Pictures stolen from a company named "Clevo" that is based in Taiwan. Yet they claim that they are assembled in Brazil and that they will continue to do that until they have their manufactoring facility ready there.
As someone else pointed out, Clevo are a bunch of perfectly respectable "white box" laptop makers. I had one of theirs myself about 4 years ago, marketed by one of the UK's medium-level box-shifters. I had various flavours of Linux running on it over the years, including being able to dual-boot it from either the primary hard drive or from the secondary drive which replaced the floppy drive. Perfectly respectable lump of bent sand, and a perfectly sensible way to go if you're starting up a box-shifting operation. This datum in itself doesn't illuminate the question of whether the site is a scam or not.
As cynical as I am about the Presidents ability to function within the confines of the constitution, I have to agree with you on this. He will step down at that point provided he doesn't get himself assassinated while engaging in diplomacy in foreign lands.
You consider the probability of him being assassinated on home territory in the intervening time as being zero? That's not a call I'd make - I know that the State Security Service are quite effective, and they're not wasting much effort on counter-counterfeiting, but given that you've had at least one successful assassination and at least two other unsuccessful attempts... I'd not be terribly surprised to wake up hearing that he's dead.
In reality, there are a lot of directors of IT and CIOs who believe that Linux is a science project, and not a suitable server platform for important tasks.
Implicit in this statment is that "directors of IT and CIOs" do not consider "science" to be "important" (all dependant, of course, on broad generalisations of "directors...", "science" and "important"). Which would be quite worrying, were it true, as a description of the general "importance" of "science" in the society you describe. What is very worrying is that these are "directors of IT" and "Chief Information Officers", many of whom one would expect to be in posession of a (real) degree in Computing Science, or at least a degree from a university's science faculty.
Isn't this just another expression of the problems of undervaluing the science that underlies all of modern life? I notice that you see a lot more Creationists spouting their fear of the modern world on the internet than you see of them chilling their remarks into slabs of granite with another lump of granite. They don't seem to realise that you can't have the cake of denying the validity of science as a description of how the universe operates while continuing to use the fruits of that science.
I don't like reading Tolkien because of its language. I know that Tolkien used a reach vocabulary, good style, and all that. But it's hard to read his "old-style" language. Rowling uses modern easy-to-read language (various puns help too).
by Cyberax
Wow. I absolutely love reading Tolkien because of his use of language; it has a melodic quality that I've not found in any others' writing. I particularly love to read Tolkien aloud, because this allows the richness to come to the surface. If I'm not reading aloud, I often go too quickly and miss the details and hidden corners of Tolkien's sentences that, while they don't necessarily advance the plot, are integral to his books as works of art. There is no such care or attention to detail in Rowling's words; hers make a workmanlike product that conveys a decent story but bears little resemblence to Tolkien's art. I guess whether or not one finds Tolkien's language easy to read depends upon experience; I grew up reading and re-reading Tolkien, so his style of language is like an old friend, immediately recognized and warmly greeted.
by nuttycom (1016165) An appropriate comment to these would be "Oh tempora! O mores!" I'll leave Slashdotters to track down the quote, but inventing a new phrase by mis-spelling a 4-letter word in this context is almost guaranteed.
That Tolkien's language is easy and rich to listen to should come as zero surprise, considering that he was a professional philologist, specialising in the etymology of words, which would require him to have an 'ear' for how people hear and modify words over the centuries, and that he was consciously trying to set out to write an epic mythology for the British peoples which would compare with the great Nordic sagas and specifically the Finnish Kalevala. And it's no surprise that in the 30-something years that he spent working on his pet languages, he managed to give them a history of war, loss, grief and victory. After all, his day-to-day working tools were stories that themselves had survived for millennia by being memorable, inspiring and repeatable (I speak of the likes of Beowulf) ; so in his decades of work, he had wonderfully effective material to emulate. (I should point out that I was actually introduced to Tolkien courtesy of a teacher covering for an absent colleague by simply sitting the class down and reading to us. If I thought there was something shameful about this, I could ripost that Douglas Adams often pointed out the the colours on the radio were always much brighter than on the television. So, logically, the voices in the books would be clearer than in any recitation.)
Having just this afternoon finished Deathly Hallows... well Rowling has done a good job in a decade-and-a-half, but she's no Tolkien. It's also patently obvious that she wrote the series more-or-less back to front, starting by plotting the last scenes and ideas, and then introducing the various elements that lead up to them as she produced the sketches for the earlier books. Then she worked forwards towards the published versions. Which is fine. Perfectly sensible way of working. But it exposes you to the risk of having to tie the story back together in the middle as the strains of the overall scheme of the series starts to build up against the committed (i.e. published) parts of the series. And strangely... in the middle of the series, didn't Rowling take the guts of 2 years between publications of books 4 and 5. Hmmmm.
Anyone that trusts AV vendors - especially foreign ones - not to imbed backdoors and spyware, or to whitelist their government's "tools" is a bit too trusting IMHO.
Define "foreign" in this context. In the context from which I'm writing this, that could mean
{anywhere outside the UK} (since I'm a UK citizen, working on a laptop belonging to a UK company), or
{anywhere outside Ireland} (since I'm sub-contracted to an Irish company for this week), or
{anywhere outside Norway} (since the installation I'm working from is owned by Norwegians), or
{anywhere outside the US} (since our satellite link is provided by an American company, I think)
Obviously, this is an opportunity for the security-conscious to exploit the international nature of software : if your Kaspersey (Russian) and [nameof Australian AV company] flag a program as being spyware or suspiscious, but Symantec and MacAfee (American, judging from other comments in this thread, but I've not checked) don't raise a flag on it... then you have grounds to consider that the NSA are spying on you. On the other hand, if your only getting silence from a British AV program (DrSolly, if that's still around??) and everyone else is saying "Danger!" about a particular file or application, then you might suspect MI5, MI6 or GCHQ. Silence from Kaspersey alone might suggest that the KGB were on to you. Then again, maybe the possibility of being exposed like this would have occurred to The Spooks in general, and they'd be very careful about not letting themselves get caught out like this. Since the AV/ Anti-spyware market is fairly international, I suspect that The Spooks would be very careful of getting caught out like this, and just go for maximum stealth. Or Tempest. Or a long-range video camera. Or searching through your trash (the high-tech trick isn't necessarily going to be the appropriate choice, even on Slashdot!).
... the entire point of Galileo (and GloNASS) is that GPS systems are useful to lots of people, but a single system that is controlled by someone who might be an enemy in the future is worse than useless.
I've gotten rather sick of the acrimony that seems to be building across the Atlantic.
However, most people find most standards really hard to read
Most people find anything hard to read. Seriously. Although most western countries claim literacy rates over 90%, in reality more like a quarter of people are functionally illiterate. (http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF) (Functional illiteracy is reading so poorly that it seriously diminishes one's earning ability.
Mod parent up, but can we also have a breakdown on weekday Vs weekend figures.
Please define "weekend" for your locale. (You did see the critique a couple of days ago on the poor definitions of functions in the OOXML "standard" document?) "weekend"= {Thursday,Friday} OR "weekend"= {IF(user in {infidels}){Friday}ELSE{NULL}} OR "weekend"= {Friday,Saturday} OR "weekend"= {Saturday,Sunday} or "weekend"= {Sunday} ?
You'd think that something as important as a "standard" document format wouldn't change enough to become incompatible every 1-4 years.
Now why would you think that? In particular, why would you expect MS to have changed the habits of a sesqui-decade (decade-and-a-half) for Orifice 2003? When Word 5 for DOS was "upgraded" at work for Word for Windows 2.0, the change in file formats was a major pain in the arse too. Particularly when the computers in the field were "upgraded" before the non-revenue-earning computers in the office, so you couldn't bring reports onshore and work on them at the end of a job. When it comes to file formats, THERE IS NO STANDARD file format; there never has been, and it's quite unlikely that there ever will be. There are within-company-division de facto most-likely-to-be-used-this year formats, but you can't rely on even that when you're swapping files with clients or cow-orkers in other specialist companies.
I'm one of the "chumps", by the way. In my defense, I don't have any delusions about the nature of the game and where the advantage lies. For me it's pure entertainment, and the vig is the price of admission.
Vig ?? Some local slang I guess. If you're calculating the house percentage as being their contribution to keeping the rain off your back and the chill out of your bones... well sitting in a smokey room full of people in various states of despair could have a certain schadenfreude appeal to it. Personally, I'd rather crawl through a cave up to my nostrils in mud, but if that's what floats your boat... .
Then there's all the rest who rush to the one-deck tables (optimum for card counting) with its reduced pay-out for blackjack (6-5 instead of 3-2, if I remember right), thinking they get some sort of advantage.
Hmmm, I didn't know that casinos gave different payouts for different variants of pontoon based purely on the number of decks in use. Makes sense, I suppose, since the differences in deck size would effectively make them different games (from a statistical point of view). I've never needed innoculation against the gambling infective-meme, but a year of statistics at university under a lecturer who made significant income from analysing gaming systems (1-arm bandits and other mechanical gambling machines mostly, but he also covered card games as trivial problems)... well I finished that course with an invitation to transfer my major to statistics, an appreciation for the difficulty of designing medical experiments, and no interest at all in trivial gambling such as casinos offer.
Did someone use the term "chumps" to refer to people who gamble on cards? Yep, thats correct terminology.
Why can't Carmack gamble? Isn't he the video games guy?
Archived Carmack.plan from 1998. He got banned for winning.
Of course he got banned for winning. I mean, if you were running a perfectly legal casino, operating exactly in accordance with the laws, and keeping [insert value for your jurisdiction here ; about 24% in my current jurisdiction] a percentage of the turnover of your tables/ wheels/ bandits/ 3-d chess tables, then there are only two things that you cannot tolerate on the premises is someone who
pays less than their 24%, be it through effective play, cheating, or not buying enough rubber chicken; and
someone who reduces turnover.
Now, what does puzzle me is... was the reduction of turnover consequent on the banning of John Carmack LESS than the (potential) gain in turnover from being able to point to an un-doubtedly bright guy who was actually managing to win? That's either an actuarial question, or a PR question, but it's not a legal or moral question.
My brother-in-law used to drive an Audi RS4, (with the BMW M5, the vehicle of choice for bank and smash and grab crimes). After the SECOND time he and his wife were threatened with knives and beaten, (in the centre of a major city each time), he replaced it with something rather more modest...
To quote a Larry Niven book (actually on the other side of the violence), "Just think of it as evolution in action". (I'm not saying that this was in any sense right... but your brother-in-law didn't predict this in advance of buying the car? He drives with windows open to let the rain in, or even worse he drives in a rag-top? I mean, come on - these things *are* predictable. And probably were predicted.)
Why the fuck are fishermen and roads and a cruiseship dock there in the first place?
The islands have been inhabited for a long time - certainly centuries, probably thousands of years (I've not heard of any major archaeological work there, but only a thousand km off the Ecuadorean coast, the Galapogos are easily within range.) They've as much right to live in their homes as you have to live in yours, and quite possibly more right. [There has been significant immigration in the last few decades, as well as population growth within the indigenous population, which raise different issues to just bulldozing the population into the sea and letting them drown.]
Here's a real easy way to save it. GO AWAY. Not just the tourists and fishermen either, everyone including the scientists. Just leave it alone.
Doesn't work - humans are destructive fuckers at the best of times, and this ain't the best of times. This particular genie is out of the bottle, and isn't going to go back into the bottle.
Maybe shoot all the stray dogs first. Put a patrol boat a mile out and sink anyone that gets close to the island.
The Galapagos are an archipelago ("a group of many islands in a large body of water" - around a hundred islands in all, depending on how long a cat you want to swing. But yes, shooting all the dogs would perobably be a good idea. Please feel free to try getting elected on a "I'm going to shoot harmless ol' Rover" platform. You might add selling the children of the islanders into Moroccan paedophile brothels as a second campaign promise, which would probably improve your electoral chances and kill a second bird with the one stone. That's democracy for you - people have the right to vote for what they want, not necessarily for what you want.
Killing the rats would probably help more. But that'd be much more difficult.
And don't whine about the displaced fishermen, build some fish farms. There isn't anywhere on earth with an ocean fishing industry where overfishing doesn't happen and the fishermen all wonder why there are so fewer fish. It's the clear cutting of the sea.
Fish farming is no panacea - we've been doing it for decades in the Highland sea and land lochs here. It provides some jobs (but not a large number), at non-trivial environmental cost (the pesticides used to control parasites are non-nice ; the fish shit and bypassed food screws up the local ecology); it kills not a few people (there's a lot of scuba diving to maintain the nets, plus lots of solo boat travel); and it looks like shit to the tourists. It's useful, and not the worst thing in the world to do, but it's no panacea. [I did look at the costs about setting up shellfish farming with a colleague as a part-time enterprise a good few years ago. We could probably have turned a profit, but not as good an income as we could have earned elsewhere ; we'll maybe look at the idea as retirement hobby-work. Not sufficiently worth the hassle for a main living.]
Sorry to dump on you, but the easy-sounding solutions may be appealing to rant about, but there are often very good reasons that they're not being done.
I was attending a conference last year about the oil & gas potential of Arctic Russia (with side-lines into Arctic Canada and Greenland) last Feburary. Interesting potential. But... it's going to be a long time until the Arctic Ocean is sufficiently free of ice to be confident of getting an oil tanker out (and in!). So perhaps the oil would come out on the railway lines instead. Hmmm, slight problem there - - - you see the railway lines are either non-existant (and will take a few decades to build), or are already loaded to the gunwhales with hydrocarbons extracted from West Siberia and already spewing oil to the West. (500 km route from my last job in Siberia to my fiancee's city - 16 hours for unimportant passenger trains. The route is packed. Too busy for the necessary trains of ballast to re-build the track supports.) Potential hydrocarbon reserves are one thing ; extractable hydrocarbons are another thing ; hydrocarbons that can be extracted and delivered to a market are a third thing. That third thing is what killed the Falkland Island's prospects - definite oil, but not enough to pay for the pipelines to get it to shore. Park the SUV. Time to get the bus.
There wasn't a "meteor that created the Pacific". There was, for a few years in the late-19th-century to eraly-20th-century, a hypothesis that the basin occupied by the Pacific Ocean was created by ejecting a considerable volume of material; there was also a hypothesis that (some) of this ejecta went on to for the Moon. This first hypothesis fell apart instantly when someone (anyone) asked "where did the energy to dissociate the newly-formed Earth come from"? It fell apart again when the volume of the Pacific basin (approximately 600 million km^3) was revealed by increasing trans-oceanic cable laying surveys through the 20th century was compared to the volume of the Moon (21990 million km^3, from it's 1738km mean radius). Further disintegration of the already-atomised hypothesis occured as the ideas of plate tectonics developed through the 20th century (based in part on the patterns of magnetic domains in the seabed, including in the Pacific; and also on the extending programme of deep-ocean drilling confirming the varying ages of oldest-sediment on the igneous sub-structure of the ocean basins), which showed that the formation of the Pacific basin developed over the period from ~180 million years ago to the present day. Having ground the idea to smithereens, along came the Apollo missions which brought back some "ground truth" from the Moon for analysis... and showed that the composition of the Moon is subtly, but distinctly, different to terrestrial materials (loss of volatile elements like sodium; loss of almost all water; changed rare-earth element abundances). The whole hypothesis is shredded to the tiniest shreds of shredded shreds that you can imagine. It's got no supporting evidence at all, and huge swathes of evidence against it ; it's got no mechanisms by which it could work, and requires the breaking of pretty basic laws of nature (conservation of mass, energy and angular momentum, for starters). Also, there have always been better-supported hypotheses addressing the same basic question. In Pythonian terms, the hypothesis is only staying on it's perch due to having been nailed to it. And of course, people who vaguely remember hearing something about it many years ago repeat it. Don't do that - the hypothesis is dead dead dead. Repeat, it's dead. It's an ex-hypothesis. It's not pining for the fjords, stunned, or fallen off it's perch but it's dead. It has ceased to be. It has fallen off it's perch and gone to join the choir immortal. It's dead.
This "Moon came from the Pacific" hypothesis differs from some other not-even-wrong hypotheses in that it was honestly proposed, and almost instantly retracted as it's deficiencies became clear. That makes it academically more satisfying than, for examples, Creationism and ExpandingEarthism, but no more correct than either.
"Congress and the Department of Homeland Security are considering several new visa restrictions, including forcing some foreign travelers to register their travel plans online 48 hours in advance. Business advocacy groups are worried about both foreign relations and the economic impact of such legislation,
As one of the numerous people who'd only travel to America if someone paid me, and knowing the way my business works (the oil business - quite popular in Texas, and with the Bush family, I hear) then it's perfectly likely that I'd need to be travelling to the States with less than 48 hours notice. I can see the DHS (Direct Home Shopping?) being really popular when they start to get the bills for down time on equipment and other personnel because of their interference.
Oh well, another reason to not go to America. Not that I felt the need for any more.
But cost subsidized or no, 400-500 dollars without 3g is a big pill to swallow.
400~500 USD (300-375EUR ; 200~250 GBP) is a fairly substantial pill to swallow, with or without 3G (whatever that means? Does 3G have any functions that are actually useful? I've never had an advertising man succeed in selling it's advantages to me. But that's a different point.) A good few years ago, the 290 GBP for a Nokia Communicator was a big pill to swallow too, but on balance the features of the phone'puter seemed sufficient for me to justify it to myself. Worked for 6 months too, until changed (non-technical) circumstances made me change tack and go down the separate-phone-and-hand-held computer route. Some people do swallow big pills. Your argument might just be enough to remind me to look at the iPhone, if it comes to Europe, isn't a complete lemon, and is still available next time I'm in the market for a new phone.
"The UK doesn't have that many more CCTV cameras than most other "developed" countries. I've just had two weeks in the Baltimore / D.C. area and I lost count of the number of CCTV cameras I saw, both in public places and on private property."
I guess it depends on what city you are in. I myself, know of no tv cameras that see me on my daily drive to/from work. I see some at the bank, and some stores, and definitely at the casinos....but, as far as govt. run official CCTV's watching my every move in general public.
[My emphasis added.]
What gave you the impression that the (allegedly high numbers of) CCTVs in Britain are "govt. run" ? A number are "government" run - if you consider the police to be a part of the government ; a considerable proportion are installed by city councils (who often vigourously protest their separation from "government") ; another considerable proportion are installed by local business groups wanting to promote how "safe" the streets of a particular town are (without ever publically saying "we're safer than the neighbouring town ; if you go there, your babies will be eaten", but that's what they mean) ; then there are the ones inside stores and private shopping centres (shopping centres are almost universally private property - but again they don't advertise the fact) ; and then there are the ones owned by individuals rather than businesses (I'm contemplating the hassles of getting planning permission for some CCTV monitoring the outside of my own apartment - necessary if the recordings are going to be acceptable as evidence). But no - most CCTV in Britain is not "government" run, in any meaningful form. And I'd expect that to be the same in most countries. Probably including America.
Not on the web - it comes in 4 concise chapters, neatly picked out in Braille characters on each face of a ClueBat and need to be cranially applied to the pupil with sufficient force to embed the lessons in their skulls a a neat series of bone chips.
The entity "fractoid (1076465)" wrote, citing someone who's comment hasn't blessed this particular part of the sub-Etha network:
If that's how you naturally talk (or if you think that your choice of words is appropriate for a casual news site) then I can't really help you.
What's wrong with simply being literate and having a good vocabulary? I'll agree that some of his grammar is somewhat stiff, but that could be due either to talking more formally than he's used to in order to better make his point,
Certainly a bit of the former, but since I'm used to having to do verbal technical reports on complex topics involving lots of someone else's money, at zero notice, and at the hard end of a 48-hour shift... I do have a tendency to engage the braincell before flapping my lips. I don't speak like that all the time - only about 50% of the time. Whoever you were quoting is either ranked below my reading threshold, or they've pulled their post, or something I can't be bothered figuring out, but what on earth do/did he/she/it/they mean by "a casual news site" ? They can't be referring to Slashdot, surely? I've always thought that it was a place for sensible discussion on serious topics, by intelligent (compared to the population median) people. "News for nerds, stuff that matters", as the saying goes. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time that my expectations and the outside world's reality didn't line up.
or to English being his second language. The second seems apposite given that he mentions his wife is studying for an English exam for citizenship purposes.
Nope, native British English speaker. The wife is Russian, from a couple of months I spent squelching around in the tundra and getting bitten by mosquitos.
Regardless, for some of us, discovering new and interesting words is a source of enjoyment in and of itself.
There's an old saying about the day that you don't learn something new - it's the day that you woke up dead and didn't notice.
(I've assumed the GP to be male, given that he mentions a wife - apologies if I'm mistaken.;)
Hmmm, well if you know someone who's not male and can talk about his wife... would you care to share the videos with us? [GRIN]
Don't laugh - I once used 127 floppies to back up a 350meg hd. You can buy a computer nowadays for what that drive cost me. (Of course, the same can be said for the 80 meg hd a few years before, or the ad lib 8-bit sound card, or the 14" vga monitor... or the dual external 5-14 floppy drives before that...)
you could *build* a computer in the time it takes to swap 127 floppies
... starting by chipping your flint hand axes to cut the wood to make the charcoal to fuel the blast furnace to make the iron for the frame of your silicon-smelting furnace. Left-over iron you can use for the frame of your chip-fab plant, saving you some time by parallel processing...
Seriously : a stack of boxes of floppies that high ; 2 single-floppy Win3.11 machines, a stack of MS Office install floppies 27 (IIRC) high, and orders to prepare 5 sets of install discs for each of 5 sites before leaving this evening. Been there, done that, flagellated myself bloody with the shredded tee-shirt.
Drilling holes in the ground, looking for oil and / or gas. Well, that's the plan anyway. There was a page about recent (last several years) activity on this which you could reach from http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=am inex&btnG=Search&meta= , but their server seems to be down at the moment. (Sunday afternoon, UK time.) It's a long-standing project anyway - doesn't stop me from going back to East Africa, or Papua New Guinea (recent attempts for work) or Ireland (offshore which I'm floating just now), or Russia (whereI met my wife), or Iran (where our software sales team are keeping up a steady stream of sales). But I don't think Iraq is on the agenda in the foreseeable future, though if that mad hippie Stef were to propose a month trip to his site in Mosul area, I'd have to give it serious consideration.
Clearly it was not write by someone who's first language is not English,
There are plenty of native English speakers that have really bad writing. It's not quite fair to assume that the first language of the poster isn't English.:)
Slight understatement there, methinks. The standard of written and spoken English amongst native speakers is often significantly poorer than amongst non-native speakers, and for a perfectly good reason : native speakers learn their mother-language mostly from people who have had little if any formal training in correct grammar, spelling and/ or punctuation, while the large majority of formally-taught users of the language learn from and (refer back to) materials produced by skilled professionals. To be blunt, the necessary qualifications for becoming a parent (functioning gonads and a partner) are not the same as those necessary for teaching a language (understanding of grammar, rules of punctuation, memory of spellings, training in pedagogy). If we had access to several populations of people who couldn't speak a particular language and were to carry out the experiment of introducing a new language to some populations by formal teaching, and to other populations by introducing the language by percolation and self-teaching, then a meaningful comparison of the efficacy of the teaching methods could be carried out. Which might be an interesting experiment, if we didn't have adequate historical testimony of what happens with spoken languages : the development of pidgin languages, and later creole languages. What might be an interesting variation would be to investigate how the analogy works with programming languages in a non-programming population. The analogy between natural languages and programming languages has often been made, and has often been taken far further than it can stand. But in this context, it could make an interesting and informative experiment. What programming languages to use for comparison is one important variable to control for ; isolating the different experiments is something that would be easily achieved if the experiment were allowed to use prisoners spread across different institutions. A motivational framework should be easy to establish (for example : if your group achieves this months programming task, your group gets a TV-hours upgrade). All in all, it might be an interesting experiment which could illuminate
which parts of "programming" as a whole are difficult for people to construct for themselves (pointing to directions for improving tuition),
what sorts of errors people are more prone to make (and therefore, language design should take into account),
and possibly how effective different organisational methods are.
Of course, this would require considerable replication to examine the effects of the variables, but the world isn't going to be short of uneducated prisoners for a long, long time. Is it?
(I should point out that I'm suffering a wife revising for her English exam at the moment, as a prerequisite to applying for dual citizenship. She was asking me to help her understand the gerund last night, which was acutely embarrassing. And now, I think I should apply the spelling checker before posting! [I forgot to capitalise "English" and flipped a syllable in "condiserable" - which is a level of correction that doesn't, quite, require seppuku.] It's hard NOT to be a grammar Nazi. Particularly on Slashdot, where speed of posting often appears to over-ride all other considerations, including thinking about the subject. Now all I've got to do is figure out how to make this damned machine STAY with en-GB as the default language for a document, instead of re-setting it every tour.)
There's even a cybercafé in Pyongyang for tourists and diplomats, so phone lines shouldn't be a problem. The only problem is finding an actual phone number connected to the outside world, since the regular phone system in NK is completely separated from the outside.
Sounds like you've been there recently. I've got the likelihood of spending several months out there at some point this year - mostly at sea, but probably having to pass through the country for access, egress and reporting. Any pointers? I'd guess that on the entertainment front you'd better hope that your minder is attractive and of the appropriate gender, because there's going to be damned-all else you can look for. I'd expect to have at least some communications to the outside world while I'm at sea - if for operational decisions and logistics only.
Slashdot Mirror
Perfectly respectable lump of bent sand, and a perfectly sensible way to go if you're starting up a box-shifting operation. This datum in itself doesn't illuminate the question of whether the site is a scam or not.
You consider the probability of him being assassinated on home territory in the intervening time as being zero? That's not a call I'd make - I know that the State Security Service are quite effective, and they're not wasting much effort on counter-counterfeiting, but given that you've had at least one successful assassination and at least two other unsuccessful attempts
Implicit in this statment is that "directors of IT and CIOs" do not consider "science" to be "important" (all dependant, of course, on broad generalisations of "directors
What is very worrying is that these are "directors of IT" and "Chief Information Officers", many of whom one would expect to be in posession of a (real) degree in Computing Science, or at least a degree from a university's science faculty.
Isn't this just another expression of the problems of undervaluing the science that underlies all of modern life? I notice that you see a lot more Creationists spouting their fear of the modern world on the internet than you see of them chilling their remarks into slabs of granite with another lump of granite. They don't seem to realise that you can't have the cake of denying the validity of science as a description of how the universe operates while continuing to use the fruits of that science.
An appropriate comment to these would be "Oh tempora! O mores!" I'll leave Slashdotters to track down the quote, but inventing a new phrase by mis-spelling a 4-letter word in this context is almost guaranteed.
That Tolkien's language is easy and rich to listen to should come as zero surprise, considering that he was a professional philologist, specialising in the etymology of words, which would require him to have an 'ear' for how people hear and modify words over the centuries, and that he was consciously trying to set out to write an epic mythology for the British peoples which would compare with the great Nordic sagas and specifically the Finnish Kalevala. And it's no surprise that in the 30-something years that he spent working on his pet languages, he managed to give them a history of war, loss, grief and victory. After all, his day-to-day working tools were stories that themselves had survived for millennia by being memorable, inspiring and repeatable (I speak of the likes of Beowulf) ; so in his decades of work, he had wonderfully effective material to emulate.
(I should point out that I was actually introduced to Tolkien courtesy of a teacher covering for an absent colleague by simply sitting the class down and reading to us. If I thought there was something shameful about this, I could ripost that Douglas Adams often pointed out the the colours on the radio were always much brighter than on the television. So, logically, the voices in the books would be clearer than in any recitation.)
Having just this afternoon finished Deathly Hallows
According to the Wikipedia article ... Rowling herself has stated that the last chapter of the seventh book was completed "in something like 1990". Well, excuse me for not being bowled over with astonishment.
One should take PTerry's comments on the "grab bag" nature of fantasy writing into account when comparing fantasy writers.
Define "foreign" in this context.
In the context from which I'm writing this, that could mean
Obviously, this is an opportunity for the security-conscious to exploit the international nature of software : if your Kaspersey (Russian) and [nameof Australian AV company] flag a program as being spyware or suspiscious, but Symantec and MacAfee (American, judging from other comments in this thread, but I've not checked) don't raise a flag on it
Then again, maybe the possibility of being exposed like this would have occurred to The Spooks in general, and they'd be very careful about not letting themselves get caught out like this.
Since the AV/ Anti-spyware market is fairly international, I suspect that The Spooks would be very careful of getting caught out like this, and just go for maximum stealth. Or Tempest. Or a long-range video camera. Or searching through your trash (the high-tech trick isn't necessarily going to be the appropriate choice, even on Slashdot!).
Sacked any presidents recently?
Most people find anything hard to read. Seriously. Although most western countries claim literacy rates over 90%, in reality more like a quarter of people are functionally illiterate. (http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF) (Functional illiteracy is reading so poorly that it seriously diminishes one's earning ability.
"weekend"= {Thursday,Friday} OR "weekend"= {IF(user in {infidels}){Friday}ELSE{NULL}} OR "weekend"= {Friday,Saturday} OR "weekend"= {Saturday,Sunday} or "weekend"= {Sunday} ?
Now why would you think that? In particular, why would you expect MS to have changed the habits of a sesqui-decade (decade-and-a-half) for Orifice 2003? When Word 5 for DOS was "upgraded" at work for Word for Windows 2.0, the change in file formats was a major pain in the arse too. Particularly when the computers in the field were "upgraded" before the non-revenue-earning computers in the office, so you couldn't bring reports onshore and work on them at the end of a job.
When it comes to file formats, THERE IS NO STANDARD file format; there never has been, and it's quite unlikely that there ever will be. There are within-company-division de facto most-likely-to-be-used-this year formats, but you can't rely on even that when you're swapping files with clients or cow-orkers in other specialist companies.
Vig ?? Some local slang I guess.
If you're calculating the house percentage as being their contribution to keeping the rain off your back and the chill out of your bones
Hmmm, I didn't know that casinos gave different payouts for different variants of pontoon based purely on the number of decks in use. Makes sense, I suppose, since the differences in deck size would effectively make them different games (from a statistical point of view).
I've never needed innoculation against the gambling infective-meme, but a year of statistics at university under a lecturer who made significant income from analysing gaming systems (1-arm bandits and other mechanical gambling machines mostly, but he also covered card games as trivial problems)
Did someone use the term "chumps" to refer to people who gamble on cards? Yep, thats correct terminology.
Of course he got banned for winning. I mean, if you were running a perfectly legal casino, operating exactly in accordance with the laws, and keeping [insert value for your jurisdiction here ; about 24% in my current jurisdiction] a percentage of the turnover of your tables/ wheels/ bandits/ 3-d chess tables, then there are only two things that you cannot tolerate on the premises is someone who
Now, what does puzzle me is
To quote a Larry Niven book (actually on the other side of the violence), "Just think of it as evolution in action".
(I'm not saying that this was in any sense right
Killing the rats would probably help more. But that'd be much more difficult. Fish farming is no panacea - we've been doing it for decades in the Highland sea and land lochs here. It provides some jobs (but not a large number), at non-trivial environmental cost (the pesticides used to control parasites are non-nice ; the fish shit and bypassed food screws up the local ecology); it kills not a few people (there's a lot of scuba diving to maintain the nets, plus lots of solo boat travel); and it looks like shit to the tourists. It's useful, and not the worst thing in the world to do, but it's no panacea. [I did look at the costs about setting up shellfish farming with a colleague as a part-time enterprise a good few years ago. We could probably have turned a profit, but not as good an income as we could have earned elsewhere ; we'll maybe look at the idea as retirement hobby-work. Not sufficiently worth the hassle for a main living.]
Sorry to dump on you, but the easy-sounding solutions may be appealing to rant about, but there are often very good reasons that they're not being done.
I was attending a conference last year about the oil & gas potential of Arctic Russia (with side-lines into Arctic Canada and Greenland) last Feburary. Interesting potential. But ... it's going to be a long time until the Arctic Ocean is sufficiently free of ice to be confident of getting an oil tanker out (and in!). So perhaps the oil would come out on the railway lines instead.
Hmmm, slight problem there - - - you see the railway lines are either non-existant (and will take a few decades to build), or are already loaded to the gunwhales with hydrocarbons extracted from West Siberia and already spewing oil to the West. (500 km route from my last job in Siberia to my fiancee's city - 16 hours for unimportant passenger trains. The route is packed. Too busy for the necessary trains of ballast to re-build the track supports.)
Potential hydrocarbon reserves are one thing ; extractable hydrocarbons are another thing ; hydrocarbons that can be extracted and delivered to a market are a third thing. That third thing is what killed the Falkland Island's prospects - definite oil, but not enough to pay for the pipelines to get it to shore.
Park the SUV. Time to get the bus.
There wasn't a "meteor that created the Pacific". ... and showed that the composition of the Moon is subtly, but distinctly, different to terrestrial materials (loss of volatile elements like sodium; loss of almost all water; changed rare-earth element abundances).
There was, for a few years in the late-19th-century to eraly-20th-century, a hypothesis that the basin occupied by the Pacific Ocean was created by ejecting a considerable volume of material; there was also a hypothesis that (some) of this ejecta went on to for the Moon. This first hypothesis fell apart instantly when someone (anyone) asked "where did the energy to dissociate the newly-formed Earth come from"? It fell apart again when the volume of the Pacific basin (approximately 600 million km^3) was revealed by increasing trans-oceanic cable laying surveys through the 20th century was compared to the volume of the Moon (21990 million km^3, from it's 1738km mean radius).
Further disintegration of the already-atomised hypothesis occured as the ideas of plate tectonics developed through the 20th century (based in part on the patterns of magnetic domains in the seabed, including in the Pacific; and also on the extending programme of deep-ocean drilling confirming the varying ages of oldest-sediment on the igneous sub-structure of the ocean basins), which showed that the formation of the Pacific basin developed over the period from ~180 million years ago to the present day.
Having ground the idea to smithereens, along came the Apollo missions which brought back some "ground truth" from the Moon for analysis
The whole hypothesis is shredded to the tiniest shreds of shredded shreds that you can imagine. It's got no supporting evidence at all, and huge swathes of evidence against it ; it's got no mechanisms by which it could work, and requires the breaking of pretty basic laws of nature (conservation of mass, energy and angular momentum, for starters). Also, there have always been better-supported hypotheses addressing the same basic question.
In Pythonian terms, the hypothesis is only staying on it's perch due to having been nailed to it. And of course, people who vaguely remember hearing something about it many years ago repeat it.
Don't do that - the hypothesis is dead dead dead. Repeat, it's dead. It's an ex-hypothesis. It's not pining for the fjords, stunned, or fallen off it's perch but it's dead. It has ceased to be. It has fallen off it's perch and gone to join the choir immortal. It's dead.
This "Moon came from the Pacific" hypothesis differs from some other not-even-wrong hypotheses in that it was honestly proposed, and almost instantly retracted as it's deficiencies became clear. That makes it academically more satisfying than, for examples, Creationism and ExpandingEarthism, but no more correct than either.
As one of the numerous people who'd only travel to America if someone paid me, and knowing the way my business works (the oil business - quite popular in Texas, and with the Bush family, I hear) then it's perfectly likely that I'd need to be travelling to the States with less than 48 hours notice.
I can see the DHS (Direct Home Shopping?) being really popular when they start to get the bills for down time on equipment and other personnel because of their interference.
Oh well, another reason to not go to America. Not that I felt the need for any more.
400~500 USD (300-375EUR ; 200~250 GBP) is a fairly substantial pill to swallow, with or without 3G (whatever that means? Does 3G have any functions that are actually useful? I've never had an advertising man succeed in selling it's advantages to me. But that's a different point.) A good few years ago, the 290 GBP for a Nokia Communicator was a big pill to swallow too, but on balance the features of the phone'puter seemed sufficient for me to justify it to myself. Worked for 6 months too, until changed (non-technical) circumstances made me change tack and go down the separate-phone-and-hand-held computer route.
Some people do swallow big pills. Your argument might just be enough to remind me to look at the iPhone, if it comes to Europe, isn't a complete lemon, and is still available next time I'm in the market for a new phone.
[My emphasis added.]
What gave you the impression that the (allegedly high numbers of) CCTVs in Britain are "govt. run" ?
A number are "government" run - if you consider the police to be a part of the government ; a considerable proportion are installed by city councils (who often vigourously protest their separation from "government") ; another considerable proportion are installed by local business groups wanting to promote how "safe" the streets of a particular town are (without ever publically saying "we're safer than the neighbouring town ; if you go there, your babies will be eaten", but that's what they mean) ; then there are the ones inside stores and private shopping centres (shopping centres are almost universally private property - but again they don't advertise the fact) ; and then there are the ones owned by individuals rather than businesses (I'm contemplating the hassles of getting planning permission for some CCTV monitoring the outside of my own apartment - necessary if the recordings are going to be acceptable as evidence).
But no - most CCTV in Britain is not "government" run, in any meaningful form. And I'd expect that to be the same in most countries. Probably including America.
Not on the web - it comes in 4 concise chapters, neatly picked out in Braille characters on each face of a ClueBat and need to be cranially applied to the pupil with sufficient force to embed the lessons in their skulls a a neat series of bone chips.
...!]
[Oh, if only
Certainly a bit of the former, but since I'm used to having to do verbal technical reports on complex topics involving lots of someone else's money, at zero notice, and at the hard end of a 48-hour shift
Whoever you were quoting is either ranked below my reading threshold, or they've pulled their post, or something I can't be bothered figuring out, but what on earth do/did he/she/it/they mean by "a casual news site" ? They can't be referring to Slashdot, surely? I've always thought that it was a place for sensible discussion on serious topics, by intelligent (compared to the population median) people. "News for nerds, stuff that matters", as the saying goes.
Then again, it wouldn't be the first time that my expectations and the outside world's reality didn't line up.
Nope, native British English speaker. The wife is Russian, from a couple of months I spent squelching around in the tundra and getting bitten by mosquitos.
There's an old saying about the day that you don't learn something new - it's the day that you woke up dead and didn't notice.
Hmmm, well if you know someone who's not male and can talk about his wife
Seriously : a stack of boxes of floppies that high ; 2 single-floppy Win3.11 machines, a stack of MS Office install floppies 27 (IIRC) high, and orders to prepare 5 sets of install discs for each of 5 sites before leaving this evening. Been there, done that, flagellated myself bloody with the shredded tee-shirt.
Drilling holes in the ground, looking for oil and / or gas. Well, that's the plan anyway.
There was a page about recent (last several years) activity on this which you could reach from http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=a
But I don't think Iraq is on the agenda in the foreseeable future, though if that mad hippie Stef were to propose a month trip to his site in Mosul area, I'd have to give it serious consideration.
Slight understatement there, methinks.
The standard of written and spoken English amongst native speakers is often significantly poorer than amongst non-native speakers, and for a perfectly good reason : native speakers learn their mother-language mostly from people who have had little if any formal training in correct grammar, spelling and/ or punctuation, while the large majority of formally-taught users of the language learn from and (refer back to) materials produced by skilled professionals. To be blunt, the necessary qualifications for becoming a parent (functioning gonads and a partner) are not the same as those necessary for teaching a language (understanding of grammar, rules of punctuation, memory of spellings, training in pedagogy).
If we had access to several populations of people who couldn't speak a particular language and were to carry out the experiment of introducing a new language to some populations by formal teaching, and to other populations by introducing the language by percolation and self-teaching, then a meaningful comparison of the efficacy of the teaching methods could be carried out. Which might be an interesting experiment, if we didn't have adequate historical testimony of what happens with spoken languages : the development of pidgin languages, and later creole languages.
What might be an interesting variation would be to investigate how the analogy works with programming languages in a non-programming population. The analogy between natural languages and programming languages has often been made, and has often been taken far further than it can stand. But in this context, it could make an interesting and informative experiment. What programming languages to use for comparison is one important variable to control for ; isolating the different experiments is something that would be easily achieved if the experiment were allowed to use prisoners spread across different institutions. A motivational framework should be easy to establish (for example : if your group achieves this months programming task, your group gets a TV-hours upgrade).
All in all, it might be an interesting experiment which could illuminate
- which parts of "programming" as a whole are difficult for people to construct for themselves (pointing to directions for improving tuition),
- what sorts of errors people are more prone to make (and therefore, language design should take into account),
- and possibly how effective different organisational methods are.
Of course, this would require considerable replication to examine the effects of the variables, but the world isn't going to be short of uneducated prisoners for a long, long time. Is it?(I should point out that I'm suffering a wife revising for her English exam at the moment, as a prerequisite to applying for dual citizenship. She was asking me to help her understand the gerund last night, which was acutely embarrassing. And now, I think I should apply the spelling checker before posting! [I forgot to capitalise "English" and flipped a syllable in "condiserable" - which is a level of correction that doesn't, quite, require seppuku.] It's hard NOT to be a grammar Nazi. Particularly on Slashdot, where speed of posting often appears to over-ride all other considerations, including thinking about the subject. Now all I've got to do is figure out how to make this damned machine STAY with en-GB as the default language for a document, instead of re-setting it every tour.)
Sounds like you've been there recently.
I've got the likelihood of spending several months out there at some point this year - mostly at sea, but probably having to pass through the country for access, egress and reporting. Any pointers? I'd guess that on the entertainment front you'd better hope that your minder is attractive and of the appropriate gender, because there's going to be damned-all else you can look for.
I'd expect to have at least some communications to the outside world while I'm at sea - if for operational decisions and logistics only.