They finally figured out what was wrong with him (an infection, pretty much what he thought in the first place) and his health has been improving since then. He's not quite cured yet, but well on the way there.
So we can look forward to quite a few more years of slackware yet:D
Here's another anecdote for your collection: my dear mother, who is not especially technical, owns a laptop. The original, an x86 beast, died for the fifth time earlier this year. We discussed what the replacement should be, and came to the conclusion that a) it needed to be a laptop, and b) we wanted to get her a laptop with OS X. We thought the interface would be easier for her to use. It seemed ideal, and the whole family was pretty enthusiastic about the idea.
So the week before her birthday, we took a look at the Apple store in the UK. Cheapest laptop available, a 12 inch iBook at 700 UKP (about 1400 dollars). Ah, we said, but her eyesight isn't as good as it once was. She needs a bigger screen than that or she'll give up in disgust. What's a 14 inch screen cost on an iBook? An extra 200 UKP, bringing us up to 1800 dollars (500 dollars more than US customers pay for the identical hardware, by the way). Isn't there a lower-spec large-screen version? No.
We duly reported this to my father, who choked on his cornflakes. He bought a computer magazine and pointed out that the cost of a decent well-built x86 laptop including XP Pro, a software bundle and an extended warranty was half the price of that 14 inch screen iBook.
Now I agree that "everything worthwhile costs money", but there is such a thing as taking the piss. I know my mother would have a better time with OS X than with XP, but the cost of the hardware required is such that you can't help noticing the delicate fragrance of a ripoff situation, particularly when you go to Apple US and compare the prices with the UK store. You say you've seen too many people who "when you take their objections away, raise new objections as to why they won't ever spend the money". On this occasion, we had every intention of "switching". The credit card was out and pointing at Apple, who simply did not deliver an affordable solution, apparently because they feel the UK market can support a 250UKP surcharge on each laptop sold. And of course the non-availability of x86 OS X will mean that we certainly won't be able to change our minds later, unless we dump that hardware investment and start from scratch. And pigs might fly.
Hah, I got stopped by the police once when biking on a certain bit of pavement in Germany. They explained that it was only legal if you were under (I think it was) eight years old... they were actually friendly about it. Whereas a nasty old female traffic warden who once caught me doing the same thing was not. German friends of mine have had quite serious problems with the police (eg biking while over the legal limit, apparently, bike confiscated, walk home).
I've not tried biking on the pavement in Austria though. If I ever do and get caught, I'll let you know what the experience is like:)
But if you buy a laptop from them - not that I recommend it by any means, you're better off buying from a smaller retailer even if it means paying £200 extra up front, because I have it on authority that half the laptops sold in the Dixons chain are peculiar to that chain and thus not up to the general standards of that manufacturer - if you must get a laptop from them, get the extended warranty. Because the piece of shit laptop you bought will almost certainly die within a year. With an extended warranty, you can nurse the thing into lasting three years before chucking it out and starting again.
When buying from the Dixon's chain, don't think of it as buying. Think of it as an overpriced lease, valid for the duration of the warranty.
Oh, and a bit of additional wisdom: if you ever send anything away for repair via PCWorld, make them sign a receipt for it. And when (if) you get it back, count the bits. Turn the item on. Check the batteries, check that all the memory is still in it (better yet, take out all the extras before you hand it in at all).
Applying paranoia to PC World is not unreasonable. Quite the opposite; it's a survival tactic.
Really? C requires you to get the hang of some fairly nasty concepts which C# usually hides. So I'd think that a 9 year old would actually find C# much easier... why do you feel it would be harder? I'm curious.
There's also a course here, which is actually in Computing and Information Systems, so perhaps less relevant. Don't ask me about the value of this particular course, as I have no idea.
Certainly these guys offer way less support than the OU, but I have the suspicion that they are cheaper - as far as I can see it (and have heard) they take the position that they give you a book list, chuck occasional assignments at you, then allow you in to the exams. They are probably therefore best suited to the annoying sort of person who never goes to lectures but somehow comes out with an 'A' anyway. Possibly the cost is irrelevant in this case, since I take the point that one can get grants under certain circumstances for the OU, particularly given the disability, but the costs are normally pretty painful for people with an overdraft like mine... sadly.
Hmm... Maybe the author of that troll intended to suggest that the kid was one of those pretentious intellectual types, and therefore mispronounced "leet" as "leté", as though it had accents on it ("yeah... that's just sooo lettay")?
Or, y'know, it could just be that the author of that venerable cut n'paste job was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic in the logic department. Pity, because leetspeak would be a lot more amusing with added Valley Girl.
I recall having a chat with a Plextor rep about just these features of their brand new drive a year or so ago at CeBIT. The guy was explaining all the wonderful new functionality: clever overburning/compression and whatnot, and an encryption thingummy. I asked him how much of it would be supported under Linux, and he said "only basic CD-writer functionality". So I asked him if he didn't imagine that any of the extra features would be reverse engineered or whatever, and he explained with a big grin that that'd be impossible. He actually sounded pretty proud about it - some of the functionality, he said, was entirely impossible to reverse engineer (the encryption stuff). And Plextor certainly had no intention of helping anybody out on the job.
It occurred to me to wonder why Plextor are so sure that this is a good thing. Then it occurred to me that by buying the new Plextor drive, I'd be paying for a whole lot of supposed R&D on unusable features.
Rugby Radio Station At the end of March 2003 Rugby Radio station sent its last commercial message when the 16kHz GBR transmitter was taken out of service.
This was the original service that the station opened with in 1926 and for which the very tall masts were built. Its high power and low frequency enabled it to contact virtually anywhere in the world. It was used initially for sending telegrams in morse and later telex messages, but was never intended to send speech, unlike the other transmitters on the site. The original transmitter was replaced in 1966.
Telephone services started on other transmitters in 1927 and as short wave services developed the site east of the A5 was opened from 1953. Short wave transmissions stopped in 2000 when communications with ships moved over to satellite.
The Rugby Radio Clock transmitter remains in service under contract with the National Physical Laboratory.
Yeah, when I read that story the first thing that came to mind was "no, what destroyed the magic of Star Wars 3 was Star Wars 1 and Star Wars 2, not to mention the, err, remastering of parts 4-6".
If anything destroyed the magic of Star Wars for me, it was George Lucas, closely followed by the endless bloody "stealing movies is a crime" announcements in the cinema (we know. That's why we bought tickets... duh). BitTorrent is fairly blameless in that regard. Especially in my case, since I live near one of the very very few cinemas in Britain that have a licence to sell alcohol, it's unusual that a sf movie fails to draw me to the cinema, since almost anything improves from the addition of a couple of pints of Guinness. Even so, I haven't bothered to go watch the thing. I can't see the point, since I have a premonition that the movie is going to be wooden, obvious and cliché'd. Just to take a line from Lucas, I sense in this movie many hackneyed plot devices.
I'm sure I'll go at some point, though - hey, it might actually be good despite the script - but I doubt that I'd want to waste the disk space for the download.
Interesting... I thought that, right up until the time that I tried authoring and maintaining a medium-size site (back in the.com days) and earned myself a rude awakening.
In my experience (YMMV) it is far, far easier to create an infrastructure capable of doing everything you want and to serve content dynamically within that infrastructure, than it is to edit more than a very few pages by hand. Now there is a good argument for serving static (cached) versions of dynamically created files where this is possible, and a lot of sites do just that.
If you haven't, you might want to go read Beggars In Spain by Nancy Kress. It discusses just that question, and doesn't come to a favourable conclusion on the subject (I'm not sure I agree with the slippery-slope progression that the book presents, outside the context of that book, but it's a good discussion nonetheless).
I imagine it's possible that genetic conditions like Downs would be more carefully screened for in that situation, but Kress suggests that it's not terribly likely that the logic would be taken all the way to full-blown eugenics, or at least that this would in practice be self-defeating, for predominantly social reasons.
Consider: outside the special circumstances of very small groups, which wouldn't be self-sustainable anyway, a group is going to need diversity, genetics being annoyingly complex and a right pain in the neck when it comes to the law of unforeseen consequences. I think in the forseeable future that suggests a limit on any realistic expectations of the effects of eugenics. Plus, the ability to calculate large sums in one's head (consciously - much of our maths happens outside that level anyway) is already somewhat obselete due to technology. On the other hand, the ability to be part of a society that is on the whole productive is not going to be superseded by technology any time soon. Perhaps there's an argument for genetic screening for mental illness, but I don't think that we've quite got to the point that we can screen for everything up to pleasantness of character. Fortunately.
It's already happening; thus all the eprints installations, the RDN and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.
The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.
I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"
OTOH, as my last word, I would disagree with the following: It's hardly fitting for me, as a junior academic, to tell him personally what to put on his university homepage.
Seeing as he has read and commented on this thread, he has inevitably seen your posts. Your opinions on his university homepage have almost certainly been noticed as well. So you have, if you like, 'told him', although you chose to do it in the third person, and by voicing your point of view to whatever percentage of 800,000-odd Slashdot logins happened to be reading at the time, rather than directly. Ultimately, that's your choice; I just don't see the logic by which it is preferable to attack a person in front of Slashdot than to simply compose and send a polite email. Again, that's probably just me.
Good, then you'll understand the difficulty. Which country was it, out of curiosity? It doesn't seem to feature on your CV, unless you mean the (semi-permanent?) summer schools.
As I say, if you feel his site contains inappropriate material, feel free to let him know directly. As an academic, I'm sure you're aware that it'd be far more appropriate than beating the subject to death on Slashdot.
Umm... you're overdoing it a bit there with your "professional context". He makes it perfectly clear; this is why it doesn't include lists of publications and all that good stuff, but instead comes with his link list, his hometown and a nice little picture of his house... and the view from his chair. I'd have thought that the miscellania on that page are pretty much uniformly informal.
Personally, I've always rather enjoyed his mode of speech, which IRL generally reflects a pretty honest outlook on the world... which is a rare, nay, freak occurrence in a "professional context" in which two-thirds of the people involved are out for nothing so much as personal glory. But that's probably just me.
In closing, I don't know if you've ever tried moving to a foreign country and living there on a semi-permanent basis, but I have, and I can tell you that it's fairly difficult to separate "idioms everybody uses, but which some guy on Slashdot might consider rude" from "idioms everybody uses, and which are fair game in most contexts". Just sayin'.
He's a nice guy, so feel free to drop him a mail if you feel he's been inaccurate and I'm sure he'll update the page in question accordingly just as soon as he has a chance. It certainly needs updating - that page is ancient and the info on it is well out of date.
You're right that it gets used for fool and idiot, etc, but the other meaning is also correct.
For this reason it's probably better to avoid using the meaning that you mention in a formal situation, because people will look at you as though a small elderberry bush has just grown out of the top of your head. You can get away with it in a lot of settings though, but it is one extraordinarily vulgar word.
Scuse me for replying to myself, just wanted to note that it appears my degree or two of fever has caused me to forget where I got the patent link from in the first place:-)
Prior art (much like patents) inherently involves a description of how to do something, not just the idea of doing it.
Which makes it a great shame that Sony don't actually seem to have had much more than an 'inspiration' on which to base the patent.
Here's the patent, by the way: USPTO. At least, I think it's the right one: Scanning method for applying ultrasonic acoustic data to the human neural cortex.
It looks to me like it's about on the level of plausible scifi, in that it's clearly written by someone who knew what they were talking about well enough to make the right noises, but you couldn't actually go out and make one based on that description alone. OTOH, I'm not a brain surgeon:)
Well, they do make it quite clear in the article that they were fundamentally making it up as they went along in the forlorn hope that somebody else would do the legwork:
Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
Which is very sweet and all, but I am finding it hard to accept that the patent office didn't tell them to go away and come back with a little more than a hunch.
I'm not sure if it's reasonable to yell "Arrogance!"
Nuclear power vs. fossil fuels is considered by many as a false dichotomy, including many who would agree with your suggestion that we should cut down on our need for energy.
Fossil fuels, unless one is of a radically unusual school of thought, are typically considered to be non-renewable. Thus, burning them at all is rather a waste, particularly with oil, which we could otherwise use for all those handy plastics. Additionally, fossil fuels mostly don't burn cleanly, producing all sorts of health hazards and whatnot. With this in mind, there is a case to be made for avoiding their use as far as possible. This is not about avoiding the fact that the West pollutes massively.
Now it is certainly the case that mindlessly promoting nuclear power is stupid, reckless and unacceptable. Although I'm not too sure about that link of yours, which seems a bit sensationalist to me: it's a bit old; american.edu, OK, but they seem to cite the Irish Times more than anything else, which is not quite authoritative; the 30kg is very probably a paper inequality and is, worryingly, in line with industry limits; Sellafield discharges have reduced recently due to improvements in the tech; it's actually the reprocessor, and not a reactor, that causes the discharges that have recently been considered most problematic (Tc-99 I believe)... so in this, Sellafield is not a typical example.
Sellafield has been around since 1952. In the 1950s UK, all sorts of things were considered fair game in government-funded science. Fortunately, things have changed. It is no longer considered acceptable to hide all sensitive information, partly a result of privatisation, one can essentially no longer get away with it (the Freedom of Information Act helped there, as you can see). Sure, in the 50s (all the way up to the 80s) you could get away with murder, particularly when it was classed as Defence. And I mean that literally. These days, there are incentives to check your ass on everything. Middle-management has hit hard and responsibility has become a worry.
Now I don't say that this necessarily means that nuclear reactors are safe. But we don't live in the 50s, either. If the Guardian can invoke the Freedom of Information act and investigate Sellafield, it is at least no longer valid to imagine that the public is kept in forced ignorance of their real danger.
It is entirely valid to concern ourselves with activities concerning nuclear power generation, and the various other methods too, and to use all the channels available to collect as much information as possible. There is, of course, no justification whatsoever to assume that the Chernobyl disaster was due to some fatal "sovietness" in its design and that no analogous accident could occur on a Western system. OTOH, there is no reason to assume that engineers are actually stupid or malicious enough to fail to build safeguards that they believe adequate. We may wish to see their numbers checked and rechecked, of course:-)
It is a little unfair to assume that all the pro-nuclear posters here are simply working from BNFL propaganda cheatsheets. Nuclear power isn't perfect; Britain has accumulated enough radioactive waste to fill five Albert Halls. But there is a lot of alarmist nonsense spoken about it. Many related engineering problems have been solved, though certain remain extant, and today's technology barely resembles historical attempts. So I'd think the posters to which you refer are "frustrated" rather than "arrogant".
Slashdot Mirror
Patrick is much, much better.
:D
They finally figured out what was wrong with him (an infection, pretty much what he thought in the first place) and his health has been improving since then. He's not quite cured yet, but well on the way there.
So we can look forward to quite a few more years of slackware yet
There's cheap and then there's competitive.
We're entering rip-off territory here.
Here's another anecdote for your collection: my dear mother, who is not especially technical, owns a laptop. The original, an x86 beast, died for the fifth time earlier this year. We discussed what the replacement should be, and came to the conclusion that a) it needed to be a laptop, and b) we wanted to get her a laptop with OS X. We thought the interface would be easier for her to use. It seemed ideal, and the whole family was pretty enthusiastic about the idea.
So the week before her birthday, we took a look at the Apple store in the UK. Cheapest laptop available, a 12 inch iBook at 700 UKP (about 1400 dollars). Ah, we said, but her eyesight isn't as good as it once was. She needs a bigger screen than that or she'll give up in disgust. What's a 14 inch screen cost on an iBook? An extra 200 UKP, bringing us up to 1800 dollars (500 dollars more than US customers pay for the identical hardware, by the way). Isn't there a lower-spec large-screen version? No.
We duly reported this to my father, who choked on his cornflakes. He bought a computer magazine and pointed out that the cost of a decent well-built x86 laptop including XP Pro, a software bundle and an extended warranty was half the price of that 14 inch screen iBook.
Now I agree that "everything worthwhile costs money", but there is such a thing as taking the piss. I know my mother would have a better time with OS X than with XP, but the cost of the hardware required is such that you can't help noticing the delicate fragrance of a ripoff situation, particularly when you go to Apple US and compare the prices with the UK store. You say you've seen too many people who "when you take their objections away, raise new objections as to why they won't ever spend the money". On this occasion, we had every intention of "switching". The credit card was out and pointing at Apple, who simply did not deliver an affordable solution, apparently because they feel the UK market can support a 250UKP surcharge on each laptop sold. And of course the non-availability of x86 OS X will mean that we certainly won't be able to change our minds later, unless we dump that hardware investment and start from scratch. And pigs might fly.
In fact, I seem to recall reading that lack of emotion impairs decision-making, especially when making decisions that involve oneself. Here for example is a brief from some guys currently studying just that, or one could take a look at the work of Antonio Damasio.
With this in mind, one would sincerely hope that both genders are equipped with a full set of emotions.
Better headline:
:-)
IQ Test-Based Studies Prove Scientists Likely To Become Media Whores, Jury Unconvinced Of Validity Of IQ As Measure Of Innate Ability
Hah, I got stopped by the police once when biking on a certain bit of pavement in Germany. They explained that it was only legal if you were under (I think it was) eight years old... they were actually friendly about it. Whereas a nasty old female traffic warden who once caught me doing the same thing was not. German friends of mine have had quite serious problems with the police (eg biking while over the legal limit, apparently, bike confiscated, walk home).
:)
I've not tried biking on the pavement in Austria though. If I ever do and get caught, I'll let you know what the experience is like
But if you buy a laptop from them - not that I recommend it by any means, you're better off buying from a smaller retailer even if it means paying £200 extra up front, because I have it on authority that half the laptops sold in the Dixons chain are peculiar to that chain and thus not up to the general standards of that manufacturer - if you must get a laptop from them, get the extended warranty. Because the piece of shit laptop you bought will almost certainly die within a year. With an extended warranty, you can nurse the thing into lasting three years before chucking it out and starting again.
When buying from the Dixon's chain, don't think of it as buying. Think of it as an overpriced lease, valid for the duration of the warranty.
Oh, and a bit of additional wisdom: if you ever send anything away for repair via PCWorld, make them sign a receipt for it. And when (if) you get it back, count the bits. Turn the item on. Check the batteries, check that all the memory is still in it (better yet, take out all the extras before you hand it in at all).
Applying paranoia to PC World is not unreasonable. Quite the opposite; it's a survival tactic.
Hint: the fantastic thing about theories is you don't have to believe in them.
Science is pretty relaxing in that sense.
Really? C requires you to get the hang of some fairly nasty concepts which C# usually hides. So I'd think that a 9 year old would actually find C# much easier... why do you feel it would be harder? I'm curious.
There's also a course here, which is actually in Computing and Information Systems, so perhaps less relevant. Don't ask me about the value of this particular course, as I have no idea.
Certainly these guys offer way less support than the OU, but I have the suspicion that they are cheaper - as far as I can see it (and have heard) they take the position that they give you a book list, chuck occasional assignments at you, then allow you in to the exams. They are probably therefore best suited to the annoying sort of person who never goes to lectures but somehow comes out with an 'A' anyway. Possibly the cost is irrelevant in this case, since I take the point that one can get grants under certain circumstances for the OU, particularly given the disability, but the costs are normally pretty painful for people with an overdraft like mine... sadly.
Hmm... Maybe the author of that troll intended to suggest that the kid was one of those pretentious intellectual types, and therefore mispronounced "leet" as "leté", as though it had accents on it ("yeah... that's just sooo lettay")?
Or, y'know, it could just be that the author of that venerable cut n'paste job was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic in the logic department. Pity, because leetspeak would be a lot more amusing with added Valley Girl.
Anecdote:
I recall having a chat with a Plextor rep about just these features of their brand new drive a year or so ago at CeBIT. The guy was explaining all the wonderful new functionality: clever overburning/compression and whatnot, and an encryption thingummy. I asked him how much of it would be supported under Linux, and he said "only basic CD-writer functionality". So I asked him if he didn't imagine that any of the extra features would be reverse engineered or whatever, and he explained with a big grin that that'd be impossible. He actually sounded pretty proud about it - some of the functionality, he said, was entirely impossible to reverse engineer (the encryption stuff). And Plextor certainly had no intention of helping anybody out on the job.
It occurred to me to wonder why Plextor are so sure that this is a good thing. Then it occurred to me that by buying the new Plextor drive, I'd be paying for a whole lot of supposed R&D on unusable features.
My next drive wasn't a Plextor.
The note:
Yeah, when I read that story the first thing that came to mind was "no, what destroyed the magic of Star Wars 3 was Star Wars 1 and Star Wars 2, not to mention the, err, remastering of parts 4-6".
If anything destroyed the magic of Star Wars for me, it was George Lucas, closely followed by the endless bloody "stealing movies is a crime" announcements in the cinema (we know. That's why we bought tickets... duh). BitTorrent is fairly blameless in that regard. Especially in my case, since I live near one of the very very few cinemas in Britain that have a licence to sell alcohol, it's unusual that a sf movie fails to draw me to the cinema, since almost anything improves from the addition of a couple of pints of Guinness. Even so, I haven't bothered to go watch the thing. I can't see the point, since I have a premonition that the movie is going to be wooden, obvious and cliché'd. Just to take a line from Lucas, I sense in this movie many hackneyed plot devices.
I'm sure I'll go at some point, though - hey, it might actually be good despite the script - but I doubt that I'd want to waste the disk space for the download.
Interesting... I thought that, right up until the time that I tried authoring and maintaining a medium-size site (back in the .com days) and earned myself a rude awakening.
In my experience (YMMV) it is far, far easier to create an infrastructure capable of doing everything you want and to serve content dynamically within that infrastructure, than it is to edit more than a very few pages by hand. Now there is a good argument for serving static (cached) versions of dynamically created files where this is possible, and a lot of sites do just that.
If you haven't, you might want to go read Beggars In Spain by Nancy Kress. It discusses just that question, and doesn't come to a favourable conclusion on the subject (I'm not sure I agree with the slippery-slope progression that the book presents, outside the context of that book, but it's a good discussion nonetheless).
I imagine it's possible that genetic conditions like Downs would be more carefully screened for in that situation, but Kress suggests that it's not terribly likely that the logic would be taken all the way to full-blown eugenics, or at least that this would in practice be self-defeating, for predominantly social reasons.
Consider: outside the special circumstances of very small groups, which wouldn't be self-sustainable anyway, a group is going to need diversity, genetics being annoyingly complex and a right pain in the neck when it comes to the law of unforeseen consequences. I think in the forseeable future that suggests a limit on any realistic expectations of the effects of eugenics. Plus, the ability to calculate large sums in one's head (consciously - much of our maths happens outside that level anyway) is already somewhat obselete due to technology. On the other hand, the ability to be part of a society that is on the whole productive is not going to be superseded by technology any time soon. Perhaps there's an argument for genetic screening for mental illness, but I don't think that we've quite got to the point that we can screen for everything up to pleasantness of character. Fortunately.
It's already happening; thus all the eprints installations, the RDN and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.
The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.
I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"
Germany eh? Gut gemacht! :-)
Yes, his English is pretty good.
OTOH, as my last word, I would disagree with the following: It's hardly fitting for me, as a junior academic, to tell him personally what to put on his university homepage.
Seeing as he has read and commented on this thread, he has inevitably seen your posts. Your opinions on his university homepage have almost certainly been noticed as well. So you have, if you like, 'told him', although you chose to do it in the third person, and by voicing your point of view to whatever percentage of 800,000-odd Slashdot logins happened to be reading at the time, rather than directly. Ultimately, that's your choice; I just don't see the logic by which it is preferable to attack a person in front of Slashdot than to simply compose and send a polite email. Again, that's probably just me.
Good, then you'll understand the difficulty. Which country was it, out of curiosity? It doesn't seem to feature on your CV, unless you mean the (semi-permanent?) summer schools.
As I say, if you feel his site contains inappropriate material, feel free to let him know directly. As an academic, I'm sure you're aware that it'd be far more appropriate than beating the subject to death on Slashdot.
Umm... you're overdoing it a bit there with your "professional context". He makes it perfectly clear; this is why it doesn't include lists of publications and all that good stuff, but instead comes with his link list, his hometown and a nice little picture of his house... and the view from his chair. I'd have thought that the miscellania on that page are pretty much uniformly informal.
Personally, I've always rather enjoyed his mode of speech, which IRL generally reflects a pretty honest outlook on the world... which is a rare, nay, freak occurrence in a "professional context" in which two-thirds of the people involved are out for nothing so much as personal glory. But that's probably just me.
In closing, I don't know if you've ever tried moving to a foreign country and living there on a semi-permanent basis, but I have, and I can tell you that it's fairly difficult to separate "idioms everybody uses, but which some guy on Slashdot might consider rude" from "idioms everybody uses, and which are fair game in most contexts". Just sayin'.
He's a nice guy, so feel free to drop him a mail if you feel he's been inaccurate and I'm sure he'll update the page in question accordingly just as soon as he has a chance. It certainly needs updating - that page is ancient and the info on it is well out of date.
You're right that it gets used for fool and idiot, etc, but the other meaning is also correct.
For this reason it's probably better to avoid using the meaning that you mention in a formal situation, because people will look at you as though a small elderberry bush has just grown out of the top of your head. You can get away with it in a lot of settings though, but it is one extraordinarily vulgar word.
Scuse me for replying to myself, just wanted to note that it appears my degree or two of fever has caused me to forget where I got the patent link from in the first place :-)
Prior art (much like patents) inherently involves a description of how to do something, not just the idea of doing it.
.
:)
Which makes it a great shame that Sony don't actually seem to have had much more than an 'inspiration' on which to base the patent.
Here's the patent, by the way: USPTO. At least, I think it's the right one: Scanning method for applying ultrasonic acoustic data to the human neural cortex
It looks to me like it's about on the level of plausible scifi, in that it's clearly written by someone who knew what they were talking about well enough to make the right noises, but you couldn't actually go out and make one based on that description alone. OTOH, I'm not a brain surgeon
Which is very sweet and all, but I am finding it hard to accept that the patent office didn't tell them to go away and come back with a little more than a hunch.
Hmm.
:-)
I'm not sure if it's reasonable to yell "Arrogance!"
Nuclear power vs. fossil fuels is considered by many as a false dichotomy, including many who would agree with your suggestion that we should cut down on our need for energy.
Fossil fuels, unless one is of a radically unusual school of thought, are typically considered to be non-renewable. Thus, burning them at all is rather a waste, particularly with oil, which we could otherwise use for all those handy plastics. Additionally, fossil fuels mostly don't burn cleanly, producing all sorts of health hazards and whatnot. With this in mind, there is a case to be made for avoiding their use as far as possible. This is not about avoiding the fact that the West pollutes massively.
Now it is certainly the case that mindlessly promoting nuclear power is stupid, reckless and unacceptable. Although I'm not too sure about that link of yours, which seems a bit sensationalist to me: it's a bit old; american.edu, OK, but they seem to cite the Irish Times more than anything else, which is not quite authoritative; the 30kg is very probably a paper inequality and is, worryingly, in line with industry limits; Sellafield discharges have reduced recently due to improvements in the tech; it's actually the reprocessor, and not a reactor, that causes the discharges that have recently been considered most problematic (Tc-99 I believe)... so in this, Sellafield is not a typical example.
Sellafield has been around since 1952. In the 1950s UK, all sorts of things were considered fair game in government-funded science. Fortunately, things have changed. It is no longer considered acceptable to hide all sensitive information, partly a result of privatisation, one can essentially no longer get away with it (the Freedom of Information Act helped there, as you can see). Sure, in the 50s (all the way up to the 80s) you could get away with murder, particularly when it was classed as Defence. And I mean that literally. These days, there are incentives to check your ass on everything. Middle-management has hit hard and responsibility has become a worry.
Now I don't say that this necessarily means that nuclear reactors are safe. But we don't live in the 50s, either. If the Guardian can invoke the Freedom of Information act and investigate Sellafield, it is at least no longer valid to imagine that the public is kept in forced ignorance of their real danger.
It is entirely valid to concern ourselves with activities concerning nuclear power generation, and the various other methods too, and to use all the channels available to collect as much information as possible. There is, of course, no justification whatsoever to assume that the Chernobyl disaster was due to some fatal "sovietness" in its design and that no analogous accident could occur on a Western system. OTOH, there is no reason to assume that engineers are actually stupid or malicious enough to fail to build safeguards that they believe adequate. We may wish to see their numbers checked and rechecked, of course
It is a little unfair to assume that all the pro-nuclear posters here are simply working from BNFL propaganda cheatsheets. Nuclear power isn't perfect; Britain has accumulated enough radioactive waste to fill five Albert Halls. But there is a lot of alarmist nonsense spoken about it. Many related engineering problems have been solved, though certain remain extant, and today's technology barely resembles historical attempts. So I'd think the posters to which you refer are "frustrated" rather than "arrogant".