make millions and retire early. You do it because you believe its a great thing to do, you do it for the love of it. Parents threatening violence and abuse will turn such people away from this career and then what are you, the parent, left with?
Now a parent who comes in to have a sensible debate with the principal, and argue that the punishment being set out is too high in a measured voice, open to listening to the principal's point of view and constructively discussing how the school could improve its policies, well those are the kind of parents teachers love to meet. These are the parents schools are desperate to encourage on to their boards of governors. Doesn't sound like you're one of them though.
statistics please with references to prove better or worse care.
What do you mean by hair trigger? that it triggers every time somebody breaks the speed limit, or triggers when somebody just breaks the speed limit? If it's the speed limit and you're over it, isn't that still breaking the speed limit?
Exactly, the speed camera is just a machine, there are no fairies inside it (unless you live somewhere that Terry Pratchett invented). It will just trigger if somebody goes faster than the speed set by the service engineers on order from the local or national government.
So I don't understand why people are unhappy with cameras sometimes. As you rightly say, the issue is about the decision on what the speed limit law should be, not whether or not it should be enforced. I think quite a few people against speed cameras confuse these two issues. They actually have an issue with the speed limit that has been set rather than the concept of enforcing law.
Actually I bought 39 when they came out and I've just put in an order for 6 this month, you must be a mind reader! :-)
I work in a university and we do research with local schools on how schoolkids use technology, so we bought a whole class set at the beginning of the project in 2007 - Asus EEE 701s, they work great, totally do what we want them to and the students love them. Now we've got a little more money to do a small scale investigation so we're buying a set to test current generation netbooks.
http://www.pi-project.ac.uk/
But I've still to buy one for myself! :-)
Or maybe the vast majority of people who wanted a netbook now have one and that's why sales have slowed down. Were people expecting month on month rise in sales of 641% for ever? sounds like a new market plateauing to me.
Early adopters might change their laptop eevery six months but most people will hang on to the same one for 2, 3 or more years. They've bought them and now the market has shrunk to a more mature marketplace shape?
Can anybody tell me about the chemical dispersants? what happens to the 'dispersed' oil plus these chemicals? This is a naive question, please educate me but surely this means you now have oil+chemical in your water rather than just oil in your water - is the dilution level so low that it doesn't affect the sealife that is later caught to eat, does it combine with the oil to something that it relatively innocuous that breaks down in sunlight, or something that sinks to the sea bed etc?
Information welcomed, just curious about what happens to that oil if its not skimmed off the surface or burnt off, but chemically treated and left in the ocean and left there. Maybe it's just so dilute it doesn't matter, I don't know. Any knowledge on this, folks?
... you lose a little of your own humanity.
Dehumanising the opposition invites your own people to carry out acts of abuse or even war crimes. We've got plenty of historical records from the last 100 years to know when fighters consider the people they oppose to be less than human very bad things happen which are later much regretted.
Both sides need to bear this in mind.
Probably also when you're younger you undercharge, life is about making sure you've got enough to get through the day or the month at the most. As time goes on you realise you might have to put some money aside for when you're retired, to cover medical emergencies, save a bit for times of unemployment etc. Then you realise minimum wage might get you by in the short term but you need to put some more on top of your rates to cover the long term costs.
I suppose the cleverness would be in working out what that threshold is. Probably higher the older you get.
When I was younger as long as I had enough money to buy food, pay rent, and give me a few quid for beer, a night out and occasional clothes/toys I was happy. No work just meant sleeping at a friend's house and living off rice and beans until more work came in. I could take on a minimum wage job if I needed a bit of cash. Putting aside money for pensions, saving for a mortgage or feeding and clothing kids just didn't come into it. As you get older these things appear on the horizon so the earning threshold goes up....
Greed definitely comes into it and working out what we "need" but we are constrained by the economic environment we live in. Definitely once this is satisfied though intrinsic motivation is likely to provide the best results. If people don't have a pride in what they are doing they are going to mess up whatever the salary.
I visited the US and drove around as a tourist once, got stopped by the police and did what folk in the UK do - I got out of the car to wait by the side of it to show the police that I wasn't going to do a runner. I didn't know that you sit inside the car until the police come to you in the USA, nobody told me this when I got my tourist visa stamped at immigration or when I picked up the hire car.
Things escalated very fast and I found myself surrounding by two or three police cars with people shouting stuff and pointing guns at me. Very scary when you're not quite sure why this is all happening. Fair play to the police officers, after a couple of minutes of me putting my hands in the air and shouting "Sorry, I am a tourist, I don't know what I've done" things calmed down to the point that we could have a chat and sort things out pleasantly (we all shook hands at the end of it and the cops pointed out where a local hotel was, my mission of the moment).
Not sure what the answer is, should foreign nationals have to read the local written driving test / read the handbooks before being allowed to drive a car in another country?
"Which part of my "ANY" was not clear?"
I was pointing out that there are organisations and nations which are not primarily bureaucracies, though on reflections you might argue that all established organisations are bureaucracies so your succinctness was correct.
"The whole issue was that it was untested. That was it. As with any bureaucracy, rules must be obeyed even if in the end the result is the same."
Indeed, though I'd go further than saying it is true of bureaucracies to any organisation or nation. Would the USA trust a device made in China (for example) if the Chinese government said they'd tested it? Probably not. Would a US company (say Ford, or Cisco, or Apple) trust a foreign made device because the Chinese/Italian/Kazakh/whatever makers said they'd tested it? Probably not.
I suppose it's down to a> how much you trust the people who tell you they've tested it and b> how much trouble you'll be in if it goes wrong and you've just taken somebody else's word that it's safe/within correct bounds when it actually proves to not be so.
I should imagine in the USA with the whole run-by-lawyers culture, sue-you-for-anything there's a lot of pressure to do your own testing to make sure devices do actually behave how they are meant to. Not sure what the drive is in Israel but I guess it's perfectly believable similar pressures happen there.
"literally impossible"? as opposed to what? "metaphorically impossible"? "orally impossible"?
Can somebody translate this bit into English for me please?
".. A second person familiar with the mattered adds that .."
Maybe I am tired but I don't understand this bit....
"My iPad has no 3G, therefore it has no GPS."
Sorry CmdrTaco, but you need to read up a little on GPS. GPS relies on satellites, you don't need cellphone connectivity to pick it up - for example TomTom and other car satnavs and hikers' Garmin eTrex GPS receivers. GPS would be pretty useless in the world if it only worked within range of 3G enabled cellphone networks.
What you're thinking of is probably the aGPS that's enabled on the iPhone, this uses other networks to help increase accuracy and triangulate position. Wikipedia article here.
Indeed Richard Branson is looking a bit canny right now, he might pick up a few pilots that need little to no training having already been trained by the tax payer. Typical private sector story, get the public sector/tax payers to provide your staff training and then pick up tip-top crew when the public sector has to offload in time of recession. Over here in the UK they say the biggest influence against the public sector being reduced is the parallel private sector, e.g. private hospitals rely on the public sector to pre-train their doctors and nurses, private security rely on the army and police to train their people on the ground. These private companies will privately scream at the government if huge cuts are proposed because they just don't invest in training themselves to the same degree as the public sector, they rely on the government/tax payers to train and employ their staff until they are good enough to head hunt.
So I think Virgin might indeed have timed this one very well - they have a sub-space ship ready to fly and will be looking to hire crew in the next twelve months. Not sure about the other companies though, your Blue Origin people for example. I can imagine if I was a NASA expert checking out prospective companies and I saw that one of the key pictures on the B.O. home page was of their bicycle rack, I might be a bit worried about what technology they have....
I am not American so please educate me. You're saying an individual would be able to sue Exxon and win? Won't Exxon (etc) just throw a million dollars on the table and say "we can afford this for lawyers, how about you?" and win by default? A million (or ten million) to them is just small change and they won't even blink.
I understand that several noble people have stood up to major corporations and won but this seems to usually be at the cost of giving up their job, using all their life time savings, ruining their social and personal lives, spending half a dozen years living on the breadline and learning to be a lawyer in the local public library ten hours a day. Technically it is possible but the odds are loaded in favour of the corporation. They have more power than people. For the vast majority of us this just isn't feasible, we have to go to work 9-5 and raise kids etc. We can't afford to sacrifice our lives and just have to put up with the proverbial bulldozer company pouring waste fluids into our yards when it happens..
You guys are so lucky. Actually I think you have a generally cool country and I think I'd happily try living in Finland if I wasn't so rubbish at languages! - thoroughly enjoyed my visits to Helsinki.
So this junk mail problem. Until recently the post workers had to deliver "unaddressed mail" to houses - junk mail/spam which is addressed "Dear Householder/ To The Owner" etc. Usually this is from insurance companies, double glazing companies etc, people selling us stuff. They don't even know who lives in the house.
Currently, the cap on the number of these items is three per house per day. But with the ratification of the new agreement between the Communications Workers Union (CWU) and the Royal Mail, that cap will be lifted. The postal workers represented by their unions weren't happy about this, they don't like carry the extra weight on their backs every day and know that they aren't popular with house owners for delivering junk mail. If they didn't have to carry so much junk mail they could carry more real mail and get round more houses in the same time.
So already you can get 18 junk mails a week (no Sunday deliveries) but now we might get as many as the junk companies want to post us.
We do have a junk mail opt-out system you can sign up for "Mail Preference Service" but this only stops you from receiving *addressed* mail, stuff with your name on it (so if you joined a competition for a prize and gave them your name and address and they send you junk afterwards). It doesn't stop the *unaddressed* mail.
I think Finland sounds a more civilised country than the UK in this respect.
The problem is our country is short of money so the national services like the post are looking to find ways of making money and being paid to deliver junk mail is something they will do...
You're a lucky man, Here in the UK it's part of the national post service's business model to accept money from spammers to deliver junk mail. So we get loads of junk mail whether we like it or not. The postal workers recently went on strike because they didn't want to deliver junk mail to people but they got told by the employers they have to, and so have had to back down and accept they must deliver it if they want to keep their jobs.
Fair comment. My dad served as a Royal Marines Commando. His stories of his times in the commandos put me off ever wanting to sign up to serve in the military. Sounded like 90% sheer drudgery and following insane and stupid orders, 5% fun and 5% sheer terror. He was taught Kipling by a sergeant major who made his soldiers remember the poems as something to do while they stood practicing parade duties on some windy blighted old airfield at 4 hours at a time, praying they weren't going to faint from standing still that long.
I have every respect for the military and particularly my dad but I have no desire to sign up after the stories my dad has told me. I am aware that I have the luxury of that choice because of the sacrifice of others and my decision has been to take advantage of that choice and try to offer something back to society in a different way (I work in education).
You say my reasoning is stupid. You say that you would prefer a smaller number of collisions, but you would be happy that they are all fatal. I would suggest we'd both prefer no collisions, but if there are to be collisions then it would be better if they were non fatal. This is the theory behind reducing speed limits in urban areas. I am in the UK and there is much debate about reducing the speed limit in residential streets from 30mph to 20mph as this significantly reduces fatal accidents. This is being supported by evidence collected in pilot trials in the UK and from wider adoption in the Netherlands.
One of my arguments is that statistics count for nothing when you are the 1 in a 1000 who gets hit, I'd prefer a broken arm than death! But on a global scale, see above, we have evidence that lower speed equals roads that are safer to pedestrians. I can't speak for your country but in the UK the vast majority of urban roads involve close interactions between pedestrians, cycle riders, and powered vehicles. People cross roads frequently, pavements are alongside the roads, cyclists need to change lanes and move out into the middle of traffic often.