You do realize that Britain's health system is socialist don't you? Under socialism, you take what is given to you
'Realise'? It's one of the things I'm most proud of about my country.
Of course it's 'socialist'. It's also extrememly popular, and no political party dares to change it other than to tinker with some details. All the parties know full well that to run on a platform of removing the socialist NHS would be electoral suicide. Even Margaret Thatcher was too 'socialist' to dismantle the NHS. The *performance* of the NHS is a political hot potato. The *principle* of an NHS 'free at the point of use' is something every party has to support strongly to stand any chance at all in elections.
I was listening to a debate about outsourcing on BBC Radio the other night, and they pointed out that in Bangalore there's a lot of worry about all the call centre backroom IT jobs getting outsourced to China, where the costs are so low that India can't possibly compete.
I agree that the Moon isn't the *real* purpose of the Indian space programme, but, just as with the US 30 years ago, aiming high helps to hit the lower targets, like comsats, earth imaging and so forth, not to mention the huge boost to national self-esteem and all the benefits that can bring in sheer morale terms - when you've got to the Moon, what challenge can you honestly say is too big to even attempt?
To the extent that it's 'stolen property', it was stolen by the salesman from the store, not from the store by the purchaser. The purchaser was offered a deal by the salesman and took it. The salesman should not have offered the deal to the purchaser in the first place.
If everyone donated their old CDs and videos to the library, it would be unnecessary to rent or buy any of the older ones; you could borrow them
Storing this stuff requires real estate, which would also have to be donated. Managing it and maintaining it, cataloguing it and classifying it, accesioning it to the catalogues, reshelving it, these all require labour, which would also have to be donated - if a Library buys from a Book Supply service, a lot of the administrative work is done there as part of the deal, and the books arrive with their electronic records ready to load.
Somehow the people who want to corrupt the system, apparently publishers, have gotten control over the libraries
And yet they haven't closed them all down. How very strange.
Have your ever noticed that the CDs and videos in the library are never the latest albums and movies?
The studios are under no obligation to make audiovisual material available to public libraries for lending, and yet they do so. There are some conditions attached, and one is that the Library can't make the product available for lending until a period (6 months in the UK I think) has elapsed after its original release, when the sales have tailed off a bit.
there are many books I would donate if I knew I could check them out later.
But would anybody else check those book out? If they were popular you might have to wait months to get to the top of the waitlist for them, and if not, then the Library would just be providing you with a free storage facility. Rather than a public service in the furtherance of knowledge.
putting a book in their system costs $30,
If you have to look up the MARC records individually, if the book isn't supplied pre-barcoded and theft-tagged, plastic-jacketed, pre-classmarked ready to shelve, then there are labour costs, research costs, lookup service costs, these all add up.
Trouble is, Librarians have to compromise, constantly. Every year, more new stuff is published than in the previous year. Every year in this decade, more material will be published than was published in all of history before 1950.
But the walls aren't getting any further apart, and the ceiling isn't rising;-)
So there's a balance between comprehensiveness (impossible), importance (subjective), popular demand (narrow), budget control (tight) and so forth.
There were plenty of books in my Uni library which were last stamped in the 1950s - this was in the 1990s. I studied Librarianship, so I noticed this sort of thing. So there's a value judgement - is it an important text, is it cited widely elsewhere, did it inspire another, greater work? Or does it actually represent 3/4" of shelf space that's been unavailable for anything else for 40 years?
Also, remember that if the library's a lending library and it's doing its job right, then most of the stock isn't on the shelves at any given time. But still there's only so much stuff you can hang onto.
One of the perhaps counter-intuitive things I picked up at Library School was that the real skill isn't knowing what to keep and how to keep it, but knowing what to dispose of, and when.
The library might well have, or be able to provide, the refereed journal articles that predate the commercial technologies by years or decades. If the library doesn't have the obscure and expensive books on data storage technologies physically on the premises, but there are Inter Library Loans, full-text article services, indexing and abstracting journals, to make the primary material findable in the first place.
Remember, we have some fantastic technological tools now, but librarians have been thinking about how to make as much information as possible available as widely as possible for centuries.
The POSIX layer wasn't there to tempt developers. it was the bare minimum needed to get some USgov certifications / contracts which required that platforms comply with a minimal POSIX standard. It was so minimal it wasn't really usable, except of course for the completion of certification checklists.
Once the certification requirement was changed, the POSIX layer's days were numbered.
My problem isn't so much with anti-immigration per se, as with the use of it as a selling point for every authoritarian knee-jerk move in the knowledge that a lot of people will accept it, with the feeding of a sense of hysteria, where a Home secretary uses terms like 'flooded with immigrants', and with the way I fear it may be implemented by a police serivce which is still clearly riddled with institutional racism despaite all attempts to root it out - the ID card has the potential to be the 'sus' laws all over again.
And as for the 40 quid, well, I can afford it easily. For other people, it's a whole week's income and I object to the idea that they should pay the same as I will, rather than using general taxation - if it's to benefit everyone, then it should be paid for like other things which benefit everyone such as schools, hospitals, policing: through progressive taxation dependent on income levels rather than a flat fee.
As for the passport element, the card will be issued with new passports, but the existing passportt fee will still be payable, *plus* the 40 quid for the ID card. Same for Drivers' licenses.
Better that than control over our monetary policy and interest rates by the likes of George Soros, who pretty much singlehandedly decided to take the pound out of the ERM some years back.
Don't let people sell you the 'economic sovereignty' myth in a free market environment.
As a 36 year old employed taxpayer, my objections are based partly on the self-serving basis that I object to being expected to pay UKP40 for a card I don't approve of in the first place, rather than the government being honest enough to put the bill on Income Tax.
And partly on the basis that even if I trust the current government*, this provides a tool that a later, less trustworthy government could abuse very nastily.
But mainly on the basis that it's being presented as either an anti-terrorist measure, of whose effectiveness I am not convinced, or as an anti-immigrant measure, of whose morality I am not convinced, since I believe it's intended as a sop to the bigot tendency come the next election.
Selby's a bit of a red herring here, but the inquiries into Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar each concluded that systemic factors contributed to the accidents - poor maintenance of signals, poor maintence of points, poor maintenance and condition checking of rails, generally poor safety culture.
I worked for Railtrack a few years back on a condition survey project, and we found at least one set of points which the contractor had signed off for five years when it was clear from a cursory inspection that the heaters had burned out five years back. If it was found that lots of road deaths were due to unsafe cars passing their MOTs there *would* be a massive outcry against the dodgy garages issuing such certificates.
You're kind of depressed? Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me if I can pick up a piece of paper. And me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side.
Genuine People Personalities they call it. Ghastly, isn't it?
There's a B-shaped thing in German that's actually a double-S, and a thing like an L with a diagonal slash that sounds like W in Polish, so there would be room for confusion even in Latin-based alphabets only. And there are an awful lot of people whose primary script isn't latin-based, probably a majority.
It's still foolishly dangerous to use a phone while you should be driving. No dispute there at all. These people scare me when I'm near them on the road. Especially at roundabouts.
But at least this is a step in the right direction - distracted with both hands free is better than distracted with a phone in one hand or a shoulder hunched so that one arm can't move freely and the head can't turn to look around. Next, we need to persuade people not to use the things at all, but that will be harder and take a long time - in the short term, the new regulation is at least a little better than the current situation.
there may be more of a need than [sic] for those who drive around with a cell phone in one hand
Ah, well, here in the UK, they've got 7 more days to do that before it becomes an offence.
If you're in the UK and you drive and use a phone, remember you've only got one week left to get a dashboard cradle and hands-free kit fitted - don't get caught out.
UKP30 per offence at first, but they're looking at changing that to UKP60 and 3 points within a year.
The License for implementing the specs requires that you attach their license to all files and derivative works.
Didn't a Mr Stallman write a license with a similar requirement some years back?
Re:Who do I have to thank for this little miracle?
on
Farscape is Back
·
· Score: 1
Take off the 'to be continued' and you have a very Blake's 7-y ending, although in that case it was all but two of the regular cast who definitely got killed, and probably one more for good luck.
Horrid at the time but after all these years very satisfyingly final and a logical conclusion to the series.
There's a big difference between 'excuse' and 'justification', and this case seems to shade more towardsthe 'justification' end of the spectrum rather than 'excuse' - it's a real problem which needs to be fixed.
Can't remember where I found it, but there's a lovely quote about Nikola Tesla's idea for a resonator capable of splitting the planet: "The scary thing isn't that he was crazy enough to think of it, the really scary thing is that he was smart enough that it might well have worked".
Sometimes it feels like this might apply to Craig Venter. I mean his intellectual achievements are staggering, world-class, unimpeachably brilliant. but his choice of topics is sometimes very unnerving.
Not at all. I see no problem with pointing out that episode 1 part one is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/shalka/one/fla sh/broadone.swf and that substiting 'broadtwo', 'broadthree', broadfour' into the URI will get the other files for episode one.
However, I'm viewing it from the BBC site because I want them to see the hits to encourage them to do more web animations and so the bosses can see that the spend was worthwhile.
If you can get hold of a VHS tape of the story 'City Of Death' from series 17 (1979), it's another Adams-penned story (credited to 'David Agnew' as a series' script editor wasn't really supposed to submit scripts) which was completed (the original production of Shada was disrupted by strikes in 1979 and never broadcast) and which consistently comes top three in fan polls of favourite Who stories over the last two decades. It's just delicious. Sadly this isn't one of the DVDs released so far.
Adams also wrote The Pirate Planet in season 16, but it's not a patch on City Of Death.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that Britain's health system is socialist don't you? Under socialism, you take what is given to you
'Realise'? It's one of the things I'm most proud of about my country.
Of course it's 'socialist'. It's also extrememly popular, and no political party dares to change it other than to tinker with some details. All the parties know full well that to run on a platform of removing the socialist NHS would be electoral suicide. Even Margaret Thatcher was too 'socialist' to dismantle the NHS. The *performance* of the NHS is a political hot potato. The *principle* of an NHS 'free at the point of use' is something every party has to support strongly to stand any chance at all in elections.
I was listening to a debate about outsourcing on BBC Radio the other night, and they pointed out that in Bangalore there's a lot of worry about all the call centre backroom IT jobs getting outsourced to China, where the costs are so low that India can't possibly compete.
I agree that the Moon isn't the *real* purpose of the Indian space programme, but, just as with the US 30 years ago, aiming high helps to hit the lower targets, like comsats, earth imaging and so forth, not to mention the huge boost to national self-esteem and all the benefits that can bring in sheer morale terms - when you've got to the Moon, what challenge can you honestly say is too big to even attempt?
To the extent that it's 'stolen property', it was stolen by the salesman from the store, not from the store by the purchaser. The purchaser was offered a deal by the salesman and took it. The salesman should not have offered the deal to the purchaser in the first place.
If everyone donated their old CDs and videos to the library, it would be unnecessary to rent or buy any of the older ones; you could borrow them
Storing this stuff requires real estate, which would also have to be donated. Managing it and maintaining it, cataloguing it and classifying it, accesioning it to the catalogues, reshelving it, these all require labour, which would also have to be donated - if a Library buys from a Book Supply service, a lot of the administrative work is done there as part of the deal, and the books arrive with their electronic records ready to load.
Somehow the people who want to corrupt the system, apparently publishers, have gotten control over the libraries
And yet they haven't closed them all down. How very strange.
Have your ever noticed that the CDs and videos in the library are never the latest albums and movies?
The studios are under no obligation to make audiovisual material available to public libraries for lending, and yet they do so. There are some conditions attached, and one is that the Library can't make the product available for lending until a period (6 months in the UK I think) has elapsed after its original release, when the sales have tailed off a bit.
there are many books I would donate if I knew I could check them out later.
But would anybody else check those book out? If they were popular you might have to wait months to get to the top of the waitlist for them, and if not, then the Library would just be providing you with a free storage facility. Rather than a public service in the furtherance of knowledge.
putting a book in their system costs $30,
If you have to look up the MARC records individually, if the book isn't supplied pre-barcoded and theft-tagged, plastic-jacketed, pre-classmarked ready to shelve, then there are labour costs, research costs, lookup service costs, these all add up.
Trouble is, Librarians have to compromise, constantly. Every year, more new stuff is published than in the previous year. Every year in this decade, more material will be published than was published in all of history before 1950.
;-)
But the walls aren't getting any further apart, and the ceiling isn't rising
So there's a balance between comprehensiveness (impossible), importance (subjective), popular demand (narrow), budget control (tight) and so forth.
There were plenty of books in my Uni library which were last stamped in the 1950s - this was in the 1990s. I studied Librarianship, so I noticed this sort of thing. So there's a value judgement - is it an important text, is it cited widely elsewhere, did it inspire another, greater work? Or does it actually represent 3/4" of shelf space that's been unavailable for anything else for 40 years?
Also, remember that if the library's a lending library and it's doing its job right, then most of the stock isn't on the shelves at any given time. But still there's only so much stuff you can hang onto.
One of the perhaps counter-intuitive things I picked up at Library School was that the real skill isn't knowing what to keep and how to keep it, but knowing what to dispose of, and when.
The library might well have, or be able to provide, the refereed journal articles that predate the commercial technologies by years or decades. If the library doesn't have the obscure and expensive books on data storage technologies physically on the premises, but there are Inter Library Loans, full-text article services, indexing and abstracting journals, to make the primary material findable in the first place.
Remember, we have some fantastic technological tools now, but librarians have been thinking about how to make as much information as possible available as widely as possible for centuries.
The POSIX layer wasn't there to tempt developers. it was the bare minimum needed to get some USgov certifications / contracts which required that platforms comply with a minimal POSIX standard. It was so minimal it wasn't really usable, except of course for the completion of certification checklists.
Once the certification requirement was changed, the POSIX layer's days were numbered.
My problem isn't so much with anti-immigration per se, as with the use of it as a selling point for every authoritarian knee-jerk move in the knowledge that a lot of people will accept it, with the feeding of a sense of hysteria, where a Home secretary uses terms like 'flooded with immigrants', and with the way I fear it may be implemented by a police serivce which is still clearly riddled with institutional racism despaite all attempts to root it out - the ID card has the potential to be the 'sus' laws all over again.
And as for the 40 quid, well, I can afford it easily. For other people, it's a whole week's income and I object to the idea that they should pay the same as I will, rather than using general taxation - if it's to benefit everyone, then it should be paid for like other things which benefit everyone such as schools, hospitals, policing: through progressive taxation dependent on income levels rather than a flat fee.
As for the passport element, the card will be issued with new passports, but the existing passportt fee will still be payable, *plus* the 40 quid for the ID card. Same for Drivers' licenses.
Given that Benito Mussolini knew a thing or two about Fascism, and given that he said
"The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and Corporate power",
I'd say that the label doesn't look entirely inappropriate.
Better that than control over our monetary policy and interest rates by the likes of George Soros, who pretty much singlehandedly decided to take the pound out of the ERM some years back.
Don't let people sell you the 'economic sovereignty' myth in a free market environment.
As a 36 year old employed taxpayer, my objections are based partly on the self-serving basis that I object to being expected to pay UKP40 for a card I don't approve of in the first place, rather than the government being honest enough to put the bill on Income Tax.
And partly on the basis that even if I trust the current government*, this provides a tool that a later, less trustworthy government could abuse very nastily.
But mainly on the basis that it's being presented as either an anti-terrorist measure, of whose effectiveness I am not convinced, or as an anti-immigrant measure, of whose morality I am not convinced, since I believe it's intended as a sop to the bigot tendency come the next election.
tV
* which I don't, as it happens.
NT 3, NT 4 and Win2000 did. XP Pro doesn't have the POSIX subsystem anymore - they'd prefer you to go with Interix nowadays.
Selby's a bit of a red herring here, but the inquiries into Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar each concluded that systemic factors contributed to the accidents - poor maintenance of signals, poor maintence of points, poor maintenance and condition checking of rails, generally poor safety culture.
BBC URIs for the reports:
Hatfield
Potters Bar
Ladbroke Grove
I worked for Railtrack a few years back on a condition survey project, and we found at least one set of points which the contractor had signed off for five years when it was clear from a cursory inspection that the heaters had burned out five years back. If it was found that lots of road deaths were due to unsafe cars passing their MOTs there *would* be a massive outcry against the dodgy garages issuing such certificates.
You're kind of depressed? Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me if I can pick up a piece of paper. And me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side.
Genuine People Personalities they call it. Ghastly, isn't it?
There's a B-shaped thing in German that's actually a double-S, and a thing like an L with a diagonal slash that sounds like W in Polish, so there would be room for confusion even in Latin-based alphabets only. And there are an awful lot of people whose primary script isn't latin-based, probably a majority.
thier
...after all, some people find just 26 letters and 0-9 hard enough already ;)
ludacris
femail
curce
mentaly
Other than the fact that MS showed no interest in implementing it..
They did implement a very early form of SVG in IE5+. It's not standards compliant, but then the standard didn't exist yet when they implemented SVG.
As soon as it went into the W3C they seem to have lost interest and they haven't caught up yet admittedly, but they certainly did an implementation.
It's still foolishly dangerous to use a phone while you should be driving. No dispute there at all. These people scare me when I'm near them on the road. Especially at roundabouts.
But at least this is a step in the right direction - distracted with both hands free is better than distracted with a phone in one hand or a shoulder hunched so that one arm can't move freely and the head can't turn to look around. Next, we need to persuade people not to use the things at all, but that will be harder and take a long time - in the short term, the new regulation is at least a little better than the current situation.
there may be more of a need than [sic] for those who drive around with a cell phone in one hand
Ah, well, here in the UK, they've got 7 more days to do that before it becomes an offence.
If you're in the UK and you drive and use a phone, remember you've only got one week left to get a dashboard cradle and hands-free kit fitted - don't get caught out.
UKP30 per offence at first, but they're looking at changing that to UKP60 and 3 points within a year.
Fantastic news!
The License for implementing the specs requires that you attach their license to all files and derivative works.
Didn't a Mr Stallman write a license with a similar requirement some years back?
Take off the 'to be continued' and you have a very Blake's 7-y ending, although in that case it was all but two of the regular cast who definitely got killed, and probably one more for good luck.
Horrid at the time but after all these years very satisfyingly final and a logical conclusion to the series.
There's a big difference between 'excuse' and 'justification', and this case seems to shade more towardsthe 'justification' end of the spectrum rather than 'excuse' - it's a real problem which needs to be fixed.
Can't remember where I found it, but there's a lovely quote about Nikola Tesla's idea for a resonator capable of splitting the planet: "The scary thing isn't that he was crazy enough to think of it, the really scary thing is that he was smart enough that it might well have worked".
Sometimes it feels like this might apply to Craig Venter. I mean his intellectual achievements are staggering, world-class, unimpeachably brilliant. but his choice of topics is sometimes very unnerving.
Not at all. I see no problem with pointing out that episode 1 part one is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/shalka/one/fla sh/broadone.swf and that substiting 'broadtwo', 'broadthree', broadfour' into the URI will get the other files for episode one.
However, I'm viewing it from the BBC site because I want them to see the hits to encourage them to do more web animations and so the bosses can see that the spend was worthwhile.
If you can get hold of a VHS tape of the story 'City Of Death' from series 17 (1979), it's another Adams-penned story (credited to 'David Agnew' as a series' script editor wasn't really supposed to submit scripts) which was completed (the original production of Shada was disrupted by strikes in 1979 and never broadcast) and which consistently comes top three in fan polls of favourite Who stories over the last two decades. It's just delicious. Sadly this isn't one of the DVDs released so far.
Adams also wrote The Pirate Planet in season 16, but it's not a patch on City Of Death.