I'm 39, born and raised in the UK; I was taught that a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 but that the Americans had long ago failed to keep up with this meaning, and that by shear force of numbers have imposed the de facto standard of billion being 1E9.
I struggled against this for a whole year or so, but when I realised that my university colleagues couldn't handle the E notation, I apathetically caved in.
After all, I'm writing down to the level of my readers. That's what I'm paid for, not for works of truth.
The accepted meaning now, in English texts, is that billion is 1E9. However, I still have to ask for clarification when sitting through finance presentations given in English by German or French people, and I sometimes still see the term "milliard" in their slides.
What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle, meaning that there's no reason to stick with gasoline (when you can get lower maintenance (assuming long lifespan batteries), higher torque, quieter, more thermodynamically efficient vehicles
No.
Charge time and range, compared to gasoline?
It takes approximately four minutes to fill the tank of my VW, to give me around 350 miles of range. I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).
Even cutting those four hours (240 minutes) by a factor of ten means a charge time of 24 minutes.
And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.
You got it right on the quietness and thermodynamic efficiency, though.
In fact, the electric buses used around the Montmartre area of Paris are so quiet that they have been fitted with a device to make a pinging noise to remind tourists to get out of the way.
Increase the price of tickets to the point at which only a small number of people are prepared to pay that much to fly.
Elasticity of demand.
Where is my prize money, please?
When flying was expensive, only sensible, reasonable people did it. Now that the great unwashed can afford it, we have all manner of drunken, impatient, hysterical, violent oiks on the aeroplanes.
Ask any female or the next three random people you meet, if it's ok to talk on the phone whilst piddling at a urinal.
I'll ask the neighbour's cat, next time I see her, what she thinks of it.
I suspect that by "female", you mean "woman".
Well in my experience, women in my town only stop talking on the phone on very rare occasions. They are not the paragons of social elegance that you seem to take them for.
They talk while driving their kids to school.
The kids jump down from the car, maybe turn round to shout "bye, mom", but mom can only wave... she's too busy talking to wish them a nice day at school.
The women then drive to the supermarkets, still talking as they park, then push a cart round the lanes, still talking.
They get to the checkout, still talking, and don't interrupt their precious conversations. Simply swiping a card through the slot can be done while talking...
Stop for gas, still talking... in NJ, gas is pumped for them.
Lunch with a friend, organized on the phone, is maybe a break for Verizon, but the inane chatter continues.
You know, it was a woman from NJ that invented the hands-free kit. Not so she could talk while driving, but so she could talk while peeing or putting on her make-up.
Movie theaters need to update the "no talking" message to "Turn OFF your phones. No Talking. No Texting. No Exceptions."
Most people have managed to figure out that ringing phones and talking is inconsiderate and attracts undue attention, but haven't yet managed to make the giant mental leap needed to figure out that an audience waving dozens of little flashlights around is equally distracting.
The message should also include the following.
No loud slurping of the last drop of soda from your 40ounce bucket.
No loud rustling of 48ounce pretzel bags.
No loud crunching of popcorn and tortilla chips.
No loud belching, farting, laughing.
No fun.
All in all, a lot like the signs on the public beaches in N.J.
In essence, the three sued Wikimedia for invasion of privacy and defamation.
The judge ruled that Wikimedia administrators cannot be held responsible for opinions published, until the disputed content is brought to the administrators' attention by a letter sent by registered post with proof of delivery and the letter must cite the articles of law according to which the offending material should be removed.
However, if you stuck a gene in there which would prevent the GM seeds from germinating without a chemical which you buy from Monsanto, then accidental contamination could not occur. The contaminated seeds would not germinate,
This is precisely the big problem.
Imagine for a moment the hypothetical backyard farmer, saving his four or five ears of maize for replanting.
Unfortunately his maize has been cross pollinated with the GM maize from the next farm. Let's imagine that 25% of seeds are the result of this cross pollination.
The terminator gene ensures that the contaminated seeds do not germinate. Great, our backyard farmer cannot be sued for having grown proprietary GM crops without license, but he has just lost 25% of his crop.
Meta tags are worthless, generally, unless you have a librarian who ensures correctness.
DON'T TRUST USERS TO ENTER META DATA!!!
I've worked in electronic document management in 3 different businesses and metadata entered by end users is worst than worthless - it is wrong. Searches that don't use full text for general documents are less than ideal.
Unless you can pin responsibility for a document to a named person, you can't trust anything in the document.
Not metadata, not content, not presentation.
The meta tags most of the documents I deal with are inserted by the applications, and only the content is human-drafted. Those meta tags contain information like creation date, mdification date, application name, character encoding, etc. They are generally trustworthy.
I'm also in the process of building a documentation system; it will be a set of documents in various formats, with an HTML interface, TomCat server and Lucene to make it fully searchable.
In a previous job, I did a similar thing with Apache and ht://dig on an old Dell I recycled. Document files could be uploaded by anybody with an FTP account on the server, and index files were automatically regenerated by a CRON task at 04h00 each day.
I could have made a trigger to regenerate the index after each FTP upload session, but using CRON was easier and sufficiently frequent to be useful.
This time around, the whole system of TomCat webserver and Lucene search engine is bundled on a CD-ROM with the docs to run on any of the firm's laptops. Because I control the documents, I can build the index files and burn them to the CD-ROM before distribution.
Why is it that airports have special significance? Seriously, think about it. There are many other places with large concentrations of people that we are not spending any money on for security that would be ideal terroristic locations.
Because the point of the attack is not simply to kill lots of people.
Attacking an airport, even if the IED fails to explode and kills nobody, causes a great deal of disruption and can cost the airport and airlines millions of dollars.
Even the article admits (albeit in an aside by David Torre) that Halamka chose to install RedHat and Fedora on a laptop that was not on the hardware compatibility list.
Having read of John Halamka's experience using Fedora and
RHEL on an X41 tablet PC, I was not surprised by the mixed results. About 90 percent of Halamka's issues were hardware-related. Coincidentally, the X41 is not listed as officially supported by either Fedora or RHEL on Linux vendor Red Hat's website.
In my experience, USB thumbdrives always work, and always have done. I've tried maybe six different drives, ranging in size from 64MBytes to 1GByte, on a variety of laptop and desktop systems. Never a problem.
Americans, please count yourselves lucky... at least you have a free-market system that works. I'm sure that, given time, this problem will resolve itself, one way or another. The market corrects itself. I just wish we had something like this here.
This free-market system you mention is all well and good for frequently consumed or repetitive-purchase goods.
Pardon my lack of a consecrated term from economic theory, but by this I mean something that is purchased and consumed frequently, for which another product can be substituted, or for which several equivalent or near-equivalent products are available. This also implies perfect competition.
An example might be bread.
You can choose between several different kinds of bread, with different textures and flavours, at different prices from different suppliers. Within the general category of bread, you get different sub-categories, but while keeping within a category you should see small price differential as the perfect competition encourages prices towards an equilibrium.
A bachelor's degree is a different purchase altogether. A master's degree or PhD even more so. This is a purchase you are likely to only ever make once. You might spend a long time trying to research teaching programs, performance of alumni. But if you spend too long researching, you'll miss your "window of opportunity" (i.e., you'll not get your application in on time). So your choice will necessarily be flawed.
For a long time, I've used the term "buying" instead of "studying" or "taking a test" when talking to friends about driving licenses, degrees and other permits.
When I got my driving license, I consider that I bought it for a combination of the time studying and the cost of the administration fee.
My bachelor's degree cost me four years of my life and a few thousand in cash.
My other licenses cost me similar fees and study time.
Many of my friends are taken aback when I point out that in the US, law or med school is basically an investment on which the graduate expects a return. This mentality is exacerbated by having to pay for tuition. Why do you think a newly qualified pharmacist expects to get $80k to $100k p.a. for filling prescriptions? It's return on invested capital.
Except that in the contract, as governed by the terms and conditions, you probably assigned your ISP right to insert ads or otherwise modify your content in exchange for hosting and serving the content (in addition to any fee you pay for the service).
This is effectively what my former ISP, Club Internet, was doing when it insisted on inserting JavaScript into the header of every page, in order to display advertising.
The very existence of your content on the server is dependent on the terms of the contract and uploading the content happens later than the date the contract became effective, I think that you would have a very hard time attacking your ISP.
The ISP will simply point out the terms and conditions you agreed to, and say "stick to the terms and conditions, or you are free to take your business elsewhere".
Thomson, the patentholder on the MP3 algorithm, has publicly declared:
1) Do you license mp3, mp3PRO and mp3surround software to end users?
No. We license mp3/mp3PRO software and patents to developers and manufacturers of software applications and hardware devices.
4) Do I need a license to stream mp3, mp3PRO or mp3surround encoded content over the Internet?
Yes. A license is needed for commercial (i.e., revenue-generating) use of mp3/mp3PRO in broadcast systems (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or other distribution channels), streaming applications (via Internet, intranets and/or other networks), other content distribution systems (pay-audio or audio-on-demand applications and the like) or for use of mp3/mp3PRO on physical media (compact discs, digital versatile discs, semiconductor chips, hard drives, memory cards and the like).
However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.
5) Do I need a license to distribute mp3, mp3PRO or mp3surround encoded content?
Yes. A license is needed for commercial (i.e., revenue-generating) use of mp3/mp3PRO in broadcast systems (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or other distribution channels), streaming applications (via Internet, intranets and/or other networks), other content distribution systems (pay-audio or audio-on-demand applications and the like) or for use of mp3/mp3PRO on physical media (compact discs, digital versatile discs, semiconductor chips, hard drives, memory cards and the like).
However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.
http://mp3licensing.com/help/index.html
So, if I buy a CD, take it home, rip it and encode it as an MP3 so I can listen to it wherever I like, I can do that without needing a license.
If I play some music, record it and encode it as an MP3 to distribute, I can do that without needing a license. I can even charge for that, so long as I earn less than $100,000 per year.
Things become less clear when we look at the rules about writing, from scratch, a clean-room implementation of an MP3 encoder or decoder.
Thomson has a shifty way of publishing the rates: as a GIF image...
But at the time of writing, this states that for a patent-only license (i.e., to cover my theoretical clean-room implementation), the rates are:
Decoder: US$0.75 per unit or US$50,000 one-time paid-up
Codec: US$2.50 per unit
But this does not specify whether it is per unit sold or distributed.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it is per unit distributed.
So I opt for the "$2.50 per unit distributed", then I distribute only, say, ten copies of the source code. I pay up my $25 and I'm done. If others distribute my source code, that's not my problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 39, born and raised in the UK; I was taught that a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 but that the Americans had long ago failed to keep up with this meaning, and that by shear force of numbers have imposed the de facto standard of billion being 1E9.
I struggled against this for a whole year or so, but when I realised that my university colleagues couldn't handle the E notation, I apathetically caved in.
After all, I'm writing down to the level of my readers. That's what I'm paid for, not for works of truth.
The accepted meaning now, in English texts, is that billion is 1E9. However, I still have to ask for clarification when sitting through finance presentations given in English by German or French people, and I sometimes still see the term "milliard" in their slides.
No.
Charge time and range, compared to gasoline?
It takes approximately four minutes to fill the tank of my VW, to give me around 350 miles of range. I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).
Even cutting those four hours (240 minutes) by a factor of ten means a charge time of 24 minutes.
And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.
You got it right on the quietness and thermodynamic efficiency, though.
In fact, the electric buses used around the Montmartre area of Paris are so quiet that they have been fitted with a device to make a pinging noise to remind tourists to get out of the way.
Beef.
Increase the price of tickets to the point at which only a small number of people are prepared to pay that much to fly.
Elasticity of demand.
Where is my prize money, please?
When flying was expensive, only sensible, reasonable people did it. Now that the great unwashed can afford it, we have all manner of drunken, impatient, hysterical, violent oiks on the aeroplanes.
Because this is a CNet blogger, trying to jump on the Open Sauce bandwagon and get a kudo at the same time.
More dangerous yet, would be to grind aluminium and steel or iron on the same wheel.
Iron oxide powder + aluminium powder -> thermite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
Beef.
The software is just a tool.
Classes at this level should be teaching technique and understanding of the underlying theory.
Asking the question "Photoshop or Gimp for computer art class" is like asking "Stanley or Estwing hammer for woodwork class".
The woodwork teacher teaches the kids how to hit the nail squarely on the head, not what brand of hammer to swing.
Beef.
Tonight I visited Yahoo mail.
My browser window shrank and moved, and a pop-up window wanted me to visit http://scanner2.malware-scan.com/3_swp/?aid=threw6ar_ma3&lid=&ax=1&ed=2&mt_info=4961_3078_11003 in order to rid my computer of viruses and malwares...
Beef.
And then again, OLPC could have bought the Konyin keyboards for any number of purposes.
Maybe even for checking that the in-house keyboard and drivers didn't infringe on Lancor's IP?
Beef
It sounds just the same.
However, if you drive the wrong way down a one-way street, you get a secret message: AC/DC Highway to Hell.
Beef.
Like a strong Brownian motion producer (say, a cup of hot tea)?
Beef.
This is the power outlet: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49293357-7,00.htm
A proper, UK 13 amp power outlet, with rocker switch.
Why, oh why can't the rest of Europe adopt this standard?
Beef
I'll ask the neighbour's cat, next time I see her, what she thinks of it.
I suspect that by "female", you mean "woman".
Well in my experience, women in my town only stop talking on the phone on very rare occasions. They are not the paragons of social elegance that you seem to take them for.
You know, it was a woman from NJ that invented the hands-free kit. Not so she could talk while driving, but so she could talk while peeing or putting on her make-up.
Beef
The message should also include the following.
All in all, a lot like the signs on the public beaches in N.J.
Beef.
If you can read French, then here is a much better article than the badly summarized version that Reuters published.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-651865,36-973824@51-974025,0.html
Or ask the Babel Fish for help.
In essence, the three sued Wikimedia for invasion of privacy and defamation.
The judge ruled that Wikimedia administrators cannot be held responsible for opinions published, until the disputed content is brought to the administrators' attention by a letter sent by registered post with proof of delivery and the letter must cite the articles of law according to which the offending material should be removed.
Beef.
Just how do you get a Bachelor of Arts degree in math?
In my world, mathematics is considered a science, and the degree awarded is a Bachelor of Science...
Beef
This is precisely the big problem.
Imagine for a moment the hypothetical backyard farmer, saving his four or five ears of maize for replanting.
Unfortunately his maize has been cross pollinated with the GM maize from the next farm. Let's imagine that 25% of seeds are the result of this cross pollination.
The terminator gene ensures that the contaminated seeds do not germinate. Great, our backyard farmer cannot be sued for having grown proprietary GM crops without license, but he has just lost 25% of his crop.
Beef.
Unless you can pin responsibility for a document to a named person, you can't trust anything in the document. Not metadata, not content, not presentation.
The meta tags most of the documents I deal with are inserted by the applications, and only the content is human-drafted. Those meta tags contain information like creation date, mdification date, application name, character encoding, etc. They are generally trustworthy.
I'm also in the process of building a documentation system; it will be a set of documents in various formats, with an HTML interface, TomCat server and Lucene to make it fully searchable.
In a previous job, I did a similar thing with Apache and ht://dig on an old Dell I recycled. Document files could be uploaded by anybody with an FTP account on the server, and index files were automatically regenerated by a CRON task at 04h00 each day.
I could have made a trigger to regenerate the index after each FTP upload session, but using CRON was easier and sufficiently frequent to be useful.
This time around, the whole system of TomCat webserver and Lucene search engine is bundled on a CD-ROM with the docs to run on any of the firm's laptops. Because I control the documents, I can build the index files and burn them to the CD-ROM before distribution.
Beef
Because the point of the attack is not simply to kill lots of people.
Attacking an airport, even if the IED fails to explode and kills nobody, causes a great deal of disruption and can cost the airport and airlines millions of dollars.
Beef.
I don't see much difference between the ad being on a phone or being on the radio.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that your hypothetical teenager is using a hands-free kit.
Your teenage driver should be able to "tune out" the radio ads.
If he's capable of that, he should be capable of tuning out the phone ads.
If he isn't, then he's probably such a klutz that remembering to breathe in and out regularly is an accident-provoking distraction.
Beef.
Maybe, but not a CTO...
Even the article admits (albeit in an aside by David Torre) that Halamka chose to install RedHat and Fedora on a laptop that was not on the hardware compatibility list.
In my experience, USB thumbdrives always work, and always have done. I've tried maybe six different drives, ranging in size from 64MBytes to 1GByte, on a variety of laptop and desktop systems. Never a problem.
Beef.
This free-market system you mention is all well and good for frequently consumed or repetitive-purchase goods.
Pardon my lack of a consecrated term from economic theory, but by this I mean something that is purchased and consumed frequently, for which another product can be substituted, or for which several equivalent or near-equivalent products are available. This also implies perfect competition.
An example might be bread.
You can choose between several different kinds of bread, with different textures and flavours, at different prices from different suppliers. Within the general category of bread, you get different sub-categories, but while keeping within a category you should see small price differential as the perfect competition encourages prices towards an equilibrium.
A bachelor's degree is a different purchase altogether. A master's degree or PhD even more so. This is a purchase you are likely to only ever make once. You might spend a long time trying to research teaching programs, performance of alumni. But if you spend too long researching, you'll miss your "window of opportunity" (i.e., you'll not get your application in on time). So your choice will necessarily be flawed.
For a long time, I've used the term "buying" instead of "studying" or "taking a test" when talking to friends about driving licenses, degrees and other permits.
When I got my driving license, I consider that I bought it for a combination of the time studying and the cost of the administration fee.
My bachelor's degree cost me four years of my life and a few thousand in cash.
My other licenses cost me similar fees and study time.
Many of my friends are taken aback when I point out that in the US, law or med school is basically an investment on which the graduate expects a return. This mentality is exacerbated by having to pay for tuition. Why do you think a newly qualified pharmacist expects to get $80k to $100k p.a. for filling prescriptions? It's return on invested capital.
Beef
Except that in the contract, as governed by the terms and conditions, you probably assigned your ISP right to insert ads or otherwise modify your content in exchange for hosting and serving the content (in addition to any fee you pay for the service).
This is effectively what my former ISP, Club Internet, was doing when it insisted on inserting JavaScript into the header of every page, in order to display advertising.
The very existence of your content on the server is dependent on the terms of the contract and uploading the content happens later than the date the contract became effective, I think that you would have a very hard time attacking your ISP.
The ISP will simply point out the terms and conditions you agreed to, and say "stick to the terms and conditions, or you are free to take your business elsewhere".
Beef>
My first two graphics cards were a Cirrus (Alpine) and a SiS (ViRGE).
Both worked with X11R6.
Beef
I read the article, and didn't see anything about attachments disappearing after reception. Maybe my eyes are dim, maybe I misunderstood.
Please quote the section of the text that supports you assertion.
Beef
Not so.
Thomson, the patentholder on the MP3 algorithm, has publicly declared:
http://mp3licensing.com/help/index.html
So, if I buy a CD, take it home, rip it and encode it as an MP3 so I can listen to it wherever I like, I can do that without needing a license.
If I play some music, record it and encode it as an MP3 to distribute, I can do that without needing a license. I can even charge for that, so long as I earn less than $100,000 per year.
Things become less clear when we look at the rules about writing, from scratch, a clean-room implementation of an MP3 encoder or decoder.
Thomson has a shifty way of publishing the rates: as a GIF image...
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/images/Software. gif
But at the time of writing, this states that for a patent-only license (i.e., to cover my theoretical clean-room implementation), the rates are:
Decoder: US$0.75 per unit or US$50,000 one-time paid-up
Codec: US$2.50 per unit
But this does not specify whether it is per unit sold or distributed.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it is per unit distributed.
So I opt for the "$2.50 per unit distributed", then I distribute only, say, ten copies of the source code. I pay up my $25 and I'm done. If others distribute my source code, that's not my problem.
Beef