Prior to the introduction of tea and coffee, 'small beer' was drunk by all except the very poorest people - this was safer than drinking untreated, unsanitary water, and was far, far more widespread than coffee / tea drinking ever became until the late 19th century, when the Empire started to produce tea in quantity and at affordable prices.
I doubt whether the consumption of tea and coffee was anything like as widespread as you imagine in British cities at the time - tea initially cost more than gold, and coffee consumption was mainly confined to the merchant classes.
Even as late as 1854, when Dr John Snow correctly identified the water-borne nature of cholera, a sigificant factor in his thinking was the realisation that workers in the local brewery, who drank ale rather than water, were not contracting the disease.
So let us hail beer, not caffeine as the saviour of the human race!
I hope the agencies considering this device have deep pockets, 'cause it's highly likely that someone will suffer a seizure as a result of having rapidly pulsating lights flashed at them.
Why on earth would I wish to search for all documents that have underlined strikethrough text?
Is there a semantic standard for using underline and strikethrough, or is it some arbitrary convention adopted by someone at some time?
There is a proper standard for semantic markup, and it's called SGML.
The proper process for conversion of an arbitrary markup scheme would involve the creation of a translation schema, and the use of a proper standard (hint - not OOXML) for the output documents.
OK - you work in document management, so you have to deal with real-world situations in which people use arbitrary conventions and proprietary formats, but that's no reason to defend OOXML. Microsoft having a dominant position in the marketplace does not excuse them from a duty to do things properly - they should adopt ODF and (as another poster points out) use namespaces to isolate their idiosyncracies.
Sorry for the 'Microtroll', by the way - I'm always a little intemperate in the mornings:P.
Suppose you have 10,000 legal documents written in Word 95
Again, I call BS - my experience of dealing with legal firms in the 90's was that they all (without exception) used WordPerfect, so the idea of a corpus of 10,000 legal documents in Word 95 format is numinous to say the least.
Perhaps you could expand on what specific legal meaning would be represented by 'small caps' in Word 95?
Besides, one of the drivers for SGML was to allow semantics to be stored as part of a document, and ODF, as a proper subset of SGML, is extensible in this way, in a manner that OOXML with its references to proprietary formats is not.
Your argument is simply fallacious - if there is a specific semantic meaning to 'small caps', the proper route to conversion is to create a well defined semantic tag for that case, and as an attribute to that tag, specify a smaller font - not to simply preserve an intrinsically meaningless attribute like 'small caps'.
PDF is a far more complex format than either OOXML or ODF. It requires a postscript engine to translate. One of the big wins of ODF and OOXML is that XML documents are easily indexed by search engines, something that is significantly harder to do with PDF.
I call BS - PDF does not require a Postscript engine - one can extract the content using zlib and a couple of buffers, and Google regularly indexes PDFs.
Well, Macca - it is on my MP3 player - too full to fit your crappy album on it, in fact.
The guy's made enough money now - could someone close to him persuade him to put his feet up and take it easy, rather than inflicting rubbish like his latest single on us?
Granted, I won't buy his record, but the bloody DJs still play it on the radio and annoy me while I'm driving...
A much cheaper solution would be to ask the Iranians if you could use their centrifuge cascades as a short term power store - Ahmamadbastid would love the deal!
The major part of the Post-It-Note invention was the creation of an adhesive that solved the problem. Merely combining 'glue' and 'paper' is not enough to make a Post-It-Note - the innovation is in an adhesive that sticks the note where you want it for long enough, but is easily and cleanly detached once the note has served its purpose.
I reckon that's far enough beyond the obvious to count, and also required innovation in the field of adhesives, so yes I do believe that (at the time) a Post-It-Note was patentable.
While at 3M, I remember being regularly encouraged to see if any of my work could result in a patent (I was not always a software engineer - I used to get my hands dirty in a lab:-)) - the company was very keen on IP, even back in the 80s
At the moment, it's an ignorant Glaswegian bouncer, who likes to be called "Dr" John Reid not because he is a fan of the great New Orleans musician, but because he has a PhD in Political Science or some such nonsense.
He tries to win debates by bluster and shouting, because he is incapable of putting forward a cogent argument.
He also wants to challenge Gordon Brown for the party leadership once Blair steps down to start his new career lecturing in the US (and avoiding the International Court for his crimes in the Iraqi misadventure).
Rest assured, if he wins, the UK is likely to lose what little respect we retain in international circles - he's a total moron.
Home Secretaries in general, though, are in charge of government policy on law and order, and internal security matters.
There's never, ever been a competent Home Secretary in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Willie Whitelaw - it's a job where reacting to press campaigns is just too tempting, and thinking your way through the problems you need to solve is just too demanding for most politicians.
When you get a firm of accountants, who are well used to working at the very edge of financial legality (and sometimes step over the line), involved in selling consultancy services, then you'd better expect some obscure financial arrangements to figure in their operations.
The fact that they have been caught out is good - though in my opinion it should be Accenture alone facing punishment, since they doubtless pressured the other companies involved to make the kickbacks, going with the supplier most prepared to bend over and take it like a bitch.
It's similar in my opinion to the price pressure put on suppliers by the big supermarket chains - Accenture are a preferred vendor to the government, and they have a lot of contracts to throw around, and will use their weight to pressurise their suppliers, maximising their profits while not passing the discounts on any more than they can get away with, exactly as the supermarkets do to the consumer.
The only difference here is it's the government that's getting shafted, and there are laws against that, whereas Tesco, Wal-Mart et al can get away with shafting the little guy (consumer and supplier alike) because the regulatory climate favours them.
I don't blame HP, IBM, Sun, or even M$ for this - the fault lies with Accenture and Accenture alone.
OK - provide me with a rational argument that a belief in god or gods is either useful or otherwise illuminates our understanding in ways that the scientific enterprise can not.
I place credence (not cree-dance, which sounds like something a particular group of Native Americans might have done of an evening) in logic because logic, and the mathematics that stem from logic, provide a means to model and explain experience that is consistent, extensible and simple to understand. Contrast this with religiosity, where 'truths' are revealed to the elect, and interpreted for the ordinary mortals by a priestly elite, who more often than not enrich themselves on the back of the ignorance, superstition and fear of others, and I think you might see how a belief in the utility of logic might be a reasonable basis for life.
As for precedence and preclusion, I admit that that was more of a rhetorical flourish than anything else, but it was in response to an insufferably arrogant post by some wet-behind-the-ears philosophy undergraduate, and was an attempt to highlight the point that I was trying to make by quoting Wittgenstein - that transcendent concepts, by their very nature, are not amenable to logical analysis, and have no place in philosophical discussion (a bit like a Godwin's law for adults).
Similarly, that was the point I was trying to highlight in saying 'to try to apply logic and reason to myths is just mot valid'.
Nice post, btw - much better than being told to learn about stuff that I learnt more than 20 years ago by some kid who's only just read it for an assignment, and still believes that giving respect to theists just because it's rude not to is somehow sensible.
I wouldn't dream of trying to dispute anything in the field of 'philosophy of religion' - I would merely point out that the whole field is of no value whatsoever.
Since the root of the word 'philosophy' means 'love of knowledge', what value does the knowledge of something non-existent have?
You might as well have a 'philosophy of unicorns' for all it's worth.
Richard Swinburne, the foremost living philosopher of religion
No - the foremost living philosopher of religion is Richard Dawkins, and there is no logical reason for believing in a god or gods at all.
Logic not only precedes gods, it precludes them as well.
Philosphy of religion? Why bother? An anthropology of religion would be valid, but to try to apply logic and reason to myths is just not valid. As Wittgenstein put it -
Of that on which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.
Although maybe not since it would reduce billable hours.
Picture the scene.
John Q Lawyer XXV sits at his keyboard, launches FsckYouRIAAMafiaGits Auto (TM), and generates the required letter, along with a calculated billing.
Meanwhile, he makes several interesting and insightful posts to/., gets a quick Lewinsky from his intern, and all in all passes an extremely pleasant afternoon.
Almost makes me want to do the huge amount of reading required to be a lawyer;-)
It's my impression that "insulting" the antagonist law firm and calling into question the competency of the lawyer, their supervisor and indeed their firm is the legal equivalent of sabre-rattling and leering. It is an attempt to encourage capitualation by indicating that you are bigger, tougher and are capable of polysyllabillic utterances. Fear the polysyllabilic utterances.
No - it's called 'having fun'.
The writer knows he's in a practically unassailable position, and is merely indulging in a little gratuitous tail-pulling.
Damn good letter apart from the typos and a couple of grammatical faux-pas, though!
Slashdot Mirror
This simple small (null)
Haiku requires no more (null)
Termination (null)
I doubt whether the consumption of tea and coffee was anything like as widespread as you imagine in British cities at the time - tea initially cost more than gold, and coffee consumption was mainly confined to the merchant classes.
Even as late as 1854, when Dr John Snow correctly identified the water-borne nature of cholera, a sigificant factor in his thinking was the realisation that workers in the local brewery, who drank ale rather than water, were not contracting the disease.
So let us hail beer, not caffeine as the saviour of the human race!
I hope the agencies considering this device have deep pockets, 'cause it's highly likely that someone will suffer a seizure as a result of having rapidly pulsating lights flashed at them.
Is there a semantic standard for using underline and strikethrough, or is it some arbitrary convention adopted by someone at some time?
There is a proper standard for semantic markup, and it's called SGML.
The proper process for conversion of an arbitrary markup scheme would involve the creation of a translation schema, and the use of a proper standard (hint - not OOXML) for the output documents.
OK - you work in document management, so you have to deal with real-world situations in which people use arbitrary conventions and proprietary formats, but that's no reason to defend OOXML. Microsoft having a dominant position in the marketplace does not excuse them from a duty to do things properly - they should adopt ODF and (as another poster points out) use namespaces to isolate their idiosyncracies.
Sorry for the 'Microtroll', by the way - I'm always a little intemperate in the mornings :P.
Again, I call BS - my experience of dealing with legal firms in the 90's was that they all (without exception) used WordPerfect, so the idea of a corpus of 10,000 legal documents in Word 95 format is numinous to say the least.
Perhaps you could expand on what specific legal meaning would be represented by 'small caps' in Word 95?
Besides, one of the drivers for SGML was to allow semantics to be stored as part of a document, and ODF, as a proper subset of SGML, is extensible in this way, in a manner that OOXML with its references to proprietary formats is not.
Your argument is simply fallacious - if there is a specific semantic meaning to 'small caps', the proper route to conversion is to create a well defined semantic tag for that case, and as an attribute to that tag, specify a smaller font - not to simply preserve an intrinsically meaningless attribute like 'small caps'.
I call BS - PDF does not require a Postscript engine - one can extract the content using zlib and a couple of buffers, and Google regularly indexes PDFs.
Go home, Microtroll!
I have mod points today, but can't find the appropriate category, or I'd have modded you +1 inflamebait!
Don't know if they still do, but the OS is wickedly slim, and ideally suited for network appliances as well as distributed computing.
Memory almost full?
Well, Macca - it is on my MP3 player - too full to fit your crappy album on it, in fact.
The guy's made enough money now - could someone close to him persuade him to put his feet up and take it easy, rather than inflicting rubbish like his latest single on us?
Granted, I won't buy his record, but the bloody DJs still play it on the radio and annoy me while I'm driving...
That's the nicest Grammar Nazi putdown I've seen in ages.
Kudos to you!
Hey, I paid good money for my scrotal piercings - and now all I have to do is post a number?
Cool...
Aye, dags - y'know - dem little fellas wid far legs an a taste fer sarsages!
The major part of the Post-It-Note invention was the creation of an adhesive that solved the problem. Merely combining 'glue' and 'paper' is not enough to make a Post-It-Note - the innovation is in an adhesive that sticks the note where you want it for long enough, but is easily and cleanly detached once the note has served its purpose.
I reckon that's far enough beyond the obvious to count, and also required innovation in the field of adhesives, so yes I do believe that (at the time) a Post-It-Note was patentable.
While at 3M, I remember being regularly encouraged to see if any of my work could result in a patent (I was not always a software engineer - I used to get my hands dirty in a lab :-)) - the company was very keen on IP, even back in the 80s
He tries to win debates by bluster and shouting, because he is incapable of putting forward a cogent argument.
He also wants to challenge Gordon Brown for the party leadership once Blair steps down to start his new career lecturing in the US (and avoiding the International Court for his crimes in the Iraqi misadventure).
Rest assured, if he wins, the UK is likely to lose what little respect we retain in international circles - he's a total moron.
Home Secretaries in general, though, are in charge of government policy on law and order, and internal security matters.
There's never, ever been a competent Home Secretary in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Willie Whitelaw - it's a job where reacting to press campaigns is just too tempting, and thinking your way through the problems you need to solve is just too demanding for most politicians.
When you get a firm of accountants, who are well used to working at the very edge of financial legality (and sometimes step over the line), involved in selling consultancy services, then you'd better expect some obscure financial arrangements to figure in their operations.
The fact that they have been caught out is good - though in my opinion it should be Accenture alone facing punishment, since they doubtless pressured the other companies involved to make the kickbacks, going with the supplier most prepared to bend over and take it like a bitch.
It's similar in my opinion to the price pressure put on suppliers by the big supermarket chains - Accenture are a preferred vendor to the government, and they have a lot of contracts to throw around, and will use their weight to pressurise their suppliers, maximising their profits while not passing the discounts on any more than they can get away with, exactly as the supermarkets do to the consumer.
The only difference here is it's the government that's getting shafted, and there are laws against that, whereas Tesco, Wal-Mart et al can get away with shafting the little guy (consumer and supplier alike) because the regulatory climate favours them.
I don't blame HP, IBM, Sun, or even M$ for this - the fault lies with Accenture and Accenture alone.
And why the f*** should it matter to you?
Your comment consists of only one (very long and heavily parenthetical) sentence, so where would anyone put the spaces?
:-)
Surely, if he lives up to his name and believes in the freedom of IP, he wouldn't enforce his copyright?
I place credence (not cree-dance, which sounds like something a particular group of Native Americans might have done of an evening) in logic because logic, and the mathematics that stem from logic, provide a means to model and explain experience that is consistent, extensible and simple to understand. Contrast this with religiosity, where 'truths' are revealed to the elect, and interpreted for the ordinary mortals by a priestly elite, who more often than not enrich themselves on the back of the ignorance, superstition and fear of others, and I think you might see how a belief in the utility of logic might be a reasonable basis for life.
As for precedence and preclusion, I admit that that was more of a rhetorical flourish than anything else, but it was in response to an insufferably arrogant post by some wet-behind-the-ears philosophy undergraduate, and was an attempt to highlight the point that I was trying to make by quoting Wittgenstein - that transcendent concepts, by their very nature, are not amenable to logical analysis, and have no place in philosophical discussion (a bit like a Godwin's law for adults).
Similarly, that was the point I was trying to highlight in saying 'to try to apply logic and reason to myths is just mot valid'.
Nice post, btw - much better than being told to learn about stuff that I learnt more than 20 years ago by some kid who's only just read it for an assignment, and still believes that giving respect to theists just because it's rude not to is somehow sensible.
Since the root of the word 'philosophy' means 'love of knowledge', what value does the knowledge of something non-existent have?
You might as well have a 'philosophy of unicorns' for all it's worth.
No - the foremost living philosopher of religion is Richard Dawkins, and there is no logical reason for believing in a god or gods at all.
Logic not only precedes gods, it precludes them as well.
Philosphy of religion? Why bother? An anthropology of religion would be valid, but to try to apply logic and reason to myths is just not valid. As Wittgenstein put it -
Not surprised he ran - you wouldn't get me anywhere near a job like that.
Picture the scene.
John Q Lawyer XXV sits at his keyboard, launches FsckYouRIAAMafiaGits Auto (TM), and generates the required letter, along with a calculated billing.
Meanwhile, he makes several interesting and insightful posts to /., gets a quick Lewinsky from his intern, and all in all passes an extremely pleasant afternoon.
Almost makes me want to do the huge amount of reading required to be a lawyer ;-)
No - it's called 'having fun'.
The writer knows he's in a practically unassailable position, and is merely indulging in a little gratuitous tail-pulling.
Damn good letter apart from the typos and a couple of grammatical faux-pas, though!