Doing a course in History of Science at Cambridge, for once in my life I found a use for school Latin. The English version was always out, but the original Latin was always available to be borrowed. Amazingly, the Union sold off its copy (I think C W Monckton bought it- if I'm right it might explain why his views on climate change are so out of date), which I guess would be worth tens of thousands by now.
Anyway, it's the Principia mathematics philosophiae naturalis - the mathematical foundations of physics, in modern English. And it's a hard read.
Act. Write to your MP, if they are not Cons or Lib Dem then write to the Conservative Party, support their initiative and respond to the attack. Point out that IBM, Sun and other companies have significant OSS products, and that there are votes in getting back some of the UK software industry under UK control, and away from Redmond. A cynical initiative sometimes turns into a bandwagon. Last year David Davis resigned and fought what was considered to be a publicity seeking by-election: this year, civil liberaties are right up the political agenda. If you don't help to get a bandwagon rolling but sit on the sidelines whining about Thatcher, you are part of the problem with politics, not the solution.
And yes, during the 80s and 90s I helped lobby Parliament on the value of the British electronics and software industries, served on DTI committees, talked to our MP and Euro MP. I didn't say "oh nasty Conservatives, don't get involved." That's pointless.
I've just sent an email to the Conservative Party (via their website) telling them that they are right, stick to their guns. I've told them we are a small UK developer who rely on OSS from major vendors to deliver a cost effective product, and that they should repond to criticism from people who simply stand to lose business by pointing out their lack of independence. I encourage others to do the same. I'm not a Conservative, I'm a long haired pinko (all right, on the right wing of the Lib Dems actually) but I think that any political party that comes up with sensible ideas should be given encouragement. Our MP used to say that he regarded every letter that wasn't boilerplate from a lobbist as representing the views of at least 500 people, so if he got 100 letters and emails on a subject saying the same thing, he took that as representative of the constituency as a whole. They DO pay attention.
The stored program digital computer was a British invention whose roots go back before WW2, but which was actually developed once the need for decryption started to ease off. In fact Turing wanted to use ex-military tubes (valves) but this was turned down in favour of commercial designs. Delay lines (early storage) had no counterpart in military systems. The cavity magnetron was invented by British engineers (and the Japanese oven makers paid royalties to Marconi for some time, I believe.) You can claim the Internet, but in its early stages it had no obvious military application; it could as easily have been developed to synchronise the work of non-military government agencies more effectively. What evidence have you that cell phones and jet engines emerged from military research? The transistor wasn't invented until 1958 and it was invented at Bell Labs for telecoms applications. Semiconductor technology was driven by the problem of repeaters in telephone cables, not the military. I'm afraid that you are peddling a well known myth, but it is a myth. The great majority of the technology we have today is based around medicine, the internal combusion engine, the electric motor, the storage battery, ceramics, and metallurgy, none of which have military origins. It has been argued by historians of science that during wars certain aspects of technology development are accelerated, causing people to think that they emerged then. But during wars general GNP drops, which causes a contraction in other areas of R&D.
In fact, military technology usually lags behind civilian technology, because things can be used in non-military environments while they are still too fragile for military ones. You won't find many bleeding edge processors in military equipment, because they aren't rad hard and can't run up to a case temperature of 100C and above, and rthe packaging may well before -65C. When I was working in this area, it was reckoned that military electronics were approximately 3 generations behind civil electronics.
OK, then explain why it is that Samsung and Nokia are eating Motorola's lunch in mobile phones, VW, Mercedes, BMW, Toyota and Honda seem able to make better designed and built cars than the US, US white goods are generally inferior to those from Bosch, Electrolux etc., most LCD monitors come from Korea, Taiwan or China, laptops get designed in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, the Long Island railway runs on imported French trains, most printers come from Japan, China or Korea, and how long is it since Kodak was last a major camera maker (though a lot of their Retina models were actually German.) As for the UK - well, we have massive military R&D per capita and our consumer products, such as they are, are obligingly made for us by foreign owned firms.
As for your knowledge of WW2 history - I'm sorry, it is utterly inadequate. Apart from the possibility that, had Britain defeated Hitler in the mid-30s the main language of Europe would be Russian, what makes you think the US, which was pretty pro-Hitler at the time, would have let us? Roosevelt had to overcome some pretty entrenched attitudes to give the UK the limited support that he did.
If you read the European history books, you will see that the 30s were pretty much a diplomatic failure. Had the West had the support instead of the fence-sitting attitude of the US, had Britain and France properly supported Austria, Poland and the Czechs, and had Weimar been supported instead of undermined, would Hitler have been allowed to form a Government? We will never know, but one thing is clear: despite its military buildup, Germany lost.
As I recall, the US economy got a boost from reduction in arms spending post-Communism, in the Clinton era. I remember discussions in the UK before that on how Japan benefited commercially from not having a significant military, meaning that not only did they not have to pay for it out of taxes, but engineers who might be making missiles could work on things like better cars.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products. Military "GNP" is akin to making lots of expensive goods and then putting them all on a bonfire.
In the present case, Obama can achieve several things: reduce the cost of government, please the bluer segments of the US, and perhaps give Bill O'Reilly and co heart attacks. Potential triple win for the new Administration, and no-one gets hurt.
They'll have drive-by readers for their Google locate-a-UK-citizen webapp.
The thing that worries me is that the downturn means that people now working at Google, Microsoft etc. will be released into the community and will then get Government jobs. One thing worse than pervasive Govt paranoia and spying is efficient pervasive government paranoia and spying.
I was born in this country, I've lived here a long time, but I didn't spot that at all. On the one hand, I'm pleased that, as a small-r republican, I've demonstrated my lack of interest in the Winzas. On the other, perhaps I might not be as good at identifying fake coins and banknotes as I should be.
Sarcastic? Hardly. I was making a straight observation. You could get away with making 2-meter transmitters in those days because there was very little around to interfere with. Nowadays, there is so much damage that you can do, that we need FCC certification and the rest.
But the "need to know anything about what's going on inside" - is it healthy for society that for most of the population electronics is a form of magic?
The US is leading in production in the small market segment of thin film solar however
Yes indeed, and this is probably where the future lies. (I'm doing comparative testing right now.) At this early stage, the current biggest manufacturers may turn out to have sunk costs in the wrong technology. Thin film has the possibility of being significantly better for volume manufacture and for low environmental cost. Silicon may turn out to be a bit of a blind alley.
Because you are just too right. Forty years ago before personal computers, to get any brownie points for this kind of thing at school you had to wind the coils yourself or bake your own resistors, because hobbyist magazines were full of designs. Ah, the great days of acorn tubes and bending aluminum chassis plates. Or the day I accidentally jammed the TV signal in a quarter mile radius, owing to the amazing bandwidth of some ex-mil tubes and misreading a capacitor value. But, sadly, that's why the authorities discourage experimentation nowadays. It's so much easier to cause problems.
The Economist states as facts opinions that I disagree with. How can you call yourself "The Economist", and then state as a basic principle that you support only one kind of economics? It's the Economist that, as a matter of editorial policy which is admittedly openly stated, slants all its stories to fit its world picture. It's a bit like Pravda in reverse.
Adam Smith lived in a world of no big corporations (where in fact the biggest corporation was a Government department, the Royal Navy)and never envisaged how things would turn out. Karl Marx wrote in the 19th century, and actually envisaged rather more accurately how things would turn out. In the 20th century, Nobel prize winning economists demonstrated the flaw in the free market concept - the accumulation of secret asymmetric information - and were promptly proved right in the early 21st Century. Now, the US Government is trying to adopt a mixed economy without actually using the "socialism" word. It looks like your own Government has decided that the worldview of the Economist hasn't panned out too well.
I'm not a Marxist, I'm not a Smithite - but if somebody tells me on page 1 that he is prejudiced, I like to check the statistics, and get a second view from someone else. Economics is not a science like, say, QED, it makes few really testable predictions and its root beliefs are constantly being called into question. The world viewpoint of the Economist is more of a religion than a science, and I'm entitled to call it into question.
When the timescale is longer than a year or so, the free market is terrible at picking winners. Ask GM. Ask Toyota, who chose last year to release the biggest Land Cruiser ever. On long timescales, the free market is no cleverer than the Government, and unfortunately infrastructure needs long timescales.
Meanwhile, technology evolves quite rapidly. Economies of scale and build cost of wind are changing rapidly. Solar cell technology is changing rapidly - I'm currently testing a set of non-silicon cells and already I've decided to wait rather than buy silicon - so there will be inevitable swings. Left to itself, the market will do what I do - wait for a winner to emerge. And without investment, there will be no winner.
You've already given away your political leaning by copy and paste from the Economist - which by the way was one of the cheerleaders that led to the present financial crisis - but it's fair to mention one other thing. Britain in the 50s and 60s was poor because the US delayed intervention in WW2, hoping that this would result in the collapse of the British Empire, to the gain of the US. The US was never bombed, and Pearl Harbor did less damage to the US than a single air raid of London. As a result, Britain emerged almost bankrupt with much of its productive capacity destroyed, and only rescued itself by having a strongly dirigiste economy focussed on exports, while people at home went cold and hungry. During the late 40s and early 50s, we got shot of the Empire (to our financial benefit). During the Thatcherite "reforms", the UK slipped back economically relative to its European neighbours.
Yours, and the Economist's view of history is dangerously simplistic. Personally, like most Europeans, I believe that the answer lies in a mixed economy. But I don't expect to learn that from a comic that sells mainly to non-tax paying expats and their accountants.
MSI is reported to have a netbook with, basically, the screen of the MacBook Air coming out around April. Obviously the processor will be slower than the original, but it's likely to be half to a third of the price.
Defeat Communism and socialism by having a purely private educational system.
Yes, having a huge uneducated underclass is really going to keep the US on top of the world. You have, like most US conservatives, totally missed the point. Marx wanted to change society and realised that the way to do this included better education. If US conservatives wanted to change society in a constructive way, they would come up with a conservative state educational system that was successful, so that people would want it for their children. But all they seem able to do is try to teach Creationism and prevent sex education in schools.
Explain to me why the most socialist European countries have the most sucessful outcomes in terms of education, better than the US. If you were right, Finland would not have created one of the world's biggest high-tech companies - they'd never have let Nokia get going.
I have only one comment, though. A lot of work has been done on why children fail. However,to fix it would require a level of social engineering and cost that taxpayers in the US and the UK (but not e.g. Finland) will not put up with. As poor people generally don't vote, politicians have little interest in solving an expensive problem with no short term solution.
Apart from the obvious fact that social justice, equity and community have nothing to do with Communism - you may have heard about a religion called Judaism which give rise to a religion called Christianity, and they are both pretty keen on all 3 - many of the best teachers are motivated by those ideas. Do you want your kids taught by a swivel eyed psychopath who is doing it solely because that's the highest earning job he can get with his crappy degree, or by someone who could be earning an awful lot more but genuinely cares about making society a better place to live in?
Disclaimer: I went to a "progressive" school in the UK. My first form teacher was a Communist who had thrown bricks at Fascists in the 1930s, but many of the staff were socialists, Catholics or both. House prices went up in the area all the time we lived there because parents wanted to be in the catchment area for that school. You see, a real Communist or socialist believes that education can transform society. Whereas it's the right wingers who want everybody else to be poor and uneducated, so they can profit.
...and say that nothing that Microsoft contributes to schools facilitates education, but that would be unfair. Gates is not the first, and will not be the last, businessman to try to give money to schools to encourage them down a path that he supports. I am sure they all mean well - but education is too big and complicated, and depends too much on local factors, to benefit from this kind of investment. It's been said that the only thing that businessmen should do is to take a leaf out of Carnegie's book and donate libraries. Not a bad place to start, especially if you are big enough to realise that you will profoundly disagree with some of those books, and that is actually a good thing.
The difference is that this was a well off amateur drawing the Moon, which was already known to have features. Galileo's main discoveries were sunspots (i.e. sun is not perfect) and 4 Jovian moons (i.e. not everything in the Universe could rotate around the Earth.) These were groundbreaking discoveries because they destroyed the Scholastic world-view as effectively as the Theory of Relativity replaced absolute space and time.
Therefore this is all a bit of special pleading. This guy basically bought a telescope and drew a few pictures. Galileo made a telescope and changed the way we looked at the world.
Disclaimer: I'm British, I revere Newton, but Galileo is the one I really look up to.
Fast breeder reactors turn out not to be as easy to make safe and reliable as their proponents think. Google for more recent literature. It's a pity, I personally like the idea, but both fast reactors and fuel reprocessing have turned out to be very difficult.
I know that in the UK they have a TV tax that is used to fund the BBC and such things, but with the TV tax you at least know that they are watching TV shows and at the time they instituted the tax BBC was I think the only or at least the biggest player. Now with sky and other channels there's more people that should be getting that money(I dunno if they do or if they are terrestrial or what)
The BBC is funded by a direct tax on households with television. It carries no (overt) advertising and therefore is able to provide programmes without reference to the Rupert Murdoch world-view, unlike Sky. Sky should definitely not receive any taxpayer subvention as it exists to promote the views of an Australian/American billionaire, like its US counterpart Fox News.
I am afraid that this latest proposal is nothing to do with the BBC model, it is all about keeping foreign recording companies in the country and onside. Which is about continuing to try to keep the City of London at a level of importance disproportionate to the country as a whole. Just about every plan we hear nowadays is about taxing the rest of us to, ultimately, keep bankers in bonuses.
The EU Competition Commission is doing its job. In case you didn't realise, the US has a similar organisation which has investigated Microsoft, concluded there was a case to answer, but seems to have been pulled off by the previous maladministration. The last similar case was Honeywell Bull. EU competition law and US law are closely aligned because the EU took the US model as a basis. And I'm sure you realise that the two superstates are polite to one another, because the last thing they ant is a trade war. I am sure that the US Competition authorities are delighted to have the EU do the job, away from all those lobbyists in DC.
Just a simple example: the embedded FTP client in IE that integrates with Windows Explorer. It's a good idea, a sound implementation, but why should it be denied to other browser makers? It's not like I didn't pay for Windows Explorer.
Contrary to what you might think, I would like W7 to do a good job. I would also like to have it work properly in diverse networks, and be able to deploy applications and shares across those networks without regard to OS. I would prefer installing IE8 not to break some of my old.NET applications when it doesn't interfere with similarly ancient Java apps. If it takes Neelie Kroes to make Microsoft do this, I say bring on Neelie Kroes. She's now up there on my "great women in IT" pedestal along with Rear-Admiral Grace Hopper.
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Anyway, it's the Principia mathematics philosophiae naturalis - the mathematical foundations of physics, in modern English. And it's a hard read.
The linked article says HP will offer a download to create a flash boot disk.
I know nobody reads Party manifestos, but this is bad even by /. standards.
And yes, during the 80s and 90s I helped lobby Parliament on the value of the British electronics and software industries, served on DTI committees, talked to our MP and Euro MP. I didn't say "oh nasty Conservatives, don't get involved." That's pointless.
I've just sent an email to the Conservative Party (via their website) telling them that they are right, stick to their guns. I've told them we are a small UK developer who rely on OSS from major vendors to deliver a cost effective product, and that they should repond to criticism from people who simply stand to lose business by pointing out their lack of independence. I encourage others to do the same. I'm not a Conservative, I'm a long haired pinko (all right, on the right wing of the Lib Dems actually) but I think that any political party that comes up with sensible ideas should be given encouragement. Our MP used to say that he regarded every letter that wasn't boilerplate from a lobbist as representing the views of at least 500 people, so if he got 100 letters and emails on a subject saying the same thing, he took that as representative of the constituency as a whole. They DO pay attention.
In fact, military technology usually lags behind civilian technology, because things can be used in non-military environments while they are still too fragile for military ones. You won't find many bleeding edge processors in military equipment, because they aren't rad hard and can't run up to a case temperature of 100C and above, and rthe packaging may well before -65C. When I was working in this area, it was reckoned that military electronics were approximately 3 generations behind civil electronics.
As for your knowledge of WW2 history - I'm sorry, it is utterly inadequate. Apart from the possibility that, had Britain defeated Hitler in the mid-30s the main language of Europe would be Russian, what makes you think the US, which was pretty pro-Hitler at the time, would have let us? Roosevelt had to overcome some pretty entrenched attitudes to give the UK the limited support that he did.
If you read the European history books, you will see that the 30s were pretty much a diplomatic failure. Had the West had the support instead of the fence-sitting attitude of the US, had Britain and France properly supported Austria, Poland and the Czechs, and had Weimar been supported instead of undermined, would Hitler have been allowed to form a Government? We will never know, but one thing is clear: despite its military buildup, Germany lost.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products. Military "GNP" is akin to making lots of expensive goods and then putting them all on a bonfire.
In the present case, Obama can achieve several things: reduce the cost of government, please the bluer segments of the US, and perhaps give Bill O'Reilly and co heart attacks. Potential triple win for the new Administration, and no-one gets hurt.
The thing that worries me is that the downturn means that people now working at Google, Microsoft etc. will be released into the community and will then get Government jobs. One thing worse than pervasive Govt paranoia and spying is efficient pervasive government paranoia and spying.
I was born in this country, I've lived here a long time, but I didn't spot that at all. On the one hand, I'm pleased that, as a small-r republican, I've demonstrated my lack of interest in the Winzas. On the other, perhaps I might not be as good at identifying fake coins and banknotes as I should be.
But the "need to know anything about what's going on inside" - is it healthy for society that for most of the population electronics is a form of magic?
Yes indeed, and this is probably where the future lies. (I'm doing comparative testing right now.) At this early stage, the current biggest manufacturers may turn out to have sunk costs in the wrong technology. Thin film has the possibility of being significantly better for volume manufacture and for low environmental cost. Silicon may turn out to be a bit of a blind alley.
Because you are just too right. Forty years ago before personal computers, to get any brownie points for this kind of thing at school you had to wind the coils yourself or bake your own resistors, because hobbyist magazines were full of designs. Ah, the great days of acorn tubes and bending aluminum chassis plates. Or the day I accidentally jammed the TV signal in a quarter mile radius, owing to the amazing bandwidth of some ex-mil tubes and misreading a capacitor value. But, sadly, that's why the authorities discourage experimentation nowadays. It's so much easier to cause problems.
Adam Smith lived in a world of no big corporations (where in fact the biggest corporation was a Government department, the Royal Navy)and never envisaged how things would turn out. Karl Marx wrote in the 19th century, and actually envisaged rather more accurately how things would turn out. In the 20th century, Nobel prize winning economists demonstrated the flaw in the free market concept - the accumulation of secret asymmetric information - and were promptly proved right in the early 21st Century. Now, the US Government is trying to adopt a mixed economy without actually using the "socialism" word. It looks like your own Government has decided that the worldview of the Economist hasn't panned out too well.
I'm not a Marxist, I'm not a Smithite - but if somebody tells me on page 1 that he is prejudiced, I like to check the statistics, and get a second view from someone else. Economics is not a science like, say, QED, it makes few really testable predictions and its root beliefs are constantly being called into question. The world viewpoint of the Economist is more of a religion than a science, and I'm entitled to call it into question.
Meanwhile, technology evolves quite rapidly. Economies of scale and build cost of wind are changing rapidly. Solar cell technology is changing rapidly - I'm currently testing a set of non-silicon cells and already I've decided to wait rather than buy silicon - so there will be inevitable swings. Left to itself, the market will do what I do - wait for a winner to emerge. And without investment, there will be no winner.
You've already given away your political leaning by copy and paste from the Economist - which by the way was one of the cheerleaders that led to the present financial crisis - but it's fair to mention one other thing. Britain in the 50s and 60s was poor because the US delayed intervention in WW2, hoping that this would result in the collapse of the British Empire, to the gain of the US. The US was never bombed, and Pearl Harbor did less damage to the US than a single air raid of London. As a result, Britain emerged almost bankrupt with much of its productive capacity destroyed, and only rescued itself by having a strongly dirigiste economy focussed on exports, while people at home went cold and hungry. During the late 40s and early 50s, we got shot of the Empire (to our financial benefit). During the Thatcherite "reforms", the UK slipped back economically relative to its European neighbours.
Yours, and the Economist's view of history is dangerously simplistic. Personally, like most Europeans, I believe that the answer lies in a mixed economy. But I don't expect to learn that from a comic that sells mainly to non-tax paying expats and their accountants.
MSI is reported to have a netbook with, basically, the screen of the MacBook Air coming out around April. Obviously the processor will be slower than the original, but it's likely to be half to a third of the price.
Yes, having a huge uneducated underclass is really going to keep the US on top of the world. You have, like most US conservatives, totally missed the point. Marx wanted to change society and realised that the way to do this included better education. If US conservatives wanted to change society in a constructive way, they would come up with a conservative state educational system that was successful, so that people would want it for their children. But all they seem able to do is try to teach Creationism and prevent sex education in schools.
Explain to me why the most socialist European countries have the most sucessful outcomes in terms of education, better than the US. If you were right, Finland would not have created one of the world's biggest high-tech companies - they'd never have let Nokia get going.
I have only one comment, though. A lot of work has been done on why children fail. However,to fix it would require a level of social engineering and cost that taxpayers in the US and the UK (but not e.g. Finland) will not put up with. As poor people generally don't vote, politicians have little interest in solving an expensive problem with no short term solution.
Disclaimer: I went to a "progressive" school in the UK. My first form teacher was a Communist who had thrown bricks at Fascists in the 1930s, but many of the staff were socialists, Catholics or both. House prices went up in the area all the time we lived there because parents wanted to be in the catchment area for that school. You see, a real Communist or socialist believes that education can transform society. Whereas it's the right wingers who want everybody else to be poor and uneducated, so they can profit.
...and say that nothing that Microsoft contributes to schools facilitates education, but that would be unfair. Gates is not the first, and will not be the last, businessman to try to give money to schools to encourage them down a path that he supports. I am sure they all mean well - but education is too big and complicated, and depends too much on local factors, to benefit from this kind of investment. It's been said that the only thing that businessmen should do is to take a leaf out of Carnegie's book and donate libraries. Not a bad place to start, especially if you are big enough to realise that you will profoundly disagree with some of those books, and that is actually a good thing.
Therefore this is all a bit of special pleading. This guy basically bought a telescope and drew a few pictures. Galileo made a telescope and changed the way we looked at the world.
Disclaimer: I'm British, I revere Newton, but Galileo is the one I really look up to.
Fast breeder reactors turn out not to be as easy to make safe and reliable as their proponents think. Google for more recent literature. It's a pity, I personally like the idea, but both fast reactors and fuel reprocessing have turned out to be very difficult.
Jingo is not his best book by far, but he has in it a human powered submarine with a tail that imitates a dolphin.
The BBC is funded by a direct tax on households with television. It carries no (overt) advertising and therefore is able to provide programmes without reference to the Rupert Murdoch world-view, unlike Sky. Sky should definitely not receive any taxpayer subvention as it exists to promote the views of an Australian/American billionaire, like its US counterpart Fox News.
I am afraid that this latest proposal is nothing to do with the BBC model, it is all about keeping foreign recording companies in the country and onside. Which is about continuing to try to keep the City of London at a level of importance disproportionate to the country as a whole. Just about every plan we hear nowadays is about taxing the rest of us to, ultimately, keep bankers in bonuses.
Just a simple example: the embedded FTP client in IE that integrates with Windows Explorer. It's a good idea, a sound implementation, but why should it be denied to other browser makers? It's not like I didn't pay for Windows Explorer.
Contrary to what you might think, I would like W7 to do a good job. I would also like to have it work properly in diverse networks, and be able to deploy applications and shares across those networks without regard to OS. I would prefer installing IE8 not to break some of my old .NET applications when it doesn't interfere with similarly ancient Java apps. If it takes Neelie Kroes to make Microsoft do this, I say bring on Neelie Kroes. She's now up there on my "great women in IT" pedestal along with Rear-Admiral Grace Hopper.