Depends on your meaning of religious - Einstein himself wrote essays were he explicitly rejected the dogma of established religion and the idea of a personal (antropomorphic) god. But in an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1930, he wrote of a feeling of "cosmic religious feeling": "The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. "
Elsewhere he wrote: "During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes."
And "In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests."
But he also wrote this:
"If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life."
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. In this sense I believe that the priest must become a teacher if he wishes to do justice to his lofty educational mission. "
So he was "religious" in the sense that he believed in a "religious feeling" and saw the search for scientific truths itself as a religious impulse, and he believed that faith in human endeavor and ethical behavior were a higher form of religious feeling than the belief in personal Gods - the latter idea which he described as invented by human fantasy.
Eh no... They should be running whatever requires the least resources and money to maintain that supports the applications you need and meets your requirements. For us, Redhat meets that because 1) almost anything under the sun is already available packaged for Redhat, 2) it's trivially easy to find people that know and understand RHEL, contrary to most of your preferred choices, 3) it's supported by most hosting providers - again most of your preferred choices aren't -, so we can offload parts of our ops tasks on them, 4) it's easy to buy support for if/when we'll need it.
And no, none of us run RHEL on our desktops, and most of us don't run Fedora either. Currently most of our team is on Windows or MacOS X - everyone joining gets a choice of two laptop models, and if they want to reinstall Linux on them, thats fine but most haven't so far.
Frankly I've never worked anywhere where the admins picked the same distro for the production servers as what they ran on their desktops. I don't doubt there are admins that do make choices based on that, but I certainly haven't seen it.
Their argument is that it is "better" because it is cheaper, and hence likely to get far wider market penetration and so have a larger impact on gasoline use, not that it's more efficient per engine. There also appears to be nothing in this technology that would prevent it from being combined with hybrid technology to get even larger boosts in fuel efficiency.
It means "existed before". Go look at a dictionary. In other words you can't just use "existing" in the same place and get the same meaning. "Existing" would just imply it exists now, "preexisting" implies it existed in the past, and in this context that it implicitly still exists (but "preexisting" can also be used when something existed in the past and doesn't exist anymore) because a technology exists by virtue of being known.
Because doing so without massive limitations would involve the halting problem. A search engine simply CAN'T determine whether a certain piece of javascript will terminate in the general case. In lots of special cases, yes (such as when there's no control constructs, or the control constructs can't possibly cause loops or recursion etc.) and they could use timeouts etc. or only execute the first "n" steps of an interpreter, yes. But all of it would mean essentially crippling the feature.
And for what? So that some lazy web developer won't have to put the content they want indexed in a div and make it invisible and have their JS pick it up from there instead if they want to do more stuff with it?
It would also pick up a lot of stuff that people have put in javascript because they don't want the search engines to index it.
Please... Europe has some of the strictest privacy legislation in the world. To the extent where we are NOT regularly getting shafted by companies trading our personal data. What you mean to say is that people in the US value their privacy from the state more than in Europe. The difference seems to be that Americans trust corporations but don't their government, while Europeans tend to trust the government but not corporations.
If anything, if you want to data mine data, the best you can do is get it to the US where there's essentially no regulation - To the extent that EU regulations makes it ILLEGAL to move personal information about customers to the US without signing up to special provisions guaranteeing you will protect the same way as guaranteed by law in EU member states. For example, they can't legally sell customer information unless they have obtained express consent (YOU need to have taken an action to specifically grant them consent to sell your information), and they need to hand over a transcript of all personal information they hold on you if you request it, for only a nominal charge.
In the UK this holds even for CCTV operators - if you want to you can legally write to the operator of a CCTV camera, attach a photo, describe when you might have been caught on camera and demand that they send you a copy of the coverage of you with the faces of any unrelated people covered up, and they are required to comply. That's incidentally a nice safeguard against abuse of CCTV - someone try to screw people over and I'm sure they'd have their hands full for a decade searching through CCTV footage.
You are also entitled by law to have any incorrect information held about you corrected, and to delete any information that the organization doesn't explicitly have a legal obligation or right to keep (i.e. you obviously can't call your credit card company and order them to delete any mention of you while you owe them money).
As for Interpol tracking - that's bullshit. Many of the Interpol coordinated paedophile busts have been as a result of operations originating or run by the FBI.
Actually no - the UK and Ireland has refused to join the border check part of Schengen, meaning you do need a passport to enter any other EU country. The UK did this because they don't trust anyone but their own border controls, and Ireland did it because not doing so would mean giving up the special arrangement they have with the UK to allow passport free travel between the two.
At least you don't get photographed and fingerprinted on entry and exit when visiting the UK. Nor when visiting China, for that matter - I found it rather amusing that my recent first and only (so far) visit to Beijing involved far less hassle with border control and customs than my regular visits to the US.
They hardly even bothered to look at me when I arrived at Beijing, contrary to the silly questions, finger printing, photography, scanning of my passport and close looks at my picture whenever I arrive in the US. At least the US visa waiver form is a neverending source of amusement (of course I would certainly tick "yes" on the form if I had committed genocide or planned to commit crimes in the US and hand those forms to the nice border police man to make sure he knows about it...).
Claiming the UK constitution is unwritten would get you an immediate fail in constitutional law if you were to ever study law in the UK. The UK constitution is mostly written - it's just not all in one tidy little document. It consists of a large number of acts of parliament that one by one defined the powers of the monarch and the parliament, dating back all the way to the Magna Carta combined with a number of other documents. The main "unwritten" source of the UK constitution is largely elements of common law, but while common law itself is "unwritten" it largely exists in writing indirectly in the form of hundreds of years of court-set precedence that defines the law.
It would not be unreasonable to claim that large parts of the UK constitution is not codified but that's different.
There's a long history of Parliament overriding the monarch in the UK, as THAT is how the UK came to be a constitutional monarchy rather than one where the monarch had real power - as the monarch's personal influence receded, parliament just stopped yielding in more and more cases or used various parts of it's power to grab power from the monarch in other areas.
If the queen tried to override parliament today, parliament would just pass a bill taking away her power to do so, and rely on the fact that the UK constitution makes Parliament supreme (the principle of parliamentary sovereignty), and that the Queen's right to exercise some influence (Royal prerogative) was codified in the Case of Proclamations in 1611 which also granted Parliament the right to curtail or remove royal prerogatives.
Note that the prerogative to prevent a bill from becoming an Act of Parliament - the prerogative of Royal Assent - was last exercised in the UK in 1707 or 1708 by Queen Anne. None of the royal prerogatives have been exercised for decades.
That is why I claim her powers are mostly fantasy. She "rules" at the grace of Parliament, not the other way around.
If the queen refused Royal Assent to a bill curtailing her powers under the Case of Proclamations it might depend on the courts, as ultimately the courts in the UK have wide latitude in determining constitutional matters, but it would cause an extraordinary constitutional crisis if the courts were to decide the queen had the power to prevent her prerogatives being taken away, as it would undermine the very basis of giving parliament the power to do so in the first place and would also undermine the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Most likely parliament would "work around it" by using existing powers to force the Queen or the courts or both to accept their power, just like the methods they've used in the past to shift the balance of power. A typical case was when Queen Anne withheld royal assent to a bill passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1703, and the Scottish Parliament turned around and threatened to withdraw it's forces from the UK army and stop levying taxes, with the result that Queen Anne was eventually forced to give assent after all.
IANAL, but I'm married to someone who's about to become one here in the UK...
The army doesn't serve the government. It serves the people.
Yes, because the history isn't full of cases where the army chose to support the government rather than the people... That would NEVER happen.
Seriously... You're dealing with an army of professional soldiers who chose to enlist in many cases despite the fact that they would be serving a government that would knowingly lie to their populace to justify war. While I'm sure there would be dissent, I'm also quite sure that parts of the UK army would be willing to go quite far in protecting the government against ordinary people.
So in other words the "passport" you had to carry around was little different from an id card, which you are required to carry on you in a large percentage of the worlds countries today, including most of Europe.
OK, so maybe that's because the UK doesn't have a national ID program. For travel in continental Europe, and I think even for continental Europeans coming to the UK, a national ID suffices.
No, it's because the UK has never agreed to accept the passport control part of the Schengen agreement. The Schengen agreement is what allows people to not present a passport when traveling between all EU states (not all of them have implemented it yet) except the UK and Ireland, as well as at least Norway and Iceland - there may be a couple of other non-EU members too. It still requires people crossing the borders to keep an approved id document on them when outside their own country. Note that for citizens of a few of those states, such as Norway, a passport may be the only approved id document they have access to, so they may defacto be required to have a passport anyway - it just won't get checked at the border.
if 20 thousand people go on strike, they'll soon start having a problem with the police.
Why do you think that? Striking is legal here. The only cases where strikers run into problems with police is when they try to physically prevent people from crossing picket lines.
You do realize there's more than one X server out there, don't you?
For example, Xvnc only takes about 800KB compressed. Yes, it doesn't display, but bolting a framebuffer driver onto it would only take a few KB - in fact you could fit both Xvnc and a full featured vnc client into less than 1MB. There are at least a few small "proper" X servers (that drives a display instead of keeping it's own frame buffer) out there that would fit in 2MB too - I only mentions Xvnc since that's the only one I happen to have installed.
Bull. I've hired PhDs from well regarded universities that turned out to be completely useless. A BSc in CS demonstrates a very basic degree of theoretical knowledge in CS, not the slightest amount of competence at software engineering. For starters the two are different fields, and there are extremely few good software engineering educations out there. Someone with good CS skills may or may not have the ability to transfer that knowledge successfully to software engineering - a lot of people I've seen with a CS background fail miserably in that respect.
Second, even if someone stays within the CS field, a BSc is extremely basic. I'm just finishing up my MSc now, mainly because I wanted the paper as an insurance against moronic recruiters. As part of it I ended up taking a few programming classes. Now, perhaps my commercial software engineering experience (12 years) and overall programming experience (27 years - since I was 5) make it hard for me to judge, but frankly all of the classes even at MSc level just seemed extremely basic. It would be trivial to pass even an MSc in CS in many well regarded universities without being suitable for even an entry level software engineering job or even have much practical experience at programming.
Now, that is not necessarily a problem with CS degrees. The problems are that 1) CS isn't software engineering, but many CS graduates think they've learned software engineering, 2) CS graduates aren't conscious enough about picking classes that fit with what they want to do after graduation, or even explicitly choose away the "hard" engineering related classes, 3) many CS students thinks that software engineering is "just programming" and completely fail to learn anything about project management, security, configuration management, testing and other essential software engineering topics.
"Hard courses" in CS are no guarantee you'd be suitable even as an entry level software engineer any more than a physics degree would make you a great trumpet player just because you know how to calculate the airflows through your instrument.
Of course we're already at a point where a $40K/year salary would be extremely unattractive for most potential Indian immigrants, for example. Bangalore and Hyderabad are seeing salaries skyrocket - it's been a few years since I hired anyone in Bangalore, and then engineering salaries had already passed $15k/year for relatively junior to mid-level enginers and it was next to impossible to keep people more than a year at those rates. Doesn't sound much, but keep in mind that buying a house in Bangalore at that time cost about 1/10th of what it does in the valley, and that overall other living costs are also a fraction. Since then average salary increases have been 10-15% a year.
Today and Indian engineer would need a salary far closer to realistic US levels for it to make economical sense at all. And in fact, last time I hired in India, several of the candidates I interviewed were Indians that had moved back from the US exactly because things had gotten to the point where they could get a higher standard of living in India than in the US even though they took significant hits in terms of salary.
There are other potential sources of significant immigration for engineering jobs, such as China, but the language barriers are much more significant.
I agree Google Apps can't replace a full office suite. But I have repeatedly resorted to Google Spreadsheets when Open Office was unable to correctly handle Excel sheets I received. I also frequently use it to open small spreadsheets I only want to read, as it's usually faster to upload to Google Spreadsheets than start Open Office on my machine... Open Office is ok, but it's far too slow and so I only ever use it when I absolutely have to.
Just because some morons decided to randomly invent new names and try to get people to change established usage doesn't give them any authority... Whenever I see someone pushing the *bibyte crap the only thing it achieves is to annoy me.
You can't outsource security [e.g. oh look google is so much better at keeping our documents secure]
Of course you can. For many organizations, handling document security is a major problem. Even basic stuff like backups is a major PITA
But even more than that, presumably one of the things he was referring to is the security implications of having people download "stuff" that may or may not be legitimate documents, and accidentally running it (and don't even try to give me shit about how there aren't any real viruses for Linux - if a major government agency starts relying on Linux boxes, you can bet someone, somewhere will start looking at ways to use it for intrusion). Yes, lots of apps have far saner policies about running things than Office has, but avoiding downloading files from mail accounts entirely in favor of processing those documents outside of your normal environment whenever possible would have the effect of limiting the potential damage further.
It's not that a webapp is required to do that, but that Google's apps present a possible way of doing it that is convenient and available.
Not only are the google versions of the tools not nearly feature complete, but they're over the internet. Thus guaranteed to be sucktastically slow (especially when a lot of people use it)
Maybe, maybe not. Google Spreadsheets handle a lot of Excel files that breaks badly in Open Office for me, and it's also FAR faster to open a document in than Open Office is on my box, and far less resource hungry to just keep open, which reduces the time to open even more. If I'd been editing lots of large spreadsheets instead of mostly viewing the occasional small one, perhaps Google Spreadsheets would be a pain, but for MY use it's actually far more efficient than Open Office. Haven't tried Gnumeric for a while, and I rarely need a word processor but when I do Abiword just haven't cut it for me (I tried it again a couple of days ago, and the printouts of the document I tested it on just came out horrendously ugly).
Also, if you're just going to use AJAX based web tools, what does it matter what OS you run?
It matters because the IT department has to manage the systems regardless what apps you run on them.
The article said it was an attempt to stop the "happy slappers" - one guy films another performing acts of violence on strangers. Interesting, the USA already has laws against this practice - assault and (I think) being an accomplice to assault. I guess France is a little behind...
The problem is how do you prove the person filming is involved in any way? So the French solution in this case is to take away any excuse.
RTFA. It's entire purpose was describing how evolution may explain religion, and the key functions of it are absent from most animals.
And if you'd RTFA'd you'd see that people are NOT suggesting there's a "religion gene", but that a propensity for believing is a byproduct of major functions of the human brain, and so it is present in everyone without exception. Yes, that means distribution of atheism must be explained by other means, such as cultural differences, but that is true for a vast number of other things where we have basic genetic mechanisms countered by specific cultural expectations.
As for being insulting - if it is, then most of science is insulting to some group or other. But is there really any doubt that "personal decision" is removed from the equation? Regardless of what our "natural" state is, it is very clear that most people grow up to hold the same beliefs as their parents. Very few of us, atheists and theists alike, make a conscious choice about what to believe or not believe. Most of us accept what we were told as children and stick to that throughout life.
Yes, there are lots of exceptions, but most of us never make a "personal decision" about what to believe. I'd like to claim that I consciously chose atheism, but I'm not naive enough to think that there's not a good chance I'd have ended up religious if I'd grown up with religious parents.
If the researchers in the article are correct, it only explains why religious parents don't have to work harder convincing their children to believe. But you know what? Atheist parents don't have to work very hard to convince their children either, despite sometimes enormous pressure on children to conform. The existence of a god never figured as something seriously worth considering to me when I was a child, despite what other children and adults said. Norway where I grew up even have a state church, and lessons in christianity used to be compulsory unless your parents explicitly took you out of the classes. When I was seven my parents asked me to choose. I don't remember exactly what they said, but I remember it being along the lines of whether I wanted to learn about different cultures and ways of life, or if I wanted to learn about christianity and God. I chose the former, with no pressure. I knew I could have chosen the latter - I could always have said I just wanted to stay with my class mates (in my class I was one out of two people who didn't do the christianity classes for the first years) and they would have respected that.
Was that a personal decision? Yes, and no. I made the choice, but as everyone else I made my choices based on who I was, and who we are is, especially as children, extremely heavily influenced by our parents lifestyles and beliefs.
Actually sorting linked lists is useful in many cases, and can be done fairly efficiently with a well written quicksort (without the step of converting to array that this code does), since quicksort is conceptually just recursive partition around a pivot element - partitioning a linked list is cheap and can sometimes be faster than using an array if the objects being sorted are complex and stored by value (i.e. in any case where moving the linked list pointers around would be faster than copying the objects). A variety of other sorts are also easily adaptable to linked lists.
Making it in place is just an implementation detail, just as most other sorts can be done either in place or not (a typical example is quicksort, where most naive implementations tends to copy, while the typical C implementations tends to be in place).
Slashdot Mirror
Elsewhere he wrote: "During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes."
And "In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests."
But he also wrote this:
"If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life."
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. In this sense I believe that the priest must become a teacher if he wishes to do justice to his lofty educational mission. "
So he was "religious" in the sense that he believed in a "religious feeling" and saw the search for scientific truths itself as a religious impulse, and he believed that faith in human endeavor and ethical behavior were a higher form of religious feeling than the belief in personal Gods - the latter idea which he described as invented by human fantasy.
And no, none of us run RHEL on our desktops, and most of us don't run Fedora either. Currently most of our team is on Windows or MacOS X - everyone joining gets a choice of two laptop models, and if they want to reinstall Linux on them, thats fine but most haven't so far.
Frankly I've never worked anywhere where the admins picked the same distro for the production servers as what they ran on their desktops. I don't doubt there are admins that do make choices based on that, but I certainly haven't seen it.
Their argument is that it is "better" because it is cheaper, and hence likely to get far wider market penetration and so have a larger impact on gasoline use, not that it's more efficient per engine. There also appears to be nothing in this technology that would prevent it from being combined with hybrid technology to get even larger boosts in fuel efficiency.
It means "existed before". Go look at a dictionary. In other words you can't just use "existing" in the same place and get the same meaning. "Existing" would just imply it exists now, "preexisting" implies it existed in the past, and in this context that it implicitly still exists (but "preexisting" can also be used when something existed in the past and doesn't exist anymore) because a technology exists by virtue of being known.
And for what? So that some lazy web developer won't have to put the content they want indexed in a div and make it invisible and have their JS pick it up from there instead if they want to do more stuff with it?
It would also pick up a lot of stuff that people have put in javascript because they don't want the search engines to index it.
Do you also believe that driving while intoxicated is rare because the papers don't write about it all that often?
If anything, if you want to data mine data, the best you can do is get it to the US where there's essentially no regulation - To the extent that EU regulations makes it ILLEGAL to move personal information about customers to the US without signing up to special provisions guaranteeing you will protect the same way as guaranteed by law in EU member states. For example, they can't legally sell customer information unless they have obtained express consent (YOU need to have taken an action to specifically grant them consent to sell your information), and they need to hand over a transcript of all personal information they hold on you if you request it, for only a nominal charge.
In the UK this holds even for CCTV operators - if you want to you can legally write to the operator of a CCTV camera, attach a photo, describe when you might have been caught on camera and demand that they send you a copy of the coverage of you with the faces of any unrelated people covered up, and they are required to comply. That's incidentally a nice safeguard against abuse of CCTV - someone try to screw people over and I'm sure they'd have their hands full for a decade searching through CCTV footage.
You are also entitled by law to have any incorrect information held about you corrected, and to delete any information that the organization doesn't explicitly have a legal obligation or right to keep (i.e. you obviously can't call your credit card company and order them to delete any mention of you while you owe them money).
As for Interpol tracking - that's bullshit. Many of the Interpol coordinated paedophile busts have been as a result of operations originating or run by the FBI.
Actually no - the UK and Ireland has refused to join the border check part of Schengen, meaning you do need a passport to enter any other EU country. The UK did this because they don't trust anyone but their own border controls, and Ireland did it because not doing so would mean giving up the special arrangement they have with the UK to allow passport free travel between the two.
They hardly even bothered to look at me when I arrived at Beijing, contrary to the silly questions, finger printing, photography, scanning of my passport and close looks at my picture whenever I arrive in the US. At least the US visa waiver form is a neverending source of amusement (of course I would certainly tick "yes" on the form if I had committed genocide or planned to commit crimes in the US and hand those forms to the nice border police man to make sure he knows about it...).
Claiming the UK constitution is unwritten would get you an immediate fail in constitutional law if you were to ever study law in the UK. The UK constitution is mostly written - it's just not all in one tidy little document. It consists of a large number of acts of parliament that one by one defined the powers of the monarch and the parliament, dating back all the way to the Magna Carta combined with a number of other documents. The main "unwritten" source of the UK constitution is largely elements of common law, but while common law itself is "unwritten" it largely exists in writing indirectly in the form of hundreds of years of court-set precedence that defines the law.
It would not be unreasonable to claim that large parts of the UK constitution is not codified but that's different.
There's a long history of Parliament overriding the monarch in the UK, as THAT is how the UK came to be a constitutional monarchy rather than one where the monarch had real power - as the monarch's personal influence receded, parliament just stopped yielding in more and more cases or used various parts of it's power to grab power from the monarch in other areas.
If the queen tried to override parliament today, parliament would just pass a bill taking away her power to do so, and rely on the fact that the UK constitution makes Parliament supreme (the principle of parliamentary sovereignty), and that the Queen's right to exercise some influence (Royal prerogative) was codified in the Case of Proclamations in 1611 which also granted Parliament the right to curtail or remove royal prerogatives.
Note that the prerogative to prevent a bill from becoming an Act of Parliament - the prerogative of Royal Assent - was last exercised in the UK in 1707 or 1708 by Queen Anne. None of the royal prerogatives have been exercised for decades.
That is why I claim her powers are mostly fantasy. She "rules" at the grace of Parliament, not the other way around.
If the queen refused Royal Assent to a bill curtailing her powers under the Case of Proclamations it might depend on the courts, as ultimately the courts in the UK have wide latitude in determining constitutional matters, but it would cause an extraordinary constitutional crisis if the courts were to decide the queen had the power to prevent her prerogatives being taken away, as it would undermine the very basis of giving parliament the power to do so in the first place and would also undermine the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Most likely parliament would "work around it" by using existing powers to force the Queen or the courts or both to accept their power, just like the methods they've used in the past to shift the balance of power. A typical case was when Queen Anne withheld royal assent to a bill passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1703, and the Scottish Parliament turned around and threatened to withdraw it's forces from the UK army and stop levying taxes, with the result that Queen Anne was eventually forced to give assent after all.
IANAL, but I'm married to someone who's about to become one here in the UK...
Yes, because the history isn't full of cases where the army chose to support the government rather than the people... That would NEVER happen.
Seriously... You're dealing with an army of professional soldiers who chose to enlist in many cases despite the fact that they would be serving a government that would knowingly lie to their populace to justify war. While I'm sure there would be dissent, I'm also quite sure that parts of the UK army would be willing to go quite far in protecting the government against ordinary people.
So in other words the "passport" you had to carry around was little different from an id card, which you are required to carry on you in a large percentage of the worlds countries today, including most of Europe.
No, it's because the UK has never agreed to accept the passport control part of the Schengen agreement. The Schengen agreement is what allows people to not present a passport when traveling between all EU states (not all of them have implemented it yet) except the UK and Ireland, as well as at least Norway and Iceland - there may be a couple of other non-EU members too. It still requires people crossing the borders to keep an approved id document on them when outside their own country. Note that for citizens of a few of those states, such as Norway, a passport may be the only approved id document they have access to, so they may defacto be required to have a passport anyway - it just won't get checked at the border.
Why do you think that? Striking is legal here. The only cases where strikers run into problems with police is when they try to physically prevent people from crossing picket lines.
For example, Xvnc only takes about 800KB compressed. Yes, it doesn't display, but bolting a framebuffer driver onto it would only take a few KB - in fact you could fit both Xvnc and a full featured vnc client into less than 1MB. There are at least a few small "proper" X servers (that drives a display instead of keeping it's own frame buffer) out there that would fit in 2MB too - I only mentions Xvnc since that's the only one I happen to have installed.
Second, even if someone stays within the CS field, a BSc is extremely basic. I'm just finishing up my MSc now, mainly because I wanted the paper as an insurance against moronic recruiters. As part of it I ended up taking a few programming classes. Now, perhaps my commercial software engineering experience (12 years) and overall programming experience (27 years - since I was 5) make it hard for me to judge, but frankly all of the classes even at MSc level just seemed extremely basic. It would be trivial to pass even an MSc in CS in many well regarded universities without being suitable for even an entry level software engineering job or even have much practical experience at programming.
Now, that is not necessarily a problem with CS degrees. The problems are that 1) CS isn't software engineering, but many CS graduates think they've learned software engineering, 2) CS graduates aren't conscious enough about picking classes that fit with what they want to do after graduation, or even explicitly choose away the "hard" engineering related classes, 3) many CS students thinks that software engineering is "just programming" and completely fail to learn anything about project management, security, configuration management, testing and other essential software engineering topics.
"Hard courses" in CS are no guarantee you'd be suitable even as an entry level software engineer any more than a physics degree would make you a great trumpet player just because you know how to calculate the airflows through your instrument.
Today and Indian engineer would need a salary far closer to realistic US levels for it to make economical sense at all. And in fact, last time I hired in India, several of the candidates I interviewed were Indians that had moved back from the US exactly because things had gotten to the point where they could get a higher standard of living in India than in the US even though they took significant hits in terms of salary.
There are other potential sources of significant immigration for engineering jobs, such as China, but the language barriers are much more significant.
I agree Google Apps can't replace a full office suite. But I have repeatedly resorted to Google Spreadsheets when Open Office was unable to correctly handle Excel sheets I received. I also frequently use it to open small spreadsheets I only want to read, as it's usually faster to upload to Google Spreadsheets than start Open Office on my machine... Open Office is ok, but it's far too slow and so I only ever use it when I absolutely have to.
Real geeks have no problem with overloading.
Just because some morons decided to randomly invent new names and try to get people to change established usage doesn't give them any authority... Whenever I see someone pushing the *bibyte crap the only thing it achieves is to annoy me.
Of course you can. For many organizations, handling document security is a major problem. Even basic stuff like backups is a major PITA
But even more than that, presumably one of the things he was referring to is the security implications of having people download "stuff" that may or may not be legitimate documents, and accidentally running it (and don't even try to give me shit about how there aren't any real viruses for Linux - if a major government agency starts relying on Linux boxes, you can bet someone, somewhere will start looking at ways to use it for intrusion). Yes, lots of apps have far saner policies about running things than Office has, but avoiding downloading files from mail accounts entirely in favor of processing those documents outside of your normal environment whenever possible would have the effect of limiting the potential damage further.
It's not that a webapp is required to do that, but that Google's apps present a possible way of doing it that is convenient and available.
Not only are the google versions of the tools not nearly feature complete, but they're over the internet. Thus guaranteed to be sucktastically slow (especially when a lot of people use it)
Maybe, maybe not. Google Spreadsheets handle a lot of Excel files that breaks badly in Open Office for me, and it's also FAR faster to open a document in than Open Office is on my box, and far less resource hungry to just keep open, which reduces the time to open even more. If I'd been editing lots of large spreadsheets instead of mostly viewing the occasional small one, perhaps Google Spreadsheets would be a pain, but for MY use it's actually far more efficient than Open Office. Haven't tried Gnumeric for a while, and I rarely need a word processor but when I do Abiword just haven't cut it for me (I tried it again a couple of days ago, and the printouts of the document I tested it on just came out horrendously ugly).
Also, if you're just going to use AJAX based web tools, what does it matter what OS you run?
It matters because the IT department has to manage the systems regardless what apps you run on them.
The problem is how do you prove the person filming is involved in any way? So the French solution in this case is to take away any excuse.
And if you'd RTFA'd you'd see that people are NOT suggesting there's a "religion gene", but that a propensity for believing is a byproduct of major functions of the human brain, and so it is present in everyone without exception. Yes, that means distribution of atheism must be explained by other means, such as cultural differences, but that is true for a vast number of other things where we have basic genetic mechanisms countered by specific cultural expectations.
As for being insulting - if it is, then most of science is insulting to some group or other. But is there really any doubt that "personal decision" is removed from the equation? Regardless of what our "natural" state is, it is very clear that most people grow up to hold the same beliefs as their parents. Very few of us, atheists and theists alike, make a conscious choice about what to believe or not believe. Most of us accept what we were told as children and stick to that throughout life.
Yes, there are lots of exceptions, but most of us never make a "personal decision" about what to believe. I'd like to claim that I consciously chose atheism, but I'm not naive enough to think that there's not a good chance I'd have ended up religious if I'd grown up with religious parents.
If the researchers in the article are correct, it only explains why religious parents don't have to work harder convincing their children to believe. But you know what? Atheist parents don't have to work very hard to convince their children either, despite sometimes enormous pressure on children to conform. The existence of a god never figured as something seriously worth considering to me when I was a child, despite what other children and adults said. Norway where I grew up even have a state church, and lessons in christianity used to be compulsory unless your parents explicitly took you out of the classes. When I was seven my parents asked me to choose. I don't remember exactly what they said, but I remember it being along the lines of whether I wanted to learn about different cultures and ways of life, or if I wanted to learn about christianity and God. I chose the former, with no pressure. I knew I could have chosen the latter - I could always have said I just wanted to stay with my class mates (in my class I was one out of two people who didn't do the christianity classes for the first years) and they would have respected that.
Was that a personal decision? Yes, and no. I made the choice, but as everyone else I made my choices based on who I was, and who we are is, especially as children, extremely heavily influenced by our parents lifestyles and beliefs.
Actually sorting linked lists is useful in many cases, and can be done fairly efficiently with a well written quicksort (without the step of converting to array that this code does), since quicksort is conceptually just recursive partition around a pivot element - partitioning a linked list is cheap and can sometimes be faster than using an array if the objects being sorted are complex and stored by value (i.e. in any case where moving the linked list pointers around would be faster than copying the objects). A variety of other sorts are also easily adaptable to linked lists.
Making it in place is just an implementation detail, just as most other sorts can be done either in place or not (a typical example is quicksort, where most naive implementations tends to copy, while the typical C implementations tends to be in place).