Hmmm, not a very catchy title, but since I've no interest in music, it'll do.
Last night I ambled into a popular pub to talk to a friend, and it turned out there was a pub quiz going on. Well, that's good fun, I've won a fair few pints like that myself, so I had my conversation while joining in with the questions. Then the music round started.
What the question-master had done, unsurprisingly, was to take short snippets of a number of songs from a number of artists, and drop them onto a CD. The question was "Title and Artist". Easy money for the question-meister. But it occurred to me, `How would the copyright lawyers treat this'. I'd expect it to be a pretty clear violation - reproduction of the track in an identifiable form (the quiz is intended to be solvable); broadcasting in a public place (a bar, a popular one at that) with approximately 80 people participating in the quiz (and so actively listening) and a similar number just idling in the rest of the bar.
But, thinks I, there is a point which might save the luckless question-meister from the wrath of the PRS (UK relative of the RIAA, for you TransPondians) - perhaps such usage is supported by the approximately £100/month that the publican pays to the PRS to allow them to play the TV, run the juke box, and present live bands. That would cover such "incidental" usage of copyrighted works, surely.
I talked to a friend of mine - a Councillor who actually sits on the Licensing Committee - and it's confirmed, sort-of : every year they receive several complaints from the PRS about bars that have not paid their monthly tax, and as the relavent legal authority, they have to send warning letters to the licensee publican to correct this, otherwise the bar will immediately lose it's license to sell beers, wines or spirits. In short, to go out of business. So, the bar should have coverage for general "background music" type uses.
Well, the average bar. But this one, in particular, has always made a specific point of not having a juke box, not having a TV, and not having any live or canned music source. It makes the place a good refuge when the football is on, and is definitely one of it's major advantages. So it doesn't pay the PRS fee.
I think my question-master is up the creek without a paddle. (Which is why I'm not detailing the bar, nor the sport club he was raising funds for with his quiz.) Can anyone think of a workable defence for him, in the event that he did ever get sued over it?
Applicable law is Scottish. Not British, and certainly not American. How different are they? - does the legal system you are familiar with only have two possible verdicts which a jury can return?
If you run an incandesent bulb off DC it will work just fine, and probably last a VERY long time compared to how long it "should" last.
Incandescant lamps have been deprecated for over a decade - they're wasteful and short lived, if cheap.
When I moved into my place, 11 years ago, I decided to never buy another incandescant lamp again. Over the next 2 years I replaced every lamp, as it blew, with an appropriate high-efficiency fluorescent. I had to replace the first of those last year.
Net saving is around 20 or 30 quid a year in electric and lampage. 'Nuff said.
but for your furnace you'd need an inverter of the caliber used in off-grid homes. (Probably more than you want to spend.)
"Gas-powered central heating with an electric controller" is what the OP said. That's most likely a 100W (-ish) motor for pumping the hot water round the radiators, and a negligible draw for a controller box. But both would run at mains voltage, and both would have noisy switches (some inverters designed for electronic equipment might not like the sugres). Might also be a fan for the exhaust flue, but I've never seen one of those except in a DIY store. "Furnace" motors make me think of oil pumps, blowers, sparking gear etc. A gas (as in "methane") heating system uses one small solenoid and a pilot light - much lighter duty.
Why everyone's "pirating" music in russia? Yes, because its cheaper than buying it in a music store.
Actually, the last couple of times I've been in Russia (Noyabrsk, Surgut, Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk if you feel the need to know), the music shops were selling blatently burned CDs. I picked up a couple for the fiancee, but didn't buy any for myself because I'm not interested in music. (Bet that scares the shit out of the RIAA and friends - a human being who isn't interested in music! It should be illegal! Burn all heretics who don't wake up in the night to buy and listen to music!)
I think further phenotypic analysis of the mice would be in order before completely denouncing everything they deleted as "junk". Obviously a lot of it is due to selection pressures and evasion of mutation, but some of it might not be.
That's much of the point. While there are no doubt effects of this... genetic butchery (in the sense of the quote to the effect that "a surgeon achieves by butchery what a civilzed man would achieve by persuasion") which won't show up for n generations, and no doubt the obvious experiment is on progress. BUT to the first generation, the effects are so minor as to be not obvious.
Consider what would happen to a program which you randomly excised a block of a million characters from the tarball. Maybe you'd take out a chunk of the documentation, which wouldn't really stop it working; maybe you'd hit the module for conversion between Roman denarii and Micronesian grindstones, which would only show up in quite uncommon circumstances. But in any program where reproduction had a signficant cost (viz, one with reasonably tight code), a million character excision from the tarball would be... immediately apparent.
This demonstrates how little we actually understan
on
Human Gene Count Slashed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In this context, the news in my in-box from Nature ( Nature home page ) that "Megabase deletions of gene deserts result in viable mice" abstract is instructive. from the abstract "Viable mice homozygous for the deletions were generated and were indistinguishable from wild-type littermates with regard to morphology, reproductive fitness, growth, longevity and a variety of parameters assaying general homeostasis."
Essentially what they're saying is, mouse genomes contain large (millions of bases long) intervals which don't appear to do anything, and that there are no noticeable effects on the mouse if these sections of their genomes are removed. Which begs the BIG question, "What are those sections of the genome actually doing there?"
It is possible that they really do nothing , but such an "explanation" would be even more disturbing than finding that they do something which we don't understand yet.
Someone mentioned Greg Bear's "Darwin's Children" series of books, and I agree that Bear is a good writer. But his explanation of these oddities of genetics is equally unsatisfying too. Nice books though - and Bear does keep his finger on the pulse of the science.
A couple of years ago the Harvard University Centre for Astronomy had one of it's collections of technical publications scanned in order to be put online. But to make the material actually usable they had to launch a program over the net for volunteers (predominantly amateur astronomers) to view the scanned pages and enter, by hand, the necessary bibligraphical information (authors, paper titles, etc), as well as to QC things (look for duplicated pages, missing pages, work out which of several scans of fold-out drawings is the best image, etc).
The scanning step was trivial (probably lots of bored students on minimum wages, getting brownie points from their professors); the INDEXING process has been going on for over 2 years now and is not yet finished. NASA ADS at SAO: Historical scans currently in the ADS
That last link (to Giton ) seems rather flaky - I can't get the PDF to reliably open in a new tab or window, but if I "save target as..." onto my hard drive, I get a valid 96kb PDF. YMMV.
This might be the acme of mouse technology as far as Logitech are concerned, but it won't get me opening my wallet. It's right-handed, and as such it's totally useless.
I know all the arguments about catering to the average user, and frankly, I don't care. I use my mouse left-handed, and I see no reason to change. I still carried on on the left when I had my left hand in a plaster cast because I simply cannot coordinate pointer and mouse movement with my right hand.
Naturally, I can use the touch screen and keyboard on my PDA fully ambidexterously. Which might be a hint about how un-intuitive mice actually are.
It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers.
Actually, it was a bit more subtle than this. For a long time after the second world war the Allies were sitting very firmly on the knowledge that they'd broken the German code systems, and made no serious attempt to prevent the German engineers from going off to work for other countries. In consequence... up until the 1960s or 1970s Britain and America had easy access to tools that could break almost any diplomatic or military cipher in use around the world. Meanwhile, these German engineers and ex-military were going around the world touting this system "which had remained secure through WW2". Yeah, right. And many people believed them. Of course, since the original work that actually broke the Enigma code system was done in Poland, the Russians had found out that Enigma was broken. So they sold it to their client states, for exactly the same reasons.
Oh, you'd forgotten that the breaking of the Enigma system was done in pre-War Poland? That's OK - the people at Bletchley Park haven't forgotten.
Interesting links: http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ is a site by some of the people who worked at Bletchley Park. http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ is the official Bl.Pk. website. Shame they still haven't got any photos of the approach roads - it's a bit of a pig to find, even if you can navigate your way around Milton Keynes. I think they're trying to encourage visitors by train. http://www.retrobeep.com/ is a link into the computer museum at Bl.Pk.
and the prospect of computerising the rock hammer is utterly laughable.
How about in 45 years time when you can set your new computerised Rock Hammer to 'auto mode' and it magically applies the right force depending on the chemical properties of the target.
Well, in 45 years I'm likely to be a subterranean daisy erector (using the well established 'pushrod' method). But whether or ont there'll be a computerised rock hammer... I doubt it.
Will there ever be sufficient market to support the development of the technology? I'd doubt it.
What would the comparative cost of the new versions versus the old ones? Much higher, I'd guess, which is always an issue.
Will the new technology provide sufficient new features to encourage take-up? I'd doubt it. (While there is useful information to be taken from the resistance of a rock to splitting, it's hugely complicated by questions such as the state of weathering of the rocks, to which there are no simple, quantifiable answers.)
What would be the reliability of the new technology? (If I do something perfectly normal, like beating the blazes out of a lump of gneiss to get a sample, and I split the shaft of my hammer (again - I'm on my 3rd shaft), will I be able to get it repaired in a fishing store in a 5-house village on Skye? OK - I've got to take it to Edinburgh to get it repaired - that's 3 days travelling time. Plus another week while they wait for parts, because this is an AutoHam Mk 13, and I haven't upgraded to the AutoHam Mk 27.)
And why haven't I taken advantage of the trade-in upgrade offer? Because no Mk 27 can replace the fact that this AutoHam Mk 13 is the one that I cut steps across the icefield on Central Gully of Beinn Laoigh that foul Sunday. It's got some sentinemtal value (even if it's had one new head and 2 new shafts since then). GRIN
Excuse me while I cuddle 'the Equaliser', my pet hammer. "All rocks are equal, but some take more equalising than others." The Equaliser and I have shared a degree course, years of work in the mountains, no small amount of ice climbing, a couple of bar fights... A friend in need.
I predict that in 30 years, what is and isn't a computer will be hard to distinguish.
The essential tools in my job (and to a large degree in my hobby) are a 1-kg geological hammer, a number of plastic bags with string neck-ties (for today's samples), a hand lens, a pencil and a notebook. That's "note book" as in multiple sheets of waterproof paper bound together against a board firm enough for writing. The only significant technological changes in the last half century have been the introduction of propelling pencils (so I don't need to carry a pencil-sharpening knife, but I do anyway.) and the production of plastic-coated papers which are more waterproof. But if the water is chest-deep anyway, often you've got more concerns than keeping your notebook dry. I don't see any benefit to computerising any of those tools. Cameras, voice recorders etc are so delicate that they can't survive the conditions (or can't be guaranteed to survive...), and the prospect of computerising the rock hammer is utterly laughable.
I started computing on a Honeywell (ummm) 66/80 IIRC. What I do remember better than the model number was that it used 36-bit words, which would be broken up into various different formats for different types of storage. Can't remember the details now (I stopped using it in 1986), but I saw the box containing my notes on it a couple of hours ago. Ahh, memories.
This could turn out to be quite an inconvenience for the UK, as the mirror.ac.uk service has proven itself very fast and reliable.
Ah, this is obviously some strange new usage of the words "fast" and "reliable", which is not in normal language. OK, I'll admit that mirror.ac.uk is always up, but in multiple attempts to get gzipped isos from it, I've never (repeat : "never") once got better than 28kbyte/s from it, when my line is capable of about 50kbyte/s. And I've only had about 1 iso in 20 download successfully - typically the browser window tells me the remote end has stopped responding. Naturally I use it overnight, when those pesky researchers who it's intended for are mostly tucked up in bed.
... for a veery good reason. In one word snowploughs. Confused? Over very large parts of Scotland (and some higher level parts of England) I was puzzled for a long time by the absence of road markers (we call them "Cats Eyes" over here, even the new, plastic, corner-cube reflectors that look nothing like a moggy's ocular). Then one day, as I was hitch-hiking down a snowy road in Scotland a snowplough overtook me (not good hitching weather), and ping the shattered remains of a road marker comes flying up from the plough's blade to land in the slush beside the road. That was that little puzzle solved. I noticed the same lack of road markers in Siberia last summer and last month, but they do use them a little a road junctions in Azerbaijan.. I'm surprised that no-one from the colder parts of America has pointed this out. Maybe it's more fun putting on a tin hat? regardless, by the time the price of these has dropped to the extent that the requisite billions can be made and installed, the price of oil will be steady above $70/barrel and people will be strongly debating if they can afford to run that car.
(If you doubt that oil prices will go that high, and stay that high... I work in Scotland, Russia, Azerbaijan, the Middle East and Tanzania, as a geologist, looking for new oil deposits. I know how hard it is to find new stocks - that's why I tried to get into the
Malvinas play [a bust] in 1998,
into the potential Tanzania play [tests continue] this year and next,
and I'm on call-out for the West Greenland play [when it gets started. We guesstimate it needs $40/bbl or higher for a year to justify the exploration costs]
) "One bearded, computer-nerd geologist, engaged to a Siberian beauty."
washoe county nevada: population 375,000, size 6,608 sware miles. this team [netopia.com] rescues about 400 people per year
FOUR HUNDRED ??!! In one area, less than half the size of Scotland? That's utterly appalling!
I've got no idea what you're doing differently to this side of the pond, but there's something deeply wrong there. Do you have any million-plus cities in the area you're describing -- hang on - population 375,000, so no you don't. Estimates from sales of outdoor gear put the hill-walking and mountaineering population of Scotland at a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe 3 - 5 % of the general population. [Thinks] about 100 regulars at my local pub; 4 of us go walking regularly; yeah, that statistic is about right. What's the overall proportion of urban-dwelling, outdoor-recreationing people in your sample area. Perhaps there's a more general knowledge of how to do it right. At the moment I'm rather annoyed that my old website at www.karley.org/KGB-MC/index.html is down, because one of the trips we described there neatly illustrates the difference that a high proportion of outdoors people in the general population can make. Cutting a long story short, one member of our little club is (quite correctly) not confident of his navigation. So we gave him the map and let him steer. Myself and Tony both knew where Dave had gone wrong, but kept our mouths shut. He got to about 8km off target before he couldn't convince himself that we were still on the desired path, and then he had to plan how to get us out of the problem. Very effective teaching tool. Also entirely safe, because the rest of the party knew what they were up to, and in the event of the weather turning while we were above the tree-line, we'd got our bail-out plans laid. Anyway - got to go, because this is dial-up, on peak rate.
if a person could check one out for a $20 deposit and get the cash back when they return it to the rental place, this could save many lives and even many man-hours of searching.
How many lives? Seriously? The annual death toll on Scotland's hills runs into a small handful, and many of them are heart attacks etc which would probably have happened anyway. Most of the rest are rock or ice climbers who are taking calculated risks. (I used to do that until I discovered caving.) Very few deaths, or even large searches, are the consequence of people actually getting lost.
For the same outlay of brain juice and moolah, if you put it into teaching people to be aware of their environment, to read, use and understand maps, you'd get most of the same benefits of reducing injuries and incidents on the hills, and improve the general competence of people on the hills, around town, and simply finding their way from point A to point B.
Personally, I think that more people should be encouraged to go up into the mountains and compete for Darwin Awards - Just Think Of It As Evolution In Action.
Or applauding Paris Hilton for having the good sense to only videotape herself having regular and oral sex and not anal sex.
So, all those spams I've been getting refer to some woman getting low down and dirty (with what? a man? a root vegetable? the scheduler code in kernel 2.5.3?), and not to advertising an over-priced French guest house. It's all so much clearer now!
Lets see, - it's got a small screen (but usable); - it's got a small keyboard (but probably big enough to type reasonably on, if it's well designed); - it's in a clamshell design; - it's grey.
It's a Psion 5mx.
Oh, just a moment:
Two full days standby power
One full day operation in low-power mode
Sorry, it's got about 1/15th of the battery life of a Psion. And it won't run my last 5 years worth of applications for the Psion. Oh well, back to Ebay to look for a replacement Psion, before I start tring to solder up the breaks in my screen cable.
Isn't it amazing how Windows machines can catch up with devices that have been out of production for 3 years.
Isn't one of the main reasons to solve crimes to deter future crime? Isn't that the idea behind a criminal justice system? Since the story is about Britain, I should point out that an explicit aim of the the UK penal system is to rehabilitate the offender. It's based on a Victorian concept that the offender is fundamentally savable (in some religious sense). Retribution is also an aim. Deterrence is a fad that has only come into the question in the last half century or so - since we stopped executing innocent people.
IIRC, the TiO2 nanoparticle technology has been being examined for some decades as a possible way to getting an abiological photosynthesis system working (something to do with the band-gaps in TiO2 being adequate to oxidise water to oxygen). So... in the paint there would be a high activity (fugacity? my chemistry is old and creaking) of oxygen (on a sunny day (needs UV to work - probably wouldn't work with diffusively reflected light. Trials were conducted in Milan, not Midlesborough!). That *might* be enough to deal with your SO2 "vog", but I wouldn't be sure. You might be able to 'localise' the paint by incorporating a proportion of V2O5 (vanadium oxide) into it to catalyse the oxidation of SO2 to SO3, which would then combine with ambient water to give sulphuric acid (H2SO4), which would then react with the calcium carbonate to give low-solubility calcium sulphate (gypsum). Should work to a degree, but I'm wondering if it would be overkill? Much of the same effect could be obtained using a lime-whitewash with-or-without the V2O5 (because SO2 will go to SO3 in ambient air, but slower, and SO2 will react to a degree to form sulphurous acid and calcium sulphite anyway). Bright sunshine and white-washed walls - how Mediterranean! Perhaps they knew something they didn't know how to express (like how easy it is to make lime-based whitewash).
You don't say which side of the pond you're on, so I'll make the reasonable assumption that you're on this side. [Old joke, to make a point.] Try Robert Gordons - they have a course in Network Engineering and Management (run by the School of Engineering, not the Computing Science Department - can't trust these silly CS people with some important engineering like a network). Prospectus at RGU.
If all my email were signed, I wouldn't even need a spam filter. I could just trash all non-signed email.... after you'd downloaded it. Which is not a lot of use if (like me) you spend months at a time where the only access to the outside world is a $6 / minute, 9600 bit/second InmarSat line.
Effective up-stream filtering is a necessity. (This is one of the reasons that my employers don't use email for the workforce yet, only managers in head office.)
Errr, sorry guys, but for our sins here in Scotland, Lizzie Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor is actually Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (plus sundry titles to do with the colonies, protectorates etc.). That, sadly, includes Scotland. And Wales.
At all times in discussions with members of the pro-Monarchy people, they should be reminded that Britain has a 150-year lead on the French, and a ~270 year lead on the Russians, in the "Kill your Abusive Monarchs Stakes".
The big fun is going to come if Big-Ears declines to step aside when Lizzie becomes expensive corgi-food.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, not a very catchy title, but since I've no interest in music, it'll do.
Last night I ambled into a popular pub to talk to a friend, and it turned out there was a pub quiz going on. Well, that's good fun, I've won a fair few pints like that myself, so I had my conversation while joining in with the questions. Then the music round started.
What the question-master had done, unsurprisingly, was to take short snippets of a number of songs from a number of artists, and drop them onto a CD. The question was "Title and Artist". Easy money for the question-meister.
But it occurred to me, `How would the copyright lawyers treat this'. I'd expect it to be a pretty clear violation - reproduction of the track in an identifiable form (the quiz is intended to be solvable); broadcasting in a public place (a bar, a popular one at that) with approximately 80 people participating in the quiz (and so actively listening) and a similar number just idling in the rest of the bar.
But, thinks I, there is a point which might save the luckless question-meister from the wrath of the PRS (UK relative of the RIAA, for you TransPondians) - perhaps such usage is supported by the approximately £100/month that the publican pays to the PRS to allow them to play the TV, run the juke box, and present live bands. That would cover such "incidental" usage of copyrighted works, surely.
I talked to a friend of mine - a Councillor who actually sits on the Licensing Committee - and it's confirmed, sort-of : every year they receive several complaints from the PRS about bars that have not paid their monthly tax, and as the relavent legal authority, they have to send warning letters to the licensee publican to correct this, otherwise the bar will immediately lose it's license to sell beers, wines or spirits. In short, to go out of business. So, the bar should have coverage for general "background music" type uses.
Well, the average bar. But this one, in particular, has always made a specific point of not having a juke box, not having a TV, and not having any live or canned music source. It makes the place a good refuge when the football is on, and is definitely one of it's major advantages. So it doesn't pay the PRS fee.
I think my question-master is up the creek without a paddle. (Which is why I'm not detailing the bar, nor the sport club he was raising funds for with his quiz.) Can anyone think of a workable defence for him, in the event that he did ever get sued over it?
Applicable law is Scottish. Not British, and certainly not American. How different are they? - does the legal system you are familiar with only have two possible verdicts which a jury can return?
If you run an incandesent bulb off DC it will work just fine, and probably last a VERY long time compared to how long it "should" last.
Incandescant lamps have been deprecated for over a decade - they're wasteful and short lived, if cheap.
When I moved into my place, 11 years ago, I decided to never buy another incandescant lamp again. Over the next 2 years I replaced every lamp, as it blew, with an appropriate high-efficiency fluorescent. I had to replace the first of those last year.
Net saving is around 20 or 30 quid a year in electric and lampage. 'Nuff said.
but for your furnace you'd need an inverter of the caliber used in off-grid homes. (Probably more than you want to spend.)
"Gas-powered central heating with an electric controller" is what the OP said. That's most likely a 100W (-ish) motor for pumping the hot water round the radiators, and a negligible draw for a controller box. But both would run at mains voltage, and both would have noisy switches (some inverters designed for electronic equipment might not like the sugres). Might also be a fan for the exhaust flue, but I've never seen one of those except in a DIY store.
"Furnace" motors make me think of oil pumps, blowers, sparking gear etc. A gas (as in "methane") heating system uses one small solenoid and a pilot light - much lighter duty.
Why everyone's "pirating" music in russia? Yes, because its cheaper than buying it in a music store.
Actually, the last couple of times I've been in Russia (Noyabrsk, Surgut, Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk if you feel the need to know), the music shops were selling blatently burned CDs. I picked up a couple for the fiancee, but didn't buy any for myself because I'm not interested in music. (Bet that scares the shit out of the RIAA and friends - a human being who isn't interested in music! It should be illegal! Burn all heretics who don't wake up in the night to buy and listen to music!)
I think further phenotypic analysis of the mice would be in order before completely denouncing everything they deleted as "junk". Obviously a lot of it is due to selection pressures and evasion of mutation, but some of it might not be.
... genetic butchery (in the sense of the quote to the effect that "a surgeon achieves by butchery what a civilzed man would achieve by persuasion") which won't show up for n generations, and no doubt the obvious experiment is on progress. BUT to the first generation, the effects are so minor as to be not obvious.
... immediately apparent.
That's much of the point. While there are no doubt effects of this
Consider what would happen to a program which you randomly excised a block of a million characters from the tarball. Maybe you'd take out a chunk of the documentation, which wouldn't really stop it working; maybe you'd hit the module for conversion between Roman denarii and Micronesian grindstones, which would only show up in quite uncommon circumstances. But in any program where reproduction had a signficant cost (viz, one with reasonably tight code), a million character excision from the tarball would be
Essentially what they're saying is, mouse genomes contain large (millions of bases long) intervals which don't appear to do anything, and that there are no noticeable effects on the mouse if these sections of their genomes are removed. Which begs the BIG question, "What are those sections of the genome actually doing there?"
It is possible that they really do nothing , but such an "explanation" would be even more disturbing than finding that they do something which we don't understand yet.
Someone mentioned Greg Bear's "Darwin's Children" series of books, and I agree that Bear is a good writer. But his explanation of these oddities of genetics is equally unsatisfying too. Nice books though - and Bear does keep his finger on the pulse of the science.
A couple of years ago the Harvard University Centre for Astronomy had one of it's collections of technical publications scanned in order to be put online. But to make the material actually usable they had to launch a program over the net for volunteers (predominantly amateur astronomers) to view the scanned pages and enter, by hand, the necessary bibligraphical information (authors, paper titles, etc), as well as to QC things (look for duplicated pages, missing pages, work out which of several scans of fold-out drawings is the best image, etc).
The scanning step was trivial (probably lots of bored students on minimum wages, getting brownie points from their professors); the INDEXING process has been going on for over 2 years now and is not yet finished.
NASA ADS at SAO: Historical scans currently in the ADS
That last link (to Giton ) seems rather flaky - I can't get the PDF to reliably open in a new tab or window, but if I "save target as ..." onto my hard drive, I get a valid 96kb PDF.
YMMV.
This might be the acme of mouse technology as far as Logitech are concerned, but it won't get me opening my wallet. It's right-handed, and as such it's totally useless.
I know all the arguments about catering to the average user, and frankly, I don't care. I use my mouse left-handed, and I see no reason to change. I still carried on on the left when I had my left hand in a plaster cast because I simply cannot coordinate pointer and mouse movement with my right hand.
Naturally, I can use the touch screen and keyboard on my PDA fully ambidexterously. Which might be a hint about how un-intuitive mice actually are.
The last site mentions the use of touch screens as a tool in managing RSI issues, which is some info that people might wish to take to work with them.
It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers.
... up until the 1960s or 1970s Britain and America had easy access to tools that could break almost any diplomatic or military cipher in use around the world. Meanwhile, these German engineers and ex-military were going around the world touting this system "which had remained secure through WW2". Yeah, right. And many people believed them.
:
Actually, it was a bit more subtle than this. For a long time after the second world war the Allies were sitting very firmly on the knowledge that they'd broken the German code systems, and made no serious attempt to prevent the German engineers from going off to work for other countries. In consequence
Of course, since the original work that actually broke the Enigma code system was done in Poland, the Russians had found out that Enigma was broken. So they sold it to their client states, for exactly the same reasons.
Oh, you'd forgotten that the breaking of the Enigma system was done in pre-War Poland? That's OK - the people at Bletchley Park haven't forgotten.
Interesting links
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ is a site by some of the people who worked at Bletchley Park.
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ is the official Bl.Pk. website. Shame they still haven't got any photos of the approach roads - it's a bit of a pig to find, even if you can navigate your way around Milton Keynes. I think they're trying to encourage visitors by train.
http://www.retrobeep.com/ is a link into the computer museum at Bl.Pk.
How about in 45 years time when you can set your new computerised Rock Hammer to 'auto mode' and it magically applies the right force depending on the chemical properties of the target.
Well, in 45 years I'm likely to be a subterranean daisy erector (using the well established 'pushrod' method). But whether or ont there'll be a computerised rock hammer
Excuse me while I cuddle 'the Equaliser', my pet hammer. "All rocks are equal, but some take more equalising than others."
The Equaliser and I have shared a degree course, years of work in the mountains, no small amount of ice climbing, a couple of bar fights
I predict that in 30 years, what is and isn't a computer will be hard to distinguish.
The essential tools in my job (and to a large degree in my hobby) are a 1-kg geological hammer, a number of plastic bags with string neck-ties (for today's samples), a hand lens, a pencil and a notebook. That's "note book" as in multiple sheets of waterproof paper bound together against a board firm enough for writing. The only significant technological changes in the last half century have been the introduction of propelling pencils (so I don't need to carry a pencil-sharpening knife, but I do anyway.) and the production of plastic-coated papers which are more waterproof. But if the water is chest-deep anyway, often you've got more concerns than keeping your notebook dry.
I don't see any benefit to computerising any of those tools. Cameras, voice recorders etc are so delicate that they can't survive the conditions (or can't be guaranteed to survive...), and the prospect of computerising the rock hammer is utterly laughable.
I started computing on a Honeywell (ummm) 66/80 IIRC. What I do remember better than the model number was that it used 36-bit words, which would be broken up into various different formats for different types of storage. Can't remember the details now (I stopped using it in 1986), but I saw the box containing my notes on it a couple of hours ago. Ahh, memories.
This could turn out to be quite an inconvenience for the UK, as the mirror.ac.uk service has proven itself very fast and reliable.
Ah, this is obviously some strange new usage of the words "fast" and "reliable", which is not in normal language.
OK, I'll admit that mirror.ac.uk is always up, but in multiple attempts to get gzipped isos from it, I've never (repeat : "never") once got better than 28kbyte/s from it, when my line is capable of about 50kbyte/s. And I've only had about 1 iso in 20 download successfully - typically the browser window tells me the remote end has stopped responding. Naturally I use it overnight, when those pesky researchers who it's intended for are mostly tucked up in bed.
Confused?
Over very large parts of Scotland (and some higher level parts of England) I was puzzled for a long time by the absence of road markers (we call them "Cats Eyes" over here, even the new, plastic, corner-cube reflectors that look nothing like a moggy's ocular). Then one day, as I was hitch-hiking down a snowy road in Scotland a snowplough overtook me (not good hitching weather), and ping the shattered remains of a road marker comes flying up from the plough's blade to land in the slush beside the road.
That was that little puzzle solved.
I noticed the same lack of road markers in Siberia last summer and last month, but they do use them a little a road junctions in Azerbaijan..
I'm surprised that no-one from the colder parts of America has pointed this out. Maybe it's more fun putting on a tin hat? regardless, by the time the price of these has dropped to the extent that the requisite billions can be made and installed, the price of oil will be steady above $70/barrel and people will be strongly debating if they can afford to run that car.
(If you doubt that oil prices will go that high, and stay that high
- Malvinas play [a bust] in 1998,
- into the potential Tanzania play [tests continue] this year and next,
- and I'm on call-out for the West Greenland play [when it gets started. We guesstimate it needs $40/bbl or higher for a year to justify the exploration costs]
)"One bearded, computer-nerd geologist, engaged to a Siberian beauty."
washoe county nevada: population 375,000, size 6,608 sware miles. this team [netopia.com] rescues about 400 people per year
FOUR HUNDRED ??!! In one area, less than half the size of Scotland? That's utterly appalling!
I've got no idea what you're doing differently to this side of the pond, but there's something deeply wrong there. Do you have any million-plus cities in the area you're describing -- hang on - population 375,000, so no you don't. Estimates from sales of outdoor gear put the hill-walking and mountaineering population of Scotland at a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe 3 - 5 % of the general population.
[Thinks] about 100 regulars at my local pub; 4 of us go walking regularly; yeah, that statistic is about right.
What's the overall proportion of urban-dwelling, outdoor-recreationing people in your sample area. Perhaps there's a more general knowledge of how to do it right.
At the moment I'm rather annoyed that my old website at www.karley.org/KGB-MC/index.html is down, because one of the trips we described there neatly illustrates the difference that a high proportion of outdoors people in the general population can make. Cutting a long story short, one member of our little club is (quite correctly) not confident of his navigation. So we gave him the map and let him steer. Myself and Tony both knew where Dave had gone wrong, but kept our mouths shut. He got to about 8km off target before he couldn't convince himself that we were still on the desired path, and then he had to plan how to get us out of the problem. Very effective teaching tool. Also entirely safe, because the rest of the party knew what they were up to, and in the event of the weather turning while we were above the tree-line, we'd got our bail-out plans laid.
Anyway - got to go, because this is dial-up, on peak rate.
if a person could check one out for a $20 deposit and get the cash back when they return it to the rental place, this could save many lives and even many man-hours of searching.
How many lives? Seriously?
The annual death toll on Scotland's hills runs into a small handful, and many of them are heart attacks etc which would probably have happened anyway. Most of the rest are rock or ice climbers who are taking calculated risks. (I used to do that until I discovered caving.) Very few deaths, or even large searches, are the consequence of people actually getting lost.
For the same outlay of brain juice and moolah, if you put it into teaching people to be aware of their environment, to read, use and understand maps, you'd get most of the same benefits of reducing injuries and incidents on the hills, and improve the general competence of people on the hills, around town, and simply finding their way from point A to point B.
Personally, I think that more people should be encouraged to go up into the mountains and compete for Darwin Awards - Just Think Of It As Evolution In Action.
Or applauding Paris Hilton for having the good sense to only videotape herself having regular and oral sex and not anal sex.
So, all those spams I've been getting refer to some woman getting low down and dirty (with what? a man? a root vegetable? the scheduler code in kernel 2.5.3?), and not to advertising an over-priced French guest house. It's all so much clearer now!
- it's got a small keyboard (but probably big enough to type reasonably on, if it's well designed);
- it's in a clamshell design;
- it's grey.
It's a Psion 5mx.
Oh, just a moment:
Sorry, it's got about 1/15th of the battery life of a Psion. And it won't run my last 5 years worth of applications for the Psion. Oh well, back to Ebay to look for a replacement Psion, before I start tring to solder up the breaks in my screen cable.
Isn't it amazing how Windows machines can catch up with devices that have been out of production for 3 years.
Isn't one of the main reasons to solve crimes to deter future crime? Isn't that the idea behind a criminal justice system?
Since the story is about Britain, I should point out that an explicit aim of the the UK penal system is to rehabilitate the offender. It's based on a Victorian concept that the offender is fundamentally savable (in some religious sense). Retribution is also an aim. Deterrence is a fad that has only come into the question in the last half century or so - since we stopped executing innocent people.
IIRC, the TiO2 nanoparticle technology has been being examined for some decades as a possible way to getting an abiological photosynthesis system working (something to do with the band-gaps in TiO2 being adequate to oxidise water to oxygen). So ... in the paint there would be a high activity (fugacity? my chemistry is old and creaking) of oxygen (on a sunny day (needs UV to work - probably wouldn't work with diffusively reflected light. Trials were conducted in Milan, not Midlesborough!). That *might* be enough to deal with your SO2 "vog", but I wouldn't be sure.
You might be able to 'localise' the paint by incorporating a proportion of V2O5 (vanadium oxide) into it to catalyse the oxidation of SO2 to SO3, which would then combine with ambient water to give sulphuric acid (H2SO4), which would then react with the calcium carbonate to give low-solubility calcium sulphate (gypsum).
Should work to a degree, but I'm wondering if it would be overkill? Much of the same effect could be obtained using a lime-whitewash with-or-without the V2O5 (because SO2 will go to SO3 in ambient air, but slower, and SO2 will react to a degree to form sulphurous acid and calcium sulphite anyway).
Bright sunshine and white-washed walls - how Mediterranean! Perhaps they knew something they didn't know how to express (like how easy it is to make lime-based whitewash).
You don't say which side of the pond you're on, so I'll make the reasonable assumption that you're on this side. [Old joke, to make a point.]
Try Robert Gordons - they have a course in Network Engineering and Management (run by the School of Engineering, not the Computing Science Department - can't trust these silly CS people with some important engineering like a network). Prospectus at RGU.
If all my email were signed, I wouldn't even need a spam filter. I could just trash all non-signed email. ... after you'd downloaded it.
Which is not a lot of use if (like me) you spend months at a time where the only access to the outside world is a $6 / minute, 9600 bit/second InmarSat line.
Effective up-stream filtering is a necessity.
(This is one of the reasons that my employers don't use email for the workforce yet, only managers in head office.)
Errr, sorry guys, but for our sins here in Scotland, Lizzie Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor is actually Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (plus sundry titles to do with the colonies, protectorates etc.). That, sadly, includes Scotland. And Wales.
At all times in discussions with members of the pro-Monarchy people, they should be reminded that Britain has a 150-year lead on the French, and a ~270 year lead on the Russians, in the "Kill your Abusive Monarchs Stakes".
The big fun is going to come if Big-Ears declines to step aside when Lizzie becomes expensive corgi-food.
[Exit, stage left, sharpening an axe.]
That is like knighting George W. Bush or William J. Clinton...... .... don't give them ideas.
Shhhh
Damn. Too late.