How can poor Percy know if a seed is mutated or not?
You know, i've figured out what this reminds me of. Salem. Traditional witchhunts. And why?
Because Percy has to test every single plant on his farm for contamination, and unless he's got a very sophisticated lab on the farm, there's only one simple test I can think of right now.
Just spray the whole farm with Roundup. Any plant that survives is a non-licensed Monsanto product and should be destroyed. Easy, and cheap.
After all, everyone knows witches float 'cos they're made of wood?
Hmm, i'm getting a severe disconnect here. So, since harvesting and replanting are what s33d h4x0rz do, just what exactly have 3000 generations of farmers been up to behind the "nothing going on here, just sowing and reaping, move along now" publicity smokescreen?
But more seriously, this case just shows, again, why we are not (will never be?) ready for licensed self-replicating organisms. The fact is, pollen flies on the wind, birds move seeds around, mammals move seeds around, insect move pollen around, seeds fly on the wind, are washed downstream by the rain, get stuck to tyres... basically anything with DNA in it is a highly optimised self-replicator, and no amount spent on lawyers is going to fix that.
Monsanto's business model for GM product can only work if they can prevent or outlaw the very mechanisms which have enabled Monsanto executives to evolve (sic) in the first place. A more religious man than I would describe it as a sin. I just describe it as deceiving their shareholders if they really claim the GM model will ever be profitable. After all, if the GM organisms are 'superior', then eventually they WILL colonise and replace all the current 'natural' (quotes because 10,000 years of human civilisation means 'nature' is a construct anyway) varieties in fairly short order anyhow.
I also draw the jury's attention to the Rice Tec Corporation of Alvin, Texas and their ludicrous claim on Basmati Rice, just because it makes me hopping mad every time I think about it
In the European Union you're looking at 'Value Added Tax' - comes in 2 flavours, Standard Rate and lower rate which covers goods the particular country has chosen to protect, usually including books. The lowest Standard Rate is 15% in Luxembourg, the highest 25% (Denmark, Sweden, and neither of them have a lower rate at all)). With 17.5% VAT in the UK, we're a relatively low tax economy by EU standards.
Is that's true, they will need to design software agents.
I Think it's not possible nowadays
If only. They've got a face recognition system called Mandrake already in use in the London Borough of Newham, and a traffic monitoring system (TrafficMaster) using number-plate recognition, currently only to gauge average speeds for traffic flow, but since it works by recognising the vehicles, it certainly counts. There's also a very clever system in development by the Uni's of Leeds and Reading which uses a neural net to identify pedestrians behaving 'suspiciously'.
although you can convert queries to views, you cannot connect plain old Access to views or stored procedures on the server
You connect to a View as an Access 'Linked Table', or in code by appending to the Tabledefs Collection, and when using a DAO OpenRecordset against it, make sure to set the options db_openDynaset and DB_seeChanges if you want to make any changes to the data. And if you don't, use an SP anyway.
For an SP, if it returns rows without input parameters, create a 'Pass-through' query containing "exec " & the SP name. If it requires parameters, use a DAO queryDef object or an ADO Command object (a lot less painful) in code.
I mean, come on, this is VB we're talking about here (in Access drag). It was never likely to be hard, was it?
The French [...] don't have jusidiction [sic] over what yahoo offers outside of France.
But as the story made clear, there's a little gulf between what the court ordered (Yahoo customers in France must not be able to access certain materials) and the implementation chosen by Yahoo to meet this requirement (no-one sees the material as this is easier than detecting users' locations).
It's a scope thing. The court ruling was scoped to cover users in France only. Yahoo chose to expand the scope as the easiest way to meet the court's requirements.
conclusion - the French court's decision has no relevance whatsoever to the availability of the materials in question outside French borders
What, the fully paid-for and credited theft? The one referred to in the Internet Explorer 'Help/About' as follows...
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
My advice to the limeys. We could always use a 51st state. Join us for some real fun, and much better food
OK, no problem.
What's the population of California, 30 million or so?
There were 60 million of us at the last (1991) census, so given the influence of CA in, e.g. and topically, Presidential Electoral College, or the House of Reps, we'll be your very own 900lb Gorilla of a State. Just try electing a non-British president once we're in...
Total domination of one remaining superpower. The Empire Strikes Back?
How is this an assault on PERSONAL PRIVACY? You are sending mail and surfing while on company time and you whine because your employer wants to see how you are using it's resources
Because RIP is not the only new legislation bearing on this matter.
It's going to take a fair bit of fighting in the courts to establish what takes precedence - this aspect of RIP, or either of...
The latest cut of the Data Protection Act, under which it's a criminal offense for the employer to monitor personal communications without the consent of both parties, so long as there's sufficient evidence that the communication is personal (e.g. "[personal]" in the subject), and..
The Human Rights Act, which (at last!) gives us, amongst others, the right to Privacy, and to private personal communications in the workplace.
As was in fact mentioned in the (broadcast) BBC reports on this story this morning on Radio 5. Just before their loopy debate on whether email actually serves any useful purpose whatsoever.
I don't think a team is going to let a robot "borrow" their car...plus in order to have a hope it would have to be either Ferarri or McLaren/Mercades..
Only really applies if the test is specifically about winning the F1 championship. If the test is to see if a computer can beat a topline driver in an F1 car, then just pick up an older car, same model for both the human and the computer - check out the Thoroughbred GP championship to see these glorious cars racing. A couple of Benetton B194's or Lotus 79's would be just as valid a test as F2000's or MP4/17's. They're nowhere near as expensive as you'd think - just check out the small ads in Autosport any week, there's usually a few ex-GP cars there.
Fortunately for Shumacher, in every situation involving other cars with human drivers it would *have* to slow down. "cannot risk to fight for positions in this curve, someone might get hurt."
If that's the case, then judging by Schumacher's record in Championship deciders over the last 6 years, Schumacher wins. He's an awesome driver, no doubt about it, but there's a definite moral vacuum there as well. The occasional red-mist incident is fair enough, most drivers get it from time to time, but ever since his time at Benetton, Schumacher has acted as if he has a god-given right to the Racing Line, something I suspect he learned from Senna.
Whilst I'm posting, this challenge is pretty much the exact reason why F1 (wrongly IMO) banned all the driver aids for the 1994 season - Traction Control, ABS, especially Active Suspension, which was the nearest F1 ever came to having a computer co-driver.
Yup, does anyone remember the command to blank the screen display to make everything run faster?
FAST
and then SLOW to get the display back. FAST/SLOW was the major difference between a zx80 and an 81, from the programmer's POV. on a zx80, there was only FAST.
If you took all the silicon (memory chips, maybe a logic gate or array) out of the board and replaced them with modern production, you could crank it a LOT faster than standard
Ah, but remember that "all the silicon" means 4 chips - the CPU, RAM, ROM and ULA, plus the odd transistor in the (external)power supply and the vidoe modulator. That's the lot. Down from, IIRC, twentysomething chips on a zx80, partly to keep the heat down, partly to keep the cost down, and partly to make it a viable kit for a wide market. This was the machine that really kicked the whole thing off for the UK.
And who can forget the dodgy 16K RAM extension pack? One slight wobble and all your hard work will be gone
true, but then there was the joy of knowing that, since you couldn't possibly type a whole 16k's worth of code before the machine died, you had 'more memory than you could ever, conceivably, need'.
And now I feel cramped with 384MB. Something went wrong, badly, somewhere along the line.
Got our first zx81 in 82 for about 25 quid, secondhand with 16k rampack and an ancient HMV b/w 14" tv thrown in. Not quite as groovy as the PET we had at school, but still. In fact, it's the only platform I ever wrote assembly for. Once I'd written an assembler in zxBASIC, of course. Those were the days. Fast mode (slow as you like!), L-cursor, K-cursor. Some of the best stringhandling in any cut of BASIC back then.
Where does it say.NET will be cross platform. I'd be very surprised if it is. Tom
I've seen very little to say the Common Language Runtime will be cross-platform, although it shouldn't be too much harder to do than it is for the JVM. And as a standard controlled by ECMA, rather than a proprietary product like the JVM it's likely to happen
But.net isn't just the CLR..net is also about SOAP-based 'Web Services', and from that point of view,.net's inherently cross-platform. Not in the 'sub main() runs on any platform' sense, but in the sense that your code running on the CLR can treat a Web Service exposed by, say, a nasty old legacy COBOL accounts program on a PDP, or a CORBA component on UNIX (check out this demo from iona.com, as if it were a COM/COM+ component running on Windows. Basically, thru SOAP, (not an MS-only thing),.net apps can not only be considered cross-platform, but actually multi-platform
Remember,.net is a lot more than just the CLR. At TechEd 2000 (byebye karma!), the two buzzphrases the MS guys kept using (and remember they were preaching to the converted) were 'The Web Won', and 'Data is XML is data is XML...'. I came away not just thinking cross-platform, but actually thinking 'so what is the platform now?
quoted from Woody's Office Watch, #5.42 (www.woodyswatch.com) - note that these people are usually MS's friends...
"WOWser Rick Tripple alerted me to yet another truly bizarre
side-effect to installing MSN Explorer Preview 2. Rick says
that if you have an MSN email account - say, woody@msn.com,
for example - installing MSN Explorer Preview 2
*permanently* prevents you from ever using Outlook or
Outlook Express to retrieve mail from that account.
Yeah. You read that right. If you have an @msn.com email
address, and you install MSN Explorer Preview 2, Microsoft
permanently re-routes the MSN email account so all of the
mail that's sent to your @msn.com address actually gets
delivered to Hotmail.
As a result, you can't use Outlook or Outlook Express to
look at your @msn.com mail. You have to use Hotmail.
Period. And if you change your mind about MSN Explorer
Preview 2 and uninstall it - tough cookies, bucko. Your
@msn.com account can't be changed back to the way it was.
What's the big deal, you ask? It's all about access.
Many people use Outlook offline. You probably log on to the
Internet periodically (by clicking the Send/Receive button,
or by setting up Outlook to retrieve messages every 10 or
20 minutes), retrieve incoming messages, disconnect from
the Internet (that's usually automatic after Send/Receive
is done), then work on your email: construct replies,
compose new messages and so on. When you're done with the
current batch of email, you log back onto the Internet (or
Outlook does it for you automatically), send the messages
you typed, and retrieve any new ones that may be hanging
around. That's cool. Lots of people will download their
messages onto a portable computer, then work on their email
while they're riding to work, munching on lunch, or flying
to Timbuktu.
Hotmail's different. In order to use Hotmail, you have to
be connected to the Web, period. You can't see your
messages unless you're connected. You can't reply to them.
You can't even compose a new message, unless you're on the
Web, and everything (including Hotmail) is working. That's
a huge difference, especially if you're accustomed to
working on email while you're on the move.
MSN Explorer Preview 2 will only let you compose messages
when you're online, connected to Hotmail. If you want to
work on email while you're on a plane, well, sorry, that
just isn't possible.
This whole situation is so bizarre, I thought at first that
Rick must've been mistaken. So I contacted the MSN folks at
Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft's PR company), and they pretty
much confirmed everything that Rick was saying."
So apart from p15sing off all your friends, colleagues, clients, customers,...., MSN messenger also forces you to entirely change the way you work with email, like it or not.
The disagreement was whether Europe has become less or more socialistic--
That's one perception, but not the one this reader got.
And we're certainly a lot less socialistic than Willy Brandt, Clement Attlee, Francois Mitterand. The monetarist '80's blew most of the post-war consensus away. And it's highly debatable whether that was a good thing.
And I can't see anything in my post concerning the relative merits of European and US society. Simply a suggestion that if the people of Europe should respect the democratic choices of the American people (which they should), then the obverse applies too. We don't have 'socialistic governments' because they are imposed on us against our will, we have them because majorities in most European countries have voted for parties and policies which are, in comparison to the current norms of US society, relatively socialistic.
I detect an inferiority complex
Odd comment. Based on no evidence in the post, probably intended to be inflammatory, but misses at point blank range due to the fact that I, for one, am extremely proud to live in a society which has a welfare state, in which certain minimum standards of living are guaranteed for all, in which, on short, the idea that we are each responsible for each other's well-being and can never thrive whilst stamping on the heads of others is taken as a given.
Incidentally, is the 'socialistic' Europe the same one where the monarchies all supposedly still have absolute power, or was that a different fantasy Europe?
...and Democracy: (1) The system by which the populations of the member countries of the EU elect the governments which some people choose to describe as "socialistic". (2) The holy grail of the US constitution.
corollary: even Semi-coherent logic doesn't allow an American to claim that 'Democracy' is better then the 'socialistic' systems of Europe.
Eskimo Day (1996) (TV).... James
... aka Interview Day (1996) (TV) (USA)
Mute Witness (1994) (as Mystery Guest Star).... The Reaper ... aka Stumme Zeugin (1995) (Germany)
Foreign Field, A (1993).... Amos ... aka We Shall Meet Again (1993)
Tales from Hollywood (1992) (TV).... Heinrich Mann
Kafka (1991).... The Chief Clerk
Handful of Dust, A (1988).... Mr. Todd
Little Dorrit (1988).... William Dorrit ... aka Little Dorrit's Story (1988) ... aka Nobody's Fault (1988)
Monsignor Quixote (1985) (TV).... Father Quixote
Edwin (1984) (TV).... Sir Fennimore Truscott
Future Schlock (1984).... Man in the White Suit
Passage to India, A (1984).... Professor Godbole
Star Wars (1983) (VG) (voice).... Obi-Wan Kenobi
Lovesick (1983).... Sigmund Freud
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983).... Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi ... aka Return of the Jedi (1983) (USA: short title)
"Smiley's People" (1982) (mini) TV Series.... George Smiley
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1980) (mini) TV Series.... George Smiley
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1980) (TV).... Earl of Dorincourt
Raise the Titanic (1980).... John Bigalow
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980).... Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi ... aka Empire Strikes Back, The (1980) (USA: short title)
To See Such Fun (1977)
Star Wars (1977).... Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi ... aka Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (1980) (USA: new title)
Murder by Death (1976).... Jamesir Bensonmum
Caesar and Cleopatra (1976) (TV).... Julius Caesar
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973).... Pope Innocent III ... aka Fratello sole, sorella luna (1973) (Italy)
Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973).... Adolf Hitler ... aka Ultimi 10 giorni di Hitler, Gli (1973) (Italy)
Cromwell (1970).... King Charles I
E.E. Cummings (1970) (TV)
Scrooge (1970).... Jacob Marley's Ghost
Twelfth Night (1969) (TV).... Malvolio
Conversation at Night (1969) (TV) ... aka Thirty-Minute Theatre: Conversation at Night (1969) (TV) (UK: series title)
Comedians in Africa, The (1967) (uncredited).... Himself
Comedians, The (1967).... Major Jones ... aka Comédiens, Les (1967) (France)
Quiller Memorandum, The (1966).... Pol
Hotel Paradiso (1966).... Benedict Boniface
Pasternak (1965) (uncredited).... Himself
Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious (1965).... Wilhelm Frick
Doctor Zhivago (1965).... Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago
Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964).... Marcus Aurelius
Lawrence of Arabia (1962).... Prince Feisal
H.M.S. Defiant (1962).... Captain Crawford ... aka Damn the Defiant! (1962) (USA)
Majority of One, A (1961).... Koichi Asano
Tunes of Glory (1960).... Major Jock Sinclair
Our Man in Havana (1960).... Jim Wormold
Scapegoat, The (1959).... John Barratt/Jacques De Gue
Horse's Mouth, The (1958).... Gulley Jimson
Barnacle Bill (1957).... William Horatio Ambrose/six ancestors ... aka All at Sea (1957) (USA)
Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957).... Colonel Nicholson
Swan, The (1956).... Prince Albert
Ladykillers, The (1955).... Professor Marcus ... aka Lady Killers, The (1955)
Prisoner, The (1955).... The Cardinal
Rowlandson's England (1955).... (voice)
To Paris with Love (1955).... Col. Sir Edgar Fraser
Stratford Adventure, The (1954)
Father Brown (1954).... Father Brown ... aka Detective, The (1954) (USA)
Malta Story, The (1953).... Flight Lieut. Peter Ross
Square Mile, The (1953) (voice).... Narrator
Captain's Paradise, The (1953).... Captain Henry St. James ... aka Captain's Progress, The (1953) ... aka Paradise (1953)
Card, The (1952).... Edward Henry 'Denry' Machin ... aka Promoter, The (1952) (USA)
Lavender Hill Mob, The (1951).... Holland
Man in the White Suit, The (1951).... Sidney Stratton
Last Holiday (1950).... George Bird
Mudlark, The (1950).... Benjamin Disraeli
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).... Ascoyne d'Ascoyne/Henry d'Ascoyne/Canon d'Ascoyne/Admiral d'Ascoyne//General d'Ascoyne/Lady Agatha d'Ascoyne/Lord d'Ascoyne/Ethelred d'Ascoyne
Run for Your Money, A (1949).... Whimple
Oliver Twist (1948).... Fagin
Great Expectations (1946).... Herbert Pocket
Evensong (1934) (uncredited).... Extra (W.W.I. soldier in concert audience)
(from www.imdb.com) - not hard if you make even the most cursory investigation. Personally, I'll go for The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets
I would suggest reading Locke's Second Treatise for more eloquent discussion about this, as i can hardly do it justice.
Conversely I'd like to bring up Henry David Thoreau, who said, roughly and horribly misquoted, "If you give me the option of obeying an unjust law or going to prison, then I have no choice and must go to prison."
Going down to Colombia and BOMBING all of the cocoa fields there would accomplish more than anything else we've tried in the past 20 years. I'd love to see that done.
Well, unfortunatley you're out of luck. The DEA's current plans don't use bombs. They intend to spray most of Colombia with a clostridium fungus which (a) contravenes all the treaties on Biological Warfare, (b) is known to be highly lethal to people with asthma or otherwise compromised immune systems, and (c) also causes 'collateral damage' such as wiping out crops including potatoes.
Drug education is NOT "this is how you make such and such... make sure you include this, and stir the proper amount."
No, it isn't. But it DOES include things like 'and if you are enough of a blithering idiot to use XXXX, you should be aware that you must drink a lot of water or risk serious damage by dehydration'. It's a harm reduction thing, basically.
Do you honestly condone teaching our nation's youth the quickest way to kill themselves
Now that's just s4!t and you know it. It took my dad less than a second to kill himself by jumping off a building. It takes very little time to jump in front of a car, to drink rat poison, to slit your wrists. It takes 4 minutes to asphyxiate. The liver damage from a paracetamol overdose will kill in under a week. A shotgun in the mouth is pretty quick too. Along with the use of alcohol and tobacco, you are looking at one of the slower means of self-termination here.
You realize that would involve conscripting nearly every male between the ages of 18 and 40, yes? From a purely biological standpoint, a nation couldn't do that without killing itself,
...and that is precisely why we get so angry at the 'we won the war we suffered you did nothing' mentality.
Because from 1939 to 1945, nearly every male between the ages of 18 and 40 in this country (UK) unless from 'reserved occupations' such as mining and steelmaking, vital to maintain the war effort, were indeed conscripted. And died in their tens of thousands. and as a result, the fragmentary scraps of our culture that survuved The Great War were pretty much blown to shreds.
Which is not to dismiss the US contribution. Thanks for the help guys. Thanks a million. But don't kid yourselves that Hollywood described it accurately.
The patent application was made by the GPO in 1976
Which gives me another reason to be pretty furious. Even if the patent is valid, which seems unlikely in view of previous work by Engelbart and Bush, I have another major objection.
The patent application was granted to the GPO (General Post Office). Now although it no longer existed by 1989, the fact remains that the research was done by the GPO, a public body. In other words, my parents and grandparents' taxes paid for this research. And put quite simply, if by some madness the ISP's find themselves paying licences for the use of hyperlinks, then I'm afraid it's me, the British Taxpayer, to whom they should write the cheques. We funded it. The patent wasn't granted at the time BT was privatised, so I don't see why BT should be considered the owner. Let this farcical patent fund my parents' retirement if it must be honoured at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, i've figured out what this reminds me of. Salem. Traditional witchhunts. And why?
Because Percy has to test every single plant on his farm for contamination, and unless he's got a very sophisticated lab on the farm, there's only one simple test I can think of right now.
Just spray the whole farm with Roundup. Any plant that survives is a non-licensed Monsanto product and should be destroyed. Easy, and cheap.
After all, everyone knows witches float 'cos they're made of wood?
TomV
Hmm, i'm getting a severe disconnect here. So, since harvesting and replanting are what s33d h4x0rz do, just what exactly have 3000 generations of farmers been up to behind the "nothing going on here, just sowing and reaping, move along now" publicity smokescreen?
But more seriously, this case just shows, again, why we are not (will never be?) ready for licensed self-replicating organisms. The fact is, pollen flies on the wind, birds move seeds around, mammals move seeds around, insect move pollen around, seeds fly on the wind, are washed downstream by the rain, get stuck to tyres... basically anything with DNA in it is a highly optimised self-replicator, and no amount spent on lawyers is going to fix that.
Monsanto's business model for GM product can only work if they can prevent or outlaw the very mechanisms which have enabled Monsanto executives to evolve (sic) in the first place. A more religious man than I would describe it as a sin. I just describe it as deceiving their shareholders if they really claim the GM model will ever be profitable. After all, if the GM organisms are 'superior', then eventually they WILL colonise and replace all the current 'natural' (quotes because 10,000 years of human civilisation means 'nature' is a construct anyway) varieties in fairly short order anyhow.
I also draw the jury's attention to the Rice Tec Corporation of Alvin, Texas and their ludicrous claim on Basmati Rice, just because it makes me hopping mad every time I think about it
TomV
You don't know you're born.
In the European Union you're looking at 'Value Added Tax' - comes in 2 flavours, Standard Rate and lower rate which covers goods the particular country has chosen to protect, usually including books. The lowest Standard Rate is 15% in Luxembourg, the highest 25% (Denmark, Sweden, and neither of them have a lower rate at all)). With 17.5% VAT in the UK, we're a relatively low tax economy by EU standards.
TomV
If only. They've got a face recognition system called Mandrake already in use in the London Borough of Newham, and a traffic monitoring system (TrafficMaster) using number-plate recognition, currently only to gauge average speeds for traffic flow, but since it works by recognising the vehicles, it certainly counts. There's also a very clever system in development by the Uni's of Leeds and Reading which uses a neural net to identify pedestrians behaving 'suspiciously'.
Big Brother's already hard at work.
TomV
You connect to a View as an Access 'Linked Table', or in code by appending to the Tabledefs Collection, and when using a DAO OpenRecordset against it, make sure to set the options db_openDynaset and DB_seeChanges if you want to make any changes to the data. And if you don't, use an SP anyway.
For an SP, if it returns rows without input parameters, create a 'Pass-through' query containing "exec " & the SP name. If it requires parameters, use a DAO queryDef object or an ADO Command object (a lot less painful) in code.
I mean, come on, this is VB we're talking about here (in Access drag). It was never likely to be hard, was it?
TomV
But as the story made clear, there's a little gulf between what the court ordered (Yahoo customers in France must not be able to access certain materials) and the implementation chosen by Yahoo to meet this requirement (no-one sees the material as this is easier than detecting users' locations).
It's a scope thing. The court ruling was scoped to cover users in France only. Yahoo chose to expand the scope as the easiest way to meet the court's requirements.
conclusion - the French court's decision has no relevance whatsoever to the availability of the materials in question outside French borders
TomV
What, the fully paid-for and credited theft? The one referred to in the Internet Explorer 'Help/About' as follows...
TomV
OK, no problem.
What's the population of California, 30 million or so?
There were 60 million of us at the last (1991) census, so given the influence of CA in, e.g. and topically, Presidential Electoral College, or the House of Reps, we'll be your very own 900lb Gorilla of a State. Just try electing a non-British president once we're in...
Total domination of one remaining superpower. The Empire Strikes Back?
TomV
Because RIP is not the only new legislation bearing on this matter.
It's going to take a fair bit of fighting in the courts to establish what takes precedence - this aspect of RIP, or either of...
- The latest cut of the Data Protection Act, under which it's a criminal offense for the employer to monitor personal communications without the consent of both parties, so long as there's sufficient evidence that the communication is personal (e.g. "[personal]" in the subject), and..
- The Human Rights Act, which (at last!) gives us, amongst others, the right to Privacy, and to private personal communications in the workplace.
As was in fact mentioned in the (broadcast) BBC reports on this story this morning on Radio 5. Just before their loopy debate on whether email actually serves any useful purpose whatsoever.TomV
to be honest, given what SDMI does to any concept of property you might have had in the past, i suspect 'S0d0my' might be closer.
TomV
Only really applies if the test is specifically about winning the F1 championship. If the test is to see if a computer can beat a topline driver in an F1 car, then just pick up an older car, same model for both the human and the computer - check out the Thoroughbred GP championship to see these glorious cars racing. A couple of Benetton B194's or Lotus 79's would be just as valid a test as F2000's or MP4/17's. They're nowhere near as expensive as you'd think - just check out the small ads in Autosport any week, there's usually a few ex-GP cars there.
TomV
If that's the case, then judging by Schumacher's record in Championship deciders over the last 6 years, Schumacher wins. He's an awesome driver, no doubt about it, but there's a definite moral vacuum there as well. The occasional red-mist incident is fair enough, most drivers get it from time to time, but ever since his time at Benetton, Schumacher has acted as if he has a god-given right to the Racing Line, something I suspect he learned from Senna.
Whilst I'm posting, this challenge is pretty much the exact reason why F1 (wrongly IMO) banned all the driver aids for the 1994 season - Traction Control, ABS, especially Active Suspension, which was the nearest F1 ever came to having a computer co-driver.
TomV
FAST
and then SLOW to get the display back. FAST/SLOW was the major difference between a zx80 and an 81, from the programmer's POV. on a zx80, there was only FAST.
TomV
Ah, but remember that "all the silicon" means 4 chips - the CPU, RAM, ROM and ULA, plus the odd transistor in the (external)power supply and the vidoe modulator. That's the lot. Down from, IIRC, twentysomething chips on a zx80, partly to keep the heat down, partly to keep the cost down, and partly to make it a viable kit for a wide market. This was the machine that really kicked the whole thing off for the UK.
TomV
true, but then there was the joy of knowing that, since you couldn't possibly type a whole 16k's worth of code before the machine died, you had 'more memory than you could ever, conceivably, need'.
And now I feel cramped with 384MB. Something went wrong, badly, somewhere along the line.
Got our first zx81 in 82 for about 25 quid, secondhand with 16k rampack and an ancient HMV b/w 14" tv thrown in. Not quite as groovy as the PET we had at school, but still. In fact, it's the only platform I ever wrote assembly for. Once I'd written an assembler in zxBASIC, of course. Those were the days. Fast mode (slow as you like!), L-cursor, K-cursor. Some of the best stringhandling in any cut of BASIC back then.
TomV
I've seen very little to say the Common Language Runtime will be cross-platform, although it shouldn't be too much harder to do than it is for the JVM. And as a standard controlled by ECMA, rather than a proprietary product like the JVM it's likely to happen
But .net isn't just the CLR. .net is also about SOAP-based 'Web Services', and from that point of view, .net's inherently cross-platform. Not in the 'sub main() runs on any platform' sense, but in the sense that your code running on the CLR can treat a Web Service exposed by, say, a nasty old legacy COBOL accounts program on a PDP, or a CORBA component on UNIX (check out this demo from iona.com, as if it were a COM/COM+ component running on Windows. Basically, thru SOAP, (not an MS-only thing), .net apps can not only be considered cross-platform, but actually multi-platform
Remember, .net is a lot more than just the CLR. At TechEd 2000 (byebye karma!), the two buzzphrases the MS guys kept using (and remember they were preaching to the converted) were 'The Web Won', and 'Data is XML is data is XML...'. I came away not just thinking cross-platform, but actually thinking 'so what is the platform now?
TomV
TomV
That's one perception, but not the one this reader got.
And we're certainly a lot less socialistic than Willy Brandt, Clement Attlee, Francois Mitterand. The monetarist '80's blew most of the post-war consensus away. And it's highly debatable whether that was a good thing.
And I can't see anything in my post concerning the relative merits of European and US society. Simply a suggestion that if the people of Europe should respect the democratic choices of the American people (which they should), then the obverse applies too. We don't have 'socialistic governments' because they are imposed on us against our will, we have them because majorities in most European countries have voted for parties and policies which are, in comparison to the current norms of US society, relatively socialistic.
I detect an inferiority complex
Odd comment. Based on no evidence in the post, probably intended to be inflammatory, but misses at point blank range due to the fact that I, for one, am extremely proud to live in a society which has a welfare state, in which certain minimum standards of living are guaranteed for all, in which, on short, the idea that we are each responsible for each other's well-being and can never thrive whilst stamping on the heads of others is taken as a given.
Incidentally, is the 'socialistic' Europe the same one where the monarchies all supposedly still have absolute power, or was that a different fantasy Europe?
TomV
corollary: even Semi-coherent logic doesn't allow an American to claim that 'Democracy' is better then the 'socialistic' systems of Europe.
TomV
(from www.imdb.com) - not hard if you make even the most cursory investigation. Personally, I'll go for The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets
TomV
Conversely I'd like to bring up Henry David Thoreau, who said, roughly and horribly misquoted, "If you give me the option of obeying an unjust law or going to prison, then I have no choice and must go to prison."
TomV
Well, unfortunatley you're out of luck. The DEA's current plans don't use bombs. They intend to spray most of Colombia with a clostridium fungus which (a) contravenes all the treaties on Biological Warfare, (b) is known to be highly lethal to people with asthma or otherwise compromised immune systems, and (c) also causes 'collateral damage' such as wiping out crops including potatoes.
Drug education is NOT "this is how you make such and such... make sure you include this, and stir the proper amount."
No, it isn't. But it DOES include things like 'and if you are enough of a blithering idiot to use XXXX, you should be aware that you must drink a lot of water or risk serious damage by dehydration'. It's a harm reduction thing, basically.
Do you honestly condone teaching our nation's youth the quickest way to kill themselves
Now that's just s4!t and you know it. It took my dad less than a second to kill himself by jumping off a building. It takes very little time to jump in front of a car, to drink rat poison, to slit your wrists. It takes 4 minutes to asphyxiate. The liver damage from a paracetamol overdose will kill in under a week. A shotgun in the mouth is pretty quick too. Along with the use of alcohol and tobacco, you are looking at one of the slower means of self-termination here.
TomV
Well, strictly, you need to remember that there were two models of Enigma.
The Polish team recovered/cracked a three-rotor Army/Commercial enigma. The machine captured by HMS Bulldog was the four-rotor naval variant.
Both were extremely valuable contributions and neither devalues the other
TomV
Because from 1939 to 1945, nearly every male between the ages of 18 and 40 in this country (UK) unless from 'reserved occupations' such as mining and steelmaking, vital to maintain the war effort, were indeed conscripted. And died in their tens of thousands. and as a result, the fragmentary scraps of our culture that survuved The Great War were pretty much blown to shreds.
Which is not to dismiss the US contribution. Thanks for the help guys. Thanks a million. But don't kid yourselves that Hollywood described it accurately.
TomV
Which gives me another reason to be pretty furious. Even if the patent is valid, which seems unlikely in view of previous work by Engelbart and Bush, I have another major objection.
The patent application was granted to the GPO (General Post Office). Now although it no longer existed by 1989, the fact remains that the research was done by the GPO, a public body. In other words, my parents and grandparents' taxes paid for this research. And put quite simply, if by some madness the ISP's find themselves paying licences for the use of hyperlinks, then I'm afraid it's me, the British Taxpayer, to whom they should write the cheques. We funded it. The patent wasn't granted at the time BT was privatised, so I don't see why BT should be considered the owner. Let this farcical patent fund my parents' retirement if it must be honoured at all.
TomV