As someone else has pointed out, they used hide not paper, but also the reason why they kept writing over old texts like this was because it was extremely expensive (one dead animal didn't exactly give that many pages...) and so everything was reused over and over again. Considering the cost I think anyone daring to use it for any other purpose than intended would find themselves in severe trouble very quickly.
Interestingly I can't get at it.... Maybe I'm missing a plugin or maybe the site is experiencing problems, but I only get a blank window. If anything that illustrates the problems of digital versions nicely. Though it may be possible for me to get at it with another browser etc. - access to it certainly is more brittle and will require ongoing maintenance.
It's only more durable if people keep making copies. The problem with digital copies is that technology quickly moves on and makes it hard to read old data - NASA for instance struggles with keeping up with this, losing vast amounts of data beause their inability to get at it while there's still working equipment isn't good enough - even if something is widely spread, the question is who keeps a copy and ensures they keep a copy in a safe way?
Domesday is likely to survive in digital form for a long time, but only because it is still of historical interest. The individual electronic copies are certainly far likely to get destroyed than the original. It is likely to be durable only because the number of copies is larger - make the same number of copies on vellum and spread them as widely as the electronic copies, and the vellum copies will easily outlast the electronic records by thousands of years.
For something like the Domesday book the question isn't that important - it's clear it will survive. But the overall question is important: Never before in human history has so large a percentage of the records produced been destroyed on such a regular basis, not on purpose, but due to accident, mistakes or lack of action. Personally I have folders and folders of printouts of documents I produced years ago where I've lost the digital copies (some of them were originally stored on 5"1/4 floppies, some on 3.5" for my Amiga, some on a long crashed 8 bit XT interface harddisk. That's records between 10-20 years old. None of them will matter much to other people than me (unless I get famous later in my life - you never know...) but they would've been lost if I wasn't so bad at throwing things out and happen to have tons of old copies on paper.
Future historians are likely to see this time as a dark age for history, in that more and more records are electronic only and will perish - while they will have a lot of data telling them what we and people in the intervening generations jointly thought important, there will be gaping holes of things that people didn't think important enough to make proper arrangements for. And that does not mean backups, because backups only protect you against short term loss, not against loss of data that nobody thought was important for 20, 50 or 200 years.
The static IP is what keeps me at Plus Net - I could get cheaper service otherwise, and it took them a while to offer 8Mbps (but then they migrated everyone who had 2Mbps to 8Mbps for the same price, nice surprise) but most of the other ISP's I've looked at have stupid usage restrictions or no static IP.
One other thing: Their support system beats most companies. They automatically raise a ticket for each payment cycle in case you have queries. They never have their customer care close tickets on you (there's nothing I hate more than companies where you keep having to reopen or even open new tickets because their customer care is convinced your problem has been solved without asking you), and their system gives you an estimated time for them to reply based on their current workload.
That in itself is a strong reason for me to stick with them. The pain of dealing with BT for instance is just too much - BT could have been giving their internet access away and I'd still stick with Plus Net.
Real thinks it's a good idea because any user they get away from using IE means they're less vulnerable to Microsoft. If one a few percent of those 2 million downloads a day leads to converted users it's probably worth it.
I guess politicians don't bother reading any research before they make their minds up. The vast majority of sexual abuse is carried out by parents, relatives and friends of the family. A few years ago a survey by the NSPCC (National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children) in the UK published a research report documenting that 75% of all abusers fell in those groups. Of the remainder, only a small percentage met their victims online.
They'd achieve far more if they instead spent some money on awareness campaigns to teach people the most common signs of abuse, and to make people aware that strangers isn't the greatest risk to their children.
But for the desktop market it will take many years before even a fraction of the software people care about will take sufficiently advantage of that many cores for it to be worthwhile. Parallelising desktop software enough to take advantage of that many cores takes a lot of work.
The corruption levels are not just rumoured, they are fact. Nigerians themselves regularly vote the country as the worlds most corrupt in the Transparency International surveys. However the current government does appear to be doing things to clamp down on it - a lot of people, including high ranking government officials, have been jailed for it.
It's not hard to see why there's so much corruption there, though. A Nigerian cabinet minister gets a salary of $6000 a year... Makes accepting the odd bribe kind of tempting... Heck, I could probably afford to "own" half a dozen high level officials if I wanted...
I'd half expect Obasanjo (the president) to arrange for aid organizations to distribute the laptops (or at least be involved in it) rather than leave it up to his own government exactly because of the corruption levels.
If a juror wishes to ignore the judges instructions, then they can do so - nothing is stopping them. This is true in most jurisdictions outside the US as well (though IANAL, so if you're due to serve on a jury and want to be sure, seek legal advice), though in some countries a judge can set aside a jury verdict that is obviously not done based on the law, and in some cases a judge has discretion to remove jurors from the jury prior to a verdict having been made.
Most jurors, however, won't know that they can decide for themselves, as many jurisdictions limit the possibility to inform the jury of this.
The main basis for the jurys power to do this in common law jurisdictions is that the courts do not have the right to sanction jurors for the way they vote, as that defeats the entire purpose of the jury system in taking power away from the judiciary. The jurys power to do this in common law countries was first confirmed by Englands highest court in 1670 after jurors who acquitted William Penn were fined, and it has been upheld in a number of cases (including in the US after independence) since then.
For the most part this falls under the name "nullification" (that is, the jurors "nullify" the law by voting according to some other standard)
Note that there is not necessarily a "right" to nullify (though some contends it is a right), but that the jury defacto has the power to nullify because courts can't sanction it.
The best way to counter this would be to produce logs that "prove" that the other sides lawyers or the judge did something they obviously didn't by spoofing IP adresses etc. Show the court that what seems like a log of what he actually did is in fact a log of what it appears like someone who happened to know how to seem to use his ip address at the time might possibly have done providing the MPAA didn't just invent the logs or screw up.
Watching them try to explain away a demonstration like that would be highly entertaining.
Not really. Class action lawsuits often qualify for triple damages. That is, someone forces the bully to turn over three times as much as he ever stole, makes off with a third of it, and the rest gets split (unevenly, based on who opted in, I think?) between the victims.
As someone else has commented, the share is yours to start with so you can't count the price you aquired the share for as part of the earned value.
The earnings does magically not get added to the share price, so you still have only $387, UNLESS the share price increases OR the company pays the full earnings out as dividends (in which case you'd have to subtract tax on it anyway, so your net return would be even lower than 0.6%, the same would apply if the share price increase and you sell).
Most tech companies, though, never pay dividends (and if they do, it will certainly never be more than portion of their earnings - and so in this case 0.6% is the upper limit) - people speculate in continued share price growth.
So if you hold the share the maximum return is equal to the earnings per share. In Google's case this is far below what you'd get at far lower risk elsewhere (case in point: I get around 5% on my UK savings account and short term bonds)
Of course, if you sell the share you may or may not make money from fluctuations in the share price which may make it a worthwhile investment.
Grossly simplified, people look at the earnings per share because it is one of many measures of whether the share is cheap or expensive. A high earnings per share (in percent of share price) means there is a higher likelihood of continued share price growth (but note that many other factors will also play in). A low earnings per share in percent of share price means that continued share price growt is unlikely unless the market believes that earnings will continue to grow rapidly to catch up with the share price increases.
You hear about the gun crime because thats what the media likes to write about. Gun crime in the UK is vanishingly low compared to the US. Last year 46 people were killed with guns in a population of 60 million. In the US in 1998 it was 11802 on a population of less than 300 million (the UK number for '98 was 45). In '98 a further 866 accidental deaths due to firearms were recorded compared to 6 in the UK. A grand total of 11.3% of all deaths in the US in '98 was due to firearms (though more than half that was suicides), compared to 0.3% of all deaths in the UK.
Knife crime in the UK far outnumbers gun crime, but for some reason knife crime is apparently not interesting enough for the media.
Before anyone thinks that means the UK just have substituted knives for guns: In '98 there were 440 recorded homicides in the UK, compared to 17893 in the US.
NOTE: Before anyone tries to make this out to be a gun control only issue: Switzerland and Norway, both countries with significant number of privatly owned or controlled guns (part of hunting traditions and private control over military equipment for homeland defense, including hundreds of thousands of AG-3's in Norway) both see similar levels of homicides as what the UK has.
Well, I'm not "liberal" (whether under the European or US definition - here in Europe "liberals" are far from left wing).
But that's beside the point - no, you are not being "forced" to commit crimes. However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
That does not mean that they are not responsible. However it's just downright stupid to point the finger at the choices of individual criminals for the crime rates, which is what I responded to. The criminals are responsible for their individual crimes, not "street crime" in general.
Society is responsible for the conditions that drive these people to make these choices, and poverty is the largest single driver for this kind of low level crime.
If you want to discuss a single crime, then sure, we can discuss the choices of that criminal. But as long as the issue is street crime in general, the criminals individual choices are not relevant.
Also, the most recent British Crime Survey shows 46 gun killings in the UK last year (in a population of about 60 million people). I'd rather keep it that way than risk getting shot by some idiot carrying a gun in public.
Yes, it is the UK, where practically noone ever get hurt by guns. Go read the WHO's World report on violence and death and compare the per capita firearms related violence in the UK compared to the US.
(Before anyone turns this into a matter of gun control alone, note that countries like Switzerland and Norway, with HUGE amounts of weapons in private ownership, including AG-3's in about 1/3'd of homes in Norway, have firearms related violence rates not much different from the UK - it's much more complicated than gun control or not)
And you know what? They're right. It's the programmers who fucked up when they started using standard ISO suffixes and modified what they meant. One kilometer is not 1024 meters, it's 1000. The hard drive manufacturers are right, the programmers are wrong.
First of all, it's modifiers for SI units, not "ISO suffixes". Second, a byte isn't an SI unit so claiming it's "wrong" to map kilo to 1024 in the context of something that doesn't have anything to do with SI is pointless. Many words are overloaded. We can argue about whether or not it's sensible, but as long as large parts of the world still seems to think imperial units are sensible, my KB will remain 1024 bytes.
If humans have undergone mutations at such a high rate that we could've ended up as we are from a "good" design in 6000 years, then that itself would be an argument against intelligent design - it would mean the odds of intelligent life spontaneously arising would need to be far better than even the most optimistic supporter of evolution would dream of suggesting.
True in some sense, but keep in mind that most software development is not done by software houses, but in house by companies that will use it.
For some of these systems getting it operational quickly may be important, but for all of them maintenance is longer term going to be far more critical. I've more than once built something quick and dirty because we needed something "yesterday", but inevitably a quickly built system will need to be replaced or rewritten to serve long term needs without driving maintenance costs through the roof. Often, planning for a early rewrite is ok - it gets you something up and running quickly and may buy you time AND experience with the actual user needs. But ultimately engineering for maintainability will be needed if your app is going to have a decent lifespan, and engineering for maintainability does take a lot more time than most people think it will.
A friend of my fiancee once called the neighbours daughters boyfriend a wanker (translation for the British English impaired: roughly equivalent to "asshole" in usage), thinking he wouldn't hear. Her 3-4 year old daughter promptly (and loudly) asked her several times "What is a wanker, mommy? Why did you call that man a wanker?".
The guy obviously heard, as word got back to the neighbour who later came round to her place. The mother thought she'd badly screwed up her relationship with him as he asked if it was true she'd called the boyfriend a wanker... When she reluctantly admitted she had, the neighbour replied "yes, he is a real wanker isn't he". Apparently they're now close friends...
They'd also have to pull out of the European market, or the EU will simply confiscate any revenues directly from their distributors. Seeing as most larger PC manufacturers bundle Windows for instance, they could easily confiscate that amount just by forcing any of those manufacturers into handing over Microsofts payments.
Non-payment is not an option if they'd like to continue to sell their products to the EU. Seeing as the EU has a population of about 490 million, I kind of doubt that they'd consider a fine like that enough of a reason to pull out.
I don't believe in making a speeding ticket relative to one's income, because the danger caused by a rich person speeding isn't any greater than a poor person speeding -- either way, they're still causing as much danger to the people around them. (I would, however, be OK making the fine proportional to the curb weight of your vehicle, say $1 per pound/kilo, but that's another story.)
The fine isn't there to cover the "cost" of the risk to society, but to encourage people to refrain from that behavior.
That effect depends on the fine actually hurting enough for people to think twice about taking the risk. Punishing everyone equally doesn't achieve that goal - it makes the punishment have less impact on people who make more.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone else has pointed out, they used hide not paper, but also the reason why they kept writing over old texts like this was because it was extremely expensive (one dead animal didn't exactly give that many pages...) and so everything was reused over and over again. Considering the cost I think anyone daring to use it for any other purpose than intended would find themselves in severe trouble very quickly.
Interestingly I can't get at it.... Maybe I'm missing a plugin or maybe the site is experiencing problems, but I only get a blank window. If anything that illustrates the problems of digital versions nicely. Though it may be possible for me to get at it with another browser etc. - access to it certainly is more brittle and will require ongoing maintenance.
Domesday is likely to survive in digital form for a long time, but only because it is still of historical interest. The individual electronic copies are certainly far likely to get destroyed than the original. It is likely to be durable only because the number of copies is larger - make the same number of copies on vellum and spread them as widely as the electronic copies, and the vellum copies will easily outlast the electronic records by thousands of years.
For something like the Domesday book the question isn't that important - it's clear it will survive. But the overall question is important: Never before in human history has so large a percentage of the records produced been destroyed on such a regular basis, not on purpose, but due to accident, mistakes or lack of action. Personally I have folders and folders of printouts of documents I produced years ago where I've lost the digital copies (some of them were originally stored on 5"1/4 floppies, some on 3.5" for my Amiga, some on a long crashed 8 bit XT interface harddisk. That's records between 10-20 years old. None of them will matter much to other people than me (unless I get famous later in my life - you never know...) but they would've been lost if I wasn't so bad at throwing things out and happen to have tons of old copies on paper.
Future historians are likely to see this time as a dark age for history, in that more and more records are electronic only and will perish - while they will have a lot of data telling them what we and people in the intervening generations jointly thought important, there will be gaping holes of things that people didn't think important enough to make proper arrangements for. And that does not mean backups, because backups only protect you against short term loss, not against loss of data that nobody thought was important for 20, 50 or 200 years.
One other thing: Their support system beats most companies. They automatically raise a ticket for each payment cycle in case you have queries. They never have their customer care close tickets on you (there's nothing I hate more than companies where you keep having to reopen or even open new tickets because their customer care is convinced your problem has been solved without asking you), and their system gives you an estimated time for them to reply based on their current workload.
That in itself is a strong reason for me to stick with them. The pain of dealing with BT for instance is just too much - BT could have been giving their internet access away and I'd still stick with Plus Net.
Real thinks it's a good idea because any user they get away from using IE means they're less vulnerable to Microsoft. If one a few percent of those 2 million downloads a day leads to converted users it's probably worth it.
They'd achieve far more if they instead spent some money on awareness campaigns to teach people the most common signs of abuse, and to make people aware that strangers isn't the greatest risk to their children.
But for the desktop market it will take many years before even a fraction of the software people care about will take sufficiently advantage of that many cores for it to be worthwhile. Parallelising desktop software enough to take advantage of that many cores takes a lot of work.
It's not hard to see why there's so much corruption there, though. A Nigerian cabinet minister gets a salary of $6000 a year... Makes accepting the odd bribe kind of tempting... Heck, I could probably afford to "own" half a dozen high level officials if I wanted...
I'd half expect Obasanjo (the president) to arrange for aid organizations to distribute the laptops (or at least be involved in it) rather than leave it up to his own government exactly because of the corruption levels.
Most jurors, however, won't know that they can decide for themselves, as many jurisdictions limit the possibility to inform the jury of this.
The main basis for the jurys power to do this in common law jurisdictions is that the courts do not have the right to sanction jurors for the way they vote, as that defeats the entire purpose of the jury system in taking power away from the judiciary. The jurys power to do this in common law countries was first confirmed by Englands highest court in 1670 after jurors who acquitted William Penn were fined, and it has been upheld in a number of cases (including in the US after independence) since then.
For the most part this falls under the name "nullification" (that is, the jurors "nullify" the law by voting according to some other standard)
Note that there is not necessarily a "right" to nullify (though some contends it is a right), but that the jury defacto has the power to nullify because courts can't sanction it.
Watching them try to explain away a demonstration like that would be highly entertaining.
Not really. Class action lawsuits often qualify for triple damages. That is, someone forces the bully to turn over three times as much as he ever stole, makes off with a third of it, and the rest gets split (unevenly, based on who opted in, I think?) between the victims.
If he thinks the treatment the burglar gets is so fantastic, I'm sure he can think of ways to get the same treatment himself...
The earnings does magically not get added to the share price, so you still have only $387, UNLESS the share price increases OR the company pays the full earnings out as dividends (in which case you'd have to subtract tax on it anyway, so your net return would be even lower than 0.6%, the same would apply if the share price increase and you sell).
Most tech companies, though, never pay dividends (and if they do, it will certainly never be more than portion of their earnings - and so in this case 0.6% is the upper limit) - people speculate in continued share price growth.
So if you hold the share the maximum return is equal to the earnings per share. In Google's case this is far below what you'd get at far lower risk elsewhere (case in point: I get around 5% on my UK savings account and short term bonds)
Of course, if you sell the share you may or may not make money from fluctuations in the share price which may make it a worthwhile investment.
Grossly simplified, people look at the earnings per share because it is one of many measures of whether the share is cheap or expensive. A high earnings per share (in percent of share price) means there is a higher likelihood of continued share price growth (but note that many other factors will also play in). A low earnings per share in percent of share price means that continued share price growt is unlikely unless the market believes that earnings will continue to grow rapidly to catch up with the share price increases.
Knife crime in the UK far outnumbers gun crime, but for some reason knife crime is apparently not interesting enough for the media.
Before anyone thinks that means the UK just have substituted knives for guns: In '98 there were 440 recorded homicides in the UK, compared to 17893 in the US.
NOTE: Before anyone tries to make this out to be a gun control only issue: Switzerland and Norway, both countries with significant number of privatly owned or controlled guns (part of hunting traditions and private control over military equipment for homeland defense, including hundreds of thousands of AG-3's in Norway) both see similar levels of homicides as what the UK has.
My source - the WHO report on violence and health. Take a look at page 337 onwards (the statistical annex).
But that's beside the point - no, you are not being "forced" to commit crimes. However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
That does not mean that they are not responsible. However it's just downright stupid to point the finger at the choices of individual criminals for the crime rates, which is what I responded to. The criminals are responsible for their individual crimes, not "street crime" in general.
Society is responsible for the conditions that drive these people to make these choices, and poverty is the largest single driver for this kind of low level crime.
If you want to discuss a single crime, then sure, we can discuss the choices of that criminal. But as long as the issue is street crime in general, the criminals individual choices are not relevant.
Go read the WHO World report on violence and death. Pay particular attention to the relative levels of firearms related violence...
Also, the most recent British Crime Survey shows 46 gun killings in the UK last year (in a population of about 60 million people). I'd rather keep it that way than risk getting shot by some idiot carrying a gun in public.
Street crime is tightly tied to poverty
(Before anyone turns this into a matter of gun control alone, note that countries like Switzerland and Norway, with HUGE amounts of weapons in private ownership, including AG-3's in about 1/3'd of homes in Norway, have firearms related violence rates not much different from the UK - it's much more complicated than gun control or not)
It wouldn't be thrown out of court, because it wouldn't make it to court until after they were done with you.
First of all, it's modifiers for SI units, not "ISO suffixes". Second, a byte isn't an SI unit so claiming it's "wrong" to map kilo to 1024 in the context of something that doesn't have anything to do with SI is pointless. Many words are overloaded. We can argue about whether or not it's sensible, but as long as large parts of the world still seems to think imperial units are sensible, my KB will remain 1024 bytes.
Most people don't need to care anyway.
If humans have undergone mutations at such a high rate that we could've ended up as we are from a "good" design in 6000 years, then that itself would be an argument against intelligent design - it would mean the odds of intelligent life spontaneously arising would need to be far better than even the most optimistic supporter of evolution would dream of suggesting.
For some of these systems getting it operational quickly may be important, but for all of them maintenance is longer term going to be far more critical. I've more than once built something quick and dirty because we needed something "yesterday", but inevitably a quickly built system will need to be replaced or rewritten to serve long term needs without driving maintenance costs through the roof. Often, planning for a early rewrite is ok - it gets you something up and running quickly and may buy you time AND experience with the actual user needs. But ultimately engineering for maintainability will be needed if your app is going to have a decent lifespan, and engineering for maintainability does take a lot more time than most people think it will.
The guy obviously heard, as word got back to the neighbour who later came round to her place. The mother thought she'd badly screwed up her relationship with him as he asked if it was true she'd called the boyfriend a wanker... When she reluctantly admitted she had, the neighbour replied "yes, he is a real wanker isn't he". Apparently they're now close friends...
Non-payment is not an option if they'd like to continue to sell their products to the EU. Seeing as the EU has a population of about 490 million, I kind of doubt that they'd consider a fine like that enough of a reason to pull out.
The fine isn't there to cover the "cost" of the risk to society, but to encourage people to refrain from that behavior.
That effect depends on the fine actually hurting enough for people to think twice about taking the risk. Punishing everyone equally doesn't achieve that goal - it makes the punishment have less impact on people who make more.