"It's extremely pretentious and arrogant to try to 'protect' another adult from something you think could harm them."
It's called 'society'. Different places have different rules, but pretty well everywhere in the world groups of humans have agreed social rules that override individual choice because as a group, the people have decided where the boundaries lie. Cross the boundaries, and the rest of the people, or some representatives, will pull you back, or even forbid you to cross the boundaries in the first place.
In some places it's injecting heroin, other places drinking alcohol, or firing guns without a licence, or driving a motor vehicle without proving you can pass a test the other people have agreed upon. But most places have these rules agreed by the wider society. Partly to protect people from themselves, and partly to prevent them harming others.
Part of being human is being sensitive enough to realise screwing up other people's lives for your own pleasure is not a good thing, that we are social animals, and to win other people's goodwill for the time when we need their help, we shouldn't ignore their concerns.
Communal groups of humans try to minimise the damage individuals who don't have that sensitivity by restricting them from going too crazy.
There are a few places in the world where there are no boundaries on individuals doing what ever they want, but not many.
"Emigration" supposes the potential for returning: previous emigrants have always known that they have the possibility to walk back to their place of departure, or pay for passage on a ship going back home. They have the capacity to achieve a return if they really want to do this. Mars One strikes me as more similar to a shipwreck, where participants know they do not have the ability to return home even if they want to. How will you manage their psychological well being?
Also, what resources do you have in reserve to keep providing your participants with resources from Earth if their own resources fail and they are completely dependent on Earth supplies? How long can you supply them for? Can you provide support for up to 50 years / their natural lifetimes?
Interesting. Do you have a reference or proof? would like to find out more, e.g. usual volume of release of oil on to the market compared to what you see happening now. cheers.
Given that Mickey Mouse is still successfully covered by copyright/patent etc. I think the lawyers for Tetris will argue that they are just following precedence and would like at least another 50 years protection.....
The more people working on manned space flight, the more likely we'll solve the problems and make interplanetary and even interstellar travel a realistic possibility. I'm all for this. Having more groups with space capacity also means more chances of helping each other in case of emergencies. Plus to be selfish it's more likely I might get to have a go sometime in the next few decades:-)
Perhaps there's a split between engineering fields and pure science fields? In pure science, everybody seems really happy when international collaborations happen and results are shared, and junior scientists are supported by more senior ones from other places. But with (space) engineering, there seems to be more of a nationalist / us vs. them attitude? Any thoughts on why? Perhaps it is more to do with applied vs. theoretic progress in a field? nobody wants the other guys to make money/ get military advantage?
Bad analogy with Australia - Australia already had a population for many thousands of years when the British came along on and used a small corner of the place as a penal colony. Probably will probably upset a few Aussies who can trace their ancestors back more than a few hundred years on the continent.
Perhaps itwbennett either has a 1970s history book on Australia or is one of those crazy ultra-right wing white Australians who really still believe nobody was on that continent before the British turned up with a flag?
Trouble with the Oyster card, it's the forcing of costs onto the passenger. Previously, I only had to give London Transport my money when I actually travelled. Until that point, the money was in my pocket, for me to use as I want.
Now with Oyster cards, I either get charged an extortionate rate for maintaining that privilege (buying higher priced paper tickets), or I have to get credit on my Oyster card that I might not use for a while. My money, given to London Transport, to use as an interest free loan.
As a non-Londoner, I've got maybe ten pounds on a card that's tied up til next time I visit London. Add up the couple of million people who use the tube regularly and consider each of them has a few pounds spare credit on their Oyster cards and pretty soon you'll see that LondonTransport has done something pretty canny: getting 20 million or more GBP interest free loans from the public... and that's not to count the classic big bank win of another big chunk of money that they've effectively got for free from all those unused and lost Oyster cards owned and never to be used again by occasional users / tourists. How may tourists visit London and leave with a pound or two left on their Oyster card and just write it off?
Very canny way of getting additional funding in micropayments from millions of people.
UK road signs were changed to their current style after testing in 1958, there's a nice summary on the BBC. This new mixed upper and lower case style became legally required on 01 January 1965.
So yes indeed, typographical designers understood this in the UK quite a while before it was a widely discussed computer interface debate..
How much do you charge for an hour's work? If you were doing a Master's degree, and were hoping for high quality feedback on the work you'd laboured over, and handed in, representing your highest quality academic achievements, what sort of feedback would you like?
Probably you'd like somebody with some knowledge of your field to spend 30 minutes looking over your major assignments and give you some personalised feedback (rather than "78%, v.good").
So how many major assignments should a real, high quality Master's degree include? Let's call it 6 in one year (=3 hours personalised marking) and an extended dissertation? How long should somebody spend reading your 10-20,000 words? a couple of hours at least I'd hope. Now we're up to up to 5 hours marking and feedback on your work.
How much are you going to pay them? 10 dollars / 7GBP an hour? or do you need more pay for a decent marker?
I reckon the maths only add up to automated marking, students, or MaccyD wages for the supervision of a 100 dollar Masters student.
I'd be cautious of hiring people who weren't adequately checked before starting their course and only had Maccy D mimimum wage quality supervision of their work, and automated pass/fail decisions based on this.
Why can't you open something called Luxor in New York? There's been a Luxor in Egypt for over 4000 years. Or will Las Vegas sue the Egyptians for prior art?
Would folk in Las Vegas sue a businessman in Luxor if he opened a casino in Luxor called the Luxor casino?
Americans have done it before in Las Vegas. Hilarious experience experience for people to visit if they are coming from the original places to find tourist copies of their home landmarks etc.
Heck, in America there are re-enactment societies going the whole way and dressing up like folk from European middle ages etc.
I am surprised some US lawyer isn't sueing the Chinese for prior art;-)
Really - is it news that some place has built replica sites for the tourists closer to home? Impressive if they've built a whole village but I reckon the original folks back home will just find it funny, and be mildly impressed that somebody is so keen to offer an experience of their town for tourists that can't afford to visit the original.
Probably been happening since the beginning of history. Check out architecture, for millenia people wanting a taste of a more exotic or to their minds more impressive culture have been copying other countries' architecture and building grand places in foreign styles. Where do you think the ideas for the columns on the White House originated from? A few ancient Greeks might recognise the style...
My guess is regulations. Have to prove the equipment is safe to operate.
Can be a good thing, you don't want rockets blowing up and crashing into populated areas, you don't want people paying for a tourist ride and dying regularly (particularly in a country so partial to lawyers as the USA). Perhaps the different flight paths make a big difference.
I'll let an air regulations expert take over from here - I don't know if Rutan and Musk have to satisfy different regulations because the SpaceX rocket is aimed to descend into the ocean hundreds of miles off US territory while Rutan's flights all happen over US land, and hence the process is less arduous for Musk's SpaceX team, or whether there are other factors involved.
A hundred years ago people went up in crazy stringbags for their first flight and quite a few died. The differences are that we are not so accepting of pilot and passenger deaths these days, but also that the fallout will be more significant and could hurt a lot more innocent bystanders. 50mph canvas and wood airframes are less likely to injure or kill people in the next town than modern multi-ton high speed rocket systems.
Could be that its the management culture in these organisations as well. Your default position as a contractor is not to risk falling out with management, particularly if you are looking to extend your contract or persuade the employer to give you a follow on contract. I should imagine that's even more the case if your visa is in some way linked to your work (and losing it might mean going back to a place where you can't get comparable paid work, and perhaps even have debts incurred to get you to the USA in the first place needing to be paid off). So contractors tend to come into organisations with their heads down. You'd be stupid to be seen to disagree with management if it will lose you your job and your right to stay in the country. Even if it is a discussion over some technical issue, and you as the contractor know your way is better than the management's idea, is it worth rocking the boat? Go along with what the big man believes and he can take the flak if it all goes wrong, you were just following orders (and will continue to get paid).
If management expect a compliant workforce, then I can see this will be self-reinforcing.
Seems to me that "Democrat" or "Republican" are USA-specific terms - not sure what's 'global' about that bias?;-)
Not much use exploring articles about political biases in civil rights articles in the UK using "Democrat" and "Republican" as terms. "Labour", "Scottish National Party", "Plaid Cymru","Liberal" , and "Conservative" (amongst others) might be more useful.
Ok, so I guess it is a good test of an example, whether USA specific articles on the English language have a political bias. Not sure it says much about UK articles (won't be much reference to these terms there as we have neither of those parties) , not sure if those US named parties exist in other countries either.
Can somebody with more knowledge ofthe US legal system explain what appears to be a tiny penalty for crashing into and permanently disabling two people? I would have expected a more serious punishment.
Is this a typical punishment for this kind of crime?
Bottom line: if you want the US government to fund it, they need to find the money.
They get money by taxing US citizens.
Will the people of the USA agree to higher taxes to fund this?
My suspicion is that while the majority of US slashdot readers might pay an extra 100 dollars a year to help fund it, most US citizens wouldn't agree to this tax rise.
They might all agree to cut 100 dollars off some other government expenditure, but my suspicion is that it would be a total nightmare to get them to all agree on one thing to cut by say, 100 dollars a year. Some would want cuts to the military, old folk might want cuts to children's services, young folk might want cuts to older folks services, and so on....
Here in the UK we have no adverts on BBC channels. BBC quality seems to be ok. It is true though that in the UK you have to pay an annual TV licence (approx 150 US dollars), that's how they pay for Doctor Who, the documentaries, rights to show Hollywood films (with no commercial breaks of course), and production costs for all the other programmes they make. I reckon BBC programme quality is pretty reasonable on the whole though.
Shipping end-of-life hardware and dumping it in rural and small town schools does not make a sustainable or well thought out pedagogical approach to providing computer science training to 11-18 year olds.
Africa is full of rusting unsupported hardware like tractors. We don't need to join that model with a bunch of out of date PCs and servers.
Teachers are very busy people. They can't drop everything because The Great Google Engineer has come in to town.They have lessons to plan, kids to teach, exams to get students through.
Start with a well thought out teaching and learning programme that fits in to the national curriculum and provides a parthway to vocational or university level education. Once you've written this, then send in the trainers and the appropriate hardware.
Don't forget we have 25,000 schools you have to cover.
Breaking news at 11! UK Defence secretary says we must spend more money on defence and other military things! Demands greater slice of government budget!
Coming up shortly on this channel - Health minister argues more must be spent on hospitals, Rural Affairs spokesman demands urgent spending on rural schools, says education of rural kids being neglected.
The idea of stimulating competition between employees is not new, nor is giving out "badges" such as plaques, trophies, other ritual and non-monetary icons that can be displayed to demonstrate one's prowess in front of other members of staff (e.g. "salesman of the year" "long service award").
I am not a researcher of workplace environments (IANAROWE?) but I should imagine there is a lot of written research on employee motivation, competition, and so forth.
In theory the Queen can use the Royal Prerogative but she doesn't really do so, RP is devolved to her ministers. On paper she waves RP, but actually she just goes along with the elected Parliament's decisions. Looking at your link, the last time it was used by royalty to refuse to enact a bill was 308 years ago.
No comment on royalism vs republicanism, just to point out that the hereditary head of states here don't tend to explicitly do politics these days (say, the last 100 years or so).
Oh man, using an infinity symbol probably seemed such a cool idea when the high tech-ness of it all impressed the authorities. But you know it's going to be a pain when the next generation of even more high tech even more whizzy road vehicles comes along. Oh heck, they'll need plates with "Infinity plus one" . Doh! Bad idea:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"It's extremely pretentious and arrogant to try to 'protect' another adult from something you think could harm them."
It's called 'society'. Different places have different rules, but pretty well everywhere in the world groups of humans have agreed social rules that override individual choice because as a group, the people have decided where the boundaries lie. Cross the boundaries, and the rest of the people, or some representatives, will pull you back, or even forbid you to cross the boundaries in the first place.
In some places it's injecting heroin, other places drinking alcohol, or firing guns without a licence, or driving a motor vehicle without proving you can pass a test the other people have agreed upon. But most places have these rules agreed by the wider society. Partly to protect people from themselves, and partly to prevent them harming others.
Part of being human is being sensitive enough to realise screwing up other people's lives for your own pleasure is not a good thing, that we are social animals, and to win other people's goodwill for the time when we need their help, we shouldn't ignore their concerns.
Communal groups of humans try to minimise the damage individuals who don't have that sensitivity by restricting them from going too crazy.
There are a few places in the world where there are no boundaries on individuals doing what ever they want, but not many.
"Emigration" supposes the potential for returning: previous emigrants have always known that they have the possibility to walk back to their place of departure, or pay for passage on a ship going back home. They have the capacity to achieve a return if they really want to do this. Mars One strikes me as more similar to a shipwreck, where participants know they do not have the ability to return home even if they want to. How will you manage their psychological well being?
Also, what resources do you have in reserve to keep providing your participants with resources from Earth if their own resources fail and they are completely dependent on Earth supplies? How long can you supply them for? Can you provide support for up to 50 years / their natural lifetimes?
Interesting. Do you have a reference or proof? would like to find out more, e.g. usual volume of release of oil on to the market compared to what you see happening now. cheers.
Given that Mickey Mouse is still successfully covered by copyright/patent etc. I think the lawyers for Tetris will argue that they are just following precedence and would like at least another 50 years protection.....
The more people working on manned space flight, the more likely we'll solve the problems and make interplanetary and even interstellar travel a realistic possibility. I'm all for this. Having more groups with space capacity also means more chances of helping each other in case of emergencies. Plus to be selfish it's more likely I might get to have a go sometime in the next few decades :-)
Perhaps there's a split between engineering fields and pure science fields? In pure science, everybody seems really happy when international collaborations happen and results are shared, and junior scientists are supported by more senior ones from other places. But with (space) engineering, there seems to be more of a nationalist / us vs. them attitude? Any thoughts on why? Perhaps it is more to do with applied vs. theoretic progress in a field? nobody wants the other guys to make money/ get military advantage?
Bad analogy with Australia - Australia already had a population for many thousands of years when the British came along on and used a small corner of the place as a penal colony. Probably will probably upset a few Aussies who can trace their ancestors back more than a few hundred years on the continent.
Perhaps itwbennett either has a 1970s history book on Australia or is one of those crazy ultra-right wing white Australians who really still believe nobody was on that continent before the British turned up with a flag?
Trouble with the Oyster card, it's the forcing of costs onto the passenger. Previously, I only had to give London Transport my money when I actually travelled. Until that point, the money was in my pocket, for me to use as I want.
Now with Oyster cards, I either get charged an extortionate rate for maintaining that privilege (buying higher priced paper tickets), or I have to get credit on my Oyster card that I might not use for a while. My money, given to London Transport, to use as an interest free loan.
As a non-Londoner, I've got maybe ten pounds on a card that's tied up til next time I visit London. Add up the couple of million people who use the tube regularly and consider each of them has a few pounds spare credit on their Oyster cards and pretty soon you'll see that LondonTransport has done something pretty canny: getting 20 million or more GBP interest free loans from the public... and that's not to count the classic big bank win of another big chunk of money that they've effectively got for free from all those unused and lost Oyster cards owned and never to be used again by occasional users / tourists. How may tourists visit London and leave with a pound or two left on their Oyster card and just write it off?
Very canny way of getting additional funding in micropayments from millions of people.
UK road signs were changed to their current style after testing in 1958, there's a nice summary on the BBC. This new mixed upper and lower case style became legally required on 01 January 1965.
So yes indeed, typographical designers understood this in the UK quite a while before it was a widely discussed computer interface debate..
How much do you charge for an hour's work? If you were doing a Master's degree, and were hoping for high quality feedback on the work you'd laboured over, and handed in, representing your highest quality academic achievements, what sort of feedback would you like?
Probably you'd like somebody with some knowledge of your field to spend 30 minutes looking over your major assignments and give you some personalised feedback (rather than "78%, v.good").
So how many major assignments should a real, high quality Master's degree include? Let's call it 6 in one year (=3 hours personalised marking) and an extended dissertation? How long should somebody spend reading your 10-20,000 words? a couple of hours at least I'd hope. Now we're up to up to 5 hours marking and feedback on your work.
How much are you going to pay them? 10 dollars / 7GBP an hour? or do you need more pay for a decent marker?
I reckon the maths only add up to automated marking, students, or MaccyD wages for the supervision of a 100 dollar Masters student.
I'd be cautious of hiring people who weren't adequately checked before starting their course and only had Maccy D mimimum wage quality supervision of their work, and automated pass/fail decisions based on this.
Why can't you open something called Luxor in New York? There's been a Luxor in Egypt for over 4000 years. Or will Las Vegas sue the Egyptians for prior art?
Would folk in Las Vegas sue a businessman in Luxor if he opened a casino in Luxor called the Luxor casino?
Americans have done it before in Las Vegas. Hilarious experience experience for people to visit if they are coming from the original places to find tourist copies of their home landmarks etc.
Heck, in America there are re-enactment societies going the whole way and dressing up like folk from European middle ages etc.
I am surprised some US lawyer isn't sueing the Chinese for prior art ;-)
Really - is it news that some place has built replica sites for the tourists closer to home? Impressive if they've built a whole village but I reckon the original folks back home will just find it funny, and be mildly impressed that somebody is so keen to offer an experience of their town for tourists that can't afford to visit the original.
Probably been happening since the beginning of history. Check out architecture, for millenia people wanting a taste of a more exotic or to their minds more impressive culture have been copying other countries' architecture and building grand places in foreign styles. Where do you think the ideas for the columns on the White House originated from? A few ancient Greeks might recognise the style...
My guess is regulations. Have to prove the equipment is safe to operate.
Can be a good thing, you don't want rockets blowing up and crashing into populated areas, you don't want people paying for a tourist ride and dying regularly (particularly in a country so partial to lawyers as the USA). Perhaps the different flight paths make a big difference.
I'll let an air regulations expert take over from here - I don't know if Rutan and Musk have to satisfy different regulations because the SpaceX rocket is aimed to descend into the ocean hundreds of miles off US territory while Rutan's flights all happen over US land, and hence the process is less arduous for Musk's SpaceX team, or whether there are other factors involved.
A hundred years ago people went up in crazy stringbags for their first flight and quite a few died. The differences are that we are not so accepting of pilot and passenger deaths these days, but also that the fallout will be more significant and could hurt a lot more innocent bystanders. 50mph canvas and wood airframes are less likely to injure or kill people in the next town than modern multi-ton high speed rocket systems.
Could be that its the management culture in these organisations as well. Your default position as a contractor is not to risk falling out with management, particularly if you are looking to extend your contract or persuade the employer to give you a follow on contract. I should imagine that's even more the case if your visa is in some way linked to your work (and losing it might mean going back to a place where you can't get comparable paid work, and perhaps even have debts incurred to get you to the USA in the first place needing to be paid off). So contractors tend to come into organisations with their heads down. You'd be stupid to be seen to disagree with management if it will lose you your job and your right to stay in the country. Even if it is a discussion over some technical issue, and you as the contractor know your way is better than the management's idea, is it worth rocking the boat? Go along with what the big man believes and he can take the flak if it all goes wrong, you were just following orders (and will continue to get paid).
If management expect a compliant workforce, then I can see this will be self-reinforcing.
thanks - clear summary without a political rant!
cheers :-)
Seems to me that "Democrat" or "Republican" are USA-specific terms - not sure what's 'global' about that bias? ;-)
Not much use exploring articles about political biases in civil rights articles in the UK using "Democrat" and "Republican" as terms. "Labour", "Scottish National Party", "Plaid Cymru","Liberal" , and "Conservative" (amongst others) might be more useful.
Ok, so I guess it is a good test of an example, whether USA specific articles on the English language have a political bias. Not sure it says much about UK articles (won't be much reference to these terms there as we have neither of those parties) , not sure if those US named parties exist in other countries either.
Peer reviewed reference please. Or I'll just claim you're making it up.
Can somebody with more knowledge ofthe US legal system explain what appears to be a tiny penalty for crashing into and permanently disabling two people? I would have expected a more serious punishment.
Is this a typical punishment for this kind of crime?
Bottom line: if you want the US government to fund it, they need to find the money.
They get money by taxing US citizens.
Will the people of the USA agree to higher taxes to fund this?
My suspicion is that while the majority of US slashdot readers might pay an extra 100 dollars a year to help fund it, most US citizens wouldn't agree to this tax rise.
They might all agree to cut 100 dollars off some other government expenditure, but my suspicion is that it would be a total nightmare to get them to all agree on one thing to cut by say, 100 dollars a year. Some would want cuts to the military, old folk might want cuts to children's services, young folk might want cuts to older folks services, and so on....
Here in the UK we have no adverts on BBC channels. BBC quality seems to be ok. It is true though that in the UK you have to pay an annual TV licence (approx 150 US dollars), that's how they pay for Doctor Who, the documentaries, rights to show Hollywood films (with no commercial breaks of course), and production costs for all the other programmes they make. I reckon BBC programme quality is pretty reasonable on the whole though.
Shipping end-of-life hardware and dumping it in rural and small town schools does not make a sustainable or well thought out pedagogical approach to providing computer science training to 11-18 year olds.
Africa is full of rusting unsupported hardware like tractors. We don't need to join that model with a bunch of out of date PCs and servers.
Teachers are very busy people. They can't drop everything because The Great Google Engineer has come in to town.They have lessons to plan, kids to teach, exams to get students through.
Start with a well thought out teaching and learning programme that fits in to the national curriculum and provides a parthway to vocational or university level education. Once you've written this, then send in the trainers and the appropriate hardware.
Don't forget we have 25,000 schools you have to cover.
Breaking news at 11! UK Defence secretary says we must spend more money on defence and other military things! Demands greater slice of government budget!
Coming up shortly on this channel - Health minister argues more must be spent on hospitals, Rural Affairs spokesman demands urgent spending on rural schools, says education of rural kids being neglected.
which unused bus lanes? the ones in Hackney have buses in them. Which ones do you mean?
The idea of stimulating competition between employees is not new, nor is giving out "badges" such as plaques, trophies, other ritual and non-monetary icons that can be displayed to demonstrate one's prowess in front of other members of staff (e.g. "salesman of the year" "long service award").
I am not a researcher of workplace environments (IANAROWE?) but I should imagine there is a lot of written research on employee motivation, competition, and so forth.
In theory the Queen can use the Royal Prerogative but she doesn't really do so, RP is devolved to her ministers. On paper she waves RP, but actually she just goes along with the elected Parliament's decisions. Looking at your link, the last time it was used by royalty to refuse to enact a bill was 308 years ago.
No comment on royalism vs republicanism, just to point out that the hereditary head of states here don't tend to explicitly do politics these days (say, the last 100 years or so).
Oh man, using an infinity symbol probably seemed such a cool idea when the high tech-ness of it all impressed the authorities. But you know it's going to be a pain when the next generation of even more high tech even more whizzy road vehicles comes along. Oh heck, they'll need plates with "Infinity plus one" . Doh! Bad idea :-)