I think it's a big problem with US shows, over UK ones.
US shows usually have 12-24 episodes to a series, and tend to produce them until viewing figures demand cancellation. UK series are often 6 episodes long, and tend not to be plugged to death.
At that sort of low intensity, a show can stay fresh for a great many years without running out of steam.
I used to ride the train every weekend to visit my student girlfriend, before I had a car. When I got a car, I stopped.
The journey was more than £10 more expensive for a return ticket than it was for petrol, it took twice as long door-to-door (2 hours by train, when on time, 1 hour by car, with average traffic), and was a little delayed maybe as much as half of the time. Serious incidents occurred many times in the year or so I was taking the train; I had only 1 seriously delayed drive in the 3 years I was driving it.
On the train I also rarely got a seat, and my weekend luggage was limited to what I could be bothered to carry. The toilets stank, the booze was overpriced, and I'd never have attempted to use my laptop while crouching in the walkway.
I'm not really sure what the point of that rant was. Maybe I just needed to let it out.
They're worried you won't pay them hard cash for the official app (iPhone version retailing at £4.99, I'm told) if you can get something as good or better for free.
Not that the trains ever run at the times in the timetable anyway. I used to rigorously plan my journeys- now I find that the pot-luck method is just as effective, and at least adds a cheap thrill of uncertainty to your trip.
I suspect the explanation is far simpler- sexier-cut tops and padded bras.
I don't know when exactly you were a kid, but it's no secret that younger teenagers wear more adult fashions than they did decades ago. Unless you're looking at a lot of topless 13 year old girls (in which case best not to admit it here) there's no easy way to tell without a good scientific study.
Don't be daft. Desktop Linux is still a tiny minnow compared to Windows and Mac, but Android (a commercial, end user OS) is thriving in it's market, and Linux on the server and Linux in embedded devices are all doing fine.
GPL clearly isn't holding it back all that badly, or you'd be seeing a 1% market share for Linux in all markets, rather than just desktop computing. Whatever factor makes Linux uncompetitive as a desktop OS clearly doesn't apply to it's other market incarnations- and the GPL is the one thing which is consistent about Linux on all platforms.
If you right something yourself, just yourself, you don't have to publish the source code under the GPL. You can publish it under BSD, or Apache, or a proprietary licence, or whatever.
If you want to take somebody else's code and do something with it (modify it, build something on top of it, etc.) they have the right to request you treat their code in the way that they wish. If they put it under GPL, it's because they want your code to be fed back into something useful for them. Seeing as you're benefiting from their hard work, you don't get ultimate control over it.
I've always hated the "what's more free" argument- I think it's pointless. If I had to say so, I'd say BSD is "more free", whatever that means. But ultimately, BSD is really useful for some things, GPL is really useful for others, and other licences are useful for other things entirely.
Both GPL & BSD are a lot more community-friendly than an old fashioned proprietary licence, and that's all that really matters to me. Stallman be damned.
I got patted down at a UK airport once (I forget which, probably Bristol). It didn't seem anywhere near as intrusive as even the "old" method described on this page is. The chap just patted down my upper body and legs, it took maybe 20 seconds, and the security guard seemed fairly good humoured about it.
I'd prefer that to the radiation bath. Not sure about my preferences if full crotch-rubbing is involved.
Furthrmore, the Jews of Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, and many other Arab countries fled to Israel in the 1950s after their property was expropriated and their lives threatened with full state support.
I don't disagree. Many of the Islamic countries in the Middle East have appalling records when it comes to dealing with their non-Muslim minority populations, Jewish populations perhaps worse of all. There would be good cause for calling that ethnic cleansing too.
Ethnic cleansing shouldn't be confused with the methods used to achieve it, such as genocide. Ethnic cleansing is the removal of an ethnic group from a certain location by any targetted means, either legal, semi-legal or otherwise. Ethnic cleansing is fairly universally acknowledged as having taken past in Israel in the past:
Arguably the creeping borders of the security fencing and steady expansions of Jewish settlements represents a low-intensity ethnic cleansing to this day. How welcome do you think local Arab farmers would feel in buying a house in the new Jewish settlements?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't sound preposterous to call that ethnic cleansing.
Lets kill everyone in China > Lets kill everyone who is a Mormon, in terms of numbers.
And Lets kill everyone who is Armenian = Lets kill everyone who is Jewish, in terms of semantics. They're both ethnic groups. Presumably the Ottomans were happy enough to leave any ethnic Turks resident in Armenia happily alone.
IANAL and all that, but the/. beloved obviousness test should apply here.
For something to be patentable, it has to be non-obvious to a person working in the relevant field. The relevant field here is genetic biology. They are simply lifting the pattern straight out of the naturally occurring genome, without altering it.
It would seem that this would be an exceedingly obvious application of genetics- anyone with the appropriate (and probably patented) equipment can do it, no skill or ingenuity required.
Customised, altered genetic code is a different matter though.
Depends if you're talking about Long Scale or Short Scale number naming. Long Scale is still pretty popular in Europe and the non-English speaking world, IIRC.
Long Scale used to be the British method too, although Short Scale has mostly (and probably officially) replaced it now.
Ah, so the moral of the story is "You shouldn't be pre-ordering official Microsoft products from big-name retailers".
No, wait. It's "You shouldn't be playing games that get delivered to your home without first going to a bricks-and-mortar shop to check the release date with a shop assistant".
Hang on, no. I've got it, it's "You should always cross reference firmware update numbers with your official Microsoft technical support resource before allowing any system modifications to take place".
Actually no, sorry, I don't think I do get it after all.
I have a NES and a MegaDrive that I've owned for decades now, and I still get them out and play them every couple of years. I also have a big library of PC games, many of which dating back to the '90s, which I can still play online- either via IP dialling or good old fashioned LAN play.
The fact an X-Box (and most new PC games) seem to have a built in expiry date (as soon as the company gets bored of supporting it) seems like a big step backwards for me. Certainly a disincentive to investing the hundreds upon hundreds of pounds that gaming hardware and a big games library calls for.
People have already pointed out that a 6-minute charge would be perfectly doable at a petrol/charging station, which could have banks of capcitors to stop it relying on spiking the grid.
It is also conceivable that the battery would be chargeable with a lower feed over a longer time. Perhaps a regular household mains service would be able to charge it overnight as with existing electric cars, while the 6-minute charge would be handy for range-extending mid-drive top-ups.
1) Book a 1st Class seat 2) Enjoy (hah!) the in flight meal, complete with metal cutlery, glass beakers and china tea cups 3) Hijack plane with your choice of weaponry 4) ??? 5) Profit!
Seriously, apparently we think that people about to commit suicide / mass murder are also too cheap to splash out for the comfy tickets. Terrorists are peasants, so they must only fly cattle class!
Just like Great Britain is a name that linger from the days when England was an empire, but has little meaning anymore.
"Great Britain" means "big Britain", and was originally to distinguish it from Brittany (diminutive form, "little Britain") in France. It refers to the largest island in the British Isles archipelago, and gets it's name from the Brythonic Celts ("Britons") who inhabited both areas.
It pre-dates a united England (let alone united Britain) by many years. Great Britain has nothing to do with the British Empire (except in giving it it's name). As a term for referring to th big island which is home to England, Scotland & Wales, it is still very much relevant and current, and has no decent replacement.
Not to comment on the validity of you post. Just thought I'd correct your misunderstanding.
Slashdot cannot be a common carrier because it does more than "carry." It chooses what stories to publish on its website, and that kind of discretion means that it doesn't provide "common" access to its service.
Genuine question then- can services such as Twitter and Facebook (which to not have any direct input into what their users send via their services) qualify as common carriers?
Zimbabwe had one of the strongest economies in Africa, once. No American super-power, sure, but they had a solid and dependable currency that was considered a good world trade currency.
True they were the authors of their own decline (Mugabe regime's corruption and mismanagement) as opposed to external pressures, but that's not really what I was replying to.
This thread has been about who has the stronger hand- China or the US. US might be able to deprive China of some trade, but China has so much of thee US debt that a trade war would seriously fuck up the dollar's worth. Whatever the cause, hyperinflation or deflation is bad.
The concept of engaging your fans/customers is hardly a new thing. It's the reason Terry Pratchett blogs regularly, the reason Star Trek has conventions (complete with unlicensed fan fiction and poorly made knock-off fancy dress), and the reason why 99% of celebrities post to Twitter. Go back a century or so, before the rise of the marketing department, and it was pretty much the only method companies used to advertise their wares.
Old fashioned concepts, such as making your product as good as you can, and respecting your customers, and dealing with people like they're proper people, are all cliche for a reason- they're good, they work, and they've always worked. And they scale perfectly well too.
The artists associations (and other similar "industry bodies") seem to have completely disregarded all the lessons above. They want their customers to act differently, to want things they don't want, and to give them money in new and exciting ways that they've never had to before. It's the behaviour of a monopolist.
They're acting like monopolists, but they've lost their monopoly. They could revert to tried and tested customer-winning behaviours. Instead they're haemorrhaging customers who want what they're not offering.
Chap from TFA has demonstrated that constructive, peer-to-peer communication is a great way to get free publicity and make himself some new fans. The RIAA will either adopt the same attitude, or (after a slow and painful (for everyone involved) decline) be replaced by someone that does.
I think from an "extraterrestrial life" point of view, there wouldn't be a lot of difference between finding something like ants and finding something like us.
I've always felt the "will it develop intelligence" thing is overstated. Most scientists expect that if we find life on Mars or wherever, it will be in the form of some simple single-celled bacteria-like creature, perhaps simple multi-celled plant slime at best. If we discover large, complex eukaryotic life, with limbs, internal organs, hunting, mating, building nests- that's massive.
The leap from bacteria to ant is so unbelievably colossal as to be mind boggling, even in the context of life here on Earth. The leap from nests made of mud to nests made of brick, or tools made of twig scraps to tools powered by batteries, seems almost a trivial baby-step by comparison.
Have a look at Zimbabwe. A country ignores it's economic pressures at it's own peril.
A hyper-inflating or deflating USD is good for no-one, but no-one less than the US population.
Re:Can atheists refute one simple fact?
on
Largest Genome Ever
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
All we can infer from Big Bang theory is that the current state of the observable universe originated from a single point of space some 13.5 billion years ago, and has expanded out from that point ever since.
It makes no judgement on what the universe looked like immediately before, or it's cause. Possibilities such as a cyclical universe, or the observable universe as part of a greater whole (such as a multiverse), are not ruled out by BB theory (and predicted by some theories, such as M-String theory).
The possibility of "all of existence" essentially following a Steady State model is still an open one. And unfortunately due to the nature of the observability of the universe, probably impossible to prove conclusively one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a big problem with US shows, over UK ones.
US shows usually have 12-24 episodes to a series, and tend to produce them until viewing figures demand cancellation. UK series are often 6 episodes long, and tend not to be plugged to death.
At that sort of low intensity, a show can stay fresh for a great many years without running out of steam.
I used to ride the train every weekend to visit my student girlfriend, before I had a car. When I got a car, I stopped.
The journey was more than £10 more expensive for a return ticket than it was for petrol, it took twice as long door-to-door (2 hours by train, when on time, 1 hour by car, with average traffic), and was a little delayed maybe as much as half of the time. Serious incidents occurred many times in the year or so I was taking the train; I had only 1 seriously delayed drive in the 3 years I was driving it.
On the train I also rarely got a seat, and my weekend luggage was limited to what I could be bothered to carry. The toilets stank, the booze was overpriced, and I'd never have attempted to use my laptop while crouching in the walkway.
I'm not really sure what the point of that rant was. Maybe I just needed to let it out.
They're worried you won't pay them hard cash for the official app (iPhone version retailing at £4.99, I'm told) if you can get something as good or better for free.
Not that the trains ever run at the times in the timetable anyway. I used to rigorously plan my journeys- now I find that the pot-luck method is just as effective, and at least adds a cheap thrill of uncertainty to your trip.
I suspect the explanation is far simpler- sexier-cut tops and padded bras.
I don't know when exactly you were a kid, but it's no secret that younger teenagers wear more adult fashions than they did decades ago. Unless you're looking at a lot of topless 13 year old girls (in which case best not to admit it here) there's no easy way to tell without a good scientific study.
Don't be daft. Desktop Linux is still a tiny minnow compared to Windows and Mac, but Android (a commercial, end user OS) is thriving in it's market, and Linux on the server and Linux in embedded devices are all doing fine.
GPL clearly isn't holding it back all that badly, or you'd be seeing a 1% market share for Linux in all markets, rather than just desktop computing. Whatever factor makes Linux uncompetitive as a desktop OS clearly doesn't apply to it's other market incarnations- and the GPL is the one thing which is consistent about Linux on all platforms.
If you right something yourself, just yourself, you don't have to publish the source code under the GPL. You can publish it under BSD, or Apache, or a proprietary licence, or whatever.
If you want to take somebody else's code and do something with it (modify it, build something on top of it, etc.) they have the right to request you treat their code in the way that they wish. If they put it under GPL, it's because they want your code to be fed back into something useful for them. Seeing as you're benefiting from their hard work, you don't get ultimate control over it.
I've always hated the "what's more free" argument- I think it's pointless. If I had to say so, I'd say BSD is "more free", whatever that means. But ultimately, BSD is really useful for some things, GPL is really useful for others, and other licences are useful for other things entirely.
Both GPL & BSD are a lot more community-friendly than an old fashioned proprietary licence, and that's all that really matters to me. Stallman be damned.
I got patted down at a UK airport once (I forget which, probably Bristol). It didn't seem anywhere near as intrusive as even the "old" method described on this page is. The chap just patted down my upper body and legs, it took maybe 20 seconds, and the security guard seemed fairly good humoured about it.
I'd prefer that to the radiation bath. Not sure about my preferences if full crotch-rubbing is involved.
Furthrmore, the Jews of Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, and many other Arab countries fled to Israel in the 1950s after their property was expropriated and their lives threatened with full state support.
I don't disagree. Many of the Islamic countries in the Middle East have appalling records when it comes to dealing with their non-Muslim minority populations, Jewish populations perhaps worse of all. There would be good cause for calling that ethnic cleansing too.
Two wrongs don't make a right though.
Ethnic cleansing shouldn't be confused with the methods used to achieve it, such as genocide. Ethnic cleansing is the removal of an ethnic group from a certain location by any targetted means, either legal, semi-legal or otherwise. Ethnic cleansing is fairly universally acknowledged as having taken past in Israel in the past:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus
Arguably the creeping borders of the security fencing and steady expansions of Jewish settlements represents a low-intensity ethnic cleansing to this day. How welcome do you think local Arab farmers would feel in buying a house in the new Jewish settlements?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't sound preposterous to call that ethnic cleansing.
Lets kill everyone in China > Lets kill everyone who is a Mormon, in terms of numbers.
And Lets kill everyone who is Armenian = Lets kill everyone who is Jewish, in terms of semantics. They're both ethnic groups. Presumably the Ottomans were happy enough to leave any ethnic Turks resident in Armenia happily alone.
IANAL and all that, but the /. beloved obviousness test should apply here.
For something to be patentable, it has to be non-obvious to a person working in the relevant field. The relevant field here is genetic biology. They are simply lifting the pattern straight out of the naturally occurring genome, without altering it.
It would seem that this would be an exceedingly obvious application of genetics- anyone with the appropriate (and probably patented) equipment can do it, no skill or ingenuity required.
Customised, altered genetic code is a different matter though.
Depends if you're talking about Long Scale or Short Scale number naming. Long Scale is still pretty popular in Europe and the non-English speaking world, IIRC.
Long Scale used to be the British method too, although Short Scale has mostly (and probably officially) replaced it now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
Ah, so the moral of the story is "You shouldn't be pre-ordering official Microsoft products from big-name retailers".
No, wait. It's "You shouldn't be playing games that get delivered to your home without first going to a bricks-and-mortar shop to check the release date with a shop assistant".
Hang on, no. I've got it, it's "You should always cross reference firmware update numbers with your official Microsoft technical support resource before allowing any system modifications to take place".
Actually no, sorry, I don't think I do get it after all.
I have a NES and a MegaDrive that I've owned for decades now, and I still get them out and play them every couple of years. I also have a big library of PC games, many of which dating back to the '90s, which I can still play online- either via IP dialling or good old fashioned LAN play.
The fact an X-Box (and most new PC games) seem to have a built in expiry date (as soon as the company gets bored of supporting it) seems like a big step backwards for me. Certainly a disincentive to investing the hundreds upon hundreds of pounds that gaming hardware and a big games library calls for.
People have already pointed out that a 6-minute charge would be perfectly doable at a petrol/charging station, which could have banks of capcitors to stop it relying on spiking the grid.
It is also conceivable that the battery would be chargeable with a lower feed over a longer time. Perhaps a regular household mains service would be able to charge it overnight as with existing electric cars, while the 6-minute charge would be handy for range-extending mid-drive top-ups.
I have an even easier method.
1) Book a 1st Class seat
2) Enjoy (hah!) the in flight meal, complete with metal cutlery, glass beakers and china tea cups
3) Hijack plane with your choice of weaponry
4) ???
5) Profit!
Seriously, apparently we think that people about to commit suicide / mass murder are also too cheap to splash out for the comfy tickets. Terrorists are peasants, so they must only fly cattle class!
Just like Great Britain is a name that linger from the days when England was an empire, but has little meaning anymore.
"Great Britain" means "big Britain", and was originally to distinguish it from Brittany (diminutive form, "little Britain") in France. It refers to the largest island in the British Isles archipelago, and gets it's name from the Brythonic Celts ("Britons") who inhabited both areas.
It pre-dates a united England (let alone united Britain) by many years. Great Britain has nothing to do with the British Empire (except in giving it it's name). As a term for referring to th big island which is home to England, Scotland & Wales, it is still very much relevant and current, and has no decent replacement.
Not to comment on the validity of you post. Just thought I'd correct your misunderstanding.
Slashdot cannot be a common carrier because it does more than "carry." It chooses what stories to publish on its website, and that kind of discretion means that it doesn't provide "common" access to its service.
Genuine question then- can services such as Twitter and Facebook (which to not have any direct input into what their users send via their services) qualify as common carriers?
Quite. All fingers point at Nokia N-Gage.
Great idea. In practice- mediocre games console, mediocre phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gage
Zimbabwe had one of the strongest economies in Africa, once. No American super-power, sure, but they had a solid and dependable currency that was considered a good world trade currency.
True they were the authors of their own decline (Mugabe regime's corruption and mismanagement) as opposed to external pressures, but that's not really what I was replying to.
This thread has been about who has the stronger hand- China or the US. US might be able to deprive China of some trade, but China has so much of thee US debt that a trade war would seriously fuck up the dollar's worth. Whatever the cause, hyperinflation or deflation is bad.
The concept of engaging your fans/customers is hardly a new thing. It's the reason Terry Pratchett blogs regularly, the reason Star Trek has conventions (complete with unlicensed fan fiction and poorly made knock-off fancy dress), and the reason why 99% of celebrities post to Twitter. Go back a century or so, before the rise of the marketing department, and it was pretty much the only method companies used to advertise their wares.
Old fashioned concepts, such as making your product as good as you can, and respecting your customers, and dealing with people like they're proper people, are all cliche for a reason- they're good, they work, and they've always worked. And they scale perfectly well too.
The artists associations (and other similar "industry bodies") seem to have completely disregarded all the lessons above. They want their customers to act differently, to want things they don't want, and to give them money in new and exciting ways that they've never had to before. It's the behaviour of a monopolist.
They're acting like monopolists, but they've lost their monopoly. They could revert to tried and tested customer-winning behaviours. Instead they're haemorrhaging customers who want what they're not offering.
Chap from TFA has demonstrated that constructive, peer-to-peer communication is a great way to get free publicity and make himself some new fans. The RIAA will either adopt the same attitude, or (after a slow and painful (for everyone involved) decline) be replaced by someone that does.
I think from an "extraterrestrial life" point of view, there wouldn't be a lot of difference between finding something like ants and finding something like us.
I've always felt the "will it develop intelligence" thing is overstated. Most scientists expect that if we find life on Mars or wherever, it will be in the form of some simple single-celled bacteria-like creature, perhaps simple multi-celled plant slime at best. If we discover large, complex eukaryotic life, with limbs, internal organs, hunting, mating, building nests- that's massive.
The leap from bacteria to ant is so unbelievably colossal as to be mind boggling, even in the context of life here on Earth. The leap from nests made of mud to nests made of brick, or tools made of twig scraps to tools powered by batteries, seems almost a trivial baby-step by comparison.
Have a look at Zimbabwe. A country ignores it's economic pressures at it's own peril.
A hyper-inflating or deflating USD is good for no-one, but no-one less than the US population.
All we can infer from Big Bang theory is that the current state of the observable universe originated from a single point of space some 13.5 billion years ago, and has expanded out from that point ever since.
It makes no judgement on what the universe looked like immediately before, or it's cause. Possibilities such as a cyclical universe, or the observable universe as part of a greater whole (such as a multiverse), are not ruled out by BB theory (and predicted by some theories, such as M-String theory).
The possibility of "all of existence" essentially following a Steady State model is still an open one. And unfortunately due to the nature of the observability of the universe, probably impossible to prove conclusively one way or the other.
IANATheoreticalCosmologist, by the by.
This one appears to work very well. Perfection rather than innovation I guess.
Appropriately, it has won the James Dyson Award. Dyson didn't invent the vacuum cleaner, just made better ones.