I had someone come for interview not that long ago with a "first class" degree in computer science from a former poly. I actually apologised to him for asking our standard questions, which begin "How many bits in a computer word?" - which can elicit a response from "32" to "which architecture are we talking about here?" - it's an open ended question, in fact.
Blank look.
To cut a long story short, all he knew about was "web design" - but he couldn't actually do any job because he would be utterly unsafe. Buffer overflow? Numeric overflow? Performance? Algorithms? Not the first clue.
In fact on this particular recruitment run we had three like that if you include the one with the fake degree certificate.
You might think so. But I have seen, recently, a smoke alarm where the battery orientation message was about 4pt and needed a magnifier to read it; another device where the orientation message was on the side of the battery compartment and could not be read when the first cell (of 3) had been inserted; and another where the contacts were reversed (i.e. you actually had to put the battery in in what appeared to be the wrong way round. The truth is that many manufacturers simply cannot be bothered to do the job properly. On the other hand, my Logitech mouse is so designed that you can only put them in the right way round (there is a guard on the positive pole that prevents the negative end from making contact, if the cell is reversed.)
The truth is, it would be cheaper for most manufacturers just to spend a little bit more on tooling and do a decent job, and it would then not be necessary to have a relatively complicated bit of metal, 4 times. This is a BMW solution to a Ford problem.
The Metropolitan Police are the London police force. A quick survey of complaints against the police will show why this is unsurprising. Most British police forces are pretty good. I've lived in Herts, Cambs,Hants,Somerset, and never had the least concern about the local police force, as regards its competence or its honesty. But the Met has a reputation for corruption and violence, along with the West Midlands Police. Whether this represents the reality of policing in those areas - I wouldn't want to live in either of them - or whether large urban police forces just tend to go this way (think LA) I don't know. The Met also suffers from having a national role (which I believe to be quite wrong) and to be subject to lots of political pressure. But the motto of the Met really needs to be "quis custodiet ipsos custodes".
I'm not sure if you're confused and don't realise that Sappho was a Lesbian because she lived on the island of Lesbos, or the (prostitute?) in brackets is supposed to be clever, but no. Come off it. She was an educated woman who wrote about romantic love. The author of the famous invocation to Hesperus was an aristocrat living in an aristocratic society. You have to remember that each Greek city state had its own culture. I think you may be confusing Lesbos with Athens, which had a positively Arabic attitude to women, but had a class of independent semi-aristocratic women called hetairae who had powerful male protectors. Calling them "prostitutes" is a major cultural misunderstanding; Athens had its street prostitutes (as Aristophanes notes in The Wasps) but they were from a totally different class. And Mytilene wasn't Athens.
Look up State Aids. It's less than likely to be a lobbyist, and more likely to be m'learned friend dropping a word in George's ear about having lunch with Joaquín Almunia, on behalf of a non-UK based developer.
Contractions are only meaningful when generally accepted
Or when the sense is plain. Anybody who has any interest in Bilski would understand this one. At least, I did, and IANAL, though I do follow US patent decisions in a general kind of way.
Headlines have always been a bit of a word game intended to get reader attention, and playing with language is part of that. I submit that it's the people above who think they understand the rules and are allowed to mock people who do not follow their prescriptions who are the "humorless killjoys".
We in the Illuminati are actually getting pretty pissed off just meeting the same of crowd of Hidden Masters, Temple Measurers, Rosicrucians, and members of the Tres. If you're into illumination, secret world domination, and communication with superior beings, post your email and we'll get in touch. Provided of course that you can prove you're female, a virgin, aged between 18 and 21, and have no pesky living close relatives. Oh shit did I really write that?
The apostrophe is largely used to show contractions or missing letters. "Supreme" is here an abbreviation for "Supreme court justices". So "Supreme's", though annoying, cannot be said to be grammatically incorrect.
It's also worth looking at the approach of the NYT. I revere the Gray Lady's punctuation standards. If they ever allowed "Supreme's" through (they would not...) they would rightly insist on the apostrophe because they are a newspaper of record which means that in the future someone might read the head line and should not think that Diana Ross had a hand in the decision.
In punctuation, a little learning is a dangerous thing. If you read Lynne Truss's essay on the apostrophe (and it is far from the last word on the subject) you will find out that even greengrocers' apostrophes are not always wrong: they date from an age when new fruit and vegetables were appearing, and their customer needed to know that there was a difference between potato's and asparagus. Later the issue was resolved by adding an e - potatoes - but you still needed to know what the rule was. Whereas, if you knew the "apostrophe rule" you knew that one of those red fruits labelled "tomato's" or one of the yellow fruits labelled "banana's" was a tomato or a banana.
There's an excellent article which illustrates your point, and shows that in some parts of the US a move to EVs will increase carbon dioxide emission. It's not just Hillbilly country either; most of the North and North-East.
Referring also to the post above, I get about the same economy as you from a similar sized European TDI. Unless I drive at illegal speeds...which of course I never do. It's a simple fact that once above the speeds at which the Government figures get calculated, the reduced drag tires,streamlining and so on of a hybrid are offset by the more efficient engine in a Diesel, which means that at autobahn speeds the fuel consumption is similar with the Diesel usually having the edge. Except that most hybrids really don't want to run all day at Autobahn speeds, whereas most TDis are perfectly happy at 160kph.
I'm like you. Last year we bought a house from someone whose job moved a long way and needed to sell. It already had efficient double glazing. It now has cavity wall insulation, 400 mm of bagged insulation in the roof, and the plumber tells us the new boiler will only need to be 2/3 the size of the old one. We replaced the old cooker with A-rated, by next year all the rainwater on the roofs will be collected for the garden, and the solar PV went on last week. We also had groundworks done to recover a piece of waste land on the edge of the yard, which is now a vegetable and fruit plot. Friends are wondering when we will "do something" with the house. But the payback on the investment is better than the bank will give you, and its depreciation is small.
Now cars. I've worked out that to make it worth while replacing my last-gen European turbodiesel (40 miles to the US gallon) with a hybrid, Diesel will need to hit around $20/US gallon, based on typical mileage. It's a pointless waste of money. EVs are even worse. To replace my wife's town car with an EV and make it worthwhile, fuel would need to hit nearly $40/US gallon. If it does, whether or not to buy and EV will be the least of most people's worries.
Sad, really. I liked the idea of an EV. But when it actually came to it, it made sense to spend the same amount of money on "boring" energy saving, generating and food growing projects.
I rather think it is precisely their business. The idea that the BBC should be restricted to radio broadcasting is ridiculous. I guess that when FM started, people like you would have suggested that the BBC be limited to AM broadcasting. And when the first video was transmitted, that they should be restricted to audio only.
Great idea. Suck all the bandwidth out of the tower.
When O2, curses on its head, first launched the iPhone, I had constant problems with 3G dropout near iPhones. I began to wonder if O2 was somehow prioritising their iPhone customers, or whether they were bandwidth constricted and the iPhone was sucking up everything. Whatever. Change to Vodafone, no more problems.
The simple biggest problem is that the US is not the only country in the world that uses the WWW, and there is widespread cultural variety in acceptable standards. It's significant that the British BT company supports these TLDs, because BT is a backward, insular corporation - if it hadn't had competition from cable, the UK would still be on dial up. Any proposal supported by BT is automatically a bad idea.
It's also worth pointing out that "sex" and "xxx" probably only have meaning in American English - in British English, XXX certainly used to mean "beer".
The last public hangman of Great Britain did the job despite being opposed to capital punishment, because he thought that anybody else was likely to screw it up (and that he would be the last one in the job.) Winston Churchill wanted to put him in charge of the Nuernberg hangings because he was convinced that Americans would mess it up (through cock up or deliberately.)
So the last real expert on the subject, and his boss, both disagree with you.
The trouble is you can't just read Ulysses...you need to read Dubliners. And the history of Ireland under British rule. Before long you're onto Jonathan Swift, and if you're not careful you'll discover Miles n'gaCopaleen. And Yeats. And before you know where you are, you'll be squandering a literary education posting feeble jokes on Slashdot.
Anyway, I wish you the best of luck. And no, I've never got past page 14 of Finnegans Wake (so spelt). Do not feel obligated. The poor guy had probably gone a bit schizophrenic by the time he wrote it.
Oblig Apple reference; I'll be quite honest. Given the choice between a world in which Jobs and Wozniak had made a fortune in ride on lawnmowers, or a world in which Ireland produced no literature, I'd sooner be in a world with the iMow catalog.
Having used his iPhone to locate the best pork kidneys in Dublin, Bloom spends a useful day selling context-sensitive ad clicks for his website, before skyping the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy. Having checked with his webcam and discovered Molly up to nookie with Blazes Boylan, he checks his iHo app for the best dominatrix in Dublin. While there he meets Stephen Dedalus, who has spent the day wandering around using location reporting to avoid Buck Mulligan. They end up in Bloom's kitchen planning an app to provide tourists with tours of the bits of Dublin the tourist board doesn't tell you about, before Bloom goes upstairs, takes a photo of Molly's ass and emails it to Boylan. The book ends with Molly updating her Facebook page with a comprehensive dissing of Boylan's performance, and her tearful announcement that from now on she's going to stick to Leo.
During the space program, the US was, I think, a net exporter of oil. It is now an importer. The truth is that the US is even more of a superpower than it was before - its military budget is stupendous, its client states are all over the Earth. Its problem is that its inhabitants expect a considerable share of the resources and energy consumption, and the very rich - the people you claim "work and innovate" - expect vastly more. Poor people consume little. One American uses the resources of hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans. It is the overconsumption of the very rich, and their unwillingness to pay taxes, that prevents the expansion of the space program.
The only way to get the rich to disgorge money is to persuade them that an external enemy wants to take it from them - hence the constant use of communism as a bogeyman by the Right. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its presence in space, the external enemy was lost. If you want a new space program, better get the Taliban to start launching satellites.
This is a completely bogus statement. It is the existence of a stock market that creates liquidity, not short term trading. Otherwise, how did capitalism ever manage to work in the days when all trades were recorded in ledgers and not complete till the cash was handed over?
Originally, the stock market was not a form of gambling but a form of insurance. Investors in trade voyages in the days of sail and marine anarchy expected that some ships would not come back, therefore they wanted to be able to invest in multiple voyages. Joint stock companies formed to carry out a voyage would then sell shares, spreading the risk. (They did this at Lloyd's Coffee House in London.) The sale of shares meant that the money they had invested in the voyage came back to them before the voyage was complete, thus creating liquidity (i.e. the joint stock owners had cash again to invest in new voyages before the first ones returned).
Short term trading is purely gambling, but does not necessarily create any more liquidity than long term investment. Hence my observation that your comment is bogus.
The asset that is moved is exactly the same as it was before, but its price is now $100 instead of $80. So you have in fact just created inflation.
When the trucker moves the widget from the factory to the store, he changes its value by moving it from the place of creation to the place of use. Any student of economics knows that major economic leaps have taken place when the costs of this have reduced - from carts to canals, from canals to railways. This is because there are real costs involved; you can regard the energy and investment in moving goods as being exactly as much part of their manufacture as pressing or welding. But the electronic transfer of the stock market transfers ownership at negligible cost and therefore adds no value, so any price increase is simple inflation.
This is exactly what has happened to the economy: house prices inflated, share prices inflated, but the actual value of the underlying assets barely increased. We are now trying to reduce a debt which is purely the difference between perceived value (what people will buy things for) and their inflated value.
The fact that people like you believe the nonsense you have posted is the underlying fact behind the financial crisis.
The bits you are referring to are the vulva. Before trying to get a girl to show you hers, you might at least learn to get the terminology right. I don't normally post on these topics, but this particular misuse annoys me as much as the people that think cars have breaks rather than brakes.
The ARM has been very successful in what have been, in effect, embedded applications. Even the iPhone and the iPad are, basically, embedded. Android and Maemo are general purpose platforms with optimisation for communications, but Android and Maemo devices are too limited to be general purpose (much as I nowadays wonder how I managed without my N900, it is not a computer replacement.) These new dual-core SOC designs mean that ARM will be back driving true general purpose computers. The original BBC Micro (though of course not ARM-powered) was a general purpose machine with, for its day, a very high level of on-board system integration. Hence my comment.
Those of us old British farts who remember the BBC Micro will be celebrating. Who would have thought that, nearly thirty years on, its descendants would at last become a threat to (at least the low end of) the Intel/Microsoft domination of personal computing?
To quote a BSi project manager I once used to work with, there are 2 sorts of standards initiative - those intended to get something done, which can be very fast, and those intended to hold up standardisation while the prime mover gains market share. Since this is intended to create a standard quicker than Windows 7 whatever edition can gain traction, it could all happen very fast.
I once had the good fortune to work on a project where the standard proceeded so much faster than capability that for 6 months we were the world's only supplier of a standards-compliant product, though a small one. Believe me, it was worth the effort.
It's tribalism. Fundamentalist Islam? Tribalism. Fundamentalist Christianity? Tribalism. Hassidic Judaism? Tribalism. Tribalism tells you that you mustn't rock the boat but defer to the authority of the elders. Tribalism tells you the other side is bad because they are from the other side of the valley/from the other side of the lake/Communists/Socialists/Fascists/Catholics/Protestants/Different from us. Religion, like nationalism, or political party is usually just a big tribe.
Slashdot Mirror
Blank look.
To cut a long story short, all he knew about was "web design" - but he couldn't actually do any job because he would be utterly unsafe. Buffer overflow? Numeric overflow? Performance? Algorithms? Not the first clue.
In fact on this particular recruitment run we had three like that if you include the one with the fake degree certificate.
The truth is, it would be cheaper for most manufacturers just to spend a little bit more on tooling and do a decent job, and it would then not be necessary to have a relatively complicated bit of metal, 4 times. This is a BMW solution to a Ford problem.
That's basically it.
The Metropolitan Police are the London police force. A quick survey of complaints against the police will show why this is unsurprising. Most British police forces are pretty good. I've lived in Herts, Cambs,Hants,Somerset, and never had the least concern about the local police force, as regards its competence or its honesty. But the Met has a reputation for corruption and violence, along with the West Midlands Police. Whether this represents the reality of policing in those areas - I wouldn't want to live in either of them - or whether large urban police forces just tend to go this way (think LA) I don't know. The Met also suffers from having a national role (which I believe to be quite wrong) and to be subject to lots of political pressure. But the motto of the Met really needs to be "quis custodiet ipsos custodes".
I'm not sure if you're confused and don't realise that Sappho was a Lesbian because she lived on the island of Lesbos, or the (prostitute?) in brackets is supposed to be clever, but no. Come off it. She was an educated woman who wrote about romantic love. The author of the famous invocation to Hesperus was an aristocrat living in an aristocratic society. You have to remember that each Greek city state had its own culture. I think you may be confusing Lesbos with Athens, which had a positively Arabic attitude to women, but had a class of independent semi-aristocratic women called hetairae who had powerful male protectors. Calling them "prostitutes" is a major cultural misunderstanding; Athens had its street prostitutes (as Aristophanes notes in The Wasps) but they were from a totally different class. And Mytilene wasn't Athens.
Look up State Aids. It's less than likely to be a lobbyist, and more likely to be m'learned friend dropping a word in George's ear about having lunch with Joaquín Almunia, on behalf of a non-UK based developer.
Or when the sense is plain. Anybody who has any interest in Bilski would understand this one. At least, I did, and IANAL, though I do follow US patent decisions in a general kind of way.
Headlines have always been a bit of a word game intended to get reader attention, and playing with language is part of that. I submit that it's the people above who think they understand the rules and are allowed to mock people who do not follow their prescriptions who are the "humorless killjoys".
We in the Illuminati are actually getting pretty pissed off just meeting the same of crowd of Hidden Masters, Temple Measurers, Rosicrucians, and members of the Tres. If you're into illumination, secret world domination, and communication with superior beings, post your email and we'll get in touch. Provided of course that you can prove you're female, a virgin, aged between 18 and 21, and have no pesky living close relatives. Oh shit did I really write that?
It's also worth looking at the approach of the NYT. I revere the Gray Lady's punctuation standards. If they ever allowed "Supreme's" through (they would not...) they would rightly insist on the apostrophe because they are a newspaper of record which means that in the future someone might read the head line and should not think that Diana Ross had a hand in the decision.
In punctuation, a little learning is a dangerous thing. If you read Lynne Truss's essay on the apostrophe (and it is far from the last word on the subject) you will find out that even greengrocers' apostrophes are not always wrong: they date from an age when new fruit and vegetables were appearing, and their customer needed to know that there was a difference between potato's and asparagus. Later the issue was resolved by adding an e - potatoes - but you still needed to know what the rule was. Whereas, if you knew the "apostrophe rule" you knew that one of those red fruits labelled "tomato's" or one of the yellow fruits labelled "banana's" was a tomato or a banana.
Referring also to the post above, I get about the same economy as you from a similar sized European TDI. Unless I drive at illegal speeds...which of course I never do. It's a simple fact that once above the speeds at which the Government figures get calculated, the reduced drag tires,streamlining and so on of a hybrid are offset by the more efficient engine in a Diesel, which means that at autobahn speeds the fuel consumption is similar with the Diesel usually having the edge. Except that most hybrids really don't want to run all day at Autobahn speeds, whereas most TDis are perfectly happy at 160kph.
Now cars. I've worked out that to make it worth while replacing my last-gen European turbodiesel (40 miles to the US gallon) with a hybrid, Diesel will need to hit around $20/US gallon, based on typical mileage. It's a pointless waste of money. EVs are even worse. To replace my wife's town car with an EV and make it worthwhile, fuel would need to hit nearly $40/US gallon. If it does, whether or not to buy and EV will be the least of most people's worries.
Sad, really. I liked the idea of an EV. But when it actually came to it, it made sense to spend the same amount of money on "boring" energy saving, generating and food growing projects.
I rather think it is precisely their business. The idea that the BBC should be restricted to radio broadcasting is ridiculous. I guess that when FM started, people like you would have suggested that the BBC be limited to AM broadcasting. And when the first video was transmitted, that they should be restricted to audio only.
When O2, curses on its head, first launched the iPhone, I had constant problems with 3G dropout near iPhones. I began to wonder if O2 was somehow prioritising their iPhone customers, or whether they were bandwidth constricted and the iPhone was sucking up everything. Whatever. Change to Vodafone, no more problems.
It's also worth pointing out that "sex" and "xxx" probably only have meaning in American English - in British English, XXX certainly used to mean "beer".
So the last real expert on the subject, and his boss, both disagree with you.
Anyway, I wish you the best of luck. And no, I've never got past page 14 of Finnegans Wake (so spelt). Do not feel obligated. The poor guy had probably gone a bit schizophrenic by the time he wrote it.
Oblig Apple reference; I'll be quite honest. Given the choice between a world in which Jobs and Wozniak had made a fortune in ride on lawnmowers, or a world in which Ireland produced no literature, I'd sooner be in a world with the iMow catalog.
Having used his iPhone to locate the best pork kidneys in Dublin, Bloom spends a useful day selling context-sensitive ad clicks for his website, before skyping the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy. Having checked with his webcam and discovered Molly up to nookie with Blazes Boylan, he checks his iHo app for the best dominatrix in Dublin. While there he meets Stephen Dedalus, who has spent the day wandering around using location reporting to avoid Buck Mulligan. They end up in Bloom's kitchen planning an app to provide tourists with tours of the bits of Dublin the tourist board doesn't tell you about, before Bloom goes upstairs, takes a photo of Molly's ass and emails it to Boylan. The book ends with Molly updating her Facebook page with a comprehensive dissing of Boylan's performance, and her tearful announcement that from now on she's going to stick to Leo.
The only way to get the rich to disgorge money is to persuade them that an external enemy wants to take it from them - hence the constant use of communism as a bogeyman by the Right. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its presence in space, the external enemy was lost. If you want a new space program, better get the Taliban to start launching satellites.
Originally, the stock market was not a form of gambling but a form of insurance. Investors in trade voyages in the days of sail and marine anarchy expected that some ships would not come back, therefore they wanted to be able to invest in multiple voyages. Joint stock companies formed to carry out a voyage would then sell shares, spreading the risk. (They did this at Lloyd's Coffee House in London.) The sale of shares meant that the money they had invested in the voyage came back to them before the voyage was complete, thus creating liquidity (i.e. the joint stock owners had cash again to invest in new voyages before the first ones returned).
Short term trading is purely gambling, but does not necessarily create any more liquidity than long term investment. Hence my observation that your comment is bogus.
When the trucker moves the widget from the factory to the store, he changes its value by moving it from the place of creation to the place of use. Any student of economics knows that major economic leaps have taken place when the costs of this have reduced - from carts to canals, from canals to railways. This is because there are real costs involved; you can regard the energy and investment in moving goods as being exactly as much part of their manufacture as pressing or welding. But the electronic transfer of the stock market transfers ownership at negligible cost and therefore adds no value, so any price increase is simple inflation.
This is exactly what has happened to the economy: house prices inflated, share prices inflated, but the actual value of the underlying assets barely increased. We are now trying to reduce a debt which is purely the difference between perceived value (what people will buy things for) and their inflated value.
The fact that people like you believe the nonsense you have posted is the underlying fact behind the financial crisis.
The bits you are referring to are the vulva. Before trying to get a girl to show you hers, you might at least learn to get the terminology right. I don't normally post on these topics, but this particular misuse annoys me as much as the people that think cars have breaks rather than brakes.
The ARM has been very successful in what have been, in effect, embedded applications. Even the iPhone and the iPad are, basically, embedded. Android and Maemo are general purpose platforms with optimisation for communications, but Android and Maemo devices are too limited to be general purpose (much as I nowadays wonder how I managed without my N900, it is not a computer replacement.) These new dual-core SOC designs mean that ARM will be back driving true general purpose computers. The original BBC Micro (though of course not ARM-powered) was a general purpose machine with, for its day, a very high level of on-board system integration. Hence my comment.
Those of us old British farts who remember the BBC Micro will be celebrating. Who would have thought that, nearly thirty years on, its descendants would at last become a threat to (at least the low end of) the Intel/Microsoft domination of personal computing?
I once had the good fortune to work on a project where the standard proceeded so much faster than capability that for 6 months we were the world's only supplier of a standards-compliant product, though a small one. Believe me, it was worth the effort.
It's tribalism. Fundamentalist Islam? Tribalism. Fundamentalist Christianity? Tribalism. Hassidic Judaism? Tribalism. Tribalism tells you that you mustn't rock the boat but defer to the authority of the elders. Tribalism tells you the other side is bad because they are from the other side of the valley/from the other side of the lake/Communists/Socialists/Fascists/Catholics/Protestants/Different from us. Religion, like nationalism, or political party is usually just a big tribe.