They used to be a wonderfull bird repellent. You hang 5-6 of them on a string and it works out to be a grand scarecrow. It is a pity they never flooded the EU market as much as the US (so I have to use coasters for this instead).
That is perfectly fine and you are correct as far as industry is concerned. We are talking about teaching students, not industry practices. It is sometimes essential to work out examples on a simple system so that people can understand the whole picture in more complex systems later on. Once upon a time a PC could double up as such a simple system for educational purposes. Now it cannot.
You missed one of the GP points: instruction timing based optimisation. You cannot teach that on a modern machine (most you can no longer turn off the cache) even if you boot it in 16 bit mode. The last machine to allow this and have a well published instruction set was 286. 386SX was still useable, but the stuff started getting muddled. 386DX (all but the earliest cacheless samples) - unusable for this.
Similarly, from Pentium 3 onwards the APIC has changed drastically so the interrupt controller handling is no longer the same. Granted, you can run it in backwards compatible mode, but it is not the same.
Similarly, IO on PCI devices is clearly nowhere near the original IO on x86. While there is some backward compatibility present, you have to go and do at least some bridge programming to get anywhere. That was not the case with any of the 8 and 16 bit IO on systems all the way up to the early 486-es. You could manipulate every device separately ignoring most bus issues.
Overall, nowdays if you want to teach anything low level you have to go to a simpler architecture like one of the 32 bit MIPS architectures. x86 in its current form is too complex to be useable even for an advanced college level architecture and drivers class.
Outlook as a standalone client is as crappy with calendar and groupware functions as Mozilla Sunbird. Both of them royally suck (just in a different way). In fact the KDE calendaring beats them in standalone mode flat.
What makes the difference is Exchange.
This is what makes Outlook the killer app as far as businesses are concerned. The fact that it is Outlook + Exchange as a combination is largely overlooked by most non-technical people. At best they mix them up to some extent.
In fact, if the EU commission really wants to do something about Microsoft monopoly it should stop fiddling around with file server and multimedia specs. The real killer will be forcing Microsoft to provide an open API to exchange and maintain it open, unencumbured and working (no MAPI style breakages) as a punishment for let's say 10 years. I suspect they will happily agree to pay 200+ million a month instead as this will remove one of the main "server+desktop" lock-ins they hold on the enterprise.
Since when is google calendar and the other google apps lot open source?
There is no open source exchange killer in the offering here. As far as Outlook killers are concerned, Mozilla has been an Outlook killer for a very long time. Even with something as lame as courier Mozilla can easily work over 12G+ IMAP mail folders. Outlook (prior to 2003) caused massive corruption crashes and loss on anything above 2G (after the local cache exceeded 1G).
As far as the usual argument about "want it local", nope I do not. Provided that:
1. Google can offer compliance and logging features for a relatively strict regulatory framework including blanket logging of all emails per domain and retention as per user specified policy. I am aware that exchange does not do that, but there is enough third party software for it (as well as for exim, sendmail, etc). Before that google + mozilla are worthless for corporate use.
2. Gooogle can offer client side certificate based authentication and ssl-enabled protocols for everything. I do not mind google maintaining the CA for that as long as they can.
3. Backup requirements which correspond to 1.
And so on and so fourth. If all of these are complied to, is it local or remote is largely irrelevant. Google has enough datacenters to ensure that the latency is low. In fact, it better be remote. One less item to worry during disaster recovery.
Reminds me of the beginning of the "Amber" series by Zelazny where they drive up the road through the multitude of worlds and stop for a snack at "Kentucky Fried Lizards".
Many things, such as persecutions, whether political or otherwise, returned to how they were during Stalin. As a direct descendant of a person from the first page of Stalin's notebook (with a note against his name: "Not now, save for later") I can tell you - you do not have a clue. The Gerontocracy never got anywhere close. People were walking around, telling political jokes and living through it. If you told a political joke under Stalin your entire family was shot and sometimes your entire village ended up in Gulag for good measure.
How about the invasion of Hungary by Krushchev, and the subsequent killings and deportations, was that another welcome change?. One country is a welcome change compared to half of Europe twice - once splitting it with Hitler, and once with Churchill and Rusvelt. You might as well ask the poles how did they like having Rokossovski performing "army cleaning" around after the war. Or the Bulgarians on the beauty of Belene under Valko Chervenkov, or the Romanians, or... As I said - you do not have the faintest clue.
How about the continued attempt at genocide in the border republics. Genocide, what genocide? Now the 10 millions dead in Ukraine during the 30-es under Stalin that is genocide. The millions dead during the displacements of whole nations into Kazahstan and the deserts of outer mongolia - that is genocide. As far as "shipping unqualified russian workers" that is exactly the village to city migration which you claim to never existed. The revocation of passports by Stalin artificially arrested the move to the cities related to the late industrial stage which happened in the rest of the world between WW1 and WW2 (just look at a UK city built-out plan and you will notice the huge build during that period). When Hrushov gave the passports back the villagers rushed to the city everywhere as Russia was not an exemption to the overall world trend (from 40:60 city:village in the 1920-es to 60:40 in the 60-es). Pre-Hrushov post-war Moscow buildings have a tell-tale sign of this - an extra 1-2 floors built over all of them in a haste on the roof. And Hrushov added a nearly 10 miles wide ring of 5 story panel buildings on top of that (3+ millions of people). And as a matter of fact, Moscow and St Petersburg residents hate these "unqualified villagers" and their descendants as much as the baltic people hate the so called "russians". Which as a matter of fact are actually mostly Belorussian and Ukrainian anyway. I can understand the baltic people hating the invasion of hordes into their pretty cities. Well, I bet Camrbidge, UK cittizens hated it as well when it happened 30 years earlier. And they got on with it instead of calling it genocide. So did everybody else in Europe.
Krushchev who almost caused not only WW3, but a nuclear . Minor difference, Hrushov did not actually schedule a date, prepare a full mobilisation plan and do the full planning for the war. Stalin did. If he was not eliminated the war would have started in around 6 months after his death. Hrushov actually listened to arguments that the war cannot be won and went back.
I think it's a pretty safe bet you're a Russian,. As a matter of fact while I have russian ascendancy, I am not. Also as a matter of fact you have no clue what are you talking about. I suggest studying some modern European history first and doing some reading before spewing some xenophobic bullshit on Slashdot.
We may get them in many places, but at least some of them have nothing to do with development.
For example let's take London - there is a nice round zero worth of development there. If you want to work as a developer for Google you have to agree to relocating to Dublin (or in more rare cases Mountain View) as a preliminary condition before any further conversations have happened.
So Google is not hating anyone. It is just doing Google recruitment. Featured on el-Reg and many other internet news sites. Makes quite a laugh reading about it.
We used to lift cars on top of 4 garbage bins (of the older metal cylindrical variety). Worked a treat. An old Skoda, Fiat or ZAZ weight under 600 kg so all it took was 10+ determined students and 20 seconds. So the teacher comes out and starts swearing not knowing what to do. The car is perched precariously 1m from the ground and there is no way to get it down without either negotiating with the students (and trusting them that they do not "unintentionally" drop it) or calling in heavy lifting equipment.
A funnier version of the same prank used to be done in a couple of schools which were located in old turn of the century buildings will proper 6+m wide main staircases and corridors. I know of at least 2 cases where the principal walked out of his office on the second floor to stumble into his skoda "parked" in the corridor.
Frankly that makes a welcome change from having a notebook with 30+ thousand names of public officials, scientists, writers, etc and notes against their names in which order they should be killed. In the rare cases when Hrushev wanted someone shot that person was shot on the spot and it was not meticulously planned for years in advance. The way Beria was removed is a good example.
That makes another welcome change from taking the passports of all rural population and effectively making them again a property assigned to the land like they were before the abolition of slavery during the land reform of 1860-1861. One of the first things Hrushev did during the warming was to give the villagers back their passports and allow them to travel again.
That makes another welcome change compared to banning genetics as antisoviet and making practicing scientific breeding techniques a gulag offence. Not entirely surprising from a person with half-baked religious education for that matter. While Hrushev had his favourites as far as research was concerned, the difference between them was usually just financing, not a walk to the wall at 5 am.
That makes another welcome change compared to planning 3rd world war and actively preparing for it. While Hrushev banged on the table in the UN with his shoe, he also finally put in place the red phone and the other measures which ensured that we now exist. If he and Beria did not kill Stalin we would have been all dead by now many times. If he did not sit down and negotiate we would have been dead at the logical conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis.
The current UK government loves to wave articles of the convention at random so you cannot rely on this convention as being useable. Oh we do not like this one, that one and that one. We shall not be bound by them regardless of the fact that we have ratified it. Human rights Antonio Bliar style at your service.
Not that the Tories are any better as there was a point where they had leaving the convention as a part of their pre-election propaganda (not that this helped them with getting anywhere).
So unfortunately this convention is used in the UK where it does not really matter that much. Where it matters and where it sets the actual moral standard of what is right and what is wrong the current UK govt has roughly the level of respect to it that the talebans had to historical monuments and human rights.
OMG...how much would it cost to verify a financial institution?
Nothing. Or to be more exact, nothing on top of the already existing mechanisms. The verification mechanisms are already in place. Joe Bloggs cannot get a SWIFT address or a Federal Reserve deposit insurance. Joe Bloggs cannot register himself as a bank. All you have is to convince the relevant institutions in each participating country to participate in the approval process.
Not that it will make any difference as the loser will continue clicking on links sent to them in email.
The apple version is forced by the sillies of their videoram technical implementation. It is also not the earliest prior art.
There is a much older prior art, more specifically the sub-pixel version of bresenheim algorithm described in "Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics" which is general, with full mathematical description to accompany it and predates Apple 2. IIRC (I do not have the book in my new house) the book explicitly mentions it as related to fonts and describes subpixel font rendering.
You are operating under the presumption that "the buddy" runs the stakehouse. In reality, the concierge gets a cut and it is not a buddy. It is a commercial relationship. Especially if you replace a few letters in "stakehouse" to get the actual customer request. That is if the customer has forgotten to wink.
1. Old airbus models had severe interference problems from old pre-GSM cellular network phones. That has been confirmed many times. I have seen that myself in the early 90-es. 2. No test has ever proven any GSM phone to interfere with plane equipment (do not care about the US ragtag of network spagetty). 3. A modern GSM base station (and EU style 3G node B) is small enough to be put on a plane. If there is a local BTS it can enforce power control criteria on any phone which it camps on. Further to this, there is at least one reject code which will shutdown and lock up a phone solid with its radio off (only really old Samsungs violate the spec and reboot, rest follows it). So having phone support and local kit on the planes is actually beneficial as it allows airlines to ensure that "interfering" mobiles are powered down to their lowest possible transmit power or are outright off. 4. The commercial reason for not having mobiles on planes is easily resolved once again by putting basestations and the airline entering into a special roaming agreement with an operator. Plenty of Timbuktu GSM operators to do so, some are actively looking into entering these partnerships. Once again - the US ragtag of cellular non-standard networks is the loser. The airline skims a portion of an outright exorbitant roaming fee and everyone is a happy camper. There is a number of airlines that already have the kit in place and/or are testing it. There are also more than one company producing these as well.
So it all boils down to crowd control and to the airline ensuring that it does not end up on the receiving end of a lot of angry customers who have just received a 90$+ phone bill for a 10 minute call from the inlaw while on the plane.
This and the fear of "organised terrorists". Not that it is possible as the current generation of kit will run any voice channels all the way to the ground and back for an in-plane call. As a result anyone trying to organise a "terrorist attack" will simply fail as the plane will run out of channels to the ground right away. This is also the reason why the producers of this type of kit keep targeting the plane market and not the much more lucrative cruise ship and ferry market. A cruise ship is not subject to stupid FAA restrictions, but it has a disproportionately large proportion of local calls (where are you, I am in bar on level 7, ok, I am on level 3).
That is based on suffering from a UK driving exam myself in 2001 (I learned to drive before elsewhere) followed by helping other people since. That is the standard style instructor's teach.
They teach people to drive at 30mph in 4th gear which on most cars ends up under 2Krpm and switch down straight to 2nd for roundabouts and lights. If you drive that way in some of the more modern cars you are bound to run into mechanical and on some electrical problems. Neither the ECU, nor the vvti controllers, nor the timing belt assembly are designed to run for long periods of time under 2Krpm. They are engineered for 2.5K-3.5K rpm or whatever the idle speed is, but not inbetween.
As far as the break lights - you are incorrect. The students are taught to perform this routine while keeping the break pressed fairly well. Essentially - use both breaks and engine simultaneously. As a result the car nearly upends like a dabbling duck. Horrible driving style, IMO outright dangerous but that is what they teach them.
You are absolutely right except the "behind the truck bit". I would not do that as I may end up "between the trucks". Unfortunately, your advice is hard to apply (at least in the UK).
Unfortunately at least in this country (UK) you are likely to cause a case of road rage. All driving schools teach a completely different driving style. Namely, you are taught to go close to the roundabout without deccelerating and switch 4-to-2nd or 5-to-3rd for the big ones to kill your speed right away with the engine while helping yourself with the breaks. Same for traffic lights, stopping, etc. Even if it is absolutely clear that a traffic light will go green any minute, the average british driver will go all the way to it, break, stop and wait. As a result if you deccelerate early the one bihind you may end up smashing into you or uses breaks to deccelerate early and gets pissed off.
Most of the population drives like that. I used to drive the way you describe (and I still do if I am more or less alone on the road) and I had idiots behind me flashing lights at me all the time.
Most phones do it in software so the codec is largely irrelevant. A trivial firmware upgrade or an application download solves that problem as long as the codec does not require floating point like ogg (most phones use ARM or TI cores which have no FP).
It is not just that. It is accumulating them inefficiently over a very large and hotly contested area. The efficiency of the full fuel conversion cycle for plant matter is around 1%. Nearly any other "environmental" fuel is more efficient. While it is obviously interesting to consider these methods for recycling and waste processing, growing foodstuffs for that purpose is a waste of resources.
While at it, if we look into the possible sources of energy of tomorrow there is only one that strikes me as viable - the temperature difference between deep ocean water and surface water. There are immense technical challenges:
extraction - we need to learn to use efficiently a small temperature difference with a very large fluid volume. Current electricity production is geared towards the opposite (large differences, small fluid volumes).
transportation - the only developed country in the world to have suitable facilities to use this right off its coast is USA (the entire Mexican Gulf is a perfect place for it 20C+ difference all year around), rest will have to find means to transport the electricity from the tropics.
At the same time there are immense advantages - the natural limitations are so remote that it is not worth to bother about them. Similarly, there are no resource conflicts and this is not a resource you have to fight someone over with. Once you have mastered the technology all you need is to build more of it.
While you have a point, as far as environmental issues are concerned they deserve a topic of their own. Everything else aside, the amount of flamewars they cause clearly distinguishes them from other article topics.
As far as the article is concerned - well, about damn time. CO2 is a pollutant just like everything else and the US environmental agency has been giving all kinds of lame excuses for not considering it as such.
As for large bore pipes where people can walk though them, they are so infrequent that it is pointless
Depends where. In the US - maybe yes. In Europe (where digging in downtown is really a problem) - definitely not.
For example, the main sewerage network under central London was built during victorian times and the tunnels are wider than the tunnels for the tube. It covers all central London. Similarly, you can drive a submarine through parts of the sewerage network in Paris or Rome. They were built for unassisted flow and as a result had to be fairly wide. These are the places where it actually matters - old metropolitan downtown. There digging is costly, risky (you may end up digging into an archaeological site and having your dig interrupted for years until the archaeologist finish with it) and subject to a lot of restrictions. At the same time the sewerage network is vast and built with capacity wich by far exceeds current needs.
There was an episode on the BBC series "What the victorian did for us" about the London sewerage network. Some of the footage was amazing. You could probably fly a UAV in those tunnels above the water. With ease. From the West End all the way to the City and back.
The investigation into these technologies happened mostly because many city councils got pissed off by the non-stop digging to lay fiber during dot-bomb and started threatening to introduce limits on how many times you can dig up a road as well as license fees on digging. The number discussed in the UK were once per 5 years and something in the tens of thousands of pounds per linear meter of dig licensing fee if you have to re-dig before this expires.
The dot bomb ended and the surviving telecom operators successfully fought it off. The licensing regime as not introduced.
Otherwise, fiber through sewerage is a viable tech. The only reason it is not being done more often is that most of the water utilities who control the sewers live in the 17th century (or would like to) and it is nearly impossible to negotiate a sensible access deal with them.
I know at least several cases where people working on medical diagnostics projects have tried to get their hand on the OLPC kit for the purposes of field medical lab automation and have been told to sod off.
There is a long list of diagnostic technologies which require a computer for analysing data in the field. At the moment this means using either a specialised system or a commercial ruggedized portable. In either case the overall bill for a small field lab goes into the many 1000$ range which makes this technology prohibitive for mass deployment. OLPC class hardware would have been the perfect replacement bringing the cost down into a range which will make it affordable.
So if the OLPC gets sidelined and the same kit is available commercially, personally I would give one big cheer. This will mean that people like Medicines sans Frontiers will finally be able to have proper diagnostic (and medical records) kit anywhere they go, no matter how in the middle of nowhere it is.
IIRC It was MIR2 leftovers which Russians contributed to the space station project and it counted as their contribution.
It probably still has MIR2 labels here and there. It was launched without insurance and without backup because NASA did not want to pay for it (for the exact reason that they did not pay for it in first place and did not contract it and define the spec). So no govt pork involved there either AFAIK.
There was some American money involved though, but it had nothing to do with the taxpayers. To be most exact 1 million of private money.
It was the famous Pizza Hut launch AKA the first advertisement campaign on a space launch vehicle. I remember laughing my arse off seeing NASA admin staff boiling off in a fit of righteous indignation (and obviously in their mind swearing that they did not think of doing that themsleves) on the news after that.
Slashdot Mirror
They used to be a wonderfull bird repellent. You hang 5-6 of them on a string and it works out to be a grand scarecrow. It is a pity they never flooded the EU market as much as the US (so I have to use coasters for this instead).
That is perfectly fine and you are correct as far as industry is concerned. We are talking about teaching students, not industry practices. It is sometimes essential to work out examples on a simple system so that people can understand the whole picture in more complex systems later on. Once upon a time a PC could double up as such a simple system for educational purposes. Now it cannot.
You missed one of the GP points: instruction timing based optimisation. You cannot teach that on a modern machine (most you can no longer turn off the cache) even if you boot it in 16 bit mode. The last machine to allow this and have a well published instruction set was 286. 386SX was still useable, but the stuff started getting muddled. 386DX (all but the earliest cacheless samples) - unusable for this.
Similarly, from Pentium 3 onwards the APIC has changed drastically so the interrupt controller handling is no longer the same. Granted, you can run it in backwards compatible mode, but it is not the same.
Similarly, IO on PCI devices is clearly nowhere near the original IO on x86. While there is some backward compatibility present, you have to go and do at least some bridge programming to get anywhere. That was not the case with any of the 8 and 16 bit IO on systems all the way up to the early 486-es. You could manipulate every device separately ignoring most bus issues.
Overall, nowdays if you want to teach anything low level you have to go to a simpler architecture like one of the 32 bit MIPS architectures. x86 in its current form is too complex to be useable even for an advanced college level architecture and drivers class.
Outlook as a standalone client is as crappy with calendar and groupware functions as Mozilla Sunbird. Both of them royally suck (just in a different way). In fact the KDE calendaring beats them in standalone mode flat.
What makes the difference is Exchange.
This is what makes Outlook the killer app as far as businesses are concerned. The fact that it is Outlook + Exchange as a combination is largely overlooked by most non-technical people. At best they mix them up to some extent.
In fact, if the EU commission really wants to do something about Microsoft monopoly it should stop fiddling around with file server and multimedia specs. The real killer will be forcing Microsoft to provide an open API to exchange and maintain it open, unencumbured and working (no MAPI style breakages) as a punishment for let's say 10 years. I suspect they will happily agree to pay 200+ million a month instead as this will remove one of the main "server+desktop" lock-ins they hold on the enterprise.
Since when is google calendar and the other google apps lot open source?
There is no open source exchange killer in the offering here. As far as Outlook killers are concerned, Mozilla has been an Outlook killer for a very long time. Even with something as lame as courier Mozilla can easily work over 12G+ IMAP mail folders. Outlook (prior to 2003) caused massive corruption crashes and loss on anything above 2G (after the local cache exceeded 1G).
As far as the usual argument about "want it local", nope I do not. Provided that:
1. Google can offer compliance and logging features for a relatively strict regulatory framework including blanket logging of all emails per domain and retention as per user specified policy. I am aware that exchange does not do that, but there is enough third party software for it (as well as for exim, sendmail, etc). Before that google + mozilla are worthless for corporate use.
2. Gooogle can offer client side certificate based authentication and ssl-enabled protocols for everything. I do not mind google maintaining the CA for that as long as they can.
3. Backup requirements which correspond to 1.
And so on and so fourth. If all of these are complied to, is it local or remote is largely irrelevant. Google has enough datacenters to ensure that the latency is low. In fact, it better be remote. One less item to worry during disaster recovery.
Reminds me of the beginning of the "Amber" series by Zelazny where they drive up the road through the multitude of worlds and stop for a snack at "Kentucky Fried Lizards".
Many things, such as persecutions, whether political or otherwise, returned to how they were during Stalin. As a direct descendant of a person from the first page of Stalin's notebook (with a note against his name: "Not now, save for later") I can tell you - you do not have a clue. The Gerontocracy never got anywhere close. People were walking around, telling political jokes and living through it. If you told a political joke under Stalin your entire family was shot and sometimes your entire village ended up in Gulag for good measure.
How about the invasion of Hungary by Krushchev, and the subsequent killings and deportations, was that another welcome change?. One country is a welcome change compared to half of Europe twice - once splitting it with Hitler, and once with Churchill and Rusvelt. You might as well ask the poles how did they like having Rokossovski performing "army cleaning" around after the war. Or the Bulgarians on the beauty of Belene under Valko Chervenkov, or the Romanians, or... As I said - you do not have the faintest clue.
How about the continued attempt at genocide in the border republics. Genocide, what genocide? Now the 10 millions dead in Ukraine during the 30-es under Stalin that is genocide. The millions dead during the displacements of whole nations into Kazahstan and the deserts of outer mongolia - that is genocide. As far as "shipping unqualified russian workers" that is exactly the village to city migration which you claim to never existed. The revocation of passports by Stalin artificially arrested the move to the cities related to the late industrial stage which happened in the rest of the world between WW1 and WW2 (just look at a UK city built-out plan and you will notice the huge build during that period). When Hrushov gave the passports back the villagers rushed to the city everywhere as Russia was not an exemption to the overall world trend (from 40:60 city:village in the 1920-es to 60:40 in the 60-es). Pre-Hrushov post-war Moscow buildings have a tell-tale sign of this - an extra 1-2 floors built over all of them in a haste on the roof. And Hrushov added a nearly 10 miles wide ring of 5 story panel buildings on top of that (3+ millions of people). And as a matter of fact, Moscow and St Petersburg residents hate these "unqualified villagers" and their descendants as much as the baltic people hate the so called "russians". Which as a matter of fact are actually mostly Belorussian and Ukrainian anyway. I can understand the baltic people hating the invasion of hordes into their pretty cities. Well, I bet Camrbidge, UK cittizens hated it as well when it happened 30 years earlier. And they got on with it instead of calling it genocide. So did everybody else in Europe.
Krushchev who almost caused not only WW3, but a nuclear . Minor difference, Hrushov did not actually schedule a date, prepare a full mobilisation plan and do the full planning for the war. Stalin did. If he was not eliminated the war would have started in around 6 months after his death. Hrushov actually listened to arguments that the war cannot be won and went back.
I think it's a pretty safe bet you're a Russian,. As a matter of fact while I have russian ascendancy, I am not. Also as a matter of fact you have no clue what are you talking about. I suggest studying some modern European history first and doing some reading before spewing some xenophobic bullshit on Slashdot.
Well...
We may get them in many places, but at least some of them have nothing to do with development.
For example let's take London - there is a nice round zero worth of development there. If you want to work as a developer for Google you have to agree to relocating to Dublin (or in more rare cases Mountain View) as a preliminary condition before any further conversations have happened.
So Google is not hating anyone. It is just doing Google recruitment. Featured on el-Reg and many other internet news sites. Makes quite a laugh reading about it.
Well...
We used to lift cars on top of 4 garbage bins (of the older metal cylindrical variety). Worked a treat. An old Skoda, Fiat or ZAZ weight under 600 kg so all it took was 10+ determined students and 20 seconds. So the teacher comes out and starts swearing not knowing what to do. The car is perched precariously 1m from the ground and there is no way to get it down without either negotiating with the students (and trusting them that they do not "unintentionally" drop it) or calling in heavy lifting equipment.
A funnier version of the same prank used to be done in a couple of schools which were located in old turn of the century buildings will proper 6+m wide main staircases and corridors. I know of at least 2 cases where the principal walked out of his office on the second floor to stumble into his skoda "parked" in the corridor.
And nowdays... Myspace... whimps...
Well...
Frankly that makes a welcome change from having a notebook with 30+ thousand names of public officials, scientists, writers, etc and notes against their names in which order they should be killed. In the rare cases when Hrushev wanted someone shot that person was shot on the spot and it was not meticulously planned for years in advance. The way Beria was removed is a good example.
That makes another welcome change from taking the passports of all rural population and effectively making them again a property assigned to the land like they were before the abolition of slavery during the land reform of 1860-1861. One of the first things Hrushev did during the warming was to give the villagers back their passports and allow them to travel again.
That makes another welcome change compared to banning genetics as antisoviet and making practicing scientific breeding techniques a gulag offence. Not entirely surprising from a person with half-baked religious education for that matter. While Hrushev had his favourites as far as research was concerned, the difference between them was usually just financing, not a walk to the wall at 5 am.
That makes another welcome change compared to planning 3rd world war and actively preparing for it. While Hrushev banged on the table in the UN with his shoe, he also finally put in place the red phone and the other measures which ensured that we now exist. If he and Beria did not kill Stalin we would have been all dead by now many times. If he did not sit down and negotiate we would have been dead at the logical conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis.
And so on.
You missed to state one more point.
The current UK government loves to wave articles of the convention at random so you cannot rely on this convention as being useable. Oh we do not like this one, that one and that one. We shall not be bound by them regardless of the fact that we have ratified it. Human rights Antonio Bliar style at your service.
Not that the Tories are any better as there was a point where they had leaving the convention as a part of their pre-election propaganda (not that this helped them with getting anywhere).
So unfortunately this convention is used in the UK where it does not really matter that much. Where it matters and where it sets the actual moral standard of what is right and what is wrong the current UK govt has roughly the level of respect to it that the talebans had to historical monuments and human rights.
Nothing. Or to be more exact, nothing on top of the already existing mechanisms. The verification mechanisms are already in place. Joe Bloggs cannot get a SWIFT address or a Federal Reserve deposit insurance. Joe Bloggs cannot register himself as a bank. All you have is to convince the relevant institutions in each participating country to participate in the approval process.
Not that it will make any difference as the loser will continue clicking on links sent to them in email.
The apple version is forced by the sillies of their videoram technical implementation. It is also not the earliest prior art.
There is a much older prior art, more specifically the sub-pixel version of bresenheim algorithm described in "Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics" which is general, with full mathematical description to accompany it and predates Apple 2. IIRC (I do not have the book in my new house) the book explicitly mentions it as related to fonts and describes subpixel font rendering.
You are operating under the presumption that "the buddy" runs the stakehouse. In reality, the concierge gets a cut and it is not a buddy. It is a commercial relationship. Especially if you replace a few letters in "stakehouse" to get the actual customer request. That is if the customer has forgotten to wink.
The truth is that:
1. Old airbus models had severe interference problems from old pre-GSM cellular network phones. That has been confirmed many times. I have seen that myself in the early 90-es.
2. No test has ever proven any GSM phone to interfere with plane equipment (do not care about the US ragtag of network spagetty).
3. A modern GSM base station (and EU style 3G node B) is small enough to be put on a plane. If there is a local BTS it can enforce power control criteria on any phone which it camps on. Further to this, there is at least one reject code which will shutdown and lock up a phone solid with its radio off (only really old Samsungs violate the spec and reboot, rest follows it). So having phone support and local kit on the planes is actually beneficial as it allows airlines to ensure that "interfering" mobiles are powered down to their lowest possible transmit power or are outright off.
4. The commercial reason for not having mobiles on planes is easily resolved once again by putting basestations and the airline entering into a special roaming agreement with an operator. Plenty of Timbuktu GSM operators to do so, some are actively looking into entering these partnerships. Once again - the US ragtag of cellular non-standard networks is the loser. The airline skims a portion of an outright exorbitant roaming fee and everyone is a happy camper. There is a number of airlines that already have the kit in place and/or are testing it. There are also more than one company producing these as well.
So it all boils down to crowd control and to the airline ensuring that it does not end up on the receiving end of a lot of angry customers who have just received a 90$+ phone bill for a 10 minute call from the inlaw while on the plane.
This and the fear of "organised terrorists". Not that it is possible as the current generation of kit will run any voice channels all the way to the ground and back for an in-plane call. As a result anyone trying to organise a "terrorist attack" will simply fail as the plane will run out of channels to the ground right away. This is also the reason why the producers of this type of kit keep targeting the plane market and not the much more lucrative cruise ship and ferry market. A cruise ship is not subject to stupid FAA restrictions, but it has a disproportionately large proportion of local calls (where are you, I am in bar on level 7, ok, I am on level 3).
That is based on suffering from a UK driving exam myself in 2001 (I learned to drive before elsewhere) followed by helping other people since. That is the standard style instructor's teach.
They teach people to drive at 30mph in 4th gear which on most cars ends up under 2Krpm and switch down straight to 2nd for roundabouts and lights. If you drive that way in some of the more modern cars you are bound to run into mechanical and on some electrical problems. Neither the ECU, nor the vvti controllers, nor the timing belt assembly are designed to run for long periods of time under 2Krpm. They are engineered for 2.5K-3.5K rpm or whatever the idle speed is, but not inbetween.
As far as the break lights - you are incorrect. The students are taught to perform this routine while keeping the break pressed fairly well. Essentially - use both breaks and engine simultaneously. As a result the car nearly upends like a dabbling duck. Horrible driving style, IMO outright dangerous but that is what they teach them.
I had to check the calendar twice if it is not the 1st of April...
You are absolutely right except the "behind the truck bit". I would not do that as I may end up "between the trucks". Unfortunately, your advice is hard to apply (at least in the UK).
Unfortunately at least in this country (UK) you are likely to cause a case of road rage. All driving schools teach a completely different driving style. Namely, you are taught to go close to the roundabout without deccelerating and switch 4-to-2nd or 5-to-3rd for the big ones to kill your speed right away with the engine while helping yourself with the breaks. Same for traffic lights, stopping, etc. Even if it is absolutely clear that a traffic light will go green any minute, the average british driver will go all the way to it, break, stop and wait. As a result if you deccelerate early the one bihind you may end up smashing into you or uses breaks to deccelerate early and gets pissed off.
Most of the population drives like that. I used to drive the way you describe (and I still do if I am more or less alone on the road) and I had idiots behind me flashing lights at me all the time.
Most phones do it in software so the codec is largely irrelevant. A trivial firmware upgrade or an application download solves that problem as long as the codec does not require floating point like ogg (most phones use ARM or TI cores which have no FP).
It is not just that. It is accumulating them inefficiently over a very large and hotly contested area. The efficiency of the full fuel conversion cycle for plant matter is around 1%. Nearly any other "environmental" fuel is more efficient. While it is obviously interesting to consider these methods for recycling and waste processing, growing foodstuffs for that purpose is a waste of resources.
While at it, if we look into the possible sources of energy of tomorrow there is only one that strikes me as viable - the temperature difference between deep ocean water and surface water. There are immense technical challenges:
extraction - we need to learn to use efficiently a small temperature difference with a very large fluid volume. Current electricity production is geared towards the opposite (large differences, small fluid volumes).
transportation - the only developed country in the world to have suitable facilities to use this right off its coast is USA (the entire Mexican Gulf is a perfect place for it 20C+ difference all year around), rest will have to find means to transport the electricity from the tropics.
At the same time there are immense advantages - the natural limitations are so remote that it is not worth to bother about them. Similarly, there are no resource conflicts and this is not a resource you have to fight someone over with. Once you have mastered the technology all you need is to build more of it.
While you have a point, as far as environmental issues are concerned they deserve a topic of their own. Everything else aside, the amount of flamewars they cause clearly distinguishes them from other article topics.
As far as the article is concerned - well, about damn time. CO2 is a pollutant just like everything else and the US environmental agency has been giving all kinds of lame excuses for not considering it as such.
Depends where. In the US - maybe yes. In Europe (where digging in downtown is really a problem) - definitely not.
For example, the main sewerage network under central London was built during victorian times and the tunnels are wider than the tunnels for the tube. It covers all central London. Similarly, you can drive a submarine through parts of the sewerage network in Paris or Rome. They were built for unassisted flow and as a result had to be fairly wide. These are the places where it actually matters - old metropolitan downtown. There digging is costly, risky (you may end up digging into an archaeological site and having your dig interrupted for years until the archaeologist finish with it) and subject to a lot of restrictions. At the same time the sewerage network is vast and built with capacity wich by far exceeds current needs.
There was an episode on the BBC series "What the victorian did for us" about the London sewerage network. Some of the footage was amazing. You could probably fly a UAV in those tunnels above the water. With ease. From the West End all the way to the City and back.
The investigation into these technologies happened mostly because many city councils got pissed off by the non-stop digging to lay fiber during dot-bomb and started threatening to introduce limits on how many times you can dig up a road as well as license fees on digging. The number discussed in the UK were once per 5 years and something in the tens of thousands of pounds per linear meter of dig licensing fee if you have to re-dig before this expires.
The dot bomb ended and the surviving telecom operators successfully fought it off. The licensing regime as not introduced.
Otherwise, fiber through sewerage is a viable tech. The only reason it is not being done more often is that most of the water utilities who control the sewers live in the 17th century (or would like to) and it is nearly impossible to negotiate a sensible access deal with them.
I know at least several cases where people working on medical diagnostics projects have tried to get their hand on the OLPC kit for the purposes of field medical lab automation and have been told to sod off.
There is a long list of diagnostic technologies which require a computer for analysing data in the field. At the moment this means using either a specialised system or a commercial ruggedized portable. In either case the overall bill for a small field lab goes into the many 1000$ range which makes this technology prohibitive for mass deployment. OLPC class hardware would have been the perfect replacement bringing the cost down into a range which will make it affordable.
So if the OLPC gets sidelined and the same kit is available commercially, personally I would give one big cheer. This will mean that people like Medicines sans Frontiers will finally be able to have proper diagnostic (and medical records) kit anywhere they go, no matter how in the middle of nowhere it is.
As a matter of fact - yes.
IIRC It was MIR2 leftovers which Russians contributed to the space station project and it counted as their contribution.
It probably still has MIR2 labels here and there. It was launched without insurance and without backup because NASA did not want to pay for it (for the exact reason that they did not pay for it in first place and did not contract it and define the spec). So no govt pork involved there either AFAIK.
There was some American money involved though, but it had nothing to do with the taxpayers. To be most exact 1 million of private money.
It was the famous Pizza Hut launch AKA the first advertisement campaign on a space launch vehicle. I remember laughing my arse off seeing NASA admin staff boiling off in a fit of righteous indignation (and obviously in their mind swearing that they did not think of doing that themsleves) on the news after that.