Getting other people to do things for you, and not knowing how everything works is positive, it's called civilisation. Possibly people could live on this planet as complete autonomous islands, being completely self sufficient, but working together and sharing tasks is more efficient for everybody, frees up time, and allows for redundancy.
You may be able to manage to maintain a 21st (or even 19th) century lifestyle all on your own but most people just wouldn't have the time to plant their own crops, grow cotton, weave their clothes, find metal ores, mine them, smelt them to produce metal goods, build petrol driven machines from the raw ores, learn enough medical science to undertake complex medical operations when accidents and illness occurred, raise children, find the time to teach them, still keep this going after you've had an accident and are laid up in bed for six months, etc.
Same as with any organised event, I've been along to and involved with the Edinburgh Beltane since 1991 (it started in '88) and people have always said the same thing "it's not what it used to be". Problem with organised events is that it boils down to somebody taking the rap if things go wrong so rules get put into place so no organiser gets personally sued when an idiot throws petrol on a fire (with the usual consequences), or deals have to be struck with the authorities to let some shape of event go on (and the organisers have to work out what point to negotiate to).
Can't speak about photographic rights as Beltane Fire Festival lets anybody film anything - but as a just about surviving community festival that doesn't like corporate branding its pretty galling when all the volunteers work themselves to the bone for months to do a great show then a major TV company or magazine shoots loads of film, publishes the images, makes profit, and gives nothing back to the organisation itself. Dealing with the media - or working out who is shooting film for their personal pleasure and who is shooting to make big profits is very difficult.
My favourite moment was when a National Geographic photographer wanted us to stop part of the show so he could get a good shot on the grounds that he was from the National Geographic.
Agreed that most of the power in *England* is in a two party system but in Scotland and Wales the devolved system means that other parties get a good shout, and have some power as a result. The SNP runs the Scottish parliament for example. There are signficant local difference between English and Scottish legal situations and the SNP / Labour divide on political issues means that people in England and Scotland can be in quite different situations (e.g. healthcare).
"you can't sing "Happy Birthday" in the UK without paying a license fee"
I was at my nieces' birthday party the other day and we sang happy birthday to them and nobody asked us for a licence fee. Parent poster is wrong.
Yes, I believe technically the parent poster may be right that the song is still under copyright and payment should be made for public performance but thankfully the UK isn't the USA (yet!) and so we don't have lawyers suing us for breathing. A judge would laugh you out of the court.
You guys in the USA have brought a lot of good ideas into the world but exchanging common sense for lawyers is not one of them.
"As an analogy, imagine a shed in your yard that you keep locked. Law enforcement would, under almost all circumstances, require probable cause or a warrant based on probable cause in order to go onto your property and search that shed."
Unless you're Arabic looking and you and your shed aren't on US land (say in Iraq, or Afghanistan).
In which circumstances they'd blow the side of your shed out, ship you off to a dodgy country outside US jurisdiction, get you tortured, lock you up in Guantanamo Bay for a few years til you go mad, tell you you'll never see your family again if you don't confess, and then ask you to talk. Allegedly.
The afflicted DJ claims that it's "wifi signals" that cause his problem. I've opened up my Linksys WRT54G access point and I can't find a "LARGE coil as an antenna" (as you note may be found in RFID devices). What do you think is causing him pain from access points?
He notes all wifi signals cause him pain so I assume he doesn't just mean RFID units and damaged tv sets but also domestic wifi routers. Interested in your thoughts on this.
There are a good number of trees older than 500 years. Come on. Nobody's expecting a species to evolve in its own lifetime (outside sci-fi movies), give it a few generations at least. Humans haven't evolved different skins in 500 years and some trees live for a couple of thousand years.
Saving $330 million per plane not built, your government could set up factories to build an awful lot of other things instead and pay for a heck of a lot of training to give workers the skills to do work in other sectors. I heard that while your publicly funded military is in reasonable shape your publicly funded health care and education could do with some help; build tools and equipment for these industries? Maybe lobby your politicians to spend money on improving those services and building factories to turn out equipment for those sectors instead? (also train people as teachers, nurses, etc)?
How does it differ from credit reference agencies like Experian telling me about my credit rating ? (and usually screwing up badly and then charging me to have to sort it out....)
If your ancestors were rievers they probably stole cattle from both sides. Rievers and the borderers generally had a strong reputation of not worrying too much about philosophical high ideals like nationality when an opportunity for a little extra wealth presented itself.
Many cases of rievers joining the Scottish army as they marched south to join with a bit of English plundering and happily picking off wounded and unwary Scots soldiers or joining in English counter-raids on the return journey (and vice versa).
Not so many cases of rievers standing in a field next to a herd of unattended cows and asking "should we check if these are English cows or Scots cows before we decide whether to rustle them away?";-)
Lots of records with no family/surname. "What's your name soldier?" "John" "Right, stick him down scribe, John the archer".
Don't hold your hopes out if you were dreaming to find your ancestor on some particular march out to France or Scotland. Not unless your ancestors happen to be the Dukes of Northumberland or the like...
You should read a bit of history, matey. "Never had any kind of revolution or defining moment"... "never had to struggle to get (freedom and liberty)"....
Take a bit of time out to read some history and you might find out why you've got the right to vote, what habeus corpus is, why we we're allowed to move from parish to parish without getting permission from our lords and a whole lot more.
Check this - in the USA they use police that look like the military, the whole guns and armour thing to break up their parties... so looks like its the same both sides of the pond.
Obvious isn't it? "The Market will decide". This famous beastie called the market will decide what survives and what doesn't... and in India where there's a fair few people living on a dollar a day (say a hundred million or so people) then the idea of making a couple of thousand dollars for a days work hunting down and killing (poaching) a tiger seems quite attractive. What would you do for 6 years your current salary as a day's work?
India - developing country - limited resources - can't fund its nature reserves or equip its park rangers like a western country might, versus a lot of folk who see an opportunity to make several years wages in a day.
The west has to take a lot of the blame for reducing the numbers down to where they are right now, hunting tigers in India was big sport at the turn of the last century.
Apologies and serves my bias right, I just assumed somebody shouting "what about the legal issues" was from the USA seeing as it's such a lawyer heavy culture. Apologies all US citizens.
Too many lawyers there, too many in the UK from where I am posting, in my opinion sounds like you've got a few as well...
I'd argue my original point: you could say he's not tracking the people, he's not tracking the truck, he's tracking his phone. He could argue that he has no idea about the whereabouts of anything else. If he'd stuck it onto the truck or on the truck driver's clothing maybe you could argue he's tracking them?
Only in the USA do people shout "think of the lawyers!" before considering innovations in technology....;-)
The guy is only tracking his own stuff. He doesn't know who's driving the truck, if they changed every 100 miles and different people are in the cab from when they picked up his stuff, if they are in the cab when the vehicle is stationary or if they've gone off to a cafe or home to sleep for the night. He only knows where his iphone is. For all he knows his stuff might have been shifted to another vehicle, he doesn't even know if it's in the same truck.
See if you can get to a swimming pool and swim once a week. Ok so every day might be super cool but really even if you can have a weekly swim it will be good for you. Once a week is also a nice break from your normal routine rather than a daily grind. Do an hour to start with, that's plenty enough till you get into it. Swimming is great exercise for folks with ankle issues - I took up swimming after I ripped all the ligaments on one ankle- I was convinced I'd broken it the pain was that much when I went to the hospital the next morning (no point trying to go to my local hospital on a Friday night, way too crazy unless you're actually dying of something).
Swimming over the next three months really built the strength up in it again - it was great because when I started and was hobbling I could swim without using the ankle at all but rather the rest of my leg muscles. So if you've got to take it easy on your ankle you'll be able to use the rest of your muscles and still give yourself a great work out.
When I started swimming it was the first time for 20 years so I was rubbish and splashed around until I was puffed out but each time I'd try to do a wee bit more and by the end of three months I was feeling pretty good about the amount I could do, I really did improve. I am sure you will as well. Don't get freaked out by nutty slashdot posters who tell you it's not worth it unless you're doing hours each day and thousands of laps of the pool or millions of sit ups. Just try to do enough that's pushing you, you know when you're working hard, and try to up your laps or whatever every week by a bit and you'll find you'll impress yourself after 3 months, you'll be doing way more than when you started.
I went one day a week and it really improved my strength and got me into shape, and I always slept like a baby the night after I went swimming, really worked out the mental stress of the day.
Laws based on baseball rules ("three strikes and you're out") or morality based on "cowboys and indians" games ("we are the good guys and you are the bad guys") seem to be fine when you're 8 years old. But for adults in the real world? Please, I thought we'd left that behind with George Bush and Ronnie Reagan.
The real world is far too nuanced and complicated for child-logic to fairly run a society.
If you go to Bletchley Park the tour guides (some of whom served there during the war) are very clear about crediting all contributions where due.
One of the places the tour stops at is the memorial to the Polish code breakers and the tour guides clearly explain the Polish connection. They have an annual Polish day at the Park - celebrated two weeks ago, photos here. Bletchley Park folks recognise the Polish contribution and make their visitors aware of this.
Agreed that slashdotters tend to be a technical community and are highly critical of bad management - which suggests that slashdot posters are desperate for good management. I suppose some slashdotters work in organisations where they'd prefer no management, but you could argue that even open source projects need some sorts of decision making to protect them from a war between the biggest egos.
So maybe a starting point would be to ask slashdotters how they feel good open source projects are successfully managed? This might be a relevant starting point.
but percentage of English speaking geeks?
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
"two-thirds of people living in an industrialized English-speaking country live in the USA."
I'd love to get a breakdown of how many English speaking geeks live in the USA compared to the rest of the world... there's a heck of a lot of English speaking geeks in many countries where English is a second or third language.
Or did you mean English-only speaking people?:-)
Would be really interesting to get a slashdot breakdown of readers by country for sure.
BBC radio is reporting this will bring the USA and Russia down to owning a mere 95% of the world's nuclear weapons. Go USA! Go Russia!
Seriously, good work both countries for making a step in the right direction. But keep going, you've got a long way to go before you can start preaching to countries with a dozen or nuclear weapons about the need for restraint.
Probably there are many more professors who would like this but you have to be pretty untouchable to be able to take on your employer, do something they really don't like, and still stay in your job.
These professors are probably so senior in their field, international leaders I'd guess, so their employer (the university) can't afford to sack them.
There's likely to be a lot of other professors who'd like to follow the path of breaking the system and losing their employer's money but don't have the security to be able to afford to do that. Maybe they are just good professors rather than world-leading and have to worry about house payments, paying for their teenaged children's college education, etc, and can't afford to get the sack.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting other people to do things for you, and not knowing how everything works is positive, it's called civilisation. Possibly people could live on this planet as complete autonomous islands, being completely self sufficient, but working together and sharing tasks is more efficient for everybody, frees up time, and allows for redundancy.
You may be able to manage to maintain a 21st (or even 19th) century lifestyle all on your own but most people just wouldn't have the time to plant their own crops, grow cotton, weave their clothes, find metal ores, mine them, smelt them to produce metal goods, build petrol driven machines from the raw ores, learn enough medical science to undertake complex medical operations when accidents and illness occurred, raise children, find the time to teach them, still keep this going after you've had an accident and are laid up in bed for six months, etc.
Same as with any organised event, I've been along to and involved with the Edinburgh Beltane since 1991 (it started in '88) and people have always said the same thing "it's not what it used to be". Problem with organised events is that it boils down to somebody taking the rap if things go wrong so rules get put into place so no organiser gets personally sued when an idiot throws petrol on a fire (with the usual consequences), or deals have to be struck with the authorities to let some shape of event go on (and the organisers have to work out what point to negotiate to).
Can't speak about photographic rights as Beltane Fire Festival lets anybody film anything - but as a just about surviving community festival that doesn't like corporate branding its pretty galling when all the volunteers work themselves to the bone for months to do a great show then a major TV company or magazine shoots loads of film, publishes the images, makes profit, and gives nothing back to the organisation itself. Dealing with the media - or working out who is shooting film for their personal pleasure and who is shooting to make big profits is very difficult.
My favourite moment was when a National Geographic photographer wanted us to stop part of the show so he could get a good shot on the grounds that he was from the National Geographic.
Agreed that most of the power in *England* is in a two party system but in Scotland and Wales the devolved system means that other parties get a good shout, and have some power as a result. The SNP runs the Scottish parliament for example. There are signficant local difference between English and Scottish legal situations and the SNP / Labour divide on political issues means that people in England and Scotland can be in quite different situations (e.g. healthcare).
"you can't sing "Happy Birthday" in the UK without paying a license fee"
I was at my nieces' birthday party the other day and we sang happy birthday to them and nobody asked us for a licence fee. Parent poster is wrong.
Yes, I believe technically the parent poster may be right that the song is still under copyright and payment should be made for public performance but thankfully the UK isn't the USA (yet!) and so we don't have lawyers suing us for breathing. A judge would laugh you out of the court.
You guys in the USA have brought a lot of good ideas into the world but exchanging common sense for lawyers is not one of them.
"As an analogy, imagine a shed in your yard that you keep locked. Law enforcement would, under almost all circumstances, require probable cause or a warrant based on probable cause in order to go onto your property and search that shed."
Unless you're Arabic looking and you and your shed aren't on US land (say in Iraq, or Afghanistan).
In which circumstances they'd blow the side of your shed out, ship you off to a dodgy country outside US jurisdiction, get you tortured, lock you up in Guantanamo Bay for a few years til you go mad, tell you you'll never see your family again if you don't confess, and then ask you to talk. Allegedly.
The afflicted DJ claims that it's "wifi signals" that cause his problem. I've opened up my Linksys WRT54G access point and I can't find a "LARGE coil as an antenna" (as you note may be found in RFID devices). What do you think is causing him pain from access points?
He notes all wifi signals cause him pain so I assume he doesn't just mean RFID units and damaged tv sets but also domestic wifi routers. Interested in your thoughts on this.
There are a good number of trees older than 500 years. Come on. Nobody's expecting a species to evolve in its own lifetime (outside sci-fi movies), give it a few generations at least. Humans haven't evolved different skins in 500 years and some trees live for a couple of thousand years.
Not a big car fan, not an American, so help me here and correct me if I've got it wrong.
The deal is you pay $1000 and you get some stickers to stick on your car?
Maybe they stick the stickers onto your car as well, so you don't have to do it and presumably they put them on nice and straight?
Wow, if this is what you get they'd better be very nice stickers.
Are you considering declaring war on us sometime soon?
Saving $330 million per plane not built, your government could set up factories to build an awful lot of other things instead and pay for a heck of a lot of training to give workers the skills to do work in other sectors. I heard that while your publicly funded military is in reasonable shape your publicly funded health care and education could do with some help; build tools and equipment for these industries? Maybe lobby your politicians to spend money on improving those services and building factories to turn out equipment for those sectors instead? (also train people as teachers, nurses, etc)?
How does it differ from credit reference agencies like Experian telling me about my credit rating ? (and usually screwing up badly and then charging me to have to sort it out....)
If your ancestors were rievers they probably stole cattle from both sides. Rievers and the borderers generally had a strong reputation of not worrying too much about philosophical high ideals like nationality when an opportunity for a little extra wealth presented itself.
Many cases of rievers joining the Scottish army as they marched south to join with a bit of English plundering and happily picking off wounded and unwary Scots soldiers or joining in English counter-raids on the return journey (and vice versa).
Not so many cases of rievers standing in a field next to a herd of unattended cows and asking "should we check if these are English cows or Scots cows before we decide whether to rustle them away?" ;-)
Lots of records with no family /surname. "What's your name soldier?" "John" "Right, stick him down scribe, John the archer".
Don't hold your hopes out if you were dreaming to find your ancestor on some particular march out to France or Scotland. Not unless your ancestors happen to be the Dukes of Northumberland or the like...
You should read a bit of history, matey. "Never had any kind of revolution or defining moment"... "never had to struggle to get (freedom and liberty)"....
Take a bit of time out to read some history and you might find out why you've got the right to vote, what habeus corpus is, why we we're allowed to move from parish to parish without getting permission from our lords and a whole lot more.
Check this - in the USA they use police that look like the military, the whole guns and armour thing to break up their parties... so looks like its the same both sides of the pond.
Obvious isn't it? "The Market will decide". This famous beastie called the market will decide what survives and what doesn't... and in India where there's a fair few people living on a dollar a day (say a hundred million or so people) then the idea of making a couple of thousand dollars for a days work hunting down and killing (poaching) a tiger seems quite attractive. What would you do for 6 years your current salary as a day's work?
India - developing country - limited resources - can't fund its nature reserves or equip its park rangers like a western country might, versus a lot of folk who see an opportunity to make several years wages in a day.
The west has to take a lot of the blame for reducing the numbers down to where they are right now, hunting tigers in India was big sport at the turn of the last century.
Apologies and serves my bias right, I just assumed somebody shouting "what about the legal issues" was from the USA seeing as it's such a lawyer heavy culture. Apologies all US citizens.
Too many lawyers there, too many in the UK from where I am posting, in my opinion sounds like you've got a few as well...
I'd argue my original point: you could say he's not tracking the people, he's not tracking the truck, he's tracking his phone. He could argue that he has no idea about the whereabouts of anything else. If he'd stuck it onto the truck or on the truck driver's clothing maybe you could argue he's tracking them?
Only in the USA do people shout "think of the lawyers!" before considering innovations in technology.... ;-)
The guy is only tracking his own stuff. He doesn't know who's driving the truck, if they changed every 100 miles and different people are in the cab from when they picked up his stuff, if they are in the cab when the vehicle is stationary or if they've gone off to a cafe or home to sleep for the night. He only knows where his iphone is. For all he knows his stuff might have been shifted to another vehicle, he doesn't even know if it's in the same truck.
See if you can get to a swimming pool and swim once a week. Ok so every day might be super cool but really even if you can have a weekly swim it will be good for you. Once a week is also a nice break from your normal routine rather than a daily grind. Do an hour to start with, that's plenty enough till you get into it. Swimming is great exercise for folks with ankle issues - I took up swimming after I ripped all the ligaments on one ankle- I was convinced I'd broken it the pain was that much when I went to the hospital the next morning (no point trying to go to my local hospital on a Friday night, way too crazy unless you're actually dying of something).
Swimming over the next three months really built the strength up in it again - it was great because when I started and was hobbling I could swim without using the ankle at all but rather the rest of my leg muscles. So if you've got to take it easy on your ankle you'll be able to use the rest of your muscles and still give yourself a great work out.
When I started swimming it was the first time for 20 years so I was rubbish and splashed around until I was puffed out but each time I'd try to do a wee bit more and by the end of three months I was feeling pretty good about the amount I could do, I really did improve. I am sure you will as well. Don't get freaked out by nutty slashdot posters who tell you it's not worth it unless you're doing hours each day and thousands of laps of the pool or millions of sit ups. Just try to do enough that's pushing you, you know when you're working hard, and try to up your laps or whatever every week by a bit and you'll find you'll impress yourself after 3 months, you'll be doing way more than when you started.
I went one day a week and it really improved my strength and got me into shape, and I always slept like a baby the night after I went swimming, really worked out the mental stress of the day.
Good luck with it.
Laws based on baseball rules ("three strikes and you're out") or morality based on "cowboys and indians" games ("we are the good guys and you are the bad guys") seem to be fine when you're 8 years old. But for adults in the real world? Please, I thought we'd left that behind with George Bush and Ronnie Reagan.
The real world is far too nuanced and complicated for child-logic to fairly run a society.
If you go to Bletchley Park the tour guides (some of whom served there during the war) are very clear about crediting all contributions where due.
One of the places the tour stops at is the memorial to the Polish code breakers and the tour guides clearly explain the Polish connection. They have an annual Polish day at the Park - celebrated two weeks ago, photos here. Bletchley Park folks recognise the Polish contribution and make their visitors aware of this.
Agreed that slashdotters tend to be a technical community and are highly critical of bad management - which suggests that slashdot posters are desperate for good management. I suppose some slashdotters work in organisations where they'd prefer no management, but you could argue that even open source projects need some sorts of decision making to protect them from a war between the biggest egos.
So maybe a starting point would be to ask slashdotters how they feel good open source projects are successfully managed? This might be a relevant starting point.
"two-thirds of people living in an industrialized English-speaking country live in the USA."
I'd love to get a breakdown of how many English speaking geeks live in the USA compared to the rest of the world... there's a heck of a lot of English speaking geeks in many countries where English is a second or third language.
Or did you mean English-only speaking people? :-)
Would be really interesting to get a slashdot breakdown of readers by country for sure.
BBC radio is reporting this will bring the USA and Russia down to owning a mere 95% of the world's nuclear weapons. Go USA! Go Russia!
Seriously, good work both countries for making a step in the right direction. But keep going, you've got a long way to go before you can start preaching to countries with a dozen or nuclear weapons about the need for restraint.
Probably there are many more professors who would like this but you have to be pretty untouchable to be able to take on your employer, do something they really don't like, and still stay in your job.
These professors are probably so senior in their field, international leaders I'd guess, so their employer (the university) can't afford to sack them.
There's likely to be a lot of other professors who'd like to follow the path of breaking the system and losing their employer's money but don't have the security to be able to afford to do that. Maybe they are just good professors rather than world-leading and have to worry about house payments, paying for their teenaged children's college education, etc, and can't afford to get the sack.