Some of these still exist! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Park_Railway
Google for "Children's Railway Kiev". It's a working thing here in Kiev in an excellent condition. I love it.
Children's Railways of the Former USSR
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty obviously I'm the professor, right? The assignment is WiFi AP points and attacking authentication. It's in the syllabus (signed, sealed and approved all the way up to VC). Attacking the institutional access points would definitely not be okay. Where do you suppose professional, dedicated IT staff come from?
Look, I'm sure whatever beef you have with IT staff and admin policy is completely well-founded. But comparing the children's railway to IT limitations preventing graduate students from running their own WiFi networks is absolutely ridiculous. University IT has lots of good reasons for centralizing the administration and allocation of WiFi networks that have nothing to do with "children" (30 year olds) not being "res…
[deleted]
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty obviously I'm the professor, right? The assignment is WiFi AP points and attacking authentication. It's in the syllabus (signed, sealed and approved all the way up to VC). Attacking the institutional access points would definitely not be okay. Where do you suppose professional, dedicated IT staff come from?
Look, I'm sure whatever beef you have with IT staff and admin policy is completely well-founded. But comparing the children's railway to IT limitations preventing graduate students from running their own WiFi networks is absolutely ridiculous. University IT has lots of good reasons for centralizing the administration and allocation of WiFi networks that have nothing to do with "children" (30 year olds) not being "res…
This is a complex area that I can't sensibly respond to in this forum.
But JFYI I have written counter-policy documents and popular articles
[1] that sparked investigations into how ITC is managed in educational
institutions.
Things do need to change.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#64I think this will be the last time that I see a website listing an ICQ number to contact the author. Does that network even operate?
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#65In "Ender's Game", Scott Card uses his smart children to echo the same sentiment: treat children as if they were miniature human beings!
Yes, but there it is so children will take responsibilities that adults wish to avoid.
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#66I think that most of those railroads have nothing to do with children operation - it was just a narrow gouge standard railway for less intensive commuting, some specific industrial purposes (like bringing fresh cut wood from forest or clay from careers) or even military (railroad system build around Vilnius during Polish rule in 1930's to provide ammunition to underground forts) and some was built way before soviet union occupied Baltics.
In Lithuania this narrow gouge standard is called "Siaurukas" (eng. "narrowy") and some parts are still being operated as a tourist attraction [1][2]
[1] https://siaurukas.eu/en/history/ [2] https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siaurasis_gele%C5%BEinkelis
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#67I think that most of those railroads have nothing to do with children operation - it was just a narrow gouge standard railway for less intensive commuting, some specific industrial purposes (like bringing fresh cut wood from forest or clay from careers) or even military (railroad system build around Vilnius during Polish rule in 1930's to provide ammunition to underground forts) and some was built way before soviet u…
> I think that most of those railroads have nothing to do with children operation
Except they are operated literally by the children? And many of them have 'Children's' in the name?
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#68> A children's railway or pioneer railway is an extracurricular educational institution, where teenagers interested in rail transport can learn railway professions. This phenomenon originated in the USSR and was greatly developed in Soviet times. The world's first children's railway was opened in Gorky Park, Moscow,[1] in 1932. At the breakup of the USSR, 52 children's railways existed in the country.
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#69I actually rode a local museum steam railway this weekend where 6 of 8 staff members were children aged 10 to 15-ish - the driver and head conductor were adults.
They seemed to do their tasks quite well. And they took them dead serius. Felt kinda strange having a 10yo in uniform with a serius face marking your ticket.
Re: Children's Railways of the Former USSR
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, and a lot of them lived back when being accused of heresy by the church was literally a death sentence. So again, not exactly an environment that fostered critical thinking, certainly one that punished speaking out against the church in any sort of way. Galileo, for example, was condemned on his death bed by the pope and buried in an unceremoniously small room next to the novice's chapel for almost 100 years bef…
Thomas Aquinas (just to name one) was a scholar of the highest order and was absolutely not just pretending to be a Christian. It’s a strange worldview to imagine that Christianity provided no academic contributions to the world. To some extent, it invented academics. This is more or less z I am not a Christian and was for a long time a fairly militant atheist - but this point is historical fact.
Thomas Aquinas was a theologian, working purely within the circular Christian scholastic system to talk, essentially, about nothing. Where he did talk about concrete things (ethics, politics, even economics) he simply argued based on his religious dogmas. Meh, not very interesting.
> To some extent, it invented academics.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Keep in mind Christians were responsible for the destroying huge amounts of books, temples, and cultural artifacts after they took power in the Roman Empire. The amount of knowledge lost to the murderous hands of Christian monks is incalculable. It was only really after the 10th century that Christian monks began to preserve and translate the classics to Latin (the common picture we have of the monk painstakingly hand-copying the classics to preserve them).