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Newspapers no longer care about typesetting quality. The Times used to be the standard against which everyone was judged -- the world's most popular typeface was even designed for them. But now, it's embarassingly poor. The reason is because about 5 years ago, they switched from using Atex to using Unisys' Hermes typesetting system. While Hermes certainly does a lot more, in terms of providing live feeds, and so on, it doesn't come close to Atex (or indeed, any other serious typestting system) in terms of typesetting quality. Hell, it doesn't even do ligatures! It can handle a very limited set of accented characters, and has numerous other faults. I think (though I'm not 100% sure) that the reason is its reliance on the underlying Windows font handling routines, rather than using its own. Either way, I was embarassed to be associated with it when I worked there. But management just saw a system with a pretty GUI front end and were sold. Quality didn't come into the equation at all.

I believe if you check your facts you'll find that every industrialized nation has experienced just the opposite in the last 10 years.

This article, originally published in The Times suggests otherwise, and so does this article from the BBC.

Also, although you will undoubtedly experience a higher tax burden when the baby boom generation retires, the job opportunities and prospects will be a lot better because of the openings those retiring boomers will create. The Gen-X'ers will be next in line for the best jobs once that happens.

Not if the boomers are vacating middle management jobs that can be more efficiently done by technology, and they can these days.

And so what if you got off to a bad start. Even if you are like me at the older end of the Gen-X generation you still have 30 years to go before retirement age. That's plenty enough time to correct the mistakes of our youth, plan ahead and retire comfortably.

The mistakes were not of our youth, but the Boomers. We are trapped between a rock and a hard place; don't save and there will be no state pension for you, save and it will be raided by the taxman.

Personally I don't really want to "retire" because people tend to keel over and die shortly after they stop using their minds and/or bodies to be productive.

Even if you did want to - and many people do - that option probably won't exist. Paying for our own mistakes is fine, but we are picking up the tab for theirs, and they're laughing all the way to the bank.

an article appeared in The Times here. Dated 30/Sep/00.

Unfortunately they are. Reports on CNN, TV5 and BBC this week point to companies moving from Germany (the strongest economy in Europe) to the States because they cannot compete with the prices of raw materials being caused by the weak Euro. Unfortunately it was on TV, and thus I cannot provide a link, so I cannot provide the evidence to back this up despite a quick search on Google.

most Japanese car manufacturer were building or moving their plants from UK to countries part of the Euro...

Most? Evidence please? I think perhaps you are confusing Ford moving manufacturing of the Fiesta to Cologne from Dagenham, and from this page, this quote sums that up:

Bill Morris, the Transport and General Workers' leader, is almost certainly right to maintain that it is much easier and cheaper to sack workers in Britain than in Germany and that this is a major factor behind Ford's apparent decision to shift output to Cologne.

What would you prefer : pay someone 50000 USD/year or 50000 Euros/year ?

It doesn't work like that. If the cost of living in Europe is higher, which it is, it means you pay them accordingly. You don't just set an arbritary figure and then add a $ or on the end of it. If a barrel cost $30 and the Euro slumps, it means that whereas it used to cost 30 it now costs 35. So the fact that the oil has risen as well is only part of the reason for the current blockades.

kissing the US ass

I hope this isn't just jealousy because the UK overtook France as the second biggest economy in Europe this year having not joined the Eurozone and although Echelon was not just the UK and America as you seem to imply, France wasn't included...? You should be grateful as you got your own Echelon system whereas we had to share with Australia, New Zealand... :-(

If the UK wants to remain an island isolated from the world

remain (r-mn)
v. intr. remained, remaining, remains.
To continue in the same state or condition: These matters remain in doubt.

For us to 'remain' it is dependant on us already being isolated, and we aren't really as we are kissing up to the US ass and moaning all the time about the EU, as well as being the head of the Commonwealth? When Norway voted against becoming part of the EU, did you notice how isolated they became('remained'), and the country's GDP rose in the following year?

I am with you on the last point: I wish we never had joined, as do most (69% at the last poll) of the people in the UK. We moan for good reason. For an example of this and on how certain people want Europe to work try checking here. He implies that he only thought the German people had a right to decide on whether more countries should joing the EU..

PS Maybe we should be working together on this, as we both seem to want the same thing: the UK out of Europe! :-)

You need to stop idealizing the French Revolution and look at what it actually did: a reign of terror, and terrible persecution of the typical French peasant. I'll just mention the fact that when the Revolution happened, only one third of the population of France actually spoke French; yet the Revolutionaries declared even the private use of any other languages illegal.

As a last note, everyone who has any doubts about Mr. Martinez's bias and racism and classism should follow the URL provided at the top of his user page here on /. It leads to a hate-filled tabloid which does nothing but portray white Americans as evil racists and Hispanics as poor downtrodden people who are oppressed by the evil white upper class.

You must truly enjoy misrepresentation, right? The top headline says "Mexican Migrant Workers Savagely Attacked by Racists in San Diego, California; Seven Skinheads Arrested". It doesn't say "white", it says "racists", "skinheads". How is that racist?

Next headline is about a Mexican Deputy who joins a bi-national mobilization to stop border violence. How is this racist?

The third headline, "US/Mexico Border Crisis" leads to an investigative report about the shooting of a Mexican in Arizona by organized white supremacist vigilante militias, which the local authorities don't investigate. Again, who is this racist?

Nowhere in the site you find anti-white statements. You find anti white supremacist statements. Statements against groups of the likes of American Patrol, which spout true racist propaganda.

This paints a very disturbing pattern about you. You are obviously given to cry out "racism" and "classism" whenever a non-mainstream social group that is being attacked tries to defend itself. You are given to, whenever you are countered with the sheer implausibility and unsupportedness of your accusations, to pointing to silly evidence like my saying "mi gente and everyone else" (if I'd written "my friends and everybody else", would you have called me a "friendist"?), or blatant misrepresentation of facts (like you did with La Voz de Aztlán's page).

Per this Obit from The Times of London, Davies worked with Alan Turing after the war to help build first ACE computer. Later in life he was an early advocate of security for networks, which he spent the last 20 years researching.

Davies was also awarded the Royal honor of Commander of the British Empire (CBE), essentially one level short of knighthood, for his contributions to computing science.

I guess you haven't been listening to the news lately: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/s tory/0,3604,102378,00.html

Quote from the link above: "These K-For figures suggest that there are as many murders now as there were in the two months of mutual ethnic attacks before Nato air strikes began against Yugoslavia in March - roughly 15 to 20 a week." Happen to know how many Serb civilian were killed by NATO airstrikes? (Hint: it's more than the number of people from all sides that had been killed in Kosovo before the NATO airstrikes.

It looks like that if you are Serb, Roma, muslim Slav, Jew, or even moderate Albanian being killed doesn't count as ethnic cleansing: http://www.seattle-pi.com/opinion/soap131.shtml and http://www.emperors-clothes.com/interviews/ceda.ht m

At least the NATO troops at Kosovo have some perks . http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/02/ 05/timfgneur01001.html?1984

Care to reconsider your views? Maybe human rights didn't have much to do with the Kosovo "virtual war"?

There is also a $1,000,000 prize for anyone solving Goldbach's Conjecture which is another of the 23 problems Hilbert stated at the ICM. See this article , it's an unrelated contest to bring attention to a book, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture which I definetely recommend. It's more of a story/biography than a math book though.

If you live in one of the first roll out areas this is great. Problem is of course that only 10% of the population do, and some of them won't see anything for another year or two.

The rest of us will have to wait that long just to see when we might expect to get a connection. Couple that with the sparsity of Cable Modem providers and the general lack (or low quality) of free modem access and you find that the uk remains a technological backwater.

The government in all its wisdom wants us all to use the internet and make the uk a leader in e-commerce, but forgets that no one will help them unless they can enjoy the sort of access all you lucky people get in the US.

Anyhow, the Times has this introduction to ADSL in case you haven't heard of it and you can register with BT to be told when they have decided to roll out to your area over here.

Harmless fun nearly by definition. Quite unobjectionable on its own merits, although other methods to both hunt and fire projectiles at targets exist.

Other methods of transportation exist, yet we do not ban automobiles, despite the fact that they kill tens of thousands of people every year. The point is that while other methods are available, they are not equivalent. We use the method that works best for us.

In both England and Japan, effective policing takes place without arms, but then, the people are not armed either.

Wrong. England is currently having a seriou s gun problem. Guns are still coming into the country despite the ban. Why? Because people still want them, and other people can make money off of them. Criminals still get all the guns they want. They are having problems with gangs toting around automatics. The police still use guns as well (note the picture in that article). Not all of them carry a gun all the time, but they definitely still keep them handy. I haven't read anything about Japan's situation, so I can't comment on that.

Multiple armed home invaders aren't going to be very amused by resistance.

Actually, resistance is usually enough to send them packing. They are there for the quick, easy score. They don't want to die over it.

At least with knifes, the chances are that they'll only wound one another.

Sorry, but as you pointed out, some people are bigger and stronger than others. I have no intention of engaging in a knife fight with someone. A gun is much more effective. Even a warning shot will often make an intruder run rather than take his chances against someone with a gun. The odds are way too even, and possibly even against him. If I am competent in the use of my gun, then I am unlikely to be disarmed or have it used against me. I think the real thing that gives guns a bad name is that people don't learn how to handle them. They think it's just like on tv, you point and shoot and bad guys start dropping. I personally think you should have to pass a test to own a gun, just like you do in order to drive a car. There are just too many incompetent gun owners. But, until there are non-lethal weapons available to the public that are at least as effective in any given situation as a gun, I believe we all have the right to defend ourselves and our families to the best of our ability and with the most effective weapon available to us.

I think it highly unlikely that either one of us can convert the other to the opposite way of thinking, but if you'd like to continue the discussion, I am quite happy to.

You're probably right, but naturally I couldn't let your post go unanswered. You understand, of course. :)

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Yes, this is slashdot, where the trolls get more rabid and the moderators get more irrational, but remember, folks, it isn't just you: the whole WWW gets uglier with each passing day.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the creators of all cool-looking animated movie files for their work, because I'd rather be watching their movies than reading their HTML.

What inspired me, in my baseless ranting? I'm glad you asked! Not only does the story linked from slashdot look horrible, but so does its HTML--it's really broken. The HTML tag is commented out, the ads are in JavaScript, so not only are they annoying, but they output broken HTML if Java/JavaScript is not turned on; the commenting looks like some of the joking in the polls (this is the TITLE tag...), and the background and page layout doesn't scale at all.

Beyond that, their Terms & Conditions are also a travesty. First, the whole thing is invalid because condition #1 is false!

(I have no User Account with them, and I wish I didn't have to have one for *EVERY* frickin' web site I ever visit. That isn't the answer. A universal ID isn't, either, but I'm sure we could use some sort of common challenge/response method, at least...)

Let's hope our friends at Slashdot don't have an account, because you're not allowed to link below the main page of their site without express written permission from the webmaster. Oh, and you can only display the page on the screen or on paper, so you'd better delete that netscape cache...

You also need their express written permission to use the trademarks "The Times" and "The Sunday Times". So can I say "My grandfather likes to read The Sunday Times"? Can I write it? Sue me already, I'd love to see it.

Oh, and my favorite: we reserve the right to add or change this agreement, so if you do something we don't like, we can change that contract you agreed to, and sue you under the new one. Yeah, that's fair.

Summary: Screw corporations. Take back the web. If you need to have a DISCLAIMER on a web page, feel a need to sue your client base, or don't want to learn how to write HTML correctly, leave. If you'd rather make pretty pictures and movies, and let everyone see them, stay.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A mistake from a gun can end a life - my life, because you made an error in judgement.

By your logic we should outlaw cars. An error in judgement can kill many people, and does, in fact, kill several orders of magnitude more people every year than guns do. Yet I hear nobody crying for the banning of motor vehicles. "Ah, but they're useful" people will say. So what? A gun is very useful to me in providing a defense for my home and family. Is it my fault that some idiots don't know how to take responsibility for a gun? Why should I have the only reasonably effective means of defending my family taken away because of someone else's incompetence? Aside from requiring training (and/or a competence test) for the purchase of a gun, I don't believe I should be restricted in any way from owning weapons for sport or defense. Such training and testing should cut down on the number of accidents quite a bit. Then the vast majority of gun-related injuries and deaths will be caused by criminals, just as they would if you banned guns altogether. (More on this later)

I don't trust anyone's judgement, thus I'd like to see guns removed from society.

Just like they've removed drugs from society. Just like prohibition removed alcohol and its evil effects such as crime from society, right? Wake up. If you ban guns, people will want them even more, because they will suddenly feel defenseless. There will be many people willing to provide those guns too, because it will become a much more lucrative business, just like drugs. Suddenly only criminals and the government will have weapons. As someone who doesn't trust the judgement of others, surely you can understand that people will not like such a situation where they feel even more at the mercy of those in power. I don't trust the judgement of others all that much either. That's exactly why I want the right to possess a gun. In case their bad judgement leads them to assault me or my family.

Try this article if you'd like to see some numbers. Gun violence is actually rising in the UK now, despite the gun ban. This illustrates the point that it's not legal owners of guns that are the problem. It's the criminals who don't give a damn about any gun ban anyway.

Try this article for a look at how well a total handgun ban has worked for England. Crime involving weapons is actually increasing.

"But the rate of crime is much lower than in the US!," you might say. Not according to this study by the US Department of Justice.

Britain does not use the SAS as a routine policing force for anti-firearms violations.

I am somewhat surprised at the high level of anti-gun sentiment on slashdot. You would think that in a group with a large percentage of self-described nerds with a penchant for anti-government, libertarian thinking, there would be more people into firearms. Or at least that the detractors would be better informed.

Shall we just pick and choose from the Bill of Rights for just those amendments which please us, then? Yes on 1, no on 2? I bet the police and courts find 4 and 5 pretty pesky at times, let's get rid of those while we're at it.

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Hacker gang blackmails firms with stolen files
£10m ransom demands sent out

Along with the story we're discussing here, we have this little jem:
Pollution set to rip giant hole in ozone layer
More than half the ozone is likely to disappear by March, climatologists warn
Rip a hole? March is 2.5 months away!

Along with that little story, we have more "all the news that's fit to spit":
Call girl fights Vat man's bill for £500,000
Flesh-coloured stockings not claimable - but lacy ones might be
Is this hard news? I think not.

And this little tidbit about Mr. big lips:
Do not arise Sir Mick Jagger
Downing Street blocks planned honour because of errant ways
looks like a gossip rag to me, but then again, I'll let you be the judge.
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aliebrah got all stupid before posting by assuming that because the Times article mentioned the Internet and the web that visa.com's web server must be implicated somehow. How do we know this guy wasn't war-dialing for modem pool numbers (no Internet involved, just the POTS PSTN)?

I'm from Chicago where they used to say "If your mother tells you something CHECK IT OUT!" Shame on you for magnifying the noise!

But just because it's the most obviously revolutionary thing happening doesn't make it the most revolutionary. What CmdrTaco and the boys are doing is pretty revolutionary too - to take another of today's stories, for example, it's the Slashdot effect which surges huge flows of traffic around the Web. It isn't the Times effect, the CNN effect or the BBC effect, and it isn't because these bodies, skilled and resourced at newsgathering as they are, have not managed to exploit this new medium in the way that Slashdot has.

What I'm suggesting is that Slashdot may be to Berners-Lee as The Times was to Caxton, or CNN has been to Logie Baird: the body which has most effectively discovered the formula to harness the new technology to journalism, and which will in the long run influence the way in which journalism on the medium is presented.

Of course I may be wrong here; I may be simply absurdly overestimating Slashdot's importance. But at the same time I can't help betting that there are executives in half the media coroprations in the world lying awake at night wondering how they let Andover get away with such a bargain, and executives at Andover lying awake at nights wondering what to do with it.

We all (I assume) believe this medium is powerful, and yet we're all continually being surprised by how powerful it is. And so, from time to time, we get surprised when stories like this blow up out of nowhere. This is another sort of Slashdot effect , a consequence of using a powerful technology when you don't have enough experience with it to know instinctively the potential consequences of your actions.

What I liked about this story is that it is Slashdot introspecting about Slashdot. Introspection is something which, as Eric Raymond has often pointed out, we in the open source movement don't do enough of. When what you're doing is revolutionary, when the waters which you are navigating are uncharted, if you don't think carefully about what you're doing you are likely to do much less well than you otherwise might.

So Rob (and everyone else who has contributed), don't be upset by accusations of self indulgence. Sometimes looking at what we're doing, trying to understand what we're doing, and, most importantly, trying to understand the consequences of what we're doing, are as important as doing it.

Viva la revoluçion!

Browsing through the current discussion (which I'm happy to see if rife with content), my caffiene-induced long memory recalled an article posted to /. recently about artificial photosynthesis, using solar energy to fuel chemical reactions in the same manner that plants do it. I could see something like this applied to a small plate on the hood of my truck, keeping my battery charged. Or not, since I live in Arizona, and don't want my truck becoming self-aware.

Back on topic.. As mentioned previously, the problem with broadcast power is the stuff that gets in between. Biomass tends to react poorly to the levels we'd need to power all our toys. Don't believe me? Call the people who live on Mercury, and their disgruntled neighbors on Venus. Broadcast energy, like microwave (as was mentioned in a previous post), has a side effect of particle excitation in the medium. Done in space, between non-terrestrial platforms, it wouldn't be much of a problem. Done on terra firma, you begin generating biological side effects caused by pumping extra heat into the immediate environment. Over time and in abundance, you contribute to trivial things like greenhouse effects, technicians hanging out on the roof and angling dishes at random birds, and (God forbid) roach mutation.

Air by itself isn't a practical medium for transmission of high energy. The required power outputs are just to high, and the return isn't high enough. Old 'Star Wars' theory involving ground based lasers (for the purpose of courtesy polishing of enemy spy satellites to a glossy shine) postulates the leeching properties of 'thermal blooming' as heating air begins distorting the optical path and decreasing efficiency.

But.

Another article posted on /. back in May/99, discussed the use of an ultr aviolet laser emitting a stream of photons to perform optical path ionization to facilitate transmission of electricity (25ma, 100hz) to ranges of 100 meters! Granted, the use they purport is for tasers, and my immediate thoughts went back to cat experimentation (Hey, PETA, I want some 9v cells for Christmas), but the cross-over application possibilities exist.

Combinations of the two concepts would probably result in marked increases in efficiency, but working in non-vacuum environments still leaves you open to transmission degradation due to something as simple as wholesale friction.

Current limitations aside, other recent developments in miniaturization opens a door to using low power broadcast technology to provide power to devices that don't need a lot (like that hokey 'smart dust' concept, that you can counter with in-born allergies and thermonuclear sneeze assaults). You've played Starcraft. The Protoss concept of short range power pylons lends itself well to this, albeit on a smaller scale.

Relaying power between low-draw sensor clusters would be a good application, too. Weather monitoring, tracking HIGH LEVELS OF RF/EM RADIATION IN URBAN SETTINGS, and trivial biomass affecting things like that would be good, too.

UK firms fear cost of tighter rules on options
"British companies may be forced to reconsider the way they reward staff as the result of a new threat to make granting share options more onerous. The Accounting Standards Board (ASB), an independent regulatory body with the power to set accounting standards, wants to make companies reflect the cost of issuing share options in their annual profit and loss accounts... While the ASB proposals are a long way from being finalised, the body is confident it will succeed in changing the rules. Andrew Lennard, assistant technical director of the ASB, said: "The arguments are compelling. I think we have the ability to set them out in a way that will command acceptance."

In recent years there has been considerable movement towards convergence in accounting standards. If the ASB can establish a respected and workable standard in the UK, this could make it much easier for the FASB to bring in changes in the US.

http ://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/98/11/10/tim obiobi03003.html?1048521
Colossus was a mechanical computer