Nor did the guy who modded me down as flamebait, even with a smiley to indicate it was a joke. Some ppl just don't have a sense of humour. Hey, maybe he was German...;-)
It's a quote from a science-fiction writer who wrote pulp novels aimed at teenagers. Any pearls of wisdom from this source are entirely unintentional. The same man also had one of his characters say, "I don't believe in safety interlocks. If I tell a door to close, and someone's head is in the way, you can reasonably assume that I think he looks better without his head." (as close as I can remember to the exact text). Nice reasoning attitude there, from someone whose head was never personally on the block.
I've always wondered if Heinlein looked at the world when he wrote that. Think of all the places where guns are readily available to civilians - Afghanistan, Rwanda, Angola, LA - and look at all the pain they cause. An armed society is not a polite society, it's a society that's one small step away from anarchy, mass violence, mob rule and genocide. One very small step.
ESR likes to say that he feels comfortable hanging out with guys wearing guns. But bear in mind, he's then hanging out with a group of ppl from the same social background who share the same interest as him - naturally they'll get on well. If he was to meet with a few LA teen gang members, maybe he'd change his mind...
Sure, they'll have something. But there's many cases where it has to be towed to the start line and never moves, or (in the case of the bombers or the submarines) where the only movement is down like a stone, or where it travels a few yards and then sheds its engine. Having "something" is no guarantee of having something that works!
That's the point though, not everyone can. The expert comes up with a base idea, and it's then up to the team to try and make it happen, given the limited and rusty materials available. And then to keep whatever it is alive long enough to beat the opposition!:-)
Be practical here - no-one knows enough about tractor pulls, drag racing, hang-gliders, high-pressure pumps, steam engines and rocketry to be able to design one of each successfully in a day. It isn't possible. You could maybe find two teams in the world who knew about all those subjects, and then they'd be blown out bcos none of them knew anything about balloons...:-) There's any number of wrong ways of doing stuff like that, and when they involve ppl standing around them, riding on them or operating them, you'd damn well better have an expert on hand to make sure everyone survives! And the time limit (regardless of if they get "tinkering time" allowed the next day) is restrictive enough without the extra hassle of having to experiment to find a way of doing something. For the more dramatic programs (the gliders and rockets, for instance), there is literally no way they could have done it without experts on hand; they would have had to have given them a less technical task, and the programme would have been poorer for it.
Depends. Plenty of times when things went radically wrong due to crap gear (the number of engines failing under pressure is a matter of record). And in the first series, the shortage of kit meant that only one team got a hovercraft built, and that had to be pushed.
Compare to the American version. Full roll-cages in the dragsters and off-road buggies - that doesn't happen in 8 hours with scaffolding poles! Sorry, it's American dumbing-down in action again, I'm afraid.
They've actually toned it down since the first (British) series when it was called Scrapheap. Robert Llewellyn's outfit in that was the dead spit of the Gyrocaptain's in Mad Max 2. I think they twigged that it was a bit _too_ OTT though, and toned it down a bit.
Nah, the Yanks replaced an intelligent, charismatic and enthusiastic actor with... well, some bloke. Sorry guys, but your presenter sucks. At least they kept whatsername, the lass who runs it as well. Actually they'd have to, since she OWNS it (she came up with the idea, owns the rights, produces, etc, etc).
Bcos you want somewhere to park your brain in idle for 8 hours on a trans-Atlantic flight. Or somewhere to park your brain while you fry on a beach. Very few of us read textbooks to relax...
OTOH, Britain at least has a nice range of top-shelf sex-books in all bookshops, including the ones in airport terminals. That makes the flight a little more enjoyable, even if it may result in some hard-to-explain stains at the end.;-)
Although not all things claimed to be thrillers are actually thrilling. Don't bother with "Rainbow Six", a couple-of-years-old book by Tom Clancy - it's merely stomach-churning. The man's a sick individual in need of help. The book's a sensitive paean to how good it is to shoot ppl, and how criminals and anyone the US doesn't agree with should be shot on sight, even if they pose no actual threat to you. The "victory" is when 3 dozen civilians (who've picked up pistols and guns bcos they're scared the soldiers are going to attack) are massacred at night by a dozen well-armed and well-trained soldiers with IR gear, sniper rifles, silenced weapons, etc. The surviving half-dozen are left to starve in the jungle without food or equipment. I used to enjoy TC books, but he's got so right-wing now that it's stopped being funny. Next TC book, I'm sure Jack Ryan is going to launch a holy war on all countries which don't agree to America's divine right to rule, and become World President or something.
Yeah, it blows your mind. Does this mean that in the film of Rodney Whatsit from LA getting beaten up by a gang of racist thugs (who happened to work as policemen), the only criminal was the person taking the film? Thank god I'm only visiting the US, I don't have to stay here permanently...
"Most people learn to program by studying and then modifying the works of others."
Not exactly, in my experience. I find the structure is more like:-
1) Copy programs from a textbook, and modify them to work out how each bit behaves.
2) Write stuff yourself, from scratch, see what you've learnt in action, and imprint what you've learnt deeply enough that it comes naturally.
3) Look at other ppl's work to see if there's any little tips and tricks to pick up.
But most of your real learning is in stage 2. It's like learning to improvise in music - you can copy other ppl's improvisation as much as you want, to get an idea of how it works, but unless you actually do it yourself you'll never learn it!
An open-source project may be useful for stage 3, but it's certainly not the place for 1 (which is learnt from a beginner's textbook), and 2 is done entirely on your own.
I'd agree with you on programming being easy, but then we're programmers. For Itzsak Perlman, playing the violin is easy, but I personally am never going to play to that level! It just requires a certain innate ability to follow things through logically, which means it's fairly inclusive, but everyone knows a few ppl who couldn't use logic to save their lives! (and the Darwin Awards show a few of those in action:-)
Unless you're in a language where it is. I used Occam (a parallel-processing language) for a few years - in that, the sequential/parallel structure of the program was set by statements SEQ and PAR, and the indentation under those statements. Yeah, brackets would have been nicer, but anyway.
The thing is, it's too damn easy to write obfuscated code if there's no requirement to put whitespace anywhere. I agree with you though that it's not the language's purpose to deal with that - this is the job of anyone teaching you or working with you to give you a swift kick in the backside when you obfuscate!
C++ for embedded systems is on its way. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your POV, and on what application you're developing for.
C is a stable language. It is reasonably well-defined, and where it is not well-defined, there are numerous books out there to tell you what to steer clear of (bit-fields, precedence problems etc), so you can produce code which consistently works how you expected it to. It is a relatively simple language in terms of the number of language features available, which helps since the number of possible interactions between features will increase exponentially with the number of features available, and it's quite easy for someone to pick up the language quickly. Finally, it's possible to code your programs to maximise code-space and/or RAM-space efficiency.
Then we come to C++. According to Les Hatton who used to serve on the C++ committee, there are so many undefined corners of the language that the committee literally GAVE UP trying to record them all, after they'd filled more undocumented features in 5 years than C had recorded in its entire lifespan! There are many new features over C, which radically increases the complexity of the language. C++ maps poorly onto the actual assembly language of the processor (which is why OO is such a radical diversion from "traditional" programming languages) and therefore the code produced in C++ for any program with more than one object will ALWAYS be slower than equivalent C code. Finally, it's not possible to write C++ code to maximise code-space or RAM-space efficiency, since you are entirely at the mercy of the compiler writer - the best you can do is select from a coarse menu and hope the compiler does it properly.
This is not to say that C is a good language to program in, or that C++ is inherently broken. What I am saying is that there is NO WAY to be sure that the executable you produce in C++ will work correctly - the subset of features which are 100% reliable for C++ (or the techniques required to make these features 100% reliable) is not yet known. For a safety-related or safety-critical system, therefore, C++ is a poor choice. MISRA (Motor Industry Safety and Reliability Association, IIRC) has produced guidelines for software development and for developing in particular languages, and the recommendation so far is that C++ not be used due to its immaturity. If anything went wrong with your embedded controller and someone died, the very fact that you were using C++ would therefore imply that you were not following best practice for development, therefore not exercising due diligence - punitive damages, fines and jail-time result from this!
As for PICs and other smaller processors, there often isn't the RAM available to allow any high-level language to be used. Even when a HLL can be used, C++ is often too memory-hungry to be applicable (the most RAM I've ever seen on a car engine controller is a few hundred K), and unlike GUIs, speed of execution is a major issue on most embedded systems.
Some embedded systems (mobile phones, etc) do use C++, but mainly for user interface work where speed of response is not an issue. Where there's real processing to be done, it'll always be done in C, or if there's a real crisis, then in assembler. I can't ever see this changing - if you make the executable more inefficient, you need a faster processor, and that always costs more. Build a few million of these, and even a few cents difference mounts up!
"Hoover's Triple Vortex vacuum cleaner was banned from sale yesterday after the company was found guilty of infringing James Dyson's patented vacuum cleaner technology.
"A High Court judge ordered Hoover to pay an advance of £200,000 towards Dyson's costs. Mr Dyson, inventor of the dual cyclone system, is awaiting judgment on multi-million pound damages he is seeking after Hoover copied his designs. Peter Prescott QC, for Dyson, had told the judge that Hoover had been given at least a 12-month advantage in developing its bagless cleaners because it infringed a patent and it should not be allowed to benefit from it.
"He said Hoover had spent £5 million promoting the name Vortex, and was now trying to launch a machine which did not infringe the patent but was cashing in on the reputation of the infringing Triple Vortex. Hoover is recalling the Triple Vortex from dealers. The machines will have a non-infringing single cyclone operation and filter installed. Deputy High Court Judge Michael Fysh QC granted Hoover permission to take the case to the Court of Appeal."
In other words, Dyson made it, but only bcos the case was tried in Britain. Hoover is an American company, and they thought they could get away with it.
Trouble is, consider the precedent this is going to set, if any single English word with a prefix can be "reserved" by a company who's previously used that word. Consider the words "Word", "Office", "Draw", "Sketch", "Paint", as examples. And then consider trying to create a word processor, an office suite or a drawing program without using any of these words in its name. It just isn't possible - these words describe the function of the program.
The base fact is that every word which can be used to describe a program's function, has been used at some point as the basis of the title of some program. "Draw" is CorelDraw, "Sketch" is AutoSketch, "Paint" has MS and Corel varieties.
Another thing - "Illustrator" only means "Adobe" to ppl who do lots of graphic design. Personally, I didn't know about it until this. But think of "KWord" and "KOffice" - I don't think there's a single computer user in the whole world who's not aware of MS's products using those base names. Let's be honest here - if it was viable to try and do this, MS would have done it a long time ago. The very fact that no other software company has tried this does rather tend to suggest that it's not a tenable argument.
Or maybe it suggests that no other company is as petty and small-minded as Adobe...
I know much land isn't farmed, but that doesn't mean it's farmable. You're not going to grow much on the slopes of Everest or in the Sahara Desert, for instance. Agricultural land is a pretty scarce commodity and is all already spoken for, which is why flooding agricultural land is such a serious problem for the ppl living there.
Simple answers - lack of investment, and lack of overseas emphasis. America's typically had plenty of ppl willing to invest in non-blue-chip, whereas it's very difficult to get startup or continuity investment in Britain, simply bcos the banks and venture capitalists historically didn't want to invest locally. Paul Dyson, for instance, had to go to Japan to get funding. And the government hasn't helped - they're quite happy to give multi-hundred-million-pound bribes to large overseas companies to get inward investment, but they've never thought that the money would be better used to kickstart _British_ businesses.
Add to that the fact that Psion's not been heavily promoted outside Europe, and it all falls apart. As with VHS and Betamax, the product which won was the one with the better marketing, not the one with the technical superiority.
> Do you think the Earth would have stayed around for as long as it has if it had no way of keeping itself in equilibrium?
It can keep itself in equilibrium, so long as no-one does anything downright foolish, or subjects it to a threat it's never seen before. CFCs do not AFAIK exist in nature - they are manmade chemicals. The ozone layer never had to deal with them before, so there's nothing to stop them eating the ozone. That's why all we can do is wait around until the same cosmic rays break the CFCs down, over a few hundred years - there is actually no other way to get rid of them. If we'd not stopped using CFC aerosols and CFC fridges, the hole would still be expanding. I'm glad we saw sense on that one - a worldwide ozone hole would have killed everything by wiping out all animals. Remember that the hole only just stopped short of Australia and South America. A few more years, and the kangaroo, koala, etc would be just more stuffed specimens in a museum box.
Surely you're joking. If either of those three had seen it, it would never have left the room alive! I know if I'd seen my career going down with that turkey, I'd've torched the film. Or at least forced them to reshoot it, or rescript it, or recut it, or _something_!:-)
Trouble is, they don't have anywhere to move TO. If you live in Bangladesh on your little farm, there's nowhere to go to. You move, you lose the resources to grow your food, you die. It's that simple. Well, the UN (assuming the US ever gives them the money they owe!) will set up refugee camps and try to do something with them, but you can bet that if it's farmable, someone's farming it already.
It's likely the Earth _will_ survive - at the very worst case, some bacteria will continue and provide the basis for a new evolutionary path. As you say, it seems that life is difficult to kill completely.
But as to whether "people" will be around, that is a different matter. See, if we really screw it up well, we can change the local temperature so indigenous animals can't survive, change the climate so that indigenous plants die, etc, etc. And that makes it more difficult to grow crops, so world food supplies will suffer. The icecaps melting will change the salinity of the sea, affecting fish populations. Low-lying areas will be flooded by the rising sea level, forcing millions to relocate (mainly in the third world), but without anywhere to move to where they can farm, they will probably die.
Given our technological skills, a proportion of the rich nations will survive reasonably OK. But ppl in poorer nations will die by the millions, and some nations (eg. Bangladesh) may simply cease to exist. As a natural, unstoppable chain of events, it would be tragic. As a preventable, manmade disaster, it's unconscionable. Would you, personally, like to explain to your grandchildren (bcos that's the timescale we're talking) that this happened bcos your culture was too fond of their SUVs and air-conditioning?
Depends on the language - this is one of those strange words...
In English, "Gymnasium" means a hall where you do gymnastics or exercise.
In German, "Gymnasium" means an upper-tier secondary school (attended from age 11 to age 19 IIRC).
Just one of those strange English/German glitches. Like, don't the words "mist" or "missed" around Germans, since "Mist" means "poo" in German - not "sh*t" or anything like that, just almost exactly the same resonance as "poo". Foreign golfers missing a putt and saying "Poo!" is quite amusing for the Germans (who says they lack a sense of humour?:-)
The Mulberry harbours used during the D-Day landings were concrete as well, I believe.
For a while, concrete boats were popular amongst the build-your-own-yacht community. Quite a few are still going, although few are made these days since GRP is so easy, cheap and convenient. The advent of GRP pretty much stopped concrete dead.
The advantages (when done properly) are durability and ease of repair - the hull is very strong, and if you do hole it then you can make a permanent repair using materials available anywhere they build houses or roads. By contrast, GRP and metal require specialist materials and/or equipment to make permanent repairs. The thicker hull is also better at insulating than other materials.
The downsides are that they're heavier than other boats (particularly GRP ones), they don't have the nice smooth finish of GRP and steel hulls, and the extra hull thickness reduces the living area somewhat. It shares with GRP the problem that minor dents can cause holes, where steel just dents. But the main problem is just that since it was so popular amongst build-your-own ppl, there's loads of poorly-made, badly-designed and generally horrible boats were produced in concrete, and that's damaged its reputation.
Wrong decade. By the 70s, RP was on the way out of broadcasting, mainly bcos it was so unrepresentative. By the 80s, you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone with RP on the news.
So it they're that important, how about they merge? I can just see "McDonalds-Douglas" in operation now - Big Mac meal with a side-order of F15 Fries.:-)
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Nor did the guy who modded me down as flamebait, even with a smiley to indicate it was a joke. Some ppl just don't have a sense of humour. Hey, maybe he was German... ;-)
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It's a quote from a science-fiction writer who wrote pulp novels aimed at teenagers. Any pearls of wisdom from this source are entirely unintentional. The same man also had one of his characters say, "I don't believe in safety interlocks. If I tell a door to close, and someone's head is in the way, you can reasonably assume that I think he looks better without his head." (as close as I can remember to the exact text). Nice reasoning attitude there, from someone whose head was never personally on the block.
I've always wondered if Heinlein looked at the world when he wrote that. Think of all the places where guns are readily available to civilians - Afghanistan, Rwanda, Angola, LA - and look at all the pain they cause. An armed society is not a polite society, it's a society that's one small step away from anarchy, mass violence, mob rule and genocide. One very small step.
ESR likes to say that he feels comfortable hanging out with guys wearing guns. But bear in mind, he's then hanging out with a group of ppl from the same social background who share the same interest as him - naturally they'll get on well. If he was to meet with a few LA teen gang members, maybe he'd change his mind...
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You've obviously been to Paris, and met the ppl there... ;-)
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Sure, they'll have something. But there's many cases where it has to be towed to the start line and never moves, or (in the case of the bombers or the submarines) where the only movement is down like a stone, or where it travels a few yards and then sheds its engine. Having "something" is no guarantee of having something that works!
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That's the point though, not everyone can. The expert comes up with a base idea, and it's then up to the team to try and make it happen, given the limited and rusty materials available. And then to keep whatever it is alive long enough to beat the opposition! :-)
:-) There's any number of wrong ways of doing stuff like that, and when they involve ppl standing around them, riding on them or operating them, you'd damn well better have an expert on hand to make sure everyone survives! And the time limit (regardless of if they get "tinkering time" allowed the next day) is restrictive enough without the extra hassle of having to experiment to find a way of doing something. For the more dramatic programs (the gliders and rockets, for instance), there is literally no way they could have done it without experts on hand; they would have had to have given them a less technical task, and the programme would have been poorer for it.
Be practical here - no-one knows enough about tractor pulls, drag racing, hang-gliders, high-pressure pumps, steam engines and rocketry to be able to design one of each successfully in a day. It isn't possible. You could maybe find two teams in the world who knew about all those subjects, and then they'd be blown out bcos none of them knew anything about balloons...
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Depends. Plenty of times when things went radically wrong due to crap gear (the number of engines failing under pressure is a matter of record). And in the first series, the shortage of kit meant that only one team got a hovercraft built, and that had to be pushed.
Compare to the American version. Full roll-cages in the dragsters and off-road buggies - that doesn't happen in 8 hours with scaffolding poles! Sorry, it's American dumbing-down in action again, I'm afraid.
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They've actually toned it down since the first (British) series when it was called Scrapheap. Robert Llewellyn's outfit in that was the dead spit of the Gyrocaptain's in Mad Max 2. I think they twigged that it was a bit _too_ OTT though, and toned it down a bit.
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Nah, the Yanks replaced an intelligent, charismatic and enthusiastic actor with... well, some bloke. Sorry guys, but your presenter sucks. At least they kept whatsername, the lass who runs it as well. Actually they'd have to, since she OWNS it (she came up with the idea, owns the rights, produces, etc, etc).
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Bcos you want somewhere to park your brain in idle for 8 hours on a trans-Atlantic flight. Or somewhere to park your brain while you fry on a beach. Very few of us read textbooks to relax...
;-)
OTOH, Britain at least has a nice range of top-shelf sex-books in all bookshops, including the ones in airport terminals. That makes the flight a little more enjoyable, even if it may result in some hard-to-explain stains at the end.
Although not all things claimed to be thrillers are actually thrilling. Don't bother with "Rainbow Six", a couple-of-years-old book by Tom Clancy - it's merely stomach-churning. The man's a sick individual in need of help. The book's a sensitive paean to how good it is to shoot ppl, and how criminals and anyone the US doesn't agree with should be shot on sight, even if they pose no actual threat to you. The "victory" is when 3 dozen civilians (who've picked up pistols and guns bcos they're scared the soldiers are going to attack) are massacred at night by a dozen well-armed and well-trained soldiers with IR gear, sniper rifles, silenced weapons, etc. The surviving half-dozen are left to starve in the jungle without food or equipment. I used to enjoy TC books, but he's got so right-wing now that it's stopped being funny. Next TC book, I'm sure Jack Ryan is going to launch a holy war on all countries which don't agree to America's divine right to rule, and become World President or something.
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Yeah, it blows your mind. Does this mean that in the film of Rodney Whatsit from LA getting beaten up by a gang of racist thugs (who happened to work as policemen), the only criminal was the person taking the film? Thank god I'm only visiting the US, I don't have to stay here permanently...
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"Most people learn to program by studying and then modifying the works of others."
:-)
Not exactly, in my experience. I find the structure is more like:-
1) Copy programs from a textbook, and modify them to work out how each bit behaves.
2) Write stuff yourself, from scratch, see what you've learnt in action, and imprint what you've learnt deeply enough that it comes naturally.
3) Look at other ppl's work to see if there's any little tips and tricks to pick up.
But most of your real learning is in stage 2. It's like learning to improvise in music - you can copy other ppl's improvisation as much as you want, to get an idea of how it works, but unless you actually do it yourself you'll never learn it!
An open-source project may be useful for stage 3, but it's certainly not the place for 1 (which is learnt from a beginner's textbook), and 2 is done entirely on your own.
I'd agree with you on programming being easy, but then we're programmers. For Itzsak Perlman, playing the violin is easy, but I personally am never going to play to that level! It just requires a certain innate ability to follow things through logically, which means it's fairly inclusive, but everyone knows a few ppl who couldn't use logic to save their lives! (and the Darwin Awards show a few of those in action
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Unless you're in a language where it is. I used Occam (a parallel-processing language) for a few years - in that, the sequential/parallel structure of the program was set by statements SEQ and PAR, and the indentation under those statements. Yeah, brackets would have been nicer, but anyway.
The thing is, it's too damn easy to write obfuscated code if there's no requirement to put whitespace anywhere. I agree with you though that it's not the language's purpose to deal with that - this is the job of anyone teaching you or working with you to give you a swift kick in the backside when you obfuscate!
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C++ for embedded systems is on its way. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your POV, and on what application you're developing for.
C is a stable language. It is reasonably well-defined, and where it is not well-defined, there are numerous books out there to tell you what to steer clear of (bit-fields, precedence problems etc), so you can produce code which consistently works how you expected it to. It is a relatively simple language in terms of the number of language features available, which helps since the number of possible interactions between features will increase exponentially with the number of features available, and it's quite easy for someone to pick up the language quickly. Finally, it's possible to code your programs to maximise code-space and/or RAM-space efficiency.
Then we come to C++. According to Les Hatton who used to serve on the C++ committee, there are so many undefined corners of the language that the committee literally GAVE UP trying to record them all, after they'd filled more undocumented features in 5 years than C had recorded in its entire lifespan! There are many new features over C, which radically increases the complexity of the language. C++ maps poorly onto the actual assembly language of the processor (which is why OO is such a radical diversion from "traditional" programming languages) and therefore the code produced in C++ for any program with more than one object will ALWAYS be slower than equivalent C code. Finally, it's not possible to write C++ code to maximise code-space or RAM-space efficiency, since you are entirely at the mercy of the compiler writer - the best you can do is select from a coarse menu and hope the compiler does it properly.
This is not to say that C is a good language to program in, or that C++ is inherently broken. What I am saying is that there is NO WAY to be sure that the executable you produce in C++ will work correctly - the subset of features which are 100% reliable for C++ (or the techniques required to make these features 100% reliable) is not yet known. For a safety-related or safety-critical system, therefore, C++ is a poor choice. MISRA (Motor Industry Safety and Reliability Association, IIRC) has produced guidelines for software development and for developing in particular languages, and the recommendation so far is that C++ not be used due to its immaturity. If anything went wrong with your embedded controller and someone died, the very fact that you were using C++ would therefore imply that you were not following best practice for development, therefore not exercising due diligence - punitive damages, fines and jail-time result from this!
As for PICs and other smaller processors, there often isn't the RAM available to allow any high-level language to be used. Even when a HLL can be used, C++ is often too memory-hungry to be applicable (the most RAM I've ever seen on a car engine controller is a few hundred K), and unlike GUIs, speed of execution is a major issue on most embedded systems.
Some embedded systems (mobile phones, etc) do use C++, but mainly for user interface work where speed of response is not an issue. Where there's real processing to be done, it'll always be done in C, or if there's a real crisis, then in assembler. I can't ever see this changing - if you make the executable more inefficient, you need a faster processor, and that always costs more. Build a few million of these, and even a few cents difference mounts up!
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Quoted from the Daily Telegraph, 14 Oct 2000....
"Hoover's Triple Vortex vacuum cleaner was banned from sale yesterday after the company was found guilty of infringing James Dyson's patented vacuum cleaner technology.
"A High Court judge ordered Hoover to pay an advance of £200,000 towards Dyson's costs. Mr Dyson, inventor of the dual cyclone system, is awaiting judgment on multi-million pound damages he is seeking after Hoover copied his designs. Peter Prescott QC, for Dyson, had told the judge that Hoover had been given at least a 12-month advantage in developing its bagless cleaners because it infringed a patent and it should not be allowed to benefit from it.
"He said Hoover had spent £5 million promoting the name Vortex, and was now trying to launch a machine which did not infringe the patent but was cashing in on the reputation of the infringing Triple Vortex. Hoover is recalling the Triple Vortex from dealers. The machines will have a non-infringing single cyclone operation and filter installed. Deputy High Court Judge Michael Fysh QC granted Hoover permission to take the case to the Court of Appeal."
In other words, Dyson made it, but only bcos the case was tried in Britain. Hoover is an American company, and they thought they could get away with it.
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Trouble is, consider the precedent this is going to set, if any single English word with a prefix can be "reserved" by a company who's previously used that word. Consider the words "Word", "Office", "Draw", "Sketch", "Paint", as examples. And then consider trying to create a word processor, an office suite or a drawing program without using any of these words in its name. It just isn't possible - these words describe the function of the program.
The base fact is that every word which can be used to describe a program's function, has been used at some point as the basis of the title of some program. "Draw" is CorelDraw, "Sketch" is AutoSketch, "Paint" has MS and Corel varieties.
Another thing - "Illustrator" only means "Adobe" to ppl who do lots of graphic design. Personally, I didn't know about it until this. But think of "KWord" and "KOffice" - I don't think there's a single computer user in the whole world who's not aware of MS's products using those base names. Let's be honest here - if it was viable to try and do this, MS would have done it a long time ago. The very fact that no other software company has tried this does rather tend to suggest that it's not a tenable argument.
Or maybe it suggests that no other company is as petty and small-minded as Adobe...
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I know much land isn't farmed, but that doesn't mean it's farmable. You're not going to grow much on the slopes of Everest or in the Sahara Desert, for instance. Agricultural land is a pretty scarce commodity and is all already spoken for, which is why flooding agricultural land is such a serious problem for the ppl living there.
Grab.
Simple answers - lack of investment, and lack of overseas emphasis. America's typically had plenty of ppl willing to invest in non-blue-chip, whereas it's very difficult to get startup or continuity investment in Britain, simply bcos the banks and venture capitalists historically didn't want to invest locally. Paul Dyson, for instance, had to go to Japan to get funding. And the government hasn't helped - they're quite happy to give multi-hundred-million-pound bribes to large overseas companies to get inward investment, but they've never thought that the money would be better used to kickstart _British_ businesses.
Add to that the fact that Psion's not been heavily promoted outside Europe, and it all falls apart. As with VHS and Betamax, the product which won was the one with the better marketing, not the one with the technical superiority.
Grab.
> Do you think the Earth would have stayed around for as long as it has if it had no way of keeping itself in equilibrium?
It can keep itself in equilibrium, so long as no-one does anything downright foolish, or subjects it to a threat it's never seen before. CFCs do not AFAIK exist in nature - they are manmade chemicals. The ozone layer never had to deal with them before, so there's nothing to stop them eating the ozone. That's why all we can do is wait around until the same cosmic rays break the CFCs down, over a few hundred years - there is actually no other way to get rid of them. If we'd not stopped using CFC aerosols and CFC fridges, the hole would still be expanding. I'm glad we saw sense on that one - a worldwide ozone hole would have killed everything by wiping out all animals. Remember that the hole only just stopped short of Australia and South America. A few more years, and the kangaroo, koala, etc would be just more stuffed specimens in a museum box.
Grab.
Surely you're joking. If either of those three had seen it, it would never have left the room alive! I know if I'd seen my career going down with that turkey, I'd've torched the film. Or at least forced them to reshoot it, or rescript it, or recut it, or _something_! :-)
Grab.
Trouble is, they don't have anywhere to move TO. If you live in Bangladesh on your little farm, there's nowhere to go to. You move, you lose the resources to grow your food, you die. It's that simple. Well, the UN (assuming the US ever gives them the money they owe!) will set up refugee camps and try to do something with them, but you can bet that if it's farmable, someone's farming it already.
Grab.
It's likely the Earth _will_ survive - at the very worst case, some bacteria will continue and provide the basis for a new evolutionary path. As you say, it seems that life is difficult to kill completely.
But as to whether "people" will be around, that is a different matter. See, if we really screw it up well, we can change the local temperature so indigenous animals can't survive, change the climate so that indigenous plants die, etc, etc. And that makes it more difficult to grow crops, so world food supplies will suffer. The icecaps melting will change the salinity of the sea, affecting fish populations. Low-lying areas will be flooded by the rising sea level, forcing millions to relocate (mainly in the third world), but without anywhere to move to where they can farm, they will probably die.
Given our technological skills, a proportion of the rich nations will survive reasonably OK. But ppl in poorer nations will die by the millions, and some nations (eg. Bangladesh) may simply cease to exist. As a natural, unstoppable chain of events, it would be tragic. As a preventable, manmade disaster, it's unconscionable. Would you, personally, like to explain to your grandchildren (bcos that's the timescale we're talking) that this happened bcos your culture was too fond of their SUVs and air-conditioning?
Grab.
Depends on the language - this is one of those strange words...
:-)
In English, "Gymnasium" means a hall where you do gymnastics or exercise.
In German, "Gymnasium" means an upper-tier secondary school (attended from age 11 to age 19 IIRC).
Just one of those strange English/German glitches. Like, don't the words "mist" or "missed" around Germans, since "Mist" means "poo" in German - not "sh*t" or anything like that, just almost exactly the same resonance as "poo". Foreign golfers missing a putt and saying "Poo!" is quite amusing for the Germans (who says they lack a sense of humour?
Grab.
The Mulberry harbours used during the D-Day landings were concrete as well, I believe.
For a while, concrete boats were popular amongst the build-your-own-yacht community. Quite a few are still going, although few are made these days since GRP is so easy, cheap and convenient. The advent of GRP pretty much stopped concrete dead.
The advantages (when done properly) are durability and ease of repair - the hull is very strong, and if you do hole it then you can make a permanent repair using materials available anywhere they build houses or roads. By contrast, GRP and metal require specialist materials and/or equipment to make permanent repairs. The thicker hull is also better at insulating than other materials.
The downsides are that they're heavier than other boats (particularly GRP ones), they don't have the nice smooth finish of GRP and steel hulls, and the extra hull thickness reduces the living area somewhat. It shares with GRP the problem that minor dents can cause holes, where steel just dents. But the main problem is just that since it was so popular amongst build-your-own ppl, there's loads of poorly-made, badly-designed and generally horrible boats were produced in concrete, and that's damaged its reputation.
Grab.
Wrong decade. By the 70s, RP was on the way out of broadcasting, mainly bcos it was so unrepresentative. By the 80s, you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone with RP on the news.
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Typo, but anyway...
:-)
So it they're that important, how about they merge? I can just see "McDonalds-Douglas" in operation now - Big Mac meal with a side-order of F15 Fries.
Grab.