If you care enough to worry about an uninformed vote being bad, why haven't you taken steps to become informed? As a citizen of a democracy, you have the responsibility to do at least cursory research to help you choose who to vote for as your future leaders. It doesn't take long, and it's surely worth some of your time in order to allow you to be confident that you're voting for the right person?
DNA samples are taken from everyone who's arrested in England and Wales (probably Scotland too, not sure). They're destroyed (or should be) if you're released without charge or action.
These kids were given a formal warning which stays on their record, therefore there's a basis for retaining their DNA. Parental approval doesn't come into it - legal precedent is there for it, and that's all that's required.
And vandalising a publicly-owned cherry tree is definitely something that needs to be dealt with. If the coppers just said 'oh stop doing that' and went away, what do you think's going to happen? Will the kids go 'oh well we should stop' and go home? Sometimes a shock is what's needed. Okay so they could end up hating the police for the rest of their lives, but they wouldn't exactly be unusual in that regard - many other people do with far less justification.
But I would hope that they were treated fairly and politely throughout, and will as they grow up come to realise that it was the right thing to be done.
Much like any other sport really, but it makes a change from fighting in the street. Unfortunately my countrymen like to do that after the match, so they get all the fun of both.
This is something I'm peripherally involved in - automated proof tools are becoming more capable all the time, and I was at a keynote address by Tom Hales (University of Pittsburgh) who has been using such tools to formalise one of the proofs he's known for. There's some resistance (a lot, perhaps) to using such things in the mathematical community, but as a mathematician who's decided to use them rather than a computer scientist who's trying to prove that they're useful, he's hoping to change some minds and it's also nice for those of us in AR research to hear that there are mathematicians out there using them!
Unfortunately, automated proof tools are not sophisticated enough to handle the kind of maths seen in solving the Really Big Problems. Not yet, anyway.
That's one of the things Microsoft want the new UI to fix... there are too many features in Office that nobody ever uses because they don't even know they exist, as they're buried in some badly-named menu or dialog box somewhere.
The collaboration stuff in Word primarily consists of the whole 'track changes' feature, allowing multiple people to edit a document with each one knowing what the others have written and changed, with accompanying comments, thus allowing whoever puts the final document together to assemble a consensus.
Some people find these invaluable - most of the time, they work pretty well too. The UI is rather obscure though.
Quite so! I would imagine the collaborative functionality isn't really used all that much in a lot of places. There'll be some companies who can't do without it anymore, but most places I've worked people have a hard enough time figuring out what the red wavy underlines mean, therefore most of the new features in Office over the last ten years are things they had better not know about, lest their brains explode.
Microsoft know this, of course, and this is why the hugest and most interesting thing in Office 2007 is the rather odd new UI, which I'm itching to get my hands on just to see if it works.
I suspect they'll also get some upgrades for the shiny new graphics engine, too.
As a British student, I've always avoided beer and the other dubious delights of the pub in favour of spending a decent amount of money on good food.
That said, a lot of people I knew as an undergraduate spent more on food than I did but ate really poorly, as they had lots of kebabs (never, ever show me a doner kebab if you expect me not to vomit in it) and other takeaway, and ready meals. Expensive and while not necessarily immediately fatal, definitely not good to eat all the time.
Yes, that's what I thought Nintendo had debunked. Given how the Revolution controller works, it did seem unlikely to me in the first place. How would they do it without diminishing the GameCube play experience?
I'd dispute all those points for a recent GNOME version. Good fonts, good layout, some fabulous themes... sure we've got overall integration problems, stuff which isn't designed for GNOME really looks out of place, but some of your criticisms are unjustified for GNOME and for KDE as well.
And if you've not looked at Apple lately... they seem to have thrown interface consistency out of the window, and are making increasingly bizarre decisions along UI lines.
Well said, well said. Albums are the only way the folk music world functions in terms of recordings - live performance is also a significant thing of course. Folk artists tend to work on themes and stories just like albums should be. Some are collections of tunes or songs (or both) with a theme, or from a specific place and time. Others really do tell a story (Maddy Prior does a lot of that these days).
The distribution media will change - just like the change from vinyl to CD - but the concepts will still be there, at least in part of the industry.
In that case, don't expect movies to get made anymore. Movies cost money to make and the money has to be reclaimed from somewhere. Those actors won't work for free, neither will the lighting techs, or the camerapeople, or the makeup crew, or the catering staff or scriptwriters or directors or marketing people who let you know about it in the first place.
It can convincingly be argued that movie studios shouldn't make as much money as they do, that they could get away with charging less and still break even and beyond, but nothing can ever be free. That's nothing. Ever. Not movies, not music, not software, not TV. You may not pay for it with money, but you will always pay for it. No other system is sustainable.
The only game I've managed to get on DVD here in the UK is Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm generally amazed to find games that don't come on DVDs these days. The Sims 2 is four CDs, Doom 3 is three CDs (of crap)... to find a game that's on less than two is very rare indeed now. I would happily have all games on DVD, as it saves on materials, shelf space and installation hassle (hate disk swapping). I was even more surprised when Baldur's Gate 2 wasn't released on DVD, as Baldur's Gate 1 had been (although 2 did come on fewer CDs, presumably due to heavy data compression).
So I'm very pleased to be able to get Half-Life 2 on DVD, and that it's compulsory. DVD drives are so cheap there's no excuse anymore.
I've met numerous Linux users who pirate as much music as Windows users. I think we all move in different circles, nobody sees the entire picture.
I don't do it anymore. The music I like is hard to obtain online, so I got fairly bored of trying to find it. Also, it didn't seem appropriate for me to be downloading music while trying to join the police... although that said, I know police officers with gigabytes of downloaded music, naughty people!
About 99.5% rips of my own CDs. The rest is a couple of audiobooks downloaded from Audible (legit), and a smallish handful of tracks downloaded from P2P networks.
Of course, ripping your own CDs is technically illegal in the UK, I believe.
Yeah, the Tories aren't good either. They're petrified about losing votes to the UKIP so they're turning into the UKIP. I voted Liberal Democrats last time because my only choices were Tory, Labour, LibDem or UKIP - not a fun decision to make. I'm living in a different ward this time so hopefully I'll be able to vote for someone marginally sane, but I'm not optimistic because sanity appears to disqualify people from politics.
Plus voting for anybody else is likely to lead to disappointment anyway, because we don't have a fair voting system. At least the LibDems are in favour of increased use of PR (probably because it would get them more seats, and likewise the two major parties don't like it for precisely the same reason).
Still, the Tories are still better than the BNP or NF. Doesn't mean we have to like them though.
No, instead I worry about what will happen if George W Bush wins the 2004 US Presidential Election, if John Kerry wins the 2004 US Presidential Election and if Labour win the 2005 UK General Election.
Because if we're not aware of what some deluded people want to do to our freedom online, we might get caught by surprise when someone manages to actually pull it off.
Although spreading their message might not be a good idea if you argue that talking about them gains them support just because people hear about them.
And why does it always have to be about terrorism? NOBODY can prevent a determined terrorist - NOTHING can stop them, short of chaining up every single person on the planet.
It's about street crime, vandalism, car thefts, robberies and muggings in public, abductions, murders, assaults... Unfortunately it's still not possible to catch everyone who does these things, but the cameras help.
...Java's strong typing isn't a problem because it's strong typing. C++ does strong typing rather nicely. Haskell does it even better. Java's libraries, because they don't have anything like templates (at least until Java 5), require huge amounts of casting and instanceof checks to pull anything out of a container. That's when static typing gets in the way instead of being helpful.
I'm quite a fan of static typing, really (honestly), but not the way it works in Java. Of course, I hate lots of other things about Java too, but it's not because it's 'un-cool', it's because it's crap. Even if nobody used it, it still wouldn't be cool (I'd have a party though).
And although it pains me to say it of a Microsoft product, I hope C# takes over from Java, because although it's not perfect (no language is, or can be), it's for the most part what you might call 'Java done right'.
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So would I... for good games anyway. GTA3 was okay, but San Andreas in particular was awful.
I wouldn't recommend it. Has anyone from Rockstar ever actually playtested the missions involving flying?
If you care enough to worry about an uninformed vote being bad, why haven't you taken steps to become informed? As a citizen of a democracy, you have the responsibility to do at least cursory research to help you choose who to vote for as your future leaders. It doesn't take long, and it's surely worth some of your time in order to allow you to be confident that you're voting for the right person?
DNA samples are taken from everyone who's arrested in England and Wales (probably Scotland too, not sure). They're destroyed (or should be) if you're released without charge or action.
These kids were given a formal warning which stays on their record, therefore there's a basis for retaining their DNA. Parental approval doesn't come into it - legal precedent is there for it, and that's all that's required.
And vandalising a publicly-owned cherry tree is definitely something that needs to be dealt with. If the coppers just said 'oh stop doing that' and went away, what do you think's going to happen? Will the kids go 'oh well we should stop' and go home? Sometimes a shock is what's needed. Okay so they could end up hating the police for the rest of their lives, but they wouldn't exactly be unusual in that regard - many other people do with far less justification.
But I would hope that they were treated fairly and politely throughout, and will as they grow up come to realise that it was the right thing to be done.
Same thing for me. The female running animation in City of Heroes is much nicer, too.
Much like any other sport really, but it makes a change from fighting in the street. Unfortunately my countrymen like to do that after the match, so they get all the fun of both.
This is something I'm peripherally involved in - automated proof tools are becoming more capable all the time, and I was at a keynote address by Tom Hales (University of Pittsburgh) who has been using such tools to formalise one of the proofs he's known for. There's some resistance (a lot, perhaps) to using such things in the mathematical community, but as a mathematician who's decided to use them rather than a computer scientist who's trying to prove that they're useful, he's hoping to change some minds and it's also nice for those of us in AR research to hear that there are mathematicians out there using them!
Unfortunately, automated proof tools are not sophisticated enough to handle the kind of maths seen in solving the Really Big Problems. Not yet, anyway.
Correct-by-construction programming is a fundamental part of a proper education in software engineering, I would have thought.
Where did these people learn to code?
That's one of the things Microsoft want the new UI to fix... there are too many features in Office that nobody ever uses because they don't even know they exist, as they're buried in some badly-named menu or dialog box somewhere.
The collaboration stuff in Word primarily consists of the whole 'track changes' feature, allowing multiple people to edit a document with each one knowing what the others have written and changed, with accompanying comments, thus allowing whoever puts the final document together to assemble a consensus.
Some people find these invaluable - most of the time, they work pretty well too. The UI is rather obscure though.
Quite so! I would imagine the collaborative functionality isn't really used all that much in a lot of places. There'll be some companies who can't do without it anymore, but most places I've worked people have a hard enough time figuring out what the red wavy underlines mean, therefore most of the new features in Office over the last ten years are things they had better not know about, lest their brains explode.
Microsoft know this, of course, and this is why the hugest and most interesting thing in Office 2007 is the rather odd new UI, which I'm itching to get my hands on just to see if it works.
I suspect they'll also get some upgrades for the shiny new graphics engine, too.
As a British student, I've always avoided beer and the other dubious delights of the pub in favour of spending a decent amount of money on good food.
That said, a lot of people I knew as an undergraduate spent more on food than I did but ate really poorly, as they had lots of kebabs (never, ever show me a doner kebab if you expect me not to vomit in it) and other takeaway, and ready meals. Expensive and while not necessarily immediately fatal, definitely not good to eat all the time.
Plus, cooking's FUN.
Yes, that's what I thought Nintendo had debunked. Given how the Revolution controller works, it did seem unlikely to me in the first place. How would they do it without diminishing the GameCube play experience?
Weren't those rumours about extra features when running Twilight Princess on the Revolution debunked fairly rapidly by Nintendo?
I'd dispute all those points for a recent GNOME version. Good fonts, good layout, some fabulous themes... sure we've got overall integration problems, stuff which isn't designed for GNOME really looks out of place, but some of your criticisms are unjustified for GNOME and for KDE as well.
And if you've not looked at Apple lately... they seem to have thrown interface consistency out of the window, and are making increasingly bizarre decisions along UI lines.
And? NTL are one of the biggest ISPs in the UK and they do the same thing.
Well said, well said. Albums are the only way the folk music world functions in terms of recordings - live performance is also a significant thing of course. Folk artists tend to work on themes and stories just like albums should be. Some are collections of tunes or songs (or both) with a theme, or from a specific place and time. Others really do tell a story (Maddy Prior does a lot of that these days).
The distribution media will change - just like the change from vinyl to CD - but the concepts will still be there, at least in part of the industry.
It can convincingly be argued that movie studios shouldn't make as much money as they do, that they could get away with charging less and still break even and beyond, but nothing can ever be free. That's nothing. Ever. Not movies, not music, not software, not TV. You may not pay for it with money, but you will always pay for it. No other system is sustainable.
Just don't buy the RAM from Apple, they overcharge horrendously for it.
Can't wait for a G5 Powerbook, but it's going to be a while I think. I think we'll see another revision of the G4 Powerbooks first.
It might be interesting if they went dual-core on the Powerbooks actually. Probably similar heat problems though.
The only game I've managed to get on DVD here in the UK is Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm generally amazed to find games that don't come on DVDs these days. The Sims 2 is four CDs, Doom 3 is three CDs (of crap)... to find a game that's on less than two is very rare indeed now. I would happily have all games on DVD, as it saves on materials, shelf space and installation hassle (hate disk swapping). I was even more surprised when Baldur's Gate 2 wasn't released on DVD, as Baldur's Gate 1 had been (although 2 did come on fewer CDs, presumably due to heavy data compression).
So I'm very pleased to be able to get Half-Life 2 on DVD, and that it's compulsory. DVD drives are so cheap there's no excuse anymore.
I've met numerous Linux users who pirate as much music as Windows users. I think we all move in different circles, nobody sees the entire picture.
I don't do it anymore. The music I like is hard to obtain online, so I got fairly bored of trying to find it. Also, it didn't seem appropriate for me to be downloading music while trying to join the police... although that said, I know police officers with gigabytes of downloaded music, naughty people!
About 99.5% rips of my own CDs. The rest is a couple of audiobooks downloaded from Audible (legit), and a smallish handful of tracks downloaded from P2P networks.
Of course, ripping your own CDs is technically illegal in the UK, I believe.
Yeah, the Tories aren't good either. They're petrified about losing votes to the UKIP so they're turning into the UKIP. I voted Liberal Democrats last time because my only choices were Tory, Labour, LibDem or UKIP - not a fun decision to make. I'm living in a different ward this time so hopefully I'll be able to vote for someone marginally sane, but I'm not optimistic because sanity appears to disqualify people from politics.
Plus voting for anybody else is likely to lead to disappointment anyway, because we don't have a fair voting system. At least the LibDems are in favour of increased use of PR (probably because it would get them more seats, and likewise the two major parties don't like it for precisely the same reason).
Still, the Tories are still better than the BNP or NF. Doesn't mean we have to like them though.
No, instead I worry about what will happen if George W Bush wins the 2004 US Presidential Election, if John Kerry wins the 2004 US Presidential Election and if Labour win the 2005 UK General Election.
Because if we're not aware of what some deluded people want to do to our freedom online, we might get caught by surprise when someone manages to actually pull it off.
Although spreading their message might not be a good idea if you argue that talking about them gains them support just because people hear about them.
And why does it always have to be about terrorism? NOBODY can prevent a determined terrorist - NOTHING can stop them, short of chaining up every single person on the planet.
It's about street crime, vandalism, car thefts, robberies and muggings in public, abductions, murders, assaults... Unfortunately it's still not possible to catch everyone who does these things, but the cameras help.
...Java's strong typing isn't a problem because it's strong typing. C++ does strong typing rather nicely. Haskell does it even better. Java's libraries, because they don't have anything like templates (at least until Java 5), require huge amounts of casting and instanceof checks to pull anything out of a container. That's when static typing gets in the way instead of being helpful.
I'm quite a fan of static typing, really (honestly), but not the way it works in Java. Of course, I hate lots of other things about Java too, but it's not because it's 'un-cool', it's because it's crap. Even if nobody used it, it still wouldn't be cool (I'd have a party though).
And although it pains me to say it of a Microsoft product, I hope C# takes over from Java, because although it's not perfect (no language is, or can be), it's for the most part what you might call 'Java done right'.