I wasn't aware that titanium didn't set off metal detectors...
I make about four round trips between France and the UK per year, and then a couple of longer trips (US, South America, Asia) each year. I find airport security a bad joke.
This Mann man was on the receiving end of incompetence and inconsistency; he got his outward leg over and done with, but his return leg was hell. That's bad enough.
But then, I carry a pocket knife all the time. Usually, when I arrive at the airport, I slip the knife into my hold luggage. A few times, I've arrived with no hold luggage. So I took my key case, slipped the knife into it, and put it into the box next to the metal-detector portal and walked through. The "guard" pats the leather pouch, it jingles, he gives it back to me. It doesn't go through the X-ray machine.
Then there are the various bits of "kit" you can easily buy: nylon and kevlar knives, rat-tail combs...
Not to mention the Friday Night Special: broken bottle. At an international airport, check in your luggage, then go to the "Duty-Free" shop and buy a couple of bottles of something or other. Board the plane; crash, tinkle, instant lethal weapons.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are so many ways of getting lethal stuff onto airplanes, that the problem isn't in the "weapons", it's the people getting on the planes!
Somebody intelligent, and with an axe to grind, will find a way of getting lethal stuff aboard.
Then again, there are some real fuckwits around, like that "British" bloke called Reid, who tried to spark up the heel of his shoe, packed with explosives... He didn't even try to hide in the khazi while doing it. I suppose he was scared of setting off the smoke detector.
Get a small household air-conditioning unit, the kind where you have the big noisy part outdoors (on a balcony, window-ledge, or on the patio). Run some flexible tubing around the edge of the wall inside the room, leading to your computer case. Blow cold air directly in to the case.
If you live somewhere humid, you might want to pump the air through a dryer unit. You could make this using the packs of crystals that you use for room de-humidifiers. I forget the name of these crystals (maybe anhydrous calcium carbonate? quicklime?), but in Europe they're sold under several brand names, Rubson is the one that springs to mind.
That Ananova link is really crap. Bite-sized (or should that be Byte-sized), pre-chewed, over-simplified gibberish. It summarizes, badly, an article from the Observer, and doesn't even publish the link! It simply links to the Observer's main welcome page.
The Ananova scribblers seem to think we all have the attention span of a goldfish. Well, this might come as a surprise, but there are still some of us capable of better than that.
The Observer's article is here.
This article is a little better, but is still unclear as to what the problem is.
Lack of hardware capable of reading raw data from the media?
Lack of software capable of interpreting and rendering the information useful?
Physically degraded and unreadable media?
For instance:
The special computers developed to play the 12in video discs of text,
photographs, maps and archive footage of British life are - quite simply - obsolete.
seems to suggest one or other (or a combination) of the first two cases.
But:
'We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs, and we are confident we will
eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text,' [said Paul Wheatley]
sugests the third case.
Finally:
Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world's experts on
data preservation, points out: 'There is currently no demonstrably viable technical
solution to this problem..."
I fail to see the really difficult problem here... I have heard of technicians using ovens and hair-dryers to prepare 9 and 21 track tapes for reading. The Australian government has a project to migrate vast quantities of mineral-prospection data from obsolete magnetic tape to magnetic disc and database archives. Admittedly, this is a Big Money project; a solution has been found.
Nobody seems to consider this 1986 project to be worth doing properly.
Where there's a will, theres a way... Unfortunately, it seems that the only Will left in England is a hard copy of Shakespeare gathering dust on a library shelf.
I am not a lawyer (this seems to be an obligatory beginning).
However, this use of trespass law to attack spammers seems an interesting approach, if a little unwieldy. This is law of tort, which I think involves bringing a civil action. The Crown Prosecution Service would not get involved. Maybe the Small Claims Court would be appropriate, or maybe an association of users could be formed to bring a case.
Spam sent to me interferes with my chattels. This is extremely easy to show: I have a dial-up connection, so downloading the message takes up time on my phone line, costing me money and depriving me of my phone line for the duration of the download. It also occupies my computing resources and especially electricity, which means more cost to me.
Parallels might be drawn between spam and unauthorised parking. In the United Kingdom, if I own a piece of land and somebody parks a vehicle on it, I am entitled to immobilise the vehicle and require a charge for freeing it. This is, I believe, also a modern interpretation of an old law concerning grazing rights (you allow your cow to wander into my meadow and eat my grass, I can sieze your cow until you pay me compensation for the loss I have suffered). There is a requirement to display a notice like "unauthorized vehicles parked here will be clamped; fee for removal £50" and a telephone number.
Now, maybe I could trace the spammer's computer, hobble it, and charge a fee to free it again....
I was reading up on this yesterday. A quick search for something like "sickle cell resistance to malaria" in google produced a good number of documents. One of the best, in language easy to understand for non-specialists, is this one.
The point is that a person who is heterozygous with the sickle gene is more resistant to malaria, which is not normally of itself a killer disease (although in conjunction with other pathologies, it kills).
At the risk of offending a lot of people, I have to say that HIV still affects three very specific and easy to identify groups in the world:
intravenous drug addicts,
homosexuals,
third-world populations.
Note that I use the word "addicts", rather than "users". I want to make a distinction between those who use drugs recreationally and those who are so psychologically dependent that they will do almost anything for a "fix". (Asan aside, there is some debate in the UK, even amongst high-court judges and the regional heads of police forces to label the "recreational, occasional" use as "responsible, acceptable" use!)
In Europe,the USA and Canada the vast majority of HIV infected people are male homosexuals. There is no getting round this fact. Putting aside any other debate about homosexuality, Aids is still very much a "gay plague".
The fastest growing numbers of HIV infected populations is in the third world. A variety of cultural and economic factors encourage this (and I will not discuss them in this message).
The point I am leading up to is that members the first two of these three groups are unlikely to contribute significantly to the gene pool by reproducing prolifically.
The third group is unfortunately subject to a whole host of other population-curbing measures such as civil war and inter-ethnic violence and disease. Let it be said here that much of this is a result of western government policy (intervention where none is needed and apathy when action is needed) and global marketing (such as Nestlé pushing powdered baby-milk in regions without safe drinking water, leading to cholera in babies). I seriously doubt that any resistance to HIV is going to arise spontaneously in these regions.
Next, on resistance in general.
To build up resistance to a virus, to a bacterium or to a parasite requires time. The "goal" of a parasite is to reproduce. A parasite that kills its host unnecessarily is literally "biting the hand that feeds it". The same may be said for a bacterium or a virus. Many bacteria live in out bodies, causing diseases which cause mild annoyance, but which only kill severly weakened members of the species (the very young, very old, the malnourished or those suffering multiple pathologies). This is because bacteria and parasites evolve slowly, within human populations. Viruses, however, evolve extrememly rapidly in comparison. There is even evidence to suggest that south and east asian agricultural methods encourage viruses endemic in poultry, fish and pigs to combine spontaneously to form new viruses to which we hve very little or no immunity. This is suspected to be the origin of numerous strains of influenza.
On the propagation of disease.
A few years ago, the term "global village" became popular. Part of this concept is the speed of physical travel, as well as telecommunications. After the eradication of smallpox, and the removal of tuberculosis and diphtheria as sporadic threats (after decades of large-scale vaccination campaigns), TB and diphtheria are resurfacing in the US and Europe. People use cheap intercontinental flights to visit regions where these are endemic, and migrants from these regions arrive carrying the diseases.
More frequent and more far-flung travel, reduced vaccination campaigns, and never enough medecine in the third-world means that diseases spread faster and faster. This in turn increases the chance of a disease hitting somebody with little or no resistance. Let's face up to it: if the developed world doesn't help the third world with clean drinking water and affordable medecine, then European and American tourists are going to suffer from far worse than a touch of Delhi Belly, and people who have never been further than the nearest Seven Eleven are going to fall prey to "tropical diseases" that the local general practitioner has never seen before.
Reading list:
Remaking Eden (can't remember the author's name or publisher): book about genetic engineering and cloning, especially manipulation to strengthen desirable traits such as resistance to disease and high intelligence,
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear: very interesting piece of science fiction (Bear call it "hard sci-fi", meaning he tries to get the science right) about a virus that triggers an evolutionary leap.
We need a legal beagle to clear up these questions...
However, I seem to remember that at least in England and Scotland, a contract cannot take away a person's statutory rights. That is to say, that if statute (law passed by Parliament) grants me a certain right, I cannot forego or negate that right by signing a contract with a third party.
In other words, if the Sale of Goods Act (or similar) grants me the right to a refund if a CD doesn't work, then no amount of gibberish in a contract can take away my right to a refund.
I'm on a dial-up account. That means that every minute I spend connected is costing me money. Now, if I have to spend time connected to download a long HTML message with images in it, that is costing me money, albeit a small amount for a single message. Let's say it cost me 0.03 Thalers. If I now get 100 of these in a month, it's just cost me 3 Thalers.
You suggest filtering... but that happens after I've downloaded the messages, so doesn't lower the cost. It's not a realistic option.
And this is before I start factoring in costs for
wear and tear: keyboard (extra typing to delete message)
wear and tear: mouse (extra pointing and clicking to delete message)
wear and tear: hard disc (extra read/write operations)
depreciation: hardware loses its value fast, so every second occupied has a high cost during the first year of use
my time: 0.9 Thalers per minute
Hmm... that makes for a low cost per spam mail received. But, like most companies, I'm going to set a "minimum invoice charge" to cover fixed costs associated with drawing up each invoice and chasing up payment. Lets say 30 Thalers. And now, we factor in a percentage for "bad payers". Let's double it.
All in all, I feel quite justified in billing for 60 Thalers per spam received.
Or give them to an organism that breathes oxygen and eats sugar... like an aerobic bacterium, or maybe even an aerobic yeast, that could release ethanol...
Ethanol is much easier and safer to store, transport and burn as a fuel (it is almost trivial to convert a gasoline engine to run on ethanol).
Samsung should sort out its web site and provide useful information. Then I could start taking the company seriously...
Try following the "What we sell" link...
Samsung doesn't seem to sell very much!
http://samsungelectronics.com/semiconductors/alp ha _cpu/product_guide/where_index.html
Absolutely! Now if we can only get Harvey Nik's interested in this, we would at last have somewhere to feel unguilty!
I mean, at long last, we could go shopping in our 3 litre intercooled turbocharged Japanese four-wheel-drives to actively support the use of renewable resources!
Now that would just be the coolest thing for we ABC1s to do, wouldn't it? I mean, it's even better than voting for Tony's NewLabour!
OK, so the text got Perl right, but read this line:
West told the newspaper editor that
his intrusion accidental.
Hmm...
Apart from that, it looks like West was guilty. The Law wants to jail him? Justice wants to reward him? Read the lyrics to Boris Vian's song about a bomb-builder!
I think you should make a distinction between two
(of the various) types of war.
If your aim is to "liberate people from their own leaders", as the war
against the Axis powers has often been presented (to British schoolchildren),
then clearly you just want a "clean war". As little collateral damage as
possible (and before anybody mentions it, I know about Dresden, revenge for
Coventry). Beat the country militarily, then help the civilian population to
rebuild, like the Allies helped Germany after 1945.
If your aim is purely territorial, if your aim is to clean out a geographic
area and make it available to your own nation, then you go for extermination.
This is the dirty, nasty face of expansionist war. This is treating humans
as vermin.
You don't understand the first thing about human psychology if you think this.
How can maiming children possibly help in winning a war?
It makes your opponent more determined, not less.
If you massacre the whole population, this determination no longer matters.
Somewhere between the two, you have "ethnic cleansing": scaring a civil
population so that it becomes a refugee population. So it moves out. Sometimes
with a "helpful push".
When I was first learning to program in BASIC in about 1980 (at the age of 12), there were exercises to calculate a person's age from date of birth and today's date... I remember very clear warnings about calculations based on two-digit years.
Some lazy programmer codes an application that judges risk based on a person's age. The algorithm is bad, just plain bad. Leaving aside the all too emotive question of abortion, let's imagine that this was something like breast cancer, or heart disease. If the software decrees "Patient X is young, ergo low-risk, there's no need to do a biopsy" then patient X may well be overlooked and go on to develop a fatal condition.
The lazy programmer, however, does not work alone. There should be peer review. There should be management that does something other than count beans and cut costs (so that the money can go elsewhere, like on "motivational golf excursions")
I've spotted sigs here on/. along the lines of
Never put down to viciousness what can be explained by stupidity
I am no longer surprised by any of the stupid and negligent oversights in our societies. I am often dissapointed, sometimes angered, but no longer surprised.
The article reads funny, as you put it, because it was written by somebody with a rather tenuous grasp on the English language.
The point of the judgement seems to be that, although Thornton has been working as a journalist for over twenty years, the inability to type is no real problem.
Sonia Giordani should be relieved to hear that... Presumably, inability to write correctly is no bar to working as a journalist, either.
Aside from the fact that I don't see why Forth would *need* OO, I think that calling its successor "Fifth" is far too sensible, and doesn't lead into a dead-end.
It's far too simple to call its successor "Fifth", since that starts a trivially simple series: "Sixth", "Seventh", etc.
On the other hand, you could propose that "Forth" be followed by "Further". After that, you need to *think* before finding a new name.
Richard the Lionheart died at a place called le Chalard in the south west of France. If you're on the Limoges ring road ("rocade") and leave through the Magré-Romanet industrial estate, after Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche you'll find yourself on the "route Richard coeur de lion". That will take you through Jumilhac-le-Grand and eventually to le Chalard. There, you can admire the castle keep where good old King Dick popped his clogs. There's a mediaeval fair in the summer.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't aware that titanium didn't set off metal detectors...
I make about four round trips between France and the UK per year, and then a couple of longer trips (US, South America, Asia) each year. I find airport security a bad joke.
This Mann man was on the receiving end of incompetence and inconsistency; he got his outward leg over and done with, but his return leg was hell. That's bad enough.
But then, I carry a pocket knife all the time. Usually, when I arrive at the airport, I slip the knife into my hold luggage. A few times, I've arrived with no hold luggage. So I took my key case, slipped the knife into it, and put it into the box next to the metal-detector portal and walked through. The "guard" pats the leather pouch, it jingles, he gives it back to me. It doesn't go through the X-ray machine.
Then there are the various bits of "kit" you can easily buy: nylon and kevlar knives, rat-tail combs...
Not to mention the Friday Night Special: broken bottle. At an international airport, check in your luggage, then go to the "Duty-Free" shop and buy a couple of bottles of something or other. Board the plane; crash, tinkle, instant lethal weapons.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are so many ways of getting lethal stuff onto airplanes, that the problem isn't in the "weapons", it's the people getting on the planes!
Somebody intelligent, and with an axe to grind, will find a way of getting lethal stuff aboard.
Then again, there are some real fuckwits around, like that "British" bloke called Reid, who tried to spark up the heel of his shoe, packed with explosives... He didn't even try to hide in the khazi while doing it. I suppose he was scared of setting off the smoke detector.
Get a small household air-conditioning unit, the kind where you have the big noisy part outdoors (on a balcony, window-ledge, or on the patio). Run some flexible tubing around the edge of the wall inside the room, leading to your computer case. Blow cold air directly in to the case.
If you live somewhere humid, you might want to pump the air through a dryer unit. You could make this using the packs of crystals that you use for room de-humidifiers. I forget the name of these crystals (maybe anhydrous calcium carbonate? quicklime?), but in Europe they're sold under several brand names, Rubson is the one that springs to mind.
That Ananova link is really crap. Bite-sized (or should that be Byte-sized), pre-chewed, over-simplified gibberish. It summarizes, badly, an article from the Observer, and doesn't even publish the link! It simply links to the Observer's main welcome page.
The Ananova scribblers seem to think we all have the attention span of a goldfish. Well, this might come as a surprise, but there are still some of us capable of better than that.
The Observer's article is here.
This article is a little better, but is still unclear as to what the problem is.
For instance:
seems to suggest one or other (or a combination) of the first two cases.
But:
sugests the third case.
Finally:
I fail to see the really difficult problem here... I have heard of technicians using ovens and hair-dryers to prepare 9 and 21 track tapes for reading. The Australian government has a project to migrate vast quantities of mineral-prospection data from obsolete magnetic tape to magnetic disc and database archives. Admittedly, this is a Big Money project; a solution has been found.
Nobody seems to consider this 1986 project to be worth doing properly.
Where there's a will, theres a way... Unfortunately, it seems that the only Will left in England is a hard copy of Shakespeare gathering dust on a library shelf.
I am not a lawyer (this seems to be an obligatory beginning).
However, this use of trespass law to attack spammers seems an interesting approach, if a little unwieldy. This is law of tort, which I think involves bringing a civil action. The Crown Prosecution Service would not get involved. Maybe the Small Claims Court would be appropriate, or maybe an association of users could be formed to bring a case.
Spam sent to me interferes with my chattels. This is extremely easy to show: I have a dial-up connection, so downloading the message takes up time on my phone line, costing me money and depriving me of my phone line for the duration of the download. It also occupies my computing resources and especially electricity, which means more cost to me.
Parallels might be drawn between spam and unauthorised parking. In the United Kingdom, if I own a piece of land and somebody parks a vehicle on it, I am entitled to immobilise the vehicle and require a charge for freeing it. This is, I believe, also a modern interpretation of an old law concerning grazing rights (you allow your cow to wander into my meadow and eat my grass, I can sieze your cow until you pay me compensation for the loss I have suffered). There is a requirement to display a notice like "unauthorized vehicles parked here will be clamped; fee for removal £50" and a telephone number.
Now, maybe I could trace the spammer's computer, hobble it, and charge a fee to free it again....
I bet many people are wondering if there are backdoors in this distribution...
What we should really worry about is Chinese Lantern.
And before any of you start ranting about using a "communist distribution", it's time you realised that China is more a state-capitalist system.
You're on the right track, but not quite...
I was reading up on this yesterday. A quick search for something like "sickle cell resistance to malaria" in google produced a good number of documents. One of the best, in language easy to understand for non-specialists, is this one.
The point is that a person who is heterozygous with the sickle gene is more resistant to malaria, which is not normally of itself a killer disease (although in conjunction with other pathologies, it kills).
First of all, on HIV.
At the risk of offending a lot of people, I have to say that HIV still affects three very specific and easy to identify groups in the world:
Note that I use the word "addicts", rather than "users". I want to make a distinction between those who use drugs recreationally and those who are so psychologically dependent that they will do almost anything for a "fix". (Asan aside, there is some debate in the UK, even amongst high-court judges and the regional heads of police forces to label the "recreational, occasional" use as "responsible, acceptable" use!)
In Europe,the USA and Canada the vast majority of HIV infected people are male homosexuals. There is no getting round this fact. Putting aside any other debate about homosexuality, Aids is still very much a "gay plague".
The fastest growing numbers of HIV infected populations is in the third world. A variety of cultural and economic factors encourage this (and I will not discuss them in this message).
The point I am leading up to is that members the first two of these three groups are unlikely to contribute significantly to the gene pool by reproducing prolifically.
The third group is unfortunately subject to a whole host of other population-curbing measures such as civil war and inter-ethnic violence and disease. Let it be said here that much of this is a result of western government policy (intervention where none is needed and apathy when action is needed) and global marketing (such as Nestlé pushing powdered baby-milk in regions without safe drinking water, leading to cholera in babies). I seriously doubt that any resistance to HIV is going to arise spontaneously in these regions.
Next, on resistance in general.
To build up resistance to a virus, to a bacterium or to a parasite requires time. The "goal" of a parasite is to reproduce. A parasite that kills its host unnecessarily is literally "biting the hand that feeds it". The same may be said for a bacterium or a virus. Many bacteria live in out bodies, causing diseases which cause mild annoyance, but which only kill severly weakened members of the species (the very young, very old, the malnourished or those suffering multiple pathologies). This is because bacteria and parasites evolve slowly, within human populations. Viruses, however, evolve extrememly rapidly in comparison. There is even evidence to suggest that south and east asian agricultural methods encourage viruses endemic in poultry, fish and pigs to combine spontaneously to form new viruses to which we hve very little or no immunity. This is suspected to be the origin of numerous strains of influenza.
On the propagation of disease.
A few years ago, the term "global village" became popular. Part of this concept is the speed of physical travel, as well as telecommunications. After the eradication of smallpox, and the removal of tuberculosis and diphtheria as sporadic threats (after decades of large-scale vaccination campaigns), TB and diphtheria are resurfacing in the US and Europe. People use cheap intercontinental flights to visit regions where these are endemic, and migrants from these regions arrive carrying the diseases.
More frequent and more far-flung travel, reduced vaccination campaigns, and never enough medecine in the third-world means that diseases spread faster and faster. This in turn increases the chance of a disease hitting somebody with little or no resistance. Let's face up to it: if the developed world doesn't help the third world with clean drinking water and affordable medecine, then European and American tourists are going to suffer from far worse than a touch of Delhi Belly, and people who have never been further than the nearest Seven Eleven are going to fall prey to "tropical diseases" that the local general practitioner has never seen before.
Reading list:
If I take the badge off an old Apple ][ and stick it on my home-brew BP6-based machine, it becomes and Apple-Labelled computer...
I have Apple-Labelled it myself, OK...
A bug that encrypts the filesystem is fine, if you like that sort of thing.
Personally, I'd like to see that bug accompanied by the one that decrypts the filesystem, too!
We need a legal beagle to clear up these questions...
However, I seem to remember that at least in England and Scotland, a contract cannot take away a person's statutory rights. That is to say, that if statute (law passed by Parliament) grants me a certain right, I cannot forego or negate that right by signing a contract with a third party.
In other words, if the Sale of Goods Act (or similar) grants me the right to a refund if a CD doesn't work, then no amount of gibberish in a contract can take away my right to a refund.
Er, let's see... surely "impregnable" means "something that can be impregnated"... which to my ear sounds the exact oppposite of "watertight"...
While we're at it, where is GrammarNazi? Would you trust text written by some numbskull who thinks that the word "criteria" is a singular?
Those are the words of Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson, copied straight from the article.
Come on, Don't you use aural prompts? Ever?
How about when you press tab or escape to complete a file name, and the terminal beeps at you to let you know the filename completion failed...
There's a thing called "visual bell", that makes your terminal window flash.
Then again, how about incorporating T-Loop apparatus into PC speakers, so that the hard-of-hearing can get better sound through their hearing-aids?
You're missing the point, Mr anonymous coward.
I'm on a dial-up account. That means that every minute I spend connected is costing me money. Now, if I have to spend time connected to download a long HTML message with images in it, that is costing me money, albeit a small amount for a single message. Let's say it cost me 0.03 Thalers. If I now get 100 of these in a month, it's just cost me 3 Thalers.
You suggest filtering... but that happens after I've downloaded the messages, so doesn't lower the cost. It's not a realistic option.
And this is before I start factoring in costs for
Hmm... that makes for a low cost per spam mail received. But, like most companies, I'm going to set a "minimum invoice charge" to cover fixed costs associated with drawing up each invoice and chasing up payment. Lets say 30 Thalers. And now, we factor in a percentage for "bad payers". Let's double it.
All in all, I feel quite justified in billing for 60 Thalers per spam received.
Or give them to an organism that breathes oxygen and eats sugar... like an aerobic bacterium, or maybe even an aerobic yeast, that could release ethanol...
Ethanol is much easier and safer to store, transport and burn as a fuel (it is almost trivial to convert a gasoline engine to run on ethanol).
Samsung should sort out its web site and provide useful information. Then I could start taking the company seriously...
Try following the "What we sell" link...
p ha _cpu/product_guide/where_index.html
Samsung doesn't seem to sell very much!
http://samsungelectronics.com/semiconductors/al
Absolutely! Now if we can only get Harvey Nik's interested in this, we would at last have somewhere to feel unguilty!
I mean, at long last, we could go shopping in our 3 litre intercooled turbocharged Japanese four-wheel-drives to actively support the use of renewable resources!
Now that would just be the coolest thing for we ABC1s to do, wouldn't it? I mean, it's even better than voting for Tony's NewLabour!
Hmm...
Would it interest anybody to know that the French word "poteau" can mean stake?
OK, so the text got Perl right, but read this line:
Hmm...
Apart from that, it looks like West was guilty. The Law wants to jail him? Justice wants to reward him? Read the lyrics to Boris Vian's song about a bomb-builder!
I think you should make a distinction between two
(of the various) types of war.
If your aim is to "liberate people from their own leaders", as the war
against the Axis powers has often been presented (to British schoolchildren),
then clearly you just want a "clean war". As little collateral damage as
possible (and before anybody mentions it, I know about Dresden, revenge for
Coventry). Beat the country militarily, then help the civilian population to
rebuild, like the Allies helped Germany after 1945.
If your aim is purely territorial, if your aim is to clean out a geographic
area and make it available to your own nation, then you go for extermination.
This is the dirty, nasty face of expansionist war. This is treating humans
as vermin.
If you massacre the whole population, this determination no longer matters.
Somewhere between the two, you have "ethnic cleansing": scaring a civil
population so that it becomes a refugee population. So it moves out. Sometimes
with a "helpful push".
When I was first learning to program in BASIC in about 1980 (at the age of 12), there were exercises to calculate a person's age from date of birth and today's date... I remember very clear warnings about calculations based on two-digit years.
Some lazy programmer codes an application that judges risk based on a person's age. The algorithm is bad, just plain bad. Leaving aside the all too emotive question of abortion, let's imagine that this was something like breast cancer, or heart disease. If the software decrees "Patient X is young, ergo low-risk, there's no need to do a biopsy" then patient X may well be overlooked and go on to develop a fatal condition.
The lazy programmer, however, does not work alone. There should be peer review. There should be management that does something other than count beans and cut costs (so that the money can go elsewhere, like on "motivational golf excursions")
I've spotted sigs here on /. along the lines of
I am no longer surprised by any of the stupid and negligent oversights in our societies. I am often dissapointed, sometimes angered, but no longer surprised.
Oops... He died at a place called "le Chalus" (not le Chalard, as I wrote above... both places exist, and are quite close together)
The article reads funny , as you put it, because it was written by somebody with a rather tenuous grasp on the English language.
The point of the judgement seems to be that, although Thornton has been working as a journalist for over twenty years, the inability to type is no real problem.
Sonia Giordani should be relieved to hear that... Presumably, inability to write correctly is no bar to working as a journalist, either.
Aside from the fact that I don't see why Forth would *need* OO, I think that calling its successor "Fifth" is far too sensible, and doesn't lead into a dead-end.
It's far too simple to call its successor "Fifth", since that starts a trivially simple series: "Sixth", "Seventh", etc.
On the other hand, you could propose that "Forth" be followed by "Further". After that, you need to *think* before finding a new name.
Not the way this boy sees things. He clearly doesn't remember BCPL.
But then, I'm still waiting for somebody to write a successor to Forth. Would it be called Further?
Richard the Lionheart died at a place called le Chalard in the south west of France. If you're on the Limoges ring road ("rocade") and leave through the Magré-Romanet industrial estate, after Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche you'll find yourself on the "route Richard coeur de lion". That will take you through Jumilhac-le-Grand and eventually to le Chalard. There, you can admire the castle keep where good old King Dick popped his clogs. There's a mediaeval fair in the summer.