First thing, you're less likely to see naked chicks than naked blokes (topless chicks shouldn't be too difficult to find though). But if naked blokes are your thing, then you could try, for example, Sylt. Not only the FKK-beaches, which is obvious, but also the unmarked beaches... last place I went to there, even the lifeguard was stark naked (and old. and ugly).
If you live in the south you have quite a high chance of coming across some of this sort of thing (quarry lakes for example seem to attract FKKers, let alone the thermal bath scene, which goes from happy families to... er... other directions). If you really didn't notice any of this in 22 years I can only assume that you don't go out much!
Honestly, I would have enjoyed it more without quite so blatant attempts at love story elements. Male friends have told me that those scenes are totally necessary (something about Liv Tyler being extremely hot), but they just don't work on me. I find them mildly embarassing to watch, especially the sheer quantity of sad, thoughtful staring that goes on.
Regarding (4), bear in mind that Germans are extreme even by European standards. They have a love of nakedness that seems a bit extreme when you first see it... not every German, of course, but it's a strong subculture. It's called FKK- Frei Koerper Kultur, or Free Body Culture- and with respect to other European cultures it can be found a bit shocking when you first see it in action.
Ye gods... if Georg CF 'Rockstar' Greve has serious influence on how the Internet evolves, then you can colour me entirely unconvinced.
The FSF Europe was not one of RMS's most uniformly great successes; whilst some people are definitely working for the good, there are too many chiefs, as it were. Too much (scuse me, people, but it has to be said...) Geek Boy Macho club, almost. Press releases. Meetings. Oh my.
They aren't nearly as effectual as simple LUGs, in so many cases... I'd much prefer we spent the effort on an EFF.
Ha, now you mention security cameras I am reminded of when I got mugged in Paris's Gare du Nord. Right in front of one. I pointed this out to the police and the station's own staff, and they said, "Yeah, but firstly, those don't generally have any film in, secondly, they're not watched, and, oh, thirdly, we wouldn't be permitted to let the footage out anyway".
So what are they for? "We thought they might dissuade criminals who didn't know that"...
But yeah, I was very impressed with BA. Even now that they give you two gropes for the price of one when flying, for example, from Frankfurt airport (airport security isn't up to scratch it seems, so they do it again at the gate). I like BA - they are my favourite airline, bar none...
Yep, dear old Blunkett is heading towards invocation of Godwin's Law at a speed seldom equalled by any other British politician, ever.
As I mentioned, it seems entirely fair to make ID cards optionally available, as with passports (and as somebody who weathered part of the tech recession by working in an off-licence I would personally welcome the idea). I just don't want to see scenarios such as the one you just described become legitimate, because as the quote might go, "if I'm not considered a citizen without my papers, the terrorists have already won".
This one time, long before September 11, I'd lost my passport whilst living in Nice. British Airways therefore arranged some kind of temporary immigration papers, during the process of which I was asked to talk to some immigration officer for a quarter of an hour. He was a nice chap, had some local accent from the south-west, and asked questions about things like what it was like to be a student, what I thought of Guinness, and did I eat baked beans? (yes, but only with melted cheese covering).
Then he apparently decided that, if not English, I sounded close enough.
The point? I'm not sure. My feeling is that as so-called European citizens, we should not be focusing on the idea that our rights are governed by whatever piece of paper we may, or may not, be able to produce at any given time. This is, of course, naive, but what's wrong with a little naivety? Given the events of the last few years I feel that there have been enough rude awakenings already. We don't really need to hear, "Sorry, but it's not possible to ensure national security without draconian Iron Curtain-style jackbooted storm troopers co-ordinating the removal of the unfortunate paperless at gunpoint".
As a side note, I was also amused by the motivation Blunkett provided for all this, "To avoid 'health tourism'". Having lived in three or four European countries, I have never yet met a citizen in any of them who would prefer to use the National Health Service of the UK to their own. Neither, come to that, would I. Dentistry is another question, but any non-British national who manages to get themselves illegitimately placed on the jealously-guarded and hopelessly overcrowded NHS lists is already doing so astonishingly well that, frankly, they deserve free treatment for their six to twelve months of effort.
I see the problem with it. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of ID cards in general (actually, as a frequent traveller within Europe I would very much like to have the ability to acquire one of these French/German style ID cards that functions as a sort of cut-down passport, principally for security reasons...) and somewhat less fine with the idea of compulsory ID cards. I'm not in the least convinced of the argument for them, other than the ability to stop random people in the street and demand to see their ID, which will result in one of a few scenarios,
1) being 'I have it, here it is' (somewhat unlikely - you can prove your identity for video rental with something called a video club card after the initial effort, for example, so there's not much incentive to carry around fourty pounds (sixty dollars, ish) worth of ID card just so some prick can hit you over the head and nick it),
2) being an honest 'I left it at home', in which case the police will have to give you a reasonable time period to go home, get it, and present it to them, thus putting you to some inconvenience for your honesty,
or 3) being a dishonest 'I left it at home', in which case the police will give you a similar grace period, and you, being not a stupid illegal immigrant/criminal/whatever, will be unlikely to go back to the police station and admit it.
And I'm totally creeped out by the idea that Blunkett and his Orwellian pals are demanding compulsory biometric registration. Biometrics isn't something to use lightly, even if it is a popular element in buzzword bingo. In summary, it could be stated that whilst, for example, EU-acceptable ID cards would be very handy, and whilst a national ID system would perhaps be a good thing - solving the 'proof of age' problem, for example - this ID card system is not really about that sort of solution. Blunkett is probably not really after making European travellers' lives easier, so much as he is after that lovely-sounding Gattaca-style database of All The Biometric Information of Every Citizen And Visitor.
I'm aware that there are arguments for the retention of biometric information. But I've worked in areas where there's an astonishing quantity of crime, and our problem has never been proving the ID of the criminal, so much as the fact that the criminals are either underage or consider themselves so far outside the law that nothing short of a prison sentence can stop them. ID is easy to establish where you have a photo or a fingerprint (this is presumably where biometric info 'helps'), and is hard to establish where you have neither and rely on witness identification or less (biometric info isn't going to help you here...) In short, unless the government were to come up with some very good reasons for force-collecting that information from every citizen, they shouldn't be permitted to go through with it. It could be harmful, it isn't much help, and given things like his fabulous extradition agreement, it is extremely hard to see why anybody would consider Blunkett an even mildly trustworthy individual.
Previously, many people in the UK have had the comforting illusion that the country, unlike certain others, did not display the 'you want human rights? Prove your entitlement first' attitude. Blunkett, (the prick), is proving otherwise. Sensibly, manypeople have the unsurprising opinion that Blunkett can fuck off.
I had this conversation with a PhD student (in CS). Context: we had a bunch of wireless-enabled handhelds and I had just suggested ad-hoc networking:
Me: We should use reserved IP addresses, it's a private network. Him: Yeah. Er. We can copy the one off my work computer. note: the work computer was on the Internet; it had a globally visible IP. But as far as he was concerned, it was a Magic Number we had to copy to have it work... Me: Er. Or we could use 192.168.0.1 Him: Oh. Hey, I've heard that address before...
Sweet Zombie Jesus. Not having him writing my firewall rules.
Indeed, it's 'Quatre-vingt-dix neuf', which is 'Four-twenty ten-nine'... there is no explicit 'times'. (And if you're going to criticise, learn to spell first).
My point is that most languages do addition to express numbers - that's what the 'y' is doing in Spanish. I feel that 'dix-neuf' is pretty much equivalent to the Spanish 'diecinueve', so I suppose your difficulty is purely this 'quatre-vingt' construct...
Perhaps it would help you to look at the reason for this - which, as I say, is pretty much superseded outside mainland France by these 'septante', 'octante', 'nonante' constructs. Since Babylonian times, humanity seems to have had a habit of counting, rather than in hundreds, in sixties. (See 'Number words and number systems' by Karl Menninger, or this site). The link suggests a number of reasons for the popularity of the number sixty, including the two that I was given as a (British) child for the popularity of currently popular non-base ten systems like the foot or the dozen - firstly, that such numbers (12, 60...) maximise the number of divisors - secondly, that there are three joints on each finger, five fingers on each hand, allowing one to count up to 60 by pointing at one of the twelve parts of the fingers of the left hand with one of the five fingers of the right hand...
One can see the importance of the number 12 in Germanic languages, like English, whereas Latin languages actually inherit a simple base-10 system (undecim, duodecim, tredecim...) Germanic languages use 'one left after ten, two left after ten' - many hundreds of years of accent and erosion have simply hidden the meaning of the terms 'eleven' and 'twelve'.
The number 20 also has a special significance in English - it is the score, 'Three score and ten'. In fact, this 'score' is exactly the equivalent to the French 'eighty' that upsets you so much. The French are simply using a somewhat Biblical expression; "Four score".
Base sixty is indeed a little further from English-speaking experience, though, as I have said, it has a remarkably long historical pedigree. However, it was historically in use in Germanic languages, including English, where I believe sixty were given a special name (like 'score' - in the case of English, it was apparently 'shock'). Dictionary.com informs me that the term 'shock' is still in use in some Baltic ports to refer to a set of sixty loose items.
Until very recently, English included a good number of these peculiarities - and still does - English as a second language is full of irregularities, in and outside the language of mathematics. Remember, Americans didn't raise an eyebrow at the term when Lincoln said "Four score and seven years ago"... when the French say it, neither should you.
Of course, if you can't cope with quatre-vingt dix-neuf, you're not likely to do very well with German either, where everything follows the old English pattern as shown in 'four-and-twenty blackbirds'... (neun-und-neunzig - nine-and-ninety).
Let alone Japanese, which goes "nine tens nine" (kyuu juu kyuu)...
Even Spanish, which at least in England is the language that is reserved by secondary schools as a last-ditch attempt at providing a single GCSE pass for those students that prove to be utterly incapable of a little basic French, has some peculiarities when it comes to numbers.
Diecinueve. Treinta y dos... ten and nine. Thirty and two...
You just have to get used to the idea that when Douglas Adams said, "The past is now exactly like a foreign country - they do things exactly the same there", he was clearly not thinking about numbers.
I'm afraid I thought this about XP until I installed a perfectly standard basic ps/2 mouse on the laptop my office provided me. Admittedly, the laptop is at the bottom of the XP specs (~Pentium 500), and it's an aging Dell, but that still doesn't entirely explain why fifteen minutes after installing the *digitally signed* driver for the mouse, XP blue-screened. It was the moment when I realised that I was indeed back in the land of Microsoft...
So the message is that with XP, you can be unlucky.
The showing I went to was in Germany, on the first night; and the audience were falling about the place laughing (albeit, nervously) by the time we got to the oh-so-fabulous death scene.
Here in Germany there weren't exactly a crowd either. In fact I was surprised how few people there were. Whereas I am informed that the Lord Of The Rings III, what is it, Return of the King, premiere sold out a month ago.
I guess a lot of moviegoers are brighter than I am and took the best advice, which is to say, didn't bother:-P
Yes. It may well have been a 'great movie', in the style somewhat of Independence Day -
but I've seen it before.
The last movie is a confused collage of (what people like to call) nods to various other movies. The Brave Old Fighter bit from Independence Day, ALIENS - it even 'nodded' to The X-Files at one point. The finale is pretty much out of a Red Dwarf episode. And you can quite clearly hear Obi-Wan Kenobi murmering 'Use the force, Luke', somewhere back near the end of the movie.
I'm aware that it is difficult to create truly original scifi movies. I'm also aware that ideas are often consciously repeated in anime.. but this, they should have called 'Matrix Re-hashed'.
Oh, I suppose it wasn't bad. It just wasn't objectively very good. Each source from which it borrows was fundamentally better in its own right, particularly the Red Dwarf episode. Finally, it fell into the 'Alien 3' school of bad storytelling and gratuitous termination of characters... oh well.
Well, I ordered the Leacock book, so it will be interesting to see what appears in the mailbox...
I am sorry to hear that the same is true in Physics, though I'm not entirely surprised. But it does possibly reduce the likelihood that going for a physics job (something I'd been considering - just to escape the bullshit for a little while) will materially improve my working conditions...
Maybe it's time for me to move into something radically different before I go nuts / practice brain surgery with a hole punch.
...whereas in certain 'sciences', such as that in which I have been working, one is earnestly advised to avoid clarity when publishing wherever possible.
This I ascribe to the fact that, as a young field (and a small field, which by consequence I will not be identifying, but let's say 'something not a billion miles from application of software engineering' and leave it at that), nobody has ever condescended to actually set plain, simple, sensible foundation rules, preferring to sort of glaze over it in a "...but it's very complicated and we must be terrifically clever to understand it" sort of way.
Of course it isn't. There's a difference between 'deliberately undefined to attract funding', and 'defined but fiendishly difficult to understand [as in much of physics]'. So don't necessarily look to all computing publications for clarity, readability and transparent sharing of ideas within a community. OTOH, within this sort of field one can assume that the less clear and readable the research, the more likely it is that the authors of the research actually have nothing to say and are merely publishing for the hell of it.
Overuse of mathematics is often another clue, particularly when the maths is both extensive and appears to lead nowhere. Achieving funding is not unusually associated with hinting the discovery of astonishing things that, nonetheless, verge on trade secrets as far as publications are concerned; people who do this are typically time-wasters and should be shot.
And, er, to annoyingly reply to myself, this is why 'edutainment' is a good sign of active Microsoft involvement. Randy Hinrichs, Microsoft Research's Group Research Manager for Learning Science and Technology, is a major believer in the use of 'learning through play'. The LAMP project, on the other hand, is just a student project, and therefore supported to the tune of $30,000. I suspect Microsoft had veto power on it, though. Um.
Microsoft are funding a bunch of campus style software and such. iCampus is one example of this, a large MIT research thingy, which covers funding for all sorts of projects (I seem to recall there being, for example, a student shuttle-bus which reports its location via gps to the web...). It's actually fairly fragmented; like most large lumps of university money it has been taken up by people as and when rather than as part of a Grand Plan.
Well, no matter how it appears, certainly if you ask MS or MIT they will tell you there is a grand plan - for sure. But relax, Microsoft have been throwing funding at universities for 'wired campus' style projects on a regular basis as far as I know, and as yet it has met with limited success from their perspective. They would love to own the education market, of course. They just haven't got a decent grip on it yet, and not for lack of trying.
You have to realise that research and industrial funding is an uneasy alliance at best. Good researchers attract funding whilst controlling the conditions under which it is given; bad researchers accept funding that comes with strings. In this case, MIT are, I suspect, in the driver's seat. This makes them relatively unusual; many researchers are rather naive and, on receipt of a few flattering comments and hints of 'long term collaborations', 'special relationships' or similar, will immediately go for it no matter what the conditions. Some even believe that they are the ones doing the 'using'. Having worked for one of these types, I can assure you that these researchers are wrong (do I sound disillusioned? Oh well).
It's worth keeping your eyes open, anyway; if you see anything using tablet PCs, MS DRM, heavy use of.NET, and 'Learning through [demonstration/play]' with [insert microsoft technologies], then you can more or less assume that the researcher is a Microsoft prostitute of some kind. But this particular project seems too 'free' to be particularly blessed by MS.
Weird... when I worked at Threshers the company policy was to accept anything with Sterling written on it. However, since the company policy also included hiring outstandingly 'budget' management, you'd be amazed at the sheer number of 20s with Faraday on that got through in an average day, too.
And since the company was too cheap to spring for any form of checking device (UV, pens, anything) the only counterfeit checking that actually took place was 1) looking for a watermark, 2) ripping the note slightly to find the little metal strip and 3) the new notes, when rubbed against a piece of paper, are supposed to leave a smear of appropriately coloured ink. All of which takes time. Which means that if you want to use counterfeit money, try Threshers at around seven-thirty PM on a friday when there's a queue of twenty-five people. Nobody'll check.
And you know what gets me? I'm an, er, 'wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiterin' (foreign, obviously...) and I work on the NUKATH project at Karlsruhe University...
And I didn't know anything about this April Fools' until I read it on Slashdot.
I might be atypical, as I appreciate my TV consumption is well below the average, but the following comment holds as true before and after I made that particular change in my life; I never learnt about artists because 'the members of the RIAA paid a shitload of money'. Generally, I almost always find new artists I like - in order - by word-of-mouth from friends, by chance (eg. turning up at a random gig or other and discovering I like it), by poking around the record store, or, recently, by internet.
Occasionally, I do find new artists I like off the radio or television - very occasionally - but really, if the RIAA are PAYING significant $ to get their acts on advertising-sponsored radio then I think they're doing something wrong (or, more likely, are victims of the payola they almost certainly imposed on themselves).
One thing that I know for sure is that at least in Europe, the idea that a musical act has to pay radio stations - especially small, local advertising sponsored stations of the few-hundred-thousand-listener variety - should by all logic be laughable. Like local newspapers, most local institutions/anywhere/ are begging for free content... if, at least, they weren't contractually bound not to play it. Which, sadly, I suspect they are.
The point of all this being that, frankly, your RIAA - advertising - economics theory is part wishful thinking and partly true, but much of what makes it true is fall-out from the bad behaviour of the RIAA and its European cousins.
Re:I got to see the pics before they get /.ed
on
Water Computing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
EMPs are basically just sudden extremely intense electromagnetic fields that appear and disappear, producing something like one nanosecond worth of electric field in whatever is within range. They're extremely 'dirty' - there's a large range of frequencies, which complicates things. The actual magnitude of the field isn't that great, less than your average lightning strike, but the problem is the rate at which the pulse occurs - which is much faster.
Any conductor will pick up on this effect, like metal pipes, land lines, what have you, which naturally tends to destroy anything connected to said devices. Processors and such are particularly vulnerable to, as you say, heating to destruction, since the devices cannot dissipate the extra heat.
You're pretty much right both ways, I think, in that overheating and 'messed up electrons' probably go hand in hand.
Incidentally, this hearing suggests another effect of high-altitude nuclear bursts, which is to fill the Van Allen belt with radiation and thus destroy all the low-earth orbit satellites not specifically designed for a high - radiation environment.
Now I must have a nice drink of Glenmorangie. or perhaps an Islay? Hmm....
Is toigh leann Famous Grouse:P
Myself I like (not necessarily agree with, but enjoy) Robert Heinlein's take on Inalienable Rights, and tend to apply it now and then ('What 'right to life' has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries'). I suspect that the majority of existing law (and morality, and so on) is already based on expedience, the moral superiority of that decision being determined after the fact of its practical usefulness. Read Stephen Pinker for an exploration of this sort of effect.
In the case of this EULA-worm, I'd suggest that in the UK at least, there are already perfectly serviceable laws applicable to this situation. The only difficulty is that Panama might not see it the same way:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Good god, you didn't notice???
First thing, you're less likely to see naked chicks than naked blokes (topless chicks shouldn't be too difficult to find though). But if naked blokes are your thing, then you could try, for example, Sylt. Not only the FKK-beaches, which is obvious, but also the unmarked beaches... last place I went to there, even the lifeguard was stark naked (and old. and ugly).
If you live in the south you have quite a high chance of coming across some of this sort of thing (quarry lakes for example seem to attract FKKers, let alone the thermal bath scene, which goes from happy families to... er... other directions). If you really didn't notice any of this in 22 years I can only assume that you don't go out much!
Honestly, I would have enjoyed it more without quite so blatant attempts at love story elements. Male friends have told me that those scenes are totally necessary (something about Liv Tyler being extremely hot), but they just don't work on me. I find them mildly embarassing to watch, especially the sheer quantity of sad, thoughtful staring that goes on.
YMMV of course.
Regarding (4), bear in mind that Germans are extreme even by European standards. They have a love of nakedness that seems a bit extreme when you first see it... not every German, of course, but it's a strong subculture. It's called FKK- Frei Koerper Kultur, or Free Body Culture- and with respect to other European cultures it can be found a bit shocking when you first see it in action.
Ye gods... if Georg CF 'Rockstar' Greve has serious influence on how the Internet evolves, then you can colour me entirely unconvinced.
The FSF Europe was not one of RMS's most uniformly great successes; whilst some people are definitely working for the good, there are too many chiefs, as it were. Too much (scuse me, people, but it has to be said...) Geek Boy Macho club, almost. Press releases. Meetings. Oh my.
They aren't nearly as effectual as simple LUGs, in so many cases... I'd much prefer we spent the effort on an EFF.
Ha, now you mention security cameras I am reminded of when I got mugged in Paris's Gare du Nord. Right in front of one. I pointed this out to the police and the station's own staff, and they said, "Yeah, but firstly, those don't generally have any film in, secondly, they're not watched, and, oh, thirdly, we wouldn't be permitted to let the footage out anyway".
So what are they for? "We thought they might dissuade criminals who didn't know that"...
But yeah, I was very impressed with BA. Even now that they give you two gropes for the price of one when flying, for example, from Frankfurt airport (airport security isn't up to scratch it seems, so they do it again at the gate). I like BA - they are my favourite airline, bar none...
Yep, dear old Blunkett is heading towards invocation of Godwin's Law at a speed seldom equalled by any other British politician, ever.
As I mentioned, it seems entirely fair to make ID cards optionally available, as with passports (and as somebody who weathered part of the tech recession by working in an off-licence I would personally welcome the idea). I just don't want to see scenarios such as the one you just described become legitimate, because as the quote might go, "if I'm not considered a citizen without my papers, the terrorists have already won".
This one time, long before September 11, I'd lost my passport whilst living in Nice. British Airways therefore arranged some kind of temporary immigration papers, during the process of which I was asked to talk to some immigration officer for a quarter of an hour. He was a nice chap, had some local accent from the south-west, and asked questions about things like what it was like to be a student, what I thought of Guinness, and did I eat baked beans? (yes, but only with melted cheese covering).
Then he apparently decided that, if not English, I sounded close enough.
The point? I'm not sure. My feeling is that as so-called European citizens, we should not be focusing on the idea that our rights are governed by whatever piece of paper we may, or may not, be able to produce at any given time. This is, of course, naive, but what's wrong with a little naivety? Given the events of the last few years I feel that there have been enough rude awakenings already. We don't really need to hear, "Sorry, but it's not possible to ensure national security without draconian Iron Curtain-style jackbooted storm troopers co-ordinating the removal of the unfortunate paperless at gunpoint".
As a side note, I was also amused by the motivation Blunkett provided for all this, "To avoid 'health tourism'". Having lived in three or four European countries, I have never yet met a citizen in any of them who would prefer to use the National Health Service of the UK to their own. Neither, come to that, would I. Dentistry is another question, but any non-British national who manages to get themselves illegitimately placed on the jealously-guarded and hopelessly overcrowded NHS lists is already doing so astonishingly well that, frankly, they deserve free treatment for their six to twelve months of effort.
I see the problem with it. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of ID cards in general (actually, as a frequent traveller within Europe I would very much like to have the ability to acquire one of these French/German style ID cards that functions as a sort of cut-down passport, principally for security reasons...) and somewhat less fine with the idea of compulsory ID cards. I'm not in the least convinced of the argument for them, other than the ability to stop random people in the street and demand to see their ID, which will result in one of a few scenarios,
1) being 'I have it, here it is' (somewhat unlikely - you can prove your identity for video rental with something called a video club card after the initial effort, for example, so there's not much incentive to carry around fourty pounds (sixty dollars, ish) worth of ID card just so some prick can hit you over the head and nick it),
2) being an honest 'I left it at home', in which case the police will have to give you a reasonable time period to go home, get it, and present it to them, thus putting you to some inconvenience for your honesty,
or 3) being a dishonest 'I left it at home', in which case the police will give you a similar grace period, and you, being not a stupid illegal immigrant/criminal/whatever, will be unlikely to go back to the police station and admit it.
And I'm totally creeped out by the idea that Blunkett and his Orwellian pals are demanding compulsory biometric registration. Biometrics isn't something to use lightly, even if it is a popular element in buzzword bingo. In summary, it could be stated that whilst, for example, EU-acceptable ID cards would be very handy, and whilst a national ID system would perhaps be a good thing - solving the 'proof of age' problem, for example - this ID card system is not really about that sort of solution. Blunkett is probably not really after making European travellers' lives easier, so much as he is after that lovely-sounding Gattaca-style database of All The Biometric Information of Every Citizen And Visitor.
I'm aware that there are arguments for the retention of biometric information. But I've worked in areas where there's an astonishing quantity of crime, and our problem has never been proving the ID of the criminal, so much as the fact that the criminals are either underage or consider themselves so far outside the law that nothing short of a prison sentence can stop them. ID is easy to establish where you have a photo or a fingerprint (this is presumably where biometric info 'helps'), and is hard to establish where you have neither and rely on witness identification or less (biometric info isn't going to help you here...) In short, unless the government were to come up with some very good reasons for force-collecting that information from every citizen, they shouldn't be permitted to go through with it. It could be harmful, it isn't much help, and given things like his fabulous extradition agreement, it is extremely hard to see why anybody would consider Blunkett an even mildly trustworthy individual.
Previously, many people in the UK have had the comforting illusion that the country, unlike certain others, did not display the 'you want human rights? Prove your entitlement first' attitude. Blunkett, (the prick), is proving otherwise. Sensibly, many people have the unsurprising opinion that Blunkett can fuck off.
I had this conversation with a PhD student (in CS). Context: we had a bunch of wireless-enabled handhelds and I had just suggested ad-hoc networking:
Me: We should use reserved IP addresses, it's a private network.
Him: Yeah. Er. We can copy the one off my work computer.
note: the work computer was on the Internet; it had a globally visible IP. But as far as he was concerned, it was a Magic Number we had to copy to have it work...
Me: Er. Or we could use 192.168.0.1
Him: Oh. Hey, I've heard that address before...
Sweet Zombie Jesus. Not having him writing my firewall rules.
Indeed, it's 'Quatre-vingt-dix neuf', which is 'Four-twenty ten-nine'... there is no explicit 'times'. (And if you're going to criticise, learn to spell first).
My point is that most languages do addition to express numbers - that's what the 'y' is doing in Spanish. I feel that 'dix-neuf' is pretty much equivalent to the Spanish 'diecinueve', so I suppose your difficulty is purely this 'quatre-vingt' construct...
Perhaps it would help you to look at the reason for this - which, as I say, is pretty much superseded outside mainland France by these 'septante', 'octante', 'nonante' constructs. Since Babylonian times, humanity seems to have had a habit of counting, rather than in hundreds, in sixties. (See 'Number words and number systems' by Karl Menninger, or this site). The link suggests a number of reasons for the popularity of the number sixty, including the two that I was given as a (British) child for the popularity of currently popular non-base ten systems like the foot or the dozen - firstly, that such numbers (12, 60...) maximise the number of divisors - secondly, that there are three joints on each finger, five fingers on each hand, allowing one to count up to 60 by pointing at one of the twelve parts of the fingers of the left hand with one of the five fingers of the right hand...
One can see the importance of the number 12 in Germanic languages, like English, whereas Latin languages actually inherit a simple base-10 system (undecim, duodecim, tredecim...) Germanic languages use 'one left after ten, two left after ten' - many hundreds of years of accent and erosion have simply hidden the meaning of the terms 'eleven' and 'twelve'.
The number 20 also has a special significance in English - it is the score, 'Three score and ten'. In fact, this 'score' is exactly the equivalent to the French 'eighty' that upsets you so much. The French are simply using a somewhat Biblical expression; "Four score".
Base sixty is indeed a little further from English-speaking experience, though, as I have said, it has a remarkably long historical pedigree. However, it was historically in use in Germanic languages, including English, where I believe sixty were given a special name (like 'score' - in the case of English, it was apparently 'shock'). Dictionary.com informs me that the term 'shock' is still in use in some Baltic ports to refer to a set of sixty loose items.
Until very recently, English included a good number of these peculiarities - and still does - English as a second language is full of irregularities, in and outside the language of mathematics. Remember, Americans didn't raise an eyebrow at the term when Lincoln said "Four score and seven years ago"... when the French say it, neither should you.
(Disclaimer: I'm not deeply into languages, but...)
o ixante,
If you went to Belgium or Switzerland you would discover that alternative terms for these numbers do exist: eg:
dix,
vingt,
trente,
quarante,
cinquante,
s
septante,
octante (also heard 'huitante'),
nonante.
Of course, if you can't cope with quatre-vingt dix-neuf, you're not likely to do very well with German either, where everything follows the old English pattern as shown in 'four-and-twenty blackbirds'... (neun-und-neunzig - nine-and-ninety).
Let alone Japanese, which goes "nine tens nine" (kyuu juu kyuu)...
Even Spanish, which at least in England is the language that is reserved by secondary schools as a last-ditch attempt at providing a single GCSE pass for those students that prove to be utterly incapable of a little basic French, has some peculiarities when it comes to numbers.
Diecinueve. Treinta y dos... ten and nine. Thirty and two...
You just have to get used to the idea that when Douglas Adams said, "The past is now exactly like a foreign country - they do things exactly the same there", he was clearly not thinking about numbers.
I'm afraid I thought this about XP until I installed a perfectly standard basic ps/2 mouse on the laptop my office provided me. Admittedly, the laptop is at the bottom of the XP specs (~Pentium 500), and it's an aging Dell, but that still doesn't entirely explain why fifteen minutes after installing the *digitally signed* driver for the mouse, XP blue-screened. It was the moment when I realised that I was indeed back in the land of Microsoft...
So the message is that with XP, you can be unlucky.
The showing I went to was in Germany, on the first night; and the audience were falling about the place laughing (albeit, nervously) by the time we got to the oh-so-fabulous death scene.
It's universal.
Here in Germany there weren't exactly a crowd either. In fact I was surprised how few people there were. Whereas I am informed that the Lord Of The Rings III, what is it, Return of the King, premiere sold out a month ago.
:-P
I guess a lot of moviegoers are brighter than I am and took the best advice, which is to say, didn't bother
Yes. It may well have been a 'great movie', in the style somewhat of Independence Day -
but I've seen it before.
The last movie is a confused collage of (what people like to call) nods to various other movies. The Brave Old Fighter bit from Independence Day, ALIENS - it even 'nodded' to The X-Files at one point. The finale is pretty much out of a Red Dwarf episode. And you can quite clearly hear Obi-Wan Kenobi murmering 'Use the force, Luke', somewhere back near the end of the movie.
I'm aware that it is difficult to create truly original scifi movies. I'm also aware that ideas are often consciously repeated in anime.. but this, they should have called 'Matrix Re-hashed'.
Oh, I suppose it wasn't bad. It just wasn't objectively very good. Each source from which it borrows was fundamentally better in its own right, particularly the Red Dwarf episode. Finally, it fell into the 'Alien 3' school of bad storytelling and gratuitous termination of characters... oh well.
Well, I ordered the Leacock book, so it will be interesting to see what appears in the mailbox...
I am sorry to hear that the same is true in Physics, though I'm not entirely surprised. But it does possibly reduce the likelihood that going for a physics job (something I'd been considering - just to escape the bullshit for a little while) will materially improve my working conditions...
Maybe it's time for me to move into something radically different before I go nuts / practice brain surgery with a hole punch.
*sigh*
...whereas in certain 'sciences', such as that in which I have been working, one is earnestly advised to avoid clarity when publishing wherever possible.
This I ascribe to the fact that, as a young field (and a small field, which by consequence I will not be identifying, but let's say 'something not a billion miles from application of software engineering' and leave it at that), nobody has ever condescended to actually set plain, simple, sensible foundation rules, preferring to sort of glaze over it in a "...but it's very complicated and we must be terrifically clever to understand it" sort of way.
Of course it isn't. There's a difference between 'deliberately undefined to attract funding', and 'defined but fiendishly difficult to understand [as in much of physics]'. So don't necessarily look to all computing publications for clarity, readability and transparent sharing of ideas within a community. OTOH, within this sort of field one can assume that the less clear and readable the research, the more likely it is that the authors of the research actually have nothing to say and are merely publishing for the hell of it.
Overuse of mathematics is often another clue, particularly when the maths is both extensive and appears to lead nowhere. Achieving funding is not unusually associated with hinting the discovery of astonishing things that, nonetheless, verge on trade secrets as far as publications are concerned; people who do this are typically time-wasters and should be shot.
And, er, to annoyingly reply to myself, this is why 'edutainment' is a good sign of active Microsoft involvement. Randy Hinrichs, Microsoft Research's Group Research Manager for Learning Science and Technology, is a major believer in the use of 'learning through play'. The LAMP project, on the other hand, is just a student project, and therefore supported to the tune of $30,000. I suspect Microsoft had veto power on it, though. Um.
Off now.
Microsoft are funding a bunch of campus style software and such. iCampus is one example of this, a large MIT research thingy, which covers funding for all sorts of projects (I seem to recall there being, for example, a student shuttle-bus which reports its location via gps to the web...). It's actually fairly fragmented; like most large lumps of university money it has been taken up by people as and when rather than as part of a Grand Plan.
.NET, and 'Learning through [demonstration/play]' with [insert microsoft technologies], then you can more or less assume that the researcher is a Microsoft prostitute of some kind. But this particular project seems too 'free' to be particularly blessed by MS.
Well, no matter how it appears, certainly if you ask MS or MIT they will tell you there is a grand plan - for sure. But relax, Microsoft have been throwing funding at universities for 'wired campus' style projects on a regular basis as far as I know, and as yet it has met with limited success from their perspective. They would love to own the education market, of course. They just haven't got a decent grip on it yet, and not for lack of trying.
You have to realise that research and industrial funding is an uneasy alliance at best. Good researchers attract funding whilst controlling the conditions under which it is given; bad researchers accept funding that comes with strings. In this case, MIT are, I suspect, in the driver's seat. This makes them relatively unusual; many researchers are rather naive and, on receipt of a few flattering comments and hints of 'long term collaborations', 'special relationships' or similar, will immediately go for it no matter what the conditions. Some even believe that they are the ones doing the 'using'. Having worked for one of these types, I can assure you that these researchers are wrong (do I sound disillusioned? Oh well).
It's worth keeping your eyes open, anyway; if you see anything using tablet PCs, MS DRM, heavy use of
Don't know if that helps.
On the activist front, here's a suggestion for a protest chant:
Hey, hey, RIAA, how many kids did you sue today?
I know, I know. They actually sued her mother. But I don't think the general public will make that difference.
Weird... when I worked at Threshers the company policy was to accept anything with Sterling written on it. However, since the company policy also included hiring outstandingly 'budget' management, you'd be amazed at the sheer number of 20s with Faraday on that got through in an average day, too.
And since the company was too cheap to spring for any form of checking device (UV, pens, anything) the only counterfeit checking that actually took place was 1) looking for a watermark, 2) ripping the note slightly to find the little metal strip and 3) the new notes, when rubbed against a piece of paper, are supposed to leave a smear of appropriately coloured ink. All of which takes time. Which means that if you want to use counterfeit money, try Threshers at around seven-thirty PM on a friday when there's a queue of twenty-five people. Nobody'll check.
And you know what gets me? I'm an, er, 'wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiterin' (foreign, obviously...) and I work on the NUKATH project at Karlsruhe University...
And I didn't know anything about this April Fools' until I read it on Slashdot.
SUKATH!!! ROTFL!
Just a small point:
/anywhere/ are begging for free content... if, at least, they weren't contractually bound not to play it. Which, sadly, I suspect they are.
I might be atypical, as I appreciate my TV consumption is well below the average, but the following comment holds as true before and after I made that particular change in my life; I never learnt about artists because 'the members of the RIAA paid a shitload of money'. Generally, I almost always find new artists I like - in order - by word-of-mouth from friends, by chance (eg. turning up at a random gig or other and discovering I like it), by poking around the record store, or, recently, by internet.
Occasionally, I do find new artists I like off the radio or television - very occasionally - but really, if the RIAA are PAYING significant $ to get their acts on advertising-sponsored radio then I think they're doing something wrong (or, more likely, are victims of the payola they almost certainly imposed on themselves).
One thing that I know for sure is that at least in Europe, the idea that a musical act has to pay radio stations - especially small, local advertising sponsored stations of the few-hundred-thousand-listener variety - should by all logic be laughable. Like local newspapers, most local institutions
The point of all this being that, frankly, your RIAA - advertising - economics theory is part wishful thinking and partly true, but much of what makes it true is fall-out from the bad behaviour of the RIAA and its European cousins.
EMPs are basically just sudden extremely intense electromagnetic fields that appear and disappear, producing something like one nanosecond worth of electric field in whatever is within range. They're extremely 'dirty' - there's a large range of frequencies, which complicates things. The actual magnitude of the field isn't that great, less than your average lightning strike, but the problem is the rate at which the pulse occurs - which is much faster.
Any conductor will pick up on this effect, like metal pipes, land lines, what have you, which naturally tends to destroy anything connected to said devices. Processors and such are particularly vulnerable to, as you say, heating to destruction, since the devices cannot dissipate the extra heat.
You're pretty much right both ways, I think, in that overheating and 'messed up electrons' probably go hand in hand.
Incidentally, this hearing suggests another effect of high-altitude nuclear bursts, which is to fill the Van Allen belt with radiation and thus destroy all the low-earth orbit satellites not specifically designed for a high - radiation environment.
Fàilte! Ciamar a tha sibh?
Now I must have a nice drink of Glenmorangie. or perhaps an Islay? Hmm....
Is toigh leann Famous Grouse :P
Myself I like (not necessarily agree with, but enjoy) Robert Heinlein's take on Inalienable Rights, and tend to apply it now and then ('What 'right to life' has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries'). I suspect that the majority of existing law (and morality, and so on) is already based on expedience, the moral superiority of that decision being determined after the fact of its practical usefulness. Read Stephen Pinker for an exploration of this sort of effect.
In the case of this EULA-worm, I'd suggest that in the UK at least, there are already perfectly serviceable laws applicable to this situation. The only difficulty is that Panama might not see it the same way :-)
It's a smegging garbage pod!