ChromeOs is also a way of steering users who want a free word processor that reads and writes Word files towards GoogleDocs, instead of OpenOffice.
Right now, if you have a choice between a "cloud" office suite and OpenOffice, then unless you have a special reason to want the cloud option, you download Ooo
A browser-based OS for netbooks that//requires// cloud-based office software makes GoogleDocs look less irrelevant.
Yes. Win7 will probably be selling a lot of units. That's partly because so many people hate Vista, and for many of them this is their first chance they've have to pay someone to get the wretched thing off their laptops.
For a MS person to then argue that those Win7 sales mean that MS are brilliant at judging what their customers want...
[=lost for words=]
Naah. What made EpIV stand out was that the characters were animated by actors and technicians rather than by puppetteers.
In the later films, "Original Yoda" looked and sounded too much like Fozzie Bear, and moved just like a like a muppet.
"Fozzie Bear am I, muppet am I being". Pah.
Had the exaggerrated theatricality that some puppeteers get off on, which was fine on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, but on a "realistic" film just amounts to really hammy acting. You know the thing, where every action is loudly flagged in advance by a set of overblown prequel movements. Walking over to a chair and sitting on it becomes a bloody mime-artist performance. For me, that totally destroyed any illusion that you were looking at a real creature. You can't blame CGI for the Ewoks, either.
IMO, "Episode III" Yoda was way better than the Hensonised version. "EpIII Yoda" acted everyone else off the screen.
JarJar Binks and the buzzing fly thing in the early episodes weren't crappy because they were CGI, they were crappy because they were badly written, played on crude and offensive ethnic stereotypes (a "Jamaican" stereotype for lazy JJB and a "Jewish" stereotype for the loansharking fly thing with the big nose), used cartoonish "pantomime" acting and were there as caricatures rather than as proper characters. It didn't matter whether you got puppeteers to animate them as mechanical puppets or as CGI - with the same script and direction they'd have been just as crap.
Now if you'd mentioned Chewbacca, THERE was a non-CGI alien that you could believe in. Guy in a suit. But an actual actor, NOT a marionettist. When Chewie stomped across a room or scratched his arse, or growled at someone, it wasn't some puppeteer trying to produce the ultimate stylised ballet performance.
Plus it probably helped that Chewie didn't have any George Lucas dialogue. Same thing for Artoo.
I just looked at the Fox News site main page and visited all their top news stories accessable from the front page.
#1, "Iran Accuses 3 Detained American Hikers of Spying"
Footnote: "The Associated Press contributed to this report".
#2 "China Executes 9 Uighurs Over Ethnic Riots"
"Associated Press" logo at the top of the article, based on a Chinese state news report, with additional info presumably added by AP.
#3 , Chavez... AP article, photo credited to AP/Miraflores Press Office
#4 Obama/Netanyahu... AP. Photo credited to AP
#5 Abortion doctor story. Associated Press logo, AP credit on photograph.
#6 PC virus story. AP logo, AP photo credit
#7 Gov Rell. short factual account, AP on story header (but as text this time, not as a logo).
#8 Legendary lost Persian army found in Sahara. Short version of an original Discovery News story (linked). According to Wikipedia, DN don't seem to be a Murdoch company.
#9 Hurricane Ida. AP logo on story header, but graphic credited to MyFoxHurricane.com . Finally, some original Murdoch organisation content! Hooray!
#10 Woman shot to death. Associated Press.
So out of their top ten stories, nine are either pure AP stories or edited from AP stories, and one comes from the Discovery News website.
Total identifiable original Murdoch content: one hurricane graphic from a Fox organisation hurricane-tracking site (which Fox News forgot to link to).
No identifiable "Murdoch press" journalistic content.
Completing the list:
#11 was AP, #12 was credited to FoxBusiness.com (a Murdoch journalism hit! Wahey!), #13 was AP, #14 was AP, #15, finally, was a Fox News piece on the Mclaren buggy recall, with a bold FOXNEWS logo and a photo provided by Mclaren.
#16 was AP.
So from their "most read" list, Fox News only have one story out of the sixteen that they actually wrote themselves.
Associated Press are a news syndication company (like Reuters), who supply news content to media outlets. This lets news companies supplement the content produced by their own journalists with ready-made stories that they can just slot into place as padding.
Given that the clear majority of FoxNews' top stories on this page (nearly 90%) were actually bought in from AP, and that Google News also subscribe to AP as a content provider to buy stories, it's not surprising that when both sites rank their content by popularity, if Murdoch looks at the Sky News page and compares it to the Google News page, he's going to see a lot of the same top-ranking stories on both sites.
But this doesn't necessarily mean that Google News are stealing stories from Fox News Journalists, or stealing the selection. Both sites are buying content from AP, and the site viewers are dictating the popularities, not the editors.
I don't know whether this means that FoxNews.com don't actually do much journalism themselves, and mainly act as aggregators (like Google News)... or whether it means that they/do/ do a fair bit of journalism, but that their readership simply prefers the AP material that can be gotten from Google News anyway.
Either way, I can see why RM is concerned. Shouting that Google is stealing their stories kinda stops people noticing that, for Fox News, their own site statistics say that most of their most popular stories aren't actually theirs anyway. One out of sixteen?
Enron demonstrated that it was possible for a single employee to shut down a power station remotely, simply by calling the control centre from an Enron office, giving his name and position, and asking politely whether it would be possible for the plant to have an impromptu maintenance shutdown for a few hours please, and yes, he did appreciate that once it was shut down it'd take a while to start it up again.
That's how brokers caused the plant shutdowns that caused the brownouts that allowed Enron to gouge electricity prices in California, by charging for the emergency rerouting required to patch the problems that they'd just deliberately created.
So back in the Enron days, you wouldn't have needed two nuclear subs. Just one guy with a telephone, calling all the power stations in turn and asking each of them nicely if they could shut down at a predetermined time and go into "heavy maintenance" mode, but please not to discuss this with anyone else, because of company confidentiality (or because of security).
BTW, you know how you take out the conventional phone and mobile networks? You don't have to. Once the emergency services see the power stations going down and think there's a coordinated attack, they shut down all the public communications as a security measure. You get that for free. So the Employee tells the plant to shut down as a security measure because the NSA has tipped them off that Something Bad is going down, and for God's Sake not to power up again under any circumstances unless they get a particular codeword (which, of course, nobody else has). All the plants shut down together, a bunch of pre-programmed scare stories break on the net, this seems to support the tale that the employee told about there being an imminent security thing, the phone lines and media communications go dead, and by the time people have worked out what's happened, nobody can get through to the power plants to tell them that they've been conned. And when they do, they don't have the fake password. You then have the local power guys desperately defending their plant from the local enforcement guys who want to turn it back on, and perhaps even sabotaging it if they look like they're about to lose.
Telephones are dangerous things. Hopefully it wouldn't work nowadays, because people are more savvy about such things (and because they remember the Enron tapes).
You spend the money in such a way as to make the system generally more robust, not just against terrorist attacks, but also against acts of nature, disgruntled employees, criminal extortion, and sheer human idiocy.
A lot of US infrastructure has been desperately vulnerable for years. How many terrorists would it take to black out fifty million people in North America? Apparently zero.
Remember the Northeast Blackout of 2003?
If the reporting was accurate, that affected 55 million people across eight US states (and Ontario), and was caused by a lightning strike Getting the grid rebooted seemed to involve a hell of a lot of grief.
If the reporting wasn't accurate (and we go down the "conspiracy theory" route), then maybe the hypothetical attack has already happened, back in 2003.
So which idea's the more scary? That we lost the Northeastern grid in 2003 through malicious intervention, or that it simply failed and "dominoed" all by itself after some nasty spikes in Canada?
A detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirmed Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving.
No, not really.
The speed of light isn't supposed to be globally constant (now that we've moved on from special relativity to general relativity), only//locally// constant. If it was globally constant, it'd be difficult for gravitational fields to exist. Lightspeed plus gravity equals variable lightspeed (although local observers may not be able to sense the local variations because gravity should make their own local clocks run differently by the same factor).
The speed of light isn't independent of direction, either, when gravitational fields are involved. Gravitational gradients have a habit of making light-velocities asymmetrical (or, running the argument backwards, an asymmatricality in lightvelocities counts as evidence of a conventional gravitational field). The velocity of light leaving a GR1915 black hole, is, arguably, zero. The velocity of light entering a GR1915 black hole is, arguably, greater than the background speed of light. The//average// speed of light (round trip) reduces in a region, as seen by outside observers, when gravity there is stronger (Shapiro effect). But if you're dealing with speed and direction, you're really starting to deal with velocities, and the rules for one-way light-velocities when gravity or matter are involved are a little different to those of SR.
The speed of light also isn't isotropic when there's moving matter present. A moving gas-cloud should make the externally-measured speed of light greater in the direction of the cloud's motion than the other way. Fizeau verified this effect back in ~1850 with flowing water.
The speed of light isn't unaffected by the observer's motion if the observer is accelerating (accelerative frame-dragging, Einstein, ~1920).
The speed of light is also affected locally by the observer's motion if the observer is made out of real particulate matter (as opposed to the ghostly "mathematical" observers assumed by SR). Back to the Fizeau effect - if you observe a supernova through your spaceship window, the relative motion of the window glass to the nova has already modified the speed of part of the signal path. And if the observer's "moving" location is associated with a persistent gravitational feature that's deemed to be significant (say, a planetary gravitational well), then the motion of that gravitational feature should be associated with gravitomagnetic dragging effects.
The speed of light//should// vary with colour when there are geometrical features in the metric that are comparable in size to the wavelength of some of the light being used. It's a "fractal" argument, the short-wavelength light "sees" a longer distance because it has to ride over the lumps and bumps that the longer wavelength light rides over. That's why, when we had an experimental result a while back, whereby shorter-wavelength light from distant bodies appeared to reach us more slowly than longer-wavelength light, it wasn't a huge surprise, because that's what we'd expect if the vacuum of space isn't perfect vacuum, or if there's quantum foam at extremely small scales (or if the higher-energy light is//so// high-energy that it's associated with virtual pair-production effects that create its own local particle-churning "medium".
So the original article's way of trying to screw an "Einstein Proved Right! / Einstein Proved Wrong!" headline from the experiment was icky. The journalist actually got some good, reasonable quotes from guys like Smolin, so they seem to have done their homework for the piece. The person who comes out of this badly is the principal investigator, who gave that stinky "Einstein proved right" quote to the journalist, k
Oh, okay. I'd read in a tv reference book that they'd chosen to do things that way because they were (rightly or wrongly) concerned about flicker.
But if you're saying that the choice allowed manufacturers to use the mains frequency as a timebase, and omit a load of timing circuitry from their TV sets, then that sounds like a much more convincing reason.
PS, while you're here, since you seem to know a bit about this - is it true that the US and UK tv standards defined different colour responses for screens and cameras, and defined different phospor "recipes"? I once read in a really ancient computer graphics textbook that because the phosphors were different, computer graphics people were advised that their animations' colours might look wrong if they showed their pieces abroad. I never really knew whether to believe that one or not (although there was a time when US imports shown on UK tv always seemed to make all the people look orangey).
Yep, I though the "swung pendulum" idea was vastly better than the French definition of the metre.
Wanna check that your lab reference metre is correct? Walk from the equator to the pole through Paris, laying down a really long piece of string as you go, wind it all in, divide by ten million... easy! Not. And it was wrong anyway. A "Jefferson metre" would have been far better.
But I like your idea of the light-nanosecond "foot" even more.
For pints, you could start serving beer in "metric pints" of 500ml.
Bigger pints! More beer! Yaaay!
I've never heard anyone complain about fizzy drinks or fruit juices being sold in the UK by the litre, or about cans of drink coming in 330ml cans. It's only when it comes to milk that people seem to get funny about it.
Some years back, UK supermarkets changed some of their packaging and started selling milk in litres and whole fractions of a litre, and I thought it was really neat. And then, once I'd gotten used to it, someone must have complained, and they went back to selling them in pint-equivalents. I was really pissed off about that.
Twelve months of exactly thirty days each.
The five leftover days at the end of the year are "free" days for partying, and sit outside the standard monthly calendar. They're yours.
It makes payroll and project planning and rent calculations simpler if every month is ALWAYS the same number of days). Leap year adjsutments are done by fiddling with the leftover days, not by changing the length of an individual month.
So if you're contracted to do a month's work, or you pay a month's rent, you don't have to worry about whether its a "long" month or a "short" month.
The UK is supposed to be replacing all its "height and width" signs on UK bridges etc with metric distances, because of the number of foreign lorry drivers who don't know the exact height of their articulated lorry in feet and inches, and keep hitting things. In fact, low bridges in the UK keep getting hit by UK residents in large vehicles, because even =we= can't work out height conversions on the spot in imperial!
I have a happy memory of once seeing someone try to drive an empty double decker bus under a bridge that was about eight inches too low. The resulting explosion of glass was one of the prettiest things I've ever seen (sigh).
That bridge was always getting things stuck under it. Once I even saw an army tank transporter firmly wedged under it.
"Miles per gallon" still seems to be lingering in the UK, but IMO it'll have to go, if only for the fact that there's not a single international standard for how big a "gallon" is supposed to be. AFAIK, US land-miles are now supposed to be the same as UK land-miles (they used to be slightly different thanks to the "old" US inch being different to the "old" imperial inch), but US liquid gallons and UK liquid gallons are still significantly different - the US gallon is based on the old abandoned UK "wine gallon", of 128 fl oz, whereas the later "imperial" gallon used in the UK is based on the "ale gallon" of 160 fl.oz. The US and UK fluid ounces are also supposed to be slightly different. Pints, too. So presumably the same car can have different local MPG ratings in the US and UK. If someone published MPG ratings in the UK, they'll presumably be wrong for a reader in the US, and vice versa.
For a while, the US was seriously considering using the Washington Meridian as its "zero" reference for all US mapping. Similarly, at one point they were considering having a brand new unit of length, defined as the length of a pendulum that swung in exactly one second when dangled at sea level at latitude 45 degrees (which would have been similar to, but not quite the same as, the metre).
In the end they set aside the idea of having their own independent system, and went with what was already popular.
The reason why Greenwich Time was so popular wasn't especially political, it was just that Greenwich as a long-standing, reliable, well-funded, high-profile observatory that was practically on the Thames, really near to where all the international shipping came in to park to use the docks. An agreed time-base was critical for navigation, and Greenwich tried to provide one. In the 1830's they also instituted the Greenwich Time Ball", which was a visual signal that passing shipping could use to calibrate their clocks. Some places used cannons, but the speed of sound meant that if you were a way away, your timing would be off. Greenwich's light-signal was better, provided that you had your telescope pointed in the right direction at the right time.
Because it was near the docks, ships didn't have to worry about passing at exactly the right time - chances are, they'd be holed up there anyway. So "Greenwich Time" was a free, easy international timebase for shipping that let captains calculate longitude, lots of ship's captains carried Greenwich Time around with them to the rest of the world, and it was a natural reference for mapping.
It also didn't hurt when England standardised on Greenwich time nationally, so that in theory, you could get Greenwich Time at any English port.
By contrast, Washington Time wouldn't tie into to the same existing nautical map-base, there probably wasn't a huge amount of international shipping parked within view of the Washignton Monument, and since the US had trouble even insisting that US maps were drawn up with reference to the Washington Meridian and Washington time, they probably did the right thing by dropping the idea, and using the existing standard. It's easy to carry Greenwich Time around the whole UK and coastal Europe by boat, with very sensitive mechanical clocks, it wouldn't have been so easy to take Washington time to both US coasts via shipping. Things got easier with the railroads and telegraphs, but for US shippng to be redrawing all the existing sea-maps specifically for a new reference system that they didn't really need... it probably wasn't a brilliant idea.
To be fair to GPS's accuracy, it was never intended to be a system that would allow locals to dial up locations that corresponded to their local street maps, or to help them find their parking places or the local restaurant. It's numbers don't have to agree with the "proper" latitude and longitude numbers for a site that appear on official local maps.
Its system was designed to produce a persistent numerical overlay that linked the position of a receiver with coordinates specified on US military satellite imagery. It doesn't matter for GPS that it puts Greenwich Observatory's nominal position "out" by 100 metres, as long as the US satellite imagery also offsets the observatory's nominal position by the same amount, so that if the US ever needs to aim a cruise missile down Greenwich's main telescope, that missile's going to get to the right place.
In that hypothetical, the missile wouldn't care that the observatory's nominal position doesn't agree with it's official position on official UK Ordanance Survey maps. GPS is designed to work with US military maps, calibrated to a convenient reference point in US territory rather than to Greenwich, UK. The US military has to have their own independent mapping system, because they can't afford to be reliant on foreign countries doing the job properly for them, and being 100% truthful about where their military installations are.
If you want to turn the dodgy GPS figures into "proper" survey numbers (eg, for archaeological reference work), you either use a different system, or you survey the place yourself, or you use an overlay mesh that converts GPS locations into "proper" locations. Assuming that Galileo comes online as planned, and they haven't buggered it up, and it hasn't been sabotaged technically or politically, there'll soon be an alternative consumer system anyway.
What's important is that we keep the GPS coordinate for locations separate from other numerical descriptions of those locations, and don't mix up the different coordinate systems. Which is easy enough to do, I guess we just stick a "GPS" prefix on the front of a GPS location, "Gal" (or similar) on the front of a Galileo location, "OS" on the front of a UK Ordanance Survey location, or come up with some other handy set of abbreviations. As long as we all know that there are differences, and don't mix up the different sets of numbers (like Wikipedia coordinates and GPS coordinates) we should be okay.
Well, Yes. The US generously built the GPS system to map the entire world, so that it could be used to target US planes and missiles at any point on the globe. It would have been a bit silly if the system only enabled the US military to bomb sites within the US.
This would have somewhat limited the system's military usefulness (for the US, at least).
GPS was opened up for worldwide civilian use, for free, so that foreign aerospace companies wouldn't launch their own competing system that enemy countries could then use to target sites within the US, and US targets abroad, without the US government having an "off switch" or control over the spoiler systems. Companies within the US have legal restrictions that prevent them from certain sorts of satellite or mapping activities that relate to US territory. Making GPS free for civilian use was supposed to eliminate the business model of any competing civilian geolocation satellite systems, including those outside US legal jurisdiction, because it's difficult to come up with a business model that competes with "free".
The EU is now finally putting up the Galileo system regardless (rollout commencing 2010), but throughout the project planning stages, the US has let it be known that it regards Galileo as an "unfriendly" system, and it's been made known that if there was ever any serious chance of hostilities breaking out between the US and another country, that seemed likely to result in the US being attacked, one of the first things that would be likely to happen would be the US shooting down the Galileo system's satellites.
So I think it's fair to say that the US has been quite keen for there not to be any other competing GPS-type system.
GPS is great, wonderful, marvellous, incredible. But let's not pretend that it was originally part of a great humanitarian plan, or that something like Galileo wouldn't have been launched years earlier if it wasn't for political considerations, Europe not wanting to antagonise the US, and European private industry not being able to create a business model for launching commercial geolocation satellites while GPS use was being given away for free, specifically to undercut them. Europeans have benefitted from free access to GPS for years (yippee!), but the price has been the lack of a system more closely tailored to local needs. In the end, we've decided that we really have to pay to put up our own system anyway.
In an ideal world, there'd be a reciprocal arrangement whereby American citizens would also be able to make use of Galileo if they wanted to, but I suppose there's a chance that the US Government might not want Galileo access generally available within their borders, and might take steps to prevent that happening.
PAL and NTSC were designed for countries in which the mains frequencies were different.
PAL is 25 frames per second because it was designed to be viewed in a country in which domestic electric lights flickered at 50Hz.
US TV standards were based on a refresh rate of 30 frames per second (later 29.97), because the official US mains frequency was 60Hz.
Both systems were designed to minimise aliasing effects between the refresh rate of the TV screen, and the flicker of local domestic electric lighting.
If you inscribe a hexagon inside a circle, it's the difference in ratio between the curved and straight-line distances between two adjacent points, and as "one-point-somethingsmall", it has a nice fundamental look to it.
Nice and easy to visualise. You know that the perimeter of a circle is six-point-something times the radius, because the inscribed hexagon has six sides.
And it gets rid of those one-third bits when you're dealing with spheres.
Far as I can tell, the reason for using the 3.14... number doesn't seem to do with logic or geoemtry, it seems to be a hangover of the tools that Greek stonemasons used to use when making pillars. It's the ratio between the caliper-width of a pillar, and the length of a piece of string wrapped around the pillar.
But geometrically, it's not sensible to be comparing the length of the flat base of a semicircle against the curved sections of//two// semicircles. It's not comparing like with like. You either compare radius with perimeter, as the earlier poster said (~6.28....), or you compare diameter with semiperimeter (~1.57... ), or you compare radius against arc (~1.047... )
Pi itself is a pretty stupid number. It's the mathematical equivalent of the human appendix, or the QUERTY keyboard. IMO it's one of the most damning indictments of human civilisation that we're still using it.
I feel ill whenever I hear SETI guys talking about broadcasting PI as a way of contacting alien civilisations. Yeah, right, broadcast to the whole universe how dumb we are, why don't you...:-Z
If I was an alien, and I picked up a transmission of "pi", it'd tell me that the species was arrogant, technologically advanced but mentally a bit retarded, and unable to understand deep relationships or alternative perspectives. It'd tell me that the species considered themselves mathematicians, but had some fundamental inability to see their own mental shortcomings. It'd be a species that wouldn't deal well with cultural conflicts, becuase they'd be sure that their own way was right, and they'd not be able to see the possibility of other points of view.
It'd be a species that you wouldn't ever want to have to deal with. So you'd warn everyone to stay away, and you'd draw up a contingency plan for eliminating the nasty species should they ever start building interstellar spaceships.
So if there are intelligent lifeforms similar to us nearby, with decent technology, we might be looking at a global extinction event as first contact
Yes, and one of the traditional ways that we used to freely exchange those ideas without the fear of reprisals before the internet came along was the "nom de plume".
People invented separate personae for the purposes of their writing. A lot of the great political and religious pamphleteering that helped reform Europe and bring about the French and American revolutions was published under pen-names. Anything vaguely political published by someone working for a country's civil service tended to be under an n-d-p. Hell, even Gulliver's Travels was published without the real author's name on it, so that he wouldn't lose his day job over it. George Orwell's real name wasn't George Orwell. Voltaire's supposed to have had more than 170 different pen-names.
It doesn't always mean that the author is spineless. Sometimes it just means that the author reckons that their work and "author's persona" is good enough to stand up by itself without the reader needing to know the exact details of who created the arguments, and sometimes it means that the writer finds it easier to continue with their work without having to risk being sacked from their mundane job that pays the rent and keeps a roof over their head, because their employer feels that having the name of a controversial writer on their public list of employees, representing the company, is asking for trouble.
If you demand of your employer that they take no notice at all of your extracurricular activities, because those are none of the employer's business ("What I do in my own time is up to me"), then it's sensible to use different identifiers for your work persona and your other activities. If you use the same linkable identifier for both, and your work involves introducing yourself as an employee of the company and giving out your full legal name, then your employer is liable to reckon that if that name is attached to some "cause" that might alienate some of their important customers, they don't want you as an employee.
They can say, "Look, we don't give a damn what you do in your own time as long as it doesn't reflect on us. We don't care what religious or sexual views you hold as long as you leave them behind when you walk through our door in the morning. But if we're promoting you as our named representative, and you're using that same name to promote other things that we don't want to be associated with, then we have a legitimate reason to sack you."
Taking away people's ability to create separate "brands" for their work and personal online activities means that unless people have very understanding employers, they're liable to self-censor pretty much anything they write for fear of upsetting their work situation.
It also means that if an employer knows that ==anything== their employee does online from home is linked to all the employee's other personal details, including their place of work – including what forums they visit and what iffy websites they view, no matter what computer they use to view it – then it means that the employer can argue that it's now their legitimate right to spend more time tracking what their employees are doing out of work hours, since it could impact on their business.
If you can't decouple your work identity from your recreational web use, it means that you no longer have a personal life (for web-related stuff) that's separate from work.
I remember a speech by Bill Gates some years back at a developer conference, where he said that people had had enough of the chaos of the internet, what they wanted was proper, reliable, source-certified information, and MS was hooking up with major vendors to create a proper, secure, safe replacement that would finally give people what they wanted.
The internet had maybe two or three years left in it, said Bill, after that, everybody would be using Microsoft Network instead. So if we were planning ahead more than a few years, he was kindly giving us the inside dope, that we shouldn't expect the internet to still exist as a major force by then.
So, one the one hand we have these nasty Middle-Eastern terrorists who are contemptuous of our personal freedoms and want to destroy our democratic way of life, and to have us all living in a totalitarian system of their choosing...
... and on the other side we have champions like Kaspersky... who wants to eliminate personal freedoms and implement a more totalitarian state... in order to save us from the terrorist threat.
We have the threat of Russian criminal gangs who want to take our personal information and milk money from the system, and embed themselves so deeply that they get a cut of everything that happens, without people being able to opt out...
... And then we have Kaspersky, who wants to be able to take our personal infomation, embed his software so deeply in the networks that it makes money from everybody else's business, and persuade regulators to make the use of these systems has to be made compulsory on public networks.
... or to have private conversations in pubs, clubs and coffeehouses, without wearing a big name-badge, staying within clear view of the cameras, and clearly and loudly announcing your identity and social security number at the start of every exchange, so that the microphones can correctly log and record everything that you're about to say.
Some years back there was a campaign for governments to crack down on terrorism and organised crime by implementing a scheme like this. Everyone would have to use a key, and copies of those keys would be lodged with trusted third parties.
The "trusted agencies" were going to be governments and banks.
I think the idea was that some citizens might not trust their governments to be entirely honest, and to have their best interests at heart, but banks were composed of entirely upright citizens who would never ever do anything illegal, unethical, or socially reprehensible.
Try suggesting that post-crash, without being laughed at.:)
I think that one of the reasons why the scheme foundered early was that people stopped to think about who it was that was actually training these terrorists and criminal organisations, and giving them shelter, and laundering their money... and to a large extent it was governments and banks.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, if you have a choice between a "cloud" office suite and OpenOffice, then unless you have a special reason to want the cloud option, you download Ooo
A browser-based OS for netbooks that //requires// cloud-based office software makes GoogleDocs look less irrelevant.
For a MS person to then argue that those Win7 sales mean that MS are brilliant at judging what their customers want ...
[=lost for words=]
Naah. What made EpIV stand out was that the characters were animated by actors and technicians rather than by puppetteers.
In the later films, "Original Yoda" looked and sounded too much like Fozzie Bear, and moved just like a like a muppet.
"Fozzie Bear am I, muppet am I being". Pah.
Had the exaggerrated theatricality that some puppeteers get off on, which was fine on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, but on a "realistic" film just amounts to really hammy acting. You know the thing, where every action is loudly flagged in advance by a set of overblown prequel movements. Walking over to a chair and sitting on it becomes a bloody mime-artist performance. For me, that totally destroyed any illusion that you were looking at a real creature. You can't blame CGI for the Ewoks, either.
IMO, "Episode III" Yoda was way better than the Hensonised version. "EpIII Yoda" acted everyone else off the screen.
JarJar Binks and the buzzing fly thing in the early episodes weren't crappy because they were CGI, they were crappy because they were badly written, played on crude and offensive ethnic stereotypes (a "Jamaican" stereotype for lazy JJB and a "Jewish" stereotype for the loansharking fly thing with the big nose), used cartoonish "pantomime" acting and were there as caricatures rather than as proper characters. It didn't matter whether you got puppeteers to animate them as mechanical puppets or as CGI - with the same script and direction they'd have been just as crap.
Now if you'd mentioned Chewbacca, THERE was a non-CGI alien that you could believe in. Guy in a suit. But an actual actor, NOT a marionettist. When Chewie stomped across a room or scratched his arse, or growled at someone, it wasn't some puppeteer trying to produce the ultimate stylised ballet performance.
Plus it probably helped that Chewie didn't have any George Lucas dialogue. Same thing for Artoo.
I just looked at the Fox News site main page and visited all their top news stories accessable from the front page.
So out of their top ten stories, nine are either pure AP stories or edited from AP stories, and one comes from the Discovery News website.
Total identifiable original Murdoch content: one hurricane graphic from a Fox organisation hurricane-tracking site (which Fox News forgot to link to).
No identifiable "Murdoch press" journalistic content.
Completing the list:
#11 was AP, #12 was credited to FoxBusiness.com (a Murdoch journalism hit! Wahey!), #13 was AP, #14 was AP, #15, finally, was a Fox News piece on the Mclaren buggy recall, with a bold FOXNEWS logo and a photo provided by Mclaren. #16 was AP.
So from their "most read" list, Fox News only have one story out of the sixteen that they actually wrote themselves.
Associated Press are a news syndication company (like Reuters), who supply news content to media outlets. This lets news companies supplement the content produced by their own journalists with ready-made stories that they can just slot into place as padding.
Given that the clear majority of FoxNews' top stories on this page (nearly 90%) were actually bought in from AP, and that Google News also subscribe to AP as a content provider to buy stories, it's not surprising that when both sites rank their content by popularity, if Murdoch looks at the Sky News page and compares it to the Google News page, he's going to see a lot of the same top-ranking stories on both sites.
But this doesn't necessarily mean that Google News are stealing stories from Fox News Journalists, or stealing the selection. Both sites are buying content from AP, and the site viewers are dictating the popularities, not the editors.
I don't know whether this means that FoxNews.com don't actually do much journalism themselves, and mainly act as aggregators (like Google News) ... or whether it means that they /do/ do a fair bit of journalism, but that their readership simply prefers the AP material that can be gotten from Google News anyway.
Either way, I can see why RM is concerned. Shouting that Google is stealing their stories kinda stops people noticing that, for Fox News, their own site statistics say that most of their most popular stories aren't actually theirs anyway. One out of sixteen?
Oh, okay. Trees.
Enron demonstrated that it was possible for a single employee to shut down a power station remotely, simply by calling the control centre from an Enron office, giving his name and position, and asking politely whether it would be possible for the plant to have an impromptu maintenance shutdown for a few hours please, and yes, he did appreciate that once it was shut down it'd take a while to start it up again.
That's how brokers caused the plant shutdowns that caused the brownouts that allowed Enron to gouge electricity prices in California, by charging for the emergency rerouting required to patch the problems that they'd just deliberately created.
So back in the Enron days, you wouldn't have needed two nuclear subs. Just one guy with a telephone, calling all the power stations in turn and asking each of them nicely if they could shut down at a predetermined time and go into "heavy maintenance" mode, but please not to discuss this with anyone else, because of company confidentiality (or because of security).
BTW, you know how you take out the conventional phone and mobile networks? You don't have to. Once the emergency services see the power stations going down and think there's a coordinated attack, they shut down all the public communications as a security measure. You get that for free. So the Employee tells the plant to shut down as a security measure because the NSA has tipped them off that Something Bad is going down, and for God's Sake not to power up again under any circumstances unless they get a particular codeword (which, of course, nobody else has). All the plants shut down together, a bunch of pre-programmed scare stories break on the net, this seems to support the tale that the employee told about there being an imminent security thing, the phone lines and media communications go dead, and by the time people have worked out what's happened, nobody can get through to the power plants to tell them that they've been conned. And when they do, they don't have the fake password. You then have the local power guys desperately defending their plant from the local enforcement guys who want to turn it back on, and perhaps even sabotaging it if they look like they're about to lose.
Telephones are dangerous things. Hopefully it wouldn't work nowadays, because people are more savvy about such things (and because they remember the Enron tapes).
You spend the money in such a way as to make the system generally more robust, not just against terrorist attacks, but also against acts of nature, disgruntled employees, criminal extortion, and sheer human idiocy.
A lot of US infrastructure has been desperately vulnerable for years. How many terrorists would it take to black out fifty million people in North America? Apparently zero.
Remember the Northeast Blackout of 2003 ?
If the reporting was accurate, that affected 55 million people across eight US states (and Ontario), and was caused by a lightning strike
Getting the grid rebooted seemed to involve a hell of a lot of grief.
If the reporting wasn't accurate (and we go down the "conspiracy theory" route), then maybe the hypothetical attack has already happened, back in 2003.
So which idea's the more scary? That we lost the Northeastern grid in 2003 through malicious intervention, or that it simply failed and "dominoed" all by itself after some nasty spikes in Canada?
No, not really.
So the original article's way of trying to screw an "Einstein Proved Right! / Einstein Proved Wrong!" headline from the experiment was icky. The journalist actually got some good, reasonable quotes from guys like Smolin, so they seem to have done their homework for the piece. The person who comes out of this badly is the principal investigator, who gave that stinky "Einstein proved right" quote to the journalist, k
But if you're saying that the choice allowed manufacturers to use the mains frequency as a timebase, and omit a load of timing circuitry from their TV sets, then that sounds like a much more convincing reason.
PS, while you're here, since you seem to know a bit about this - is it true that the US and UK tv standards defined different colour responses for screens and cameras, and defined different phospor "recipes"? I once read in a really ancient computer graphics textbook that because the phosphors were different, computer graphics people were advised that their animations' colours might look wrong if they showed their pieces abroad. I never really knew whether to believe that one or not (although there was a time when US imports shown on UK tv always seemed to make all the people look orangey).
But I like your idea of the light-nanosecond "foot" even more.
Bigger pints! More beer! Yaaay!
I've never heard anyone complain about fizzy drinks or fruit juices being sold in the UK by the litre, or about cans of drink coming in 330ml cans. It's only when it comes to milk that people seem to get funny about it.
Some years back, UK supermarkets changed some of their packaging and started selling milk in litres and whole fractions of a litre, and I thought it was really neat. And then, once I'd gotten used to it, someone must have complained, and they went back to selling them in pint-equivalents. I was really pissed off about that.
Twelve months of exactly thirty days each.
The five leftover days at the end of the year are "free" days for partying, and sit outside the standard monthly calendar. They're yours.
It makes payroll and project planning and rent calculations simpler if every month is ALWAYS the same number of days). Leap year adjsutments are done by fiddling with the leftover days, not by changing the length of an individual month.
So if you're contracted to do a month's work, or you pay a month's rent, you don't have to worry about whether its a "long" month or a "short" month.
The UK is supposed to be replacing all its "height and width" signs on UK bridges etc with metric distances, because of the number of foreign lorry drivers who don't know the exact height of their articulated lorry in feet and inches, and keep hitting things. In fact, low bridges in the UK keep getting hit by UK residents in large vehicles, because even =we= can't work out height conversions on the spot in imperial!
I have a happy memory of once seeing someone try to drive an empty double decker bus under a bridge that was about eight inches too low. The resulting explosion of glass was one of the prettiest things I've ever seen (sigh).
That bridge was always getting things stuck under it. Once I even saw an army tank transporter firmly wedged under it.
"Miles per gallon" still seems to be lingering in the UK, but IMO it'll have to go, if only for the fact that there's not a single international standard for how big a "gallon" is supposed to be. AFAIK, US land-miles are now supposed to be the same as UK land-miles (they used to be slightly different thanks to the "old" US inch being different to the "old" imperial inch), but US liquid gallons and UK liquid gallons are still significantly different - the US gallon is based on the old abandoned UK "wine gallon", of 128 fl oz, whereas the later "imperial" gallon used in the UK is based on the "ale gallon" of 160 fl.oz. The US and UK fluid ounces are also supposed to be slightly different. Pints, too. So presumably the same car can have different local MPG ratings in the US and UK. If someone published MPG ratings in the UK, they'll presumably be wrong for a reader in the US, and vice versa.
For a while, the US was seriously considering using the Washington Meridian as its "zero" reference for all US mapping. Similarly, at one point they were considering having a brand new unit of length, defined as the length of a pendulum that swung in exactly one second when dangled at sea level at latitude 45 degrees (which would have been similar to, but not quite the same as, the metre).
In the end they set aside the idea of having their own independent system, and went with what was already popular.
The reason why Greenwich Time was so popular wasn't especially political, it was just that Greenwich as a long-standing, reliable, well-funded, high-profile observatory that was practically on the Thames, really near to where all the international shipping came in to park to use the docks. An agreed time-base was critical for navigation, and Greenwich tried to provide one. In the 1830's they also instituted the Greenwich Time Ball", which was a visual signal that passing shipping could use to calibrate their clocks. Some places used cannons, but the speed of sound meant that if you were a way away, your timing would be off. Greenwich's light-signal was better, provided that you had your telescope pointed in the right direction at the right time.
Because it was near the docks, ships didn't have to worry about passing at exactly the right time - chances are, they'd be holed up there anyway. So "Greenwich Time" was a free, easy international timebase for shipping that let captains calculate longitude, lots of ship's captains carried Greenwich Time around with them to the rest of the world, and it was a natural reference for mapping.
It also didn't hurt when England standardised on Greenwich time nationally, so that in theory, you could get Greenwich Time at any English port.
By contrast, Washington Time wouldn't tie into to the same existing nautical map-base, there probably wasn't a huge amount of international shipping parked within view of the Washignton Monument, and since the US had trouble even insisting that US maps were drawn up with reference to the Washington Meridian and Washington time, they probably did the right thing by dropping the idea, and using the existing standard. It's easy to carry Greenwich Time around the whole UK and coastal Europe by boat, with very sensitive mechanical clocks, it wouldn't have been so easy to take Washington time to both US coasts via shipping. Things got easier with the railroads and telegraphs, but for US shippng to be redrawing all the existing sea-maps specifically for a new reference system that they didn't really need ... it probably wasn't a brilliant idea.
To be fair to GPS's accuracy, it was never intended to be a system that would allow locals to dial up locations that corresponded to their local street maps, or to help them find their parking places or the local restaurant. It's numbers don't have to agree with the "proper" latitude and longitude numbers for a site that appear on official local maps.
Its system was designed to produce a persistent numerical overlay that linked the position of a receiver with coordinates specified on US military satellite imagery. It doesn't matter for GPS that it puts Greenwich Observatory's nominal position "out" by 100 metres, as long as the US satellite imagery also offsets the observatory's nominal position by the same amount, so that if the US ever needs to aim a cruise missile down Greenwich's main telescope, that missile's going to get to the right place.
In that hypothetical, the missile wouldn't care that the observatory's nominal position doesn't agree with it's official position on official UK Ordanance Survey maps. GPS is designed to work with US military maps, calibrated to a convenient reference point in US territory rather than to Greenwich, UK. The US military has to have their own independent mapping system, because they can't afford to be reliant on foreign countries doing the job properly for them, and being 100% truthful about where their military installations are.
If you want to turn the dodgy GPS figures into "proper" survey numbers (eg, for archaeological reference work), you either use a different system, or you survey the place yourself, or you use an overlay mesh that converts GPS locations into "proper" locations. Assuming that Galileo comes online as planned, and they haven't buggered it up, and it hasn't been sabotaged technically or politically, there'll soon be an alternative consumer system anyway. What's important is that we keep the GPS coordinate for locations separate from other numerical descriptions of those locations, and don't mix up the different coordinate systems. Which is easy enough to do, I guess we just stick a "GPS" prefix on the front of a GPS location, "Gal" (or similar) on the front of a Galileo location, "OS" on the front of a UK Ordanance Survey location, or come up with some other handy set of abbreviations. As long as we all know that there are differences, and don't mix up the different sets of numbers (like Wikipedia coordinates and GPS coordinates) we should be okay.
Well, Yes. The US generously built the GPS system to map the entire world, so that it could be used to target US planes and missiles at any point on the globe. It would have been a bit silly if the system only enabled the US military to bomb sites within the US.
This would have somewhat limited the system's military usefulness (for the US, at least).
GPS was opened up for worldwide civilian use, for free, so that foreign aerospace companies wouldn't launch their own competing system that enemy countries could then use to target sites within the US, and US targets abroad, without the US government having an "off switch" or control over the spoiler systems. Companies within the US have legal restrictions that prevent them from certain sorts of satellite or mapping activities that relate to US territory. Making GPS free for civilian use was supposed to eliminate the business model of any competing civilian geolocation satellite systems, including those outside US legal jurisdiction, because it's difficult to come up with a business model that competes with "free".
The EU is now finally putting up the Galileo system regardless (rollout commencing 2010), but throughout the project planning stages, the US has let it be known that it regards Galileo as an "unfriendly" system, and it's been made known that if there was ever any serious chance of hostilities breaking out between the US and another country, that seemed likely to result in the US being attacked, one of the first things that would be likely to happen would be the US shooting down the Galileo system's satellites.
So I think it's fair to say that the US has been quite keen for there not to be any other competing GPS-type system.
GPS is great, wonderful, marvellous, incredible. But let's not pretend that it was originally part of a great humanitarian plan, or that something like Galileo wouldn't have been launched years earlier if it wasn't for political considerations, Europe not wanting to antagonise the US, and European private industry not being able to create a business model for launching commercial geolocation satellites while GPS use was being given away for free, specifically to undercut them. Europeans have benefitted from free access to GPS for years (yippee!), but the price has been the lack of a system more closely tailored to local needs. In the end, we've decided that we really have to pay to put up our own system anyway.
In an ideal world, there'd be a reciprocal arrangement whereby American citizens would also be able to make use of Galileo if they wanted to, but I suppose there's a chance that the US Government might not want Galileo access generally available within their borders, and might take steps to prevent that happening.
PAL and NTSC were designed for countries in which the mains frequencies were different.
PAL is 25 frames per second because it was designed to be viewed in a country in which domestic electric lights flickered at 50Hz.
US TV standards were based on a refresh rate of 30 frames per second (later 29.97), because the official US mains frequency was 60Hz.
Both systems were designed to minimise aliasing effects between the refresh rate of the TV screen, and the flicker of local domestic electric lighting.
I think Pi/3 is better.
1.047 ...
If you inscribe a hexagon inside a circle, it's the difference in ratio between the curved and straight-line distances between two adjacent points, and as "one-point-somethingsmall", it has a nice fundamental look to it.
Nice and easy to visualise. You know that the perimeter of a circle is six-point-something times the radius, because the inscribed hexagon has six sides.
And it gets rid of those one-third bits when you're dealing with spheres.
Far as I can tell, the reason for using the 3.14 ... number doesn't seem to do with logic or geoemtry, it seems to be a hangover of the tools that Greek stonemasons used to use when making pillars. It's the ratio between the caliper-width of a pillar, and the length of a piece of string wrapped around the pillar.
But geometrically, it's not sensible to be comparing the length of the flat base of a semicircle against the curved sections of //two// semicircles. It's not comparing like with like. You either compare radius with perimeter, as the earlier poster said (~6.28....), or you compare diameter with semiperimeter (~1.57 ... ), or you compare radius against arc (~1.047 ... )
Pi itself is a pretty stupid number. It's the mathematical equivalent of the human appendix, or the QUERTY keyboard. IMO it's one of the most damning indictments of human civilisation that we're still using it.
I feel ill whenever I hear SETI guys talking about broadcasting PI as a way of contacting alien civilisations. Yeah, right, broadcast to the whole universe how dumb we are, why don't you ... :-Z
If I was an alien, and I picked up a transmission of "pi", it'd tell me that the species was arrogant, technologically advanced but mentally a bit retarded, and unable to understand deep relationships or alternative perspectives. It'd tell me that the species considered themselves mathematicians, but had some fundamental inability to see their own mental shortcomings. It'd be a species that wouldn't deal well with cultural conflicts, becuase they'd be sure that their own way was right, and they'd not be able to see the possibility of other points of view.
It'd be a species that you wouldn't ever want to have to deal with. So you'd warn everyone to stay away, and you'd draw up a contingency plan for eliminating the nasty species should they ever start building interstellar spaceships.
So if there are intelligent lifeforms similar to us nearby, with decent technology, we might be looking at a global extinction event as first contact
Thanks for that, SETI
"Born on the fourth of July" ?
I dimly remember before UK currency went metric (I was very small). The sense of joy when I could suddenly understand money! Wheee!
Yes, and one of the traditional ways that we used to freely exchange those ideas without the fear of reprisals before the internet came along was the "nom de plume".
People invented separate personae for the purposes of their writing. A lot of the great political and religious pamphleteering that helped reform Europe and bring about the French and American revolutions was published under pen-names. Anything vaguely political published by someone working for a country's civil service tended to be under an n-d-p. Hell, even Gulliver's Travels was published without the real author's name on it, so that he wouldn't lose his day job over it. George Orwell's real name wasn't George Orwell. Voltaire's supposed to have had more than 170 different pen-names.
It doesn't always mean that the author is spineless. Sometimes it just means that the author reckons that their work and "author's persona" is good enough to stand up by itself without the reader needing to know the exact details of who created the arguments, and sometimes it means that the writer finds it easier to continue with their work without having to risk being sacked from their mundane job that pays the rent and keeps a roof over their head, because their employer feels that having the name of a controversial writer on their public list of employees, representing the company, is asking for trouble.
If you demand of your employer that they take no notice at all of your extracurricular activities, because those are none of the employer's business ("What I do in my own time is up to me"), then it's sensible to use different identifiers for your work persona and your other activities. If you use the same linkable identifier for both, and your work involves introducing yourself as an employee of the company and giving out your full legal name, then your employer is liable to reckon that if that name is attached to some "cause" that might alienate some of their important customers, they don't want you as an employee.
They can say, "Look, we don't give a damn what you do in your own time as long as it doesn't reflect on us. We don't care what religious or sexual views you hold as long as you leave them behind when you walk through our door in the morning. But if we're promoting you as our named representative, and you're using that same name to promote other things that we don't want to be associated with, then we have a legitimate reason to sack you."
Taking away people's ability to create separate "brands" for their work and personal online activities means that unless people have very understanding employers, they're liable to self-censor pretty much anything they write for fear of upsetting their work situation.
It also means that if an employer knows that ==anything== their employee does online from home is linked to all the employee's other personal details, including their place of work – including what forums they visit and what iffy websites they view, no matter what computer they use to view it – then it means that the employer can argue that it's now their legitimate right to spend more time tracking what their employees are doing out of work hours, since it could impact on their business.
If you can't decouple your work identity from your recreational web use, it means that you no longer have a personal life (for web-related stuff) that's separate from work.
I remember a speech by Bill Gates some years back at a developer conference, where he said that people had had enough of the chaos of the internet, what they wanted was proper, reliable, source-certified information, and MS was hooking up with major vendors to create a proper, secure, safe replacement that would finally give people what they wanted.
The internet had maybe two or three years left in it, said Bill, after that, everybody would be using Microsoft Network instead. So if we were planning ahead more than a few years, he was kindly giving us the inside dope, that we shouldn't expect the internet to still exist as a major force by then.
This was some time back in the 1990's.
So, one the one hand we have these nasty Middle-Eastern terrorists who are contemptuous of our personal freedoms and want to destroy our democratic way of life, and to have us all living in a totalitarian system of their choosing ...
... who wants to eliminate personal freedoms and implement a more totalitarian state ... in order to save us from the terrorist threat.
... and on the other side we have champions like Kaspersky
We have the threat of Russian criminal gangs who want to take our personal information and milk money from the system, and embed themselves so deeply that they get a cut of everything that happens, without people being able to opt out ...
... And then we have Kaspersky, who wants to be able to take our personal infomation, embed his software so deeply in the networks that it makes money from everybody else's business, and persuade regulators to make the use of these systems has to be made compulsory on public networks.
Hm.
... or to have private conversations in pubs, clubs and coffeehouses, without wearing a big name-badge, staying within clear view of the cameras, and clearly and loudly announcing your identity and social security number at the start of every exchange, so that the microphones can correctly log and record everything that you're about to say.
Some years back there was a campaign for governments to crack down on terrorism and organised crime by implementing a scheme like this. Everyone would have to use a key, and copies of those keys would be lodged with trusted third parties.
The "trusted agencies" were going to be governments and banks.
I think the idea was that some citizens might not trust their governments to be entirely honest, and to have their best interests at heart, but banks were composed of entirely upright citizens who would never ever do anything illegal, unethical, or socially reprehensible.
Try suggesting that post-crash, without being laughed at. :)
I think that one of the reasons why the scheme foundered early was that people stopped to think about who it was that was actually training these terrorists and criminal organisations, and giving them shelter, and laundering their money ... and to a large extent it was governments and banks.