Damped detuning is precisely absorbing energy in such a way that the spectrum broadens, the guitar string analogy. "Damped" = removing energy, "detuning" = broadening spectrum. This is like a system of resonators all with slightly different peak frequencies which cannot co-excite one another, which is neither damping nor detuning. If you want to see an everyday damped detuning system, look under your car at the engine mounts. Not only do they absorb energy (the rubber is deliberately made with energy-absorbing additives) but as they are compressed their stiffness varies, thus changing the resonant frequency of the engine assembly during the vibration. Does that look like a ring of bells?
For once, read TFA. It's quite amusing. And it isn't about what it seems to be.
It's about wakefields and the possibility of reducing their external effects by detuning. What makes this interesting is that the proposals for next-gen small accelerators are about deliberately using wakefields to achieve very high acceleration over very short ranges, effectively getting particles to surf on laser-induced wakefields.
The guy with the proposal also manages to give a spectacularly bad example of detuning - bells, anyone? - which fully complies with the Bad Analogy requirements, i.e. detuning is nothing at all like having lots of bells, and the analogy doesn't provide any insight at all into what is happening. Detuning is more like resting a finger gently on a vibrating guitar string.
All this article really tells me is that wakefields are very hot in particle accelerator research, and efforts are focussing on reducing their unwanted effects as well as extracting more energy from them.
How, exactly, does one register copyright at the Library of Congress on a piece of music?
I'm not trolling. How would you do it? The score? How would a bureaucrat, exactly, identify that a performance is indeed the same as the score - without expensive lawyers getting involved? The title? Easily changed. The composer? Need to go to law to force $evil_corporation to admit they don't have title.
I suspect this is more about Myspace=US corporation, Warners=US corporation, where is Scotland?
Show me a single developed country that does not do the same. The real point about MP's corruption in the UK, by world standards, was how little money was involved. Blair squirrels away a few millions; Berlusconi's companies get fined hundreds of millions and he passes a special law to protect himself; how much did the Bush family benefit from the oil price spike?
As for pork barrel, we aren't even in the same room as the US, where it is part of business as usual, Alaskan bridges, protection of industries, you name it.
Assuming you live in the UK, I have a suggestion. We are an overpopulated little island. Why not emigrate somewhere with less political corruption?
The FTIR mouse looks relatively easy to implement from a hardware perspective - tiny cameras being very cheap and low power. It also looks as though it could be easy to give it a "legacy" mode.
I also assume that it wouldn't be necessary to keep your fingers off all the time. A mouse press would simply be an increase in the area in contact with one finger.
As it looks as if this design would be relatively easy to make splashproof and washable, I can see it having an immediate application in hospitals, labs etc.
Simple? Low tech? Have you ever actually seen one of these plants? Are you aware of the technical challenges in making cheap, reliable Stirling engines?
If in your world steerable mirrors, Stirling generators and the electronics and computing needed to drive them is simple and low tech, then welcome to this planet, my friend, but I'm afraid you will find us very backward.
You make it clear that you're locked into a limited environment. I have no quibble with what you are doing at all. But you are in a way making my point for me. You intend to write a Python app to guide your actions, and I suspect that other similarly affected people would be interested in it. You are proposing to create an assistance tool which has benefits in extending the range of things you can do. But I doubt that most of them would worry about whether they could retrieve the data in future for further analysis. They would want the application to "just work".
I have a hearing aid to deal with quite severe deafness. The latest generation is quite amazing in what it can do. I'm aware that an immense amount of data logging and analysis went into designing its algorithms, and I'm really impressed by the science that goes into it. But all I care about now is that it works, and works extremely well.
Mr X, an executive at Woolworths, decided to use our logo because he is a dishonest cheating bastard
Not to engage in stereotyping or anything, but wouldn't that be at the "complimentary" rather than "defamatory" end of the Australian spectrum? Now "Mr. X is a whinging Pom" - grounds for assault and battery at least.
I'm serious about this. Doing something and then obsessing about the statistical data - it's using up a part of your life you won't get back again. I've always argued (over a 30 year engineering career) that the purpose of automated data collection and analysis is to enable us to do human things, not robot things. Rowing, for instance, should be a fun exercise that keeps you fit, improves your social life, and makes you aware of your environment in new ways. It's turned into something where people listen to canned music while working exercise machines in gyms, trying to turn themselves into machines. Cyclists blast along footpaths and cycle tracks more concerned with what their monitors tell them than looking where they're going, shouting at people on foot. I find this bloody depressing.
If it's your business, if you want to build an application that takes all this data and turns it into something easy to understand that doesn't intrude on people's lives, that's one thing. But fussing over numbers for the sake of it? There are many, many better things to do in the world.
I'm amazed at the people who will read about fantasy or imaginary worlds and yet balk at Ulysses. For the ignorant, Ulysses is about a day in the life of Dublin as seen through the eyes of a Jewish advertising salesman (Leopold Bloom) and the young James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus). It covers everything from the red light area through to the literary and medical world around Trinity College. You have to learn a bit about Ireland in the early 20th Century to understand it. It helps to have a copy of Harry Blamires' Bloomsday Book if you aren't up on Irish history and the geography of Dublin. Ulysses is written in perfectly good English without made up words, in different literary styles (part of it is a play) loosely organised on the return of Ulysses from the Trojan War. Bloom is Ulysses, Dedalus is Telemachus, Molly Bloom is Penelope and the IRA doesn't get a very good Press. Real people walk in and out of the plot. And that's as much of a spoiler as I'm prepared to divulge.
As I say, people will read Tolkien or fiction set in Ancient Rome and yet can't be bothered to spend the time - in bits, if necessary - to get to know Ulysses. But it's one of the greatest works in English of the 20th century, and if you don't try, it's your loss. Finnegans Wake (note no apostrophe) is another matter. Personally I believe the syphilis story, but also I suspect that Joyce was schizophrenic and as he got older it got more out of control. I think it's a failed experiment.
So "caring about driving and their car" mysteriously repels the morons who jump lights, drive too fast on wet roads, overtake on blind bends, or drive the wrong way down divided roads?
My friend, many motorcyclists care deeply about their bikes, but that does not prevent surgeons from referring to them as "organ donors".
By mid-2011, when it will deploy, the war will have been won and it will just be used to make tourist videos. I seem to have inherited Tower Bridge, it's a pain to keep painted, would you like to buy it?
Some of these US posters come over as having a mental age of about 13. You seem to think that "freedom of speech" is the freedom to say or do anything. That's an interesting US interpretation, but it has been popularised by oppressive corporations who want the right to lie to you in the name of advertising, or news. In the US it is used to attack, unfairly and inappropriately, politicians and public figures. Your libel laws are a thug's charter. (British libel laws are not bad, it is the over the top legal fees that are bad. They are designed to prevent people making false accusations of wrongdoing, whereas in the US you can make false accusations and claim to "believe" them to avoid punishment.)
You simply have no idea of the significance of Nazi symbols in Europe; the US was never invaded, and the US Government took good care not to expose US citizens to the truth about the Allied invasion of Europe, concealing (for instance) the horrors of D-Day and the Bulge. Your Government takes good care that you don't know what war is like, especially since public reaction ended the ground war in Vietnam.
When you emerge from your bedrooms and basements, try visiting Germany and the east and actually learning some real history. Then you might understand why, to much of Europe, the use of Nazi symbols in a game is highly inappropriate. But, until you are grown up and actually know something about the world other than soundbites and games, shut the fuck up about civil liberties in a country about which you clearly know less than nothing. And yes, you do make me cross. Go talk to some of the American survivors of WW2, they might tell you a thing or two.
The Dymaxion was a product of its time. The "innovation" is that it steers the way every boat has since someone thought "why not fix the steering oar to the back end and waggle it?"
It's been similarly pointed out that electric vehicles were very successful - at the end of the 19th century, because lead acid cell powered vehicles work well at horse speeds and horse ranges. Once the IC engine made much higher speeds and longer ranges possible, the electric buggy was dead.
Once trucks started their steady growth and road traffic started to rise, something like this would be too unsafe and too unmanoeuverable at higher speeds.
The reason you haven't seen anything so innovative in 70 years is that the last 70 years have had constant steady progress. Now, in 2009, a volume car maker can have a low cost vehicle with antilock brakes, power steering, air con, a high-efficiency Diesel engine, and roadholding and reliability unimaginable 30 years ago, let alone 70. If anybody had a really dramatic breakthrough - unlikely - they would have to get it to market faster and cheaper than the existing industry could improve their product to achieve the same thing. Look at the Prius, which is basically a California Special because the likes of VW and BMW can outgun it on nearly every front using existing technology.
There may be a future for electric bicycles running on dedicated cycle tracks - if the "pedalling is good" nutters don't force you off the road - but it will take a very fast, very dramatic environmental change to cause a step function rather than incremental development.
Bad example. Most theologians would agree that Pascal was quite wrong about that. By Pascal's argument, as well as being a Catholic you should also be a Muslim and a Protestant, and possibly a member of several interesting other religions to be on the safe side. In the same way, the moment we get into that argument on child safety, you should escalate your security means to the limit of your income. Because the chances are very high that your kid won't die of E coli poisoning, be eaten by a grue, break his neck falling off a bicycle, drown in the bath but he might. If you are prepared to pay several hundred dollars to combat one (actually very unlikely) threat, how much are you prepared to pay for all the others?
If your child is young enough to need a leash, well and good. But consider. A child leash is a two-way thing. You know the child is there, the child knows you are there. It is more invasive than a GPS, but also far more secure. And the parent has to pay attention to the child instead of just letting them wander off. My argument is that GPS tracking of children creates a false sense of security (like mothers thinking their kid is "safe" in the car while they drive like idiots"). A child leash doesn't. The high-tech solution is not actually as good as the low-tech one.
Forget the children for one moment. Consider the parental paranoia. We know that, fueled by irresponsible journalists, parents are being given quite wrong ideas about the frequency of abduction, number of pedophiles, and the general danger of the environment. This will not fix parental paranoia. Ten feet is the difference between sidewalk and roadway. Things like this merely feed it, inviting the "they wouldn't make these things if they weren't necessary" argument.
Meanwhile I see mothers using phones (illegally, here) while driving their kids to school and weaving across the road. That's not a "perceived" danger. They let their kids get fat. Also not a perceived danger. They don't teach them the dangers of alcohol, which will kill far more people prematurely than all the world's pedophiles and kidnappers.
We really do need to get across the idea that something can be technically feasible and yet undesirable, because a significant number of people do not get it. And in thirty years time the world is going to be run by people still metaphorically tied to mommy's apron, infantilised by never being given any freedom or responsibility. It's not a nice thought.
As I noted above "It isn't necessary for the US to pretend that they did it all by themselves; we associate that kind of insecurity with the Soviet Union."
There is not a "massive divide". A growing body of knowledge got formalised into a useful structure. We don't say modern physics began with Newton, Einstein or Planck. We recognise a continuum. Modern cryptography clearly began in the 1930s when people started formulating mechanical means of encryption and decryption, advanced when mechanical means of codebreaking were developed in the 40s, and then advanced further when Bell Labs (not just Shannon) put this all together to produce a general theory.
I suggest you go off and play with the (minority of) US astronomers who object to the downgrading of Pluto because it was the only planet discovered by a US-born astronomer. The achievements of the US make this kind of thing just plain childish, like a billionaire would be who boasted about winning a few dollars in a crap game.
Don't blame the US. This is a bit of special pleading for Bell Labs, where Shannon worked.
In fact, as is well known, A M Turing worked at Bell for a short time during WW2. He also learnt at Princeton the electronics that made the Bombes possible.
Modern cryptanalysis was a US/UK cooperation with information and development coming from both sides The Poles obtained an Enigma and started the mathematical theory of decrypting Enigma messages: the analysts at Bletchley, of whom Turing was only one (remember I J Good, anybody?) too it forward, and then post-Pearl Harbor it became (at least in part) a joint venture. It isn't necessary for the US to pretend that they did it all by themselves; we associate that kind of insecurity with the Soviet Union.
The (US) guy who recently wrote a history of D-Day (sorry, forget his name) writes somewhere that while the perception that in WW2 the British had the ideas and the US provided the productive capacity is not really correct as it stands, there is some truth in it. That should really be good enough for everybody.
At times of no war, the doors of the Temple of Janus were closed. This happened several times during the reign of Augustus. Since then, this rarely happened, often because the Persians were being a nuisance.
Looking at the rejected titles, I suggest that someone at Amazon has read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, and thinks they're being taken for a ride by Manutius Press.
Spoiler note: for those who haven't read it (your loss) it's about how a vanity publishing company has the idea of making its fortune by printing mystical conspiracy theory books. Unfortunately the mystical conspiracy nuts decide that the publishers know the secret answer to everything, and hunt them down to extract the secret. I guess that Dan Brown depends on his readership not having read it and finding out what Eco thinks of the sort of people who like that stuff.
Yeah, but won't the existing technology develop to do the same job faster and cheaper than this one can be got to market? That's why wood, ceramics, iron and cement are still the base materials of civilisation, rather than titanium, magnesium and carbon fiber.
We should not allow questions of security or negligence to divert from the fact that the root cause here was criminal activity, stalking, and it is the criminal who should be caught and punished. Otherwise we ultimately end up in the position of saying "well, the mugger was at fault, but it's also the fault of the victim for being 80 years old." This guy is, put simply, ethically challenged bottom feeding scum. Make him do community service emptying bedpans in the hospital for six months. But don't give him the excuse "they let me do it, it's their fault".
It's yet another example of a US multinational trying to prevent bad publicity in a foreign country by using the legal system.
As keeps getting pointed out above, under UK law there is a presumption of innocence. That is applied consistently. If the police accuse me of having done something wrong, there is a presumption that I am innocent. If you, private citizen, accuse me of having done something wrong, there is a presumption that I am innocent, not that you are correct. It is US law that is wrong in principle, because it distinguishes between the police (who must have evidence before bringing a case) and other citizens who are allowed to make claims based on their "belief" unsupported by evidence. Although I personally disagree with Mr. Justice Eady's interpretation of "bogus", until the case is heard the BCA is entitled to pursue their argument that did not actually know that chiropractic is junk non-science.
The thing that is wrong with the British libel system is nothing to do with the law per se: it is ridiculously high British legal fees (following the US)which makes libel cases too expensive to defend for ordinary people, and allows corporations to incur very high costs which they can then reclaim if they win. The McDonalds case was predicated on their spending £40 million in legal fees to try and destroy the defendants financially if they won. The judge did not allow them to collect. The villain in the piece was, is now and will always be McDonalds.
Slashdot Mirror
Damped detuning is precisely absorbing energy in such a way that the spectrum broadens, the guitar string analogy. "Damped" = removing energy, "detuning" = broadening spectrum.
This is like a system of resonators all with slightly different peak frequencies which cannot co-excite one another, which is neither damping nor detuning. If you want to see an everyday damped detuning system, look under your car at the engine mounts. Not only do they absorb energy (the rubber is deliberately made with energy-absorbing additives) but as they are compressed their stiffness varies, thus changing the resonant frequency of the engine assembly during the vibration. Does that look like a ring of bells?
It's about wakefields and the possibility of reducing their external effects by detuning. What makes this interesting is that the proposals for next-gen small accelerators are about deliberately using wakefields to achieve very high acceleration over very short ranges, effectively getting particles to surf on laser-induced wakefields.
The guy with the proposal also manages to give a spectacularly bad example of detuning - bells, anyone? - which fully complies with the Bad Analogy requirements, i.e. detuning is nothing at all like having lots of bells, and the analogy doesn't provide any insight at all into what is happening. Detuning is more like resting a finger gently on a vibrating guitar string.
All this article really tells me is that wakefields are very hot in particle accelerator research, and efforts are focussing on reducing their unwanted effects as well as extracting more energy from them.
I'm not trolling. How would you do it? The score? How would a bureaucrat, exactly, identify that a performance is indeed the same as the score - without expensive lawyers getting involved? The title? Easily changed. The composer? Need to go to law to force $evil_corporation to admit they don't have title.
I suspect this is more about Myspace=US corporation, Warners=US corporation, where is Scotland?
As for pork barrel, we aren't even in the same room as the US, where it is part of business as usual, Alaskan bridges, protection of industries, you name it.
Assuming you live in the UK, I have a suggestion. We are an overpopulated little island. Why not emigrate somewhere with less political corruption?
I also assume that it wouldn't be necessary to keep your fingers off all the time. A mouse press would simply be an increase in the area in contact with one finger.
As it looks as if this design would be relatively easy to make splashproof and washable, I can see it having an immediate application in hospitals, labs etc.
If in your world steerable mirrors, Stirling generators and the electronics and computing needed to drive them is simple and low tech, then welcome to this planet, my friend, but I'm afraid you will find us very backward.
I have a hearing aid to deal with quite severe deafness. The latest generation is quite amazing in what it can do. I'm aware that an immense amount of data logging and analysis went into designing its algorithms, and I'm really impressed by the science that goes into it. But all I care about now is that it works, and works extremely well.
Not to engage in stereotyping or anything, but wouldn't that be at the "complimentary" rather than "defamatory" end of the Australian spectrum? Now "Mr. X is a whinging Pom" - grounds for assault and battery at least.
If it's your business, if you want to build an application that takes all this data and turns it into something easy to understand that doesn't intrude on people's lives, that's one thing. But fussing over numbers for the sake of it? There are many, many better things to do in the world.
You also get to be whacked on the head and then cut up in the interests of research. This doesn't happen if you're human, Chinese criminals excepted.
For the ignorant, Ulysses is about a day in the life of Dublin as seen through the eyes of a Jewish advertising salesman (Leopold Bloom) and the young James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus). It covers everything from the red light area through to the literary and medical world around Trinity College. You have to learn a bit about Ireland in the early 20th Century to understand it. It helps to have a copy of Harry Blamires' Bloomsday Book if you aren't up on Irish history and the geography of Dublin. Ulysses is written in perfectly good English without made up words, in different literary styles (part of it is a play) loosely organised on the return of Ulysses from the Trojan War. Bloom is Ulysses, Dedalus is Telemachus, Molly Bloom is Penelope and the IRA doesn't get a very good Press. Real people walk in and out of the plot. And that's as much of a spoiler as I'm prepared to divulge.
As I say, people will read Tolkien or fiction set in Ancient Rome and yet can't be bothered to spend the time - in bits, if necessary - to get to know Ulysses. But it's one of the greatest works in English of the 20th century, and if you don't try, it's your loss. Finnegans Wake (note no apostrophe) is another matter. Personally I believe the syphilis story, but also I suspect that Joyce was schizophrenic and as he got older it got more out of control. I think it's a failed experiment.
My friend, many motorcyclists care deeply about their bikes, but that does not prevent surgeons from referring to them as "organ donors".
By mid-2011, when it will deploy, the war will have been won and it will just be used to make tourist videos. I seem to have inherited Tower Bridge, it's a pain to keep painted, would you like to buy it?
You simply have no idea of the significance of Nazi symbols in Europe; the US was never invaded, and the US Government took good care not to expose US citizens to the truth about the Allied invasion of Europe, concealing (for instance) the horrors of D-Day and the Bulge. Your Government takes good care that you don't know what war is like, especially since public reaction ended the ground war in Vietnam.
When you emerge from your bedrooms and basements, try visiting Germany and the east and actually learning some real history. Then you might understand why, to much of Europe, the use of Nazi symbols in a game is highly inappropriate. But, until you are grown up and actually know something about the world other than soundbites and games, shut the fuck up about civil liberties in a country about which you clearly know less than nothing. And yes, you do make me cross. Go talk to some of the American survivors of WW2, they might tell you a thing or two.
It's been similarly pointed out that electric vehicles were very successful - at the end of the 19th century, because lead acid cell powered vehicles work well at horse speeds and horse ranges. Once the IC engine made much higher speeds and longer ranges possible, the electric buggy was dead.
Once trucks started their steady growth and road traffic started to rise, something like this would be too unsafe and too unmanoeuverable at higher speeds.
The reason you haven't seen anything so innovative in 70 years is that the last 70 years have had constant steady progress. Now, in 2009, a volume car maker can have a low cost vehicle with antilock brakes, power steering, air con, a high-efficiency Diesel engine, and roadholding and reliability unimaginable 30 years ago, let alone 70. If anybody had a really dramatic breakthrough - unlikely - they would have to get it to market faster and cheaper than the existing industry could improve their product to achieve the same thing. Look at the Prius, which is basically a California Special because the likes of VW and BMW can outgun it on nearly every front using existing technology.
There may be a future for electric bicycles running on dedicated cycle tracks - if the "pedalling is good" nutters don't force you off the road - but it will take a very fast, very dramatic environmental change to cause a step function rather than incremental development.
Bad example. Most theologians would agree that Pascal was quite wrong about that. By Pascal's argument, as well as being a Catholic you should also be a Muslim and a Protestant, and possibly a member of several interesting other religions to be on the safe side. In the same way, the moment we get into that argument on child safety, you should escalate your security means to the limit of your income. Because the chances are very high that your kid won't die of E coli poisoning, be eaten by a grue, break his neck falling off a bicycle, drown in the bath but he might. If you are prepared to pay several hundred dollars to combat one (actually very unlikely) threat, how much are you prepared to pay for all the others?
If your child is young enough to need a leash, well and good. But consider. A child leash is a two-way thing. You know the child is there, the child knows you are there. It is more invasive than a GPS, but also far more secure. And the parent has to pay attention to the child instead of just letting them wander off. My argument is that GPS tracking of children creates a false sense of security (like mothers thinking their kid is "safe" in the car while they drive like idiots"). A child leash doesn't. The high-tech solution is not actually as good as the low-tech one.
Meanwhile I see mothers using phones (illegally, here) while driving their kids to school and weaving across the road. That's not a "perceived" danger. They let their kids get fat. Also not a perceived danger. They don't teach them the dangers of alcohol, which will kill far more people prematurely than all the world's pedophiles and kidnappers.
We really do need to get across the idea that something can be technically feasible and yet undesirable, because a significant number of people do not get it. And in thirty years time the world is going to be run by people still metaphorically tied to mommy's apron, infantilised by never being given any freedom or responsibility. It's not a nice thought.
There is not a "massive divide". A growing body of knowledge got formalised into a useful structure. We don't say modern physics began with Newton, Einstein or Planck. We recognise a continuum. Modern cryptography clearly began in the 1930s when people started formulating mechanical means of encryption and decryption, advanced when mechanical means of codebreaking were developed in the 40s, and then advanced further when Bell Labs (not just Shannon) put this all together to produce a general theory.
I suggest you go off and play with the (minority of) US astronomers who object to the downgrading of Pluto because it was the only planet discovered by a US-born astronomer. The achievements of the US make this kind of thing just plain childish, like a billionaire would be who boasted about winning a few dollars in a crap game.
In fact, as is well known, A M Turing worked at Bell for a short time during WW2. He also learnt at Princeton the electronics that made the Bombes possible.
Modern cryptanalysis was a US/UK cooperation with information and development coming from both sides The Poles obtained an Enigma and started the mathematical theory of decrypting Enigma messages: the analysts at Bletchley, of whom Turing was only one (remember I J Good, anybody?) too it forward, and then post-Pearl Harbor it became (at least in part) a joint venture. It isn't necessary for the US to pretend that they did it all by themselves; we associate that kind of insecurity with the Soviet Union.
The (US) guy who recently wrote a history of D-Day (sorry, forget his name) writes somewhere that while the perception that in WW2 the British had the ideas and the US provided the productive capacity is not really correct as it stands, there is some truth in it. That should really be good enough for everybody.
In this respect, not much seems to have changed.
Spoiler note: for those who haven't read it (your loss) it's about how a vanity publishing company has the idea of making its fortune by printing mystical conspiracy theory books. Unfortunately the mystical conspiracy nuts decide that the publishers know the secret answer to everything, and hunt them down to extract the secret. I guess that Dan Brown depends on his readership not having read it and finding out what Eco thinks of the sort of people who like that stuff.
Yeah, but won't the existing technology develop to do the same job faster and cheaper than this one can be got to market? That's why wood, ceramics, iron and cement are still the base materials of civilisation, rather than titanium, magnesium and carbon fiber.
We should not allow questions of security or negligence to divert from the fact that the root cause here was criminal activity, stalking, and it is the criminal who should be caught and punished. Otherwise we ultimately end up in the position of saying "well, the mugger was at fault, but it's also the fault of the victim for being 80 years old." This guy is, put simply, ethically challenged bottom feeding scum. Make him do community service emptying bedpans in the hospital for six months. But don't give him the excuse "they let me do it, it's their fault".
As keeps getting pointed out above, under UK law there is a presumption of innocence. That is applied consistently. If the police accuse me of having done something wrong, there is a presumption that I am innocent. If you, private citizen, accuse me of having done something wrong, there is a presumption that I am innocent, not that you are correct. It is US law that is wrong in principle, because it distinguishes between the police (who must have evidence before bringing a case) and other citizens who are allowed to make claims based on their "belief" unsupported by evidence. Although I personally disagree with Mr. Justice Eady's interpretation of "bogus", until the case is heard the BCA is entitled to pursue their argument that did not actually know that chiropractic is junk non-science.
The thing that is wrong with the British libel system is nothing to do with the law per se: it is ridiculously high British legal fees (following the US)which makes libel cases too expensive to defend for ordinary people, and allows corporations to incur very high costs which they can then reclaim if they win. The McDonalds case was predicated on their spending £40 million in legal fees to try and destroy the defendants financially if they won. The judge did not allow them to collect. The villain in the piece was, is now and will always be McDonalds.