Bunkum. I saw the film "Journey to the Center of the Earth", and not only was there daylight down there but the climate was temperate, with lakes, and trees growing by them. The gravity was normal.
Don't be so sure... It's great until you adjust. Then, little sounds that you'd never notice before start becoming a real problem. The thud of a closing car door a few hundred feet away, or the sounds of a second hand on an old fashioned clock, or any number of other things really can become distracting
I wouldn't agree. I live somewhere relatively quiet, by a secondary road 10 miles from the nearest town, and I much prefer the quiet to the city where I was before.
Basically, how disturbing sounds are depends how far they can be interpreted as a "threat". On a plain road, like where I live now, the low sound of a passing car can sound soothing - as long as it passes. However, there is a rough bit of ground by the road about 50 yards from me and occasionally a car stops in it, probably to use their mobile. Hearing a car pull up makes me prick my ears up, and I find myself listening intently for what happens next. When I was in a city I was by a street junction so cars were slowing or pulling up all the time - and I never got used to it. It no doubt depends on your personality - some people are gregarious and maybe they revel in it. I am not a nervous person, but I am one who is very circumspect; I notice things, see things - I think I should have been a Red Indian tracker:-)
There is a memorable moment in The Terminator [1]. Sarah Connor and Karl Reese are on the run from the Terminator and have shaken him off fttb. They stop overnight in a derelict barn 20 yards off a country road. Sitting there in the near dark they hear the sound of a motorbike approaching along the road - the Terminator rides one. They stop speaking and listen, moments of suspense; but the bike does not stop, it goes on past. They resume talking but nothing is said about the motorbike. Such an ordinary sound can be so creepy. Yet I have mentioned this moment to others who have seen the film and they never even noticed this incident, a small component of what made a great film.
every single house has multiple charging points pre-installed. Something that can't be said for gasoline.
I keep a couple of jerry cans in my garage at home and my wife's car is always filled from them. Doesn't that count?
[To pre-empt the question "Why?" It is because the way the discounts work at my local gas station. The more you buy in one go the better. So I fill my car and the two jerry cans at the same time.]
Microsoft learned the hard way with the xbox 360 kinetic fiasco that nobody like yelling at their TV. I suspect google will quickly find out that nobody likes yelling at light switches either.
It was designed for Bill Gates himself - he loves shouting. No so many people realise that he is a very shouty and bad tempered person.
In an outline of "The Road Ahead" Gates writes: "Some people don't like the idea of talking to a computer.... But we talk to machines already. When your car or computer does not work, you shout at it. We shout at things all the time." Reference
"[At school] His intensity at times simply boiled over into raw, unthrottled emotion, and occasionally childlike temper tantrums" [from "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire"] He was also described by a schoolmate as arguing with his teachers, going up to their desk, and "shouting at the top of his lungs".
Gates, even as a "mature" adult:-
" was known to get into shouting matches with CEOs of rival tech companies.... perhaps the sorest victim of Gates's temper tantrums was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who said that dealing with Gates's frequent explosions was "like being in hell."Reference
Brand advertising is getting goofier and goofier in order to stand out, but standing out for the wrong reasons is not going to work.
On British TV at least, the current ad tactic seems that you are supposed to identify with stupidity. Typically the ad centres on a 30-something white male who is supposed to be you the viewer, the mark, it being assumed that such a person has money and is gullible. This guy is acting like he is a few slices short of a loaf, and is corrected or advised by what is supposed to be a vastly more intelligent black man, or white woman; or sometimes even a child. Like being advised of a cheaper insurance deal or that he needs to buy a certain brand of car.
Why someone would want to identify themselves with this stereotyped idiot is beyond me. I would be embarrassed to go into a showroom of the advertised car for example during such an ad campaign.
what kind of people use, as a primary input into their purchasing decisions, whether they've heard the name?
Lots of people, you among them. "Well, there are 300 makers of this product with odd Chinese names, or LG. Hmmm- which to pick?",
No doubt lots of people do, but for regular purchases like bread I try all the different brands I find on the shelf and settle on the one I like best. Nothing to do with advertising. For occasional purchases like a TV or camera I read all the reviews I can and form an opinion from them. Again, nothing to do with advertising. Also, as part of my research, I discover that LG also has an odd name - Leokki Geumseong - and if I found better reviews of one of those other odd names I would go for it.
Also not mentioned is the negative impact of many ads. I have a road atlas; and to use you must first find the relevant page by looking at a small scale map. The small scale map should be on the back cover, quick to consult. Instead it is on about Page 4, a fumble to find, because they have sold the covers and first few pages to fucking advertisers. Every time I have to leaf through to Page 4 I see adverts for Karcher pressure washers and think "FUCK KARCHER FOR WASTING MY TIME!" It now makes me angry every time I see their brand name. I recently bought a pressure washer; it was a Black and Decker.
This isn’t conjecture. It’s science. It’s based on a remarkable set of in-depth studies that Facebook has conducted to show whether and how its users respond to ads on the site. The studies demonstrate that Facebook ads influence purchases
at my old job, when we got new servers even though the top bosses wanted the equipment destroyed/recycled, the lower management almost always gave us the parts to take hom
We used to be like that. Then some 'elf & safety idiot got all legal and worried that someone might cut his finger on something and sue the company $1,000,000 for giving it to him. After that everything had to be destroyed.
This is in a world when we are supposed to be recycling things. In practice we just took scrap stuff home after that - that's where I got this keyboard. As I have said before: green, safe or handy? Pick one.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business.
In my engineering career I have seen it go from no women whatsoever to women coming in and getting prompt promotion to management level - because the directors are terrified of being accused of anti-women bias. And yes, there are women directors, the sort that are also part-time directors of a dozen other companies, mostly finance and legal ones.
But these women engineers have totally different outlook from the men. The men (I am talking about the graduate engineers) have (or have had) hobbies like tinkering with cars, building boats, building electronic circuits, and amateur radio. We lend each other stuff like compression testers, welding outfits and oscilliscopes. The women "engineers" however do none of this; they look on with contempt and claim they are "too busy with families" (as if men are not), but it seems they did not take an interest even before they had a family.
In fact they do not seem much interested in engineering at all. They have helped to turn the work activity to things like financial planning, work programming, managment training, and (worst of all ) "'Elf and Safety". The whole nature of the work has changed from real engineering projects to perfecting paperwork trails. It is no wonder that the Western world is losing or has lost its technological lead and has turned to navel gazing instead.
My primary school teacher (middle-aged unmarried woman) hated boys and hated technology. She spent half her time preaching feminism (as I now recognise it) and buttering up to the little girls that she would never have herself. So me and the other boys, feeling totally kicked in the teeth, went home and played with our Meccano and model trains.
So that's how it all started. Not quite the scenario that Claire Cain Miller has in mind.
I see a world where I go to poor people's homes, and leave expensive computer equipment there for the "free" electricity....The dream part is where it's still there the next day.
You could live next door to them and run a cable through a hole in the wall, in exchange for a few cans of beer.
What kind of startup would trade part of themselves for gouda.com?
A cheese wholesaler?
If I wanted cheese, I wouldn't type in "gouda.com" in the hope that it took me somewhere, and I am not sure I would trust the result if I did; I'd Google for "cheese".
...... the value in simple generic names is not in bookmarks it is people type them in and try them and they are easy to remember
I never bother to remember website names. They don't mean shit, especially with all the new TLDs. Having found a website by Googling I bookmark it (with a name of my choice) to find it again. Eg, I frequently go to a website of a certain local builders merchant to order stuff, and do you know what - I havn't got a clue what the name of their website is, never even glanced at it. Might as well be called 123.456.321.654 for all I care.
Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon.... There might be some exceptions. I think some of the giant land guns might have had higher muzzle velocities.
WW2 battleship "cannon" (actually "guns" as they had rifling), up to 18" bore, were the longest range conventional guns ever, although the accuracy deteriorated beyond about 20 miles. Anti-aircraft guns had a higher muzzle velocity, but being smaller bore did not have such range (air resistance had greater influence). There have been higher velocity and greater range unconventional guns such as with additional firing chambers up the barrel, and the experimental German WW2 "Arrow gun" which fired a long thin shell with tail fins out of a larger bore barrel by means of a segmented wooden jacket (a "sabot") which fell away after leaving the barrel.
The germans had a big gun they used against the French and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me. Regardless, the weapons were too large to really be practical. They were big white elephants that accomplished very little compared to their cost.
In their day they were not white elephants. The Western Front in WW1 was static so those big guns, usually railway mounted (not to be confused with "rail guns"!), were useful for hitting things like enemy railway junctions miles behind the front, even though it took days to set one up and about an hour to fire each shot. A specially modified one was even used to hit Paris 70 miles away, more as a terror weapon because its shells dropped with no warning from the stratosphere like a modern ICBM. In WW2 two were used very effectively to hammer the Americans at the Anzio landings. The Germans also had massive seige guns which went for explosive power rather than range such as the "Big Berthas" of WW1, technically howitzers, which were very effective at destroying fortifications at short-ish range such as at Liege in 1914.
Except during the 1920s, when the ratio was closer to 1.......Definitions of physical beauty are constantly changing, and seem to be inherently based upon social, not biological, processes.
You are assuming that men liked women looking like they did in the 1920's. From what I have heard they did not. It has always been women who choose mainstream fashion trends among themselves, not men. Look at the differnce between the fashion seen in porn (at the start before they take their clothes off) and fashion seen generally around.
There was one period in modern times when mainstream fashion aligned with what men liked - around 1970 with the Miniskirt and fishnets. When fashion moved on to the maxiskirt, men did not like it at all. Street hookers today still dress in that 1970's fashion, in case you had not noticed.
Tommy Flowers,.... was a British engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.
Funny, I was going to mention Tommy Flowers in a post above. I find it a bit odd that people today have focussed on Turing as the hero of that time; I cannot help wondering if it's because of the gay angle. As you say, Flowers built the first computer than can be called modern - electronic, programmable, general purpose. Yet hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
At the time Bletchley Park seemed to be divided into two "camps" and Flowers was up against some influential opponents. One described Colossus as "a waste of good valves".
Flowers even put some of his own money into building the first Colossus (there were several), for which he was never fully re-imbursed, although after the war he did get a small award. What a far cry from the billions made by Jobs, Wang, Gates & co two generations later. Churchill's order to destroy the Bletchley Park paperwork and hardware left a near vacuum in the history of computing - there are many people today who even think Bill Gates invented computers, FFS.
Any documents and hardware from the 1940's was also seen as a security risk. Why tell the world how the UK had won ww2 by reading German Red, Tunny material in realtime?
Churchill ordered all material at Bletchley to be destroyed (both paperwork and hardware like several Colossus computers) not primarily because of the security risk. It was highly unlikely that any other foe would use the same encryption method as the Germans had.
It was because Churchill did not want the credit for winning the war to go to a handful of boffins rather than to the armed forces. This was for reasons of public morale; hundreds of thousands had died in combat and air raids, and everyone had lived in austerity for years. He did not want people to think that all that sacrifice had been pointless because in the end the war had really been won by "some university-type egghead smart-arses using dirty tricks" - because that is how the majority of the public would have seen it.
If you doubt how that is how most people would have seen it in 1950, just fast-forward and think of how most people see the activities of the NSA today.
Just to be clear, people in military establishments like Bletchley Park did wipe their arses on discarded papers, and such places often used earth closets for the people working in the huts. Only the big-wigs in the main house would have been able to use its WCs. Even confidential papers were used, because it was assumed that no-one would have the stomach to read them afterwards.
That is the origin of the word (in English English at least) "bumf" for paperwork - bum fodder.
Of course, spies did salvage the used bumf and read it, so the practice of taking a handful of paper from the wastepaper basket with you to the latrines was banned after a while. Presumably by then it had also been used as roof insulation, but that had been forgotten.
I would also like us to use more nuclear power. My views on nuclear power are less informed than my knowledge of GMO is. However, my views on nuclear power are still FAR more informed than the average person
1. How do you know your view is "FAR more informed than the average person"?
2. You said you were "FAR more informed", so...
2a. Who was the one informed you?
2b. And how do you know what you have been informed is correct?
I don't know about the education system where the GP lived, but generally those becoming well educated and capable in a specialist subject tend to be better educated and more capable than average in other fields. I am a nuclear engineer but did not even specialise in it until my third job. So I would claim similarly to the GP that (1) I am much more informed on subjects outside nuclear engineering, both in science and the humanities, than the average person. That is simply because I had a liberal education to a significantly further level than the average person. Even to be accepted on my course to study engineering I had also to have studied (and passed the exams in) sciences other than maths and physics, foreign languages (plural), English to the same level as someone entering a university course in it, and certain other humanities subjects. (2a & b) At that time I was taught these other subjects at a good school, and that knowledge had been confirmed by what I have seen and heard ever since.
Also a factor is the inherent tendency of scientists (in the broadest sense to include engineers) to find out about and question things, leading to more and more knowledge being acquired through life, knowledge which tends to be missed by the average person who is more likely to spend as much free time as possible being entertained.
You were a safe driver for 11 years but not as safe as one like yourself but who does not listen to the radio. Going by the data you have provided us you have a 1 in 11 chance of an accident per year, ongoing too if you keep listening.
Personally, I have always removed my car radios. Not particularly to avoid distraction, but because the space makes a handy cubbyhole, gives thieves less reason to break in, and because I don't like announcers having verbal diarrhea in my car.
Slashdot Mirror
Bunkum. I saw the film "Journey to the Center of the Earth", and not only was there daylight down there but the climate was temperate, with lakes, and trees growing by them. The gravity was normal.
This is a scare story to keep trespassers away.
You won't find any light from us. I am careful to not waste light.
So what do you do? Cover your house inside with mirrors?
Don't be so sure. .. It's great until you adjust. Then, little sounds that you'd never notice before start becoming a real problem. The thud of a closing car door a few hundred feet away, or the sounds of a second hand on an old fashioned clock, or any number of other things really can become distracting
I wouldn't agree. I live somewhere relatively quiet, by a secondary road 10 miles from the nearest town, and I much prefer the quiet to the city where I was before.
:-)
Basically, how disturbing sounds are depends how far they can be interpreted as a "threat". On a plain road, like where I live now, the low sound of a passing car can sound soothing - as long as it passes. However, there is a rough bit of ground by the road about 50 yards from me and occasionally a car stops in it, probably to use their mobile. Hearing a car pull up makes me prick my ears up, and I find myself listening intently for what happens next. When I was in a city I was by a street junction so cars were slowing or pulling up all the time - and I never got used to it. It no doubt depends on your personality - some people are gregarious and maybe they revel in it. I am not a nervous person, but I am one who is very circumspect; I notice things, see things - I think I should have been a Red Indian tracker
There is a memorable moment in The Terminator [1]. Sarah Connor and Karl Reese are on the run from the Terminator and have shaken him off fttb. They stop overnight in a derelict barn 20 yards off a country road. Sitting there in the near dark they hear the sound of a motorbike approaching along the road - the Terminator rides one. They stop speaking and listen, moments of suspense; but the bike does not stop, it goes on past. They resume talking but nothing is said about the motorbike. Such an ordinary sound can be so creepy. Yet I have mentioned this moment to others who have seen the film and they never even noticed this incident, a small component of what made a great film.
You obviously havn't heard that washing machine destruction is the next new Olympic sport :-
Here
every single house has multiple charging points pre-installed. Something that can't be said for gasoline.
I keep a couple of jerry cans in my garage at home and my wife's car is always filled from them. Doesn't that count?
[To pre-empt the question "Why?" It is because the way the discounts work at my local gas station. The more you buy in one go the better. So I fill my car and the two jerry cans at the same time.]
Microsoft learned the hard way with the xbox 360 kinetic fiasco that nobody like yelling at their TV. I suspect google will quickly find out that nobody likes yelling at light switches either.
It was designed for Bill Gates himself - he loves shouting. No so many people realise that he is a very shouty and bad tempered person.
... But we talk to machines already. When your car or computer does not work, you shout at it. We shout at things all the time." Reference
:-
.... perhaps the sorest victim of Gates's temper tantrums was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who said that dealing with Gates's frequent explosions was "like being in hell." Reference
In an outline of "The Road Ahead" Gates writes: "Some people don't like the idea of talking to a computer.
"[At school] His intensity at times simply boiled over into raw, unthrottled emotion, and occasionally childlike temper tantrums" [from "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire"] He was also described by a schoolmate as arguing with his teachers, going up to their desk, and "shouting at the top of his lungs".
Gates, even as a "mature" adult
" was known to get into shouting matches with CEOs of rival tech companies
Brand advertising is getting goofier and goofier in order to stand out, but standing out for the wrong reasons is not going to work.
On British TV at least, the current ad tactic seems that you are supposed to identify with stupidity. Typically the ad centres on a 30-something white male who is supposed to be you the viewer, the mark, it being assumed that such a person has money and is gullible. This guy is acting like he is a few slices short of a loaf, and is corrected or advised by what is supposed to be a vastly more intelligent black man, or white woman; or sometimes even a child. Like being advised of a cheaper insurance deal or that he needs to buy a certain brand of car.
Why someone would want to identify themselves with this stereotyped idiot is beyond me. I would be embarrassed to go into a showroom of the advertised car for example during such an ad campaign.
what kind of people use, as a primary input into their purchasing decisions, whether they've heard the name?
Lots of people, you among them. "Well, there are 300 makers of this product with odd Chinese names, or LG. Hmmm- which to pick?",
No doubt lots of people do, but for regular purchases like bread I try all the different brands I find on the shelf and settle on the one I like best. Nothing to do with advertising. For occasional purchases like a TV or camera I read all the reviews I can and form an opinion from them. Again, nothing to do with advertising. Also, as part of my research, I discover that LG also has an odd name - Leokki Geumseong - and if I found better reviews of one of those other odd names I would go for it.
Also not mentioned is the negative impact of many ads. I have a road atlas; and to use you must first find the relevant page by looking at a small scale map. The small scale map should be on the back cover, quick to consult. Instead it is on about Page 4, a fumble to find, because they have sold the covers and first few pages to fucking advertisers. Every time I have to leaf through to Page 4 I see adverts for Karcher pressure washers and think "FUCK KARCHER FOR WASTING MY TIME!" It now makes me angry every time I see their brand name. I recently bought a pressure washer; it was a Black and Decker.
This isn’t conjecture. It’s science. It’s based on a remarkable set of in-depth studies that Facebook has conducted to show whether and how its users respond to ads on the site. The studies demonstrate that Facebook ads influence purchases
Who would have thought it?
at my old job, when we got new servers even though the top bosses wanted the equipment destroyed/recycled, the lower management almost always gave us the parts to take hom
We used to be like that. Then some 'elf & safety idiot got all legal and worried that someone might cut his finger on something and sue the company $1,000,000 for giving it to him. After that everything had to be destroyed.
This is in a world when we are supposed to be recycling things. In practice we just took scrap stuff home after that - that's where I got this keyboard. As I have said before: green, safe or handy? Pick one.
My female colleagues and managers are WITHOUT EXCEPTION great software engineers. I wonder why your workspace is so bad? ... Any ideas?
Perhaps because the engineering I work in is not software engineeering. It is heavy engineering, building and running power stations.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business.
In my engineering career I have seen it go from no women whatsoever to women coming in and getting prompt promotion to management level - because the directors are terrified of being accused of anti-women bias. And yes, there are women directors, the sort that are also part-time directors of a dozen other companies, mostly finance and legal ones.
But these women engineers have totally different outlook from the men. The men (I am talking about the graduate engineers) have (or have had) hobbies like tinkering with cars, building boats, building electronic circuits, and amateur radio. We lend each other stuff like compression testers, welding outfits and oscilliscopes. The women "engineers" however do none of this; they look on with contempt and claim they are "too busy with families" (as if men are not), but it seems they did not take an interest even before they had a family.
In fact they do not seem much interested in engineering at all. They have helped to turn the work activity to things like financial planning, work programming, managment training, and (worst of all ) "'Elf and Safety". The whole nature of the work has changed from real engineering projects to perfecting paperwork trails. It is no wonder that the Western world is losing or has lost its technological lead and has turned to navel gazing instead.
My primary school teacher (middle-aged unmarried woman) hated boys and hated technology. She spent half her time preaching feminism (as I now recognise it) and buttering up to the little girls that she would never have herself. So me and the other boys, feeling totally kicked in the teeth, went home and played with our Meccano and model trains.
So that's how it all started. Not quite the scenario that Claire Cain Miller has in mind.
I see a world where I go to poor people's homes, and leave expensive computer equipment there for the "free" electricity....The dream part is where it's still there the next day.
You could live next door to them and run a cable through a hole in the wall, in exchange for a few cans of beer.
why do rich and poor people always get things for "free"???
Strange how the people who make these kind of claims are never willing to live in poverty to get "free stuff"?
They do. There is a whole sub-class (in the UK anyway) who don't bother to get a job in order to qualify for hand-outs.
What kind of startup would trade part of themselves for gouda.com?
A cheese wholesaler?
If I wanted cheese, I wouldn't type in "gouda.com" in the hope that it took me somewhere, and I am not sure I would trust the result if I did; I'd Google for "cheese".
...... the value in simple generic names is not in bookmarks it is people type them in and try them and they are easy to remember
I never bother to remember website names. They don't mean shit, especially with all the new TLDs. Having found a website by Googling I bookmark it (with a name of my choice) to find it again. Eg, I frequently go to a website of a certain local builders merchant to order stuff, and do you know what - I havn't got a clue what the name of their website is, never even glanced at it. Might as well be called 123.456.321.654 for all I care.
Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon. ... There might be some exceptions. I think some of the giant land guns might have had higher muzzle velocities.
WW2 battleship "cannon" (actually "guns" as they had rifling), up to 18" bore, were the longest range conventional guns ever, although the accuracy deteriorated beyond about 20 miles. Anti-aircraft guns had a higher muzzle velocity, but being smaller bore did not have such range (air resistance had greater influence). There have been higher velocity and greater range unconventional guns such as with additional firing chambers up the barrel, and the experimental German WW2 "Arrow gun" which fired a long thin shell with tail fins out of a larger bore barrel by means of a segmented wooden jacket (a "sabot") which fell away after leaving the barrel.
The germans had a big gun they used against the French and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me. Regardless, the weapons were too large to really be practical. They were big white elephants that accomplished very little compared to their cost.
In their day they were not white elephants. The Western Front in WW1 was static so those big guns, usually railway mounted (not to be confused with "rail guns"!), were useful for hitting things like enemy railway junctions miles behind the front, even though it took days to set one up and about an hour to fire each shot. A specially modified one was even used to hit Paris 70 miles away, more as a terror weapon because its shells dropped with no warning from the stratosphere like a modern ICBM. In WW2 two were used very effectively to hammer the Americans at the Anzio landings. The Germans also had massive seige guns which went for explosive power rather than range such as the "Big Berthas" of WW1, technically howitzers, which were very effective at destroying fortifications at short-ish range such as at Liege in 1914.
Currently the velocity of railguns is roughly equivalent to navel guns.
They will leave your hands free too.
Except during the 1920s, when the ratio was closer to 1 .......Definitions of physical beauty are constantly changing, and seem to be inherently based upon social, not biological, processes.
You are assuming that men liked women looking like they did in the 1920's. From what I have heard they did not. It has always been women who choose mainstream fashion trends among themselves, not men. Look at the differnce between the fashion seen in porn (at the start before they take their clothes off) and fashion seen generally around.
There was one period in modern times when mainstream fashion aligned with what men liked - around 1970 with the Miniskirt and fishnets. When fashion moved on to the maxiskirt, men did not like it at all. Street hookers today still dress in that 1970's fashion, in case you had not noticed.
Tommy Flowers, .... was a British engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.
Funny, I was going to mention Tommy Flowers in a post above. I find it a bit odd that people today have focussed on Turing as the hero of that time; I cannot help wondering if it's because of the gay angle. As you say, Flowers built the first computer than can be called modern - electronic, programmable, general purpose. Yet hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
At the time Bletchley Park seemed to be divided into two "camps" and Flowers was up against some influential opponents. One described Colossus as "a waste of good valves".
Flowers even put some of his own money into building the first Colossus (there were several), for which he was never fully re-imbursed, although after the war he did get a small award. What a far cry from the billions made by Jobs, Wang, Gates & co two generations later. Churchill's order to destroy the Bletchley Park paperwork and hardware left a near vacuum in the history of computing - there are many people today who even think Bill Gates invented computers, FFS.
Any documents and hardware from the 1940's was also seen as a security risk. Why tell the world how the UK had won ww2 by reading German Red, Tunny material in realtime?
Churchill ordered all material at Bletchley to be destroyed (both paperwork and hardware like several Colossus computers) not primarily because of the security risk. It was highly unlikely that any other foe would use the same encryption method as the Germans had.
It was because Churchill did not want the credit for winning the war to go to a handful of boffins rather than to the armed forces. This was for reasons of public morale; hundreds of thousands had died in combat and air raids, and everyone had lived in austerity for years. He did not want people to think that all that sacrifice had been pointless because in the end the war had really been won by "some university-type egghead smart-arses using dirty tricks" - because that is how the majority of the public would have seen it.
If you doubt how that is how most people would have seen it in 1950, just fast-forward and think of how most people see the activities of the NSA today.
Just to be clear, people in military establishments like Bletchley Park did wipe their arses on discarded papers, and such places often used earth closets for the people working in the huts. Only the big-wigs in the main house would have been able to use its WCs. Even confidential papers were used, because it was assumed that no-one would have the stomach to read them afterwards.
That is the origin of the word (in English English at least) "bumf" for paperwork - bum fodder.
Of course, spies did salvage the used bumf and read it, so the practice of taking a handful of paper from the wastepaper basket with you to the latrines was banned after a while. Presumably by then it had also been used as roof insulation, but that had been forgotten.
You sez:
I would also like us to use more nuclear power. My views on nuclear power are less informed than my knowledge of GMO is. However, my views on nuclear power are still FAR more informed than the average person
1. How do you know your view is "FAR more informed than the average person"?
2. You said you were "FAR more informed", so ...
2a. Who was the one informed you? 2b. And how do you know what you have been informed is correct?
I don't know about the education system where the GP lived, but generally those becoming well educated and capable in a specialist subject tend to be better educated and more capable than average in other fields. I am a nuclear engineer but did not even specialise in it until my third job. So I would claim similarly to the GP that (1) I am much more informed on subjects outside nuclear engineering, both in science and the humanities, than the average person. That is simply because I had a liberal education to a significantly further level than the average person. Even to be accepted on my course to study engineering I had also to have studied (and passed the exams in) sciences other than maths and physics, foreign languages (plural), English to the same level as someone entering a university course in it, and certain other humanities subjects. (2a & b) At that time I was taught these other subjects at a good school, and that knowledge had been confirmed by what I have seen and heard ever since.
Also a factor is the inherent tendency of scientists (in the broadest sense to include engineers) to find out about and question things, leading to more and more knowledge being acquired through life, knowledge which tends to be missed by the average person who is more likely to spend as much free time as possible being entertained.
yet we never hear about how bad the "rich" apple is
You must be new here. Plenty of Apple bashing goes on.
You were a safe driver for 11 years but not as safe as one like yourself but who does not listen to the radio. Going by the data you have provided us you have a 1 in 11 chance of an accident per year, ongoing too if you keep listening.
Personally, I have always removed my car radios. Not particularly to avoid distraction, but because the space makes a handy cubbyhole, gives thieves less reason to break in, and because I don't like announcers having verbal diarrhea in my car.