It is always labeled 500g, nobody would use "pund" in any formal context. And nobody thinks of it as a different system, it is just a shorthand for "half a kilo" (kilo alone for some reason always refer to grams, again in informal context). Pund is only used for a few places, butter and somewhat related body weight change. Body weight is always kg, but changes for some reason is often measured in pund.
The Swedish "1 mile = 10 km" is official though, you can see it on roadsigns. I guess it is useful due to the large distances in Sweden.
I do miss "pint", we have no word for half a litre. It is usually called "a large beer" (what else would you measure in pints), but in some German inspired pubs "a large beer" would one litre. It is so much simpler to just order a "pint" in an UK pub.
They used technology pioneered by others before them. And those people also build on older technology. Given that Intel really is one of the major pioneers in CPUs, it is quite likely that the Intel patents are as legitimate as the Transmeta patent.
The Netscape vs Microsoft is totally inappropriate, neither company was pioneer in anything but the commercializing of existing technology.
> Do you believe the D.A. in the Duke case needs to be disbarred?
Yes, and put in prison himself if the Wikipedia writeup is correct (it seems very POV). Apparently, he falsified evidence by *not* mentioning that the DNA did not match the boys.
> If so, how does that help the boys whose character and reputation he destroyed, not to mention > their suspension from Duke University because of his actions.
How does putting a murder in prison help the victims family? I don't see the relevance of the question.
US were never against DK in the cartoon crisis. US diplomats tried to calm down the situation, like most people with international experience, but never sided with Islam on the freedom of speech issues. Fanatics on both sides were displeased by the moderation, as they naturally wanted to escalate the situation.
> A bit like US versus French: they hate each other but both stand for Liberty... Odd, isn't it?
The French screwed up their revolution and made it a reign of terror. They have never forgiven the US for getting it right. But yes, I keep expecting Germany to side with UK instead of France, and France to seek alliance with US just to piss off the rest of us. It would make so much more sense that way.
How about movies of women visiting abortion clinics? Men visiting brothels?
Or, where I live, you could risk the life of some Muslim high-school girls by publishing photographs of them kissing non-Muslim boys.
Should two men be allowed to walk hand in hand in a public park, without getting their picture on www.godhategays.com?
Or what about people who aren't doing anything ethically wrong (even by the fanatics who would consider any of the above examples morally evil), like people who are overweight, mentally ill, bad dressers, clumsy, plain ugly, or otherwise doesn't live up to the norm of society?
> And how do you know that the idiot close enough to film you for that minor infraction is not > psychopathic enough to lean over and spit in your food while you're gone?
If you are paranoid enough to worry that the person at the next table will spit in your food while you are at the restroom, you probably shouldn't eat out anyway. Even if you watch over the food from the moment it is served, it doesn't rule out the possibility that the person who made the food, or who served the food, might have spit it as well.
Better stay at home, lock the door, at eat only vegetables you have grown yourself in artificial light.
He didn't do anything even the most conservative shop owner would think was wrong, or think his customers would think was wrong, so there is no way the video is going to hurt the kids jobs prospects directly.
But there is a lot of kids who got famous in an early age that have emotional problems from it (Michael Jackson would be an extreme example), and many kids who are ridiculed by their peers also get various kind of problems. And this kid was ridiculed by the whole world.
The self confidence he used to have might be crushed, and if so, that is likely to cost him jobs, friends, and romance. That is, it can very well ruin his life. It doesn't have to, he might be of the "what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger type". The "what doesn't kill me, cripple me" reaction to abuse is more common though.
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets." - Omar Bradley
In hiding behind your "I am a craftsman" defense, you are truly an ethical midget.
No, the people who build the atomic bombs were giants, the people who decided to use them were midgets (actually, they were not, but that it another discussion).
Refusing to impose your own morality on other people does not make you a midget. We scientist, engineers, and craftsmen create the tools with which humankind can build paradise on Earth. We do not impose paradise (or our view of paradise, which may be a hole lot nerdier than others) on them.
I'm one of those externally financed researchers, who are involved in a lot of different projects. Giving these projects some short and easy to remember shorthands makes life much easier. So finding a good acronym is useful. I suspect the same is true for bills in the political scene.
1) The big companies, who can keep newcomers out. 2) Litigation companies, with no purpose other than suing.
It can not serve the little guy with an innovative products, as all products build on older ideas, and the lifetime of a patent is much longer than the generation gab between products.
If you have a great patentable idea, and want to make money on it, here is what you must do: Patent it. Distribute it widey, for example, if applicable, as source code under a BSD/MIT style license. Watch others build products on it. Sue them. Never, ever, make the mistake of creating a product of your own. The time where you could get rich by identifying a need, and selling a product to fulfill it, is long gone.
If you use a different system when precision matter than you use in your daily life, you are more likely to overlook mistakes.
We have had that discussion at work, do we use mm/d (the common unit) for rain intensity, or do we use m/s which is the "pure" ISO unit? The advantage of using pure ISO units is that there is no risk of conversion errors. Nonetheless, I prefer the first, if I see that we had 60 mm/d I immediately know that this is a huge event (for Danish conditions). And that 600 mm/d is almost certainly an error. If I see 5.2e-7 m/s I'll have to convert it first, and an error is much more likely to slip through.
> There's no need for conversion - it's not as if some containers are marked in cubic inches and > other containers of the same product are marked in gallons.
I'd guess you would put water in both kind of containers. There will always be border cases for which product belong where, or can be used as a replacement.
> This kind of rule would primarily have nefarious consequences, not beneficial, as it would > assuredly make prosecutors overlook any case that is not a "slam-dunk".
It would also greatly increase the the temptation after the trial started to withhold evidence that could help the defense, and to fabricate evidence to ensure a win.
A substitute teacher had been using a school computer for surfing porn (although the site names sound more like dating sites), one of the sites installed some malware with porn pop-ups which were activated at a point in time where the pupils could see it.
She is most likely not allowed to use work computers for private purpose (although everybody does), and using it for porn is worse as the risk of malware is higher. This is something that would in a sane society be a cause of a "serious talk" at the boss office. So how did this get this far?
1) Someone, either the school principal or a parent, must have decided that watching porn pop-ups constitute injury to the pupils.
2) The prosecutor must have agreed.
3) The jury has agreed.
This point to a society whose norms are seriously sick, not just a few twisted individuals.
This should probably give her a warning if it was a first time offense, or maybe get it fired if she had been warned before, or there had been discussions on school about the danger and inappropriateness of using the school computers for that.
Actually, I don't know anyone here who use cubic centimeters. We use ml (milliliters) which makes the conversion even more obvious.
And yes, it convenient to be able to compare the price of four containers with 500 ml each, with one container with 2 l, without having to use a calculator.
I will leave it as an exercise to the interested student how to convert between cubic centimeters and milliliters.
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It is always labeled 500g, nobody would use "pund" in any formal context. And nobody thinks of it as a different system, it is just a shorthand for "half a kilo" (kilo alone for some reason always refer to grams, again in informal context). Pund is only used for a few places, butter and somewhat related body weight change. Body weight is always kg, but changes for some reason is often measured in pund.
The Swedish "1 mile = 10 km" is official though, you can see it on roadsigns. I guess it is useful due to the large distances in Sweden.
I do miss "pint", we have no word for half a litre. It is usually called "a large beer" (what else would you measure in pints), but in some German inspired pubs "a large beer" would one litre. It is so much simpler to just order a "pint" in an UK pub.
The really amazing thing is that we get amazed when a company use "treat your customers with respect" as a business method, and it works.
> First, if it was really OSX, why would they need Google's help to implement Google Maps?
> It would just run.
But it wouldn't be integrated into the phone functionality, which was what Jobs demonstrated at the keynote.
> Second, the interface is obviously significantly different.
Yes.
> Third, it's hard to believe a handheld would have the resources to run OSX.
The handheld is more powerful than the desktops that ran NeXTStep with no problem in its time.
> Finally, if it was really OSX, then any OSX app would run on it (in theory).
I suspect it is OS X with all the (for the demo) unnecessary components stripped out. Probably with Cocoa as the sole API.
You know, there is a reason the company is not called Apple Computer anymore.
They used technology pioneered by others before them. And those people also build on older technology. Given that Intel really is one of the major pioneers in CPUs, it is quite likely that the Intel patents are as legitimate as the Transmeta patent.
The Netscape vs Microsoft is totally inappropriate, neither company was pioneer in anything but the commercializing of existing technology.
> Do you believe the D.A. in the Duke case needs to be disbarred?
Yes, and put in prison himself if the Wikipedia writeup is correct (it seems very POV). Apparently, he falsified evidence by *not* mentioning that the DNA did not match the boys.
> If so, how does that help the boys whose character and reputation he destroyed, not to mention
> their suspension from Duke University because of his actions.
How does putting a murder in prison help the victims family? I don't see the relevance of the question.
We actually still use pund (pound) in Denmark, it is just redefined as 500 g.
Not quite as drastic as the Swedes, who redefined their miles to be 10 km!
> Ooooh.... .dk ;-) I see where that comes from ;-))
US were never against DK in the cartoon crisis. US diplomats tried to calm down the situation, like most people with international experience, but never sided with Islam on the freedom of speech issues. Fanatics on both sides were displeased by the moderation, as they naturally wanted to escalate the situation.
> A bit like US versus French: they hate each other but both stand for Liberty... Odd, isn't it?
The French screwed up their revolution and made it a reign of terror. They have never forgiven the US for getting it right. But yes, I keep expecting Germany to side with UK instead of France, and France to seek alliance with US just to piss off the rest of us. It would make so much more sense that way.
How about movies of women visiting abortion clinics? Men visiting brothels?
Or, where I live, you could risk the life of some Muslim high-school girls by publishing photographs of them kissing non-Muslim boys.
Should two men be allowed to walk hand in hand in a public park, without getting their picture on www.godhategays.com?
Or what about people who aren't doing anything ethically wrong (even by the fanatics who would consider any of the above examples morally evil), like people who are overweight, mentally ill, bad dressers, clumsy, plain ugly, or otherwise doesn't live up to the norm of society?
> And how do you know that the idiot close enough to film you for that minor infraction is not
> psychopathic enough to lean over and spit in your food while you're gone?
If you are paranoid enough to worry that the person at the next table will spit in your food while you are at the restroom, you probably shouldn't eat out anyway. Even if you watch over the food from the moment it is served, it doesn't rule out the possibility that the person who made the food, or who served the food, might have spit it as well.
Better stay at home, lock the door, at eat only vegetables you have grown yourself in artificial light.
He didn't do anything even the most conservative shop owner would think was wrong, or think his customers would think was wrong, so there is no way the video is going to hurt the kids jobs prospects directly.
But there is a lot of kids who got famous in an early age that have emotional problems from it (Michael Jackson would be an extreme example), and many kids who are ridiculed by their peers also get various kind of problems. And this kid was ridiculed by the whole world.
The self confidence he used to have might be crushed, and if so, that is likely to cost him jobs, friends, and romance. That is, it can very well ruin his life. It doesn't have to, he might be of the "what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger type". The "what doesn't kill me, cripple me" reaction to abuse is more common though.
In many international organizations, it tends to be US + Islam on one side, versus Europe on the other side, when in comes to "moral" issues.
Within the variance of "sea level", yes.
No, the people who build the atomic bombs were giants, the people who decided to use them were midgets (actually, they were not, but that it another discussion).
Refusing to impose your own morality on other people does not make you a midget. We scientist, engineers, and craftsmen create the tools with which humankind can build paradise on Earth. We do not impose paradise (or our view of paradise, which may be a hole lot nerdier than others) on them.
"bestest", "advancedist" and "coinsumer" are perfectly cromulent words!
They just haven't found their way into the dictionaries yet.
I'm one of those externally financed researchers, who are involved in a lot of different projects. Giving these projects some short and easy to remember shorthands makes life much easier. So finding a good acronym is useful. I suspect the same is true for bills in the political scene.
But only if you don't have a product of your own.
The patent system can serve two groups:
1) The big companies, who can keep newcomers out.
2) Litigation companies, with no purpose other than suing.
It can not serve the little guy with an innovative products, as all products build on older ideas, and the lifetime of a patent is much longer than the generation gab between products.
If you have a great patentable idea, and want to make money on it, here is what you must do: Patent it. Distribute it widey, for example, if applicable, as source code under a BSD/MIT style license. Watch others build products on it. Sue them. Never, ever, make the mistake of creating a product of your own. The time where you could get rich by identifying a need, and selling a product to fulfill it, is long gone.
If you use a different system when precision matter than you use in your daily life, you are more likely to overlook mistakes.
We have had that discussion at work, do we use mm/d (the common unit) for rain intensity, or do we use m/s which is the "pure" ISO unit? The advantage of using pure ISO units is that there is no risk of conversion errors. Nonetheless, I prefer the first, if I see that we had 60 mm/d I immediately know that this is a huge event (for Danish conditions). And that 600 mm/d is almost certainly an error. If I see 5.2e-7 m/s I'll have to convert it first, and an error is much more likely to slip through.
> My point exactly. Why aren't you using the metric system again?
Because I live in a country where everybody use metric, and the old system have long since been forgotten, and I like to be different.
Glad you asked.
> There's no need for conversion - it's not as if some containers are marked in cubic inches and
> other containers of the same product are marked in gallons.
I'd guess you would put water in both kind of containers. There will always be border cases for which product belong where, or can be used as a replacement.
> I don't think death by public stoning would be particularly preferable to 40 years in prison.
If the popular descriptions of the conditions of US jails are true, I'd prefer stoning over 40 years inside one of those.
> This kind of rule would primarily have nefarious consequences, not beneficial, as it would
> assuredly make prosecutors overlook any case that is not a "slam-dunk".
It would also greatly increase the the temptation after the trial started to withhold evidence that could help the defense, and to fabricate evidence to ensure a win.
She is most likely not allowed to use work computers for private purpose (although everybody does), and using it for porn is worse as the risk of malware is higher. This is something that would in a sane society be a cause of a "serious talk" at the boss office. So how did this get this far?
1) Someone, either the school principal or a parent, must have decided that watching porn pop-ups constitute injury to the pupils.
2) The prosecutor must have agreed.
3) The jury has agreed.
This point to a society whose norms are seriously sick, not just a few twisted individuals.
This should probably give her a warning if it was a first time offense, or maybe get it fired if she had been warned before, or there had been discussions on school about the danger and inappropriateness of using the school computers for that.
Actually, I don't know anyone here who use cubic centimeters. We use ml (milliliters) which makes the conversion even more obvious.
And yes, it convenient to be able to compare the price of four containers with 500 ml each, with one container with 2 l, without having to use a calculator.
I will leave it as an exercise to the interested student how to convert between cubic centimeters and milliliters.