IIRC, England stuck with the longbow for too long and eventually lost France. The longbow was a MUCH more accurate/deadly weapon than early gunpowder weapons, but it took a lot of training, plus you had to expose yourself to use it.
..yes, "The Finger" in England is normally given with two fingers, but we both understand and use the single digit form. In England, the direction the hand is facing is important when giving the two finger form, if your palm faces the target then you are merely giving the Churchillian victory symbol.
Who started the practice of cutting off fingers in the Anglo French wars is also open to debate.
Can anyone give an example of where rebranding has worked ? Windows Powered would be applicable to most systems running Windows and is a bit anonymous IMHO.
Can someone tell me what William Simpson does that is so evil and threatens the stability of the One Truly Free Nation ?
Apologies if anyone regards this as flamebait, but I have noticed the following: As earlier Slashdot articles have pointed out, the UK and a number of other "free" nations [Australia too] often draft some laws that look as though they are likely to severely curtail freedom. However, being less litigious than US citizens, the law is used more wisely and cases such as this are stopped at an early stage. In the US, this'll probably take a Supreme Court decision to stop.
Anonymous Coward wrote > 3) Put a thick layer of weak concrete around the probe...
Concrete: just one small problem - mass!!
To get a thick layer of concrete into space in the first place takes energy - to get it to Mars takes energy - I assume they're trying to make the various probes as small and light as possible for this reason.
If they were going to use a material for that purpose then I presume they'd settle for a similar material to the Space Shuttle coating, which IIRC is quite light and very heat tolerant.
Did the miltitary say it had to be black ? - I thought that was just a function of the material they made it out of - course they could have painted it that blotchy infra-red absorbent grey like the rest of the US airforce.....
or did Lockheed suddenly get taken over by Henry "you can have it any color you want as long as it's black" Ford ?:-)
I did mention in this post that I couldn't see the reason for the proliferation of licenses. I still can't see why there are just a few standard licences that we're all familiar with. I wouldn't have to read the Norton License, the Mozilla licence, Corel license etc if they just simply stuck to one of the more common license agreements out there. I'm sure we could get it down to about 3-4 different licenses in the end. Another good thing about cutting down on the number of licenses is that we are more likely to get litigation which hopefully would validate these licenses in law courts i.e. create precedents. AFAIK, we STILL don't know if the GPL is legally binding and effective. As far as I can see, Corels' 18 year old license restriction would have little effect anyway; since minors can't be bound by licenses in Canada, the term itself is paradoxically invalid. It MAY be valid in other countries though.
..noone would go this route for mass copying of DVDs a) blank DVDs are still around twice the price of original DVDs b) the recorder is fscking expensive c) you aren't going to go into mass production with one of these things most DVD writers are only currently 1 or 2x standard DVD playback speed
All of these factors are probably going take at least a few years to disappear.
AFAIK, you can access all of a DVD with DeCSS, and any of the other tools out there, but until one or more of the above factors changes, the only reason for using such tools at the moment are for legal playback of DVDs on your systems.
> I have 1575 MP3 files in 5.90 gigs sitting on my hard drive. If a DVD disc will hold 5 gigs, that gives: 5.90/1575 = 5/x = roughly 1335 MP3 files. (if my MP3 files are about average size)
Does that mean I can put every single release of "Now Thats What I Call Music" [AFAIK there's 44 at the last count] on 1 DVD ?;-)
> Now please allow me to preface my comments with where my point of view comes from. I work in the machine tool industry, where MTBF is measured in thousands of hours.
> Am I just off base? or is this criteria horibly inatiquit. Even for an Alpha.
Hey, if it worked for an hour straight, Microsoft would release it!;-P
In the UK, and most other countries, minors can enter into contracts for necessary items. This has to be the law, since otherwise a minor could not even buy a packet of sweets. Purchase is essentially a contract.
However the term "necessary items" is very vague and is often decided on a case by case basis in the UK. i.e. a kid can legitimately enter into a contract to buy a Ferrari providing he/she can show it's "necessary":-). A contract to buy/use software would probably stand up in court as computing is either a hobby or educational in some way.
..I have an interest to declare. I'm a contract engineer and therefore I'm paid hourly, but I think there is something to be said for paying all staff in this way.
For one thing, contracts should recognise the extra stress imposed on their staff by working excessive hours by 1.5x/2x payments. This has the side effect of forcing management to ensure that the company employs enough people to do the job. If you are on a fixed salary without any overtime recognition whatsoever there can be a lot of pressure to do excessive hours and prove that you are a "team player". This can be quite common in small companies.
In Europe there is the "Working Time Directive" which effectively prevents workers being forced, or even wanting to work for excessive hours [can't remember what the limits are]. I believe a far more reasonable solution would have been to force people to pay overtime at such rates for hours over those contracted - this would have provided more flexibility and freedom of choice, whilst still placing a hurdle in the way of companies abusing employment regulation.
I can understand the need for about three versions of Open Source license a) a BSD type license b) a GPL type licence c) a "commercial" license which allows the originator some rights over how his code is used to prevent forking and 'embrace & extend' by rivals. i.e. a sort of you can see the source, propose modifications and fixes, but we retain control over distribution license.
Why do people keep coming up with their own variations on a theme ?
..an outright assault on the British way of doing things is perhaps unjustified.
It's my belief that the British constitution muddles along quite nicely - certain people/ organisations, e.g. the monarch, Parliament have great power in theory but in are incapable of converting theoretical power into actual power. There are certainly miscarriages of justice, but they too happen in EVERY system, not just ours, and like every system there are checks and balances available.
A possible problem is that Labour is actually far more prone to want to "protect" us fropm the big bad world than the Conservatives, and with their large majority are able to drive through some very ill-advised legislation. A government with a small majority, Labour or Conservative, has to listen to its critics, but a large majority allows it to only listen to its friends.
I read "using Samba" online and on the basis I like what I read I plan to pay for a real copy. [Its going to join the other 12 or so O'Reilly books I have]
I *DO* print things out that I'm interested in, and I tend to work on computer programs and documentation in "dead tree" format rather than electronically - for some reason I find it easier to do major work in this form [minor problems I do fix online]. Perhaps its because I haven't got a 21" monitor yet.
If that is the case then I'd like suggest the following have merit and deserve consideration... some of the games chosen qualify under the longevity clause and I could argue that they have played a major part in the development of computing. Some of them were great hacks, as they stretch what computers could do at the time to the limit and beyond.
Even Microsoft gets a look in here!
* Pong
* Space War
* Asteriods (Atari)
* Space Invaders (Atari) The sound of marching Invaders will linger on in my memory forever.
* Trek Launch Photon Torpedoes!
* Star Raiders (Atari) or Elite (BBC/PC) Great Space War/Space Trading games
* PacMan
* Zork Text Adventures
* Minesweeper & Patience (Microsoft) How many productive hours have been consumed by these programs ?
* MS Flight Simulator Continously wins most realistic flight sim
* Falcon (Spectrum Holobyte) Still the combat flight sim of choice.
* Wolfenstein 3D
* Doom
* Quake Do I really need to justify the last three?
Runners Up ========== I was also tempted by * Civilisation as the protypical God game. * Wing Commander as the definitive games with lots of bucks and FMV. The early cartoon ones were good fun too.
AFAIK, Robert Morris' Internet Worm was an accident rather than planned i.e. he did not plan on his program stuffing the net, merely generating useful info back to him.
..the US has export bans on strong encryption products. Countries & governments to where export is banned can just simply download whatever they want [sometimes anonymously] via the Internet anyway.
OTOH, and perhaps parodoxically, I have no problems in the government doing its best to snoop on the conversations of other governments. I don't think we should ever forget that World War II was essentially won by the fact that the US and UK could read German and Japanese messages. The damage at Pearl Harbour could possibly have been limited if certain messages had been decrypted and communicated faster. A lot of damage was caused by the US Governments line of "Gentleman do not read each others mail" before each World War.
..one reason COULD be that there is a lot of interest in this field due to the increase in a desire to replace manned call centres with software, so key phrase recognition would be a neat trick. Software designed using this could help callers by recognising what they were talking about and acting accordingly
Are we really sure this thing is a planet ? I always thought that when something got to about the size of Jupiter it stood a chance of being a star of sorts itself.....anyone care to fill us in ?
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, England stuck with the longbow for too long and eventually lost France. The longbow was a MUCH more accurate/deadly weapon than early gunpowder weapons, but it took a lot of training, plus you had to expose yourself to use it.
..yes, "The Finger" in England is normally given with two fingers, but we both understand and use the single digit form. In England, the direction the hand is facing is important when giving the two finger form, if your palm faces the target then you are merely giving the Churchillian victory symbol.
Who started the practice of cutting off fingers in the Anglo French wars is also open to debate.
Can anyone give an example of where rebranding has worked ? Windows Powered would be applicable to most systems running Windows and is a bit anonymous IMHO.
Maybe "Weeny Windows" ?
Can someone tell me what William Simpson does that is so evil and threatens the stability of the One Truly Free Nation ?
Apologies if anyone regards this as flamebait, but I have noticed the following:
As earlier Slashdot articles have pointed out, the UK and a number of other "free" nations [Australia too] often draft some laws that look as though they are likely to severely curtail freedom. However, being less litigious than US citizens, the law is used more wisely and cases such as this are stopped at an early stage. In the US, this'll probably take a Supreme Court decision to stop.
Anonymous Coward wrote
> 3) Put a thick layer of weak concrete around the probe...
Concrete: just one small problem - mass!!
To get a thick layer of concrete into space in the first place takes energy - to get it to Mars takes energy - I assume they're trying to make the various probes as small and light as possible for this reason.
If they were going to use a material for that purpose then I presume they'd settle for a similar material to the Space Shuttle coating, which IIRC is quite light and very heat tolerant.
..how do you train it to get your newspaper from the newsagents ?
Even as a mature 36 year old I meet over half the requirements. What does this say about me ?
Good job I'm in the UK!
Did the miltitary say it had to be black ?
:-)
- I thought that was just a function of the material they made it out of - course they could have painted it that blotchy infra-red absorbent grey like the rest of the US airforce.....
or did Lockheed suddenly get taken over by Henry "you can have it any color you want as long as it's black" Ford ?
> That doesn't happen in a normal fighter, in an old-fashioned dogfight the stealth fighter would get murdered!
Does a stealth fighter actually have a cannon ?
AFAIK, it doesn't, meaning it shouldn't even try to enter a dogfight.
Being compared to Alan Greenspan is probably more complimentary in terms of importance.
:-)
P.S. have you had the same amount of plastic surgery as Cher ?
Well, this one got a laugh out of me.
P.S. Thankyou "chocolate pi", without your comments I would never have read "User Friendly"
I'd love to know the answers to the following:
How many registered people are there on Slashdot ?
How many unregisterered people use Slashdot ?
Maybe Slashdot ought to have a statistics page, showing the effect of the Slashdot effect on Slashdot!
I did mention in this post that I couldn't see the reason for the proliferation of licenses. I still can't see why there are just a few standard licences that we're all familiar with. I wouldn't have to read the Norton License, the Mozilla licence, Corel license etc if they just simply stuck to one of the more common license agreements out there. I'm sure we could get it down to about 3-4 different licenses in the end. Another good thing about cutting down on the number of licenses is that we are more likely to get litigation which hopefully would validate these licenses in law courts i.e. create precedents. AFAIK, we STILL don't know if the GPL is legally binding and effective. As far as I can see, Corels' 18 year old license restriction would have little effect anyway; since minors can't be bound by licenses in Canada, the term itself is paradoxically invalid. It MAY be valid in other countries though.
..noone would go this route for mass copying of DVDs
a) blank DVDs are still around twice the price of original DVDs
b) the recorder is fscking expensive
c) you aren't going to go into mass production with one of these things most DVD writers are only currently 1 or 2x standard DVD playback speed
All of these factors are probably going take at least a few years to disappear.
AFAIK, you can access all of a DVD with DeCSS, and any of the other tools out there, but until one or more of the above factors changes, the only reason for using such tools at the moment are for legal playback of DVDs on your systems.
> I have 1575 MP3 files in 5.90 gigs sitting on my hard drive. If a DVD disc will hold 5 gigs, that gives: 5.90/1575 = 5/x = roughly 1335 MP3 files. (if my MP3 files are about average size)
;-)
Does that mean I can put every single release of
"Now Thats What I Call Music"
[AFAIK there's 44 at the last count]
on 1 DVD ?
Anyone think of any more useless uses for DVD ?
> Now please allow me to preface my comments with where my point of view comes from. I work in the machine tool industry, where MTBF is measured in thousands of hours.
;-P
> Am I just off base? or is this criteria horibly inatiquit. Even for an Alpha.
Hey, if it worked for an hour straight, Microsoft would release it!
In the UK, and most other countries, minors can enter into contracts for necessary items. This has to be the law, since otherwise a minor could not even buy a packet of sweets. Purchase is essentially a contract.
:-). A contract to buy/use software would probably stand up in court as computing is either a hobby or educational in some way.
However the term "necessary items" is very vague and is often decided on a case by case basis in the UK. i.e. a kid can legitimately enter into a contract to buy a Ferrari providing he/she can show it's "necessary"
P.S. IANAL
..I have an interest to declare. I'm a contract engineer and therefore I'm paid hourly, but I think there is something to be said for paying all staff in this way.
For one thing, contracts should recognise the extra stress imposed on their staff by working excessive hours by 1.5x/2x payments. This has the side effect of forcing management to ensure that the company employs enough people to do the job. If you are on a fixed salary without any overtime recognition whatsoever there can be a lot of pressure to do excessive hours and prove that you are a "team player". This can be quite common in small companies.
In Europe there is the "Working Time Directive" which effectively prevents workers being forced, or even wanting to work for excessive hours [can't remember what the limits are]. I believe a far more reasonable solution would have been to force people to pay overtime at such rates for hours over those contracted - this would have provided more flexibility and freedom of choice, whilst still placing a hurdle in the way of companies abusing employment regulation.
I can understand the need for about three versions of Open Source license
a) a BSD type license
b) a GPL type licence
c) a "commercial" license which allows the originator some rights over how his code is used to prevent forking and 'embrace & extend' by rivals. i.e. a sort of you can see the source, propose modifications and fixes, but we retain control over distribution license.
Why do people keep coming up with their own variations on a theme ?
..an outright assault on the British way of doing things is perhaps unjustified.
It's my belief that the British constitution muddles along quite nicely - certain people/ organisations, e.g. the monarch, Parliament have great power in theory but in are incapable of converting theoretical power into actual power. There are certainly miscarriages of justice, but they too happen in EVERY system, not just ours, and like every system there are checks and balances available.
A possible problem is that Labour is actually far more prone to want to "protect" us fropm the big bad world than the Conservatives, and with their large majority are able to drive through some very ill-advised legislation. A government with a small majority, Labour or Conservative, has to listen to its critics, but a large majority allows it to only listen to its friends.
I read "using Samba" online and on the basis I like what I read I plan to pay for a real copy. [Its going to join the other 12 or so O'Reilly books I have]
I *DO* print things out that I'm interested in, and I tend to work on computer programs and documentation in "dead tree" format rather than electronically - for some reason I find it easier to do major work in this form [minor problems I do fix online]. Perhaps its because I haven't got a 21" monitor yet.
If that is the case then I'd like suggest the following have merit and deserve consideration...
some of the games chosen qualify under the longevity clause and I could argue that they have played a major part in the development of computing. Some of them were great hacks, as they stretch what computers could do at the time to the limit and beyond.
Even Microsoft gets a look in here!
* Pong
* Space War
* Asteriods (Atari)
* Space Invaders (Atari)
The sound of marching Invaders will linger on in my memory forever.
* Trek
Launch Photon Torpedoes!
* Star Raiders (Atari) or Elite (BBC/PC)
Great Space War/Space Trading games
* PacMan
* Zork Text Adventures
* Minesweeper & Patience (Microsoft)
How many productive hours have been consumed by these programs ?
* MS Flight Simulator
Continously wins most realistic flight sim
* Falcon (Spectrum Holobyte)
Still the combat flight sim of choice.
* Wolfenstein 3D
* Doom
* Quake
Do I really need to justify the last three?
Runners Up
==========
I was also tempted by
* Civilisation as the protypical God game.
* Wing Commander as the definitive games with lots of bucks and FMV. The early cartoon ones were good fun too.
AFAIK, Robert Morris' Internet Worm was an accident rather than planned i.e. he did not plan on his program stuffing the net, merely generating useful info back to him.
Anyone know the full story or got a link to it?
..the US has export bans on strong encryption products. Countries & governments to where export is banned can just simply download whatever they want [sometimes anonymously] via the Internet anyway.
OTOH, and perhaps parodoxically, I have no problems in the government doing its best to snoop on the conversations of other governments. I don't think we should ever forget that World War II was essentially won by the fact that the US and UK could read German and Japanese messages. The damage at Pearl Harbour could possibly have been limited if certain messages had been decrypted and communicated faster. A lot of damage was caused by the US Governments line of "Gentleman do not read each others mail" before each World War.
start kite flying...
..one reason COULD be that there is a lot of interest in this field due to the increase in a desire to replace manned call centres with software, so key phrase recognition would be a neat trick. Software designed using this could help callers by recognising what they were talking about and acting accordingly
..end kite flying
AAANI (An Astronomer Am Not I)
Are we really sure this thing is a planet ? I always thought that when something got to about the size of Jupiter it stood a chance of being a star of sorts itself.....anyone care to fill us in ?