Fortunately, I've only been "in hospital" a few times, once for a routine but necessary operation as a child, once when my eye was injured, once when I was assaulted in public and injured quite badly, and twice for sporting injuries (both minor).
The operation left me with unsightly scarring (luckily not visible when wearing clothing you would wear for a job) due to incompetence on the part of the surgeon/finisher. The time my eye was injured I actually received excellent help - though I did have to wait two hours to be seen despite freaking out over blood leaking from my eyeball - apparently it didn't count as a "head injury" - though the person with a nail hanging loose, and someone with a bad back were seen before me... go triage. When I was assaulted in public the medical treatment I received was OK - but again left two small scars on my face (not their fault, but the second opinion of a private surgeon was that had they been done professionally, there would be no scarring) as apparently they were heavy handed when doing it, and their treatment of me was abysmal. I was attacked while out for a meal for a friends birthday by a drunken guy who thought I looked at his girl... I was treated as a drunken lout by the NHS despite barely having had anything to drink, and as it was a "friday night" and I'd "had a beer" it was clearly my own fault that my face was split open in two parts. When I was 16 I was involved in a clash in a sporting match which left two heavy people lying on my right leg and wrenched it further sideways than it should go, this tore some muscle and a tendon in my groin. I was twice rejected from having any treatment (or even a decent inspection) by staff at an NHS hospital, which left me with a bad injury. After six weeks of treatment from a private clinic (paid for by my mother) including heat therapy, massage and a course of exercise designed to build strength up in that area, I was able to walk without pain again, though any stress with my right leg turned outwards today leaves me in pain for a couple of days. Finally, when 17 I received a terrible tackle at a soccer match that damaged my Anterior Talofibular Ligament (outside the ankle bone). At the time the doctor AND the emergency room told me it was nothing serious despite swelling to a truly enormous size and me being unable to walk. Ten years and nine recursions later I have discovered due to a private physiotherapist and good scanning equipment that the ligament is now almost entirely composed of scar tissue - for several months until I received private treatment I was unable to walk properly, but the NHS didn't want to know because "old sporting injuries can be hard to pin down" and I just got fobbed off with "put an ice pack on it and relax it for a few days" - despite the fact it would reoccur approximately twice weekly and prevent me from walking or driving without extreme pain.
As mentioned in my grandparent post I was also given a dose of antibiotics 10x the adult dose at the age of 12 for a sore throat by someone who could barely speak English - and nearly died. I've also had other, more minor, misdiagnosis and issues at the hands of GPs, but they do not have any lasting effects like the above problems (the over prescription has left me with a dangerous allergy to an antibiotic I previously had no issues with).
This is my tale of the NHS, I hope it has been instructive. For those who replied to my post saying I "support the positions of letting the proles die out" or similar, I do not - I believe emergency medical treatment should be available for all - but for more minor issues a privatised system with genuine market forces would ensure better standards of care for less.
And finally, I have several friends who work INSIDE the NHS in a variety of capacities - and almost all of them believe the current system is a mess and needs a huge change.
I'm proud to pay my taxes towards the NHS that provides top notch treatment to EVERYBODY.
Wow, which UK do you live in? I've had to deal with the NHS about a dozen times in my life, and with private hospitals just twice. I can say without a doubt that if I ever require anything important done, I will opt for private treatment every time.
The incompetence of our NHS, the apathy of their "professionals" and utterly abysmal levels of customer service lead me to believe it is just a scheme designed to ensure that healthcare professionals have the right to a paypacket without actually having to compete with others in their field.
I have been given the wrong treatment twice, diagnosed incorrectly three times, almost killed by an allergic reaction to an antibiotic when I was twelve years old, and was given 10x the adult dose by a doctor who could barely speak any English, I have been refused treatment for 2 debilitating physical injuries suffered in my teenage years which now in my late 20s restrict my ability to enjoy sports and sometimes to even walk normally.
I have no dentist and cannot get one, and apparently eyecare I must arrange and pay for myself... I can safely say that if we had no NHS and only private sector medical care I would have a much higher quality of life.
As others have already said this is a bad name for the following reasons:
1: If you need to explain a name; it's bad. 2: If your name can be easily insulted; it's bad (ask parents how careful they are with kids names). 3: If your name is hard to pronounce, or can be confusing to work out how to pronounce on sight; it's bad. 4: If your name doesn't convey what the product is, and it's going to be used on its own; it's bad. 5: Finally, if you know it's going to be bad, yet you still release it then defend it; it's really bad, and was a pet decision of a director.
From someone who has worked in companies providing both online and offline marketing services for almost a decade: 1: Wrong. A name is a name, not a description. 2: Only among certain demographics - and those demographics will not be buying Wii by the ton no matter what you name it. For the target demographic it could easily be regarded as a boon to have strong worldplay connotations. 3: Incorrect - it can actually be a huge benefit. Testing and focus groups have shown that such names are more easily retrieved from memory than names plucked straight from a dictionary or which have simple pronunciation. 4: Not correct - see [1:]. 5: Entirely subjective, and your opinion.
The name is easily memorable, short, unique and generating billions of dollars worth of free publicity. I would say at this point it is probably the smartest choice any console maker has made to date.
Power generation from most current power plants, even coal burning ones, are less polluting per watt of power output than an internal combustion engine.This is true, however how much transmission losses are taken into account? I know transmission losses can be very significant when you're talking about a giant nuclear plant serving energy to homes 100 miles away - though I'm not an EE so don't have any figures.
Can someone qualified let us know roughly what the energy conversion %ages are for Internal Combustion Engines, Nuclear Plants, and factor in average transmission losses?
Also, it's worth bearing in mind that centralising the infrastructure saves alot of cash (driving the fuel to the filling station for starters, staffing them etc.) and makes it easier to scrub and clean outputs from the generation process to make the air cleaner.
Actually it *is* his concern, because should ad revenues drop many sites which have significant bandwidth or editorial costs must stop publishing because they are incurring a loss. Furthermore, if the ad (or other) revenues were to *rise* in a particular sector of online publishing this would raise the competition in that sector and, hopefully, the quality and quantity of content available to the great grand parent poster.
Therefore, while we do have a "tragedy of the commons" type situation, you cannot claim it is "not his concern" - because the quality of the material he reads is influenced by his behaviour and by the same behaviour of other people. The grand parent poster was asking a constructive question : exactly *how* should publishers of "free" content be compensated by their users. Currently this happens to be mostly advertising revenue, but when this drys up or is no longer viable, possibly due to ad blockers, should these sites simply stop publishing?
It is a 214MB file on a fairly weak host. By posting the URL to Slashdot the parent has almost certainly gauranteed that FEWER people will get the file in coming days than if he had not acted as such.
To link from Slashdot to a file nearly a quarter of a gig large is surely meant in jest?:)
They already have. Those users who deem the issue is to be of enough importantance have punished Google. Those users who don't believe the issue to be important enough have not.
Would this not be more useful as software, able to render simple 3d hands with low microprocessor overheads, and preferably available for mobile phones and PDAs?
Deaf people could carry a PDA, and when they need to find out what someone is saying, they can hold the PDA up like a microphone, and watch the screen, assuming the translation is at least reasonable accurate... Of course they could lipread too but some find that harder than others, and this could also be used eventually to cross language barriers?
I imagine it's extremely hard to lipread a foreign language.
""If I was working for Microsoft I think I'd know it, but I'm still in Oslo, not Washington, still working for Opera.""
Which actually has a meaning of.... NOTHING.
It is not a confirmation, nor a denial - she has skipped around the question by making a joke. The reporter should ask her outright again to answer the question, or not quote at all.
The quote means nothing - she could be telling the truth, *and* know that Microsoft has taken over Opera *and* the quote would still be correct. (If MS took a majority stake in Opera, Operas employees wouldn't work for MS, they would work for Opera... *and* you can bet most jobs wouldn't be moving to Washington anyway).
I call for our local carpenter to be held personally responsible when someone crowbars their way into my house. After all his door should have been 100% secure. Absolutely secure. It should have stopped a tank getting in.
this is about disrupting the entire regional network. Just the sort thing a criminal or terrorist might want to do during or in the wake of some mal-behavior
It is now standard practice for the government here in the UK to shut down the mobile phone network (for the public) in the UK after a terrorist incident in a large area surrounding the scene... no need for the terrorists to do it when our elected officials are busy creating havoc.
Their popularity is about to skyrocket as countless OSS projects look for alternatives to MySQL.
Why is that? Is MySQL suddently going to lose features, or perform worse? Anyone who uses MySQL for what it is won't have any cause to so much as sniff at this announcement.
It may cause gnashing of teeth on/. but in the real business world people who base their business decisions on some kind of moral philosophy they subscribe to don't do very well - and consequently don't make particularly good customers.
MySQL will probably be making bank with this decision, while a few hundred slashbots moan about how awful it is... in the meantime all the people who actually PAY MySQL AB money will continue to do - and the load on their download servers may lighten a little.
The story explains that the force of the supernova appears to have accelerated the stars core away from our galaxy and that soon it will move out... but if there was an "explosion" surely the stars core would be at the CENTRE of the explosion, so relative to the rest of the galaxy the force exerted on the star by the supernova would be pretty much zero (cancel itself out by pushing in all directions at once)...?
Anyone care to explain it to a long-time-ago astrology student?
If anyone should be fired it should be the librarian on-duty sice he or she was not doing his or her duty of performing a walk-through of the area and monitoring all the computers.
So I suppose any librarian who allows a patron to come in and read The Catcher In The Rye without walking behind them to "monitor" their reading and instantly stop this perversion of library resources should be fired too?
A librarians job is to assist citizens in gaining access to the information they desire. A librarians job is not to act as a propaganda or law enforcement officer - that role is reserved for officers of the law.
It is relatively easy for one to say that European schools are better because they teach more languages at younger ages. The fact is they have to. Look at the geography. In an area roughly the size of the US English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German are spoken.
I agree with much of what you said... just wanted to look at the languages you mentioned.
Add in Portugese, Basque, Welsh, Gaelic, Swiss German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, and probably around a dozen more I haven't mentioned. And yes, these are primary languages of regions or countries within a similar geographic area:)
Ok... last year, Microsoft sued Lindows because the name had a 1 letter difference from their own Windows... and now, they're making an OS code-named Eiger.........
Lindows published their OS. Microsoft is not publishing Eiger - it is an internal code name. Have you any idea how VAST the difference is here?
Sweden is changing their copyright law, though it's only proposed law now, and if it passes as it is, it might kick in as early as june or july. The law focuses on taking down people making profit with illegal filesharing.
So could they start up a non-profit organisation to handle the donations?
Furthermore they're exposed to this kind of repression at home. If your parents tell them not to wear X type of clothes they don't, and they don't tell their parents to fuck off either.
The RIAA are a private police force using the court system to extort money from people for the benefit of corporations.
I agree that their actions seem distasteful, and the possible penalties are ridiculous, but you can blame the penalties on the law makers - and remember that the RIAA don't use the court system to extort money from people for the benefit of corporation, except where those people have been freely offering songs copyrighted by the RIAA to anyone in the world who wants them, no questions asked.
Dirt and turds have legitimate uses... People pay money for these because making enough dirt or crap themselves is prohibitively inconvenient. On the other hand, browser extensions... are much easier either to create by oneself
I don't know about you, bust almost EVERYONE I know would find it far easier to make a turd than a browser extension.
So are they in breach of the eu data protection act or not ? I am pretty sure that the dataprotection act states that the data cannot be exported to a country that does not have a data protection act (ala india) but america does have one so that's okay however I don't think americas data protection type act has any such conditions in it so technically they haven't broken it.
Yes they are in breach of the UK Data Protection Act, and no, the USA is not considered "OK" for exporting your data to, it does not have an equivalent of the Data Protection Act so passing your information to into the hands of employees of an American firm also contravenes the Data Protection Act.
Ebay do this, by the way - if you join Ebay UK, despite their assurances that they will not pass your data outside the EU, I get spammed by their mailers based in the US, and registered to some faceless corporation in office 43534 floor 3254 some building, some no-name city.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, I've only been "in hospital" a few times, once for a routine but necessary operation as a child, once when my eye was injured, once when I was assaulted in public and injured quite badly, and twice for sporting injuries (both minor).
The operation left me with unsightly scarring (luckily not visible when wearing clothing you would wear for a job) due to incompetence on the part of the surgeon/finisher.
The time my eye was injured I actually received excellent help - though I did have to wait two hours to be seen despite freaking out over blood leaking from my eyeball - apparently it didn't count as a "head injury" - though the person with a nail hanging loose, and someone with a bad back were seen before me... go triage.
When I was assaulted in public the medical treatment I received was OK - but again left two small scars on my face (not their fault, but the second opinion of a private surgeon was that had they been done professionally, there would be no scarring) as apparently they were heavy handed when doing it, and their treatment of me was abysmal. I was attacked while out for a meal for a friends birthday by a drunken guy who thought I looked at his girl... I was treated as a drunken lout by the NHS despite barely having had anything to drink, and as it was a "friday night" and I'd "had a beer" it was clearly my own fault that my face was split open in two parts.
When I was 16 I was involved in a clash in a sporting match which left two heavy people lying on my right leg and wrenched it further sideways than it should go, this tore some muscle and a tendon in my groin. I was twice rejected from having any treatment (or even a decent inspection) by staff at an NHS hospital, which left me with a bad injury. After six weeks of treatment from a private clinic (paid for by my mother) including heat therapy, massage and a course of exercise designed to build strength up in that area, I was able to walk without pain again, though any stress with my right leg turned outwards today leaves me in pain for a couple of days.
Finally, when 17 I received a terrible tackle at a soccer match that damaged my Anterior Talofibular Ligament (outside the ankle bone). At the time the doctor AND the emergency room told me it was nothing serious despite swelling to a truly enormous size and me being unable to walk. Ten years and nine recursions later I have discovered due to a private physiotherapist and good scanning equipment that the ligament is now almost entirely composed of scar tissue - for several months until I received private treatment I was unable to walk properly, but the NHS didn't want to know because "old sporting injuries can be hard to pin down" and I just got fobbed off with "put an ice pack on it and relax it for a few days" - despite the fact it would reoccur approximately twice weekly and prevent me from walking or driving without extreme pain.
As mentioned in my grandparent post I was also given a dose of antibiotics 10x the adult dose at the age of 12 for a sore throat by someone who could barely speak English - and nearly died. I've also had other, more minor, misdiagnosis and issues at the hands of GPs, but they do not have any lasting effects like the above problems (the over prescription has left me with a dangerous allergy to an antibiotic I previously had no issues with).
This is my tale of the NHS, I hope it has been instructive. For those who replied to my post saying I "support the positions of letting the proles die out" or similar, I do not - I believe emergency medical treatment should be available for all - but for more minor issues a privatised system with genuine market forces would ensure better standards of care for less.
And finally, I have several friends who work INSIDE the NHS in a variety of capacities - and almost all of them believe the current system is a mess and needs a huge change.
The incompetence of our NHS, the apathy of their "professionals" and utterly abysmal levels of customer service lead me to believe it is just a scheme designed to ensure that healthcare professionals have the right to a paypacket without actually having to compete with others in their field.
I have been given the wrong treatment twice, diagnosed incorrectly three times, almost killed by an allergic reaction to an antibiotic when I was twelve years old, and was given 10x the adult dose by a doctor who could barely speak any English, I have been refused treatment for 2 debilitating physical injuries suffered in my teenage years which now in my late 20s restrict my ability to enjoy sports and sometimes to even walk normally.
I have no dentist and cannot get one, and apparently eyecare I must arrange and pay for myself... I can safely say that if we had no NHS and only private sector medical care I would have a much higher quality of life.
1: Wrong. A name is a name, not a description.
2: Only among certain demographics - and those demographics will not be buying Wii by the ton no matter what you name it. For the target demographic it could easily be regarded as a boon to have strong worldplay connotations.
3: Incorrect - it can actually be a huge benefit. Testing and focus groups have shown that such names are more easily retrieved from memory than names plucked straight from a dictionary or which have simple pronunciation.
4: Not correct - see [1:].
5: Entirely subjective, and your opinion.
The name is easily memorable, short, unique and generating billions of dollars worth of free publicity. I would say at this point it is probably the smartest choice any console maker has made to date.
Power generation from most current power plants, even coal burning ones, are less polluting per watt of power output than an internal combustion engine.This is true, however how much transmission losses are taken into account? I know transmission losses can be very significant when you're talking about a giant nuclear plant serving energy to homes 100 miles away - though I'm not an EE so don't have any figures.
Can someone qualified let us know roughly what the energy conversion %ages are for Internal Combustion Engines, Nuclear Plants, and factor in average transmission losses?
Also, it's worth bearing in mind that centralising the infrastructure saves alot of cash (driving the fuel to the filling station for starters, staffing them etc.) and makes it easier to scrub and clean outputs from the generation process to make the air cleaner.
What about the Berne convention?
Dude, Berne is in Europe!
His point specifically caters for Pearl Harbour - those ships were moored in port, *not* out on patrol.
Actually it *is* his concern, because should ad revenues drop many sites which have significant bandwidth or editorial costs must stop publishing because they are incurring a loss. Furthermore, if the ad (or other) revenues were to *rise* in a particular sector of online publishing this would raise the competition in that sector and, hopefully, the quality and quantity of content available to the great grand parent poster.
Therefore, while we do have a "tragedy of the commons" type situation, you cannot claim it is "not his concern" - because the quality of the material he reads is influenced by his behaviour and by the same behaviour of other people. The grand parent poster was asking a constructive question : exactly *how* should publishers of "free" content be compensated by their users. Currently this happens to be mostly advertising revenue, but when this drys up or is no longer viable, possibly due to ad blockers, should these sites simply stop publishing?
It is a 214MB file on a fairly weak host. By posting the URL to Slashdot the parent has almost certainly gauranteed that FEWER people will get the file in coming days than if he had not acted as such.
:)
To link from Slashdot to a file nearly a quarter of a gig large is surely meant in jest?
They already have. Those users who deem the issue is to be of enough importantance have punished Google. Those users who don't believe the issue to be important enough have not.
Welcome to the free market.
Would this not be more useful as software, able to render simple 3d hands with low microprocessor overheads, and preferably available for mobile phones and PDAs?
Deaf people could carry a PDA, and when they need to find out what someone is saying, they can hold the PDA up like a microphone, and watch the screen, assuming the translation is at least reasonable accurate...
Of course they could lipread too but some find that harder than others, and this could also be used eventually to cross language barriers?
I imagine it's extremely hard to lipread a foreign language.
""If I was working for Microsoft I think I'd know it, but I'm still in Oslo, not Washington, still working for Opera.""
Which actually has a meaning of.... NOTHING.
It is not a confirmation, nor a denial - she has skipped around the question by making a joke. The reporter should ask her outright again to answer the question, or not quote at all.
The quote means nothing - she could be telling the truth, *and* know that Microsoft has taken over Opera *and* the quote would still be correct. (If MS took a majority stake in Opera, Operas employees wouldn't work for MS, they would work for Opera... *and* you can bet most jobs wouldn't be moving to Washington anyway).
Insecure? Rancid tabloid hyperbole more like.
I call for our local carpenter to be held personally responsible when someone crowbars their way into my house. After all his door should have been 100% secure. Absolutely secure. It should have stopped a tank getting in.
It may cause gnashing of teeth on
MySQL will probably be making bank with this decision, while a few hundred slashbots moan about how awful it is... in the meantime all the people who actually PAY MySQL AB money will continue to do - and the load on their download servers may lighten a little.
The story explains that the force of the supernova appears to have accelerated the stars core away from our galaxy and that soon it will move out... but if there was an "explosion" surely the stars core would be at the CENTRE of the explosion, so relative to the rest of the galaxy the force exerted on the star by the supernova would be pretty much zero (cancel itself out by pushing in all directions at once)...?
Anyone care to explain it to a long-time-ago astrology student?
So I suppose any librarian who allows a patron to come in and read The Catcher In The Rye without walking behind them to "monitor" their reading and instantly stop this perversion of library resources should be fired too?
A librarians job is to assist citizens in gaining access to the information they desire. A librarians job is not to act as a propaganda or law enforcement officer - that role is reserved for officers of the law.
Add in Portugese, Basque, Welsh, Gaelic, Swiss German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, and probably around a dozen more I haven't mentioned. And yes, these are primary languages of regions or countries within a similar geographic area
I don't know about you, bust almost EVERYONE I know would find it far easier to make a turd than a browser extension.
Ebay do this, by the way - if you join Ebay UK, despite their assurances that they will not pass your data outside the EU, I get spammed by their mailers based in the US, and registered to some faceless corporation in office 43534 floor 3254 some building, some no-name city.