I'm in the UK, and in the last two years, my Mum has had a bunion removed in Krakow and a retinal examination in Turin. These were both provided on the NHS, though they could have been bought privately for a fraction of the UK cost - the main reason for going down this route was that the waiting lists for NHS treatment for these conditions, deemed non-essential though one stopped her from walking and the other stopped her from seeing, were well over a year.
It's actually fairly unusual for a failed private op to be fixed by the NHS, becasue by and large the private sector refuses to get involved with the more risky procedures, prefferring to milk the cash-cow of routine tasks for which the NHS hasn't sufficient capacity. Bunion - private. Triple heart bypasses - NHS all the way.
It's hardly surprising that millions of our fellow human beings continue to die from malaria, when the pharmaceutical companies are more interested in developing hugely profitable treatments for the ill-effects of over-consumption and lack of exercise by the rich.
Oh, I don't know. We British managed to exploit the massive resource that is India in the most disgustingly rapacious and murderous way for the better part of two hundred years, without planes and telephones. That's how Empires work - if the US is going to be an Empire it needs to get used to this.
"Over a year" won't be nearly enough for Prior Art, here's an article from MSDN dated November 17, 2000 including examples of XML-formatted WSH scripts in both VBscript and JavaScript. This article actually covers WSH v5.6, the version after 2.0 (don't ask, I don't know why the sequence jumped), and the XML-based WSF files were in WSH 2.0
It looks at first sight like it's about WSF files (Windows Script Files, for the Windows Script Host). Early versions of WSH didn't use XML, just raw script in a text file (.vbs,.js), but from WSH2, WSF files look like the following example from the MSDN Library:
[quote]
Since one scripting language may not have all the functionality you need, Windows Script Host allows you to combine multiple languages in a single.wsf file. The following example shows a.wsf file that includes both VBScript and PerlScript code:
<job id="PERLandVBS">
<script language="PerlScript">
sub PerlHello {
my $str = @_[0];
$WScript->Echo($str);
}
</script>
<script language="VBScript">
WScript.Echo "Hello from VBScript"
PerlHello "Hello from PERLScript"
</script> </job> [/quote]
Using XML to delimit script fragments in a variety of languages may or may not be particularly original; it seems to me that this is what the patent's about, rather than (shock, horror, page impressions, revenue) the whole of XML per se.
Given that the Indian family model is often rather more extended than the 'western' one, when an job which previously sustained a couple, perhaps with two children, in the USA, is outsourced, how many people are sustained by that job in India?
"Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. It killed the ancient Romans, and now it's killing me."
Nonetheless, I honestly believe that learning Latin at school has genuinely contributed to my coding. It's a wonderfully rigorous and structured language, but one which uses that rigour and structure to describe the real world. The strength of Latin is its unforgiving structure, while the strength of English is its flexibility.
Apart from anything else Latin lessons gave me a clear understanding of terms such as 'syntax' and 'parse', of proper sentence construction and the importance of precision in language.
I also feel there may, in some sense, be an added benefit, which manifests in a variety of ways, some obvious and some far more subtle, to be gained from the study of a language, even a language which is no longer current, vernacular or in any sense idiomatic, from which not only are a great many of the present day languages of Europe clear derivatives, but which was also the nearest thing to a universal language for many centuries, in which it would be, were that language to be more widely used today, considered entirely reasonable to construct sentences of great structural complexity, far beyond that displayed in current English, containing a range of subsidiary clauses, embedded phrases, hypothetical diversions and clearly structured formations such as the dreaded Ablative Absolute, with the consequent benefit of a remarkable precision in the expression of far more complex constructs in a single structural unit than might be possible in a language tending towards a shorter, more atomic, style of construction.
On the other hand, there's readability to consider...;-)
OTOH, an IT manager at a Fortune 500 company would very probably have terms in his or her contract which would make it inappropriate to express a view on a case like this one in a public forum without first consulting the legal department, and could very well face disciplinary proceedings for breaching such conditions.
A friend simply wouldn't stop raving about this utterly bizarre new comedy on Radio 4, so I tuned in to Fit The Second and was instantly hooked. Then I went to a Stage version at the Theatr Clwyd in north Wales, then the first and second LP's on Megadodo Records. Then book and TV series though I can't remember which I met first. Each medium brought some new embellishments, and all bear re-listening, re-reading, re-viewing.
[quote]Parents of younf organic lifeforms are warned that towels can be harmful if swallowed in large quantities.[/quote]
The Book's closing comment at the end of Fit The Tenth (In which our heroes have some close encounters with others and themselves. ARTHUR: "It's not a question of whose habitat it is, it's a question of how hard you hit it")
Given the draconian way the Libel laws work here in the England/Wales jurisdiction, the Slashdot editors may not have been very clever in posting this story as worded. Very, very unwise in fact. Especially as the Hutton Report won't be published until 12:30 GMT and it's currently 07:20 GMT.
At the moment it's an unfounded allegation, and the sort of allegation that could lose Slashdot hundreds of thousands in punitive damages.
Your pain is his pain too. Because of the current state of the job market, every post he offers will get hundreds if not thousands of responses. In the first instance what the employer needs, above all, is any excuse whatsoever to whittle down the pile of CVs until it's manageable. One spelling error, one stupid font, one obviously cut-and-pasted buzzword, one gap in the employment history is enough.
If you get past this point, then the person who paid attention to the details on one application of the hundred he wrote last tuesday is likely to be the person who will pay attention to the details of one subroutine of the dozens he will write next month if hired.
To keep it positive, remember that the vacancy represents a problem for the employer, and every single response may be the solution they deperately need. While they need to whittle down the CVs easily, every CV represents the hope that they may be able to solve the problem and get on with running a business. In short, they'd love to give you (anyone) the job, just as long as you don't give them ANY reason not to.
I should add here, though it makes us look even sillier, the following:
I used to work in railways. Railways are still measured in chains and quarter-miles (20 chains to the quarter mile).
Actually, a chain's really easy as any fule kno that it's the length of a cricket pitch from wicket to wicket;)
The railway example actually gives a pointer to why we retain certain units - it's at least in part about installed infrastructure. To re-do the railways in km rather than miles would require the replacement of tens of thousands of mileposts (one every 20 chains, roughly), re-marking of speed restrictions all over the place, probably reassessing safety calculations from scratch rather than just recalculating the final figures, since the safety rules are very strict like that.
To re-do the road speeds would be anightmare for the millions of cars with no km markings on the speedometer, and might well need either the re-designation of speed limits all over the place or re-grading the limits to much harder-to-remember figures like 48km/h in a current 30mph zone or 64km/h for a 40 zone.
The pint's just an emotive thing, I'm pretty certain of that.
I saw it as Anakin knowing full well that the relationship was forbiddenand dangerous for a Jedi, and being afraid of the possible consequences but unable to stop himself. The romance with Padme was every bit as important in his fall from grace as his vengeance against the Tuskens.
It's a bit of a topical talking point in Doctor Who fandom at the moment - with a new series arriving in 2005, it's interesting to speculate whether it's now possible to bring back the 1966-vintage Cybermen without being instantly tarred with a 'Borg rip-off' label.
Trouble with Daleks is that while for us old viewers, they're scary by association and memory, and while they're very very nasty in character and behaviour, in a lot of ways they'd be a fairly crap new monster, with the sink plunger and so on.
It was the Restoration Team who were given the film reels (Steve Roberts got them on Tuesday) by Francis Watson. The news was originally broken on the Restoration Team's forum at the site you cite. I expect they'll put a proper write-up on the main site when they've stopped drooling.
A good place to look is the This Week page at Outpost Gallifrey (a very fine site, recommended recently by the BBC's own Doctor Who pages and frequented by a lot of the professionals).
The listing shows BBC Kids showing Doctor Who every day at 3:30 am EST, plus local stations for several US cities. Good luck.
It's pretty much impossible to get a handle on the Daleks' history because their timeline is terminally bugg3r3d.
They have two contradictory origins, depending on whether you prefer the 1963 The Daleks story, of the mutated survivors of a nuclear war, the Dals, slowly evolving to the point where they needed radiation to survive and were no longer human, and developing those pepperpot Travel Machines themselves, or the 1975 Genesis Of The Daleks version involving Davros experimenting on mutants force-bred from the existing Kaled people at the end of the war, creating a Travel Machine for them, then wiping out all the surviving Kaleds to ensure his mutants' survival.
Davros unequivocally died at the end of Genesis. He was retconned back in for Destiny, in which Terry Nation this time decided that they were emotionless machines, even though we'd seen the nasty green mutant several times before. Then in Resurrection, Davros decides to mutate humans into Dalek mutants, again to breed back in some cunning. To the extent the timeline makes any sense, they seem to have been mutants, then machines, then mutants again later, all the while squawking on and on about how they're the ultimate genetically perfect master race.
As if this doesn't mess up their timeline enough, they had Time Machines in several 60's stories, and that's never healthy for a coherent history.
They should be invading to steal the Earth's magnetic core and turn the planet into a giant spaceship pretty soon, if I've got the hang of it...
In any case, it will be a while until we see the colour episodes in Australia again, as I'm pretty sure we are still on episodes from 1964.
Sadly, it won't be as long as it 'should' be - the Troughton era suffered terribly from the Great Videotape Cull, and the only surviving complete stories are Tomb of the Cybermen (4 episodes), The Dominators (5 eps), The Mind Robber (5 eps), The Krotons (4 eps), The Seeds Of Death (6 eps) and The War Games (10 eps).
So, only 6 complete stories from 21 originally made (110 episodes).
I vaguely remember Troughton in colour from when I was a kid, although I'm sure that's just my memory playing tricks on me.
Your Troughton memories may very well be correct - he reprised the role in the increasingly unimaginatively-titled commemorative stories The Three Doctors (1972 into 1973), The Five Doctors (1983) and The Two Doctors (1985), all of which were in colour.
I wasn't so much trying to list the 7-parters comprehensively as to identify those stories *longer* than 7 parts. But you're quite right about the other 7-parters. I've a niggling feeling there may have been another 8-parter other than "The Invasion", but I'll have to check that in the Television Companion when I get home.
re: The Mutants / The Daleks: you could call it "The Dead Planet (the one after The Tribe Of Gum and before Inside The Spaceship)" if you really want a fan-war...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the UK, and in the last two years, my Mum has had a bunion removed in Krakow and a retinal examination in Turin. These were both provided on the NHS, though they could have been bought privately for a fraction of the UK cost - the main reason for going down this route was that the waiting lists for NHS treatment for these conditions, deemed non-essential though one stopped her from walking and the other stopped her from seeing, were well over a year.
It's actually fairly unusual for a failed private op to be fixed by the NHS, becasue by and large the private sector refuses to get involved with the more risky procedures, prefferring to milk the cash-cow of routine tasks for which the NHS hasn't sufficient capacity. Bunion - private. Triple heart bypasses - NHS all the way.
It's hardly surprising that millions of our fellow human beings continue to die from malaria, when the pharmaceutical companies are more interested in developing hugely profitable treatments for the ill-effects of over-consumption and lack of exercise by the rich.
Oh, I don't know. We British managed to exploit the massive resource that is India in the most disgustingly rapacious and murderous way for the better part of two hundred years, without planes and telephones. That's how Empires work - if the US is going to be an Empire it needs to get used to this.
"Over a year" won't be nearly enough for Prior Art, here's an article from MSDN dated November 17, 2000 including examples of XML-formatted WSH scripts in both VBscript and JavaScript. This article actually covers WSH v5.6, the version after 2.0 (don't ask, I don't know why the sequence jumped), and the XML-based WSF files were in WSH 2.0
Using XML to delimit script fragments in a variety of languages may or may not be particularly original; it seems to me that this is what the patent's about, rather than (shock, horror, page impressions, revenue) the whole of XML per se.
Given that the Indian family model is often rather more extended than the 'western' one, when an job which previously sustained a couple, perhaps with two children, in the USA, is outsourced, how many people are sustained by that job in India?
It will never be possible to live on $11K a year. Never.
In 1928, a reasonable and credible statement.
In 1931, arrant nonsense.
You can *hope* it will never happen, but you can't be certain of it.
"Latin is a language
;-)
as dead as dead can be.
It killed the ancient Romans,
and now it's killing me."
Nonetheless, I honestly believe that learning Latin at school has genuinely contributed to my coding. It's a wonderfully rigorous and structured language, but one which uses that rigour and structure to describe the real world. The strength of Latin is its unforgiving structure, while the strength of English is its flexibility.
Apart from anything else Latin lessons gave me a clear understanding of terms such as 'syntax' and 'parse', of proper sentence construction and the importance of precision in language.
I also feel there may, in some sense, be an added benefit, which manifests in a variety of ways, some obvious and some far more subtle, to be gained from the study of a language, even a language which is no longer current, vernacular or in any sense idiomatic, from which not only are a great many of the present day languages of Europe clear derivatives, but which was also the nearest thing to a universal language for many centuries, in which it would be, were that language to be more widely used today, considered entirely reasonable to construct sentences of great structural complexity, far beyond that displayed in current English, containing a range of subsidiary clauses, embedded phrases, hypothetical diversions and clearly structured formations such as the dreaded Ablative Absolute, with the consequent benefit of a remarkable precision in the expression of far more complex constructs in a single structural unit than might be possible in a language tending towards a shorter, more atomic, style of construction.
On the other hand, there's readability to consider...
OTOH, an IT manager at a Fortune 500 company would very probably have terms in his or her contract which would make it inappropriate to express a view on a case like this one in a public forum without first consulting the legal department, and could very well face disciplinary proceedings for breaching such conditions.
What was it that drew everyone to Hitchhiker's?
A friend simply wouldn't stop raving about this utterly bizarre new comedy on Radio 4, so I tuned in to Fit The Second and was instantly hooked. Then I went to a Stage version at the Theatr Clwyd in north Wales, then the first and second LP's on Megadodo Records. Then book and TV series though I can't remember which I met first. Each medium brought some new embellishments, and all bear re-listening, re-reading, re-viewing.
* Counter staff with Genuine People Personalities (tm)
* A cup of something which tastes almost (but not entirely) unlike tea.
* Shoes that not only do not fit, but which are actually joined at the heels.
DNA was always a bit close to the bone.
[quote]Parents of younf organic lifeforms are warned that towels can be harmful if swallowed in large quantities.[/quote]
The Book's closing comment at the end of Fit The Tenth (In which our heroes have some close encounters with others and themselves. ARTHUR: "It's not a question of whose habitat it is, it's a question of how hard you hit it")
Douglas already had all the best jokes in 1981.
Given the draconian way the Libel laws work here in the England/Wales jurisdiction, the Slashdot editors may not have been very clever in posting this story as worded. Very, very unwise in fact. Especially as the Hutton Report won't be published until 12:30 GMT and it's currently 07:20 GMT.
At the moment it's an unfounded allegation, and the sort of allegation that could lose Slashdot hundreds of thousands in punitive damages.
Big whoops, editors.
Now walk a mile in the other man's shoes...
Your pain is his pain too. Because of the current state of the job market, every post he offers will get hundreds if not thousands of responses. In the first instance what the employer needs, above all, is any excuse whatsoever to whittle down the pile of CVs until it's manageable. One spelling error, one stupid font, one obviously cut-and-pasted buzzword, one gap in the employment history is enough.
If you get past this point, then the person who paid attention to the details on one application of the hundred he wrote last tuesday is likely to be the person who will pay attention to the details of one subroutine of the dozens he will write next month if hired.
To keep it positive, remember that the vacancy represents a problem for the employer, and every single response may be the solution they deperately need. While they need to whittle down the CVs easily, every CV represents the hope that they may be able to solve the problem and get on with running a business. In short, they'd love to give you (anyone) the job, just as long as you don't give them ANY reason not to.
I should add here, though it makes us look even sillier, the following:
;)
I used to work in railways. Railways are still measured in chains and quarter-miles (20 chains to the quarter mile).
Actually, a chain's really easy as any fule kno that it's the length of a cricket pitch from wicket to wicket
The railway example actually gives a pointer to why we retain certain units - it's at least in part about installed infrastructure. To re-do the railways in km rather than miles would require the replacement of tens of thousands of mileposts (one every 20 chains, roughly), re-marking of speed restrictions all over the place, probably reassessing safety calculations from scratch rather than just recalculating the final figures, since the safety rules are very strict like that.
To re-do the road speeds would be anightmare for the millions of cars with no km markings on the speedometer, and might well need either the re-designation of speed limits all over the place or re-grading the limits to much harder-to-remember figures like 48km/h in a current 30mph zone or 64km/h for a 40 zone.
The pint's just an emotive thing, I'm pretty certain of that.
I saw it as Anakin knowing full well that the relationship was forbiddenand dangerous for a Jedi, and being afraid of the possible consequences but unable to stop himself. The romance with Padme was every bit as important in his fall from grace as his vengeance against the Tuskens.
It's a bit of a topical talking point in Doctor Who fandom at the moment - with a new series arriving in 2005, it's interesting to speculate whether it's now possible to bring back the 1966-vintage Cybermen without being instantly tarred with a 'Borg rip-off' label.
Trouble with Daleks is that while for us old viewers, they're scary by association and memory, and while they're very very nasty in character and behaviour, in a lot of ways they'd be a fairly crap new monster, with the sink plunger and so on.
The Borg weren't Daleks.
The Borg were Cybermen. Technically enhanced ex-humans now devoid of emotion bent only on survival by converting members of other species.
Compare and contrast:
"You will be assimilated"
vs
"You belong to us. You will be like us"
And in turn, both were just another variant on the classical undead zombie bodysnatcher.
It was the Restoration Team who were given the film reels (Steve Roberts got them on Tuesday) by Francis Watson. The news was originally broken on the Restoration Team's forum at the site you cite. I expect they'll put a proper write-up on the main site when they've stopped drooling.
I have BBC America now, is it on there?
A good place to look is the This Week page at Outpost Gallifrey (a very fine site, recommended recently by the BBC's own Doctor Who pages and frequented by a lot of the professionals).
The listing shows BBC Kids showing Doctor Who every day at 3:30 am EST, plus local stations for several US cities. Good luck.
You'll change your tune when they've got you working in their giant mine in Bedforshire in their quest to steal the Earth's magnetic core.
Don't say I didn't warn you...
It's pretty much impossible to get a handle on the Daleks' history because their timeline is terminally bugg3r3d.
They have two contradictory origins, depending on whether you prefer the 1963 The Daleks story, of the mutated survivors of a nuclear war, the Dals, slowly evolving to the point where they needed radiation to survive and were no longer human, and developing those pepperpot Travel Machines themselves, or the 1975 Genesis Of The Daleks version involving Davros experimenting on mutants force-bred from the existing Kaled people at the end of the war, creating a Travel Machine for them, then wiping out all the surviving Kaleds to ensure his mutants' survival.
Davros unequivocally died at the end of Genesis. He was retconned back in for Destiny, in which Terry Nation this time decided that they were emotionless machines, even though we'd seen the nasty green mutant several times before. Then in Resurrection, Davros decides to mutate humans into Dalek mutants, again to breed back in some cunning. To the extent the timeline makes any sense, they seem to have been mutants, then machines, then mutants again later, all the while squawking on and on about how they're the ultimate genetically perfect master race.
As if this doesn't mess up their timeline enough, they had Time Machines in several 60's stories, and that's never healthy for a coherent history.
They should be invading to steal the Earth's magnetic core and turn the planet into a giant spaceship pretty soon, if I've got the hang of it...
My Vision Is Impaired! I Cannot See!
:-)
My Vision Is Impaired! I Cannot See!
My Vision Is Impaired! I Cannot See!
BANG!!!!
In any case, it will be a while until we see the colour episodes in Australia again, as I'm pretty sure we are still on episodes from 1964.
Sadly, it won't be as long as it 'should' be - the Troughton era suffered terribly from the Great Videotape Cull, and the only surviving complete stories are Tomb of the Cybermen (4 episodes), The Dominators (5 eps), The Mind Robber (5 eps), The Krotons (4 eps), The Seeds Of Death (6 eps) and The War Games (10 eps).
So, only 6 complete stories from 21 originally made (110 episodes).
I vaguely remember Troughton in colour from when I was a kid, although I'm sure that's just my memory playing tricks on me.
Your Troughton memories may very well be correct - he reprised the role in the increasingly unimaginatively-titled commemorative stories The Three Doctors (1972 into 1973), The Five Doctors (1983) and The Two Doctors (1985), all of which were in colour.
Absolutely right :)
I wasn't so much trying to list the 7-parters comprehensively as to identify those stories *longer* than 7 parts. But you're quite right about the other 7-parters. I've a niggling feeling there may have been another 8-parter other than "The Invasion", but I'll have to check that in the Television Companion when I get home.
re: The Mutants / The Daleks: you could call it "The Dead Planet (the one after The Tribe Of Gum and before Inside The Spaceship)" if you really want a fan-war...