"In Australia you have to log something like 200 hours of driving before they'll issue you a probationary license. While that means you'll be more likely to have encountered tricky situations with an experienced driver sitting next to you, it doesn't actually reduce the number of dickheads on the road."
I think it's only 100 hours (in Qld at least; may be different elsewhere), and the 'experienced driver' needs only have held an open license for 12 months or more.
Which goes a long way to explaining the number of dickheads on the road. Far from having an 'experienced driver' beside them, chances are they had just another dickhead sitting next to them for most of those 100 hours...
It might be a bit of a reach, but it's certainly inside arguable territory. USB was Intel's baby, a low-speed & simpler to implement alternative to Firewire, and had been around since '95 or '96. There were a few PCs with USB prior to the iMac in '98; what was really missing was general OS support (Windows didn't get that until Win98; USB was only vaguely supported by device-specific OEM drivers or 3rd-party USB stacks in Win95 OSR2.1) and general retail availability of USB devices to connect to.
Win98 went on sale in June '98; the iMac G3 went on sale in August the same year. While Wintel hardware may have been the first to adopt & start the move to USB, the iMac certainly drove the rapid adoption of USB by dropping Apple-standard ADB / serial ports and the standard inbuilt floppy. You wanted to read your old floppys or connect to a printer? You had to buy a USB floppy or adaptor. Pretty soon, you could buy floppys and serial / parallel interfaces in matching Bondi Blue everywhere...
It's the "amino acid not found in nature" that's the story here, not the "dye which glows when exposed to UV light".
They've modified the DNA of a multi-celluar organism to produce a non-natural amino acid. It's been done before, yes, but only in single-celled organisms. The sequence is
1) Take a fluorescing protein 2) Modify the protein so it only glows when contains_custom_amino_acid == TRUE. 3) Insert protein sequence in DNA 4) PROFIT!
The glowing pigs, cats, dogs, and fish omit step #2.
I edit Wikipedia not a lot, but regularly. In a few instances I got reverted, and every time I came to agree with the editor's decision. While my experience is anecdotal, here is why I think all of these whiners are full of crap: if a single one of my good edits got reverted I would probably make a stink there and then.
I used to edit Wikipedia a bit a few years ago - nothing major, just fixing stupid errors like mixups between north/south or east/west on pages related to my city and surrounding area. Obviously wrong, too trivial to require a citation, simply fixable, and easily verifiable by any "editor" who was capable of finding North on a map.
And when they were reverted - as most were within a few hours - I didn't make a stink there and then. I said "Fuck it - be wrong then!" and went on with my life. Because, frankly, I don't care if Wikipedia is wrong.
Just stop telling me that Wikipedia is right - or that, if it's not right, it's my fault for not trying hard enough! to make it right.
I've had articles that I follow from time to time deleted for "non-notability" even if they were well-sourced and had verifiable information.
Did you take them to Deletion review?
How would I, a casual user without a Wikipedia account who just follows articles, take a deleted article to a Deletion Review?
History deleted.
Deletion of an article only removes it from public view as not part of the encyclopedia. All revisions of all deleted articles are preserved in history and are visible to administrators. Ask an administrator to e-mail the deleted article to you.
How would I, a casual user without a Wikipedia account who just follows articles, find an administrator who will respond and email the deleted article to me?
OK, so I just went to Wikipedia to look all that up. Guessed that "Contact Us" would lead me in the right direction. Decided "Report a problem with an article" under "For Readers" looked like a good place to start. Nope, it specifically says "In particular, the volunteer response team will not add links / add data / override article deletions. It is therefore useless to contact us by email about such issues". So It seems that's not the place to request a deletion review - still, might be handy for when I want to contact an admin to get a deleted article emailed to me.
No, wait - I scroll down a bit and there's a link that says "You want to delete or undelete an article". Good stuff, exactly what I'm after! Click on that, and see "To undelete an article, request its restoration on our Deletion Review page. Before requesting an undeletion, please read the undeletion policy and ask the administrator who deleted the article, if you know who it is. We will not process requests for undeletion sent through email."
No, stuff it - it's already gotten more involved that I want it to be. Do I really have to now read the undeletion policy, poke around trying to find who deleted the page, contact them (how?), wait an appropriate amount of time to get a reply, hope that reply is informative, then remember the undeletion policy before heading off to the deletion review page?
Hmmm, maybe I do. So, a week after all that, I head off to the Deletion Review page. Wait, what's this? "For articles deleted via proposed deletion or simple image undeletions, please post a request at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion." Well, you could've told me that a week ago! But how do I find out if the article was deleted via a proposed deletion?
Dunno. So I keep reading down the page - hang on, now I've got to read Wikipedia:Deletion Policy and the list of perennial requests? Better do that then......... OK, I'm back now, still scrolling down, reading all the do's and don'ts, and I think I've got it all covered. Wait, what? "If your request is completely non-controversial (e.g., restoring an article deleted with a prod,...". My request is completely non-controversial - but WTF is a prod? Oh, it's a "Proposed Deletion" - good, I covered that earlier. Now I'm just six arcane steps away from making my first Request for Undeletion!
Or, remembering that I'm just a casual reader with absolutely no investment in Wikipedia beyond following a now-deleted page, it's more likely that I just said "Fuck it, can't be bothered" somewhere back around "Contact Us"...
Australia got rid of the 1c coin years ago. Prices that used to end in.99 now end in.95, not.00.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
That's because it's not true. A quick look at all the receipts awaiting reimbursment on the wall in front of me indicates that the vast majority of things are still priced $x.99, with the occasional oddity priced at $x.96 or $x.77
If you pay cash, the prices are rounded up (or down) to the nearest 5c. If you pay by EFT or CC, then the unrounded price stands.
Well, a couple of hundred bucks plus a fairly lo-noise receiving location with space for a small turnstile or crossed dipole antenna will do it.
But regardless, what your $200 (or $5000) gets you is the APT transmissions - a low-res 1 or 2 channel image which bears about as much relationship to the images the weather bureau uses for forecasting as YouTube does to Bluray...
Speak for yourself. I'm stuck on FF3.5.x due to my university's SoE policy, and can't upgrade beyond that using the standard FF install (I'd have to grab one of the 3rd-party stand-alone / USB stick releases). Even despite the fact that everybody accesses their email via Exchange webmail, 90+% of people use either FF or Chrome (which is also an old version in the SoE).
We're also heavy users of Google Calendar - everything that needs to be accessed by both staff & students is done there, because Outlook Calendar sucks at synchronising between our in-house staff Exchange server & our MS Live student accounts. I can see our IT guys will be busy rolling out SoE updates in the near future...
Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well. Not necessarily in GMB, but 'the west' never fully divested itself of the ideas; even after the NAZIs gave us a front row seat in how badly these things can go.
Interestingly, one only has to look at the origins of marriage counselling (e.g. Paul Popenoe, Robert Dickinson) and Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger, Abraham & Hannah Stone, etc) in the US to see the connection...
No, Mozilla worked hard to create a sprawling, all-in-one 'application suite' encompassing web, mail, news, etc. They got 8/10ths of the way there - then noticed that interest was dropping off, captured by a 'brilliant little browser' called Phoenix, a slimmed-down version of the Mozilla codebase initially developed by 3 guys
Mozilla eventually decided to ditch - but not really, because that would be admitting that Mozilla made a mistake, and ever since admitting that Mozilla made a huge mistake by trying to use the Netscape codebase, the Mozilla organisation has taken criticism about as well as a pit-bull takes being kicked in the nuts - the Mozilla Suite, and sidled their way into taking over Phoenix development.
Having learned the hard way that people wanted a browser, not a do-everything suite, they still refused to admit they'd made a mistake. Mistaking 'change' for 'development', 'enhancement', or 'evolution', Mozilla directed all the effort they'd been spending on building a do-everything suite into changing Phoenix (later Firebird, now Firefox).
At this point, however - somewhere just before the time of Firefox 2, when they went from "Firefox! With Thunderbird, part of Mozilla's Internet application suite!" to "Firefox! Oh yeah, we also make a mail / newsreader, you'll find it on our other site somewhere..." - their culture started to clash with itself. The relentless development drive, now sublimated into a "gotta keep changing" drive, mean they focussed on introducing new 'features' and changing existing functionality for no purpose other than to show 'development'; the "admit no mistakes" culture meant that any new feature recieving less than 100% admiration from users was now guaranteed to be included, out of plain bloody-minded stubbornness.
To Mozilla, every new version of Firefox is more perfect than before; if the users don't agree, it's the users that are imperfect - and the only way to deal with that is force them to use the new features; eventually they'll have to agree and come around to Mozilla's way of thinking. Meanwhile, users are getting pissed off with new 'features' that work significantly worse than previous functionality - a few, like me, still stick around from habit and a lack of really good alternatives, but those alternatives are starting to look better and better...
To be completely fair, the acting in Blake's 7 is quite good. The problem is that it's good stage acting, not good television acting.
Why it should be so, when Dr Who didn't suffer from the same problem 20-something years earlier, is a mystery. My personal guess is (a) all the principles in Blake's 7 (Blake, Avon, Servalan) and half the non-regular supporting cast were already established stage actors, while in Dr Who only William Hartnell was; (b) Dr Who was aimed at children (so the need for 'proper' acting was presumed to be lesser), while Blake's 7 was aimed at at more discerning 'adult' audience; and (c) each scene in early Dr Who was pretty much done on film and live to camera in one take (only egregious errors merited a second take) so as to be ready for broadcast next week, while Blake's 7 had the leisure of multiple takes (filming for the first series started 3 1/2 months before the first broadcast).
(In fact, you can see evidence of that third point in the last 1/2~1/3 of season one - a lot more production errors were allowed to slip through than earlier that season or in later seasons, because the filming schedule had gotten all out of whack.)
It's also interesting to note that the 'better' actors that crop up in early Blake's 7 were either primarily non-stage (TV, movie) actors, or from overseas (e.g. Australia, South Africa). I know that, in Australia at least, most actors had much more experience with TV (due to the smaller theatre circuit), and had a tendency to head to the UK establish their 'real' (i.e. theatre) credentials.
No, but what if someone convinced the BBC to knock off 6 more copies, then sealed them up in a wall so they could be picked up later and sold to collectors?
Yeah, sure, they'd have "This is a fake" scrawled all over them, but since a copy by the original producer can't really be a fake...
No, my point was that the poster to whom I replied was implying that an unaccountable cabal of faceless bureaucrats was responsible for classifying movies, games, and other media in Australia. My reply was pointing out the irrationality of that position when a) we know who they work for, b) we know who the individuals are, c) we know what guidelines they use, and d) we know why they made each individual decision.
Additionally, since it's obviously impractical to ask every media consumer in Australia their opinion on every piece of media available in this country, they address that problem by forming a review committee that e) anyone can apply to join.
And, though I'd bet large amounts of money I'm way way to the left of you politically, I have no desire to move to China. I would, however, like to know where this mythical land you live in - where no decisions that affect you personally are ever made without your direct and individual consultation - is located.
Mainly so I can avoid it - it sounds like a horrible recipe for either a disasterous and devastating stalemate, or a toughest, most ruthless and manipulative dog-eats-dog winner-takes-all world. My guess is you see it as the latter scenario, with yourself coming out on top...
Slashdot Mirror
"In Australia you have to log something like 200 hours of driving before they'll issue you a probationary license. While that means you'll be more likely to have encountered tricky situations with an experienced driver sitting next to you, it doesn't actually reduce the number of dickheads on the road."
I think it's only 100 hours (in Qld at least; may be different elsewhere), and the 'experienced driver' needs only have held an open license for 12 months or more.
Which goes a long way to explaining the number of dickheads on the road. Far from having an 'experienced driver' beside them, chances are they had just another dickhead sitting next to them for most of those 100 hours...
Not the second time...
It might be a bit of a reach, but it's certainly inside arguable territory. USB was Intel's baby, a low-speed & simpler to implement alternative to Firewire, and had been around since '95 or '96. There were a few PCs with USB prior to the iMac in '98; what was really missing was general OS support (Windows didn't get that until Win98; USB was only vaguely supported by device-specific OEM drivers or 3rd-party USB stacks in Win95 OSR2.1) and general retail availability of USB devices to connect to.
Win98 went on sale in June '98; the iMac G3 went on sale in August the same year. While Wintel hardware may have been the first to adopt & start the move to USB, the iMac certainly drove the rapid adoption of USB by dropping Apple-standard ADB / serial ports and the standard inbuilt floppy. You wanted to read your old floppys or connect to a printer? You had to buy a USB floppy or adaptor. Pretty soon, you could buy floppys and serial / parallel interfaces in matching Bondi Blue everywhere...
So, what you're saying is that the U.S. government controls your clocks by beaming invisible rays into them?
"... such as by making the code into it's own executable and shelling out to it ..."
Which is what they did when they used ffmpeg & mencoder in one of their other products, Hamster Free Video Converter.
In other words, they have a history of this type of thing...
It's the "amino acid not found in nature" that's the story here, not the "dye which glows when exposed to UV light".
They've modified the DNA of a multi-celluar organism to produce a non-natural amino acid. It's been done before, yes, but only in single-celled organisms. The sequence is
1) Take a fluorescing protein
2) Modify the protein so it only glows when contains_custom_amino_acid == TRUE.
3) Insert protein sequence in DNA
4) PROFIT!
The glowing pigs, cats, dogs, and fish omit step #2.
I used to edit Wikipedia a bit a few years ago - nothing major, just fixing stupid errors like mixups between north/south or east/west on pages related to my city and surrounding area. Obviously wrong, too trivial to require a citation, simply fixable, and easily verifiable by any "editor" who was capable of finding North on a map.
And when they were reverted - as most were within a few hours - I didn't make a stink there and then. I said "Fuck it - be wrong then!" and went on with my life. Because, frankly, I don't care if Wikipedia is wrong.
Just stop telling me that Wikipedia is right - or that, if it's not right, it's my fault for not trying hard enough! to make it right.
How would I, a casual user without a Wikipedia account who just follows articles, take a deleted article to a Deletion Review?
How would I, a casual user without a Wikipedia account who just follows articles, find an administrator who will respond and email the deleted article to me?
OK, so I just went to Wikipedia to look all that up. Guessed that "Contact Us" would lead me in the right direction. Decided "Report a problem with an article" under "For Readers" looked like a good place to start. Nope, it specifically says "In particular, the volunteer response team will not add links / add data / override article deletions. It is therefore useless to contact us by email about such issues". So It seems that's not the place to request a deletion review - still, might be handy for when I want to contact an admin to get a deleted article emailed to me.
No, wait - I scroll down a bit and there's a link that says "You want to delete or undelete an article". Good stuff, exactly what I'm after! Click on that, and see "To undelete an article, request its restoration on our Deletion Review page. Before requesting an undeletion, please read the undeletion policy and ask the administrator who deleted the article, if you know who it is. We will not process requests for undeletion sent through email."
No, stuff it - it's already gotten more involved that I want it to be. Do I really have to now read the undeletion policy, poke around trying to find who deleted the page, contact them (how?), wait an appropriate amount of time to get a reply, hope that reply is informative, then remember the undeletion policy before heading off to the deletion review page?
Hmmm, maybe I do. So, a week after all that, I head off to the Deletion Review page. Wait, what's this? "For articles deleted via proposed deletion or simple image undeletions, please post a request at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion." Well, you could've told me that a week ago! But how do I find out if the article was deleted via a proposed deletion?
Dunno. So I keep reading down the page - hang on, now I've got to read Wikipedia:Deletion Policy and the list of perennial requests? Better do that then ... ... ... ...". My request is completely non-controversial - but WTF is a prod? Oh, it's a "Proposed Deletion" - good, I covered that earlier. Now I'm just six arcane steps away from making my first Request for Undeletion!
OK, I'm back now, still scrolling down, reading all the do's and don'ts, and I think I've got it all covered. Wait, what? "If your request is completely non-controversial (e.g., restoring an article deleted with a prod,
Or, remembering that I'm just a casual reader with absolutely no investment in Wikipedia beyond following a now-deleted page, it's more likely that I just said "Fuck it, can't be bothered" somewhere back around "Contact Us"...
So you don't have any citations? Just half-remembered anecdotes from /.?
Fair enough, but you should've just said that in the first place...
That's because it's not true. A quick look at all the receipts awaiting reimbursment on the wall in front of me indicates that the vast majority of things are still priced $x.99, with the occasional oddity priced at $x.96 or $x.77
If you pay cash, the prices are rounded up (or down) to the nearest 5c. If you pay by EFT or CC, then the unrounded price stands.
Well, a couple of hundred bucks plus a fairly lo-noise receiving location with space for a small turnstile or crossed dipole antenna will do it.
But regardless, what your $200 (or $5000) gets you is the APT transmissions - a low-res 1 or 2 channel image which bears about as much relationship to the images the weather bureau uses for forecasting as YouTube does to Bluray...
"Anyone on FF3.5 can move to 3.6, ..."
Speak for yourself. I'm stuck on FF3.5.x due to my university's SoE policy, and can't upgrade beyond that using the standard FF install (I'd have to grab one of the 3rd-party stand-alone / USB stick releases). Even despite the fact that everybody accesses their email via Exchange webmail, 90+% of people use either FF or Chrome (which is also an old version in the SoE).
We're also heavy users of Google Calendar - everything that needs to be accessed by both staff & students is done there, because Outlook Calendar sucks at synchronising between our in-house staff Exchange server & our MS Live student accounts. I can see our IT guys will be busy rolling out SoE updates in the near future...
Sure, if all you want to do is toy high school science fair fiddling and not real science.
Every proper scientist should know that you need at least 3 replicates per treatment...
Notice she was very careful not to say her DVDs were confiscated? Because they weren't; Customs "were only interested in illegal pornography".
... or else, you'll be allowed to keep it?
Interestingly, one only has to look at the origins of marriage counselling (e.g. Paul Popenoe, Robert Dickinson) and Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger, Abraham & Hannah Stone, etc) in the US to see the connection...
Because you're not a wombat?
"The Scots are trying to screw up English programmers?
What about the Welsh?"
They're going to pull out of the whole deal...
No, Mozilla worked hard to create a sprawling, all-in-one 'application suite' encompassing web, mail, news, etc. They got 8/10ths of the way there - then noticed that interest was dropping off, captured by a 'brilliant little browser' called Phoenix, a slimmed-down version of the Mozilla codebase initially developed by 3 guys
Mozilla eventually decided to ditch - but not really, because that would be admitting that Mozilla made a mistake, and ever since admitting that Mozilla made a huge mistake by trying to use the Netscape codebase, the Mozilla organisation has taken criticism about as well as a pit-bull takes being kicked in the nuts - the Mozilla Suite, and sidled their way into taking over Phoenix development.
Having learned the hard way that people wanted a browser, not a do-everything suite, they still refused to admit they'd made a mistake. Mistaking 'change' for 'development', 'enhancement', or 'evolution', Mozilla directed all the effort they'd been spending on building a do-everything suite into changing Phoenix (later Firebird, now Firefox).
At this point, however - somewhere just before the time of Firefox 2, when they went from "Firefox! With Thunderbird, part of Mozilla's Internet application suite!" to "Firefox! Oh yeah, we also make a mail / newsreader, you'll find it on our other site somewhere..." - their culture started to clash with itself. The relentless development drive, now sublimated into a "gotta keep changing" drive, mean they focussed on introducing new 'features' and changing existing functionality for no purpose other than to show 'development'; the "admit no mistakes" culture meant that any new feature recieving less than 100% admiration from users was now guaranteed to be included, out of plain bloody-minded stubbornness.
To Mozilla, every new version of Firefox is more perfect than before; if the users don't agree, it's the users that are imperfect - and the only way to deal with that is force them to use the new features; eventually they'll have to agree and come around to Mozilla's way of thinking. Meanwhile, users are getting pissed off with new 'features' that work significantly worse than previous functionality - a few, like me, still stick around from habit and a lack of really good alternatives, but those alternatives are starting to look better and better...
Late to this, but...
To be completely fair, the acting in Blake's 7 is quite good. The problem is that it's good stage acting, not good television acting.
Why it should be so, when Dr Who didn't suffer from the same problem 20-something years earlier, is a mystery. My personal guess is (a) all the principles in Blake's 7 (Blake, Avon, Servalan) and half the non-regular supporting cast were already established stage actors, while in Dr Who only William Hartnell was; (b) Dr Who was aimed at children (so the need for 'proper' acting was presumed to be lesser), while Blake's 7 was aimed at at more discerning 'adult' audience; and (c) each scene in early Dr Who was pretty much done on film and live to camera in one take (only egregious errors merited a second take) so as to be ready for broadcast next week, while Blake's 7 had the leisure of multiple takes (filming for the first series started 3 1/2 months before the first broadcast).
(In fact, you can see evidence of that third point in the last 1/2~1/3 of season one - a lot more production errors were allowed to slip through than earlier that season or in later seasons, because the filming schedule had gotten all out of whack.)
It's also interesting to note that the 'better' actors that crop up in early Blake's 7 were either primarily non-stage (TV, movie) actors, or from overseas (e.g. Australia, South Africa). I know that, in Australia at least, most actors had much more experience with TV (due to the smaller theatre circuit), and had a tendency to head to the UK establish their 'real' (i.e. theatre) credentials.
The difference is the WSC cars are allowed to use a battery - the rules for the Guinness World Record specify solar power only.
In the 2009 WSC the UNSW car reached 103km/h with a LiPol battery, but that was removed for this attempt to comply with the Guinness rules.
No, but what if someone convinced the BBC to knock off 6 more copies, then sealed them up in a wall so they could be picked up later and sold to collectors?
Yeah, sure, they'd have "This is a fake" scrawled all over them, but since a copy by the original producer can't really be a fake...
BrianMoynihanIsAThievingCunt.com, for one...
"I am altering the agreement. Pray I do not alter it any further ..."
No, my point was that the poster to whom I replied was implying that an unaccountable cabal of faceless bureaucrats was responsible for classifying movies, games, and other media in Australia. My reply was pointing out the irrationality of that position when a) we know who they work for, b) we know who the individuals are, c) we know what guidelines they use, and d) we know why they made each individual decision.
Additionally, since it's obviously impractical to ask every media consumer in Australia their opinion on every piece of media available in this country, they address that problem by forming a review committee that e) anyone can apply to join.
And, though I'd bet large amounts of money I'm way way to the left of you politically, I have no desire to move to China. I would, however, like to know where this mythical land you live in - where no decisions that affect you personally are ever made without your direct and individual consultation - is located.
Mainly so I can avoid it - it sounds like a horrible recipe for either a disasterous and devastating stalemate, or a toughest, most ruthless and manipulative dog-eats-dog winner-takes-all world. My guess is you see it as the latter scenario, with yourself coming out on top...
Do you mean the secret cabal that oversees ratings in Australia? That the members of the ratings board are secret? That the guidelines they use to determine classification are secret? That their review decisions are secret?
Or are you just pissed that they make decisions without asking you?