Consider a cat of the Schroedinger subspecies. In the experiment, it is neither alive nor dead until observed. A rock, positioned near the detection apparatus, can observe the result. So for the rock, the cat is either alive or dead. But until YOU observe the rock, you don't know whether the rock is happy that the cat is alive, or sad that the cat will never again rub it's tail against the quartz inclusion on the rock's lower anterior surface. The quantum wave-function describing the cat has collapsed with respect to the rock, but to you the quantum wave-function of the cat and the rock are now entangled; in fact, by observing the rock and causing its quantum wave function to collapse, you will also cause the quantum wave function of the cat to collapse... but in both cases, it is collapsing for YOU, the observer. Every other observer has to make them collapse for themselves by either observing something the cat/rock, or observing something that has already collapsed those wave-functions for itself.
It isn't that simple.
I shine a light at a double slit and I see a diffraction pattern. I watch which slit each photon goes through and I lose the diffraction pattern.
You only observe the target but you still see the same results as me.
The EPR effect and Bells inequality takes this further. My measurement on one of the two correlated particles affects your measurements on the other particle even though it is impossible (speed of light limits) for you to even know whether I've made a measurement.
Consider the cat in a double box with a door between the two boxes. I'm in the box with the cat and I observe whether it's dead or alive. I now go into the other box and close the door. As far as you are concerned the cat is still in a superposition of dead and alive and I'm in a superposition of happy/sad. You now open the box with the cat in it but there is only one possible result - therefore the wavefunction must already have collapsed. (Actually the alternative is that the cat I thought was dead suddenly becomes alive and my happy/sad state flips)
There are ways to describe the universe where these problems aren't a problem but they're not very aesthetic and, AFAIAA, completely untestable
That's nice rhetoric and a few years ago I would have believed this too.
However, having lived in the United Kingdom and having been involved in a prosecution of an offender, I can say that this could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that it is very, very hard to prosecute somebody for child porn possession if they're will to fight it. The "It was a virus defence" almost always gets the case chucked before it even reaches a jury. There's this thing called "continuity of evidence" and it's a hard hurdle to jump over (and rightly so).
And that's why the police have been running a smear campaign rather than a proper investigation. What does it matter if a thousand innocents suffer as long as one paedofile suffers as well.
"Later in September 2004, I received a letter from the Hampshire police stating that as there was no evidence of any wrongdoing found on any of my computers or on any of the hundreds of flash drives, CD disks or floppy disks they had seized during their two searches they were not taking any further action in my case. They told me to come and collect my property or they would dispose of it."
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
"With respect I submit that Windows is easier to use than Linux for even advanced Linux users."
This is rubbish. The easiest system to use is the one you are used to.
Windows is well nigh impossible to use because the focus doesn't follow the mouse. You put the mouse over a window, start typing and then discover you are typing in the wrong window.
I was using my partners Mac at the weekend and I couldn't work out how to browse to an application when the "open with" dialog appeared. She had to show me where to click to find the relevant directory
I'd say I was in the "advanced linux users" category. I've built my own bootable CD that runs in 16Mb (might run in less but I've never tried it on a machine with less memory) and can be used to do a remote install - I post the disk to someone, they put it in and let it boot, I then login and can install Debian. Alternatively, they can boot from the CD and then I can diagnose problems where a machine won't boot. I'm not even sure this CAN be done with Windows or OSX however experienced the user is.
Fortunately for me where I have to use Windows on the desktop at work, we have a supported application that allows me to have the focus under the mouse. Funnily enough, whenever anybody tries to show me anything on my machine they have the same problems I have when I try to show them something on their machine - typing keeps going to the wrong window. While it's a rare setup there are a few other people who have their desktop set up the same way I do with the focus under the mouse.
(One of the things I find really frustrating about the MS-windows model is that you can't have the window with the focus (mostly) underneath another window. I'd suspect the majority of Windows users aren't even aware that they can't do this and their automatic reaction on hearing that I want to be able to do it is "why? I don't see the need therefore it isn't a restriction that makes Windows hard to use." But sometime I do have a window covering almost the entire screen that I'm reading from and typing into another window that is underneath it.)
Who are these academic publishers? Springer, Wiley, etc. Try doing a scholarly search in Google. You'll find many PDF entries show a few words from the article, but no [cache]. When you click, you seen none of the article, but are taken to a "Pay Up!" page run by Springer, Wiley, etc. I wish Google wouldn't even waste my time listing these. (Note they even make an exception, allowing them to show one version of the web page to Google and another to the public. BMW was blacklisted by Google for doing this. Why are these publishers allowed to get away with it?)
Google listing these (and giving them a high ranking) is a damn nuisance. I quite often want to do a search in a field purely out of interest. You have to go through hundreds of hits to find one or two items you can read. There ought at least to be an option to exclude pages like this from the search results.
The point of pre-installed Linux is that if there is a pre-installed Linux, then most likely the hardware is well supported in Linux also.
Definitely - infact I'd settle for a no-OS laptop with a live CD that supports all the hardware.
That way I can install it exactly the way I want but if I can't get something to work I can boot it up with the live CD and find out how it can be made to work.
Although they nominally have a 3W output@6V they behave more like a constant current source and you can fairly easily get 6W@12V although you have to be going slightly faster.
I have one on my Brompton (http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/) - the light is on at walking pace.
There are cheaper options - the Shimano hub dynamos are about half the price (in the UK anyway) and almost as efficient.
The article doesn't hide this either, but there is really very little real energy to be won in this way, I don't really get what Mr. Woodring says about megawatts being wasted though, no human is able to generate that much electrical power, maybe he refers to megawatthours which he might be right about, but it would have been generated over the span of many years.
Agreed. Top cyclists eat about 10000 calories/day while in competition. This works out to something like 30MJ over and above the 2500 calories for normal people.
Assume their muscles are at most 25% efficient and it's less than 8MJ useful energy output.
And that's for the top athletes while in competition.
Tim.
I found in the days when I used to travel around London from one meeting to another that cycling was by far the most reliable means of arriving on time--much better than taking the bus, a taxi or the Underground. And it was good exercise into the bargain. Cycling or walking to work on a regular basis is one of the best contributors to good health, far more worthwhile than the practice of a hospital executive I heard about the other day. He took his health seriously. He believed in getting into his company car twice a week and driving to a gym in order to sit astride a stationary bicycle. - Lord Thomson of Monifieth (from hansard)
Keywords like -force are there for a reason. They're intended for use by someone who knows what they're doing. The system didn't force ESR to use them, it simply was the case that ESR didn't know what he needed to do and used the wrong "system override" to try to do it. Ordinary users would, quite simply, never have destroyed their system in the way ESR did, because of some limitation being imposed by their system.
I left RedHat when upgrading (IIRC) glibc-386 on a 686 system rendered the system unbootable. No warnings, no errors, just a trashed setup.
Or you can just decrease the pressure. I remember seeing a demonstration once where water was placed in a beaker that was sealed at a near-vacuum. Even whenever submerged in liquid nitrogen, the water was still boiling and steaming.
You can't have liquid water at liquid nitrogen temperatures. The coldest you can possibly have liquid water is about 250K at 200MPa.
No! In the UK recession when negative equity was rampant, people could neither rent nor move because they could not sell their houses (the bank would not remove the charge over the property unless the loan was paid off).
People who were made redundant just had to wait for the bank to reposess their house. And contrary to the wikipedia article on negative equity, in the UK the outstanding debt is not cancelled. So you then had the situation of the banks selling properties cheap for a quick sale[1] and then still chasing the borrower for the difference.
[1] there were few buyers due to falling prices and high risk of unemployment. It was a good time for first time buyers if you had a job but there weren't that many of us around. The (reposessed) house I bought in '94 I paid 67% of the price it was originally advertised at although almost all of that reduction had happened before I even looked at the property (I could not have afforded the house at the original advertised price but then obviously neither could anybody else as it was on the market for over a year.)
I've seen stories of people who wanted out in the very early 90's where they were just a few thousand pounds into negative equity. They were forced to hang on until finally reposessed a few years later after being made redundant where the few thousand had grown to a few tens of thousands. This is also where the stories of people who just handed in their keys to the bank and walked away from the property came from - although in the UK you are then classed as voluntarily homeless and so there is no obligation for the council to find a house for you so if you literally have no job and no money then your only option is to hang on until forced out.
It's become more common and more acceptable now to declare yourself bankrupt in the UK but in the early 90's almost nobody did unless they were forced into it by creditors[2] - and the banks were hardly likely to force someone into bankruptcy when they had already taken their main asset, all that would achieve is the writing off of the remaining debt which is clearly not in the banks interest.
[2] This has changed so much in the last ten years that student loans are now not discharged in bankruptcy (law changed). The main problem with being a bankrupt is getting a mortgage, and as so many students in the UK can see no prospect of being able to afford a house for 10+ years they were just declaring themselves bankrupt on leaving university and starting afresh.
If you look at my output you'll see that it didn't recurse either. But it did indicate that x was a subdirectory. Up to the user to be smart enough to realize that a subdirectory might contain something. Since this is tcsh, ls without any flags does the internal ls-F command. If you don't use tcsh or disable that automagic aliasing you are welcome to change the alias to explicitly call "ls -F" or even "ls -FR" if you must see the contents of subdirs.
When I run "rm *" I expect it to remove files but not directories. Your alias silently changes that to do a recursive delete. Even worse, you say it will tell me what it's going to delete but it will delete files that it doesn't list.
Aliasing rm to rm -i is only slightly less dangerous than aliasing rm to rm -rf. rm -i as an alias encourages people to get into the habit of relying on getting that yes/no prompt. They are then at a customer site where that alias isn't set up and get that "oh shit" moment.
The buyers of this item did not walk out of a store with the intent of not paying for goods. If you want to draw an accurate analogy to a brick & mortar, they took the goods to the cashier who then chose not to charge them and wished them a nice day. Trying to throw that back in the customer's face is disingenuous at best and libel at worst.
But if that cashier is deliberately trying to screw the store and the customers are taking stuff at prices they know cannot be correct then they are likely to find that they are required to return the goods or pay for them or find themselves prosecuted as an accomplice.
I think in all those cases, the orders were cancelled before the items shipped. What happened here is very different - Amazon is demanding their products that they have already shipped back, or they will charge people's credit cards. Once the item has shipped, the sale has been completed. Like pretty much everyone else here, IANAL, but I think they'd get in hot water if the tried that in the UK.
The nearest I can think of is the periodic cases where someone loads twenties into the tens dispenser in a cashpoint.
Every time it happens you get queues of people, fights, and the police called, and everyone gets charged the amount they actually got out of the machine eventually.
WTC stuff: because I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond.
We're five hours ahead of you, not behind you. It was early afternoon here when the first plane hit.
The problem is that the US is NOT the biggest CO2 emissions maker in the world, that title belongs to China, and India is right behind it.
Utter bollocks.
China is catching up with the US but it hasn't got there yet (something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the emissions of the US). India is about 5th behind Russia and Japan as well as China and the US.
Real classical music bores tend to prefer LP for its unique reproductive qualities (CD necessarily has a sharp cut-off at 20kHz., which is only about 5kHz. higher than the human ear can hear);
Which is why they are bores, and not music lovers.
While the outside edge of an LP might have better bandwidth than a CD, the inside is far worse than CD.
On a really good LP with a first rate turntable and amp you can easily hear this by playing just the start and end of the LP. AIUI, DJs/broadcasters would never go from a track on the outside of an LP straight to a track on the inside of an LP for precisely this reason.
In tests, people were unable to distinguish between the direct mic->amp->speaker path and the same path with a A-D + D-A stage at CD quality. I cannot hear a difference either.
Up until my mid twenties at least, I could hear signals up to about 18kHz - UK CRT TVs whistle at 15.625kHz and I could easily hear it, often even in the next room. (Even today I can hear some switch mode power supplies whistling if the room is silent - the charger for my camera is one I sometimes realise I've left plugged in because I hear it - there's no light on it when there is no battery attached so it must be the sound that's making me go and check)
Since then I haven't really seen TV at all. A recent test I did (actually I was building an ultrasonic transmitter but I got curious) suggested that I could still hear up to about 16kHz[1] athough that was a lot of power into the transducer and my ear only about a foot away. I certainly don't notice any whistling when I go into shops with TVs on show although most of them are plasma or LCD now which probably don't have transformers running at 16kHz to hear.
[1] Somewhat rough because the transducer I'd grabbed out of a bits box had a resonance at 4.5kHz and as the frequency went up past about 15kHz the transducer started sounding at 1/2 the frequency and it was difficult to be sure how much was me able to hear the higher tone and how much was wishful thinking.
If I'm not mistaken, you can get a fresh ballot paper and try again... but you have to ask for one and hand over the spoilt one to be cancelled... if you put it in the ballot box, then tough...
That's correct, you can get a fresh ballot paper. But maybe his decision was to spoil his paper deliberately.
I deliberately didn't vote in the general election (despite my seat being one of the closest three way marginals in the country) because I believe that a low turnout is the best way to get the election system changed to something fairer.
I did vote in the local elections. (Both elections were held at the same time - which left them scrabbling for the rules on how to cross out my name because you can still go back later and vote in the other ballot if you want to)
Note that I don't think first past the post has to be bad. However, in this day and age where almost every MP votes with the party line regardless of what is best for their constituents or what their constituents would want, FPTP is just a way of ensuring that 35% of the vote and 25% of the electorate gets the Prime Minister absolute power.
The reason a lot of people bid their maximum is to avoid being beat by snipers in the last seconds of bidding. Shill bidding is fraud. Just because I would be willing to pay $100 for something doesn't give the seller the right to take my $100 if no one else thinks it is worth that much.
But what about a third person unrelated to the seller thinks that it's worth $100 and so is prepared to bid $90 with the intention of reselling at a profit?
Their guess in the value of the item was correct - there was someone prepared to pay $100. Maybe they think they can drum up better interest in their auction than the seller can and attract that $100 bidder even if the seller can't.
Shill bidding is most certainly NOT in the spirit of the Auction. I am supposed to be competing against people who want the item I want. A shill bidder is there to drive up the price, with zero interest in the product.
A shill bidder does have an interest in the item. A shill bidder is prepared to bid no more than he thinks he can get for the item less twice the auction fees (and any expenses) so that if he wins he can relist and make a profit.
A bidder who intends to resell the item will be prepared to pay more than the shill because he only pays the fees once.
And someone who wants the item will be prepared to pay more than either of them because he doesn't pay the fees at all.
If you don't bid until the last second then you can't be affected by shills unless they've already bid. And if you think it's a shill bidding then you can play their own game back at them, bid just less than the shill is prepared to pay (but make sure this is less than you're prepared to pay) and force their expenses up to a maximum. You can't lose with this strategy.
You can also play the shills game back at them on items you don't want - just bid them up to what you think they'll sell for if you sell them less your fees and expenses. If you get the item you can sell it for a profit (assuming your pricing model is correct). If you don't get the item then you've maximized the shills costs or someone else wanted the item and was prepared to pay more.
There is no difference between a shill and someone bidding on what they think are underpriced items in order to resell them at a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a cat of the Schroedinger subspecies. In the experiment, it is neither alive nor dead until observed. A rock, positioned near the detection apparatus, can observe the result. So for the rock, the cat is either alive or dead. But until YOU observe the rock, you don't know whether the rock is happy that the cat is alive, or sad that the cat will never again rub it's tail against the quartz inclusion on the rock's lower anterior surface. The quantum wave-function describing the cat has collapsed with respect to the rock, but to you the quantum wave-function of the cat and the rock are now entangled; in fact, by observing the rock and causing its quantum wave function to collapse, you will also cause the quantum wave function of the cat to collapse... but in both cases, it is collapsing for YOU, the observer. Every other observer has to make them collapse for themselves by either observing something the cat/rock, or observing something that has already collapsed those wave-functions for itself.
It isn't that simple.
I shine a light at a double slit and I see a diffraction pattern. I watch which slit each photon goes through and I lose the diffraction pattern.
You only observe the target but you still see the same results as me.
The EPR effect and Bells inequality takes this further. My measurement on one of the two correlated particles affects your measurements on the other particle even though it is impossible (speed of light limits) for you to even know whether I've made a measurement.
Consider the cat in a double box with a door between the two boxes. I'm in the box with the cat and I observe whether it's dead or alive. I now go into the other box and close the door. As far as you are concerned the cat is still in a superposition of dead and alive and I'm in a superposition of happy/sad. You now open the box with the cat in it but there is only one possible result - therefore the wavefunction must already have collapsed. (Actually the alternative is that the cat I thought was dead suddenly becomes alive and my happy/sad state flips)
There are ways to describe the universe where these problems aren't a problem but they're not very aesthetic and, AFAIAA, completely untestable
Tim.
That's nice rhetoric and a few years ago I would have believed this too.
o unce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=286
o unce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=284
l ists_inq21/
However, having lived in the United Kingdom and having been involved in a prosecution of an offender, I can say that this could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that it is very, very hard to prosecute somebody for child porn possession if they're will to fight it. The "It was a virus defence" almost always gets the case chucked before it even reaches a jury. There's this thing called "continuity of evidence" and it's a hard hurdle to jump over (and rightly so).
And that's why the police have been running a smear campaign rather than a proper investigation. What does it matter if a thousand innocents suffer as long as one paedofile suffers as well.
http://www.inquisition21.com/
It appears that the name of one of the senior Canadian investigators was on the list of names.
http://www.inquisition21.com/index.php?module=ann
One person who faced no charges - but lost his job and is now losing his home because he shopped at tesco.
http://www.inquisition21.com/index.php?module=ann
"Later in September 2004, I received a letter from the Hampshire police stating that as there was no evidence of any wrongdoing found on any of my computers or on any of the hundreds of flash drives, CD disks or floppy disks they had seized during their two searches they were not taking any further action in my case. They told me to come and collect my property or they would dispose of it."
Google doesn't list inquisition21 but won't say why. (Inquisition21 say it's at the behest of US and UK police requests)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/21/google_de
Tim.
"With respect I submit that Windows is easier to use than Linux for even advanced Linux users."
This is rubbish. The easiest system to use is the one you are used to.
Windows is well nigh impossible to use because the focus doesn't follow the mouse. You put the mouse over a window, start typing and then discover you are typing in the wrong window.
I was using my partners Mac at the weekend and I couldn't work out how to browse to an application when the "open with" dialog appeared. She had to show me where to click to find the relevant directory
I'd say I was in the "advanced linux users" category. I've built my own bootable CD that runs in 16Mb (might run in less but I've never tried it on a machine with less memory) and can be used to do a remote install - I post the disk to someone, they put it in and let it boot, I then login and can install Debian. Alternatively, they can boot from the CD and then I can diagnose problems where a machine won't boot. I'm not even sure this CAN be done with Windows or OSX however experienced the user is.
Fortunately for me where I have to use Windows on the desktop at work, we have a supported application that allows me to have the focus under the mouse. Funnily enough, whenever anybody tries to show me anything on my machine they have the same problems I have when I try to show them something on their machine - typing keeps going to the wrong window. While it's a rare setup there are a few other people who have their desktop set up the same way I do with the focus under the mouse.
(One of the things I find really frustrating about the MS-windows model is that you can't have the window with the focus (mostly) underneath another window. I'd suspect the majority of Windows users aren't even aware that they can't do this and their automatic reaction on hearing that I want to be able to do it is "why? I don't see the need therefore it isn't a restriction that makes Windows hard to use." But sometime I do have a window covering almost the entire screen that I'm reading from and typing into another window that is underneath it.)
Tim.
Weird. ;-)
Who are these academic publishers? Springer, Wiley, etc. Try doing a scholarly search in Google. You'll find many PDF entries show a few words from the article, but no [cache]. When you click, you seen none of the article, but are taken to a "Pay Up!" page run by Springer, Wiley, etc. I wish Google wouldn't even waste my time listing these. (Note they even make an exception, allowing them to show one version of the web page to Google and another to the public. BMW was blacklisted by Google for doing this. Why are these publishers allowed to get away with it?)
Google listing these (and giving them a high ranking) is a damn nuisance. I quite often want to do a search in a field purely out of interest. You have to go through hundreds of hits to find one or two items you can read. There ought at least to be an option to exclude pages like this from the search results.
Tim.
The point of pre-installed Linux is that if there is a pre-installed Linux, then most likely the hardware is well supported in Linux also.
Definitely - infact I'd settle for a no-OS laptop with a live CD that supports all the hardware.
That way I can install it exactly the way I want but if I can't get something to work I can boot it up with the live CD and find out how it can be made to work.
Tim.
In my experience, quite a bit of resistance is added to my peddling, and that's just to light up a puny bike headlight!
That's why you want a hub dynamo rather than a sidewall dynamo. Also don't get slip in the wet.
Tim.
What you really want is one of these:
http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/schmidt.asp
Although they nominally have a 3W output@6V they behave more like a constant current source and you can fairly easily get 6W@12V although you have to be going slightly faster.
I have one on my Brompton (http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/) - the light is on at walking pace.
There are cheaper options - the Shimano hub dynamos are about half the price (in the UK anyway) and almost as efficient.
Tim.
The article doesn't hide this either, but there is really very little real energy to be won in this way, I don't really get what Mr. Woodring says about megawatts being wasted though, no human is able to generate that much electrical power, maybe he refers to megawatthours which he might be right about, but it would have been generated over the span of many years.
/ ldhansrd/vo990127/text/90127-03.htm
Agreed. Top cyclists eat about 10000 calories/day while in competition. This works out to something like 30MJ over and above the 2500 calories for normal people.
Assume their muscles are at most 25% efficient and it's less than 8MJ useful energy output.
And that's for the top athletes while in competition.
Tim.
I found in the days when I used to travel around London from one meeting to another that cycling was by far the most reliable means of arriving on time--much better than taking the bus, a taxi or the Underground. And it was good exercise into the bargain. Cycling or walking to work on a regular basis is one of the best contributors to good health, far more worthwhile than the practice of a hospital executive I heard about the other day. He took his health seriously. He believed in getting into his company car twice a week and driving to a gym in order to sit astride a stationary bicycle. - Lord Thomson of Monifieth (from hansard)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199899
It was a security update. You need a good reason NOT to install security update.
If you did a rpm -Fvh *.rpm on the i386 security updates and you had a i686 version of glibc installed then your system was instantly hosed.
Tim.
Keywords like -force are there for a reason. They're intended for use by someone who knows what they're doing. The system didn't force ESR to use them, it simply was the case that ESR didn't know what he needed to do and used the wrong "system override" to try to do it. Ordinary users would, quite simply, never have destroyed their system in the way ESR did, because of some limitation being imposed by their system.
? id=88456 but it was a while ago now.
I left RedHat when upgrading (IIRC) glibc-386 on a 686 system rendered the system unbootable. No warnings, no errors, just a trashed setup.
I think it was probably this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi
Tim.
Or you can just decrease the pressure. I remember seeing a demonstration once where water was placed in a beaker that was sealed at a near-vacuum. Even whenever submerged in liquid nitrogen, the water was still boiling and steaming.
You can't have liquid water at liquid nitrogen temperatures. The coldest you can possibly have liquid water is about 250K at 200MPa.
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html
Tim.
They could rent or move.
No! In the UK recession when negative equity was rampant, people could neither rent nor move because they could not sell their houses (the bank would not remove the charge over the property unless the loan was paid off).
People who were made redundant just had to wait for the bank to reposess their house. And contrary to the wikipedia article on negative equity, in the UK the outstanding debt is not cancelled. So you then had the situation of the banks selling properties cheap for a quick sale[1] and then still chasing the borrower for the difference.
[1] there were few buyers due to falling prices and high risk of unemployment. It was a good time for first time buyers if you had a job but there weren't that many of us around. The (reposessed) house I bought in '94 I paid 67% of the price it was originally advertised at although almost all of that reduction had happened before I even looked at the property (I could not have afforded the house at the original advertised price but then obviously neither could anybody else as it was on the market for over a year.)
I've seen stories of people who wanted out in the very early 90's where they were just a few thousand pounds into negative equity. They were forced to hang on until finally reposessed a few years later after being made redundant where the few thousand had grown to a few tens of thousands. This is also where the stories of people who just handed in their keys to the bank and walked away from the property came from - although in the UK you are then classed as voluntarily homeless and so there is no obligation for the council to find a house for you so if you literally have no job and no money then your only option is to hang on until forced out.
It's become more common and more acceptable now to declare yourself bankrupt in the UK but in the early 90's almost nobody did unless they were forced into it by creditors[2] - and the banks were hardly likely to force someone into bankruptcy when they had already taken their main asset, all that would achieve is the writing off of the remaining debt which is clearly not in the banks interest.
[2] This has changed so much in the last ten years that student loans are now not discharged in bankruptcy (law changed). The main problem with being a bankrupt is getting a mortgage, and as so many students in the UK can see no prospect of being able to afford a house for 10+ years they were just declaring themselves bankrupt on leaving university and starting afresh.
Tim.
re: v |= *p ^ '0'
This is not portable.
While C requires that '1' == '0' + 1, it doesn't (necesarily) follow that '1' ^ '0' == 1.
e.g.
'0' == 63
'1' == 64
'0' ^ '1' == 127
Tim.
If you look at my output you'll see that it didn't recurse either. But it did indicate that x was a subdirectory. Up to the user to be smart enough to realize that a subdirectory might contain something. Since this is tcsh, ls without any flags does the internal ls-F command. If you don't use tcsh or disable that automagic aliasing you are welcome to change the alias to explicitly call "ls -F" or even "ls -FR" if you must see the contents of subdirs.
When I run "rm *" I expect it to remove files but not directories. Your alias silently changes that to do a recursive delete. Even worse, you say it will tell me what it's going to delete but it will delete files that it doesn't list.
Aliasing rm to rm -i is only slightly less dangerous than aliasing rm to rm -rf. rm -i as an alias encourages people to get into the habit of relying on getting that yes/no prompt. They are then at a customer site where that alias isn't set up and get that "oh shit" moment.
Tim.
The buyers of this item did not walk out of a store with the intent of not paying for goods. If you want to draw an accurate analogy to a brick & mortar, they took the goods to the cashier who then chose not to charge them and wished them a nice day. Trying to throw that back in the customer's face is disingenuous at best and libel at worst.
But if that cashier is deliberately trying to screw the store and the customers are taking stuff at prices they know cannot be correct then they are likely to find that they are required to return the goods or pay for them or find themselves prosecuted as an accomplice.
Tim.
I think in all those cases, the orders were cancelled before the items shipped. What happened here is very different - Amazon is demanding their products that they have already shipped back, or they will charge people's credit cards. Once the item has shipped, the sale has been completed. Like pretty much everyone else here, IANAL, but I think they'd get in hot water if the tried that in the UK.
The nearest I can think of is the periodic cases where someone loads twenties into the tens dispenser in a cashpoint.
Every time it happens you get queues of people, fights, and the police called, and everyone gets charged the amount they actually got out of the machine eventually.
Tim.
No - at least it behaves identically on the dozens of unixes I've used over the years.
I suspect you also have an alias for ls somewhere if your ls behaves differently to mine.
Doing an ls will list the contents of the directory but will not recurse into any subdirectories. Tim.
Of course, without your alias you get: Personally, I think any alias of rm/mv etc is dangerous because there's always a time when the alias isn't set and you will rely on it.
The corollary of that is that someone who has learned to use mv/rm will now make a mistake because of your alias that they wouldn't have made before.
Tim.
WTC stuff: because I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond.
We're five hours ahead of you, not behind you. It was early afternoon here when the first plane hit.
Tim.
The problem is that the US is NOT the biggest CO2 emissions maker in the world, that title belongs to China, and India is right behind it.
s .php
i ronment-co2-emissions
- countrys-share-of-co2-emissions.html
s sions+by+country&btnG=Search&meta=
Utter bollocks.
China is catching up with the US but it hasn't got there yet (something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the emissions of the US). India is about 5th behind Russia and Japan as well as China and the US.
Assorted years for different countries.
http://www.carbonplanet.com/home/country_emission
2003 figures:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_co2_emi-env
2002 figures:
http://timeforchange.org/CO2-emissions-by-country
1996 figures:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/each
Lots more here:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=global+emi
Tim.
Real classical music bores tend to prefer LP for its unique reproductive qualities (CD necessarily has a sharp cut-off at 20kHz., which is only about 5kHz. higher than the human ear can hear);
Which is why they are bores, and not music lovers.
While the outside edge of an LP might have better bandwidth than a CD, the inside is far worse than CD.
On a really good LP with a first rate turntable and amp you can easily hear this by playing just the start and end of the LP. AIUI, DJs/broadcasters would never go from a track on the outside of an LP straight to a track on the inside of an LP for precisely this reason.
In tests, people were unable to distinguish between the direct mic->amp->speaker path and the same path with a A-D + D-A stage at CD quality. I cannot hear a difference either.
Up until my mid twenties at least, I could hear signals up to about 18kHz - UK CRT TVs whistle at 15.625kHz and I could easily hear it, often even in the next room. (Even today I can hear some switch mode power supplies whistling if the room is silent - the charger for my camera is one I sometimes realise I've left plugged in because I hear it - there's no light on it when there is no battery attached so it must be the sound that's making me go and check)
Since then I haven't really seen TV at all. A recent test I did (actually I was building an ultrasonic transmitter but I got curious) suggested that I could still hear up to about 16kHz[1] athough that was a lot of power into the transducer and my ear only about a foot away. I certainly don't notice any whistling when I go into shops with TVs on show although most of them are plasma or LCD now which probably don't have transformers running at 16kHz to hear.
[1] Somewhat rough because the transducer I'd grabbed out of a bits box had a resonance at 4.5kHz and as the frequency went up past about 15kHz the transducer started sounding at 1/2 the frequency and it was difficult to be sure how much was me able to hear the higher tone and how much was wishful thinking.
Tim.
If I'm not mistaken, you can get a fresh ballot paper and try again... but you have to ask for one and hand over the spoilt one to be cancelled... if you put it in the ballot box, then tough...
That's correct, you can get a fresh ballot paper. But maybe his decision was to spoil his paper deliberately.
I deliberately didn't vote in the general election (despite my seat being one of the closest three way marginals in the country) because I believe that a low turnout is the best way to get the election system changed to something fairer.
I did vote in the local elections. (Both elections were held at the same time - which left them scrabbling for the rules on how to cross out my name because you can still go back later and vote in the other ballot if you want to)
Note that I don't think first past the post has to be bad. However, in this day and age where almost every MP votes with the party line regardless of what is best for their constituents or what their constituents would want, FPTP is just a way of ensuring that 35% of the vote and 25% of the electorate gets the Prime Minister absolute power.
Tim.
The reason a lot of people bid their maximum is to avoid being beat by snipers in the last seconds of bidding. Shill bidding is fraud. Just because I would be willing to pay $100 for something doesn't give the seller the right to take my $100 if no one else thinks it is worth that much.
But what about a third person unrelated to the seller thinks that it's worth $100 and so is prepared to bid $90 with the intention of reselling at a profit?
Their guess in the value of the item was correct - there was someone prepared to pay $100. Maybe they think they can drum up better interest in their auction than the seller can and attract that $100 bidder even if the seller can't.
Tim.
Shill bidding is most certainly NOT in the spirit of the Auction. I am supposed to be competing against people who want the item I want. A shill bidder is there to drive up the price, with zero interest in the product.
A shill bidder does have an interest in the item. A shill bidder is prepared to bid no more than he thinks he can get for the item less twice the auction fees (and any expenses) so that if he wins he can relist and make a profit.
A bidder who intends to resell the item will be prepared to pay more than the shill because he only pays the fees once.
And someone who wants the item will be prepared to pay more than either of them because he doesn't pay the fees at all.
If you don't bid until the last second then you can't be affected by shills unless they've already bid. And if you think it's a shill bidding then you can play their own game back at them, bid just less than the shill is prepared to pay (but make sure this is less than you're prepared to pay) and force their expenses up to a maximum. You can't lose with this strategy.
You can also play the shills game back at them on items you don't want - just bid them up to what you think they'll sell for if you sell them less your fees and expenses. If you get the item you can sell it for a profit (assuming your pricing model is correct). If you don't get the item then you've maximized the shills costs or someone else wanted the item and was prepared to pay more.
There is no difference between a shill and someone bidding on what they think are underpriced items in order to resell them at a profit.
Tim.