Military budgets are being cut too. Even worse than science ones.
Do we like it or not, but the Labour government has been living on credit for 12 years with no intention of paying it back. This is a fact. The average pay in the non-productive government sector has increased above the average private sector pay. More than 700000 jobs were created in various quasi independent non governement organisations. In the area where I live they went from virtually zero in 2000 to a point where they are close to taking 30%+ of the available office space.
We will now have to work like slaves paying that debt off. The current government is not in the position which Thatcher was. Thatcher had lots of stuff to privatise and raise cash for restructuring and fixing the economy - housing, railways, energy generation and distribution, manufacturing, mining, etc. That is no longer an option. There is nothing left to sell.
All has been sold and eaten. So 25% cut in the science budget is nowhere near what other stuff is being cut. There are areas where the cuts are above 40%.
Imagine if the UK National Health System decided that doctors aren't being paid enough so they're going to start charging a fee to get priority service?
I have. It is very difficult to resist the urge to degenerate into a eye candy frenzy and dilute the explanation with shiny shiny and more effects. They have only one major advantage - they have potential for distance learning. However, that is still potential for now. It has not settled to a point where you can rely on it for that.
Nothing has managed to replace the blackboard (and its more modern equivalent the whiteboard). I have some first hand observations from junior changing 3 schools in 3 years. The lower the tech in the classroom - the better the teaching.
To put it in other terms - if the kids need an interactive soundtrack for slideware that can be bought from amazon for a fraction of the cost of a teacher.
Further on this from the perspective of teaching older students and explaining to adults.
I have met only a handful of people who can have a laptop open on their desk in front of them and at the same time pay full attention to something complex happening on the whiteboard. I have met hundreds of people who have no problem dividing their attention between handwritten notes and explanation on the board. I would not be surprised if it is something related to motor control and short term memory similar to the well known phenomenon of "death by powerpoint".
The joy of using centralised versus distributed systems. We live in the age of the network. Load balancing data sets across multiple databases, machines and systems and merging them whenever they are needed is trivial. Designing for such load balancing is trivial as well.
Anyone designing a system that piles up everything on a single box gets whatever christmas they deserve. By the way, considering the name of the company I am not surprised. It says everything that there is to be said about their design methodology...
Not that most of government contracts in the UK or USA are any different. They have been taken over the BI crowd and competence in design has been replaced by competence in explaining how it is not your fault that a f*ck up has occured. PRINCE, ISO, TOGAF, ZAMAN all have this as their primary function and they are now the only requirement towards jobs in this area. It is quite scary - you look at an advert for an architect and see these listed _WITHOUT_ any technical knowledge domain whatsoever...
99.99% of the population lives with no reserves and relies on various forms of insurance where our parents used to rely on savings. Whatever you get at the end of the month is spent by the end of next month. 1% of annual income will actually hurt nearly anyone out there. 5% for nearly anyone mean that you cannot meet your established spending commitments and need to reorg your credits. 10% - you can consider yourself bankrupt.
Microsoft embedded systems - WinCE and Co have had all the necessary support for IPTV for a long time now. I am no microsoft fan, but credit where credit due - their IPTV implementation at least in theory is very good and should work over nearly any network.
I am surprised this is not used more often. After all, the last gen of consoles already has app signing and app delivery frameworks so you can do all kinds of fancy stuff on them at very small incremental cost.
You can patent a method for producing graphene, not just for using it.
Example - the Aluminium purification process presently in use across the industry was patented once upon a time. The zone recrystallisation used to purify Si and other semiconductor materials was also patented. Both patents have expired now, but they were perfectly valid patents on how to produce what you call a "basic element".
You obviously never had to deal with a rip current. It is not funny. You just see the shore going away at a speed that can make even an experienced swimmer panic on the spot and try to fight the current instead of getting out of it.
You cannot guess which one? It is fairly easy to guess. There are about two of them which fit the bill and I am pretty sure which one was he talking to. It is not the one which once upon a time did a blue roses advert. That one would have given a considerably more subtle answer.
Microsoft possesses "significant market power" as per monopoly laws definitions in most of the world. So in fact it is not allowed to do that.
Similarly, Apple is marching bravely into the same territory. It may not be doing so on the computer front but it is nearly there with mp3 players, smart phones, etc. It is only a matter of time until it will get a visit from the office of Steelie Neelie (or whoever holds that position today) with a prospectus describing the virtues of not getting to the point of the 1Bn fine Intel paid recently.
Most of the "rest of the world" relative to the aforementioned precedent culprits including France uses the napoleonic law system. This system mandates a strict separation of legislative, judicial and administrative powers. In that system the letter of the law is followed strictly and the courts do not go on inventive sentencing and precedent creation spree which practically replaces functions of the legislative branch. Similarly, the parliament cannot suspend, amend, correct and violate fundamental rights the way the UK does on a casual basis under the pretext that "the parliament is sovereign and cannot be bound". And so on.
The law will be returned to parliament, amended and "normal service" will resume shortly. However prior to that the courts will not "replace the pariliament" and engage in "inventive sentencing" the way they do in the UK and the USA.
It is actually more "common sense" than USA and UK because it does not feed endless litigation and appeals of anything regardless how small all the way to the supreme court. It makes the law "stick".
I had that idea around 3 years back when one of the major UK service providers asked me if I want to be the security director for their Internet ops (in an hindsight I should have taken the job).
There is a big problem with the idea in this "proactive" manner. You cannot certify PCs to connect because they do not connect to the Internet. They connect to a network behind a CPE or a router which in the administrative domain of whoever connects them. That person is not implementing it any time soon. It is _HIS_ network.
Consumers are buying unlocked phones. I am definitely not buying any more contract phones and I could not care less what is exclusive and what is not. Android did with that. There is enough of the same from all carriers and unlocked as well so no need to fight for that coveted spot in the queue in front of the shop when a new gadget comes out.
An average smartphone costs 230£ to 400£ for most models. That is well within what most people can afford nowdays and most carriers have pretty good SIM-only tariffs.
Even large ones have ridiculous aspect ratios designed for entertainment. I am typing this on a 22in Iiama 1920x1080 which has about the same usability as a 19" classic 4:3. If not less...
Well, if you claim I am wrong point out the exact act of Parliament which enshrined this basic right as fundamental so it cannot be encroached by further legislation like Blair's H&S act.
Let me give you a hint - THERE IS NONE. NADA. ZILCH. NEIN.
It is not in the Magna Carta, it is not in the Bill of Rights of 1868, not in the act of settlement and nobody bothered to legislate anything more than that ever since. There is only the much weaker right for "due process".
So the presumption of innocence in British law is purely there by force of habit and centuries of precedent which means that the parliament can suspend it and revoke it on any particular matter they so desire by writing it into a particular act (and they have done so systematically under Blair). It is _NOT_ a fundamental, nonrevocable and unalienable right as it is in any other civilised country.
If it was, the courts would have revoked 90% of Blair's legislative spree especially in its "mandatory vetting" and "nanny state protection part" 10 times by now.
In britain there is no presumption of innocence. There is no "Right To Be Presumed Innocent Until Proven Guilty". That thing IS NOT on the British statute book. It is IMO the most basic of all human rights and a country that does not have it cannot claim to have human rights at all because not having this cornerstone allows it to suspend any other right at any given time with or without reason.
Interestingly enough it is part of conventions which Britain has signed like the European convention on human rights. However the Labour government that signed them specifically opted out of these clauses. It after that went on and voted into the statute book several hundred criminal offences which explicitly postulate that you are guilty until proven innocent. The RIPA act, The H&S act, you name them. Half of Blair's legislation (Blair and Co raised the number of criminal offences on the statutes by more than 100% in 10 years) is based around "guilty until proven innocent".
Thankfully, someone pointed this to Cameron and Co in the run up to the elections as the Conservatives initially wanted to revoke Britain's signature under the convention altogether. So the new government has actually promissed to fix this by accepting _ALL_ rights in the convention and repealing most of Blair's handywork as a big block vote including most of the RIPA act. Unfortunately, that fix has not been forthcoming as fast as it should. It was promissed for mid-summer before the parliament goes in recess. However it looks like it was what all politician promisses are... Talk the talk, but cannot walk the walk.
Actually, that is not the only way of looking at this. IMO, more than everything, the diagram shows that the RAND process common in cellular standards does not work. While the MPEG-LA may be a common hate figure on Slashdot looking at this diagram makes me think that there may be some method in their madness. Combining standards with 3rd party control over the patent pool seems to create a much more sane environment compared to RAND.
The tech described there is metallurgy. It is good for recovering Fe, Cu and Pb (which is nowdays banned anyway). I have some doubts about its ability to recover rare earths effectively.
Well, this goes to show how much of electronics recycling is a gimmick and publicity stunt.
Separating rare earths out of electronics waste is actually not that difficult: hit it with acid; do some basic purification first to get rid of Fe, Cu and a few other "usual suspects"; after that ion exchange chromatography does the deed. Even without initial mechanical separation there should be enough of them in the acid effluent. The fact that it was not done shows how much are we really "recycling" there.
In fact, we should say thank you to China on this one. This may finally make EU, USA and Japan governments put some money behind the electronic waste disposal laws.
In any case, 200C at 5 km is also quite deep for economically viable hydrothermals. That is "deep drilling" territory which is quite expensive. As the article notes Nevada has it at sub-2km, so does most of Europe along the Alps fault line.
15+ years ago the current Bulgarian prime minister business was called "First Private Police". That was in the first years after the fall of the berlin wall and funnily enough they were more efficient and less corrupt than the police proper. IIRC the ministry of the interior tried to sue them for trademarke infringment and failed. So they started stopping their cars for 2h checks every time they had to attend to an incident in progress, arrest their staff for nealry anything and so on until they forced a name change.
So it depends. The government has "its ways". Now are they going to apply them is a different matter
Slashdot Mirror
Military budgets are being cut too. Even worse than science ones.
Do we like it or not, but the Labour government has been living on credit for 12 years with no intention of paying it back. This is a fact. The average pay in the non-productive government sector has increased above the average private sector pay. More than 700000 jobs were created in various quasi independent non governement organisations. In the area where I live they went from virtually zero in 2000 to a point where they are close to taking 30%+ of the available office space.
We will now have to work like slaves paying that debt off. The current government is not in the position which Thatcher was. Thatcher had lots of stuff to privatise and raise cash for restructuring and fixing the economy - housing, railways, energy generation and distribution, manufacturing, mining, etc. That is no longer an option. There is nothing left to sell.
All has been sold and eaten. So 25% cut in the science budget is nowhere near what other stuff is being cut. There are areas where the cuts are above 40%.
Imagine if the UK National Health System decided that doctors aren't being paid enough so they're going to start charging a fee to get priority service?
They do. Through the AXA PPP system.
I have. It is very difficult to resist the urge to degenerate into a eye candy frenzy and dilute the explanation with shiny shiny and more effects. They have only one major advantage - they have potential for distance learning. However, that is still potential for now. It has not settled to a point where you can rely on it for that.
Nothing has managed to replace the blackboard (and its more modern equivalent the whiteboard). I have some first hand observations from junior changing 3 schools in 3 years. The lower the tech in the classroom - the better the teaching.
To put it in other terms - if the kids need an interactive soundtrack for slideware that can be bought from amazon for a fraction of the cost of a teacher.
Further on this from the perspective of teaching older students and explaining to adults.
I have met only a handful of people who can have a laptop open on their desk in front of them and at the same time pay full attention to something complex happening on the whiteboard. I have met hundreds of people who have no problem dividing their attention between handwritten notes and explanation on the board. I would not be surprised if it is something related to motor control and short term memory similar to the well known phenomenon of "death by powerpoint".
The joy of using centralised versus distributed systems. We live in the age of the network. Load balancing data sets across multiple databases, machines and systems and merging them whenever they are needed is trivial. Designing for such load balancing is trivial as well.
Anyone designing a system that piles up everything on a single box gets whatever christmas they deserve. By the way, considering the name of the company I am not surprised. It says everything that there is to be said about their design methodology...
Not that most of government contracts in the UK or USA are any different. They have been taken over the BI crowd and competence in design has been replaced by competence in explaining how it is not your fault that a f*ck up has occured. PRINCE, ISO, TOGAF, ZAMAN all have this as their primary function and they are now the only requirement towards jobs in this area. It is quite scary - you look at an advert for an architect and see these listed _WITHOUT_ any technical knowledge domain whatsoever...
I would not be so sure.
99.99% of the population lives with no reserves and relies on various forms of insurance where our parents used to rely on savings. Whatever you get at the end of the month is spent by the end of next month. 1% of annual income will actually hurt nearly anyone out there. 5% for nearly anyone mean that you cannot meet your established spending commitments and need to reorg your credits. 10% - you can consider yourself bankrupt.
Microsoft embedded systems - WinCE and Co have had all the necessary support for IPTV for a long time now. I am no microsoft fan, but credit where credit due - their IPTV implementation at least in theory is very good and should work over nearly any network.
I am surprised this is not used more often. After all, the last gen of consoles already has app signing and app delivery frameworks so you can do all kinds of fancy stuff on them at very small incremental cost.
You can patent a method for producing graphene, not just for using it.
Example - the Aluminium purification process presently in use across the industry was patented once upon a time. The zone recrystallisation used to purify Si and other semiconductor materials was also patented. Both patents have expired now, but they were perfectly valid patents on how to produce what you call a "basic element".
Yeah, and everyone on the beach wearing one.
You obviously never had to deal with a rip current. It is not funny. You just see the shore going away at a speed that can make even an experienced swimmer panic on the spot and try to fight the current instead of getting out of it.
You cannot guess which one? It is fairly easy to guess. There are about two of them which fit the bill and I am pretty sure which one was he talking to. It is not the one which once upon a time did a blue roses advert. That one would have given a considerably more subtle answer.
It is not an apple thing which is copied. It has been invented long before Apple. Google for Trusted Solaris (or DGUX even before that).
Apple is simply the first company to successfully integrate the idea with a commercial model into a working consumer PC.
Not quite so.
Microsoft possesses "significant market power" as per monopoly laws definitions in most of the world. So in fact it is not allowed to do that.
Similarly, Apple is marching bravely into the same territory. It may not be doing so on the computer front but it is nearly there with mp3 players, smart phones, etc. It is only a matter of time until it will get a visit from the office of Steelie Neelie (or whoever holds that position today) with a prospectus describing the virtues of not getting to the point of the 1Bn fine Intel paid recently.
Rezt of ze world means USA and UK, no?
Most of the "rest of the world" relative to the aforementioned precedent culprits including France uses the napoleonic law system. This system mandates a strict separation of legislative, judicial and administrative powers. In that system the letter of the law is followed strictly and the courts do not go on inventive sentencing and precedent creation spree which practically replaces functions of the legislative branch. Similarly, the parliament cannot suspend, amend, correct and violate fundamental rights the way the UK does on a casual basis under the pretext that "the parliament is sovereign and cannot be bound". And so on.
The law will be returned to parliament, amended and "normal service" will resume shortly. However prior to that the courts will not "replace the pariliament" and engage in "inventive sentencing" the way they do in the UK and the USA.
It is actually more "common sense" than USA and UK because it does not feed endless litigation and appeals of anything regardless how small all the way to the supreme court. It makes the law "stick".
Same here. Need new coffee...
Silverlight and Flash tighing the knot to create the ultimate in-browser resource abuse?
We may see Java coming back to the in-browser space as a result...
I had that idea around 3 years back when one of the major UK service providers asked me if I want to be the security director for their Internet ops (in an hindsight I should have taken the job).
There is a big problem with the idea in this "proactive" manner. You cannot certify PCs to connect because they do not connect to the Internet. They connect to a network behind a CPE or a router which in the administrative domain of whoever connects them. That person is not implementing it any time soon. It is _HIS_ network.
Which is happening in the EU.
Consumers are buying unlocked phones. I am definitely not buying any more contract phones and I could not care less what is exclusive and what is not. Android did with that. There is enough of the same from all carriers and unlocked as well so no need to fight for that coveted spot in the queue in front of the shop when a new gadget comes out.
An average smartphone costs 230£ to 400£ for most models. That is well within what most people can afford nowdays and most carriers have pretty good SIM-only tariffs.
Even large ones have ridiculous aspect ratios designed for entertainment. I am typing this on a 22in Iiama 1920x1080 which has about the same usability as a 19" classic 4:3. If not less...
Well, if you claim I am wrong point out the exact act of Parliament which enshrined this basic right as fundamental so it cannot be encroached by further legislation like Blair's H&S act.
Let me give you a hint - THERE IS NONE. NADA. ZILCH. NEIN.
It is not in the Magna Carta, it is not in the Bill of Rights of 1868, not in the act of settlement and nobody bothered to legislate anything more than that ever since. There is only the much weaker right for "due process".
So the presumption of innocence in British law is purely there by force of habit and centuries of precedent which means that the parliament can suspend it and revoke it on any particular matter they so desire by writing it into a particular act (and they have done so systematically under Blair). It is _NOT_ a fundamental, nonrevocable and unalienable right as it is in any other civilised country.
If it was, the courts would have revoked 90% of Blair's legislative spree especially in its "mandatory vetting" and "nanny state protection part" 10 times by now.
You are all forgetting the fundamentals.
In britain there is no presumption of innocence. There is no "Right To Be Presumed Innocent Until Proven Guilty". That thing IS NOT on the British statute book. It is IMO the most basic of all human rights and a country that does not have it cannot claim to have human rights at all because not having this cornerstone allows it to suspend any other right at any given time with or without reason.
Interestingly enough it is part of conventions which Britain has signed like the European convention on human rights. However the Labour government that signed them specifically opted out of these clauses. It after that went on and voted into the statute book several hundred criminal offences which explicitly postulate that you are guilty until proven innocent. The RIPA act, The H&S act, you name them. Half of Blair's legislation (Blair and Co raised the number of criminal offences on the statutes by more than 100% in 10 years) is based around "guilty until proven innocent".
Thankfully, someone pointed this to Cameron and Co in the run up to the elections as the Conservatives initially wanted to revoke Britain's signature under the convention altogether. So the new government has actually promissed to fix this by accepting _ALL_ rights in the convention and repealing most of Blair's handywork as a big block vote including most of the RIPA act. Unfortunately, that fix has not been forthcoming as fast as it should. It was promissed for mid-summer before the parliament goes in recess. However it looks like it was what all politician promisses are... Talk the talk, but cannot walk the walk.
Actually, that is not the only way of looking at this. IMO, more than everything, the diagram shows that the RAND process common in cellular standards does not work.
While the MPEG-LA may be a common hate figure on Slashdot looking at this diagram makes me think that there may be some method in their madness. Combining standards with 3rd party control over the patent pool seems to create a much more sane environment compared to RAND.
The tech described there is metallurgy. It is good for recovering Fe, Cu and Pb (which is nowdays banned anyway). I have some doubts about its ability to recover rare earths effectively.
Well, this goes to show how much of electronics recycling is a gimmick and publicity stunt.
Separating rare earths out of electronics waste is actually not that difficult: hit it with acid; do some basic purification first to get rid of Fe, Cu and a few other "usual suspects"; after that ion exchange chromatography does the deed. Even without initial mechanical separation there should be enough of them in the acid effluent. The fact that it was not done shows how much are we really "recycling" there.
In fact, we should say thank you to China on this one. This may finally make EU, USA and Japan governments put some money behind the electronic waste disposal laws.
5km is a bit too deep for coal fires.
In any case, 200C at 5 km is also quite deep for economically viable hydrothermals. That is "deep drilling" territory which is quite expensive. As the article notes Nevada has it at sub-2km, so does most of Europe along the Alps fault line.
Well, the question here is rather "did Devonport Lyons" copyright their cases and put a no-reproduction notice on them. Probably not...
That is still not common in the UK. In the USA quite a lot of the legal documents flying around have one nowdays and this is for a reason.
Depends on the country.
15+ years ago the current Bulgarian prime minister business was called "First Private Police". That was in the first years after the fall of the berlin wall and funnily enough they were more efficient and less corrupt than the police proper. IIRC the ministry of the interior tried to sue them for trademarke infringment and failed. So they started stopping their cars for 2h checks every time they had to attend to an incident in progress, arrest their staff for nealry anything and so on until they forced a name change.
So it depends. The government has "its ways". Now are they going to apply them is a different matter