yeah but anybody who's smuggling is probably involved in other nasty business... I mean if somebody doesn't give the smugglers the promised cash for their smuggled load, or turn up with goods after said smugglers have handed over a sports bag of dollars, well they probably don't call the local police to sort it out. Probably don't mind carry high value drugs alongside your cheap cigarettes and that kind of cargo usually comes with lots of nasty karma attached as well...
Politics, my naive but well meaning friend. No country wants pictures of its top secret places free for the world to see. Look at the whole google-spotting fun going on already with people posting up pics of bomber bases, submarines, warships etc. Lots of countries really don't want you to know where they keep their tanks, or that they've sneakily pushed up their advanced forces into somebody else's disputed territory.
Lots of farmers in Europe got caught out a few years ago when the satellite images proved that they were claiming subsidies for farming land they weren't actually doing anything with, lots of logging companies in the Amazon probably would prefer that hippy ecologist PhD students don't get ready access to high quality data. Pick your prefered flavour of scenario.
Some countries find it good not to let others know what they are doing with nuclear power. Commercial companies are doing very nicely making money out of selling you pictures, why should they want you to get them for free?
Right now, geographical and geological data about Mars and Venus are of commercial / geopolitical little worth, we can just about get remote control robots there. Wait till any medium sized company and tin pot dictatorship can get 50 people there with mining/digging/ fighting equipment and then it will be interesting to see how easy it is to get high resolution maps "of the land 10km to the East of US Mars Base 7" "geological survey of 100km surrounding Exxon drilling rig 39" etc....
It's lucky you made you clear you were interested in which open-source information and reference site(s) slashdotters couldn't live without. I'm really not sure I'd like to know about some of the other sites people here visit on a regular basis....
The Open University is rated as one of the best universities in the UK (and takes overseas students), but you won't find it in many of the listings because it *only* does distance undergraduate degrees. The Times Good University Guide FAQ writes the following:
--"Why isn't the Open University (the UK's largest in number of students) included? Its independent teaching quality assessment is 5th in the country, above Oxford." Louis De La Foret, Milton Keynes
-Because it caters entirely for distance learners, several of the measures in The Times table - notably those which measure spending on libraries and other facilities - do not apply to the Open University. Its size would also put the OU at a considerable disadvantage in comparisons of staffing levels.
"As Wilma rolled though the region on 24 October, fierce 122-kilometer-per-hour winds tore holes in the hangar's 83-meter-tall door and caused minor damage to the rocket inside."
Can we have this in imperial units, this is an American website and an American space program we're talking about here...
So this date in 2018 is a great time to put people on Mars... but what about getting them back? does that mean they've got to wait there for 13/50/ 10,000 years before they can come back.... errr.... I sense a problem here....
nah, ya mean "everywhere you go there's BT", even the Americans have a kinda BT, even though their telephone boxes kinda look and work funny and they ring the wrong number for emergency services;-)
I'd heard that pro-abortionists who've put their opinion forth on television in the USA have had death threats and occasionally get killed- is this true?
indeedy - read the long now website - they are aware that for it to last 10,000 years it will need to be woven into the social/ ritual fabric of culture.
As you rightly point out, it just takes one group of people to trash it, hey in the UK lots of people got upset about the Taleban blowing up the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, but then remembered we also destroyed most of our own religious heritage through a series of political/religious fundamentalist purges - Richard Lionheart (lets sell gold and relics to fund the war and pay for freeing the king) Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monastries (I'm going to start my own flavour of Christianity so I can marry again, this gold will do nicely), and Puritanism (destroy the evil Catholic relics). Seems like humans do a pretty good job of trashing their long term histories every few years:-)
"Have you looked at comparative economic growth over the last 20 years and predictions for the next 20? "
Think in terms of not 20 years but 200, 500, or more. British Empire - couple of hundred years really. And China has proved throughout the last 3000 years it can play the long game. So it's worth making sure when power does shift, you are well thought of.
You ask a very good question: but surely the findings of this research raise another question: if Mars-like conditions (therefore Mars itself) can support life, should we be importing life to Mars?
Long term colonisation of Mars would require locally grown food, and preferably not at the expense of shipping in from Earth all the resources they need to grow. Is this a step towards finding hardy life forms that can be mutated to grow in Mars, or in a hybrid Mars-Earth condition? (ie. giving plants some support but not having to create Earth conditions). Hence making the possibility of long term missions to Mars more achievable...
I agree. My dad equated the Blue E with the Internet, click on it and you can get the football scores. I moved him over to Firefox - the alpha geeks were saying its much better for Windows users to be using this, I got some of the arguments, seemed to work, so fine: less patching up for me to do on my dad's machine. My dad - well he just took my word. He's heard of viruses and security problems, doesn't really understand them. Most users don't - see the latest Pew report on users understanding of technical terms: he's just like me and the mechanic on my car:
Mechanic: you should change from a wiggley-diddly carb thingy to a blargy -wargy one, it works better and has less problems
Only in the USA could it say FROM souped-up SUVs:-)
Here in the UK it would probably be FROM a bunch of lego bricks and a clockwork motor UP TO a Sinclair C5 (or possibly an Austin Mini with an Aibo gaffa-taped in)...
Some nice points made over at The Register critically commenting on wikipedia.
Wikipedia's Emergent People fail to impress readers. Makes the nice point that a bazaar might not necesarily create a better structure than a cathedral method of collating information, i.e. lots of ill-informed time rich people don't necessarily give you a great answer. I'm all for wikipedia, but I think it still needs to be treated with a certain scepticism like any other publication.
"weaponizing"???.... for goodness sake man stop this trend of verbalizing nouns! That's what *really* worries me, semi-literate monkeys in charge of all these weapons. Couldn't he have have written something more eloquent, I don't know, even "We're not talking about turning space into a theatre of war"? Sigh.
Colour matters, as does design style. I completely agree with you that what's inside is most important, but as laptops move from office machines to home / lifestyle appliances, the external design styling of your boxes will differentiate and add sales. Just ask Apple. I'm willing to bet that a sizeable percentage of Apple sales happen because their computers look cool. You might laugh but to be honest I think computer functionality is topping out for most people, laptops are much of a muchness powerwise, and once you've hit reliability, well you choose the one you like the look of. Even Henry Ford gave up on telling people they could have any colour so long as it was black....
Who can buy your data? here in the UK we have some protection (Data Protection Act) but there's still lots of holes and most of the time if you sign up for anything (free gift offer, airmiles, etc) there's a tiny little box which says "tick here if you don't mind us sharing your data" (it used to be "tick here if you don't want us to share your data" but the law was changed). So if you've ever signed up for anything, chances are somebody has bought and sold your data. Credit reference agencies also buy and sell your data from the electoral register. Not sure who can buy access to your SSN in your country.
If you were a vegetarian since before Maggie Thatcher and her chums decided to allow farmers to feed cows on recycled other cows, you'd not have eaten meat with the higher level of CJD infection - I think ? At least that's what I'm hoping:-)
"I'm not sure what kind of crack or meth these people are smoking when they decide to wire up the subway system for cell phones"
The crack? votes, and money. Telling people they can phone 911 when they are in the subway makes people feel good, means they'll vote for the councillors who made this happen. Plus money, it's a free market economy. X million commuters a day on the subways, how much income is that if each of them makes a 10 cent phone call? I shouldn't be suprised if the phone companies weighed in to help make it happen.
"mass casualty environment"
I call it "going shopping", or "going on the subway to meet up with some friends". I think you should ease off those FPS games;-)
Samhuinn/ Samhain - Celtic Quarter Day: "The Samhuinn Festival serves the seasonally opposite role to Beltane. It was the Celtic New Year, although its practice far precedes the Celtic culture. It marked the end of summer and the time to bring herds in from summer pastures to lowland fields and enclosures for protection. With the signs of approaching winter, it is understandable that the festival should have a strong association with death. The trees are bare and the land barren of the earlier vegetation - nature itself seems to be dying.
Thus it was believed that this was the night of the dead - a time for the spirits of the departed from the previous year to pay one last visit to their relatives before departing for the other-world forever. Also taking advantage of this closeness between the land of the living and the dead were the mischievous and malevolent spirits of the underworld, and measures had to be taken to protect against their pranks. Thus evolved the tradition of modern Hallowe'en to wear masks - originally to disguise oneself against the unwanted attentions of spirits and faeries.
Another Samhuinn tradition was a market fair held in the nearest trading centre. This was a chance to settle business, to trade livestock and produce of the autumn and to revel with friends for one last time before the winter conditions made travel too difficult. Amongst the entertainments were the Goloshan Plays. The main theme of these ancient narratives was the battle between light and dark, summer and winter. The two characters fight to the death, winter overcoming summer as inevitably as the seasons, but the medicine-man steps in to revive the summer figure, thus ensuring the return of spring and light."
In the UK at least, primary school teacher (5 - 11 years students) are often people who have a first degree (undergraduate) in Education. They've spent three years learning about education, how to teach. This is not a trivial task - just look at the number of guru level geeks who quite frankly are lousy at passing on their knowledge to others.
So in the three years, as well as learning how to teach they also learn about all the topics they have to cover (I don't know, ten or twelve?), so each subject area probably doesn't get that long. Any wonder that kids may only get rudimentary skills in computing? Not sure what the solution is - probably - spend more money on schools, pay teachers more, increase the respect that teachers get so more high quality students want to become the next generation of teachers?
Is the "Queen's English" an American expression? Can anybody give me the root of where this phrase came from? In the UK I'm more aware of people talking about "BBC English" (but this is as much to do with pronunciation).
As for the whole Olympic selling-off-of-words-and-banning-the-use-of, well hey, slashdot is home to libertarian capitalism right? Free market rules and all that? you wanted it, you got it. I'm a bit disappointed in Ken (Livingstone) myself, hope he makes a bit of noise. What's going to happen to my favourite chip sho, the Golden Fish Bar?
Slashdot Mirror
yeah but anybody who's smuggling is probably involved in other nasty business... I mean if somebody doesn't give the smugglers the promised cash for their smuggled load, or turn up with goods after said smugglers have handed over a sports bag of dollars, well they probably don't call the local police to sort it out. Probably don't mind carry high value drugs alongside your cheap cigarettes and that kind of cargo usually comes with lots of nasty karma attached as well...
Politics, my naive but well meaning friend. No country wants pictures of its top secret places free for the world to see. Look at the whole google-spotting fun going on already with people posting up pics of bomber bases, submarines, warships etc. Lots of countries really don't want you to know where they keep their tanks, or that they've sneakily pushed up their advanced forces into somebody else's disputed territory.
Lots of farmers in Europe got caught out a few years ago when the satellite images proved that they were claiming subsidies for farming land they weren't actually doing anything with, lots of logging companies in the Amazon probably would prefer that hippy ecologist PhD students don't get ready access to high quality data. Pick your prefered flavour of scenario.
Some countries find it good not to let others know what they are doing with nuclear power. Commercial companies are doing very nicely making money out of selling you pictures, why should they want you to get them for free?
Right now, geographical and geological data about Mars and Venus are of commercial / geopolitical little worth, we can just about get remote control robots there. Wait till any medium sized company and tin pot dictatorship can get 50 people there with mining/digging/ fighting equipment and then it will be interesting to see how easy it is to get high resolution maps "of the land 10km to the East of US Mars Base 7" "geological survey of 100km surrounding Exxon drilling rig 39" etc....
It's lucky you made you clear you were interested in which open-source information and reference site(s) slashdotters couldn't live without. I'm really not sure I'd like to know about some of the other sites people here visit on a regular basis ....
--"Why isn't the Open University (the UK's largest in number of students) included? Its independent teaching quality assessment is 5th in the country, above Oxford." Louis De La Foret, Milton Keynes
-Because it caters entirely for distance learners, several of the measures in The Times table - notably those which measure spending on libraries and other facilities - do not apply to the Open University. Its size would also put the OU at a considerable disadvantage in comparisons of staffing levels.
Vapourware until proven otherwise. Let's see what the working mass produced version has...
Can we have this in imperial units, this is an American website and an American space program we're talking about here...
So this date in 2018 is a great time to put people on Mars... but what about getting them back? does that mean they've got to wait there for 13/50/ 10,000 years before they can come back.... errr.... I sense a problem here....
nah, ya mean "everywhere you go there's BT", even the Americans have a kinda BT, even though their telephone boxes kinda look and work funny and they ring the wrong number for emergency services ;-)
I'd heard that pro-abortionists who've put their opinion forth on television in the USA have had death threats and occasionally get killed- is this true?
As you rightly point out, it just takes one group of people to trash it, hey in the UK lots of people got upset about the Taleban blowing up the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, but then remembered we also destroyed most of our own religious heritage through a series of political
Think in terms of not 20 years but 200, 500, or more. British Empire - couple of hundred years really. And China has proved throughout the last 3000 years it can play the long game. So it's worth making sure when power does shift, you are well thought of.
Long term colonisation of Mars would require locally grown food, and preferably not at the expense of shipping in from Earth all the resources they need to grow. Is this a step towards finding hardy life forms that can be mutated to grow in Mars, or in a hybrid Mars-Earth condition? (ie. giving plants some support but not having to create Earth conditions). Hence making the possibility of long term missions to Mars more achievable...
I agree. My dad equated the Blue E with the Internet, click on it and you can get the football scores. I moved him over to Firefox - the alpha geeks were saying its much better for Windows users to be using this, I got some of the arguments, seemed to work, so fine: less patching up for me to do on my dad's machine. My dad - well he just took my word. He's heard of viruses and security problems, doesn't really understand them. Most users don't - see the latest Pew report on users understanding of technical terms: he's just like me and the mechanic on my car:
Mechanic: you should change from a wiggley-diddly carb thingy to a blargy -wargy one, it works better and has less problems
Me: ok.
Same difference for most end users I think.
Only in the USA could it say FROM souped-up SUVs :-)
Here in the UK it would probably be FROM a bunch of lego bricks and a clockwork motor UP TO a Sinclair C5 (or possibly an Austin Mini with an Aibo gaffa-taped in)...
Some nice points made over at The Register critically commenting on wikipedia.
Wikipedia's Emergent People fail to impress readers. Makes the nice point that a bazaar might not necesarily create a better structure than a cathedral method of collating information, i.e. lots of ill-informed time rich people don't necessarily give you a great answer. I'm all for wikipedia, but I think it still needs to be treated with a certain scepticism like any other publication.
"weaponizing"??? .... for goodness sake man stop this trend of verbalizing nouns! That's what *really* worries me, semi-literate monkeys in charge of all these weapons. Couldn't he have have written something more eloquent, I don't know, even "We're not talking about turning space into a theatre of war"? Sigh.
Colour matters, as does design style. I completely agree with you that what's inside is most important, but as laptops move from office machines to home / lifestyle appliances, the external design styling of your boxes will differentiate and add sales. Just ask Apple. I'm willing to bet that a sizeable percentage of Apple sales happen because their computers look cool. You might laugh but to be honest I think computer functionality is topping out for most people, laptops are much of a muchness powerwise, and once you've hit reliability, well you choose the one you like the look of. Even Henry Ford gave up on telling people they could have any colour so long as it was black....
Has anybody done a UK version of find - a - person? would be really useful...
Who can buy your data? here in the UK we have some protection (Data Protection Act) but there's still lots of holes and most of the time if you sign up for anything (free gift offer, airmiles, etc) there's a tiny little box which says "tick here if you don't mind us sharing your data" (it used to be "tick here if you don't want us to share your data" but the law was changed). So if you've ever signed up for anything, chances are somebody has bought and sold your data. Credit reference agencies also buy and sell your data from the electoral register. Not sure who can buy access to your SSN in your country.
If you were a vegetarian since before Maggie Thatcher and her chums decided to allow farmers to feed cows on recycled other cows, you'd not have eaten meat with the higher level of CJD infection - I think ? At least that's what I'm hoping :-)
The crack? votes, and money. Telling people they can phone 911 when they are in the subway makes people feel good, means they'll vote for the councillors who made this happen. Plus money, it's a free market economy. X million commuters a day on the subways, how much income is that if each of them makes a 10 cent phone call? I shouldn't be suprised if the phone companies weighed in to help make it happen.
"mass casualty environment"
I call it "going shopping", or "going on the subway to meet up with some friends". I think you should ease off those FPS games
Samhuinn/ Samhain - Celtic Quarter Day: "The Samhuinn Festival serves the seasonally opposite role to Beltane. It was the Celtic New Year, although its practice far precedes the Celtic culture. It marked the end of summer and the time to bring herds in from summer pastures to lowland fields and enclosures for protection. With the signs of approaching winter, it is understandable that the festival should have a strong association with death. The trees are bare and the land barren of the earlier vegetation - nature itself seems to be dying.
Thus it was believed that this was the night of the dead - a time for the spirits of the departed from the previous year to pay one last visit to their relatives before departing for the other-world forever. Also taking advantage of this closeness between the land of the living and the dead were the mischievous and malevolent spirits of the underworld, and measures had to be taken to protect against their pranks. Thus evolved the tradition of modern Hallowe'en to wear masks - originally to disguise oneself against the unwanted attentions of spirits and faeries.
Another Samhuinn tradition was a market fair held in the nearest trading centre. This was a chance to settle business, to trade livestock and produce of the autumn and to revel with friends for one last time before the winter conditions made travel too difficult. Amongst the entertainments were the Goloshan Plays. The main theme of these ancient narratives was the battle between light and dark, summer and winter. The two characters fight to the death, winter overcoming summer as inevitably as the seasons, but the medicine-man steps in to revive the summer figure, thus ensuring the return of spring and light."
So in the three years, as well as learning how to teach they also learn about all the topics they have to cover (I don't know, ten or twelve?), so each subject area probably doesn't get that long. Any wonder that kids may only get rudimentary skills in computing? Not sure what the solution is - probably - spend more money on schools, pay teachers more, increase the respect that teachers get so more high quality students want to become the next generation of teachers?
cheers! You learn something every day... I never did get much beyond Macbeth with Shakespeare....
As for the whole Olympic selling-off-of-words-and-banning-the-use-of, well hey, slashdot is home to libertarian capitalism right? Free market rules and all that? you wanted it, you got it. I'm a bit disappointed in Ken (Livingstone) myself, hope he makes a bit of noise. What's going to happen to my favourite chip sho, the Golden Fish Bar?