I'd expect the world's single superpower to win any military conflict and roll into any place they fancy, smashing the infrastructure of the country into the stone age. But that's just the easy bit. I think you guys will be judged on how you deal with the hard tasks after that.
The fact that this was an online poll means that it's not scientific
The fact that the poll is online or offline is irrelevant as to whether it was conducted "scientifically". "Scientific" methodologies can be applied both online and offline. I can generate a well made poll online, and equally I can ask a right bunch of tosh in door to door interviews in person.
I think you might mean "accurate" or "well designed" not "scientific" but hey let's not go there.
As long as there some sort of measure to make sure that kids know if they pull out video phones/ cameras every ten seconds and film each other and the teacher for a lark when they are supposed to be working on their French/Maths/Chemistry/whatever that they will get pulled up before the head teacher and disciplined for disruptive behaviour.
My experience of teaching (only as a school librarian teaching library skills and computer skills) was that a minority of kids will find any excuse to mess around and it's a constant battle to keep them concentrating on their work and not poking their mates with pencils/throwing paper balls at each other etc.Putting it into a school contract that they can randomly pull out a video device and start recording at any time... hmmm.... not so sure.
hmmm.. I know where you coming from, but can I ask, have you any experience of teaching school aged kids?
Ok, I'll raise to your bait. I'm in the UK and I hate open plan offices. There you go! one more complaint to add to your "few":-)
I'm a PhD student in a department of the Open University (yes there are on-campus postgrad students at the Open University). I work in an open plan office. I'll say up front we get a generous amount of space, a big desk, our own shelf space, comfy chairs. There are 24 spaces divided into 6 areas. These are in the middle of a whole floor single room area. But not everybody 'lives' here: this is how the building was designed, but then the senior management insisted that they needed offices, so offices for the more important people were built the length of the floor on both sides against the windows. So we have offices down the sides (one and two person) and open plan up the middle.
I can't concentrate in the open plan area: there is too much noise. It's ok if I just want to do routine work, but if I have to think hard then there are just too many noise distractions. I think there's some basic sociology happening here: I don't believe 20 or so people can all be on the same work rhythm. 4 people in an office maybe: you can negotiate when is 'heads down hard concentrating' time and when is 'ok lets let off some steam and chat about tv/sport/whatever' time. I just don't think this can happen with 24 people. Particularly in an office like ours where people keep different time schedules. I don't think people are being selfish, they just forget other people are maybe in a different head state at different times. Some people can work with headphones on listening to music, but me, I just end up concentrating on the music....
Add to this the offices down the side: I've noticed an interesting effect: people will go into the rooms to do serious business and have their meetings, but as they leave the office, standing in the doorway, they have broken out of serious business mode and that's the place they carry out the chit-chat/social grooming ("how are the kids? did you see the football last night? let me tell you a funny joke..."). And... standing in the doorway means - 1.5 metres from somebody in the open plan area's desk!!! So we get the disruptive social chat.
Also at one end of the floor is the entrance, at the other end is the meeting room. So we get passing meeting room traffic. Another distraction. Grrr. Life in a goldfish bowl when you are trying to do the hardest work of your life. What do I do? I pay for a broadband connection and work from home....
Sorry about the length of the post, you can see this has been therapy letting off some steam, grin!!!
Wow. That's something like the price of two or three MS Office licences. I bet Bill is shaking in his boots....:-)... maybe the editors missed "million" in the headline?
you beat me to it:-) grandparent poster is obviously from some agrarian economy, haven't got as far as paper money yet.. mind you one day somebody will manage to explain the financial "futures" market to me as well!
DeBeers I'd say is more actual rather than artificial scarcity. I understand they hold back some diamonds and release them as they will, but still, big fancy diamonds for wedding rings still cost a lot to source (the mining operations and production of finished diamonds) and so can be sold for a huge amount. Hence the terrible 'blood diamonds' situations.
You n me can't knock out the artificial scarcity because there just aren't diamonds all over the land for digging up with a pick and shovel and an hour's work.
Now if somebody produced a 3D copying machine which allowed you me and anybody to copy and produce real diamonds as good as De Beers ones at a dollar a time, then the bottom would drop out of De Beers business model and they'd be out of business. Of course if they patented/copyrighted/ otherwise did some legal rubbish that artificially prevented you or me from producing these 'photocopied' diamonds, then we'd be into artificial scarcity.
I think the latter situation is where we're at with the SL software silliness. Same as any other code and software. You just got to go to India or China (or talk to any high school geeks) to see that - where people don't give a damn about the legal barriers but can technically produce, software is pretty close to free. SL is just discovering industrialisation....;-)
Indeed, it's just too much trouble, which show you and I both agree with the parent to your post. It's one thing being a highly competent email user and setting your own PGP up, but can we really be bothered setting up all our friends, work colleagues and family? I can't. And why don't they set up PGP? Because it's too much work and too difficult for the average user.
As one of the parent posts noted, the same people understand and happily use secure payment methods over the web. So what are the PGP tools missing? why doesn't everybody run PGP or an equivalent? My guess is 1. no media scare stories to get people to investigate encrypted email (a decent reason to change) and 2. an easy installation procedure....
hey well pity poor old Linus and the rest for having to appear on the same list as Maggie Thatcher ("Milk Snatcher"). Stopped school milk for primary school kids and told us "you know, there is no such thing as society" [1]... oh we knew the national health service and public sector education was going to be in good hands after that...
[1] Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women's Own magazine, October 31 1987
How about "paid by Sony"? Look at the media coverage those 7 guys are getting. How much does it cost to hire 7 geeks for a week? 100 dollars a day each? that's 4900 dollars for the week, how much advertising air time can you buy for 4900 dollars these days? I am guessing a lot less than the "viral marketing" (yuk! expression) Sony are getting from the "7 guys in a queue FOR PS3, lets laugh at the geeks" funny news coverage.
(and hey they are Sony so I am sure it doesn't cost them much to chuck the 7 guys a PS3 each if there aren't actually any in that shop come the official day).
"I think Rummy hoped the Iraq people would have stood up and participated sooner than they have."
I think the problem is that some Iraqi people have a different agenda from Rumsfeld. Participation is happening but on a whole number of different agendas. Some people are participating in the building of Rumsfeld's vision, and some on completely different visions. Hence the conflict.
Winning a military victory over Saddam's army was only the start, not all of it and I think that's where a lot of people got it wrong. They say generals always fight the last war, but the liberation of France in 1944 was several wars ago....
On the other hand - every year thousands of Americans die needlessly due to illnesses caused by smoking, alcohol, drugs, and poor nutrition (more often obesity than starvation). Shouldn't the US Government better fix these first with their money before spending on its space programme?
"Sometimes I wonder where people get their ideas about what America is about"
Mainly from the media, and listening to the US political leaders.
Hollywood and US TV dramas treat justice in a comic strip manner: obviously most people know these are just fictional over the top interpretations but the repetitions of some themes are worrying.
The US political leaders however seem to have watched rather too many of such films and tv programmes and seem to see the world in those terms, or at least articulate their policies in Hollywood ethical frameworks. Very frightening. OK for children in playgrounds, but not for world leaders with massive military forces: George Bush on Iraq "I said a long time ago, one of our objectives is to smoke them out and get them running and bring them to justice". Please, this is not a John Ford cowboy movie.
"If these countries were truly looking for nuclear power, why not just buy light water reactors from the U.S.?"
Because they want to develop local expertise? Develop a local knowledge base and scientific programme that can then undertake indigenous innovation (whether for good or bad).
"Panem et circenses" was coined by Juvenal in Satire X. He was writing about the Roman Empire, not the Roman Republic. He was writing approximately 100 years after the change from republic to empire. I'll leave it to you to decide if USA is undergoing a subtle change to empire, in the same way it is difficult to define when exactly Rome became an empire and was no longer a republic...
"In the old days, respectable news outlets could be counted on to check their sources and accurately report the news coming out of the defense department."
Alas I think you're a misguided romantic. Can I ask what experience you have of 'news outlets' in 'the old days'?
I am afraid I am deeply suspicious of anybody who tries to tell me they have solid facts after they start with "in the old days".
In the UK this is a bit close to Tory MPs telling us about warm beer and cricket on sunny Sunday afternoons while coppers cycled past and clipped kids round the ear for scrumping apples from Farmer Giles' orchard. I guess in the USA these 'old days' were when kids ate blueberry pie and fished in the hollow and were called Huckleberry Finn or something.
Define "in the old days" please. 1980? 1950? 1785? (last being first publication date of the Times)
"But if you've ever forgotten your ID when traveling, you know that you don't have to show ID to get through security or even to get on an airplane." (From the ABC article)
Parent post ("time0day") says you do need ID - what's the situation for internal flights in the USA? no ID required, or if you do need ID, what sort? passport, driving licence...
I think you slightly miss the point about community theatre, I don't think it's just a money making dodge. I think there's consciousness that it's more than just the entertainment and that the show offered might be less polished than a professional performance but there are other side benefits. People in the village/community and the participants know there is a reason for not just hiring a professional group - they are getting something out of it, whether its fun, having their 5 minutes of fame, job training, peacemaking between sub-communities that are in conflict, therapy etc. I think people generally appreciate their six months of one night a week rehearsals isn't going to make them as good an opera singer as Maria Callas. Sometimes people involve everybody to make more money but I'd day usually any money made gets ploughed back into the community or pays central crew a little bit for their time. I don't see many 'community theatre workers" in Forbes rich list.
So I think you make a good parallel - is there a similar process at work here -do the participants get to learn film making, get their 5 minutes of fame? But this doesn't necessarily mean it will be as good entertainment for non-involved viewers. Let's see. Wildcards happen.
Make sure you localise the materials as well, you need a localisation team on top (I guess USians would probably call that 'localization' for a start:-) ). For example I am writing from the UK and I don't understand the concept of "K" and "6 grade" ( I am guessing K=5 year olds, 6 grade = 18 year olds?...trying to work out at what happens at less than "0" to get me back to "K" in the alphabet:-) ) - we have a different educational system here. Cultural references may change from country to country and reading materials need to reflect it. Plus we all know the different local words, expressions and spellings that may confuse/ cause offense.
f'sure but equally true that not everything small gets big, I had plans for world domination aged 7 and here I am with a small vegetable garden in a wee house in the country....:-)
I was responding to the headline "OMG town of 40,000 does this therefore the whole planet will follow suit!".. my point was that in the UK more people have voted for monkeys to be their town mayor (Hartlepool not Hull as well corrected, and it was a bloke in a monkey suit, the local football team mascot) than have voted for finger print recognition before you can have a pint. So I think we've got a while yet before it takes over the world.
World of technology is littered with pilot projects that just don't scale up. I'd say we don't have to worry till the system's been well tested. Other posters have suggested it's a pretty small scale hack.
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I'd expect the world's single superpower to win any military conflict and roll into any place they fancy, smashing the infrastructure of the country into the stone age. But that's just the easy bit. I think you guys will be judged on how you deal with the hard tasks after that.
The fact that the poll is online or offline is irrelevant as to whether it was conducted "scientifically". "Scientific" methodologies can be applied both online and offline. I can generate a well made poll online, and equally I can ask a right bunch of tosh in door to door interviews in person.
I think you might mean "accurate" or "well designed" not "scientific" but hey let's not go there.
As long as there some sort of measure to make sure that kids know if they pull out video phones/ cameras every ten seconds and film each other and the teacher for a lark when they are supposed to be working on their French/Maths/Chemistry/whatever that they will get pulled up before the head teacher and disciplined for disruptive behaviour.
My experience of teaching (only as a school librarian teaching library skills and computer skills) was that a minority of kids will find any excuse to mess around and it's a constant battle to keep them concentrating on their work and not poking their mates with pencils/throwing paper balls at each other etc.Putting it into a school contract that they can randomly pull out a video device and start recording at any time... hmmm.... not so sure.
hmmm.. I know where you coming from, but can I ask, have you any experience of teaching school aged kids?
Ok, I'll raise to your bait. I'm in the UK and I hate open plan offices. There you go! one more complaint to add to your "few" :-)
/social grooming ("how are the kids? did you see the football last night? let me tell you a funny joke..."). And... standing in the doorway means - 1.5 metres from somebody in the open plan area's desk!!! So we get the disruptive social chat.
I'm a PhD student in a department of the Open University (yes there are on-campus postgrad students at the Open University). I work in an open plan office. I'll say up front we get a generous amount of space, a big desk, our own shelf space, comfy chairs. There are 24 spaces divided into 6 areas. These are in the middle of a whole floor single room area. But not everybody 'lives' here: this is how the building was designed, but then the senior management insisted that they needed offices, so offices for the more important people were built the length of the floor on both sides against the windows. So we have offices down the sides (one and two person) and open plan up the middle.
I can't concentrate in the open plan area: there is too much noise. It's ok if I just want to do routine work, but if I have to think hard then there are just too many noise distractions. I think there's some basic sociology happening here: I don't believe 20 or so people can all be on the same work rhythm. 4 people in an office maybe: you can negotiate when is 'heads down hard concentrating' time and when is 'ok lets let off some steam and chat about tv/sport/whatever' time. I just don't think this can happen with 24 people. Particularly in an office like ours where people keep different time schedules. I don't think people are being selfish, they just forget other people are maybe in a different head state at different times. Some people can work with headphones on listening to music, but me, I just end up concentrating on the music....
Add to this the offices down the side: I've noticed an interesting effect: people will go into the rooms to do serious business and have their meetings, but as they leave the office, standing in the doorway, they have broken out of serious business mode and that's the place they carry out the chit-chat
Also at one end of the floor is the entrance, at the other end is the meeting room. So we get passing meeting room traffic. Another distraction. Grrr. Life in a goldfish bowl when you are trying to do the hardest work of your life. What do I do? I pay for a broadband connection and work from home....
Sorry about the length of the post, you can see this has been therapy letting off some steam, grin!!!
It's ok, you don't need to feel left out, men get breast cancer too (about 250 a year in the UK). So keep on worrying.
Wow. That's something like the price of two or three MS Office licences. I bet Bill is shaking in his boots.... :-) ... maybe the editors missed "million" in the headline?
you beat me to it :-) grandparent poster is obviously from some agrarian economy, haven't got as far as paper money yet.. mind you one day somebody will manage to explain the financial "futures" market to me as well!
DeBeers I'd say is more actual rather than artificial scarcity. I understand they hold back some diamonds and release them as they will, but still, big fancy diamonds for wedding rings still cost a lot to source (the mining operations and production of finished diamonds) and so can be sold for a huge amount. Hence the terrible 'blood diamonds' situations.
;-)
You n me can't knock out the artificial scarcity because there just aren't diamonds all over the land for digging up with a pick and shovel and an hour's work.
Now if somebody produced a 3D copying machine which allowed you me and anybody to copy and produce real diamonds as good as De Beers ones at a dollar a time, then the bottom would drop out of De Beers business model and they'd be out of business. Of course if they patented/copyrighted/ otherwise did some legal rubbish that artificially prevented you or me from producing these 'photocopied' diamonds, then we'd be into artificial scarcity.
I think the latter situation is where we're at with the SL software silliness. Same as any other code and software. You just got to go to India or China (or talk to any high school geeks) to see that - where people don't give a damn about the legal barriers but can technically produce, software is pretty close to free. SL is just discovering industrialisation....
"Personally, I've given up"
Indeed, it's just too much trouble, which show you and I both agree with the parent to your post. It's one thing being a highly competent email user and setting your own PGP up, but can we really be bothered setting up all our friends, work colleagues and family? I can't. And why don't they set up PGP? Because it's too much work and too difficult for the average user.
As one of the parent posts noted, the same people understand and happily use secure payment methods over the web. So what are the PGP tools missing? why doesn't everybody run PGP or an equivalent? My guess is 1. no media scare stories to get people to investigate encrypted email (a decent reason to change) and 2. an easy installation procedure....
(political rant and a bit cheeky)
... oh we knew the national health service and public sector education was going to be in good hands after that...
hey well pity poor old Linus and the rest for having to appear on the same list as Maggie Thatcher ("Milk Snatcher"). Stopped school milk for primary school kids and told us "you know, there is no such thing as society" [1]
[1] Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women's Own magazine, October 31 1987
"87%" hmm, - if you're going to be as definite as that, quote your reference.
I'll take no response as you acknowledging you made it up.
In Soviet USA, you watch Big Brother!
....
In democratic UK, Big Brother... err... wait... hang on
How about "paid by Sony"? Look at the media coverage those 7 guys are getting. How much does it cost to hire 7 geeks for a week? 100 dollars a day each? that's 4900 dollars for the week, how much advertising air time can you buy for 4900 dollars these days? I am guessing a lot less than the "viral marketing" (yuk! expression) Sony are getting from the "7 guys in a queue FOR PS3, lets laugh at the geeks" funny news coverage.
(and hey they are Sony so I am sure it doesn't cost them much to chuck the 7 guys a PS3 each if there aren't actually any in that shop come the official day).
I think the problem is that some Iraqi people have a different agenda from Rumsfeld. Participation is happening but on a whole number of different agendas. Some people are participating in the building of Rumsfeld's vision, and some on completely different visions. Hence the conflict.
Winning a military victory over Saddam's army was only the start, not all of it and I think that's where a lot of people got it wrong. They say generals always fight the last war, but the liberation of France in 1944 was several wars ago....
On the other hand - every year thousands of Americans die needlessly due to illnesses caused by smoking, alcohol, drugs, and poor nutrition (more often obesity than starvation). Shouldn't the US Government better fix these first with their money before spending on its space programme?
Mainly from the media, and listening to the US political leaders.
Hollywood and US TV dramas treat justice in a comic strip manner: obviously most people know these are just fictional over the top interpretations but the repetitions of some themes are worrying.
The US political leaders however seem to have watched rather too many of such films and tv programmes and seem to see the world in those terms, or at least articulate their policies in Hollywood ethical frameworks. Very frightening. OK for children in playgrounds, but not for world leaders with massive military forces: George Bush on Iraq "I said a long time ago, one of our objectives is to smoke them out and get them running and bring them to justice". Please, this is not a John Ford cowboy movie.
Because they want to develop local expertise? Develop a local knowledge base and scientific programme that can then undertake indigenous innovation (whether for good or bad).
"Panem et circenses" was coined by Juvenal in Satire X. He was writing about the Roman Empire, not the Roman Republic. He was writing approximately 100 years after the change from republic to empire. I'll leave it to you to decide if USA is undergoing a subtle change to empire, in the same way it is difficult to define when exactly Rome became an empire and was no longer a republic...
"In the old days, respectable news outlets could be counted on to check their sources and accurately report the news coming out of the defense department."
Alas I think you're a misguided romantic. Can I ask what experience you have of 'news outlets' in 'the old days'?
I am afraid I am deeply suspicious of anybody who tries to tell me they have solid facts after they start with "in the old days".
In the UK this is a bit close to Tory MPs telling us about warm beer and cricket on sunny Sunday afternoons while coppers cycled past and clipped kids round the ear for scrumping apples from Farmer Giles' orchard. I guess in the USA these 'old days' were when kids ate blueberry pie and fished in the hollow and were called Huckleberry Finn or something.
Define "in the old days" please. 1980? 1950? 1785? (last being first publication date of the Times)
"But if you've ever forgotten your ID when traveling, you know that you don't have to show ID to get through security or even to get on an airplane." (From the ABC article)
Parent post ("time0day") says you do need ID - what's the situation for internal flights in the USA? no ID required, or if you do need ID, what sort? passport, driving licence...
"Community Theatre Model" - well pointed out.
I think you slightly miss the point about community theatre, I don't think it's just a money making dodge. I think there's consciousness that it's more than just the entertainment and that the show offered might be less polished than a professional performance but there are other side benefits. People in the village/community and the participants know there is a reason for not just hiring a professional group - they are getting something out of it, whether its fun, having their 5 minutes of fame, job training, peacemaking between sub-communities that are in conflict, therapy etc. I think people generally appreciate their six months of one night a week rehearsals isn't going to make them as good an opera singer as Maria Callas. Sometimes people involve everybody to make more money but I'd day usually any money made gets ploughed back into the community or pays central crew a little bit for their time. I don't see many 'community theatre workers" in Forbes rich list.
So I think you make a good parallel - is there a similar process at work here -do the participants get to learn film making, get their 5 minutes of fame? But this doesn't necessarily mean it will be as good entertainment for non-involved viewers. Let's see. Wildcards happen.
check the small print, you might find the bank owns the card and you're not allowed to alter it.
Make sure you localise the materials as well, you need a localisation team on top (I guess USians would probably call that 'localization' for a start :-) ). For example I am writing from the UK and I don't understand the concept of "K" and "6 grade" ( I am guessing K=5 year olds, 6 grade = 18 year olds? ...trying to work out at what happens at less than "0" to get me back to "K" in the alphabet :-) ) - we have a different educational system here. Cultural references may change from country to country and reading materials need to reflect it. Plus we all know the different local words, expressions and spellings that may confuse/ cause offense.
f'sure but equally true that not everything small gets big, I had plans for world domination aged 7 and here I am with a small vegetable garden in a wee house in the country.... :-)
I was responding to the headline "OMG town of 40,000 does this therefore the whole planet will follow suit!".. my point was that in the UK more people have voted for monkeys to be their town mayor (Hartlepool not Hull as well corrected, and it was a bloke in a monkey suit, the local football team mascot) than have voted for finger print recognition before you can have a pint. So I think we've got a while yet before it takes over the world.
World of technology is littered with pilot projects that just don't scale up. I'd say we don't have to worry till the system's been well tested. Other posters have suggested it's a pretty small scale hack.
Apologies to the good citizens of Hull, you are indeed right :-)