Too right. If you don't want to do a job, then you shouldn't be there to make up numbers. I can't imagine anything worse than a positive discrimination position where you find that you weren't the best candidate, you were just hired to improve the male/female ratio.
Yeah, but you could tell even in Star Wars (that's the original Star Wars, originally designed as a one-off, before Lucas got delusions of adequacy) that Hamill was completely useless as an actor.
The point is that I don't believe it's a solvable issue.
On a typical trans-Atlantic link on a typical corporate app (disclaimer: I do work for Ford, and I reckon their network setup is pretty much link everyone else's), an X app takes around 10 seconds between window shell appearing and full redraw of all widgets inside it. This simply ain't acceptable. The link is fast to transmit bulk data once the transmission is started (typical FTP speed is 30KB/s), but all the handshaking inherent in X means sending a few bytes one way, then a few bytes back, then a few bytes again, and the extra trans-Atlantic delay on these exchanges are what kills you.
The problem is that this is a feature of the architecture, caused by where the dividing line between "server" and "terminal" is placed. The only fixes are for X to exchange less data, or for the link to get faster. With significant work from X people, and significant advances in the network infrastructure, we might just get an acceptable performance for basic desktop apps.
Yippee - basic desktop apps that work at an acceptable speed on anyone's PC. But didn't Windows 3.1 do that 15 years ago? So why not fuck X off your machine, install Windows, give people Windows versions of the software to install, and give them all access to the data? Or if your company is all using Linux on their desktops (which is rare), then they can use X locally on their machine, which obviously is a damn sight faster bcos there's no trans-Atlantic delays. Now they're only limited speed-wise by how fast they can access the raw data, which in 99.99999% of cases requires less data transmission than to draw an entire screen, and those transmissions can be done using efficient database transactions which take much less interchange between desktop and server.
My point is that today, drawing your client-server dividing line at the display level is almost never a good decision. In fact it's so rare that we can isolate it to one specific case - the use of high-performance clusters. X (or NX) will *always* deliver less performance graphically, and due to the speed of desktops these days will *always* deliver less processing performance unless your server is using something really serious *and* you have exclusive use of that machine/cluster. In other words, the use of X between remote locations is only justifiable under some extremely rare conditions, and under any other conditions any proposal to use it should be refused by anyone who knows their stuff. It really is that simple.
A central Xserver works fine if your users are all on-site. The moment you need to do X over a VPN to allow people in other sites to do the same work, you might as well shoot yourself in the head now and save your users doing it to you in 6 months time. Or possibly your manager doing it to you at your next appraisal, when he figures out that every task his employees do takes 5 times as long to carry out.
X was a great idea when all desktop machines were chronically underpowered, couldn't do any significant processing, and didn't have enough storage space to accomodate the data anyway. In that case it made sense to keep all the data and processing back at base. The delays inherent in graphics processing were acceptable when the delays in data processing or the physical impossibility of getting data onto the remote machine. These days though, your desktop/laptop will almost certainly have more spare processing power than your process on a server (except for on a few very exotic machines), and there's plenty of storage space to accomodate the data.
X is now the equivalent of the human evolutionary design of having your testicles hanging between your legs, instead of stored somewhere where they can't be easily knocked. The testicle design made sense at the time, bcos no-one had learnt how to kick someone else in the crotch, and aircooling was just about good enough. Then people learnt the bollock-kicking trick, and suddenly guys are in a world of hurt, and it's too late to un-evolve it. Similarly, using X was just good enough at the time, but now it's about as much fun as a size-10 in the nads, and it's too late to get anything else in there that'd work more effectively.
Come on, dude. If someone can seriously suggest this today, does he not rate "This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it"?
Also the following definitely apply as well:
- Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical - Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually - Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
In other words Sikandril (aka Ami Rodan), you don't know enough to know what you don't know. You're, what, 18 and in your first job doing IT support, right? If you're any older than that, then you really should be ashamed of yourself, because that's more like a "no great shakes on the brains front" kind of error. I hope future employers read this, so they know what level your abilities are at.
Who needs to take a photo of something everywhere they go? I know I don't.
If I'm going somewhere where I'll want pictures to remind me of it later, I bring a proper camera. If I'm out in town, I don't need a camera. It's that simple - there is *nothing* out-and-about in town that I would want a camera for, especially a low-quality PoS camera. Yes, I know they get used to take pictures in pubs, and I wonder how many of those cameras survive longer than a couple of months with owners like that. If you need to take crappy pictures in what's a hostile environment for electronics, take a disposable camera instead - then you've not lost £200 when some drunk spills beer all over it.
Integration of these things is neat, but only if they do the job to a reasonable quality. I don't want a piece of crap that tries to be a phone, an MP3 player, a PDA, a colour TV and a camera, does none of them well and costs a bloody fortune, thanks all the same.
It's easy enough to pick the holes in LotR or Neuromancer. The difference is that they were the first of their kind. Snow Crash was revolutionary in getting away from the tired old cyberpunk schtick that had been filling the shelves for the previous decade or so. It also had a view of a future society which was truly new, whilst still being rooted in how the US runs today, and that takes some doing.
It wasn't intended to be a deep insightful arthouse novel with all that multi-layer deconstructive bullshit, but then nor was Neuromancer or LotR. What it was intended to do was provide a wholly new physical/political/scientific environment, and embed an interest-grabbing storyline with strong characterisation into that environment. On that level it succeeded just fine.
If you want deep insightful stuff and absolutely no plot, check out Iris Murdoch instead. The EngLit crowd love them because there's absolutely no meaning in them *unless* you do the deconstructive thing. They're not half as much fun to read though, and I read books for enjoyment, not as a technical exercise.
If you go to any amateur orchestra, you'll see a huge range of abilities. Some of them may only have been playing for 2-3 years, but they're competent enough to get along as third violin or whatever - like your "powerchord" guitarists. No-one's ever going to confuse them with a serious professional player, but they're just about good enough to get around the instrument for the easier parts of the score. Your "powerchord" players who know nothing more than that are going nowhere further than backing guitar in a pub rock band, just like your third violins. Or at least, they aren't going any further until they learn how to play better, which takes time.
I think you're confusing "proficient" with "professional". To be a professional in any instrument, you do really need that commitment, and a large amount of natural ability. But to be roughly proficient (ie. able to play about grade 3-4 standard, which is about where your third violin lives) takes maybe 3 years on a typical classical instrument. Some instruments *are* known for being harder to play (the oboe and bassoon are examples) but 3 years of solid committed practise (like an hour or two a night) on most instruments should get most people to a reasonable standard for playing simple stuff in public. And the same is true of the guitar - you're not going to be able to do even convincing powerchord stuff without that kind of experience level.
Academia uses non-rad-hardened stuff due to cost. If you don't need it to last for X years, and you don't mind it resetting occasionally at random intervals when the RAM glitches, and you don't mind the odd bit of noise on your CCD, then you can make your microsat for several orders of magnitude less. This is important for academia, which doesn't have the pork budget that defense does.
Wings are only important as a way of getting down safely. Chutes are OK but there are problems steering them to land at a specified location, they don't open 100% of the time, and they need repacking each time (including resetting whatever deployment system they use). Wings just *are* - test craft will doubtless get thoroughly checked out each time, but otherwise they can be done on the same schedule as regular planes. SS1 does this right. The Shuttle did this 100% wrong by adding disposable heat-shield stuff which needs refitting every time at vast expense, which was the worst of both worlds.
Active folk musicians will be any age (from 8 to 80!). Many/most folk musicians play several instruments, so they'll usually be actively learning one. This means that if you can find yourself a group of people learning to play folk tunes, there are always going to be people in the group who are a bit more advanced and people who are beginners. Similarly, if you can find a teacher who plays folk then he/she will be used to teaching adults.
There's a good range of tunes too. Studies in books are usually deathly boring, but folk music lets you learn whilst playing some decent tunes.
In related news, games enthusiasts all laugh at chess players because the rules can be taught to anyone and even a young kid can learn how to play in a day. Chess obviously isn't a *real* game because the barrier to entry is so low, and there's clearly no real skill involved. Oh wait...
If what you say is even remotely true, then it says more about the classical musicians you hang out with being stuck-up snobs than it does about guitar players. I won't even say those assholes are elitist - "elitist" means celebrating people with superior ability, and if you're going to look down on someone because of their choice of instrument, regardless of whether they're lightyears more able than you, then "elitist" is definitely the wrong word.
You're right, MS doesn't have the right to dictate terms. And you may have noticed that even from your post's quote, it *didn't*.
MS has every right to send a reminder (or a scare letter, depending on your POV) saying "if you load Windows on a donated machine, you'd better have a valid license for it or you're in BIIIG trouble", same way that a bank has every right to send scare letters saying "keep your PIN safe or you may be liable for the money we lose". Would you disagree?
According to NewScientist, studies so far haven't found anyone claiming these symptoms who can correctly recognise when these things are turned on. In studies so far, people who claim they're sensitive to this end up showing symptoms when they're exposed to something that's just a LED in a box, and then don't show symptoms when they're in a room where the widget is hidden.
This gives two possibilities:
1) Your symptoms are psychosomatic. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but there's no physical link between EM radiation and your symptoms, so there's no physical solution possible.
2) You are an exception and genuinely *are* sensitive to EM radiation. In which case you should be contacting the various researchers into this, bcos you may be able to provide the evidence that so far is lacking. You can't guarantee that government would do anything about it, but you might get your symptoms recognised as a genuine medical condition.
I suggest you get your friends to help with experiments. A good initial test would be to have one of your friends turn his wireless network on or off when you come round, and keep notes of the state in a diary. When you come to the door, if you're sensitive then you should be able to notice the wireless network signal, so write down in your diary what you think its state is. Then you compare notes after a month or so. That'll give you some feedback about how your symptoms relate to things. Obviously this might be prone to interference from PCs or TVs on at the same time, but it's a start.
I'm not going to prejudge your specific case. All I can offer is the existing evidence, which says that so far no-one's been found who can do this. As a natural sceptic, I'd personally go with the evidence until someone shows otherwise, but we've got to give people every opportunity to disprove the existing evidence, otherwise it becomes faith-based not evidence-based, and we all know where that bullshit lands you.
No, phones are very tightly locked down. PDAs with phone capability have some possibilities (although even then I suspect you won't be able to get at the lower layers), but you won't get into a mobile phone.
There's two main reasons. Firstly it gives them better security if they know the phones on their network have their software locked down tight; and secondly it lets them charge extra for downloading add-on programs.
The B&MGF has also put a large amount of money into research on Third World disease prevention, for one thing. I don't keep real close tabs on everything they do, but this one was in the news not long back. You think they're doing this to play their money better? I really don't think so.
You might say that the "self-serving reason" is self-publicity. You can't prove that though (and I can't prove it isn't), so the only people who know the truth are B&MG. You might say they should donate anonymously, but that ain't an option for a billion-dollar operation like the B&MGF - everything needs to be audited, and large donations become public knowledge.
Re your PC assertion, I challenge you to find me a major (top-20 US-wide) manufacturer selling desktop PCs preloaded with Linux and OpenOffice. No? Then why do you think the B&MGF should pay *extra* to get them? (And it will cost extra, because the major cost to the manufacturer is not licensing fees but technician time, and a non-standard install costs extra technician time.) Also, if the charity wants to use OpenOffice then they're perfectly free to download it or get it off a magazine coverdisk, like the rest of the world - possession of one office suite does not prevent you owning another, so that's not locking anyone out.
As for locking out other places donating hardware, that's pure bullshit. Sure, if you've had some shiny new hardware donated, you don't need some old stuff. But check round the list of charities, and you'll find 99% of them *aren't* getting money off the B&MGF, and they'll be happy to take it. If it's really old then they'll turn it down, but that's pure practicality - I wouldn't expect any charity to be grateful for the donation of a 486SX25, would you?
It's been in NewScientist too. None of them are saying "yes, it's definitely fusion" - once bitten, and all that. But they are saying that there's something going on which isn't readily explainable. I suspect we can discount measurement errors, since it's been reproduced. A novel chemical process is a possibility (maybe some incredible catalyst that no-one's yet discovered). Or it could really be fusion.
Not being a free-energy conspiracy-theory wierdo, I wouldn't like to guess either way. But *something* interesting is happening in there, whichever way it goes.
The general process required is that a change can be tracked from a customer request, through the design, to a code file, and back up the V (or round the spiral) to the testing/verification/validation used to make sure that the design and code do what the customer asked for. And then that you can track all the changes that went into a particular version build, which means recording what files you used to build it.
How do you do that? I don't care, and nor does Sarbanes-Oxley. We used to use Access databases at our place (and still do on some projects). Other projects use a tool called Visual Intercept, which I'd recommend people avoid like a rabid maneating tiger. Some projects have even used Excel (heavens preserve us!). Or simply use multiple text files (checked into your version control system of choice), one per customer request. Or Bugzilla or any number of other tools will serve your purpose. Tracking versions of files could involve some hugely complex build system, or it could just involve slapping a label across the files and doing "get all".
But if you don't grok the basic premise that every line in your code must be attributable to a customer request, then no tool you can buy will help you. This is a process you need to follow, not a magic-bullet tool you can install and everything will be fine. Repeat after me - There Is No Quick Fix For Quality.:-)
The most important thing you can do make sure your system works is therefore to review each change before it gets signed off to make sure changes are complete. That doesn't just mean reviewing that files are changed, but that they're all checked in under version control, AND that the change details (however you do it) are fully filled in. Even if there's automated fields to list all files and their versions in, review them anyway - there's bound to be cases where someone says "well I've got one test file listed, so that'll keep the tool happy, never mind about the other 20".
Problem then is that everyone gets their own instances, so nothing you do in that instance affects the rest of the world. Which I think is what the parent post was meaning.
Actually mostly rich old people. Also a large number are political appointees from previous governments. They also had something like "Lords Idol" not long back where many of them lost their seats in the Lords (and incidentally this *was* supported by the Lords - they're mostly *not* self-indulgent yahoos). There are also a few bishops, and a few senior judges.
The point is that the Commons don't need to consider anything longer-term than 4 years, and in fact getting them to think longer term than a few months is a bit of an achievement. Yes, the Lords represent the status quo, and that's a *good* thing - it means that anything affecting the country long-term gets some serious consideration. The Commons certainly won't do that. No elected politician will give a shit about how it'll affect his grandkids, cos all he cares about is the next election. It's only the Lords that has any stake in preserving the country's long-term interests, and they can *only* do that by being unelected. Even if we assume they're only in it to benefit their families, their families make their money from investments and land ownership, so they need the economy to work and their tenants to make money to pay the rents, which has pretty much the same effect. That's why the Lords returns all those knee-jerk proposals back to the Commons for rewriting.
I'd personally prefer a lottery system to randomly choose people for the Lords, but as an alternative, whose daddy fought with Henry VIII is better than most of the alternatives.
What's the alternative anyway? The US system doesn't work - it's even more class-ridden and prone to nepotism than the British one, and all it takes is money to buy positions of power. How fucked up is that? The US even allows one single person to stand at the top and send the country to war, which in any other country would be called a dictatorship.
To be honest, the only good system for choosing representatives is the British jury system, which picks 12 people at random. (None of the jury-picking of the US system.) The same system applied to government would be great. It ain't ever likely to happen though, sadly. In its absence, you just need to find a least worst option, and the Brits have got something which, whilst not perfect, does a good job.
That's a fair point. Proof or otherwise of God's existence isn't possible.
Rephrase: "Your maths/physics can't solve the problem, therefore this proves that they're going to go wherever God tells them to go." Now *that* would be dumb, and that's the situation we're in...
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Too right. If you don't want to do a job, then you shouldn't be there to make up numbers. I can't imagine anything worse than a positive discrimination position where you find that you weren't the best candidate, you were just hired to improve the male/female ratio.
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Yeah, but you could tell even in Star Wars (that's the original Star Wars, originally designed as a one-off, before Lucas got delusions of adequacy) that Hamill was completely useless as an actor.
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The point is that I don't believe it's a solvable issue.
On a typical trans-Atlantic link on a typical corporate app (disclaimer: I do work for Ford, and I reckon their network setup is pretty much link everyone else's), an X app takes around 10 seconds between window shell appearing and full redraw of all widgets inside it. This simply ain't acceptable. The link is fast to transmit bulk data once the transmission is started (typical FTP speed is 30KB/s), but all the handshaking inherent in X means sending a few bytes one way, then a few bytes back, then a few bytes again, and the extra trans-Atlantic delay on these exchanges are what kills you.
The problem is that this is a feature of the architecture, caused by where the dividing line between "server" and "terminal" is placed. The only fixes are for X to exchange less data, or for the link to get faster. With significant work from X people, and significant advances in the network infrastructure, we might just get an acceptable performance for basic desktop apps.
Yippee - basic desktop apps that work at an acceptable speed on anyone's PC. But didn't Windows 3.1 do that 15 years ago? So why not fuck X off your machine, install Windows, give people Windows versions of the software to install, and give them all access to the data? Or if your company is all using Linux on their desktops (which is rare), then they can use X locally on their machine, which obviously is a damn sight faster bcos there's no trans-Atlantic delays. Now they're only limited speed-wise by how fast they can access the raw data, which in 99.99999% of cases requires less data transmission than to draw an entire screen, and those transmissions can be done using efficient database transactions which take much less interchange between desktop and server.
My point is that today, drawing your client-server dividing line at the display level is almost never a good decision. In fact it's so rare that we can isolate it to one specific case - the use of high-performance clusters. X (or NX) will *always* deliver less performance graphically, and due to the speed of desktops these days will *always* deliver less processing performance unless your server is using something really serious *and* you have exclusive use of that machine/cluster. In other words, the use of X between remote locations is only justifiable under some extremely rare conditions, and under any other conditions any proposal to use it should be refused by anyone who knows their stuff. It really is that simple.
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A central Xserver works fine if your users are all on-site. The moment you need to do X over a VPN to allow people in other sites to do the same work, you might as well shoot yourself in the head now and save your users doing it to you in 6 months time. Or possibly your manager doing it to you at your next appraisal, when he figures out that every task his employees do takes 5 times as long to carry out.
X was a great idea when all desktop machines were chronically underpowered, couldn't do any significant processing, and didn't have enough storage space to accomodate the data anyway. In that case it made sense to keep all the data and processing back at base. The delays inherent in graphics processing were acceptable when the delays in data processing or the physical impossibility of getting data onto the remote machine. These days though, your desktop/laptop will almost certainly have more spare processing power than your process on a server (except for on a few very exotic machines), and there's plenty of storage space to accomodate the data.
X is now the equivalent of the human evolutionary design of having your testicles hanging between your legs, instead of stored somewhere where they can't be easily knocked. The testicle design made sense at the time, bcos no-one had learnt how to kick someone else in the crotch, and aircooling was just about good enough. Then people learnt the bollock-kicking trick, and suddenly guys are in a world of hurt, and it's too late to un-evolve it. Similarly, using X was just good enough at the time, but now it's about as much fun as a size-10 in the nads, and it's too late to get anything else in there that'd work more effectively.
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Come on, dude. If someone can seriously suggest this today, does he not rate "This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it"?
Also the following definitely apply as well:
- Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
- Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
- Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
In other words Sikandril (aka Ami Rodan), you don't know enough to know what you don't know. You're, what, 18 and in your first job doing IT support, right? If you're any older than that, then you really should be ashamed of yourself, because that's more like a "no great shakes on the brains front" kind of error. I hope future employers read this, so they know what level your abilities are at.
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Is that you, Terry?
Cryptonomicon...
The downside is that you need a satellite filled with the deformed brain from some mutant baby...
Offtopic - I love Tad Williams' writing, and most of Otherland was awesome, but the last half of the last book just fell apart at the seams.
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Awesome man - I like! :-)
Who needs to take a photo of something everywhere they go? I know I don't.
If I'm going somewhere where I'll want pictures to remind me of it later, I bring a proper camera. If I'm out in town, I don't need a camera. It's that simple - there is *nothing* out-and-about in town that I would want a camera for, especially a low-quality PoS camera. Yes, I know they get used to take pictures in pubs, and I wonder how many of those cameras survive longer than a couple of months with owners like that. If you need to take crappy pictures in what's a hostile environment for electronics, take a disposable camera instead - then you've not lost £200 when some drunk spills beer all over it.
Integration of these things is neat, but only if they do the job to a reasonable quality. I don't want a piece of crap that tries to be a phone, an MP3 player, a PDA, a colour TV and a camera, does none of them well and costs a bloody fortune, thanks all the same.
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"Good" compared to what?
It's easy enough to pick the holes in LotR or Neuromancer. The difference is that they were the first of their kind. Snow Crash was revolutionary in getting away from the tired old cyberpunk schtick that had been filling the shelves for the previous decade or so. It also had a view of a future society which was truly new, whilst still being rooted in how the US runs today, and that takes some doing.
It wasn't intended to be a deep insightful arthouse novel with all that multi-layer deconstructive bullshit, but then nor was Neuromancer or LotR. What it was intended to do was provide a wholly new physical/political/scientific environment, and embed an interest-grabbing storyline with strong characterisation into that environment. On that level it succeeded just fine.
If you want deep insightful stuff and absolutely no plot, check out Iris Murdoch instead. The EngLit crowd love them because there's absolutely no meaning in them *unless* you do the deconstructive thing. They're not half as much fun to read though, and I read books for enjoyment, not as a technical exercise.
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I don't think so.
If you go to any amateur orchestra, you'll see a huge range of abilities. Some of them may only have been playing for 2-3 years, but they're competent enough to get along as third violin or whatever - like your "powerchord" guitarists. No-one's ever going to confuse them with a serious professional player, but they're just about good enough to get around the instrument for the easier parts of the score. Your "powerchord" players who know nothing more than that are going nowhere further than backing guitar in a pub rock band, just like your third violins. Or at least, they aren't going any further until they learn how to play better, which takes time.
I think you're confusing "proficient" with "professional". To be a professional in any instrument, you do really need that commitment, and a large amount of natural ability. But to be roughly proficient (ie. able to play about grade 3-4 standard, which is about where your third violin lives) takes maybe 3 years on a typical classical instrument. Some instruments *are* known for being harder to play (the oboe and bassoon are examples) but 3 years of solid committed practise (like an hour or two a night) on most instruments should get most people to a reasonable standard for playing simple stuff in public. And the same is true of the guitar - you're not going to be able to do even convincing powerchord stuff without that kind of experience level.
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Academia uses non-rad-hardened stuff due to cost. If you don't need it to last for X years, and you don't mind it resetting occasionally at random intervals when the RAM glitches, and you don't mind the odd bit of noise on your CCD, then you can make your microsat for several orders of magnitude less. This is important for academia, which doesn't have the pork budget that defense does.
Wings are only important as a way of getting down safely. Chutes are OK but there are problems steering them to land at a specified location, they don't open 100% of the time, and they need repacking each time (including resetting whatever deployment system they use). Wings just *are* - test craft will doubtless get thoroughly checked out each time, but otherwise they can be done on the same schedule as regular planes. SS1 does this right. The Shuttle did this 100% wrong by adding disposable heat-shield stuff which needs refitting every time at vast expense, which was the worst of both worlds.
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Look for folk music stuff.
Active folk musicians will be any age (from 8 to 80!). Many/most folk musicians play several instruments, so they'll usually be actively learning one. This means that if you can find yourself a group of people learning to play folk tunes, there are always going to be people in the group who are a bit more advanced and people who are beginners. Similarly, if you can find a teacher who plays folk then he/she will be used to teaching adults.
There's a good range of tunes too. Studies in books are usually deathly boring, but folk music lets you learn whilst playing some decent tunes.
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In related news, games enthusiasts all laugh at chess players because the rules can be taught to anyone and even a young kid can learn how to play in a day. Chess obviously isn't a *real* game because the barrier to entry is so low, and there's clearly no real skill involved. Oh wait...
If what you say is even remotely true, then it says more about the classical musicians you hang out with being stuck-up snobs than it does about guitar players. I won't even say those assholes are elitist - "elitist" means celebrating people with superior ability, and if you're going to look down on someone because of their choice of instrument, regardless of whether they're lightyears more able than you, then "elitist" is definitely the wrong word.
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You're right, MS doesn't have the right to dictate terms. And you may have noticed that even from your post's quote, it *didn't*.
MS has every right to send a reminder (or a scare letter, depending on your POV) saying "if you load Windows on a donated machine, you'd better have a valid license for it or you're in BIIIG trouble", same way that a bank has every right to send scare letters saying "keep your PIN safe or you may be liable for the money we lose". Would you disagree?
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According to NewScientist, studies so far haven't found anyone claiming these symptoms who can correctly recognise when these things are turned on. In studies so far, people who claim they're sensitive to this end up showing symptoms when they're exposed to something that's just a LED in a box, and then don't show symptoms when they're in a room where the widget is hidden.
This gives two possibilities:
1) Your symptoms are psychosomatic. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but there's no physical link between EM radiation and your symptoms, so there's no physical solution possible.
2) You are an exception and genuinely *are* sensitive to EM radiation. In which case you should be contacting the various researchers into this, bcos you may be able to provide the evidence that so far is lacking. You can't guarantee that government would do anything about it, but you might get your symptoms recognised as a genuine medical condition.
I suggest you get your friends to help with experiments. A good initial test would be to have one of your friends turn his wireless network on or off when you come round, and keep notes of the state in a diary. When you come to the door, if you're sensitive then you should be able to notice the wireless network signal, so write down in your diary what you think its state is. Then you compare notes after a month or so. That'll give you some feedback about how your symptoms relate to things. Obviously this might be prone to interference from PCs or TVs on at the same time, but it's a start.
I'm not going to prejudge your specific case. All I can offer is the existing evidence, which says that so far no-one's been found who can do this. As a natural sceptic, I'd personally go with the evidence until someone shows otherwise, but we've got to give people every opportunity to disprove the existing evidence, otherwise it becomes faith-based not evidence-based, and we all know where that bullshit lands you.
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No, phones are very tightly locked down. PDAs with phone capability have some possibilities (although even then I suspect you won't be able to get at the lower layers), but you won't get into a mobile phone.
There's two main reasons. Firstly it gives them better security if they know the phones on their network have their software locked down tight; and secondly it lets them charge extra for downloading add-on programs.
Grab.
The B&MGF has also put a large amount of money into research on Third World disease prevention, for one thing. I don't keep real close tabs on everything they do, but this one was in the news not long back. You think they're doing this to play their money better? I really don't think so.
You might say that the "self-serving reason" is self-publicity. You can't prove that though (and I can't prove it isn't), so the only people who know the truth are B&MG. You might say they should donate anonymously, but that ain't an option for a billion-dollar operation like the B&MGF - everything needs to be audited, and large donations become public knowledge.
Re your PC assertion, I challenge you to find me a major (top-20 US-wide) manufacturer selling desktop PCs preloaded with Linux and OpenOffice. No? Then why do you think the B&MGF should pay *extra* to get them? (And it will cost extra, because the major cost to the manufacturer is not licensing fees but technician time, and a non-standard install costs extra technician time.) Also, if the charity wants to use OpenOffice then they're perfectly free to download it or get it off a magazine coverdisk, like the rest of the world - possession of one office suite does not prevent you owning another, so that's not locking anyone out.
As for locking out other places donating hardware, that's pure bullshit. Sure, if you've had some shiny new hardware donated, you don't need some old stuff. But check round the list of charities, and you'll find 99% of them *aren't* getting money off the B&MGF, and they'll be happy to take it. If it's really old then they'll turn it down, but that's pure practicality - I wouldn't expect any charity to be grateful for the donation of a 486SX25, would you?
Grab.
It's been in NewScientist too. None of them are saying "yes, it's definitely fusion" - once bitten, and all that. But they are saying that there's something going on which isn't readily explainable. I suspect we can discount measurement errors, since it's been reproduced. A novel chemical process is a possibility (maybe some incredible catalyst that no-one's yet discovered). Or it could really be fusion.
Not being a free-energy conspiracy-theory wierdo, I wouldn't like to guess either way. But *something* interesting is happening in there, whichever way it goes.
Grab.
The general process required is that a change can be tracked from a customer request, through the design, to a code file, and back up the V (or round the spiral) to the testing/verification/validation used to make sure that the design and code do what the customer asked for. And then that you can track all the changes that went into a particular version build, which means recording what files you used to build it.
:-)
How do you do that? I don't care, and nor does Sarbanes-Oxley. We used to use Access databases at our place (and still do on some projects). Other projects use a tool called Visual Intercept, which I'd recommend people avoid like a rabid maneating tiger. Some projects have even used Excel (heavens preserve us!). Or simply use multiple text files (checked into your version control system of choice), one per customer request. Or Bugzilla or any number of other tools will serve your purpose. Tracking versions of files could involve some hugely complex build system, or it could just involve slapping a label across the files and doing "get all".
But if you don't grok the basic premise that every line in your code must be attributable to a customer request, then no tool you can buy will help you. This is a process you need to follow, not a magic-bullet tool you can install and everything will be fine. Repeat after me - There Is No Quick Fix For Quality.
The most important thing you can do make sure your system works is therefore to review each change before it gets signed off to make sure changes are complete. That doesn't just mean reviewing that files are changed, but that they're all checked in under version control, AND that the change details (however you do it) are fully filled in. Even if there's automated fields to list all files and their versions in, review them anyway - there's bound to be cases where someone says "well I've got one test file listed, so that'll keep the tool happy, never mind about the other 20".
Grab.
Problem then is that everyone gets their own instances, so nothing you do in that instance affects the rest of the world. Which I think is what the parent post was meaning.
Actually mostly rich old people. Also a large number are political appointees from previous governments. They also had something like "Lords Idol" not long back where many of them lost their seats in the Lords (and incidentally this *was* supported by the Lords - they're mostly *not* self-indulgent yahoos). There are also a few bishops, and a few senior judges.
The point is that the Commons don't need to consider anything longer-term than 4 years, and in fact getting them to think longer term than a few months is a bit of an achievement. Yes, the Lords represent the status quo, and that's a *good* thing - it means that anything affecting the country long-term gets some serious consideration. The Commons certainly won't do that. No elected politician will give a shit about how it'll affect his grandkids, cos all he cares about is the next election. It's only the Lords that has any stake in preserving the country's long-term interests, and they can *only* do that by being unelected. Even if we assume they're only in it to benefit their families, their families make their money from investments and land ownership, so they need the economy to work and their tenants to make money to pay the rents, which has pretty much the same effect. That's why the Lords returns all those knee-jerk proposals back to the Commons for rewriting.
I'd personally prefer a lottery system to randomly choose people for the Lords, but as an alternative, whose daddy fought with Henry VIII is better than most of the alternatives.
What's the alternative anyway? The US system doesn't work - it's even more class-ridden and prone to nepotism than the British one, and all it takes is money to buy positions of power. How fucked up is that? The US even allows one single person to stand at the top and send the country to war, which in any other country would be called a dictatorship.
To be honest, the only good system for choosing representatives is the British jury system, which picks 12 people at random. (None of the jury-picking of the US system.) The same system applied to government would be great. It ain't ever likely to happen though, sadly. In its absence, you just need to find a least worst option, and the Brits have got something which, whilst not perfect, does a good job.
Grab.
So you thought there *were* significant differences before this...?
As you said at the end, "folks are folks, wherever". Does you really need evidence to show this?
That's a fair point. Proof or otherwise of God's existence isn't possible.
Rephrase: "Your maths/physics can't solve the problem, therefore this proves that they're going to go wherever God tells them to go." Now *that* would be dumb, and that's the situation we're in...