Oh, of course - flashy graphics, incomprehensible (or arguably non-existant) plotline, strange things suddenly pop up for reasons never explained. And lots of shit blowing up.
Tell the truth - did _anyone_ understand that film? And if so, how?
Not too surprising really. Consider the non-Internet version:-
"There was a murder right in front of this shop's video camera. We've got film of someone who looks like you shooting that guy. Your move."
In other words, it's always been that way. If there's evidence which appears to incriminate you beyond reasonable doubt, it's your job to prove it wasn't you. In the video example, proving you were elsewhere at the time would do - the police then have to find someone else who looks like you who hasn't got an alibi. In the proxy-logs situation, you have to show that you weren't logged in at that point.
Grab.
PS. I know murder and spamming through a proxy aren't equivalent crimes, so don't get on my case for that.
They won't have to pay to buy the tab, but they'll still have to pay if they perform it for money. If they don't charge for it, they don't pay. But Metallica would pay to perform and record "Ecstacy of Gold", Mike Flowers Pops would pay to perform and record "Wonderwall", etc.
I certainly, in the hundreds of gigs I've played, have never been required to list by the dollar and dime which of the popular slop I am playing I owe royalties on.
I'm afraid you have. The fact that you haven't done it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility. If you're ever playing copyright songs for money, there's a fee per song. Larger organisations may wangle a "block booking", but I'd ask to see the documents b4 I'd trust them.
If you don't pay your taxes and you don't get any letters chasing you for them, does that mean you're no longer liable to pay tax? Of course not. Same thing here.
Of course, most part-time pub bands will get away without paying the royalties. But if Metallica cover "Ecstacy of Gold" by Ennio Morricone then they'll be paying a fee per recording and per performance to use that song, unless Morricone (or his publishers) make it public domain. Harry Fox is merely the collection agency, contracted by the music companies to collect royalties owing to songwriters. How they collect and who they collect from is their business - at some point it'll cost more to chase all the little pub bands than they'd get back in royalties.
I agree the time period is too long (myself, I'd look at around 10 years for copyright of anything, maybe 20 at most), but that's the way the rules work ATM, right or wrong.
If you ever had antibiotics, been vaccinated, or needed any sort of surgery, then quit whining. You're only alive bcos ppl used animal experiments to work out what was happening. Would you rather your kids/family died than that animal experiments were done? bcos this is absolutely an either/or. There is no third choice. Experiments on tissue samples don't give the full picture, and there isn't a mathematical model that'll simulate an animal properly.
So how's this useful then? Well, think Christopher Reeve, or any other patient with spinal damage - if you can wire up to the brain then you can bypass the damaged section and let them control their bodies again. Or anyone who's lost a limb could be given an artificial one which works properly ("Luke Skywalker" hand, for instance)- current ones are all just kludges.
If you see this as plain wrong, you're likely in the minority. Explain _why_ we don't have a right to be doing this. Animals do NOT have the same rights as humans, otherwise we wouldn't be eating them - that's a fact of every culture on the planet. And I do eat them, and enjoy doing it.
But the comment about network computers (dumb terminals) - nope. Dumb terminals flourish in an environment where the processing power required is significant and the display and/or interaction required is insignificant. Nearly all modern applications (games, WYSIWYG office applications, etc) require significant display capacities, and passing these over a network just isn't on - the investment required in the network becomes larger than the investment in computers.
As for "the market is always right", I can come up with several cases against that.
The first one is that where there is only a monopoly to choose from, you're stuffed. As an example, consider phone lines. 10 years ago in the UK, you had the choice of having a phone or not having a phone. There were no alternative carriers, no other solutions to the "final mile" - you paid BT your money or you lived without a phone, and as a monopoly, they could charge what they liked. This is still the case in many areas, particularly if you live in the country. And they're busy suppressing ADSL and fixed-price access too - it's actually taken government intervention to get them to talk about these, and they're still stalling. Microsoft fits rather well into this category - the simple fact is that in most cases you have to buy Microsoft software or you can't do your job.
The second one is that when what the whole industry is doing is unsafe, dangerous or immoral, the government MUST act to protect the public. Examples here would be nuclear industry regulations to stop another Three Mile Island, or bans on disposing of asbestos in landfill sites. Or, in the UK now, bans on certain types of animal feeds which can cause CJD or foot-and-mouth. Or, last century, banning the slave trade.
To extend the libertarian analogy, consider Nixon. He gained power and used his position to order criminal activities. But the market chose to go with him, and the market is always right... Libertarianism is of the same level of impact as communism, in that it's a lovely idea which just can't work in the real world - as soon as anyone abuses the system, the whole thing falls apart.
Remember that Columbus thought it was India! Hence the name "Red Indian" which persists today.
Sounds like a pretty damn good analogy for what seems to have happened, thinking about it. No matter what the process actually was, something interesting did happen. So despite them being (possibly) wrong about what it actually was, it's still worth investigating.
Hmm. Exactly 75%, eh? Does this sound like a "pull numbers out of my ass" situation to anyone? Or did they use a seriously small sample (say, 8 or 12 ppl)?
IMO, it will work. Maybe ppl use their PCs for different things at different times - OK, so we need to make each one of those things easier to use.
In this case the PC is merely the environment in which the application runs, and the application itself is what needs to be the appliance. For the kitchen analogy, the PC and its OS merely provide the work surface to support the appliances, the power supply to drive the appliances, and (if required) the squeegy-mop to clean up when they go wrong and spew cake-mix everywhere!:-)
As an example, consider MS Excel. Say you want to draw up a spreadsheet, and sort out the layout of it - not too radical. The most common features you'll use are inserting and deleting rows and columns. Why then: (a) are the insert and delete row and column buttons not on the toolbar by default; (b) are the insert and delete menu options on different menus; (c) does the delete option require a further selection to do it? Things like that get in the way of useability. The ability to customise toolbars and menus to your liking allows advanced users to put obscure things they do more frequently somewhere where they can access them easily, but the essential point is that the default configuration MUST be totally user-friendly, so that anyone can (with a bit of experimenting) use the newly-installed package to do productive stuff with.
Certainly there's things required of the OS, but you shouldn't have to know about them. If you had to crawl around in a cupboard for 5 minutes every day just to turn your kettle on, you'd not be too impressed!:-) The ideal OS really is one which _isn't_ _visible_, just as a home-owner doesn't need to know exactly where the wires run, only that flicking the switch (which is conveniently next to the socket, and nicely obvious) will turn the socket on.
In quality and reliability, there's a thing called the "bathtub curve". At the start and finish of the product's life, the probability of failure is high, and it drops down to a valley in between which is the normal running life, where probability of failure is low.
This is not the same as saying that the probability of failure is zero.
So your CPU failed early - you maybe got caught by the front end of the curve. Or maybe you were within the "normal running" section, but just got unlucky.
Point is, things still break down. Shit happens. Mobos and CPUs aren't 100% tested, they rely on the process being 99.99...% reliable, and sometimes you just get one of the 0.00..1% ones. Given the millions of PC chips produced each year, I'd be surprised if some didn't fail early.
Modern things being unreliable is really a myth anyway. Old cars were constantly in and out of the garage being fixed, and drop rust like snowflakes. Old hard drives were hopelessly unreliable, and old floppy drives tended to eat disks for breakfast. Old memory needed error-checking (remember parity memory?) so that the CPU/BIOS could detect when it got corrupted.
What old things do survive are the ones which were incredibly overengineered in their time - old houses, some old cars, etc. And a few old computers. Overengineering is an option, but you always have to spend more money to buy something that's overengineered, and the general concensus around ppl who buy hardware is that they want it cheap - they don't think about much else, except maybe for speed. And rightly so, if they're going to be upgrading in 2 years time - you really don't need the overengineering to make something last 10 years. So there isn't much overengineered computer stuff out there, simply bcos no-one wants it. You may all say you want ultra-reliable hardware that'll last 20 years, but in the end you'll always buy a $1000 system instead of a $2000 system, if the two have exactly the same specs.
Check out NASA's history with balloons. And Richard Branson (and various others)'s attempts at round-the-world. Balloons are _not_ the easy option they look...
Hmm, modded down as offtopic for pointing out the April 1st connection!:-( The film is definitely non-existant anyway.
There's plenty of trolls out there (and you may be trolling now for all I know:-) so ignore them. Email's much easier for ignoring stuff, you just hit the "delete" key. Not much help, I know, but spam's like that. Being listed as a bloke, I get various dodgy crap which I just have to delete, mostly unread (it's usually pretty obvious from the titles what they are).
/. certainly isn't for the thin-skinned, but then if you post an opinion then you're usually disagreeing with someone, so expect other ppl to disagree with you in turn. Looking at your info, your last 2 notes led to quite a variety of posts, and I didn't notice any with heavy personal attacks. Plenty disagreeing, some strongly, but that's it.
And I wish you better luck with your next date! Look on the bright side, at least you know now that he's not worth bothering with!:-/
Dead right, they shouldn't be in _business_ at all. But providing a public service is a different matter. Basic services - roads, water supplies, drainage, electricity, gas, phone connections - there's no reason for privatisation. As you say, a little competition makes the difference, but they're simply constructing *artificial* competition where there's no reason for it. Why privatise up the railways, when you don't have a choice of which train you take? Or why privatise water or gas supplies, when it's all connected to the same place, and the only difference is who charges you the bills?
About the only thing left now is the military. I'm waiting for them to announce that they're all going to be split up into separate mercenary troops.:-)
Sorry, but public services in the UK are in the process of being sold off to private enterprises, and have been for the last couple of decades. I won't discuss subsidised coal-mining and stuff like that - that's not a service. But of the others:-
(1) Busses. If you can find a free parking space in town, it's a damn sight cheaper to use your car. It costs me £1.20 for a 10-minute bus journey, which isn't exactly an incentive.
(2) Trains. As a single national network, they could plan nationally. Split into multiple companies running different sections of railway, and yet another company responsible for maintaining tracks, the result is chaos. And when anything does go wrong, they just play "pass-the-blame" around the various companies instead of actually fixing it.
(3) Telecoms. Instead of providing a service to the ppl of the UK, BT (the national carrier) charges way over the odds, and is busy screwing all the country's ISPs as hard as it can. This has gone to the extent that the government regulator is having to step in and tell BT what to do. As an example, BT is doing its level best to stop anyone installing ADSL, simply bcos it's got a monopoly on ISDN lines. If it needs the government to tell them what to do, why not have the government running it in the first place and cut out the middle-man?
The only reasons private enterprise can work better than publicly-funded government departments is (a) where there are economies of scale, and (b) where the expertise is seriously esoteric. When the government itself has the economy of scale (as it often does), there's no point contracting out; and when the expertise required is merely that of running a business effectively (as with the railways), there's no skills required which any manager anywhere couldn't do. I'll grant you, government departments may be inefficient, but that's just due to poor management and the "corporate style", not to any inherent feature of the job, so all they need is training on how to do it properly. Long-term, training is always cheaper than getting "hired guns".
Sounds more like a report on a fight in a cocktail bar.
"And as the B-52s fly overhead, the yuppies make a frontal assault with a round of Harvey Wallbangers, but are held off by a group of underdressed women with repeating Pina Coladas."
Sorry, I'm not sure where I was going with that. I think I should stop now.:-)
Answer: It may do, unless the tapes in question are in heavily-EM-shielded cases. However, since they will be, in very quick succession, toasted by the heat wave and blown apart by the shock front, this is rather immaterial. And even if they are outside this radius, the fallout will prevent anyone from using them for some time. Assuming anyone survives the bombing, and that they're not blinded by the flash.
In other words, whether your copy of Baywatch survives is likely fairly low down the list of priorities when a nuclear bomb goes off above you.
Nope. Some fashion designer actually had a model wearing a set of these (styled better!) along with a cheetah-type outfit. Walking slowly, it does convert your gait into that "stalking" movement that big cats have, and running seemed to have the same kind of big-cat look to it.
The film of the model doing it is an advert over here in the UK, and has been around for a year or so.
The amount of force you'd put on it is definitely quite large, but it's a known quantity. So you can get your spring steel made up to right specifications, and you're OK. Incidentally, if you watch the film, the curved struts at the back do actually bend quite considerably on impact.
What it doesn't discuss is what happens if a strut breaks from metal fatigue. I imagine some serious body protection would be a good idea.
Yeah. You'd have thought the starship designers would have learned not to put explosives in the consoles after the first few "accidents", wouldn't you? But no...
One hint - it worked for me. Find a martial arts class, one NOT attended by anyone from your school, and for preference a more "traditional" type one rather than a "freestyle beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other" one. What you get out of it isn't necessarily the skills to fight back (although it does help!) but it gives you back your self-confidence. It's not an overnight thing, but you look round in a year or two's time, and suddenly find someone's poured a couple of pounds of guts into you.
It doesn't mean that other kids won't take the piss - nothing stops that. But it teaches you to control yourself, and to know that whatever they say, although it hurts, it's not important. Self-respect is the single most important thing you can have.
Depends. AMD and Intel were identical up to the 486, but Intel added extra commands to the Pentium. So it depends if the beasty only uses x86 code or whether it uses any Pentium-specific extensions. IIRC the Pentium-specific stuff was all about throwing data around quickly so I doubt those extensions would be relevant to a virus - in which case AMD would be vulnerable.
But it definitely won't corrupt files on your Sun, PowerPC, Mac or Amiga. Might crash it though - the code wouldn't make much sense on those platforms, which might have some odd effects.
Remember, this is written in ASSEMBLER. Assembler is the level BELOW compiled code. So if you can do it in compiled code, you can do it (albeit with some difficulty!) in assembler. The file systems are different? OK then, it'll have two separate parts then, one for each OS. Not a problem, it just has to know how each file system constructs its files.
The key thing though is that it can ONLY affect PCs. Other platforms are completely immune - they speak another language entirely (although they may crash when fed a bit of code which looks like total garbage to them). Chances are (from the article) it's specific to Intel Pentiums and above, too, so AMD may be immune as well. Interestingly, it's not really a virus either, since it doesn't attempt to provide a transmission vector to other machines - guess that's why it's just a proof-of-concept rather than an active, in-the-wild one.
The Windows email virii have spread by being written in languages - Javascript and VBS - which are platform-independent, to get the maximum possible coverage. It's interesting that this one has managed to bust its way in by going completely in the other direction - making itself specific enough to the platform that it can work its way in. This is a real "back to basics" approach to virus-writing which hasn't been around since the early days of floppy disks.
I think (without knowing the toy in question) that yours is just relying on persistence of vision as the ring goes round. You can buy (or build) little clocks consisting of a column of LEDs on the end of a stick (or pendulumn), and as you wave the stick around, the LEDs change their display. Persistence of vision makes you see the brighter LED image for longer, so it looks like the message is written in the air. I think there's a version called the SpaceWriter.
Point is, with the SpaceWriter system the LED has to physically go through the location where you want the pixel. That's the difference - Actuality's one uses projection to do it, so the LEDs stay fixed in the base of the unit. If you had a pillar of LEDs flying around, (a) it'd be difficult to get it to move fast enough, and (b) it'd get in the way of viewing the image from all sides.
They're definitely missing a trick anyway by not using a version of the Princess Leia film!:-)
Not quite. Disney can pay zillions to be top in a search for "animation techniques", but they're actually not a reference site for learning how to do animation. Ditto a search for "electronic circuit design" - Intel could pay to be listed on there, but you're not going to find much info about designing electronics on their site. Paying for listing on those kind of things simply increases the noise, whereas Google's system looks for sites which are popular references on a subject.
But you're right in some ways, too. If you search for "children's toy company" or something (and temporarily ignoring the other 'toys' listed;-) then pay-per-listing is more likely to show you ToySmart or whoever (are they still going? can't remember), which you actually want.
Good points and bad points about both. I think the best would be a two-tier system - a pay-per-listing one for commercial stuff (Amazon, etc) and a free one with a reference-check system for information-search purposes. Maybe the pay-per-listing could subsidise the free one?
Slashdot Mirror
So how are they going to do this?
Oh, of course - flashy graphics, incomprehensible (or arguably non-existant) plotline, strange things suddenly pop up for reasons never explained. And lots of shit blowing up.
Tell the truth - did _anyone_ understand that film? And if so, how?
Grab.
Not too surprising really. Consider the non-Internet version:-
"There was a murder right in front of this shop's video camera. We've got film of someone who looks like you shooting that guy. Your move."
In other words, it's always been that way. If there's evidence which appears to incriminate you beyond reasonable doubt, it's your job to prove it wasn't you. In the video example, proving you were elsewhere at the time would do - the police then have to find someone else who looks like you who hasn't got an alibi. In the proxy-logs situation, you have to show that you weren't logged in at that point.
Grab.
PS. I know murder and spamming through a proxy aren't equivalent crimes, so don't get on my case for that.
They won't have to pay to buy the tab, but they'll still have to pay if they perform it for money. If they don't charge for it, they don't pay. But Metallica would pay to perform and record "Ecstacy of Gold", Mike Flowers Pops would pay to perform and record "Wonderwall", etc.
Grab.
I certainly, in the hundreds of gigs I've played, have never been required to list by the dollar and dime which of the popular slop I am playing I owe royalties on.
I'm afraid you have. The fact that you haven't done it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility. If you're ever playing copyright songs for money, there's a fee per song. Larger organisations may wangle a "block booking", but I'd ask to see the documents b4 I'd trust them.
If you don't pay your taxes and you don't get any letters chasing you for them, does that mean you're no longer liable to pay tax? Of course not. Same thing here.
Of course, most part-time pub bands will get away without paying the royalties. But if Metallica cover "Ecstacy of Gold" by Ennio Morricone then they'll be paying a fee per recording and per performance to use that song, unless Morricone (or his publishers) make it public domain. Harry Fox is merely the collection agency, contracted by the music companies to collect royalties owing to songwriters. How they collect and who they collect from is their business - at some point it'll cost more to chase all the little pub bands than they'd get back in royalties.
I agree the time period is too long (myself, I'd look at around 10 years for copyright of anything, maybe 20 at most), but that's the way the rules work ATM, right or wrong.
Grab.
Eel, rat, monkey, human when it's worked out.
If you ever had antibiotics, been vaccinated, or needed any sort of surgery, then quit whining. You're only alive bcos ppl used animal experiments to work out what was happening. Would you rather your kids/family died than that animal experiments were done? bcos this is absolutely an either/or. There is no third choice. Experiments on tissue samples don't give the full picture, and there isn't a mathematical model that'll simulate an animal properly.
So how's this useful then? Well, think Christopher Reeve, or any other patient with spinal damage - if you can wire up to the brain then you can bypass the damaged section and let them control their bodies again. Or anyone who's lost a limb could be given an artificial one which works properly ("Luke Skywalker" hand, for instance)- current ones are all just kludges.
If you see this as plain wrong, you're likely in the minority. Explain _why_ we don't have a right to be doing this. Animals do NOT have the same rights as humans, otherwise we wouldn't be eating them - that's a fact of every culture on the planet. And I do eat them, and enjoy doing it.
Grab.
You're dead right on the internet thing.
But the comment about network computers (dumb terminals) - nope. Dumb terminals flourish in an environment where the processing power required is significant and the display and/or interaction required is insignificant. Nearly all modern applications (games, WYSIWYG office applications, etc) require significant display capacities, and passing these over a network just isn't on - the investment required in the network becomes larger than the investment in computers.
As for "the market is always right", I can come up with several cases against that.
The first one is that where there is only a monopoly to choose from, you're stuffed. As an example, consider phone lines. 10 years ago in the UK, you had the choice of having a phone or not having a phone. There were no alternative carriers, no other solutions to the "final mile" - you paid BT your money or you lived without a phone, and as a monopoly, they could charge what they liked. This is still the case in many areas, particularly if you live in the country. And they're busy suppressing ADSL and fixed-price access too - it's actually taken government intervention to get them to talk about these, and they're still stalling. Microsoft fits rather well into this category - the simple fact is that in most cases you have to buy Microsoft software or you can't do your job.
The second one is that when what the whole industry is doing is unsafe, dangerous or immoral, the government MUST act to protect the public. Examples here would be nuclear industry regulations to stop another Three Mile Island, or bans on disposing of asbestos in landfill sites. Or, in the UK now, bans on certain types of animal feeds which can cause CJD or foot-and-mouth. Or, last century, banning the slave trade.
To extend the libertarian analogy, consider Nixon. He gained power and used his position to order criminal activities. But the market chose to go with him, and the market is always right... Libertarianism is of the same level of impact as communism, in that it's a lovely idea which just can't work in the real world - as soon as anyone abuses the system, the whole thing falls apart.
Grab.
Remember that Columbus thought it was India! Hence the name "Red Indian" which persists today.
Sounds like a pretty damn good analogy for what seems to have happened, thinking about it. No matter what the process actually was, something interesting did happen. So despite them being (possibly) wrong about what it actually was, it's still worth investigating.
Grab.
Hmm. Exactly 75%, eh? Does this sound like a "pull numbers out of my ass" situation to anyone? Or did they use a seriously small sample (say, 8 or 12 ppl)?
Grab.
IMO, it will work. Maybe ppl use their PCs for different things at different times - OK, so we need to make each one of those things easier to use.
:-)
:-) The ideal OS really is one which _isn't_ _visible_, just as a home-owner doesn't need to know exactly where the wires run, only that flicking the switch (which is conveniently next to the socket, and nicely obvious) will turn the socket on.
In this case the PC is merely the environment in which the application runs, and the application itself is what needs to be the appliance. For the kitchen analogy, the PC and its OS merely provide the work surface to support the appliances, the power supply to drive the appliances, and (if required) the squeegy-mop to clean up when they go wrong and spew cake-mix everywhere!
As an example, consider MS Excel. Say you want to draw up a spreadsheet, and sort out the layout of it - not too radical. The most common features you'll use are inserting and deleting rows and columns. Why then: (a) are the insert and delete row and column buttons not on the toolbar by default; (b) are the insert and delete menu options on different menus; (c) does the delete option require a further selection to do it? Things like that get in the way of useability. The ability to customise toolbars and menus to your liking allows advanced users to put obscure things they do more frequently somewhere where they can access them easily, but the essential point is that the default configuration MUST be totally user-friendly, so that anyone can (with a bit of experimenting) use the newly-installed package to do productive stuff with.
Certainly there's things required of the OS, but you shouldn't have to know about them. If you had to crawl around in a cupboard for 5 minutes every day just to turn your kettle on, you'd not be too impressed!
Grab.
In quality and reliability, there's a thing called the "bathtub curve". At the start and finish of the product's life, the probability of failure is high, and it drops down to a valley in between which is the normal running life, where probability of failure is low.
This is not the same as saying that the probability of failure is zero.
So your CPU failed early - you maybe got caught by the front end of the curve. Or maybe you were within the "normal running" section, but just got unlucky.
Point is, things still break down. Shit happens. Mobos and CPUs aren't 100% tested, they rely on the process being 99.99...% reliable, and sometimes you just get one of the 0.00..1% ones. Given the millions of PC chips produced each year, I'd be surprised if some didn't fail early.
Modern things being unreliable is really a myth anyway. Old cars were constantly in and out of the garage being fixed, and drop rust like snowflakes. Old hard drives were hopelessly unreliable, and old floppy drives tended to eat disks for breakfast. Old memory needed error-checking (remember parity memory?) so that the CPU/BIOS could detect when it got corrupted.
What old things do survive are the ones which were incredibly overengineered in their time - old houses, some old cars, etc. And a few old computers. Overengineering is an option, but you always have to spend more money to buy something that's overengineered, and the general concensus around ppl who buy hardware is that they want it cheap - they don't think about much else, except maybe for speed. And rightly so, if they're going to be upgrading in 2 years time - you really don't need the overengineering to make something last 10 years. So there isn't much overengineered computer stuff out there, simply bcos no-one wants it. You may all say you want ultra-reliable hardware that'll last 20 years, but in the end you'll always buy a $1000 system instead of a $2000 system, if the two have exactly the same specs.
Grab.
Check out NASA's history with balloons. And Richard Branson (and various others)'s attempts at round-the-world. Balloons are _not_ the easy option they look...
Grab.
Hmm, modded down as offtopic for pointing out the April 1st connection! :-( The film is definitely non-existant anyway.
:-) so ignore them. Email's much easier for ignoring stuff, you just hit the "delete" key. Not much help, I know, but spam's like that. Being listed as a bloke, I get various dodgy crap which I just have to delete, mostly unread (it's usually pretty obvious from the titles what they are).
:-/
There's plenty of trolls out there (and you may be trolling now for all I know
/. certainly isn't for the thin-skinned, but then if you post an opinion then you're usually disagreeing with someone, so expect other ppl to disagree with you in turn. Looking at your info, your last 2 notes led to quite a variety of posts, and I didn't notice any with heavy personal attacks. Plenty disagreeing, some strongly, but that's it.
And I wish you better luck with your next date! Look on the bright side, at least you know now that he's not worth bothering with!
Grab.
Dead right, they shouldn't be in _business_ at all. But providing a public service is a different matter. Basic services - roads, water supplies, drainage, electricity, gas, phone connections - there's no reason for privatisation. As you say, a little competition makes the difference, but they're simply constructing *artificial* competition where there's no reason for it. Why privatise up the railways, when you don't have a choice of which train you take? Or why privatise water or gas supplies, when it's all connected to the same place, and the only difference is who charges you the bills?
:-)
About the only thing left now is the military. I'm waiting for them to announce that they're all going to be split up into separate mercenary troops.
Grab.
Sorry, but public services in the UK are in the process of being sold off to private enterprises, and have been for the last couple of decades. I won't discuss subsidised coal-mining and stuff like that - that's not a service. But of the others:-
(1) Busses. If you can find a free parking space in town, it's a damn sight cheaper to use your car. It costs me £1.20 for a 10-minute bus journey, which isn't exactly an incentive.
(2) Trains. As a single national network, they could plan nationally. Split into multiple companies running different sections of railway, and yet another company responsible for maintaining tracks, the result is chaos. And when anything does go wrong, they just play "pass-the-blame" around the various companies instead of actually fixing it.
(3) Telecoms. Instead of providing a service to the ppl of the UK, BT (the national carrier) charges way over the odds, and is busy screwing all the country's ISPs as hard as it can. This has gone to the extent that the government regulator is having to step in and tell BT what to do. As an example, BT is doing its level best to stop anyone installing ADSL, simply bcos it's got a monopoly on ISDN lines. If it needs the government to tell them what to do, why not have the government running it in the first place and cut out the middle-man?
The only reasons private enterprise can work better than publicly-funded government departments is (a) where there are economies of scale, and (b) where the expertise is seriously esoteric. When the government itself has the economy of scale (as it often does), there's no point contracting out; and when the expertise required is merely that of running a business effectively (as with the railways), there's no skills required which any manager anywhere couldn't do. I'll grant you, government departments may be inefficient, but that's just due to poor management and the "corporate style", not to any inherent feature of the job, so all they need is training on how to do it properly. Long-term, training is always cheaper than getting "hired guns".
Grab.
Sounds more like a report on a fight in a cocktail bar.
:-)
"And as the B-52s fly overhead, the yuppies make a frontal assault with a round of Harvey Wallbangers, but are held off by a group of underdressed women with repeating Pina Coladas."
Sorry, I'm not sure where I was going with that. I think I should stop now.
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If they're going to tease you... :-)
Answer: It may do, unless the tapes in question are in heavily-EM-shielded cases. However, since they will be, in very quick succession, toasted by the heat wave and blown apart by the shock front, this is rather immaterial. And even if they are outside this radius, the fallout will prevent anyone from using them for some time. Assuming anyone survives the bombing, and that they're not blinded by the flash.
In other words, whether your copy of Baywatch survives is likely fairly low down the list of priorities when a nuclear bomb goes off above you.
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Nope. Some fashion designer actually had a model wearing a set of these (styled better!) along with a cheetah-type outfit. Walking slowly, it does convert your gait into that "stalking" movement that big cats have, and running seemed to have the same kind of big-cat look to it.
The film of the model doing it is an advert over here in the UK, and has been around for a year or so.
The amount of force you'd put on it is definitely quite large, but it's a known quantity. So you can get your spring steel made up to right specifications, and you're OK. Incidentally, if you watch the film, the curved struts at the back do actually bend quite considerably on impact.
What it doesn't discuss is what happens if a strut breaks from metal fatigue. I imagine some serious body protection would be a good idea.
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Yeah. You'd have thought the starship designers would have learned not to put explosives in the consoles after the first few "accidents", wouldn't you? But no...
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Someone's not read their guide to Franglais. Or has had a sense of humour bypass... ;-)
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Hang on in there.
One hint - it worked for me. Find a martial arts class, one NOT attended by anyone from your school, and for preference a more "traditional" type one rather than a "freestyle beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other" one. What you get out of it isn't necessarily the skills to fight back (although it does help!) but it gives you back your self-confidence. It's not an overnight thing, but you look round in a year or two's time, and suddenly find someone's poured a couple of pounds of guts into you.
It doesn't mean that other kids won't take the piss - nothing stops that. But it teaches you to control yourself, and to know that whatever they say, although it hurts, it's not important. Self-respect is the single most important thing you can have.
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Depends. AMD and Intel were identical up to the 486, but Intel added extra commands to the Pentium. So it depends if the beasty only uses x86 code or whether it uses any Pentium-specific extensions. IIRC the Pentium-specific stuff was all about throwing data around quickly so I doubt those extensions would be relevant to a virus - in which case AMD would be vulnerable.
But it definitely won't corrupt files on your Sun, PowerPC, Mac or Amiga. Might crash it though - the code wouldn't make much sense on those platforms, which might have some odd effects.
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Remember, this is written in ASSEMBLER. Assembler is the level BELOW compiled code. So if you can do it in compiled code, you can do it (albeit with some difficulty!) in assembler. The file systems are different? OK then, it'll have two separate parts then, one for each OS. Not a problem, it just has to know how each file system constructs its files.
The key thing though is that it can ONLY affect PCs. Other platforms are completely immune - they speak another language entirely (although they may crash when fed a bit of code which looks like total garbage to them). Chances are (from the article) it's specific to Intel Pentiums and above, too, so AMD may be immune as well. Interestingly, it's not really a virus either, since it doesn't attempt to provide a transmission vector to other machines - guess that's why it's just a proof-of-concept rather than an active, in-the-wild one.
The Windows email virii have spread by being written in languages - Javascript and VBS - which are platform-independent, to get the maximum possible coverage. It's interesting that this one has managed to bust its way in by going completely in the other direction - making itself specific enough to the platform that it can work its way in. This is a real "back to basics" approach to virus-writing which hasn't been around since the early days of floppy disks.
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I think (without knowing the toy in question) that yours is just relying on persistence of vision as the ring goes round. You can buy (or build) little clocks consisting of a column of LEDs on the end of a stick (or pendulumn), and as you wave the stick around, the LEDs change their display. Persistence of vision makes you see the brighter LED image for longer, so it looks like the message is written in the air. I think there's a version called the SpaceWriter.
:-)
Point is, with the SpaceWriter system the LED has to physically go through the location where you want the pixel. That's the difference - Actuality's one uses projection to do it, so the LEDs stay fixed in the base of the unit. If you had a pillar of LEDs flying around, (a) it'd be difficult to get it to move fast enough, and (b) it'd get in the way of viewing the image from all sides.
They're definitely missing a trick anyway by not using a version of the Princess Leia film!
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Damn, I wish I had mod points for that one! :-)
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Not quite. Disney can pay zillions to be top in a search for "animation techniques", but they're actually not a reference site for learning how to do animation. Ditto a search for "electronic circuit design" - Intel could pay to be listed on there, but you're not going to find much info about designing electronics on their site. Paying for listing on those kind of things simply increases the noise, whereas Google's system looks for sites which are popular references on a subject.
;-) then pay-per-listing is more likely to show you ToySmart or whoever (are they still going? can't remember), which you actually want.
But you're right in some ways, too. If you search for "children's toy company" or something (and temporarily ignoring the other 'toys' listed
Good points and bad points about both. I think the best would be a two-tier system - a pay-per-listing one for commercial stuff (Amazon, etc) and a free one with a reference-check system for information-search purposes. Maybe the pay-per-listing could subsidise the free one?
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