The Labour Party - you know, the social democrats - have behaved like the Newcastle Government of the pre-reform era in putting unelected and unelectable nonentities into power. (the Attorney General is another unelectable, "Baroness" Scotland.) Mandelson has too much time in which to make this stuff actually happen. This is the guy who suppressed any attempt by the British Press to mention his Brazilian boyfriend - he is hardly an advertisement for freedom of information - and who is trying to privatise the Royal Mail against the views of the great majority including many in his own party. My suspicion is that he is actually a long-term deep penetration Conservative mole whose job is to make labour unelectable. He's even managed to make Labour give him a peerage so that the Conservatives won't be seen to do it. He is the best argument for abolishing the House of Lords imaginable.
We need a new Reform Bill. Actually, we need a new Glorious Revolution.
I live in the UK and I cannot understand why anybody would want a manual transmission on our congested roads. Of course our fuel costs more, but the latest autos are automated manual transmissions and actually do better on fuel mileage than manuals. I've driven both (usually through being stuck in Europe with a manual hire car) and I feel considerably safer in the auto. It's one less thing to think about, and after all the manual transmission is not a design feature - it's a failure, a technological throwback to the pre-cybernetic era. Having watched morons take both hands off the wheel to change gear too often, I think I would actually go so far as to ban all mobile phone use by drivers in moving manual transmission cars, and all GPS use in manuals unless there is a passenger to operate it, and legislate to phase out manual transmissions on road vehicles.
But can 99% of the human race? The answer is "probably not".
Unfortunately laws have to be made for the majority not the minority. This is a pity. I personally would like to see a world in which nobody was allowed to drive who had an IQ below 145 and had been assessed as safe by a personality test which included tests for psychopathy, sociopathy and reckless behavior. It would keep the roads nice and empty for me...but it won't happen.
The summary is totally misleading. I have yet to see a car with handheld climate control, and any decent modern car has built in radio and media player. Ontario has not banned built-in or dashboard-attached GPS.
On the other hand there is a lot of evidence that using handheld devices while driving is dangerous, and in our rather busier UK traffic anybody drinking coffee while driving is a risk to everybody else.
However the summary and some of the responses show part of a trend. "Libertarianism" translating as "I should be allowed to do whatever I want, but stop those other idiots". Once you reach the age of 40 it becomes apparent that young drivers are crap and greatly overestimate their skills and their road attentiveness. As a colleague of mind once remarked "when I think how I used to drive when i was younger and put my family at risk, my blood runs cold". I expect lots of posts here slagging off Ontario, but they are right - and remember kids, you can't post a retraction to Slashdot from the cemetary.
One thing that would be a nice idea would be to sell netbook remix installers on a USB stick. Not everybody knows how to download the file and convert a usb stick into a bootable version.
I have 9.10 running off a flash card and everything is working properly - with no email setup, encrypted home, and browser history deleted on exit it's now my internet banking appliance, but I'm getting close to putting it on the HDD too.
Oh, do come off it. Mathematicians never showed any hockey stick curve was "bogus" because, guess what, mathematicians != statistical analysts. All we have is an elderly physicist or two with no knowledge of modern modeling complaining that they couldn't have done it back in the day using slide rules and mechanical calculators. Just like elderly physicists in the past rejected QED because they didn't understand it. In fact, the latest papers on improved climate modeling show that not only is the "hockey stick" correct, but that the additional data shows greater variability in the past, but mainly in the lower temperature direction - this is the first time in 2 millennia that temperatures have been consistently rising for an extended period with no previous fall. Basically, every statement you make is either a lie, a distortion, or just plain wrong. What do you get out of it? One way another your patio heater and hemi V8 are going to get too expensive to run, either by carbon taxt or by oil shortages.
"Exponentially" means according to a function in which one of the terms is a constant raised to a term which includes the power of the x variable. It is not a synonym for "many times", and it cannot apply to something which is, even instantaneously, a constant, since it can only refer to a function. If you mean that the number of MIPS/Linux applications increases linearly while that of X86 functions is increasing exponentially you might have a point - except that, at any moment in time without more information, this would not tell you which function was largest or had the largest gradient.
Since most of mainland Europe uses the Napoleonic legal system then yes, it is
You must be French, or from Louisiana.
The official definition of the mainstream European legal system is either "Roman Law" or "Romano-Germanic". As the WTO describes it,
Comparative lawyers have identified the following main legal families: Romano-Germanic Law, Common Law, Socialist Law, Hindu Law, Muslim Law, Laws of the Far East, Black Africa and Malagasy Law.
I would remind you that the Netherlands has signed up to the Treaty of Rome, and so has the UK on behalf of both its legal systems, so your "yes it is" is not based on actual knowledge, but an assumption that may be wrong. I was avoiding stating an opinion on something I don't know about for sure. Conclusion - you are not a lawyer.
The cases you are describing are those where the lawyer knows the client is probably guilty. In cases where the lawyer knows that the client is actually guilty, the arguments in court should not happen. (and incidentally, I rather imagine the number of criminal cases handled by solicitors is greater than those handled by barristers. Most crime in the UK is petty crime.)
Members of the Law Society are lawyers. I have both branches of the profession in my family, and I think I know the difference. At the level of criminals stupid enough to tell someone they did it, the solicitor will typically be representing them in court as well. At higher levels, the solicitor cannot be told by the client the he did it and withhold this information from the barrister.
However, your post is utterly uninformed. Solicitors advise clients on law in lower courts. In higher courts barristers will more usually do the work. Commercial clients who don't like solicitor's advice will frequently try to get advice from a QC - a senior barrister - in the hope it will persuade their boss to go on with the case, hence my father's oft-repeated comment to clients "You can have counsel's opinion and it'll cost you £30000, or you can slip me £15000 and I'll tell you that it's 50-50 for half as much."
..but are just a few years behind. You need to get up to speed on sucking up to the American DHS and spying on your citizens. Could I make you an offer? We will soon have an Administration that is surplus to requirements. Why don't you take it over?
After all, in 1688 we acquired our Government from the Netherlands and it was a big success story. Now it's time to return the favor. Gordon Brown is not quite as glamorous as William of Orange, but I'm sure we'd let you have him and his Cabinet for free.
We also have some bankers you might like. The famous Dutch bankers were the Fuggers. We call ours by a very similar name, sometimes prefixed with "mother".
I don't know if the law is different in the Netherlands, but in the UK if the client tells the lawyer that he did do it, he has to either find a new lawyer or agree to plead guilty and present mitigating circumstances. A lawyer is not allowed to tell actual lies in court.I doubt it is different elsewhere in the EU.
Market capitalisation was one of the things that caused the financial crisis.It isn't real because it makes the incorrect assumption that you could sell the shares and the price would remain the same. This is characteristic of a bubble. One cause of the Japanese crisis was that at one time real estate in Tokyo was so expensive that its market value was greater than all of the rest of Japan. But once there was a recession and offices started to empty, real estate prices dropped like a stone. There was a similar bubble collapse in the UK in the 1990s, and there is a similar one in the US today.
Market capitalisation is a result of several factors - the perceived cool factor of a share being one of them, and the need to include them in certain types of fund being another. The point is that a perceived decline in value can collapse the bubble very fast, as shares start to be sold which triggers off removal from portfolios and small investors getting out.
All this is very basic finance 101 but is widely misunderstood. If you are in for the long term (which is the least risky way of making a profit) you need to look at the customer base and the value added. Apple has many customers for its newer products which are on phone company contracts, and it does not have the majority of the smartphone market. It has forced Nokia to look at its product range again, it has stimulated the development of Maemo, Moblin, Chrome and Ubuntu Netbook. The competition is coalescing around Linux with value added in the front ends. Apple has a strong installed base but its market cap is based on a belief that it is the wave of the future. A change in perception, a major provider coming out with a competitive iPhone replacement (Verizon/Pre?) could depress Apple shares overnight.
IBM, like Rolls-Royce, is rather invisible to the public. It has no real brand image. But, like Rolls-Royce, it has stackloads of bought in installed base who can't just replace their phone when the contract ends, or buy a new notebook computer.
I'm reminded of someone at Rolls-Royce commenting on their share price that "people don't take into account that if we never sold another product, starting tomorrow, we would still be around in 60 years servicing our installations. And many of our customers are Governments".
Apple may overtake IBM in the long term. But currently this is far from evident, and market cap is not a useful measurement.
Same argument used to claim that Francis Bacon or Essex wrote the plays.
Now consider TP. Started in local journalism, worked in PR dfor the nuclear industry. Didn't have a classical education. Very successful author. Like WS, gets themes from all over the place, pastiches, parodies, makes them his own. TP is a "middlebrow" author. If you know the literature of the period, you will know the highbrow stuff - the stuff that would win Bookers nowadays - is almost unreadable today. Shakespeare was a popular playwright, not an intellectual.
In some future, people like you will be explaining that TP could never have written his books as he didn't go to Oxford and didn't live in London. So they must have been written by Will Self, or Martin Amis, when just messing around.
Shakespeare didn't write Old English. He actually wrote modern English. Old English is Anglo-Saxon. Even Chaucer (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote) wrote in English, though he was sometimes unsure as to how many esses to use.
Why the pedantry? Because, if you didn't know that, you really shouldn't be pontificating on linguistics or linguistic analysis.
This is a common misconception. Capacitors have significant inductance (have to be specially designed not to) and as everybody knows the rate of change of current is limited by the driving voltage and the inductance. As inductance does not convert current to heat (unlike resistance), putting inductance in a capacitor array does not waste energy like resistive limiting would. The converters that produce constant current from the array to drive the motors will themselves use inductors as part of the electronics. Also, there is a limited rate at which charge can move off the dielectric in ultracapacitors. Fancy dielectrics like barium titanate have much lower charge mobility than, say, polypropylene which stores practically no energy in the dielectric at all.
If you doubt this, there is a simple experiment you can do. Find an old high voltage electrolytic capacitor. Charge to a few hundred volts (if you don't know how to do this you should not be doing it.) Then discharge it with a suitable insulated screwdriver, but don't keep the screwdriver on too long. You will get a bang. A check with a voltmeter will reveal residual charge on the capacitor, in fact it may still be unsafe to handle.
Most Diesels are much more efficient than 18-20%. In fact, my small Mercedes Diesel engine is so efficient it requires an additional heater in winter because the heat output of the engine is not sufficient to heat the cabin when in low speed traffic.
I suspect that the real issue is with emissions from Diesel engines in city traffic. The ultracapacitor approach gets the emissions out into the countryside, where the coal mining and power generating plants are.
Of course, if you are a liberal who believes there is no personal responsibility
How about if you're a normal liberal who does believe in personal responsibility, believes that the scientists are right and that not only are there gay human beings but that many other species have an analog, that this is a result of genetic makeup and prenatal environment, and that gay people can no more help being attracted to the same sex than I, for instance, am attracted to the opposite one? How about if you're a Liberal who believes you right wingers are a collection of mindless buffoons endlessly repeating what your shock radio cheerleaders tell you, and that it's us Liberals who are responsible for almost all human progress, while your lot, from Southern Baptists to the Taliban, want to drag us back screaming and kicking into the Dark Ages?
Well, then we might think you're just another racist/homophobe spouting a load of offensive bullshit. And your point is?
All these things were tried, and failed, in the 19th century. That's how old this is. If you do that, then the radius of the axle to the wheel is constantly varying which means that the angular velocity of the wheel has to change very fast - which it cannot do because the transmission requires it to be fixed.
The solution, found in the 20th century, was the constant velocity joint. Tinfoil hat not needed. They went to Detroit and some old guy in the SAE said "folks, we tried that and it was a very bad idea because..."
Car makers have had over a hundred years of experience of what does, and what doesn't work. They don't suppress technology because it might replace theirs - everybody wants a technology lead. They just don't buy stuff that doesn't work.
My personal view, based on several of them, is that CEOs are weird because they are put in an impossible job which rewards a degree of psychopathy, but are expected also to be successful socially. Traders would be expected to be weird for quite a different reason. As Taleb points out, they think that they are making rational decisions which affect the outcome of their bets, when in fact the outcome is more or less random. As a result there is little correlation between their mental processes and reward. This is a recipe for neurosis.
Programming involves trying to reproduce the literal mindedness of an autistic person. Maths involves deliberate abstraction from the real world. Surgery involves doing things that may kill someone in order to cure them. It's unsurprising that these occupations too can result in strange mindsets in their practitioners.
Clearly you have never worked in an environment when one boss has several personalities, they change several times a day, and each one contradicts what the last one just said. And it's no good getting things in writing because the claim will then be that you've "misinterpreted" it, as in "when I said black you should have realised I meant white."
It took me two years to realise that this was a deliberate boss strategy by a clueless middle manager who was overpromoted, and was using it to freak out his underlings. More usually the multi-personality boss has only two personalities, the before lunch and the after lunch, resulting from a lunchtime session with his or her personal psychoanalyst (Dr. Jack Daniels).
I'm getting rather tired of this "The Chinese can do everything, blah blah blah" - so often used as a justification for spending money on willy-waggling projects. China is a country with a vast population and severe resource limitation. They can produce plenty of engineering and science graduates, they can do cheap manufacturing of increasingly small products, but spaceflight requires huge natural resources - energy and material - and for China to deflect those resources to it will not merely slow the progress of their industrialisation, but raise prices on world markets, making the exercise less affordable.
In his 200X books, Arthur C Clarke suggested that China would do space travel on the cheap. But he always had to imagine a (nonexistent) nuclear drive to overcome the energetic considerations of getting to Mars and beyond.
Boulton and Watt held patents on the original steam (as distinct from vacuum) engine which held up development for many years. The engine patents were nearly as bad as patenting the wheel - they basically were allowed to patent the crank when used as part of a steam engine, though it is an ancient mechanism. Fox Talbot had patents on photography which held up development for years. The patent laws were just as ridiculous then.
Slashdot Mirror
We need a new Reform Bill. Actually, we need a new Glorious Revolution.
I live in the UK and I cannot understand why anybody would want a manual transmission on our congested roads. Of course our fuel costs more, but the latest autos are automated manual transmissions and actually do better on fuel mileage than manuals. I've driven both (usually through being stuck in Europe with a manual hire car) and I feel considerably safer in the auto. It's one less thing to think about, and after all the manual transmission is not a design feature - it's a failure, a technological throwback to the pre-cybernetic era. Having watched morons take both hands off the wheel to change gear too often, I think I would actually go so far as to ban all mobile phone use by drivers in moving manual transmission cars, and all GPS use in manuals unless there is a passenger to operate it, and legislate to phase out manual transmissions on road vehicles.
How do people who don't understand irony manage to get mod points?
Unfortunately laws have to be made for the majority not the minority. This is a pity. I personally would like to see a world in which nobody was allowed to drive who had an IQ below 145 and had been assessed as safe by a personality test which included tests for psychopathy, sociopathy and reckless behavior. It would keep the roads nice and empty for me...but it won't happen.
On the other hand there is a lot of evidence that using handheld devices while driving is dangerous, and in our rather busier UK traffic anybody drinking coffee while driving is a risk to everybody else.
However the summary and some of the responses show part of a trend. "Libertarianism" translating as "I should be allowed to do whatever I want, but stop those other idiots". Once you reach the age of 40 it becomes apparent that young drivers are crap and greatly overestimate their skills and their road attentiveness. As a colleague of mind once remarked "when I think how I used to drive when i was younger and put my family at risk, my blood runs cold". I expect lots of posts here slagging off Ontario, but they are right - and remember kids, you can't post a retraction to Slashdot from the cemetary.
I have 9.10 running off a flash card and everything is working properly - with no email setup, encrypted home, and browser history deleted on exit it's now my internet banking appliance, but I'm getting close to putting it on the HDD too.
Oh, do come off it. Mathematicians never showed any hockey stick curve was "bogus" because, guess what, mathematicians != statistical analysts. All we have is an elderly physicist or two with no knowledge of modern modeling complaining that they couldn't have done it back in the day using slide rules and mechanical calculators. Just like elderly physicists in the past rejected QED because they didn't understand it. In fact, the latest papers on improved climate modeling show that not only is the "hockey stick" correct, but that the additional data shows greater variability in the past, but mainly in the lower temperature direction - this is the first time in 2 millennia that temperatures have been consistently rising for an extended period with no previous fall. Basically, every statement you make is either a lie, a distortion, or just plain wrong. What do you get out of it? One way another your patio heater and hemi V8 are going to get too expensive to run, either by carbon taxt or by oil shortages.
You have to expect pedantry, this is Slashdot.
You must be French, or from Louisiana.
The official definition of the mainstream European legal system is either "Roman Law" or "Romano-Germanic". As the WTO describes it,
I would remind you that the Netherlands has signed up to the Treaty of Rome, and so has the UK on behalf of both its legal systems, so your "yes it is" is not based on actual knowledge, but an assumption that may be wrong. I was avoiding stating an opinion on something I don't know about for sure. Conclusion - you are not a lawyer.
The cases you are describing are those where the lawyer knows the client is probably guilty. In cases where the lawyer knows that the client is actually guilty, the arguments in court should not happen. (and incidentally, I rather imagine the number of criminal cases handled by solicitors is greater than those handled by barristers. Most crime in the UK is petty crime.)
However, your post is utterly uninformed. Solicitors advise clients on law in lower courts. In higher courts barristers will more usually do the work. Commercial clients who don't like solicitor's advice will frequently try to get advice from a QC - a senior barrister - in the hope it will persuade their boss to go on with the case, hence my father's oft-repeated comment to clients "You can have counsel's opinion and it'll cost you £30000, or you can slip me £15000 and I'll tell you that it's 50-50 for half as much."
After all, in 1688 we acquired our Government from the Netherlands and it was a big success story. Now it's time to return the favor. Gordon Brown is not quite as glamorous as William of Orange, but I'm sure we'd let you have him and his Cabinet for free.
We also have some bankers you might like. The famous Dutch bankers were the Fuggers. We call ours by a very similar name, sometimes prefixed with "mother".
I don't know if the law is different in the Netherlands, but in the UK if the client tells the lawyer that he did do it, he has to either find a new lawyer or agree to plead guilty and present mitigating circumstances. A lawyer is not allowed to tell actual lies in court.I doubt it is different elsewhere in the EU.
Market capitalisation is a result of several factors - the perceived cool factor of a share being one of them, and the need to include them in certain types of fund being another. The point is that a perceived decline in value can collapse the bubble very fast, as shares start to be sold which triggers off removal from portfolios and small investors getting out.
All this is very basic finance 101 but is widely misunderstood. If you are in for the long term (which is the least risky way of making a profit) you need to look at the customer base and the value added. Apple has many customers for its newer products which are on phone company contracts, and it does not have the majority of the smartphone market. It has forced Nokia to look at its product range again, it has stimulated the development of Maemo, Moblin, Chrome and Ubuntu Netbook. The competition is coalescing around Linux with value added in the front ends. Apple has a strong installed base but its market cap is based on a belief that it is the wave of the future. A change in perception, a major provider coming out with a competitive iPhone replacement (Verizon/Pre?) could depress Apple shares overnight.
IBM, like Rolls-Royce, is rather invisible to the public. It has no real brand image. But, like Rolls-Royce, it has stackloads of bought in installed base who can't just replace their phone when the contract ends, or buy a new notebook computer.
I'm reminded of someone at Rolls-Royce commenting on their share price that "people don't take into account that if we never sold another product, starting tomorrow, we would still be around in 60 years servicing our installations. And many of our customers are Governments".
Apple may overtake IBM in the long term. But currently this is far from evident, and market cap is not a useful measurement.
Now consider TP. Started in local journalism, worked in PR dfor the nuclear industry. Didn't have a classical education. Very successful author. Like WS, gets themes from all over the place, pastiches, parodies, makes them his own. TP is a "middlebrow" author. If you know the literature of the period, you will know the highbrow stuff - the stuff that would win Bookers nowadays - is almost unreadable today. Shakespeare was a popular playwright, not an intellectual.
In some future, people like you will be explaining that TP could never have written his books as he didn't go to Oxford and didn't live in London. So they must have been written by Will Self, or Martin Amis, when just messing around.
Why the pedantry? Because, if you didn't know that, you really shouldn't be pontificating on linguistics or linguistic analysis.
If you doubt this, there is a simple experiment you can do. Find an old high voltage electrolytic capacitor. Charge to a few hundred volts (if you don't know how to do this you should not be doing it.) Then discharge it with a suitable insulated screwdriver, but don't keep the screwdriver on too long. You will get a bang. A check with a voltmeter will reveal residual charge on the capacitor, in fact it may still be unsafe to handle.
I suspect that the real issue is with emissions from Diesel engines in city traffic. The ultracapacitor approach gets the emissions out into the countryside, where the coal mining and power generating plants are.
How about if you're a normal liberal who does believe in personal responsibility, believes that the scientists are right and that not only are there gay human beings but that many other species have an analog, that this is a result of genetic makeup and prenatal environment, and that gay people can no more help being attracted to the same sex than I, for instance, am attracted to the opposite one? How about if you're a Liberal who believes you right wingers are a collection of mindless buffoons endlessly repeating what your shock radio cheerleaders tell you, and that it's us Liberals who are responsible for almost all human progress, while your lot, from Southern Baptists to the Taliban, want to drag us back screaming and kicking into the Dark Ages?
Well, then we might think you're just another racist/homophobe spouting a load of offensive bullshit. And your point is?
Or perhaps he really was a good ol' racist boy and was thinking "Geez we sure don't want any more half castes becoming President"
The solution, found in the 20th century, was the constant velocity joint. Tinfoil hat not needed. They went to Detroit and some old guy in the SAE said "folks, we tried that and it was a very bad idea because..."
Car makers have had over a hundred years of experience of what does, and what doesn't work. They don't suppress technology because it might replace theirs - everybody wants a technology lead. They just don't buy stuff that doesn't work.
Programming involves trying to reproduce the literal mindedness of an autistic person. Maths involves deliberate abstraction from the real world. Surgery involves doing things that may kill someone in order to cure them. It's unsurprising that these occupations too can result in strange mindsets in their practitioners.
It took me two years to realise that this was a deliberate boss strategy by a clueless middle manager who was overpromoted, and was using it to freak out his underlings. More usually the multi-personality boss has only two personalities, the before lunch and the after lunch, resulting from a lunchtime session with his or her personal psychoanalyst (Dr. Jack Daniels).
Thunderbird, Firefox, Chrome, OOO3.1.1, NetBeans, no, none of it's illegal.
And I have paid-for software too: SQL Server 2008, Toad, AVG...
What do you mean, something's missing? Not that I know of.
In his 200X books, Arthur C Clarke suggested that China would do space travel on the cheap. But he always had to imagine a (nonexistent) nuclear drive to overcome the energetic considerations of getting to Mars and beyond.
Boulton and Watt held patents on the original steam (as distinct from vacuum) engine which held up development for many years. The engine patents were nearly as bad as patenting the wheel - they basically were allowed to patent the crank when used as part of a steam engine, though it is an ancient mechanism. Fox Talbot had patents on photography which held up development for years. The patent laws were just as ridiculous then.