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Of course you are right that counting funtions or objects and methods if you are doing c++ would be a better metric but that was not in the artical.

Actually I wasn't talking about counting functions or objects, I was talking about counting function points, which are a more accurate software metric used for estimations:

If you're a software developer, you should check out function points even just to know they exist as a better alternative to LOC.

Selling chunks of spectrum as limited resources to the highest bidder is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. This would make an even more hostile environment to software & cognitive radios. Frequency bands are _not_ a limited resource. Just stop using dumb radios!

I started my online life with a 486 laptop with 8 MB running Windows 3.1. Browsing with IE, Netscape and Opera (the fastest). Even ran a web server, Wsplug, to server my first homepages.

This 400 MHz K6 laptop with 160 MB is blazingly fast with Firefox (or whatever it's called this week), almost overkill :)

Another proposal in that linked document did result in a related early US innovation which was unknown at the time but is now universally standard: decimal money. I suspect the UK was one of the last nations to give up non-decimal currency partially because we colonials were the ones who came up with it.

If you can get access to both sides of the river, you could try rigging up a floating power generator. They seem easier to home-brew than a turbine, and are probably accordingly less efficient.

There is a company in britaing that specializes in this kind of generator - one application that it lends itself to is water pumping from bodies that have a deep draft and a large amount of excess flow.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/throptone nergy/

I know that these are available from other places as well, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't make something like this yourself if you have a little motivation...

learning STUPID USELESS DRILLS in grade school is something that the education profession should be UTTERLY ASHAMED of. Why do students not learn about set theory and relationships early on?

Decades ago, people with those kinds of opinions experimentally reformed elementary education.

It was called "New Math", and it was a fiasco.
(link has a strong negative bias)

It turns out that for most students, addition and multiplication are all they'll really need, and set theory is wasted on them.

I think you'll find that, over the past 200 or so years, this guy has led to more bloodshed than anyone else. Your guy just doesn't even hit the top 100.

The stereo AM radio story actually illustrates the reverse of your point- the market was forced into FM stereo by legal restrictions, and the market had inertia to stay there even after the ban was lifted.

If the US Government bans the sale of a specific product, like Stereo AM radio, it can and has resulted in a market demanding an inferior but established product (FM Stereo) instead of a superior product which is unestablished due to government interference (AM Stereo.)

The parallel to HDTV is clear: if alternative products of similar quality are unavailable for long enough due to FCC interference, people will settle on HDTV as the de facto standard just as they settled on FM stereo.

Going way off topic but wishing to enlighten said reader. Gary Glitter is a British pop star who turned dirty bastard... two sites you can visit the official "I didn't do anything Guv" site, and the "I know what you did you dirty bastard" site... hope that helps! Probably not...

Found it, finally. The authority for the private party (record labels) to raid Sharman's various offices came from something called an Anton Piller order. The would-be raiders go before the court, lay out their accusation of copyright infringement, and then explain that the evidence may be removed if the soon-to-be defendant learns of the raid before it happens. If the court buys it, the court issues an order stating that the raid can take place and what the conditions are going to be. The order gets its name from a 1976 court case called Anton Pillar KG. v. Manufacturing Processes Ltd. et al. [1976] R.P.C. 719, which was the first time a court issued such an order.

Maybe they don't want people to have access to it because the hardware could be used for other things than just wireless LAN.

Depending on the hardware, who knows maybe someone could even implement GSM/PCS on it. Whatever may be the case, having access to hardware like this would allow people to play around with it.

What is SDR?
GNU SDR implementation

Does anyone remember C-Net, a rather common and rather annoying BBS program for the Commodore 64?

I'm sure there were still some C-Net BBS's running when someone decided to use the name as an Internet news/download site. When I first heard of www.cnet.com, I wondered "Why bring a bad BBS into the Internet era?"

I guess this would interest you too. BTW, have you read "Le Ton Beau de Marot" by Hofstadter?

In 1977, Xerox adopted Systran for internal translations by creating a Multinational Customized English that's easier to translate. [1]

In 1930, C.K. Ogden proposed a tiny version of English: just 850 words that could be learned in a few months and used to say anything. He called it Basic English (BE). [2] [3]

1. basic english
2. machine translation
3. xerox systran

JOTTO is also good for two people, sort of like MASTERMIND with words instead of colors.

Not much.

Part of what makes reprocessing so bad is the hazards of handling the radioactive materials involved. The processing involved in Np-237 Pu-238 production is vastly different. The hazard from fission-product is essentially nil, because there is no fission product involved. But Pu-238 is 247 times more toxic (by weight) than Pu-239. Both Pu-238 and Pu-239 are routinely handled with rubber gloves because the radiation is so non-penetrating.

And again, a less energetic and toxic source could be used. Plutonium just happens to work the best. If better atomic generators could be invented, we could potentially extract tremendous amounts of energy from lightly radioactive materials. RTGs are damn near 40 years old! We haven't done anything but sit on them! (Well, save for the Plutonium in pace makers.)

Not only was he a character in Tim Burton's "Ed Wood", he was a real life prognositcator.

He made some rather funny predictions that can now be tested, since the target date has past. I wouldn't be surprised if 'Moon-based Power Plants' was indeed a Criswell prediction.

See this Criswell page or this one for some details.

Something similar happened in Canada during WW1; December 6th, 1917 to be exact.

"The Mont Blanc, a French steamer, was 330 feet long and 40 feet wide. Her cargo of explosives was bound for the fighting in Europe by way of Bordeaux, France. And what a cargo it was...! The manifest of the Mont Blanc reads like a chemistry experiment:
2300 tons of wet and dry picric acid;
200 tons of TNT;
35 tons of benzol (stored on the open decks); and
10 tons of gun cotton."

CBC even has a $ value breakdown, roughly 3.6 million US 1917 dollars -- an amazing amount to explode in Halifax harbour.

Nice details + pictures here..also, another page detailing the timeline and some injuries.

Erm... Are you talking tons or KILOtons here? Are you sure that that explosion was 2.5 kton (about 1e13 Joules, and about 1/6th of the Little Boy bomb at Hiroshima), and not 2.5 ton (about 1e10 Joules, and about 1/6000th of the Hiroshima bomb)?

According to this site, the amount of TNT that exploded was "only" 200 tons, but there was also 2,300 tons of picric acid. So, I'm not sure the impact of the acid is, but even if only TNT exploded, it's still a lot more than a 2.5 ton explosion.

...or the Halifax, Nova Scotia disaster in 1917.

Actually, if you read the Compuserve Web Page, you will see that "Since February 1998, CompuServe has been a wholly owned subsidiary of America Online, Inc."

Why do you think Compuserve became another "brainless 'tard" ISP? You didn't think they could go that wrong on their own, did you?

Your idea is on the right track, but I don't know how you could sell AOL to a company owned _by_ AOL.

Compuserve, which is wholly owned by AOL, and branded as their 'aol - lite and cheaper' ISP service? Or, will 'netscape' be the new name for 'compuserve'?

Maybe you can call it 'imperial' system because some people will categorize America as an empire.

While I can see some valid points in that argument, the whole system with inches-feet-yards, quarts-pint-gallons and ounces-pound-stones are know as the imperial system because it was the system used by the british empire, while the metric system is know as the metric system because it was developed by the french...

Considering how anti-british and pro-french the US was in it's infancy, it's surpricing that they didn't adopt the SI (System International) the second it came out - when all is said and done, Thommas Jefferson did propose a decimal based system in 1790, five years before france adopted the first metric system. In 1875, the US was one of the first nations to sign the The Convention of the Metre, which was nine years after the metric system was made legal (but not mandatory) in the US. Even so, 213 years after a US stateman suggested a system close to todays metric system, the US remains the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system, but instead insist on using an outdated system of measurements inherated from their earlier cononial overlords...

Sounds to me like the whole moon is infested with Paradroids.

(For the youngin's, here, here, and here.)

Queens University in Belfast did a studying linking your major in college with your life expectancy. Scientists and Engineers live the longest next to pre-med. Sweet.

But remember that Britain was very much the declining power at this time and the labour government was cancelling most areospace projects at the time.

Also remember that the early space programmes were the public face of ICBM programmes. It became clear that trident was going to be our nuclear deterent, so there was little point in continuing the rocketry side of things. The deterent we had in the meantime was characteristicly heath-robinson. I'm a huge fan of the 'delta lady' myself - the vulcan, but they have one of each at Duxford

From Caspian Sea or Lake: What Difference Does It Make?

"Geography. On the one hand, like most lakes, the Caspian Sea is fed by rivers and is not connected directly to the open sea. Apart from the rivers, it Is completely surrounded by land. It is below sea level.

On the other hand, unlike most lakes, the Caspian Sea is bordered by several states.(21) It is the largest inland body of water in the world,(22) comparable in size, depth and salinity (23) to many semi-enclosed marine seas.(24) Rivers feed the Caspian Sea, but do not drain it. It is possible to navigate between the Caspian Sea and the open ocean by a complex network of rivers and canals."

I'd honestly like to see a real cite (not a rant site)...

I don't see how the writings of a former Army Lieutenant Colonel and West Point instructor, on the subject of military history, quite qualifies as a "rant site". You may disagree; he may or may not be correct (I'm a hacker, not a military historian); but he's hardly "ranting".

I've seen several variations of this quote citing different wars and different percentages

Perhaps because there were different percentages in different wars?

Here's an extended quote with some names of references (I did some quick Googling and added links):

In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Paddy Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment ( The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazing, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel. In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. So, he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.

During World War II, US Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.

.. considering JRR Tolkien's history with Beowulf.

There are several threads about this from tha past week in the compuserve aquaria forum here: Aquarists & The Law

Link looks OK to me. You could try again, download the pdf version, or read below:

The smell of ultra-violet

Many things in the everyday world can have an adverse effect on a bottle of beer, but the single worst offender is simple ultra-violet (UV) light. The hops flowers that are used to add flavor to most fine beers are extremely sensitive to UV light. When exposed to UV for even a short period--as, for example, in as little as 15 minutes under fluorescent lighting in a store's cooler case or in direct sunlight-- beer promptly undergoes a chemical reaction that creates an organic compound, 3-methyl crotyl mercaptan. Not only does this not even sound like something you'd want to put in your mouth, it's actually the same compound that skunks spray to ward off foes. Hence the slang term skunky for a beer that is affected.

This is not mere hypothesis, but a well documented chemical reaction, reported most recently by the researcher Denis de Keukeliere of the State University of Ghent, Belgium, in a September 1991 article titled Photochemistry of Beer in The Spectrum, Vol. 4, Issue 2. Other scholarly journal articles on the subject go back as far as a report in the German Lehrbuch der Bierbrauerei in 1875.

What's more, you can conduct a simple test yourself. Take two bottles of a fine import (Pilsner Urquell would be a good one) out of the original packing case, to ensure that they have never been exposed to light. Keep one dark; place the other in direct sunlight--or adjacent to the fluorescents in your cooler box--for a couple of hours. Chill and open both, and taste the difference!

Remarkably, many consumers of mass-produced European lagers believe that this aroma of skunk juice in light struck beer is normal, since many of them have never tasted a fresh, unafflicted sample. Green glass bottles allow the highest transmission of UV light. Brown bottles are somewhat better, and canned and kegged beer is not in danger from ultra-violet light. The American brewers who use clear-glass bottles resort to the use of hydrogenated hop extracts instead of fresh hops, which solves the skunk problem but results in a beverage that lacks the full flavor of a natural beer.

Unfortunately, many retail display cases are illuminated by fluorescent lighting. This simple and popular marketing presentation looks attractive, but it rapidly destroys the flavor of the beers that retailers are so proudly displaying for sale.

We strongly recommend that fine beers displayed for sale in refrigerated cases not be exposed to fluorescent light. Fluorescent lighting in refrigerated cases should be turned off, at least in that portion of the display devoted to top-quality imports and American microbrewery beers. We suggest that this strategy can be turned into a marketing advantage, by the simple use of a poster or sign explaining that quality beers are best displayed in dark surroundings. This not only protects the beer, but displays the retailer's knowledge and proper care. By the same token, we recommend that fine beers on the shop floor be kept in the original sealed packing cartons.

We believe that these measures would demonstrate the kind of care for beer that makes us want to patronize a shop. As a minimum, however, we hope that any retailer would be agreeable to a connoisseur's request for a six-pack out of a closed carton in the back room rather than one that's been sitting under the lights.

For us beer geeks we would just drink beer in the sun faster. UV rays is what skunks beer.

UV interacts with the alpha acids from the hops and creates that "skunky" taste. This is why most beer bottle are brown, it blocks out most of the UV for a period of time.

This page does a a decent job of explaining what happens.

Nonetheless, this is a cool hack. Just drink it fast or leave it in the bottle/can.

Looks like there *IS* a pc (and a heavily modified Linux version) Here:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/paradroid 90/paradroid90/frames.html

Since you're keeping score on how long the US has considered yet failed to adopt a metric system, you should know that this has been true for a longer time than the metric system has been used in France. The idea of metric measurements was not totally new in 1790 either, having been proposed by a French friar over a century before.

On the other hand, a decimal monetary system was also proposed in the above document. The US was the first to nation to formally adopt decimal currency. (US currency wasn't produced until 1793, though Jefferson had proposed and there was some agreement on a decimal system of US currency as early as 1785) - an innovation which now has nearly worldwide acceptance. Even the British finally emulated the US and adopted a decimal monetary system almost 200 years later, in 1971.

{insert erroneous "Most Brits don't know obvious fact X" claim here}

What do they do with old [US] bills and coinage?

They shred the bills. And sell bales to novelty vendors, who repackage it into smaller bags with clever sayings printed on them (think we can slashdot compuserve?), who sell them to you in exchange for unshredded bills, in a process akin to perpetual motion.

Coins don't wear out very fast. What ones do, probably get melted down. In the old days, before laminated coins, they could just melt them down and make new coins with them.

Besides which, GSM mobile phones typically use they're processing power to allow them to do fast frequency hopping, etc.

Once the workers get experience with whatever they were doing, they are either moved to something else that they have no experience with, or they move to management (where they stop doing actual work). It's a vicious cycle...

It's called the Peter Principle.
It's as true today as it was back in 1969 when Dr. Laurence J. Peter first wrote his book as it is today.

It is propellant. The solid part is the fuel, and the nitrous oxide is the oxidizer. Now, it's true that N20 is a decent monopropellant as well, and these motors have been described as "fuel-assisted monopropellant rockets". The good thing about them is that both propellants are inert, and hence fairly unregulated.

But hybrids require infrastructure, which is expensive, and solids are clearly the way to enter the hobby. We really need Enzi's exemption to pass!

If you're in the US, call or fax your senator!

The hybrids are prefered for 2nd or 3rd stage int he realyl high power areana.

I wouldn't say so, hybrids are a PITA for second stages, because they need to be filled from somewhere. The only system that's half-way usable for that is probably the little-used Aerotech hybrids with their pre-filled tanks. And maybe micro-hybrids, but they don't really count...

/August.

If you can read German: This story show a possible use (and it's drawbacks) :-)

Sure, what's a mere 800 Kms against the awesome power of the plot? :^) Mind you, if I wrote a book, it'd probably be in Toronto, and if Toronto needed to be on the equator, so what! That's why James Blish invented spindizzies. (But I'd probably leave Scarborough behind to freeze.)

Actually, William Higinbotham invented the videogame while working for Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York in the 1950s. The game he invented was called "Tennis for Two" and was placed on an oscilliscope.

Interestingly, he was brought into the court battle to testify back when Magnavox (Baer's employer) and the rest were fighting over who owned the patent on the videogame. The court found that Mr. Higinbotham invented the videogame, and that since he was an employee of the U.S. Government at the time and did it as part of his job (it was part of the annual "Visitor's Day" exhibit at the Laboratory), the idea of the videogame couldn't be patented and was owned by the public.

-Joe

At the resolution necessary to resolve a LM, the moon probably is too bright.

One of the reasons you don't use eyepiece projection to photograph dim, deep-sky objects is that by adding an eyepiece, you are increasing the telescope's effective focal length, which in turn increases the focal ratio (sometimes to as much as f/30 or f/40), resulting in a dimmer image. Deep-sky photography really shouldn't be attempted with focal ratios greater than about f/12.

Boy Scouts schmoi scouts, I'm sure they mean Birmingham Small Arms.

MC5 was a rightfully underrated band beloved to Discordians and evil malcontents of any ilk.

To clear up some points people have commented on (based on a very preliminary inspection plus a lot of discussion at the conference):

1. The default save format is still .doc (ie you have to go the extra click to save in XML format)
2. If you pick to click it, the default XML format is MS's own office-document vocabulary, which retains all the formatting, held in attributes. Hairy but processable, and they will be shipping their schema for it so people can reprocess it externally. But this format will (of course) only represent the appearance, not any structure.
3. It will also let you specify your own schema (or an industry standard one) and let you supply a binding of named styles to your element types, so you can edit using what look like styles but actually get represented in the saved file as XML markup. There is some debate as to whether this constitutes "being an XML editor" or just "being a wordprocessor that saves data in XML" (my money is on the latter).
4. It will not support DTDs, so you're stuck with W3C Schemas whether you like them or not*
5. The discussion over a [more?] suitable schema/DTD for handling office documents (wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentation) continues at the OASIS TC on Open Office XML Formats **

* [Bias note] I think W3C schemas were a big mistake; provision for data content typing and validation, namespaces, and extended grouping could have been achieved by extending DTD syntax; and wimpy programmers who moan about having two syntaxes to handle should get a life - it's not a big deal, the code is free and has been in use for 15 years :-)

** Sun has donated the OpenOffice (aka StarOffice) XML file formats to the public domain. It's worth remembering that {Star|Open}Office has been saving in XML as its native format for some time now, and has a lot more experience at this than MS.

Rather than living in a sewer pipe, I'd much rather live in this underground house.

You're right to be cynical, unfortunately you're being cynical about the wrong side in this debate. The truth is that Monsanto wanted to put in a "terminator" gene to control the spread of GMOs, but the luddite/green left screamed bloody murder. They claimed that Monsanto was using this as a cynical ploy to make third-world farmers dependent on GMOs, and then starve them to death unless they paid Monsanto. Fortunately they seem to be finally coming around to the realization that a Terminator gene is actually a good idea as a result of stories like this one.

Remember, fight the powers that be.
Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters!

Read more about the 10 Point Program For Freedom
from The Chump-In-Charge

Thanks and spread the news that democracy IS possible in The United States of Amerika.

Kick out the jams, motherf$ckers!!

Read more about the 10 point program here:
MC5

Main news/defense fund, full dockets

Other defense fund page

Defense Fund merchandise

Discussion forum for the lawsuit

PetsWarehouseSucks.com (Novak bought up the .net and .org versions of this domain, by the way)

Aquatic Plants digest

Google search with many relevant results

Rec.Aquaria.Freshwater.Plants

Between all those pages, you should be able to find plenty of links to archives of the messages in question, full court documents, links to news coverage of the story, etc. etc. etc. If you have any interest in aquatic plants or planted aquariums, check the link to the Aquatic Plants mailing list, where all this began. You'll find all the original posts, plus some early discussion of the lawsuit. Also, you can find plenty of stuff in the archive of rec.aquaria.freshwater.plants, including the rantings and ravings of Mr. Novak himself, as well as posts from a few people who support him and happen to have EXACTLY the same spelling and grammer that he does...

There's all kinds of fun things to discover about this case. For example, the NY Better Business Bureau gave PetsWarehouse its worst possible rating for its business practices. Mr. Novak claims that the BBB is *actually* talking about the retail store, not the website, and as a result, he's threatened to actually SUE the Better Business Bureau.

Mr. Novak is on very shaky legal ground. He's been reprimanded by judges (since he's filed three seperate lawsuits and several ammendments, there are a lot of judges involved) for not having a clue what he's doing. He told a magazine that he considers suing people to be "his hobby", and a profitable one, because he lives right down the street from the courthouse and most people can't afford to travel to his venue to fight the lawsuits. When Slashdot first covered the lawsuit in April, someone posted a comment sayign that they new Mr. Novak, and he told the poster that he has a lawyer in the family who gives him advice on filing baseless lawsuits for extra income.

Also, one of Mr. Novak's big claims in this lawsuit is "trademark infringement" (since we ALL know that saying "I don't like XYZ" is a violation of XYZ's trademark, right??), however, there's some question of whether he owns the trademark at all. He used Pets Warehouse as a "common law" trademark (IANAL, but I think that means he never actually filed the trademark, he just started using it and that entitles him to some legal protection), however, when he filed bankruptcy in the 90's, he didn't list any intellectual property that he wanted to keep on his bankruptcy application, thus it's entirely likely that he lost any trademark he might have had on the name during the bankruptcy.

He also refuses to actually serve papers against any of the defendents who live in California, because California has a strong SLAPP law that would bite him in the ass he if tried to actually bring any California residents into the lawsuit.

I'm not the only one who thinks all this is very, very crazy.

Main news/defense fund, full dockets

Other defense fund page

Defense Fund merchandise

Discussion forum for the lawsuit

Aquatic Plants digest

Rec.Aquaria.Freshwater.Plants

Between all those pages, you should be able to find plenty of links to archives of the messages in question, full court documents, links to news coverage of the story, etc. etc. etc. If you have any interest in aquatic plants or planted aquariums, check the link to the Aquatic Plants mailing list, where all this began. You'll find all the original posts, plus some early discussion of the lawsuit. Also, you can find plenty of stuff in the archive of rec.aquaria.freshwater.plants, including the rantings and ravings of Mr. Novak himself, as well as posts from a few people who support him and happen to have EXACTLY the same spelling and grammer that he does...