There are many advantages to having paper that is sized based on area, and with sides that have a clear relationship to each other. The exact lengths aren't that important for most tasks
One advantage of having the system set up with a sqrt(2) ratio is that folding a sheet of A4 in half makes it the size of A5, and this works for any size in the series. This is particularly useful for photocopying, where you can copy 2 A4 sheets, scaled down by 50% to fit 2 pages per sheet evenly.
The C sizes of the system are also useful. The exact dimensions and how they're calculated aren't important, but a C4 envelope will fit a flat A4 sheet, a C5 envelope will fit an A5 sheet, or folded A4 sheet, and the special C5/C6 envelope fits an A4 sheet folded into thirds.
The density of the paper is specified in g/m^2 (grams per square metre, or "gsm"), with the common density for standard office paper being 80 gsm. That means, 1 sheet of A0 paper would weigh 80g, and A4, being 1/16th of that weighs 5g. Conversely, 16 A4 sheets weighs 80 grams. A standard ream containing 500 sheets is 500*5g = 2.5kg. Now, you can easily calculate the mass of any number of sheets, which is very useful for shipping purposes. More imporantly, it also lets customers compare the density of different sized paper products. e.g. 80 gsm A4 paper has the same density as 80 gsm A5, so they can know what quality of paper they will be printing on.
Compare this with the US system, where paper mass is measured with the complicated basis weight system, in lbs/ream. But it doesn't represent the mass of the paper as sold to the customer. It represents it at some stage in the manufacturing process before the paper has been cut to size, and this weight can't be reliably compared among different sizes of paper. e.g. Letter size paper rated at 5 lb/ream is not necessarily going to be as dense as a US legal size paper rated at 5 lb/ream.
In reality, the US does have a dual system of measurement, and that is what's costing the US so much. The general population may think everything is in USC, but a lot of engineering is done in SI units, or in some cases, in a mixture of the two systems.
For example, PCB boards in the USA are designed in mils (1 mil = 0.001 inches), and yet many electronic components are sized in metric. This results in rounding errors and parts that don't quite fit and need a lot of manual corrections. More info here. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=454
Actually, there's also a third system in use too, but that's mostly hidden from the general population. Roads in the US are measured and constructed using Ramsden's chain, which is 100 US survey feet, where a survey foot is slightly different from a regular foot. Each foot is divided into decimal fractions. But then, for long distances, they actually measure it with GPS, which gives readings in metres that then need to be converted for entry into the design software. It gets even more complicated that that, and that's explained in more detail here. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=465
No, they don't use micrometres on a construction site. In Australia, it's all millimetres. The lengths they commonly use (e.g. 600mm between studs in the wall, 2400mm ceiling heights) are easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, or 6 when needed. Tape measures in Australia measure in mm, not cm, especially those used in construction. You are highly unlikely to find centimetres or micrometres anywhere on a construction site. Micrometres are used for much smaller scale engineering. The kind of thing you'd need a set of vernier callipers to measure.
The US customary units differ from the imperial units anyway. Imperial gallon is 4.54 L (based on volume of 10 pounds of water), US gallon is 3.785 L (defined as 231 cubic inches). Even the ratios of fl oz to cups and pints is different. 1 imperial pint = 2 Imp. cups = 20 Imp. fl oz ~= 568 mL, 1 US pint = 2 US cups = 16 US fl oz ~= 473 mL.
The FDA also already defines metricated units for use on food labelling, so that on nutrition labels where fl oz are stated, that really means 30 mL exactly, and similarly for teaspoon (5 mL) and tablespoon (15 mL).
Although the international inch, foot, yard and mile are all the same in every day usage, the US also has the special survey foot and mile.
The US survey foot differs from the regular foot by about 610 nm, and the US survey mile by about 3.2 mm (~ 1/8 in). That difference multiplies to about 1 foot over a distance of 95 miles, or about 27 feet over the 2600 mile distance from San Francisco to New York.
Except blood pressure, which is still measured in mmHg (millimetres of mercury) instead of hPa (hectopascals).
require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow.
Ask the English how that worked out for them. They buy petrol by the litre, but measure speed and distances in miles, and fuel economy in miles per (Imperial) gallon.
In Australian copyright, there is the concept of fair dealing. This is similar to fair use in the US. That gives the right to use copyrighted material for, among other things, the purpose of news reporting.
Opera does hold patents and does sometimes patent new inventions. (As an employee, I am forbidden from discussing specifics and I don't know if a patent application was even filed for this particular feature). However, for specifications developed within or submitted to the W3C, Opera is subject to the W3C patent policy.
WTF? How does it possibly stop you from removing the battery when the phone is turned off? Isn't the battery held in with some sort of mechanical latch, with either a slider, something to depress to release the hooks, or similar? Which blackberry model are you talking about specifically?
These patents are NOT related to HTML5. These are related to the Widget specifications in the WebApps working group. The HTML5 work does not make use of this specification (though W3C widgets do use HTML5). Apple has not and there is no indication that they have any interest in doing anything that will impede the work of HTML5.
Torrents you've already got won't be affeted by thepiratebay.org going down. The web site is only used to distribute the torrent files and magnet links. Once you've got that, then you find other peers either through the openbittorrent.com tracker or the trackerless alternatives.
Tony Abbot's skepticism is easily addressed by giving him a demonstration of the technology. The only problem is that he's such a stubborn fool, he'll probably keep insisting that maintaining the ageing copper lines is fine for now and ignore the future as somebody else's problem. He's an tehnologically incompetent fool who should not be put in a position to make technical decisions on this issue, particularly because he seems incapable of listening to the industry experts on the issue.
To be fair, though, the Labor party has it's own share of misguided policies (the filtering policy, for one), but having a Labor government would be significnat better than a Liberal government right now. I think the best option is to give preferences to parties like The Greens, The Secular Party of Australia, and the Australian Sex Party ahead of Labor, and to put Liberal, National, Family First and the Christian Democrats at the end (with Labor's Stephen Conroy given the special Dead Last position, for voters in Victoria only), with the rest in the middle somewhere.
Compulsory voting is fantastic because it encourages a higher voter turn than voluntary schemes, and gives a better chance of actually getting what the public wants, rather than just what politically motivated groups want. Donkey votes are a minor problem, but at least such people can be seen to have willingly abstained, rather just failing to turn up.
I think it would be a complete disaster if Australia ever adopted a voluntary system like the US, where half the battle is just getting people to bother turning up, and the result can often be heavily influenced by politically motivated groups. For instance, just think about terrible the result will turn out if the Tea Party movement manages to motivate a significant portion of their followers to vote for extreme right-wing nutjobs, while the less politically motivated people and less well-organised groups who don't agree with them at all, just don't bother to vote.
So compulsory voting levels the playing field and gives a much fairer and more representative outcome.
The latency is irrelevant. I meant that they would look up the data from participating ISPs, using whatever implementation method they use, regardless of whether that's a local database or a remote lookup service. The fact is, SSL does not hide your IP address, and so SSL is not any kind of protection against this issue.
SSL won't help guard against this at all. If you visit a site that embeds an advertisement, the ad provider still obtains your IP address, and they can still query participating ISPs for the postal code of the user at that address.
I don't buy that argument. Petrol stations set their prices based on what they pay for the fuel and necessary profit margins. Also, they are still going to want to compete with each other by offering the best price they can. It's not in their interest to rip off consumers by 20 or 30 cents, expecially when there's a station down the road that isn't doing that.
Also, if you're getting around $0.70/L for fuel in the US, you're already getting a serious bargin compared with what we pay in Australia, and what I've seen being charged in some places in Europe. You'd have little to whinge about even if the prices did go up a little.
Of course, I meant to imply that the US should also switch to using metric at the pump, selling fuel per litre rather than per gallon, and also switch to using km/h for road speeds.
It can be done and has been done in many countries before. It does, however, require that the actual conversion be done relatively quickly, rather than a gradual changeover.
The US should also adopt L/100km, rather than, as TFA suggests, Gallons/100Miles. Seriously, if they're going to switch the measurements anyway, it makes more sense to switch to metric, like most of the rest of the world already has, than to retain the imperial system.
The problem with the CSIRO here is that since they are governement owned, they are tax payer funded and instead of using that money to fund real research that benefits everyone, they're sinking it into legal battles in an attempt to extract more money from foreign companies. While they technically aren't patent trolls in the classical sense, since they certainly are doing some real work, their aggressiveness in enforcing their patents makes them almost as bad.
The problem here is that patents are only supposed to cover the one specific method of implementing the invention. But with all the overly broad patents in this area, you have Apple patenting the actual gestures, preventing those same gestures from being used by any other device manufacturer, even if the multitouch detection system were implemented in a completely different way.
Seriously, patenting finger gestures is like patenting a method of turning a door knob. It's completely ridiculous, and it's only going to force every phone manufacturer to come up with their own overly complex and insanely unusable gestures, just because they weren't the first to file for a patent on the obvious.
Opera has had operamail.com for many years, but as far as I know, it has not been linked with the My Opera social networking site. As you can see from its current state, the operamail service has not been maintained for years. According to the TOS on that site, it's been outsourced to Outblaze - another mail company I know nothing about. It seems obvious that this new acquisition of FastMail.fm will change that.
(Disclaimer: I work for Opera, but I am not involved with our email products. The above represents my own opinion)
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There are many advantages to having paper that is sized based on area, and with sides that have a clear relationship to each other. The exact lengths aren't that important for most tasks
One advantage of having the system set up with a sqrt(2) ratio is that folding a sheet of A4 in half makes it the size of A5, and this works for any size in the series. This is particularly useful for photocopying, where you can copy 2 A4 sheets, scaled down by 50% to fit 2 pages per sheet evenly.
The C sizes of the system are also useful. The exact dimensions and how they're calculated aren't important, but a C4 envelope will fit a flat A4 sheet, a C5 envelope will fit an A5 sheet, or folded A4 sheet, and the special C5/C6 envelope fits an A4 sheet folded into thirds.
The density of the paper is specified in g/m^2 (grams per square metre, or "gsm"), with the common density for standard office paper being 80 gsm. That means, 1 sheet of A0 paper would weigh 80g, and A4, being 1/16th of that weighs 5g. Conversely, 16 A4 sheets weighs 80 grams. A standard ream containing 500 sheets is 500*5g = 2.5kg. Now, you can easily calculate the mass of any number of sheets, which is very useful for shipping purposes. More imporantly, it also lets customers compare the density of different sized paper products. e.g. 80 gsm A4 paper has the same density as 80 gsm A5, so they can know what quality of paper they will be printing on.
Compare this with the US system, where paper mass is measured with the complicated basis weight system, in lbs/ream. But it doesn't represent the mass of the paper as sold to the customer. It represents it at some stage in the manufacturing process before the paper has been cut to size, and this weight can't be reliably compared among different sizes of paper. e.g. Letter size paper rated at 5 lb/ream is not necessarily going to be as dense as a US legal size paper rated at 5 lb/ream.
In reality, the US does have a dual system of measurement, and that is what's costing the US so much. The general population may think everything is in USC, but a lot of engineering is done in SI units, or in some cases, in a mixture of the two systems.
For example, PCB boards in the USA are designed in mils (1 mil = 0.001 inches), and yet many electronic components are sized in metric. This results in rounding errors and parts that don't quite fit and need a lot of manual corrections. More info here. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=454
Actually, there's also a third system in use too, but that's mostly hidden from the general population. Roads in the US are measured and constructed using Ramsden's chain, which is 100 US survey feet, where a survey foot is slightly different from a regular foot. Each foot is divided into decimal fractions. But then, for long distances, they actually measure it with GPS, which gives readings in metres that then need to be converted for entry into the design software. It gets even more complicated that that, and that's explained in more detail here. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=465
No, they don't use micrometres on a construction site. In Australia, it's all millimetres. The lengths they commonly use (e.g. 600mm between studs in the wall, 2400mm ceiling heights) are easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, or 6 when needed. Tape measures in Australia measure in mm, not cm, especially those used in construction. You are highly unlikely to find centimetres or micrometres anywhere on a construction site. Micrometres are used for much smaller scale engineering. The kind of thing you'd need a set of vernier callipers to measure.
Actually, you can eat gold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_leaf#Culinary_uses
In Australia, cans are 375 mL, and in Europe they are 330 mL.
1 mile is 1.609344 km. I suspect the GP confused the conversion of 8 feet to 2.4m with miles to km.
The US customary units differ from the imperial units anyway. Imperial gallon is 4.54 L (based on volume of 10 pounds of water), US gallon is 3.785 L (defined as 231 cubic inches). Even the ratios of fl oz to cups and pints is different. 1 imperial pint = 2 Imp. cups = 20 Imp. fl oz ~= 568 mL, 1 US pint = 2 US cups = 16 US fl oz ~= 473 mL.
The FDA also already defines metricated units for use on food labelling, so that on nutrition labels where fl oz are stated, that really means 30 mL exactly, and similarly for teaspoon (5 mL) and tablespoon (15 mL).
Although the international inch, foot, yard and mile are all the same in every day usage, the US also has the special survey foot and mile.
The US survey foot differs from the regular foot by about 610 nm, and the US survey mile by about 3.2 mm (~ 1/8 in). That difference multiplies to about 1 foot over a distance of 95 miles, or about 27 feet over the 2600 mile distance from San Francisco to New York.
All medicine is metric
Except blood pressure, which is still measured in mmHg (millimetres of mercury) instead of hPa (hectopascals).
require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow.
Ask the English how that worked out for them. They buy petrol by the litre, but measure speed and distances in miles, and fuel economy in miles per (Imperial) gallon.
In Australian copyright, there is the concept of fair dealing. This is similar to fair use in the US. That gives the right to use copyrighted material for, among other things, the purpose of news reporting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing#Australia
Opera does hold patents and does sometimes patent new inventions. (As an employee, I am forbidden from discussing specifics and I don't know if a patent application was even filed for this particular feature). However, for specifications developed within or submitted to the W3C, Opera is subject to the W3C patent policy.
WTF? How does it possibly stop you from removing the battery when the phone is turned off? Isn't the battery held in with some sort of mechanical latch, with either a slider, something to depress to release the hooks, or similar? Which blackberry model are you talking about specifically?
These patents are NOT related to HTML5. These are related to the Widget specifications in the WebApps working group. The HTML5 work does not make use of this specification (though W3C widgets do use HTML5). Apple has not and there is no indication that they have any interest in doing anything that will impede the work of HTML5.
Torrents you've already got won't be affeted by thepiratebay.org going down. The web site is only used to distribute the torrent files and magnet links. Once you've got that, then you find other peers either through the openbittorrent.com tracker or the trackerless alternatives.
Tony Abbot's skepticism is easily addressed by giving him a demonstration of the technology. The only problem is that he's such a stubborn fool, he'll probably keep insisting that maintaining the ageing copper lines is fine for now and ignore the future as somebody else's problem. He's an tehnologically incompetent fool who should not be put in a position to make technical decisions on this issue, particularly because he seems incapable of listening to the industry experts on the issue.
To be fair, though, the Labor party has it's own share of misguided policies (the filtering policy, for one), but having a Labor government would be significnat better than a Liberal government right now. I think the best option is to give preferences to parties like The Greens, The Secular Party of Australia, and the Australian Sex Party ahead of Labor, and to put Liberal, National, Family First and the Christian Democrats at the end (with Labor's Stephen Conroy given the special Dead Last position, for voters in Victoria only), with the rest in the middle somewhere.
Compulsory voting is fantastic because it encourages a higher voter turn than voluntary schemes, and gives a better chance of actually getting what the public wants, rather than just what politically motivated groups want. Donkey votes are a minor problem, but at least such people can be seen to have willingly abstained, rather just failing to turn up.
I think it would be a complete disaster if Australia ever adopted a voluntary system like the US, where half the battle is just getting people to bother turning up, and the result can often be heavily influenced by politically motivated groups. For instance, just think about terrible the result will turn out if the Tea Party movement manages to motivate a significant portion of their followers to vote for extreme right-wing nutjobs, while the less politically motivated people and less well-organised groups who don't agree with them at all, just don't bother to vote.
So compulsory voting levels the playing field and gives a much fairer and more representative outcome.
The latency is irrelevant. I meant that they would look up the data from participating ISPs, using whatever implementation method they use, regardless of whether that's a local database or a remote lookup service. The fact is, SSL does not hide your IP address, and so SSL is not any kind of protection against this issue.
SSL won't help guard against this at all. If you visit a site that embeds an advertisement, the ad provider still obtains your IP address, and they can still query participating ISPs for the postal code of the user at that address.
Oh, you're just whinging without actually paying attention to any of the benefits that metrication would bring. Please watch Metrication Matters and read this site to find out more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M
http://www.metricationmatters.com/
I don't buy that argument. Petrol stations set their prices based on what they pay for the fuel and necessary profit margins. Also, they are still going to want to compete with each other by offering the best price they can. It's not in their interest to rip off consumers by 20 or 30 cents, expecially when there's a station down the road that isn't doing that.
Also, if you're getting around $0.70/L for fuel in the US, you're already getting a serious bargin compared with what we pay in Australia, and what I've seen being charged in some places in Europe. You'd have little to whinge about even if the prices did go up a little.
Of course, I meant to imply that the US should also switch to using metric at the pump, selling fuel per litre rather than per gallon, and also switch to using km/h for road speeds.
It can be done and has been done in many countries before. It does, however, require that the actual conversion be done relatively quickly, rather than a gradual changeover.
Watch Metrication Matters, a Google Tech Talk that covers these issues well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M
The US should also adopt L/100km, rather than, as TFA suggests, Gallons/100Miles. Seriously, if they're going to switch the measurements anyway, it makes more sense to switch to metric, like most of the rest of the world already has, than to retain the imperial system.
The problem with the CSIRO here is that since they are governement owned, they are tax payer funded and instead of using that money to fund real research that benefits everyone, they're sinking it into legal battles in an attempt to extract more money from foreign companies. While they technically aren't patent trolls in the classical sense, since they certainly are doing some real work, their aggressiveness in enforcing their patents makes them almost as bad.
The problem here is that patents are only supposed to cover the one specific method of implementing the invention. But with all the overly broad patents in this area, you have Apple patenting the actual gestures, preventing those same gestures from being used by any other device manufacturer, even if the multitouch detection system were implemented in a completely different way.
Seriously, patenting finger gestures is like patenting a method of turning a door knob. It's completely ridiculous, and it's only going to force every phone manufacturer to come up with their own overly complex and insanely unusable gestures, just because they weren't the first to file for a patent on the obvious.
Opera has had operamail.com for many years, but as far as I know, it has not been linked with the My Opera social networking site. As you can see from its current state, the operamail service has not been maintained for years. According to the TOS on that site, it's been outsourced to Outblaze - another mail company I know nothing about. It seems obvious that this new acquisition of FastMail.fm will change that.
(Disclaimer: I work for Opera, but I am not involved with our email products. The above represents my own opinion)