If anyone would like to stump up the air fare to the States - I volunteer to personally saw Robert Billingsleys head off with a blunt plastic spoon.
As reported, it seems that the head librarian is being sacked in order to make the city commisioner look good, makes you wonder what other vile acts of crass injustice Mr Billingsley has committed on the way to his highly paid public office.
If you define quality as fitness for purpose then yes audio tapes have a more appropriate sound inside a noisy car - but that wasnt what I was talking about.
I was talking about the highly developed analogue chain that at least initialy sounded better than Cd's. We are quibbling about small matters here - nothing like the crap that we routinely put up with on low bitrate mp3's.
And it is therefore a good time to buy a decent analog camera before they become antiques - the digital ones are convenient but still not as good at taking pictures as film cameras. Its just like the arrival of CD all over again - we will have to spend the next 15 years looking at shite pictures untill digital catches up with analogue - still arguably not the case with CD's
Space technology is advanced engineering with applications in sustainable technology. Never mind the fact that a lot of our knowledge about environmental impact comes from satellite observations.
However it is generally acknowledged that the organisational imperatives of NASA are too conservative to disseminate or even use the new technology to reduce its environmental impact.
However there is plenty of hope that the competitions that are open to speculative developers will both find disruptive technologies faster but also that commercial exploitation will supply systems that have lower environmental impact to users in non space technology sectors. Fuel cells have been part of space technology for a long time - its only the need to power cell phones that has created a wider market for them though.
Yup, and the broads I know all seem delighted by a wide range of frequencies
The marketing on this product is uber-cool so whatever the operating system that is used, it certainly rings bells in the same market that the traditional audiophile suppliers have been going after for several years - multiroom sound systems. All it needs is a few reviews in the audiophile press to declare it a low cost wonder and it should sell well, it is actually a cheap component by the historical standards of the world of Hi-Fi.
Well said. I nominate anyone who has scruples about squishing a few inadequate martian microbes with our super strong bio-engineered armour plated vacuum growing mega-sunflowers.. I nominate them for being both spoil sports and as candidates for a Darwin Award.
No Realy - Having said that it annoys me intensely that the churches taking advantage of our religious memes are so primitive that they havent got much further than a set of worries about 1st centuary Palestinian social mores - when they could be focusing on our collective impact on the environment which would appear to be an ongoing concern since the industrial revolution. In fact if you are looking for the most modern and relevant religion it would probably be environmental fanaticism. Having said that I've never liked goatee beards and I am not going to stop eating steak anytime soon myself.
A proper understanding of what lifeforms are already on mars and an effort to ensure that they are conserved would also be in our interest because they will already have the most usefull genes for surviving in the Martian environment - even or perhaps especially if they are rare and difficult to find.
This is a significant article - in 100 years time it could well be one of the first postings on the net for the creation of forests that now carpet mars ( ok these forests may consist of large purple leathery leafed things 2 cm high - but forest sounds much more interesting).
Not to mention the fact that in 400 years time we live in bioengineered tree houses and 75% of our food is grown in the ocean - as this has the least deleterious impact on the environment.
This is a tremendously exciting direction for research to be going - it has no connotations of screwing up our existing environment and it looks like Mars has little existing biology going on on it - so why not create an ecology on Mars? Fantastic!
I'm going to start my own Jihad against Al Quaida and the Intelligent design crowd as they are both motivated by the same desire to re-educate the rest of us.
I'm going to buy some guns and set up a web site under the banner "organisation of pragmatic humanists who have come to the sorry conclusion that the only way to deal with 'do gooder fanatics' is to join their bandwaggon and use violence such as cutting their ears off with meat cleavers because life is too short to put up with this crap."
I have no objection to special interest groups setting up their own schools to indoctrinate their own children (memes are not bad for their victims) but I strongly object to them trying to ram their memes down my throat or other members of the general population.
A speed limit does encourage a safer flow of trafic than an unregulated speed regime but it does not necessarily make the road safer.
The speed limit is not the safe speed to drive, it is an estimate of a safe speed to drive in normal conditions. If it is raining you should drive slower, and arguably if it is 3am and the road is empty it is a lot slower than the safe speed to drive. In fact there is no safe speed to drive at, only speeds at which either the risk of collision is lower or the risk of consequential death or injury is lower.
It is the conflict between the drivers often more accurate perception of a safe driving speed and the arbitary speeds set by a comittee for political reasons that brings the speed limit into disrepute.
This being the case people will always speed. The nanny state may well decide to overcome this resistance by installing speed regulators in our vehicles, however this is unlikely to substantially reduce the risk of serious collisions untill speed limits are artificially reduced to very low speeds. The money wasted on this effort would be better spent on dynamically allocated speed limits which take account of the road conditions.
Sometimes I wish the citizens of the UK had guns just like the Americans because an armed revolt might be the only way to end the new regulations and interference in peoples lives, a return to right wing government would be very welcome. Currently however Stalin would be proud of tony blairs New Labour Party.
Common sense suggests that the police should be provided with any evidence that enables them to trace the criminals who dropped rocks onto a freight train off a bridge.
Common sense also suggests that Indymedia have a right to control the disposition of the private information that may exist on their servers in the same way that any business information would normally be expected to remain private.
We have a legal system and laws that should be capable of resolving the two conflicting interests. However it would appear that the seizure of the server in order to obtain information on the rock dropping criminals does not ensure the normal expectation of privicy that the Indymedia business would expect to enjoy. The police have the opportunity to take a copy of and browse all of Indymedias private information at their lesiure and this is clearly not normal.
The solution is either that the police should have an expectation that Indymedia releases all relevant information about the rock droppers or that an independant body be allowed access to Indymedia servers to obtain forensic evidence.
The problem is that both parties are right and that the detail of the application of the law is broken.
You only have to look at the "no brand" food in a supermarket in the UK to realise that the price of "branded" stuff is 50% advertising. Whilst a market predicated on satisfying the needs of brainwashed 14 year old girls is undoubtedly profitable, it is also a far more reliable indicator of "The end of days" than any loony branch cult prediction. Any half observant god would be dropping twin towers sized chunks of sodium chlorate from orbit by now in order to exterminated the weeds and get a good clean restart from a sterile base.
Shares in EMI music collapsed on the rumour that the new Coldplay cd was going to be delayed by a couple of months past year end. The new Coldplay cd could be utter bollocks musically speaking but if its a bit like the last one then it will sell ten million copies on the back of advertising and massive hype. (actualy not realy my taste but it sounds fine to me).
Speaking with a degree of expertise that the status of old git entitles me to : Something the music industry does not seem to have recognised is that most of the youth of today think that music as a thing in itself is bollocks. No one talks about it and no one is interested in it. I dont know why this is but outside of a passing interest in boy/girl bands knowledge of and interest in recorded music is zero by the time people start work. They buy boxed set dvd's of tv shows instead. This may be because pop music has now matured and has ceased to be culturally relevant - in which case the desperate attempt by the music business of today to screw the brainwashed customer one last time is irrelevant. Recorded music is finished, relegated to the trash heap of quaint old history like the music hall and fox hunting. On the other hand it could be because todays brittiny spears sounds just like yesterdays brittiny spears and just like tomorrows brittiny spears and we would probably get more entertainment out of projectile vomiting than listening to her (and I mean doing it not watching).
The one thing that does seem clear to me is that I cannot afford to buy any more recorded music, I spend the money I have on live music. They could start burning file sharers at the stake in front of the local Tower records and I wouldnt buy one more cd, not even if they put their eyes out with battery acid first. Meanwhile I will be tuning into one of several thousand available internet radio streams wondering when they are going to be stopped in order to entice me to buy more cds.
Bugger that, its time I had another go at learning bass guitar or better still the Djembe - its more sociable.
Actualy this one actualy gave me the solution to something that had been bugging me ever since university - the wave/particle paradox.
All explained by this simple little experiment:
The wavelike properties of an electron particle shown by firing a single electron particle at a youngs slit experiment giving rise to an wave like interference pattern on the other side of the double slits
- its all because for a single electron particle there were two equaly possible histories - it could have gone through either slit, and the wave like interference pattern is just demonstrating the quantum probabalistic nature of the universe. The probability of the electron going through either slit is 1/2 so the historical evidence of the electrons path is just like it went through either slit - and the only sort of evidence we have for something coming through both slits is an interference patteren from a wave.
I'm so glad all thats cleared up, now I know that sometimes particles look like waves - when quantum probability enters the equation. Its so simple Jim - even a child could understand it!
fun book though, through the link, very hitchikers, but like for real.
Theres still no better way to get a bunch of people to collaborate over solving a problem than sticking ideas on postit notes on a framework sketched out on a Very Large Piece of Paper (TM.) stuck on a wall.
What I could do with is a way of capturing these things and then cutting and pasting portions of the thing and moving them around and then reprojecting them, rinse and repeat..
I could do it with a laser scanner (of the sort used to capture egyptian tombs) and a high deffinition projector I guess.
Good for web site design, FMEA, Business process re-engineering and the capture of complex systems.
No time to lose, I'm off to start up a new business right now, just as soon as I have recorded the idea on a postit note stuck on my monitor. Now where did I leave them....
I'm not laughing whilst the USA mutates into its own version of the Taliban.
Seperation of state and religion was a neat trick that took Europeans several centuries to achieve. It appears that our young American cousins are prepared to repeat the process just to make sure it was a good idea.
I am not looking forward to the bit where the American Inquisition burns us all at the stake for being pragmatic humanists and having no "beliefs".
Religion is a sucessfull meme for its followers, churches and their books are parasitical leeches on that meme.
Creationism and intelligent design are interesting concepts that belong in the philosophy classroom where you have a personal choice about how relevant they are. They do not belong in the science classroom.
Well work is over for the day so its off down the pub to celebrate...
The computer game market is now essentialy the same as the Pop music market. The product is marketed in fashion waves and is purchased by 13yr old boys. Unlike pop music however for some reason girls dont seem to be so keen.
In the begining computer games were only marketable to wealthy older people who could afford the computers and were clever enough to want to make primitive computers do something useful. There were also things known as video arcade games with which children wore the phosphor out on their parents black and white television screens playing pong - or on which drunks sat down to and attempted to hammer buttons off whilst in the persona of pac man - trapped in a maze being persued by ghosts.
So contrasting the current market with the earlier one is obviously a fairly stupid thing to do, Brittiny Spears has little in common with Aaron Copland. And the modern video arcade game computer or console is probably not significantly less human than its owner in the Turing test. Things have changed.
However it does have to be said that running around in a virtual world effectively playing paintball is a strange mismatch of activities - sitting on ones arse, eating donuts, drinking sugary soft drinks and clagging up your arteries with fat whilst pretending to lead a physically challenging adrenalin pumping existance in a virtual world is also a fairly stupid thing to do. Go and play paintball if you enjoy that sort of experience, its bloody fantastic by comparison.
The virtual environment of a computer on the other hand lends itself well to more intellectual activities which even the avid game addict has recognised by claiming that "I dont play games that have no plot".
The game industry needs to look outside its current teenage fashion market if it is to achieve the sort of respect that the film industry aspires to.
It may well be trying to do just that - but if it is, it hasnt reached crusty old farts like me who would rather configure obscure Linux server functions and occasionaly play the original demo version of Doom than buy what is on offer. A demo version that seems sufficiently representative of the last 11 years of video gaming that I doubt I have missed anything.
Give me "Zac Mckracken and the Alien mind benders" any day, that had me microwaving an egg long before the Cambridge Trojan Room Coffee Machine saw the light of day. Mind you, tell that to the youngsters of today and they wont believe you.
You pose the only solution that sugests how we might keep jobs in the "west" which seems viable to me, work smarter not harder. Something along the lines of creating a workforce that cannot be assembled from talented but inexperienced people. Organisations that rely upon investment in teams over a period of time and have talented and experienced people.
Exactly what might make these people special does not seem clear, it will not be motivation or cleverness as these are replicatable anywhere. Possibly the marketing department or any other portion of an organisation which relies on cultural expertise? Expertise that analysts have developed by working with people in particular corporate cultures?
Other routes such as government regulation to maintain jobs that are exportable all seem anti competitive and therefore doomed to failure in the long run.
Ironic realy that potentialy the only jobs which may not be exportable are those in organisations where a job for life is not seen as laughable.
192.168.1.100 - oooh so peachy peachy peachy, I've got you now !!
You'd better watch out sucker, if you have XP service pack two, my TEREDO server knows exactly where you are and i can tunnel straight through your router and your firewall on UDP, just try running ethereal (dont forget WinPcap) sometime and watch my packets sneaking through. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!! youre all gonna die!! ha ah ha haha hah !! you are OWNed !!
Of course Linux is so sub human it mostly isnt clever enough to do TEREDO yet so you should be safe if you reformat your hard disk and coat it in fresh penguin.
And for you loosers who google for TEREDO and dont believe I can do it, and think I'm fakin it, just try the ethereal test, its for real, youve been hacked !!
I agree, soundbite culture will not allow you to use the figure that most closely represents reality. You have to face the fact that most of the media is in a ratings arms race as to who can tell the most evil story. The median is far more representative of most peoples experience, its just far more exciting to talk about the average which represents no one but leaves everyone feeling dissatisfied with their lot in life.
On the other hand you could ask why 5% of the population is paying itself millions of dollars and creating this false average value. But that would be "communism" and that is as we all know a bad thing.
I say that whatever king Bill says is law, its for the econonmy stupid, for freedom and free trade. All you whining middle class workers just have to face economic reality - you are worth nothing. What the economy needs is cheap labour from abroard and if King Bill cant have it then all of your jobs will have to be outsourced to India - thats the real agenda here.
In a way he has a point, if his business wants to compete and remain the most profitable software company in the world then he has to use the cheapest workforce he can find. Sadly that means that the US i.t. worker can look forward to a future of declining saleries and job opportunities. As people often point out the US economy is the most sucessful in the world and has achieved this status by lightly regulated raw capitalism.
Its time that IT workers retrained as telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and middle management executives (burger flippers). After all thats what happened to the steel workers, ship builders, coal miners, semiconductor fab workers, Car workers, metal workers, electronics assemblers.
Whats so special about your job that it cant be exported to the third world like all the others?
In the radio series Marvin is not a funny football like creature, the film makers have made a serious error by making him look like a cartoon character. His presence in the radio series always had an air of a grave metal humanoid, at one point in a telephone conversation from Milliways resturant at the end of the universe he is washing cars in the car park having arrived there by living through all history (with a pain in all the diodes down my left side).. and threatens and then actualy does put his head in a bucket of water. There is no way that this stupid creation could put its head in a bucket of water. The point about Marvin is that he is a noble and ancient miserable human being trapped in an everlasting menial robot like form - picture him as an unemployed english butler with an iq of 800 that everybody ignores because his conversation is always so miserable.
Marvin will go down like a large piece of plastic excrement in the uk, it appears to be neither human like, subtle or ironic as the original character was.
Having said that I havent seen the film so I am still looking forward to enjoying whatever else the film version has to offer.
Thank god someone has some common sense around here!
Its so sad seeing the great US of A being buried under the tide of politically incorrect rubbish available on the internet
If the state pays for it then the state should be in control of it. Though idealy the best way to deal with the problem would be to monitor all of the transactions all of the time and to detect those truckers abusing the service.
The proper course of action would then be to imprision them without trial and re-educate them. I'm sure modern interrogation techniques accompanied by powerfull psychotropic drugs, regular beatings, poor food and watching all their relatives being burned to death would ensure that they did not misbehave again.
I just cannot understand why a poor third world nation like China can be better at this sort of thing than the USA. I blame lax moral standards myself, its about time god fearing christians got organised and butchered all those heathen non-believers, theres just too many of them. This is another place where the US is falling far behind the progressive modern world - when was the last time a christian suicide bomber killed, mutilated and maimed dozens of supposedly innocent young people in a coffee bar?
Its time the USA pulled its socks up and imposed some decency on the internet before it becomes the laughing stock of the world.
Yes I agree, the id system would be very useful after a terroist attack -
With an integrated id tracking system you would also have records of all financial transactions, all email, phone calls, web browsing, tax records, health records, employment records, education, access to public services, car registration number, periodicals suscribed to, cctv cameras walked past.
You could pretty soon identify all the people that the terrorist had ever met, been to school with, worked with, played football with, eaten in the same resturant as - and you could immediately start reading these peoples email and arranging for their future interrogation after arrest for minor traffic offenses. You could even pay their neighbours to spy on them! In fact you could do anything that the Former East German Stazi did - only better!!
People forget the cold war when it was a battle between an ultra leftwing communist totalitarian regime - USSR and an ultra right wing democratic totalitarian regime - USA. In those days it was often difficult to distinguish between the madder aspects of State power in the two camps. However it was posible to complain and remove ones own worst transgressions because you could point to the other side abusing that power (at least from the democratic side as we found in the UK when the stop and search SUSS laws were abolished). Now this comparison is no longer possible and stupid bureaucrats are implementing all of the worst nightmares of totalitarian state control with hardly a complaint being raised. In fact if you do complain the thought police accuse you of not being patriotic.
On the other hand since no one looks likely to complain I look forward with enthusiasm to reading and laughing about newspaper scare stories about the weekly jailing of hundreds of innocent people who are victims of faults in the id system - after all they deserve to rot in gaol for not paying more atention to what their governments are up to.
It could do great things on earth too:- Surely as part of an automated construction process the added cost of custom designs will be exactly that - the cost of a new design. The actual manufacturing process has no added costs for unique designs assuming that they use similar material content - ie overall size. This sounds like an opportunity for suburban estates in which each house is built to a different design - and hurrah to that! The contouring process allows for curved outer and inner surfaces with any amount of detailed patterning, the machine could easily construct flying buttresses and emplace ready made gargoyles along your guttering should you be interested in that mediaeval cathedral look. Remember that we are moving from the age of uniformity of automated production to the age of uniqueness of automated production.
If the interest in the use of mass production line robotic jeans making machines to make unique designs to your measurements is anything to go by, then there should be plenty of interest from people wanting to buy a custom designed house that they themselves have designed - or at least chosen the design of. This becomes a more viable proposition when you have a mass house production robot that completes the process quicker and at lower cost than current methods.
I can see this technology being adopted by the builders of high values properties as well as use in quickly building shells for low cost housing in disaster areas. On the other hand as with so many breakthroughs in technology it could be 15 years before the process is in mainstream use...
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone would like to stump up the air fare to the States - I volunteer to personally saw Robert Billingsleys head off with a blunt plastic spoon.
As reported, it seems that the head librarian is being sacked in order to make the city commisioner look good, makes you wonder what other vile acts of crass injustice Mr Billingsley has committed on the way to his highly paid public office.
If you define quality as fitness for purpose then yes audio tapes have a more appropriate sound inside a noisy car - but that wasnt what I was talking about.
I was talking about the highly developed analogue chain that at least initialy sounded better than Cd's. We are quibbling about small matters here - nothing like the crap that we routinely put up with on low bitrate mp3's.
And it is therefore a good time to buy a decent analog camera before they become antiques - the digital ones are convenient but still not as good at taking pictures as film cameras. Its just like the arrival of CD all over again - we will have to spend the next 15 years looking at shite pictures untill digital catches up with analogue - still arguably not the case with CD's
Space technology is advanced engineering with applications in sustainable technology. Never mind the fact that a lot of our knowledge about environmental impact comes from satellite observations.
However it is generally acknowledged that the organisational imperatives of NASA are too conservative to disseminate or even use the new technology to reduce its environmental impact.
However there is plenty of hope that the competitions that are open to speculative developers will both find disruptive technologies faster but also that commercial exploitation will supply systems that have lower environmental impact to users in non space technology sectors. Fuel cells have been part of space technology for a long time - its only the need to power cell phones that has created a wider market for them though.
Yup, and the broads I know all seem delighted by a wide range of frequencies
The marketing on this product is uber-cool so whatever the operating system that is used, it certainly rings bells in the same market that the traditional audiophile suppliers have been going after for several years - multiroom sound systems. All it needs is a few reviews in the audiophile press to declare it a low cost wonder and it should sell well, it is actually a cheap component by the historical standards of the world of Hi-Fi.
Well said. I nominate anyone who has scruples about squishing a few inadequate martian microbes with our super strong bio-engineered armour plated vacuum growing mega-sunflowers .. I nominate them for being both spoil sports and as candidates for a Darwin Award.
No Realy - Having said that it annoys me intensely that the churches taking advantage of our religious memes are so primitive that they havent got much further than a set of worries about 1st centuary Palestinian social mores - when they could be focusing on our collective impact on the environment which would appear to be an ongoing concern since the industrial revolution. In fact if you are looking for the most modern and relevant religion it would probably be environmental fanaticism. Having said that I've never liked goatee beards and I am not going to stop eating steak anytime soon myself.
A proper understanding of what lifeforms are already on mars and an effort to ensure that they are conserved would also be in our interest because they will already have the most usefull genes for surviving in the Martian environment - even or perhaps especially if they are rare and difficult to find.
This is a significant article - in 100 years time it could well be one of the first postings on the net for the creation of forests that now carpet mars ( ok these forests may consist of large purple leathery leafed things 2 cm high - but forest sounds much more interesting).
Not to mention the fact that in 400 years time we live in bioengineered tree houses and 75% of our food is grown in the ocean - as this has the least deleterious impact on the environment.
This is a tremendously exciting direction for research to be going - it has no connotations of screwing up our existing environment and it looks like Mars has little existing biology going on on it - so why not create an ecology on Mars? Fantastic!
Its a hoax
I'm getting very tired of these people.
I'm going to start my own Jihad against Al Quaida and the Intelligent design crowd as they are both motivated by the same desire to re-educate the rest of us.
I'm going to buy some guns and set up a web site under the banner "organisation of pragmatic humanists who have come to the sorry conclusion that the only way to deal with 'do gooder fanatics' is to join their bandwaggon and use violence such as cutting their ears off with meat cleavers because life is too short to put up with this crap."
I have no objection to special interest groups setting up their own schools to indoctrinate their own children (memes are not bad for their victims) but I strongly object to them trying to ram their memes down my throat or other members of the general population.
A speed limit does encourage a safer flow of trafic than an unregulated speed regime but it does not necessarily make the road safer.
The speed limit is not the safe speed to drive, it is an estimate of a safe speed to drive in normal conditions. If it is raining you should drive slower, and arguably if it is 3am and the road is empty it is a lot slower than the safe speed to drive. In fact there is no safe speed to drive at, only speeds at which either the risk of collision is lower or the risk of consequential death or injury is lower.
It is the conflict between the drivers often more accurate perception of a safe driving speed and the arbitary speeds set by a comittee for political reasons that brings the speed limit into disrepute.
This being the case people will always speed. The nanny state may well decide to overcome this resistance by installing speed regulators in our vehicles, however this is unlikely to substantially reduce the risk of serious collisions untill speed limits are artificially reduced to very low speeds. The money wasted on this effort would be better spent on dynamically allocated speed limits which take account of the road conditions.
Sometimes I wish the citizens of the UK had guns just like the Americans because an armed revolt might be the only way to end the new regulations and interference in peoples lives, a return to right wing government would be very welcome. Currently however Stalin would be proud of tony blairs New Labour Party.
Common sense suggests that the police should be provided with any evidence that enables them to trace the criminals who dropped rocks onto a freight train off a bridge.
Common sense also suggests that Indymedia have a right to control the disposition of the private information that may exist on their servers in the same way that any business information would normally be expected to remain private.
We have a legal system and laws that should be capable of resolving the two conflicting interests. However it would appear that the seizure of the server in order to obtain information on the rock dropping criminals does not ensure the normal expectation of privicy that the Indymedia business would expect to enjoy. The police have the opportunity to take a copy of and browse all of Indymedias private information at their lesiure and this is clearly not normal.
The solution is either that the police should have an expectation that Indymedia releases all relevant information about the rock droppers or that an independant body be allowed access to Indymedia servers to obtain forensic evidence.
The problem is that both parties are right and that the detail of the application of the law is broken.
Theres only one word for this - Google-fish.
Seconded.
You only have to look at the "no brand" food in a supermarket in the UK to realise that the price of "branded" stuff is 50% advertising. Whilst a market predicated on satisfying the needs of brainwashed 14 year old girls is undoubtedly profitable, it is also a far more reliable indicator of "The end of days" than any loony branch cult prediction. Any half observant god would be dropping twin towers sized chunks of sodium chlorate from orbit by now in order to exterminated the weeds and get a good clean restart from a sterile base.
Shares in EMI music collapsed on the rumour that the new Coldplay cd was going to be delayed by a couple of months past year end. The new Coldplay cd could be utter bollocks musically speaking but if its a bit like the last one then it will sell ten million copies on the back of advertising and massive hype. (actualy not realy my taste but it sounds fine to me).
Speaking with a degree of expertise that the status of old git entitles me to : Something the music industry does not seem to have recognised is that most of the youth of today think that music as a thing in itself is bollocks. No one talks about it and no one is interested in it. I dont know why this is but outside of a passing interest in boy/girl bands knowledge of and interest in recorded music is zero by the time people start work. They buy boxed set dvd's of tv shows instead. This may be because pop music has now matured and has ceased to be culturally relevant - in which case the desperate attempt by the music business of today to screw the brainwashed customer one last time is irrelevant. Recorded music is finished, relegated to the trash heap of quaint old history like the music hall and fox hunting. On the other hand it could be because todays brittiny spears sounds just like yesterdays brittiny spears and just like tomorrows brittiny spears and we would probably get more entertainment out of projectile vomiting than listening to her (and I mean doing it not watching).
The one thing that does seem clear to me is that I cannot afford to buy any more recorded music, I spend the money I have on live music. They could start burning file sharers at the stake in front of the local Tower records and I wouldnt buy one more cd, not even if they put their eyes out with battery acid first. Meanwhile I will be tuning into one of several thousand available internet radio streams wondering when they are going to be stopped in order to entice me to buy more cds.
Bugger that, its time I had another go at learning bass guitar or better still the Djembe - its more sociable.
Remember The Stranglers "Quark Stangeness and Charm"?
http://motionmountain.dse.nl/
also
Actualy this one actualy gave me the solution to something that had been bugging me ever since university - the wave/particle paradox.
All explained by this simple little experiment:
The wavelike properties of an electron particle shown by firing a single electron particle at a youngs slit experiment giving rise to an wave like interference pattern on the other side of the double slits
- its all because for a single electron particle there were two equaly possible histories - it could have gone through either slit, and the wave like interference pattern is just demonstrating the quantum probabalistic nature of the universe. The probability of the electron going through either slit is 1/2 so the historical evidence of the electrons path is just like it went through either slit - and the only sort of evidence we have for something coming through both slits is an interference patteren from a wave.
I'm so glad all thats cleared up, now I know that sometimes particles look like waves - when quantum probability enters the equation. Its so simple Jim - even a child could understand it!
fun book though, through the link, very hitchikers, but like for real.
Theres still no better way to get a bunch of people to collaborate over solving a problem than sticking ideas on postit notes on a framework sketched out on a Very Large Piece of Paper (TM.) stuck on a wall.
What I could do with is a way of capturing these things and then cutting and pasting portions of the thing and moving them around and then reprojecting them, rinse and repeat..
I could do it with a laser scanner (of the sort used to capture egyptian tombs) and a high deffinition projector I guess.
Good for web site design, FMEA, Business process re-engineering and the capture of complex systems.
No time to lose, I'm off to start up a new business right now, just as soon as I have recorded the idea on a postit note stuck on my monitor. Now where did I leave them....
I'm not laughing whilst the USA mutates into its own version of the Taliban.
Seperation of state and religion was a neat trick that took Europeans several centuries to achieve. It appears that our young American cousins are prepared to repeat the process just to make sure it was a good idea.
I am not looking forward to the bit where the American Inquisition burns us all at the stake for being pragmatic humanists and having no "beliefs".
Religion is a sucessfull meme for its followers, churches and their books are parasitical leeches on that meme.
Creationism and intelligent design are interesting concepts that belong in the philosophy classroom where you have a personal choice about how relevant they are. They do not belong in the science classroom.
Well work is over for the day so its off down the pub to celebrate...
The computer game market is now essentialy the same as the Pop music market. The product is marketed in fashion waves and is purchased by 13yr old boys. Unlike pop music however for some reason girls dont seem to be so keen.
In the begining computer games were only marketable to wealthy older people who could afford the computers and were clever enough to want to make primitive computers do something useful. There were also things known as video arcade games with which children wore the phosphor out on their parents black and white television screens playing pong - or on which drunks sat down to and attempted to hammer buttons off whilst in the persona of pac man - trapped in a maze being persued by ghosts.
So contrasting the current market with the earlier one is obviously a fairly stupid thing to do, Brittiny Spears has little in common with Aaron Copland. And the modern video arcade game computer or console is probably not significantly less human than its owner in the Turing test. Things have changed.
However it does have to be said that running around in a virtual world effectively playing paintball is a strange mismatch of activities - sitting on ones arse, eating donuts, drinking sugary soft drinks and clagging up your arteries with fat whilst pretending to lead a physically challenging adrenalin pumping existance in a virtual world is also a fairly stupid thing to do. Go and play paintball if you enjoy that sort of experience, its bloody fantastic by comparison.
The virtual environment of a computer on the other hand lends itself well to more intellectual activities which even the avid game addict has recognised by claiming that "I dont play games that have no plot".
The game industry needs to look outside its current teenage fashion market if it is to achieve the sort of respect that the film industry aspires to.
It may well be trying to do just that - but if it is, it hasnt reached crusty old farts like me who would rather configure obscure Linux server functions and occasionaly play the original demo version of Doom than buy what is on offer. A demo version that seems sufficiently representative of the last 11 years of video gaming that I doubt I have missed anything.
Give me "Zac Mckracken and the Alien mind benders" any day, that had me microwaving an egg long before the Cambridge Trojan Room Coffee Machine saw the light of day. Mind you, tell that to the youngsters of today and they wont believe you.
You pose the only solution that sugests how we might keep jobs in the "west" which seems viable to me, work smarter not harder. Something along the lines of creating a workforce that cannot be assembled from talented but inexperienced people. Organisations that rely upon investment in teams over a period of time and have talented and experienced people.
Exactly what might make these people special does not seem clear, it will not be motivation or cleverness as these are replicatable anywhere. Possibly the marketing department or any other portion of an organisation which relies on cultural expertise? Expertise that analysts have developed by working with people in particular corporate cultures?
Other routes such as government regulation to maintain jobs that are exportable all seem anti competitive and therefore doomed to failure in the long run.
Ironic realy that potentialy the only jobs which may not be exportable are those in organisations where a job for life is not seen as laughable.
192.168.1.100 - oooh so peachy peachy peachy, I've got you now !!
You'd better watch out sucker, if you have XP service pack two, my TEREDO server knows exactly where you are and i can tunnel straight through your router and your firewall on UDP, just try running ethereal (dont forget WinPcap) sometime and watch my packets sneaking through. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!! youre all gonna die!! ha ah ha haha hah !! you are OWNed !!
Of course Linux is so sub human it mostly isnt clever enough to do TEREDO yet so you should be safe if you reformat your hard disk and coat it in fresh penguin.
And for you loosers who google for TEREDO and dont believe I can do it, and think I'm fakin it, just try the ethereal test, its for real, youve been hacked !!
I agree, soundbite culture will not allow you to use the figure that most closely represents reality. You have to face the fact that most of the media is in a ratings arms race as to who can tell the most evil story. The median is far more representative of most peoples experience, its just far more exciting to talk about the average which represents no one but leaves everyone feeling dissatisfied with their lot in life.
On the other hand you could ask why 5% of the population is paying itself millions of dollars and creating this false average value. But that would be "communism" and that is as we all know a bad thing.
I say that whatever king Bill says is law, its for the econonmy stupid, for freedom and free trade. All you whining middle class workers just have to face economic reality - you are worth nothing. What the economy needs is cheap labour from abroard and if King Bill cant have it then all of your jobs will have to be outsourced to India - thats the real agenda here.
In a way he has a point, if his business wants to compete and remain the most profitable software company in the world then he has to use the cheapest workforce he can find. Sadly that means that the US i.t. worker can look forward to a future of declining saleries and job opportunities. As people often point out the US economy is the most sucessful in the world and has achieved this status by lightly regulated raw capitalism.
Its time that IT workers retrained as telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and middle management executives (burger flippers). After all thats what happened to the steel workers, ship builders, coal miners, semiconductor fab workers, Car workers, metal workers, electronics assemblers.
Whats so special about your job that it cant be exported to the third world like all the others?
In the radio series Marvin is not a funny football like creature, the film makers have made a serious error by making him look like a cartoon character. His presence in the radio series always had an air of a grave metal humanoid, at one point in a telephone conversation from Milliways resturant at the end of the universe he is washing cars in the car park having arrived there by living through all history (with a pain in all the diodes down my left side) .. and threatens and then actualy does put his head in a bucket of water. There is no way that this stupid creation could put its head in a bucket of water. The point about Marvin is that he is a noble and ancient miserable human being trapped in an everlasting menial robot like form - picture him as an unemployed english butler with an iq of 800 that everybody ignores because his conversation is always so miserable.
Marvin will go down like a large piece of plastic excrement in the uk, it appears to be neither human like, subtle or ironic as the original character was.
Having said that I havent seen the film so I am still looking forward to enjoying whatever else the film version has to offer.
Thank god someone has some common sense around here!
Its so sad seeing the great US of A being buried under the tide of politically incorrect rubbish available on the internet
If the state pays for it then the state should be in control of it. Though idealy the best way to deal with the problem would be to monitor all of the transactions all of the time and to detect those truckers abusing the service.
The proper course of action would then be to imprision them without trial and re-educate them. I'm sure modern interrogation techniques accompanied by powerfull psychotropic drugs, regular beatings, poor food and watching all their relatives being burned to death would ensure that they did not misbehave again.
I just cannot understand why a poor third world nation like China can be better at this sort of thing than the USA. I blame lax moral standards myself, its about time god fearing christians got organised and butchered all those heathen non-believers, theres just too many of them. This is another place where the US is falling far behind the progressive modern world - when was the last time a christian suicide bomber killed, mutilated and maimed dozens of supposedly innocent young people in a coffee bar?
Its time the USA pulled its socks up and imposed some decency on the internet before it becomes the laughing stock of the world.
Yes I agree, the id system would be very useful after a terroist attack -
With an integrated id tracking system you would also have records of all financial transactions, all email, phone calls, web browsing, tax records, health records, employment records, education, access to public services, car registration number, periodicals suscribed to, cctv cameras walked past.
You could pretty soon identify all the people that the terrorist had ever met, been to school with, worked with, played football with, eaten in the same resturant as - and you could immediately start reading these peoples email and arranging for their future interrogation after arrest for minor traffic offenses. You could even pay their neighbours to spy on them! In fact you could do anything that the Former East German Stazi did - only better!!
People forget the cold war when it was a battle between an ultra leftwing communist totalitarian regime - USSR and an ultra right wing democratic totalitarian regime - USA. In those days it was often difficult to distinguish between the madder aspects of State power in the two camps. However it was posible to complain and remove ones own worst transgressions because you could point to the other side abusing that power (at least from the democratic side as we found in the UK when the stop and search SUSS laws were abolished). Now this comparison is no longer possible and stupid bureaucrats are implementing all of the worst nightmares of totalitarian state control with hardly a complaint being raised. In fact if you do complain the thought police accuse you of not being patriotic.
On the other hand since no one looks likely to complain I look forward with enthusiasm to reading and laughing about newspaper scare stories about the weekly jailing of hundreds of innocent people who are victims of faults in the id system - after all they deserve to rot in gaol for not paying more atention to what their governments are up to.
It could do great things on earth too:- Surely as part of an automated construction process the added cost of custom designs will be exactly that - the cost of a new design. The actual manufacturing process has no added costs for unique designs assuming that they use similar material content - ie overall size. This sounds like an opportunity for suburban estates in which each house is built to a different design - and hurrah to that! The contouring process allows for curved outer and inner surfaces with any amount of detailed patterning, the machine could easily construct flying buttresses and emplace ready made gargoyles along your guttering should you be interested in that mediaeval cathedral look. Remember that we are moving from the age of uniformity of automated production to the age of uniqueness of automated production.
If the interest in the use of mass production line robotic jeans making machines to make unique designs to your measurements is anything to go by, then there should be plenty of interest from people wanting to buy a custom designed house that they themselves have designed - or at least chosen the design of. This becomes a more viable proposition when you have a mass house production robot that completes the process quicker and at lower cost than current methods.
I can see this technology being adopted by the builders of high values properties as well as use in quickly building shells for low cost housing in disaster areas. On the other hand as with so many breakthroughs in technology it could be 15 years before the process is in mainstream use...