I don't want a tablet or a phone made of alumin(i)um, thank you. It is too rigid, which is bad for shock resistance. A magnesium alloy chassis with overmoulded nylon, glass filled nylon, or polycarbonate are much more suitable structural materials for small electronic products as they have considerable shock resistance. Did you know that Blackberry design their phone cases to distort safely on impact, thus reducing damage?
The perception that polymers are somehow inferior dates from the days of polystyrene, which was a very low spec polymer. Now look at advanced racing bicycles, or the control surfaces on F1 cars, or the wings of the Dreamliner. They are made of plastic, rather than aluminum. It certainly isn't to save money. Those carbon fibre/kevlar/polymer resin composites are 100% synthetic plastics.
I think last year I had to hose off some bird poop once. And nobody I know has had an inverter fail. I would just mod you down, but I'd like to call attention to the fact that solidraven is full of bird poop.
Among those "Monopolistic business practices" must be included "Using the USPTO as a barrier to trade by allowing trivial patents by large corporations and making it prohibitively expensive for small companies to oppose them in court". The US patent system is now designed to achieve the exact opposite of its original goals, just as in the late 2000s the credit ratings agencies were gamed so as to give good ratings to junk debt, at the instigation of the banks, thus doing the exact opposite of what investors imagined.
Actually, prams were smaller than today's monstrous SUV buggies. The main limitation on folding them was the large wheels, developed in a day when many roads even in towns were gravelled rather than hard surfaced. They require less effort to push than a buggy, partly because of the large wheels with narrow tyres and partly because they have proper bicycle ball bearings for the wheels, and when they come on the market they tend to fetch quite a lot of money. There was one in need of some minor restoration at our local market last week priced at $320 equivalent, and at around 60 years old it still looked better than most buggies after they've bashed into a few pedestrians, lamp-posts etc.
Norland nannies (the expensive, highly trained ones) like them. When I was a small child it used to amuse me to watch them pushing them around St. James's Park or the Serpentine with their small, but usually titled, occupants.
I doubt that is true. What this is really about is monopolistic business practices in the US and how they distort the global market. I suspect that the US Government doesn't actually want too much light shed because then the EU competition commission might get involved, and that might shame the US equivalent into action.
However, I doubt any of it is much of a brake on real technical progress. The limitation on that, at the moment, is battery technology. And that has been the limitation on mobile technical progress since the first mobile phones.
I've commented on this thread so I can't moderate, but the GP post is obviously sarcastic and I imagine (s)he agrees with you. And me...I love the libertarian fantasy world in which everybody is walking down mean streets carrying a gun in their hand with the catch off, because it would be no use in your pocket (the thief is holding his and pointing it at you....), and you are somehow supposed to distinguish all the honest citizens carrying guns from the criminals. I can only suspect that the hidden agenda here is that the test is "white or black". Because, as we know well, there are no white criminals in the US.
How, then, does the US system prevent the "professional criminal" from gaining access to guns? Currently, you can't even stop someone with severe mental health issues from entering a movee theater carrying guns and then carrying out a massacre. Who is likely to come off worse - the professional criminal who carries a gun and is practised in threatening people with it, or the ordinary citizen fumbling in his or her coat pocket?
As someone remarked only the other day, the difference between "Atlas shrugged" and "Lord of the Rings" is that one is a fantasy written by someone out of touch with reality, with cardboard characters, unrealistic premises and an unlikely conclusion, and the other is Lord of the Rings.
Actually, the law in the UK is not at all Draconian. The Draconian law was a zero-tolerance law: all crimes were punishable by death. The law on gun ownership in the UK is simply strict and rightly so, because we have many immigrants from countries with gun cultures, ranging from the USA to Iraq and Somalia, and there is no reason why we should adapt our culture to suit them.
London is a different matter. One argument is that, despite its large budget, or perhaps because of it, the Met has been out of control for many years. Recent events suggest there is some truth in this: for instance the recent evidence of the violent policeman who left the Met because he was about to be investigated, returned as a civilian and then re-entered the police through a back door, and the number of senior policemen who are being investigated for apparent conflict of interest by being paid by the Murdoch press.
In short, the problem with crime rates in London may be because the Met needs a thorough remodeling such as happened to the NYPD in the past.
If it's legal to carry handguns, and they are as cheap as they are in the US, why wouldn't the thief have a gun too? I've never had explained to me how the American legal system distinguishes between law abiding citizens and criminals when it comes to gun ownership. Assuming I ever visited the US again (and I've stayed away since the craziness started in 2000), how do I know if the person walking around with a concealed handgun is a legitimate person or an armed criminal? And if I am confronted because I look like I don't fit in the neighborhood - how do I know if it's Neighborhood Watch or a crackhead thief?
Lesson 1: Investors are stupid.
Lesson 2: Investors are so stupid they still believe banks after the toxic mortgages fiasco in which they were lied to morning and night.
Lesson 3: Investors are so stupid they believe a fashion business in a volatile industry is worth sackloads of money.
Lesson 4: Nobody ever missed a bonus through screwing investors.
First, the junior judge in the case was a woman. Second, junior judges might well be overawed by the CPS.
The police didn't want to take action. My Lords of Appeal said there was no case. The case was brought entirely at the instigation of the Crown Prosecution Service and your beef is with them.
London also has 2: the City of London and the City of Westminster. Budapest consists of Buda and Pest. And of course there's Ankh-Morpork. It would appear that binary cities are as relatively frequent as binary stars, perhaps because, like stars, they grow by accretion.
There have been articles demonstrating that, watt for watt, electric vehicles may result in more emissions than Diesel ones in areas where a lot of electricity is produced using coal. This is a fair point and one I wouldn't dispute. It is also an argument in favor of nuclear power, since the emissions benefit (very large over the life of the plant) apply to electric vehicles as well as stationary use.
Where he is wrong is in failing to realise that this only compares like with like. If I put a big electric motor in a Chevy truck and drove it like a redneck, it would possibly result in similar emissions to the Diesel version (there are benefits because the electric motor doesn't use power when stationary, and there is no auto transmission to waste fuel). But a hybrid isn't nearly as big and heavy as a truck, and it has much better aerodynamics. If I am transporting up to 4 people plus luggage, a hybrid is far more energy efficient than a truck. The problem is people who commute in overly large vehicles, for reasons of status.
Sea transport has throughout history been the cheapest way to move goods long distances. It hasn't always been reliable - the days of wind power - but it has been cheap. Now we have huge container ships burning the fuel we won't allow inland (think - where does all the sulfur removed from low-sulfur fuel go?) and so they are very cheap. They are almost running on a waste product. And they have vast economies of scale; the bigger a ship is, the less fuel it uses per tonne mile.
Land transport remains expensive for a variety of reasons, one being that it has to mix with fragile people.
The implication of this is that living near the coast has advantages. If you live on the West or East Coast, or places like Britain, Hong Kong, Sydney and so on, goods can be moved to and from major markets very cheaply. If you live in St. Louis, Alice Springs or Tibet you are at at disadvantage.
This shows. In Europe fuel is highly taxed to encourage efficiency (which works). In the US it has low taxes because otherwise it would be a major economic drain. Because of the distances, rises in oil and gas price have far more effect on the US than they do on Europe. Conclusion: Cheap or expensive depends very much on where you live.
"Some elitist scientists argued about something you wouldn't understand. That proves scientists can't be trusted to tell the truth about climate change".
One of the things that is supposed to have demoralised numbers of German soldiers later in WW2 is that so many of the Russian tank crews were women. But why should that be surprising? In the Napoleonic wars and after, the powder room on many British warships (where they kept the explosives, not the toilet) would have been operated by women who, according to the official lists, didn't even exist. It seems amazing that so many of them managed to live on cramped warships in addition to the official crew establishment, but memos from Nelson to John Jervis make it clear that this was a case where sensible officers turned a blind eye.
So long as there are no rules imposed from above, companies will recruit people who will tolerate being abused. Look at the people who worked for Bob Diamond at Barclays; making a big bonus was more important than having a decent life. If you just say "No", these are the people you are competing with.
So yes, it is the strange American political and cultural systems that persuade people that they are free where everywhere they are in chains. The USA has, since WW2, steadily become less egalitarian and more like Imperial Rome, with a small corrupt political class (= the Senators) in hock to a larger rich banking and commercial class (= the Knights) and a large population with only the semblance of political power. It's because the greed of the rich ultimately exceeds prudence; they don't know when to stop because, as Talib points out, they only compare themselves to their neighbours. It is easily possible to be happy on $60 000 a year and miserable on $600 000.
Gadgets are not the problem; they may partly be a symptom because time-poor people do not have the time to develop outside interests and so focus attention on shiny things that they can get instantly.
It isn't a power cable, it is SELV (safety extra low voltage). If you want to comment on power distribution standards without looking like an idiot, try doing a little research. You will have great difficulty getting any kind of "zap" from 20V at 5A with the built-in short circuit and overload protection built into modern DC/DC converters.
Is reading the idiot comments above from people who seem to think they are going to put AC power through USB, or that some magical kind of cable is needed to carry a mere 5A, or who don't seem to realise that quite thin laptop cables already have this capacity and have small connectors, or indeed that the cable doesn't need any kind of protocol to identify itself - a simple handshake based on the voltage drop down the cable would do the job. Especially when they describe the proposal as "stupid".
Of course, here in Europe we expect all mobile phones other than Apple to use the same connector, and we expect that any phone charger will work with almost any phone (just a few very small chargers won't charge large phones at reasonable speed). Despite the restriction on our freedom to have lots of incompatible chargers, we seem to get by. This is an obvious step forward.
This will come as a shock and perhaps create a reaction of disbelief, but nice lawyers exist. (Mine is one such). They exist because there are, in this world, nice companies. The issue is whether the client wants to achieve something through negotiation, or just wants to scream, rampage and hurl faeces like an angry chimpanzee.
It's possible, for instance, to imagine a world in which the President of Apple paid a visit to the President of Samsung and said "Plenty here for both of us, let's see how we can product differentiate to our mutual advantage so we don't waste time on lawyers." It might even be that such an arrangement would be mutually beneficial. But it tends to happen more with SMEs, who don't have to worry about pleasing the psychopaths who run the trading floors, and worry more about getting on with fellow Rotarians.
In England at least, judges have determined that SMS messages and Twitter have exactly the same status as any other written publication. Australian law is, I believe, based on English law. So: this would be a blackmail attempt. Five years' jail for every message seems about right. They need to find him and then he can spend the rest of his life locked in his parents' basement. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what will happen if they don't catch him.
If I wrote "I am a full time IT person and part time amateur lawyer for our IT service provision company", what would your advice be? Correct. Physician, heal thyself: stop messing about, ignore the DIY responses from Slashdot and pay someone to do the job properly. Being in charge of IT at a law firm is a deeply boring job, but you surely must have a local service provider for whom it's routine. The business of buying and selling houses is pretty tedious, but fortunately I know a good local guy who makes it painless. You can write the contract.
As for using cloud services, I believe you can get a proper T&C from Microsoft, one that you can review as a lawyer. Your tradeoff is the security of your offices, the reliability of your electricity supply and HVAC, and the reliability with which you remember to take secure off site backups, versus the reliability of your Internet connection.
If that doesn't persuade you, look up Ricardo's Law.
Slashdot Mirror
The perception that polymers are somehow inferior dates from the days of polystyrene, which was a very low spec polymer. Now look at advanced racing bicycles, or the control surfaces on F1 cars, or the wings of the Dreamliner. They are made of plastic, rather than aluminum. It certainly isn't to save money. Those carbon fibre/kevlar/polymer resin composites are 100% synthetic plastics.
I think last year I had to hose off some bird poop once. And nobody I know has had an inverter fail. I would just mod you down, but I'd like to call attention to the fact that solidraven is full of bird poop.
Among those "Monopolistic business practices" must be included "Using the USPTO as a barrier to trade by allowing trivial patents by large corporations and making it prohibitively expensive for small companies to oppose them in court". The US patent system is now designed to achieve the exact opposite of its original goals, just as in the late 2000s the credit ratings agencies were gamed so as to give good ratings to junk debt, at the instigation of the banks, thus doing the exact opposite of what investors imagined.
Norland nannies (the expensive, highly trained ones) like them. When I was a small child it used to amuse me to watch them pushing them around St. James's Park or the Serpentine with their small, but usually titled, occupants.
However, I doubt any of it is much of a brake on real technical progress. The limitation on that, at the moment, is battery technology. And that has been the limitation on mobile technical progress since the first mobile phones.
I've commented on this thread so I can't moderate, but the GP post is obviously sarcastic and I imagine (s)he agrees with you. And me...I love the libertarian fantasy world in which everybody is walking down mean streets carrying a gun in their hand with the catch off, because it would be no use in your pocket (the thief is holding his and pointing it at you....), and you are somehow supposed to distinguish all the honest citizens carrying guns from the criminals. I can only suspect that the hidden agenda here is that the test is "white or black". Because, as we know well, there are no white criminals in the US.
As someone remarked only the other day, the difference between "Atlas shrugged" and "Lord of the Rings" is that one is a fantasy written by someone out of touch with reality, with cardboard characters, unrealistic premises and an unlikely conclusion, and the other is Lord of the Rings.
London is a different matter. One argument is that, despite its large budget, or perhaps because of it, the Met has been out of control for many years. Recent events suggest there is some truth in this: for instance the recent evidence of the violent policeman who left the Met because he was about to be investigated, returned as a civilian and then re-entered the police through a back door, and the number of senior policemen who are being investigated for apparent conflict of interest by being paid by the Murdoch press.
In short, the problem with crime rates in London may be because the Met needs a thorough remodeling such as happened to the NYPD in the past.
If it's legal to carry handguns, and they are as cheap as they are in the US, why wouldn't the thief have a gun too? I've never had explained to me how the American legal system distinguishes between law abiding citizens and criminals when it comes to gun ownership. Assuming I ever visited the US again (and I've stayed away since the craziness started in 2000), how do I know if the person walking around with a concealed handgun is a legitimate person or an armed criminal? And if I am confronted because I look like I don't fit in the neighborhood - how do I know if it's Neighborhood Watch or a crackhead thief?
No, there is a third group. The people genuinely trying to understand. Understanding is not the same as looking for answers.
Lesson 2: Investors are so stupid they still believe banks after the toxic mortgages fiasco in which they were lied to morning and night.
Lesson 3: Investors are so stupid they believe a fashion business in a volatile industry is worth sackloads of money.
Lesson 4: Nobody ever missed a bonus through screwing investors.
Yup, looks like they applied all the lessons.
The police didn't want to take action. My Lords of Appeal said there was no case. The case was brought entirely at the instigation of the Crown Prosecution Service and your beef is with them.
The CPS consists of the lawyers who didn't get a place at a decent firm of solicitors or a good Chambers.
They didn't take it seriously. Outside London and Birmingham, our police forces are pretty sensible. This was entirely down to the CPS.
London also has 2: the City of London and the City of Westminster. Budapest consists of Buda and Pest. And of course there's Ankh-Morpork. It would appear that binary cities are as relatively frequent as binary stars, perhaps because, like stars, they grow by accretion.
Where he is wrong is in failing to realise that this only compares like with like. If I put a big electric motor in a Chevy truck and drove it like a redneck, it would possibly result in similar emissions to the Diesel version (there are benefits because the electric motor doesn't use power when stationary, and there is no auto transmission to waste fuel). But a hybrid isn't nearly as big and heavy as a truck, and it has much better aerodynamics. If I am transporting up to 4 people plus luggage, a hybrid is far more energy efficient than a truck. The problem is people who commute in overly large vehicles, for reasons of status.
Land transport remains expensive for a variety of reasons, one being that it has to mix with fragile people.
The implication of this is that living near the coast has advantages. If you live on the West or East Coast, or places like Britain, Hong Kong, Sydney and so on, goods can be moved to and from major markets very cheaply. If you live in St. Louis, Alice Springs or Tibet you are at at disadvantage.
This shows. In Europe fuel is highly taxed to encourage efficiency (which works). In the US it has low taxes because otherwise it would be a major economic drain. Because of the distances, rises in oil and gas price have far more effect on the US than they do on Europe. Conclusion: Cheap or expensive depends very much on where you live.
"Some elitist scientists argued about something you wouldn't understand. That proves scientists can't be trusted to tell the truth about climate change".
One of the things that is supposed to have demoralised numbers of German soldiers later in WW2 is that so many of the Russian tank crews were women. But why should that be surprising? In the Napoleonic wars and after, the powder room on many British warships (where they kept the explosives, not the toilet) would have been operated by women who, according to the official lists, didn't even exist. It seems amazing that so many of them managed to live on cramped warships in addition to the official crew establishment, but memos from Nelson to John Jervis make it clear that this was a case where sensible officers turned a blind eye.
So yes, it is the strange American political and cultural systems that persuade people that they are free where everywhere they are in chains. The USA has, since WW2, steadily become less egalitarian and more like Imperial Rome, with a small corrupt political class (= the Senators) in hock to a larger rich banking and commercial class (= the Knights) and a large population with only the semblance of political power. It's because the greed of the rich ultimately exceeds prudence; they don't know when to stop because, as Talib points out, they only compare themselves to their neighbours. It is easily possible to be happy on $60 000 a year and miserable on $600 000.
Gadgets are not the problem; they may partly be a symptom because time-poor people do not have the time to develop outside interests and so focus attention on shiny things that they can get instantly.
It isn't a power cable, it is SELV (safety extra low voltage). If you want to comment on power distribution standards without looking like an idiot, try doing a little research. You will have great difficulty getting any kind of "zap" from 20V at 5A with the built-in short circuit and overload protection built into modern DC/DC converters.
Of course, here in Europe we expect all mobile phones other than Apple to use the same connector, and we expect that any phone charger will work with almost any phone (just a few very small chargers won't charge large phones at reasonable speed). Despite the restriction on our freedom to have lots of incompatible chargers, we seem to get by. This is an obvious step forward.
It's possible, for instance, to imagine a world in which the President of Apple paid a visit to the President of Samsung and said "Plenty here for both of us, let's see how we can product differentiate to our mutual advantage so we don't waste time on lawyers." It might even be that such an arrangement would be mutually beneficial. But it tends to happen more with SMEs, who don't have to worry about pleasing the psychopaths who run the trading floors, and worry more about getting on with fellow Rotarians.
In England at least, judges have determined that SMS messages and Twitter have exactly the same status as any other written publication. Australian law is, I believe, based on English law. So: this would be a blackmail attempt. Five years' jail for every message seems about right. They need to find him and then he can spend the rest of his life locked in his parents' basement. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what will happen if they don't catch him.
As for using cloud services, I believe you can get a proper T&C from Microsoft, one that you can review as a lawyer. Your tradeoff is the security of your offices, the reliability of your electricity supply and HVAC, and the reliability with which you remember to take secure off site backups, versus the reliability of your Internet connection.
If that doesn't persuade you, look up Ricardo's Law.