The final outcome of this story is unfortunate and appears to condemn the American Criminal Justice system more than anything else.
Aaron did not do something without consequence however. He broke a trust in a club (People on campus) and spoiled the party for the members of that club. Free access had been granted to members of the club and his actions took that away. The club members are not trusted anymore and have to go through authentication to get at the data now because of his actions.
When you look around at society most of the petty unpleasantness of it all happens because someone was greedy, stupid or criminal. It is a shame that Aaron contributed to this slow slide into the straightjacket, whatever the justification.
Ridiculous. I see an article about helicopters crashing into downtown city blocks or similar unbelievably amazing thing every day on my television. The whole world is awash with pedophile, corrupt, politicians kidnapping and murdering children because I saw one on television only yesterday.
You can talk up almost any bollocks you want to based on television stories these days because if it ever happens anywhere just once its now the main headline on the six o'clock news.
As for the barking insanity of arming your population with assault rifles the civilized world could understand it if America was a poor lawless basket case country often struck by famine and run by local warlords. But you idiots also have police, law and lawyers running the place as well, what the heck do you need millions of guns for as well? Why are you paying for both kinds of security? Vigilante gun law and written down book law?
3% of Americans are under the correctional supervision of their justice system. There are seven times more people in prison in the US as a percentage of the population as there are in Europe.
There is no evidence that this policy is any more effective than things like removing Lead in Gas for reducing overall crime. The rest of the world looks on in horror at prison camp America which locks up slightly more people than the Russians. Ever tried looking in the mirror?
I'm not surprised this guy looked at the options and chose the one he did, it was probably the most rational sane thing to do.
Shame about all the people who used to work for the company who lost their pensions too because it was mostly invested in Nortel stock.
Still you should be thankful as you live out your last years in a trailer that the problem of over regulation by the government is being valiantly fought over by Fox news and the WSJ.
Unfettered wealth creation by the super rich for the super rich should never be held back!
All it needs is a single case of work related injury and no business is going to buy anything slidy interfaced unless you can pick it up. Result warehouses full of unsold shit laptops.
The DNG convertor revision is locked to the main software revision for Elements so you cant use the latest DNG convertors with old versions of the main software.
You should be reasonably well served if you use canikon kit even if this is the case with these.
I stopped using their photo products when I found Elements 7 could only be upgraded by buying a full priced Elements 8. Adobe keep making you pay for the whole product again and again and again. I dont like them.
The track pad as a kludge to fix the problem of having something convenient on a portable laptop to drive the GUI has always been a poxy interface. Thats why people with common sense always buy a mouse of some kind to go with their laptop. Only a moron would use a laptop for extended or creative use using the touch pad alone.
I sit here typing on my cheap wireless keyboard, scrolling through the posts with the scroll wheel on my mouse I am reading a full sized monitor at one end of the kitchen table - these flat screen monitors and second hand laptops are brilliant, you can fill the house with them without them getting in the way. Best thing of all is that the cloud and the NAS server mean that it doesn't matter which machine I log into.
What would I want a smartphone for in the hour or two a day I am either not in the office or the home? I suppose one would be handy for cheating in the quiz in the local bar or maybe for providing my location information to the government?. A smartphone is a toy version of everything else I use to interact with the digital world with, its only fashionable right now because businesses are making a ton of money out of all the plebs who think they need one to maintain their social status.
Oh I have no doubt that when we have artificial intelligence in the cloud it will be useful to maintain an always on connection with our digital estates, its just that I can wait for that to happen without spending my money on smartphones.
In this respect Win 8 is a tiresome aberration along the way and I strongly resent the way it will screw up my desktop if it doesn't get fixed. .
Ahem, the ribbon is a marketing con introduced to make sure that children given free copies of office at school would be unable to use the free open source office alternatives. Likewise Metro is only forced on us because it makes marketing sense. I just cant understand why people dont see this, both things have bugger all to do with user interests. Oh and I;m sure they paid someone on staff to do a study proving that these new things were better than something else, I would too if you paid me.
I'm not actually against Microsoft remaining a large player in the market, The world has done very well out of the standard they have enforced over the last twenty five years. But I am astonished that people keep repeating their marketing nonsense, gullible fools.
I'm looking forward to how you folk get on without government once you have risen up with all those guns you love and killed all of them. I imagine the super rich will be laughing in their gated compounds. But I dont give great odds for the ordinary scum. Should be a laugh watching it on live tv though. A bit like Syria on youtube, but in english.
rant on/ Take two documents and try to read two pages side by side - an almost universal task when doing design work. It doesn't work on shit tv movie monitors because you have to keep scrolling up and down to see a whole page. Widescreen monitors were invented by the video content industry to separate their widescreen cinema experience from the poxy consumers who wouldn't pay the extra cash to view it in their retail outlets and tried to watch it on their home viewing devices.
Unfortunately manufacturers found that they could make panels cheaper if they lost the vertical resolution and advertised the diagonal size. Hence we are trying to do rocket science (like writing documents) on poxy monitors invented by people who just want to screw us for more money. Its a die die situation invented by morons who are flying in Lear jets and eating our productivity to feed their coke addictions. 16:10 is a good ratio for a 24 or 27 inch monitor to do work that is efficient and fits the size of the information we need to process to feed ourselves with. Any other size is something that parasitic scum are foisting on us with fashion, money and evil as their motivation.
I am so pleased that the absurdity of the screen in TFA is being showered with scorn. Most previous discussions of the ratshit movie monitor being the only thing you could buy has brought nothing but scorn from all the mindless morons who only use digital devices to watch soul sucking video content from their moms basements - they don't produce anything and don't see why us un-trendy people who actually have to work for a living by doing creative stuff should want anything other than a widescreen television monitor to work on. They would say fuck off and die because widescreen is trendy and you are just a dinosaur who isn't moving with the fashion of the times because you cant adapt.
Turns out that when the question gets asked the right way we don't want widescreen monitors to work on. Don't get me started on all that fucking space wasted at the top of the screen by the trend mongering ribbon bar that micro-sloth foisted on us so that it could differentiate itself from all the free office software in its free school software programs. What was wrong with the mega efficient drop down tree view menu?
Wake up you scumbags, everything the marketing droids are using to exploit you is being gleefully sucked up to as the new shiny thing that must be better than anything old farts used because its new. Its not true, half the fashions that capture youth because they are new are cynical marketing ploys to destroy the existing market players with fashion and have absolutely nothing to do with giving you something better to use.
Enjoy trying to use a touch tablet interface on your muliti monitor programming CAD station setup at work, enjoy the full screen only applications as you try to read off measurements from one document as you construct your drawing in another full screen application that you cant see at the same time. Yes Windows 8 may finally do what the Soviet Union, Hitler, Japan and Vietnam failed to do - fuck you.
Multiple monitors are only of any use if you can get a whole application to fit vertically on the damn thing - email, file browser, web browser, document, ERP application - otherwise you are forever scrolling up and down in the fucking things for no reason whatsoever except that most of the market is for people consuming wide screen movies. I have absolutely no problem ripping you people off and spending your earnings on my food housing and entertainment but I draw a line at you ruining my working experience with your toy interfaces./rant off.
So you think US food recipes in cup measurements are wrong because we scientists like to measure in SI units because it makes our lives easy? I'm guessing that your mom cooks your food here, because cooking works great in cups spoons and other random measurements and is a right pain in the arse in grams ml and mm. The consumer is always right and you are not a cook.
Deliberate or mistaken comment, still makes it funny. That's why its good to read an open self regulating forum, the mistakes get corrected with information rather than censorship. Prankster or idiot, well done and now be off with you, we have work to do.
The Imperial measurement system just happens to be slightly better tuned to everyday use than the metric system. The units fit better because of their size in food preparation for example, 75 grammes is nowhere as easy to comprehend as 3oz for example or a 1lb or 2lb loaf. Of course Newtons and the rest of the SI units work much better than Imperial units in science but actually in these days of instantaneous unit translation on digital devices it doesn't matter very much what units you sell things to as an end consumer who wants a lump of something in understandable units without lots of significant digits. The supply chain doesn't care what the units are.
Its particularly frustrating as well that every translation from an imperial unit to a metric unit has been used to gouge consumers by the marketplace. Buying petrol at 1.48 UK Pounds per liter would give anyone a heart attack if they realized that this was $9 per gallon, 5.60 UK pounds per US gallon, or 6.7 pounds per imperial gallon. He had a legitimate complaint that all of us grumpy old people have when changes introduce rip offs that the young don't see.
UKIP are a party particularly dedicated to getting the UK out of the European Union and find resonance with a lot of people in the UK who think that the country are getting a poor deal out of being in it. They also cite the European Union rules of unrestricted migration between members of the Union as causing breakdowns in social provisioning because of their unplanned nature. They emphatically deny that their opposition to unrestricted migration is because of racism but of course they do attract support from individuals who are racist because they are one of the few parties who do want to restrict migration.
I do not believe myself that Patrick was likely to be motivated by racial questions. It would not match his lack of interest in class or education that illuminated his support for people interested in astronomy for one thing and another thing is that he was a man of science who moved with the times and would be easily persuaded by the science that now says that racial differences are peanuts compared to politics and culture. Racists in a word are stupid and Patrick was not stupid.
You might argue that it would have been better for him to join a mainstream party and argue for them to make better provision for incoming migrants so that social provision for the existing population was not put under extreme pressure but at the time he joined UKIP any discussion of this nature was being sat on with the racist tag. The mainstream party's are only just beginning to take this issue seriously now. Sometimes it takes a pressure groups existence and popularity to get the mainstream to take peoples complaints seriously.
I don't blame Mr Moore for joining a pressure group, particularly one that just came second in two out of three recent local elections, that's democracy for you, do it by the vote and not the bullet, that's what we do. I am not personally a UKIP voter but I do think the mainstream parties need to take note of the grievances of the people who do vote for them. We still believe in democracy here in the UK and the irritating pressure groups that have reasonable requests and dont encourage hatred are a useful part of civil society. UKIP do not encourage hatred unlike the BNP who are not regarded as a useful part of civil society by the majority in this country.
A fellow of huge significance in our lifetimes, so many of us will admit to having been influenced by his enthusiasm for astronomy and quite frankly his bravery in being himself in a world increasingly obsessed with vain self promotion. This is not to say that he was not dedicated to helping others because he is well known for tirelessly working to help any individual who asked him for help. It takes moments of searching the web to discover that he talked and wrote to countless individuals throughout his life with advice and encouragement about their interest in astronomy.
In some ways he predates the internet in his understanding that direct communication has tremendous value, in typewritten letters and time for people he met. Today we have this great digital channel where we hunger for connection through twitter, forums, email, Facebook and he did all of this with the tools of his era - connect. So top appreciation for being one of the first people in the world to join up the thrill and excitement of those in a fascinating profession with us the amateurs and the interested in space and astronomy. He was doing citizen science before the concept really existed.
And like most interesting people in the world apart from his profession he had other passions in life Cricket and particularly music, you only have to see something on YouTube showing him playing the Xylophone to understand that. Oh and that's the other thing, he obviously had a seriously funny sense of humor.
Or as an alternative to Songbird on Windows which doesn't do Podcasts (and doesn't look like it ever will) Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ is pretty good, especially if you pair it up with Winamp http://www.winamp.com/ for Shoutcast streaming radio.
There is no scientific proof that dihydrogen oxide is safe either but people continue to use the stuff.
What we actually have going on here is that you are being terminally stupid, a crime given the couple of million years of evolution that went into the underused mechanism that is your brain. You see you have fallen for the current propoaganda war of the extremely wealthy who are manipulating you and the rest of the zombies.
Everything we do now and everything we have ever done has been risky, from falling off a horse and breaking your leg to holding your arm up to your head for 5 hours a day for 12 years and developing a fault in your nervous system, everything carries a risk. The thing is that a lot of the risks we face in the present are infintesimaly smaller than the ones we used to face and determining the causality is a lot harder than root causing my broken leg to falling ten feet onto a rock from my horse. So its harder to associate cause with effect today and guess what, people with an agenda have noticed this and are using it to manipulate the way you think, using it to make you do what they want you to do. If I had a ton of money and liked the way things worked I would be very keen to stop any scientifically driven popularist nonsense like reducing my income by spending my investment profits on stupid shit like the environment, health care for the slave class or god forbid mitigating climate change. So lets spend a couple of hundred mil a year with some like minded friends on a concerted campaign to discredit scientific opinion in the minds of the plebs so that we can put our views in their heads instead. It worked like a treat for tobacco for decades so it should be a pushover.
And it is a pushover, you all bleat the same storyline that the propaganda machine has fed you, there are two sides to the story, science is pretty sure about something but there are a few paid shills who scream at the top of their expense account funded voices that all the rest of them, the rest of the scientific establishment are conspiritorial liers with a funded agenda to fool the public - follow the money they shout, follow the money! With good reason of course because they have to disguise their own immorality somehow.
So now we have a story with two sides, ninety eight percent of the academic world using the scientific methodology of testing a hypothesis with available evidence belive on the balance of probabilities that a hypothesis is correct, and a few mavericks and funded shills say something else. All of a sudden the 2% view becomes weighted at 50% in the media and a few schills and a couple of nutters can persuade the whole world that black might be white that water may flow uphill and that you might prefer permanant slavery to being a free citizen.
Well good luck to you and the rest of the zombies, I hope you enjoy your continued slavery and the rotting environment you have chosen to live in. Its not too late to wake up of course, I'm rather hoping that it happens before something serious like arbitary loss making wars to ensure the profitability of oil companies happens though. Ooops it already did, wonder what awefullness is comming next.
Oh and as for the mobile phone thing, if it bothers you then I suggest you dont use one for five hours a day for twelve years, for one thing your body is likely to end up lopsided.
Same goes for me Taco. Also lost my low id moving jobs between the UK and Sweden and back again. Slashdot is still a great concept and still has some of the best threaded discussions on the web. Still has a community feel with the memes and OS wars revisited occasionally. So thanks to you and the team.
Interestingly I see fewer and fewer trolls these days, all the really kooky and unpleasant posters are doing it for real. They really do think that for example, Hitler was doing the right thing in exterminating the Jews and that anyone with your views is due for extermination too. I'm not sure when the world went from a state of general tolerance to one of polarized hatred but I'm afraid I have to blame American politics.
Slashdot is unique because its editorial policy is defined by a vast range of users who mostly keep things real. It is streets ahead of the moderated BBC website commenting system for example. I rarely swear on Slashdot but want to every time I use the BBC site.
Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) are designed to fail safe using active intervention mechanisms and totally don't fail safe if the active mechanism screws up as it did in Fukushima. Personally I would dig up the long dead generals of the nuclear weapon testing era and Kill Them all again for the crime against humanity that they committed. What crime you ask? The crime of denying the world cheap and safe nuclear power.
All of the modern worlds reactors are fundamentally unsafe PWR reactors which were designed and created because the only technology available came from the manufacture of plutonium. Now the only technology available is plutonium generating fundamentally unsafe PWR reactors with so many billions invested in it that we could never build anything else. Its also the reason that Iran can build a nuclear weapon, because all nuclear technology is basically designed to make plutonium for weapons.
The consequence is going to be that we stop using nuclear power altogether just as soon as people realize just what a shit technology is actually being used. Never mind global warming, at least thats only going to kill our grand kids, PWR reactors could easily kill millions of people right now.
Germany, Japan, Sweden have all committed to get rid of nuclear power because they have woken up to the fact that the technology we have now is a total fuckup. Only the Chinese and Indians are likely to carry on with it because they are working on alternative fuel cycle reactors which really are fail safe.
We will have to wait and see if the super rich in America whip the population into line and carry on with PWR power stations or if the sheep wake up and get the whole lot banned. PWR reactors are not fail safe and every hundred years or so one is going to go critical and flood vast areas with radioactive waste. Good luck with that long term.
The answer isn't always "censorship" of what people say. We already have laws about inciting violence which ought to be able to extract damages from people who have incited the violence after the event even if we cannot censor what they say before it. You say the makers have no blame associated with them but I disagree. If the intent of the film was to incite violence then they are to blame. Western law is already quite capable of considering intent. I doubt that the law would find any intent to incite violence in the publishing of The Satanic Verses or the Dutch Cartoons, but I suspect they would in this film.
I note that the businesses which have control over access to film trailers online have sensibly pulled it themselves so civil society found a way of getting it offline fairly quickly anyway. Society has dealt with it without any special laws pandering to extremists.
The riots might be stopped more quickly if there was a mechanism that clearly showed the rioters that even if our free speech allows people to say what they want to, we don't have to sanction everything they say as being approved of by our democratic States. This is not censorship or an inquisition or the implementation of religious law, its diplomacy.
As for the actual rioters and the people telling them to riot, well they are of course to blame for the deaths and injuries absolutely. The States that have the riots should be doing as much as possible to stop them and would be open to strong criticism if they don't.
As ever the discussion on this site has ranged widely and usefully, it is an amazing thing to be able to draw on so many peoples thoughts in a discussion. I hope I have learned from it. This is a complicated subject and it does not have a simple answer. We should certainly beware politicians who claim that there is a simple answer.
Any country that cant find some way of deleting the offensive excoritating rubbish that this film represents doesnt deserve to belong to the world community whatever santimonious freespeech bullshit they go on about. If you go online and threaten the president it wont take long for your free speech to put you in a cell. So how some right wing nutjobs can be allowed to kill an ambassador and hundreds of thick rioting foriegners I dont understand at all. This just makes the US look even more arrogant and stupid than usual. Oh and dont think that I dont believe that information should be free becuause it should, but that doesnt extend to blatant offensive trolling directly causing many peoples deaths. How effing stupid can you get? Get them locked up and pull the video. Free speech my arse.
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The fine words of a cult leader are as helpful as piss in the wind. Ask Lenin.
Idiot, a systemic fail cannot by nature be the responsibility of one person.
The final outcome of this story is unfortunate and appears to condemn the American Criminal Justice system more than anything else.
Aaron did not do something without consequence however. He broke a trust in a club (People on campus) and spoiled the party for the members of that club. Free access had been granted to members of the club and his actions took that away. The club members are not trusted anymore and have to go through authentication to get at the data now because of his actions.
When you look around at society most of the petty unpleasantness of it all happens because someone was greedy, stupid or criminal. It is a shame that Aaron contributed to this slow slide into the straightjacket, whatever the justification.
Ridiculous. I see an article about helicopters crashing into downtown city blocks or similar unbelievably amazing thing every day on my television. The whole world is awash with pedophile, corrupt, politicians kidnapping and murdering children because I saw one on television only yesterday.
You can talk up almost any bollocks you want to based on television stories these days because if it ever happens anywhere just once its now the main headline on the six o'clock news.
As for the barking insanity of arming your population with assault rifles the civilized world could understand it if America was a poor lawless basket case country often struck by famine and run by local warlords. But you idiots also have police, law and lawyers running the place as well, what the heck do you need millions of guns for as well? Why are you paying for both kinds of security? Vigilante gun law and written down book law?
Idiots.
3% of Americans are under the correctional supervision of their justice system. There are seven times more people in prison in the US as a percentage of the population as there are in Europe.
There is no evidence that this policy is any more effective than things like removing Lead in Gas for reducing overall crime. The rest of the world looks on in horror at prison camp America which locks up slightly more people than the Russians. Ever tried looking in the mirror?
I'm not surprised this guy looked at the options and chose the one he did, it was probably the most rational sane thing to do.
Shame about all the people who used to work for the company who lost their pensions too because it was mostly invested in Nortel stock.
Still you should be thankful as you live out your last years in a trailer that the problem of over regulation by the government is being valiantly fought over by Fox news and the WSJ.
Unfettered wealth creation by the super rich for the super rich should never be held back!
All it needs is a single case of work related injury and no business is going to buy anything slidy interfaced unless you can pick it up. Result warehouses full of unsold shit laptops.
The DNG convertor revision is locked to the main software revision for Elements so you cant use the latest DNG convertors with old versions of the main software.
You should be reasonably well served if you use canikon kit even if this is the case with these.
I stopped using their photo products when I found Elements 7 could only be upgraded by buying a full priced Elements 8. Adobe keep making you pay for the whole product again and again and again. I dont like them.
No rawfile support for mirrorless cameras.
Acrobat professional 8 (478Mb) is fantastic though - you can create reviewable pdf with it.
The track pad as a kludge to fix the problem of having something convenient on a portable laptop to drive the GUI has always been a poxy interface. Thats why people with common sense always buy a mouse of some kind to go with their laptop. Only a moron would use a laptop for extended or creative use using the touch pad alone.
I sit here typing on my cheap wireless keyboard, scrolling through the posts with the scroll wheel on my mouse I am reading a full sized monitor at one end of the kitchen table - these flat screen monitors and second hand laptops are brilliant, you can fill the house with them without them getting in the way. Best thing of all is that the cloud and the NAS server mean that it doesn't matter which machine I log into.
What would I want a smartphone for in the hour or two a day I am either not in the office or the home? I suppose one would be handy for cheating in the quiz in the local bar or maybe for providing my location information to the government?. A smartphone is a toy version of everything else I use to interact with the digital world with, its only fashionable right now because businesses are making a ton of money out of all the plebs who think they need one to maintain their social status.
Oh I have no doubt that when we have artificial intelligence in the cloud it will be useful to maintain an always on connection with our digital estates, its just that I can wait for that to happen without spending my money on smartphones.
In this respect Win 8 is a tiresome aberration along the way and I strongly resent the way it will screw up my desktop if it doesn't get fixed.
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Ahem, the ribbon is a marketing con introduced to make sure that children given free copies of office at school would be unable to use the free open source office alternatives. Likewise Metro is only forced on us because it makes marketing sense. I just cant understand why people dont see this, both things have bugger all to do with user interests. Oh and I;m sure they paid someone on staff to do a study proving that these new things were better than something else, I would too if you paid me.
I'm not actually against Microsoft remaining a large player in the market, The world has done very well out of the standard they have enforced over the last twenty five years. But I am astonished that people keep repeating their marketing nonsense, gullible fools.
I'm looking forward to how you folk get on without government once you have risen up with all those guns you love and killed all of them. I imagine the super rich will be laughing in their gated compounds. But I dont give great odds for the ordinary scum. Should be a laugh watching it on live tv though. A bit like Syria on youtube, but in english.
rant on/
Take two documents and try to read two pages side by side - an almost universal task when doing design work. It doesn't work on shit tv movie monitors because you have to keep scrolling up and down to see a whole page. Widescreen monitors were invented by the video content industry to separate their widescreen cinema experience from the poxy consumers who wouldn't pay the extra cash to view it in their retail outlets and tried to watch it on their home viewing devices.
Unfortunately manufacturers found that they could make panels cheaper if they lost the vertical resolution and advertised the diagonal size. Hence we are trying to do rocket science (like writing documents) on poxy monitors invented by people who just want to screw us for more money. Its a die die situation invented by morons who are flying in Lear jets and eating our productivity to feed their coke addictions. 16:10 is a good ratio for a 24 or 27 inch monitor to do work that is efficient and fits the size of the information we need to process to feed ourselves with. Any other size is something that parasitic scum are foisting on us with fashion, money and evil as their motivation.
I am so pleased that the absurdity of the screen in TFA is being showered with scorn. Most previous discussions of the ratshit movie monitor being the only thing you could buy has brought nothing but scorn from all the mindless morons who only use digital devices to watch soul sucking video content from their moms basements - they don't produce anything and don't see why us un-trendy people who actually have to work for a living by doing creative stuff should want anything other than a widescreen television monitor to work on. They would say fuck off and die because widescreen is trendy and you are just a dinosaur who isn't moving with the fashion of the times because you cant adapt.
Turns out that when the question gets asked the right way we don't want widescreen monitors to work on. Don't get me started on all that fucking space wasted at the top of the screen by the trend mongering ribbon bar that micro-sloth foisted on us so that it could differentiate itself from all the free office software in its free school software programs. What was wrong with the mega efficient drop down tree view menu?
Wake up you scumbags, everything the marketing droids are using to exploit you is being gleefully sucked up to as the new shiny thing that must be better than anything old farts used because its new. Its not true, half the fashions that capture youth because they are new are cynical marketing ploys to destroy the existing market players with fashion and have absolutely nothing to do with giving you something better to use.
Enjoy trying to use a touch tablet interface on your muliti monitor programming CAD station setup at work, enjoy the full screen only applications as you try to read off measurements from one document as you construct your drawing in another full screen application that you cant see at the same time. Yes Windows 8 may finally do what the Soviet Union, Hitler, Japan and Vietnam failed to do - fuck you.
Multiple monitors are only of any use if you can get a whole application to fit vertically on the damn thing - email, file browser, web browser, document, ERP application - otherwise you are forever scrolling up and down in the fucking things for no reason whatsoever except that most of the market is for people consuming wide screen movies. I have absolutely no problem ripping you people off and spending your earnings on my food housing and entertainment but I draw a line at you ruining my working experience with your toy interfaces. /rant off.
So you think US food recipes in cup measurements are wrong because we scientists like to measure in SI units because it makes our lives easy? I'm guessing that your mom cooks your food here, because cooking works great in cups spoons and other random measurements and is a right pain in the arse in grams ml and mm. The consumer is always right and you are not a cook.
lol
Deliberate or mistaken comment, still makes it funny. That's why its good to read an open self regulating forum, the mistakes get corrected with information rather than censorship. Prankster or idiot, well done and now be off with you, we have work to do.
The Imperial measurement system just happens to be slightly better tuned to everyday use than the metric system. The units fit better because of their size in food preparation for example, 75 grammes is nowhere as easy to comprehend as 3oz for example or a 1lb or 2lb loaf. Of course Newtons and the rest of the SI units work much better than Imperial units in science but actually in these days of instantaneous unit translation on digital devices it doesn't matter very much what units you sell things to as an end consumer who wants a lump of something in understandable units without lots of significant digits. The supply chain doesn't care what the units are.
Its particularly frustrating as well that every translation from an imperial unit to a metric unit has been used to gouge consumers by the marketplace. Buying petrol at 1.48 UK Pounds per liter would give anyone a heart attack if they realized that this was $9 per gallon, 5.60 UK pounds per US gallon, or 6.7 pounds per imperial gallon. He had a legitimate complaint that all of us grumpy old people have when changes introduce rip offs that the young don't see.
UKIP are a party particularly dedicated to getting the UK out of the European Union and find resonance with a lot of people in the UK who think that the country are getting a poor deal out of being in it. They also cite the European Union rules of unrestricted migration between members of the Union as causing breakdowns in social provisioning because of their unplanned nature. They emphatically deny that their opposition to unrestricted migration is because of racism but of course they do attract support from individuals who are racist because they are one of the few parties who do want to restrict migration.
I do not believe myself that Patrick was likely to be motivated by racial questions. It would not match his lack of interest in class or education that illuminated his support for people interested in astronomy for one thing and another thing is that he was a man of science who moved with the times and would be easily persuaded by the science that now says that racial differences are peanuts compared to politics and culture. Racists in a word are stupid and Patrick was not stupid.
You might argue that it would have been better for him to join a mainstream party and argue for them to make better provision for incoming migrants so that social provision for the existing population was not put under extreme pressure but at the time he joined UKIP any discussion of this nature was being sat on with the racist tag. The mainstream party's are only just beginning to take this issue seriously now. Sometimes it takes a pressure groups existence and popularity to get the mainstream to take peoples complaints seriously.
I don't blame Mr Moore for joining a pressure group, particularly one that just came second in two out of three recent local elections, that's democracy for you, do it by the vote and not the bullet, that's what we do. I am not personally a UKIP voter but I do think the mainstream parties need to take note of the grievances of the people who do vote for them. We still believe in democracy here in the UK and the irritating pressure groups that have reasonable requests and dont encourage hatred are a useful part of civil society. UKIP do not encourage hatred unlike the BNP who are not regarded as a useful part of civil society by the majority in this country.
A fellow of huge significance in our lifetimes, so many of us will admit to having been influenced by his enthusiasm for astronomy and quite frankly his bravery in being himself in a world increasingly obsessed with vain self promotion. This is not to say that he was not dedicated to helping others because he is well known for tirelessly working to help any individual who asked him for help. It takes moments of searching the web to discover that he talked and wrote to countless individuals throughout his life with advice and encouragement about their interest in astronomy.
In some ways he predates the internet in his understanding that direct communication has tremendous value, in typewritten letters and time for people he met. Today we have this great digital channel where we hunger for connection through twitter, forums, email, Facebook and he did all of this with the tools of his era - connect. So top appreciation for being one of the first people in the world to join up the thrill and excitement of those in a fascinating profession with us the amateurs and the interested in space and astronomy. He was doing citizen science before the concept really existed.
And like most interesting people in the world apart from his profession he had other passions in life Cricket and particularly music, you only have to see something on YouTube showing him playing the Xylophone to understand that. Oh and that's the other thing, he obviously had a seriously funny sense of humor.
Do appreciate the twinkle in his eye at the closing words of this recent interview (skip down to number 10)
http://www.philipwilliams.uk.com/characters-on-the-coastline.html
We will be watching that candle and having a chuckle.
Thank you Patrick for passing on the light.
Or as an alternative to Songbird on Windows which doesn't do Podcasts (and doesn't look like it ever will) Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ is pretty good, especially if you pair it up with Winamp http://www.winamp.com/ for Shoutcast streaming radio.
There is no scientific proof that dihydrogen oxide is safe either but people continue to use the stuff.
What we actually have going on here is that you are being terminally stupid, a crime given the couple of million years of evolution that went into the underused mechanism that is your brain. You see you have fallen for the current propoaganda war of the extremely wealthy who are manipulating you and the rest of the zombies.
Everything we do now and everything we have ever done has been risky, from falling off a horse and breaking your leg to holding your arm up to your head for 5 hours a day for 12 years and developing a fault in your nervous system, everything carries a risk. The thing is that a lot of the risks we face in the present are infintesimaly smaller than the ones we used to face and determining the causality is a lot harder than root causing my broken leg to falling ten feet onto a rock from my horse. So its harder to associate cause with effect today and guess what, people with an agenda have noticed this and are using it to manipulate the way you think, using it to make you do what they want you to do. If I had a ton of money and liked the way things worked I would be very keen to stop any scientifically driven popularist nonsense like reducing my income by spending my investment profits on stupid shit like the environment, health care for the slave class or god forbid mitigating climate change. So lets spend a couple of hundred mil a year with some like minded friends on a concerted campaign to discredit scientific opinion in the minds of the plebs so that we can put our views in their heads instead. It worked like a treat for tobacco for decades so it should be a pushover.
And it is a pushover, you all bleat the same storyline that the propaganda machine has fed you, there are two sides to the story, science is pretty sure about something but there are a few paid shills who scream at the top of their expense account funded voices that all the rest of them, the rest of the scientific establishment are conspiritorial liers with a funded agenda to fool the public - follow the money they shout, follow the money! With good reason of course because they have to disguise their own immorality somehow.
So now we have a story with two sides, ninety eight percent of the academic world using the scientific methodology of testing a hypothesis with available evidence belive on the balance of probabilities that a hypothesis is correct, and a few mavericks and funded shills say something else. All of a sudden the 2% view becomes weighted at 50% in the media and a few schills and a couple of nutters can persuade the whole world that black might be white that water may flow uphill and that you might prefer permanant slavery to being a free citizen.
Well good luck to you and the rest of the zombies, I hope you enjoy your continued slavery and the rotting environment you have chosen to live in. Its not too late to wake up of course, I'm rather hoping that it happens before something serious like arbitary loss making wars to ensure the profitability of oil companies happens though. Ooops it already did, wonder what awefullness is comming next.
Oh and as for the mobile phone thing, if it bothers you then I suggest you dont use one for five hours a day for twelve years, for one thing your body is likely to end up lopsided.
Have you taken the time to check the allowed arsenic levels in your meat know it all? http://healthyfoodaction.org/?q=issues/banning-arsenic-meat
Same goes for me Taco. Also lost my low id moving jobs between the UK and Sweden and back again. Slashdot is still a great concept and still has some of the best threaded discussions on the web. Still has a community feel with the memes and OS wars revisited occasionally. So thanks to you and the team.
Interestingly I see fewer and fewer trolls these days, all the really kooky and unpleasant posters are doing it for real. They really do think that for example, Hitler was doing the right thing in exterminating the Jews and that anyone with your views is due for extermination too. I'm not sure when the world went from a state of general tolerance to one of polarized hatred but I'm afraid I have to blame American politics.
Slashdot is unique because its editorial policy is defined by a vast range of users who mostly keep things real. It is streets ahead of the moderated BBC website commenting system for example. I rarely swear on Slashdot but want to every time I use the BBC site.
So here's to another 15 years of Slashdot!
1) Immanentize the eschaton
2) ???
3) Profit!
Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) are designed to fail safe using active intervention mechanisms and totally don't fail safe if the active mechanism screws up as it did in Fukushima. Personally I would dig up the long dead generals of the nuclear weapon testing era and Kill Them all again for the crime against humanity that they committed. What crime you ask? The crime of denying the world cheap and safe nuclear power.
All of the modern worlds reactors are fundamentally unsafe PWR reactors which were designed and created because the only technology available came from the manufacture of plutonium. Now the only technology available is plutonium generating fundamentally unsafe PWR reactors with so many billions invested in it that we could never build anything else. Its also the reason that Iran can build a nuclear weapon, because all nuclear technology is basically designed to make plutonium for weapons.
The consequence is going to be that we stop using nuclear power altogether just as soon as people realize just what a shit technology is actually being used. Never mind global warming, at least thats only going to kill our grand kids, PWR reactors could easily kill millions of people right now.
Germany, Japan, Sweden have all committed to get rid of nuclear power because they have woken up to the fact that the technology we have now is a total fuckup. Only the Chinese and Indians are likely to carry on with it because they are working on alternative fuel cycle reactors which really are fail safe.
We will have to wait and see if the super rich in America whip the population into line and carry on with PWR power stations or if the sheep wake up and get the whole lot banned. PWR reactors are not fail safe and every hundred years or so one is going to go critical and flood vast areas with radioactive waste. Good luck with that long term.
The answer isn't always "censorship" of what people say. We already have laws about inciting violence which ought to be able to extract damages from people who have incited the violence after the event even if we cannot censor what they say before it. You say the makers have no blame associated with them but I disagree. If the intent of the film was to incite violence then they are to blame. Western law is already quite capable of considering intent. I doubt that the law would find any intent to incite violence in the publishing of The Satanic Verses or the Dutch Cartoons, but I suspect they would in this film.
I note that the businesses which have control over access to film trailers online have sensibly pulled it themselves so civil society found a way of getting it offline fairly quickly anyway. Society has dealt with it without any special laws pandering to extremists.
The riots might be stopped more quickly if there was a mechanism that clearly showed the rioters that even if our free speech allows people to say what they want to, we don't have to sanction everything they say as being approved of by our democratic States. This is not censorship or an inquisition or the implementation of religious law, its diplomacy.
As for the actual rioters and the people telling them to riot, well they are of course to blame for the deaths and injuries absolutely. The States that have the riots should be doing as much as possible to stop them and would be open to strong criticism if they don't.
As ever the discussion on this site has ranged widely and usefully, it is an amazing thing to be able to draw on so many peoples thoughts in a discussion. I hope I have learned from it. This is a complicated subject and it does not have a simple answer. We should certainly beware politicians who claim that there is a simple answer.
Any country that cant find some way of deleting the offensive excoritating rubbish that this film represents doesnt deserve to belong to the world community whatever santimonious freespeech bullshit they go on about. If you go online and threaten the president it wont take long for your free speech to put you in a cell. So how some right wing nutjobs can be allowed to kill an ambassador and hundreds of thick rioting foriegners I dont understand at all. This just makes the US look even more arrogant and stupid than usual. Oh and dont think that I dont believe that information should be free becuause it should, but that doesnt extend to blatant offensive trolling directly causing many peoples deaths. How effing stupid can you get? Get them locked up and pull the video. Free speech my arse.