If you (or your job) has been "made redundant", it means - quite literally - that they no longer have a use for you. It doesn't matter what version of English you speak, that's the meaning of the word. It may not specifically state that would mean losing your job, but the context is there and useful - and differs from "being sacked/fired" quite significantly. It wasn't that they sacked you, they didn't need you any more. It was NOTHING you did wrong. You were simply redundant to the business. We even use terms like "redundancy money" where the business compensates you when it stops your contract because it *COULDN'T* find a use for you any more.
And to "enter administration". That means that some process has taken over to administer the business. Not bankruptcy, because we have that word too and that wouldn't be administration of the business but a final "winding up", but someone is there to administer things - presumably because they can't do it themselves.
Though the terms are not clear-as-day, they are no worse than any other English phrasing and at least hint at what they mean (I'd expect most people to understand them by the context they are used and the inference of the meaning of the words). I don't see why you can't pick up those words from context, to be honest, or just from their meaning - especially when I spend a LOT of my time looking up what the hell certain Americanisms mean because they're not at all obvious (John Doe? Really? You can't just say you don't know their names?).
Company enters Chapter Whatever? What the hell does that mean. The fifth amendment? Eh? Which one's that? What does it say? Amendment to what? Do the other 4 take precedence?
Although the answers are easy to find, they aren't anywhere near easy to infer just from the context given. English is one of the most poetic, cross-culture, verbose and diverse languages. Use it and the facilities available within it, and people can infer what you mean. Numbering everything is only logical if everyone has a reference list of what those numbers refer to and memorises it. But the word "redundant" is present and means the same in both languages - it's just a particular instance of it that doesn't fully explain the implications of your "redundancy" but that the context does.
Don't even get me started on navigation in America. Xing-Ped (Someone had to TELL me what it meant, and that it was "backwards" and I only speak English!) and 49th/50th/51st/52nd street drive me mad. It's abuse of language where it's not necessary, no imagination, nothing to make anything or anyone stand out and not using meanings have been attached to words for centuries.
The American customer service model does not work well in Britain. A lot of American chains forget that when they come over here. If an Englishman wants help, he'll come and find you and ask. Otherwise, leave him the hell alone.
If you come up to me all smiles and "Hello Sir, can I help you", I don't think "Oh, that's nice", I think "What are you trying to sell?" and "How can I get rid of you?". If you try to learn my name, or start trying to steer me towards products, I actually feel more like a number, not like you're helping. And English sales assistants can't do smalltalk well at all, and you find them approaching you with an offhand comment about the weather before launching into sales patter as an example of their "engaging" with the customer.
If you approach me in a shop as a member of staff, you will be politely turned away. If you're persistent, I will just walk unless I really *NEED* the thing I'm trying to buy - I've done it several times. I *KNOW* whether I need your help or not, so listen to me when I tell you. If I look incredibly baffled, of course you can try to ask, but chances are that most geeks and kids will say they're fine and want to carry on on their own. And, kid, I was writing computer games before you were even born - don't try to tell me "What you really want is...". If you haven't got what I want, tell me. Hell, point me to your competitor. Because you won't make any money out of me, I'm costing you valuable sales time AND I will return if you're honest and help me buy what I want rather than what YOU want me to buy.
To be honest, it baffles me even in Europe, and is a small part of the reason why the English are considered rude abroad. You can spend 30 minutes talking to a pharmacist in Europe (even as a native) when all you wanted is some sunscreen, and they will deliberately put things out of reach or on counters that deter browsing just so they *can* talk to you.
In England, walk up to the shelf, pick it up, buy it. There's usually a nice assistant available if necessary but if she says more than "Hello", she's getting in your way. The English sometimes see such "personal" service as fake because - well, we don't have it and don't understand it, and a lot of the time it is completely fake. Do I really believe that spotty oik #8 cares about me leaving his shop with what I wanted to buy, even if it's only a £5 game?
GAME were incredibly annoying for this. "Do you need help?" four or five times per visit. Not buggering off when I don't. When I do (or the person I'm with stupidly launches into a ten minute explanation of why we're there), they steer you to things that you just said you DON'T want (whether because of sheer stupidity, high sales pressure, or just bad knowledge of their industry area) and hassle you to buy a DS when you only went in for a £5 PC game. And NO imagination over what to stock. Top-end £50 Wii-titles and nothing else, tiny PC section at the back with top-end £50 AAA titles that need Steam accounts of GfW to activate anyway. Where's the budget section? Where are the indie games? Where's the stuff that people WOULD want to buy on impulse?
They also had high prices compared to online sales and, I'm sorry, nothing that I'd actually buy. I used to be in there all the time as a teenager, but haven't bought anything in one for literally YEARS. The pre-owned section gets the most attention from other customers, and the only time they're busy and not just a small shop of geeks and kids is when Christmas is coming and they've secured a few units of whatever the next big thing is. They remind me a lot of the Games Workshop stores - from outside it's all kids and geeks, which is enough to put off e.g. girlfriends, mothers, grandparents, etc. but at least Games Workshop have half-decent service and sell them what they wanted.
In comparison, the other geek/kid hangout of the local exchange shop (Cash Convertors, CEX or some local equivalent) had lots of customers
That's the problem with reporting things so early. Nobody knows if this has even been narrowed to be caused by the procedures that they suggest it is (and not random variation or other causes) or that ANYTHING will happen at all even in another species of mouse, let alone humans.
Or that it won't kill them a month after the cancer would have killed them. Sure, all little steps forward, but not necessarily getting you any closer to your goal, and certainly not getting you *SIGNIFICANTLY* closer to claiming you could do even something simple with it yet.
Sir David Attenborough (a famous naturalist, and someone whom I admire) basically says the same.
Whenever asked if he believes in God, the answer is vehemently not. His usual anecdote is about seeing a child in Africa with a worm that was slowly burrowing into their eye and blinding them:
"Are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball?"
It's a similar argument. If God is wonderful and created everything, he created rapists, murderers, child molestors, pain, suffering, and every disease we see. Deliberately. Knowingly. And seeing all that they would do.
And if you think you're divinely favoured, and such things (e.g. AIDS, HIV, etc.) are targeted only at "sinners" (e.g. homosexuals, drug-users, deviants, etc. and that's NOT my definition but some Christian groups!), then I suggest you go kiss their wounds and bleeding sores in the spirit of Christian easing of their suffering and see how long he favours you, too.
If you're in science just for the credit, you shouldn't be.
If you're in science to provide breakthroughs and build and rely on others work, with the assistance of similar people, then having 44 authors on a paper gives it approximately 44 times more weight than a single name. And you *can* still say "I worked on Project X" when you want to use it as a job-seeking tool. The people who care about that will find out exactly what you did on the project, I assure you.
So much science, nowadays, CANNOT be done by a lone crank working out of a hermit-like existence, especially where it concerns medical trials and sharing information.
In maths, yes, 44 names on a paper would reek of "Put my name on that because I helped you changed the font size", but in medicine? I don't think I'd believe anything without a significant trial and, thus, weight of names behind a paper. But WHO those 44 are matters infinitely more than how many there are.
"Gerson's therapy has not been independently tested or subjected to randomized controlled trials"
"Evidence for the effectiveness of the Budwig diet is limited as most research has only been done on cell culture studies and experiments on rats and mice with inconsistent results"
"Cellect has not been studied in clinical trials and there is no evidence that it can be used to prevent or treat any diseases in humans. We do not support using this product as a cancer treatment." (By the report LINKED TO on the Cellect page that they then try to spin positively!)
The other two examples, I can't find nice quotes for because they ONLY come up on cancer-cure-crank sites that provide absolutely no medical trial information at all.
They are also both things that we would notice having an effect in the SIMPLEST of trials, if true. People who ate apricot seeds (or maybe even just lots of apricots!) would have a lovely, positive reaction above placebo. And pancreatin is a naturally occurring substance in the body anyway, so we'd notice portions of the population who were more or less likely to develop cancer just because of their naturally high/low levels of pancreatin. We don't.
Just because something is sidelined and condemned doesn't mean it ISN'T just a waste of time. A conspiracy is easier to believe than the fact that these people (and the websites that promote these items) ARE JUST LYING TO YOU in order to make money. They have no idea what they can or can't do, or how effective they are and they CERTAINLY have zero proof that would convince even a small minority of independent and reliable cancer charities / scientists.
There are plenty of examples of cancer-fighting products that just never made it through certification even WITH proven effectiveness, too. It's not like there aren't hundreds put through certification and trials EVERY SINGLE YEAR. The problem is, the people certifiying and trialling them are NOT the people who "discovered", "invented" or stand to gain financially from them - so they have no impetus to push something through or not and the smallest paper from the smallest post-grad researcher with dubious reproducibility can kill an active trial or a product reaching approval.
Just because someone is a Dr, PhD, etc. DOES NOT MEAN they aren't lying to you. Otherwise we'd all be having free energy by now, and cold-fusion, and no diseases, and we'd all lose weight just by eating the right diet.
And the American Cancer Society, several prominent, qualified (and non-controversial) scientists working in that area, Cancer Research UK, the National Cancer Institute, the British Medical Journal, and several patients and organisations who've sued him for saying such things (some while dying of cancer) WITHOUT REPRODUCIBLE PROOF would probably agree with me.
I can find you a mother that claims unicorns and crystals helped heal her cancerous son. Just because she's thick and stubborn doesn't mean she's correct, or that we should be certifying faith healers or sourcing Unicorn droppings.
When you can reproduce the results and a SINGLE independent and well-known cancer research organisation gets behind the research with their own scientists, then you can get bolshy and claim he's an outcast.
At the moment, he's an outcast because he's a fecking idiot that's encouraging people to try an unlicensed treatment that REPEATEDLY and VERIFIABLY DOES NOT WORK. Not for any other reason.
-- Person living with someone who has spent their life researching leukaemia and other cancers
Because what I *really* want in an Instant Messaging provider when I could use ANY of the dozens there are in the world (including a roll-your-own using Jabber), is for them to start reading my messages, deciding if they are appropriate and censoring links automatically.
Fortunately, I use Pidgin, which lets me use any of the others right alongside it in the same program and not even care. In fact, I can't remember the last time I used an MSN connection (it's possible, because some of my contacts also use Pidgin and have 5+ accounts on different servers, but it wouldn't have been a deliberate choice on my part).
And if I really HAD to use MSN to do that, then it's not hard to obscure or encrypt the conversation to bypass their pathetic filtering effort here. So all they've really achieved is to inconvenience their own customers (especially if no-ip is blocked too) at the behest of (presumably) some organisation that disapproves of a certain website, or some stupid algorithm that they don't appear to want to override.
Fortunately, I don't trust these people with my IM or email any more, though I did for years. Seems a silly thing to do as IM is so competitive and in change at the moment (e.g. BBIM, etc.). Nice way to distinguish yourself from the competition.
Miraculous claims require miraculous proofs. And doctors aren't just sitting on the sidelines waiting to be paid more to kill more people, despite what you might think.
Driving with an airbag but without a seatbelt is suicide. Honestly. Only America really does it routinely.
All EU cars have seatbelts mandated, and airbags mandated, and the airbag system even has seat-belt pretensioners to make sure you are pulled *AWAY* from the bag as much as possible. Most modern cars won't even fire the bag, no matter what you do, if you have the seatbelt warning light on, for exactly this reason.
Airbags *were* designed for seatbelts. It's only the idiots that insist on driving without belts, and thus funding cars with different (and less effective) airbags to compensate, that are raising their risk of death.
And I don't see what's so wrong with an EXTRA 5% of safety for that minority of accidents that seat-belt alone cannot cope with.
If you're ever in an accident where an air-bag sees fit to deploy, you're already in trouble - probably trouble that belt alone won't ever save you (especially "low and snug" - it's your shoulder that matters not the lap-belt, which just cuts you in half). In that kind of accident, it's a choice of the lesser of two evils. Broken nose, possible unconsciousness, and damage to any extremities in the way is the BETTER trade-off should it deploy correctly.
If your head is flung far enough forward to contact solid matter (which isn't difficult in a collision), the airbag will hurt you - of course it will - but with a certainty much less than the steering wheel would have.
My first thoughts on reading the article were: You know what? If my airbag goes off, the location of my hands on the steering wheel won't matter one iota compared to having kept the car straight / out of trouble in the first place. By the time the bag deploys, I've already lost control, hit something solid that I couldn't avoid and have no further control of the vehicle anyway and likely my legs are going to get crushed first by the engine being thrust into them. What happens to my arms? Who cares? I'd be more worried about my brains at that point, and puncture wounds from the steering column.
You have to *REALLY* go some to deploy an airbag, beyond even the strongest brake your car is capable of (which is already enough to throw rear-passenger adults into the front seat and crack the windscreen if they're not buckled up). Of course, poorly maintained cars are more likely to have "false" firings, but that's true of anything at all and the reason those little lights flash up and the system is checked EVERY time you start the engine (or, in my 15+ year old car, every time you brake hard too - because I have seen that warning light come on after a really sharp brake, so I assume it "prepares" the airbag just-in-case and notices it wouldn't fire). A car with a faulty fuel line, or no brake fluid, is infinitely more dangerous and much easier to happen (airbags tend to be closed systems that self-check AND that even the most skilled mechanic is wary of even the most basic tampering with).
In my country, disabling the airbag on a model fitted with one is an instant test failure on your annual check. And disabling it without reason (or just "it didn't work", which means an improperly maintained vehicle not up-to-standard) will significantly affect any insurance payout if the accident wasn't my fault. I don't live in a country with medical insurance but I imagine it's a factor there too. You going to go put the bulb back in after you've wrecked your car and it's near-killed you? And what do you think your insurers will say about the near-fatal (or even fatal) injuries you sustained after having deliberately disabled a required safety function of the car that's logged and checked by the OBD all the time?
My father works in the automotive repair game and has done for 30+ years. He drives a car with an airbag. That's good enough for me. Hell, yes, he's paranoid about disabling the thing in my car too before we touch the steering column, and of course he prefers cars without lots of electronics to them. But he wouldn't turn off his airbag.
Between us, we know about 1 person who was injured by their airbag (and only a handful where they actually deployed at all). That person WAS an amateur boxer (who lost every fight I ever saw him in) many years ago, driving a car which was, let's say, of dubious roadworthiness. They punched the steering wheel while in traffic, with their head basically resting on the steering wheel. The bag deployed. It knocked him out, for about a minute. The "it-will-kill-you" rhetoric isn't exactly true and, of course, it's a trade-off. You can say "he was a boxer" and that's why he survived but he was the skinniest little runt in the lowest class and hadn't trained in ten years. That makes it no different to the average guy in the driving seat in terms of resistance.
Hunt down an online programmer in another country.
Pay them a few hundred.
They will knock up an app that's better, works on everything, and can be extended and customised later and you'll have the source too.
The problem here is not the app or some "big bad company", but that the legalities mean that your app will always be at risk and specialist support apps are INCREDIBLY expensive and crap (ask Stephen Hawking).
Whether the patent is valid or not, you'll never know. They could really have a legitimate legal claim and the app-maker could have deliberately infringed their patents in order to make a quick buck. You don't know and can't guarantee anything.
I've worked in schools that have paid thousands for a simple flashcard app for hearing-impaired children. It was literally a VB4 app that I could replicate in an afternoon if I sat down with a licensed clipart library. But if I made one, I wouldn't be able to sell it because schools would only ever buy from established, recognised institutions, etc.
Get yourself a programmer. In fact, turn the blog post into a plea for someone to create the programme for you. If they create it in a country that doesn't recognise software patents, there is NOTHING they can do about it and the author can put it on their website and charge what they like and you can tell all your friends to buy it from him. Plus, you'll get EXACTLY what you want.
Don't fight the patents - you don't have the money or inclination, just a single sob-story that has zero real weight. Sidestep the patents instead, and also hit that company where it hurts at the same time. And as your child grows, make the app grow with her and fix the problems she experiences.
If something is crap, expensive, liable to infringement / removal, etc. then you get around this by using SOMETHING ELSE.
I don't think it would, because of your assumption.
Affordable or not, at some point you have to do a cost/value trade-off and it will be a LONG time after they become technically affordable before they give you a manufacturing tradeoff that's *worth* throwing away the 40p fan we use at the moment.
Like SSD's - been around for YEARS, but still not viable for everything, or even close to it.
The people who pay for Ads are. That's why Google makes billions from ads every single you. In fact, you are their PRODUCT that they sell to their customers (advertisers).
I laughed when I saw the Humble Bundle post just now. Seriously? The first one was "news" if you stretched the definition but now? And then it was Raspberry Pi. Hell, I'm a pre-orderer of that device but it was too much even for me.
I have officially tried for the third time to filter this type of crud out by removing editors and categories. I think that's my limit, really. I now can't remember the last time I saw something on Slashdot first, either.
Yeah. Time to remove this site from my browser's initial saved session of windows, I think. I'll probably pop back now and then but only when I remember to type in the full URL rather than it being one of my "daily-check" sites.
Half a million PAYING subscribers is in line with the number of people with an Iridium satellite phone, the number of people who use MuveMusic on their smartphone, or the number of people who pay to play Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, etc.
I.e. statistically insignificant, especially if you only count the US. I can't name anyone in the above groups, for example, and it's the amount of people Spotify attract in just two months.
I can't remember the last time I saw an NYT article (despite, a few years ago, coming across them all the time online). I certainly can't remember the last time I tried to "bypass" anything to see a website like that. Or the last time I subscribed to any website (I did have a subscription to LWN.net - and Slashdot - at one point but more as a donation to them than providing any benefit to me).
Hell, the last time I actually bought a paper, there *wasn't* a decent online version of any UK paper (but I was still getting all my news from the Internet), and the paper wasn't even for me.
You can try singing about your paywall all you like but the more restrictions you put on non-paywall activities, the more it confirms my suspicion - they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers, if they aren't already dying. If they were happy and comfortable and making lots of profit, they wouldn't care about the article limit, or they'd raise it, or they'd have "free" versions and "premium" versions and not have to crowbar you into the premium version all the time.
My granddad's generation - who took whatever news was fed to them - would probably be that loyal to a paper, or even a political party, without thinking. Nowadays? If you don't put your news online where I can see it, it won't get seen.
-- An Englishman who drives a 16-year-old car that gets 40mpg without even trying (for the past three years, zero testing issues), and cost £300 second-hand. I get charged slightly higher road tax and insurance because it's considered a "large" engine (1.8) that's not very green.
That car existed before I turned of legal age to drive and gets more than 35mpg without having to use premium fuels, hybrid fuels, LPG, etc. I had an LPG quote last year. £800 for the entire conversion. Nearly three times what I paid for it, but still less than half what I spend on fuel each year.
That's the point, the boot-loader is custom-made to the computer in question. It's not even as simple as a configuration option enabled by selecting, say, an ARM-build or something - and you have an UEFI BIOS and I don't, so that'd be another config option to select during kernel compilation (and a recompile if you moved machines).
Literally, the boot-loader is THE lowest denominator when it comes to interfacing with the hardware. It has to find and supply disk access to any and all disks you wish to boot a kernel from using only BIOS calls, load things from disk into memory (which often requires paging tricks), and all sorts. That's inherently machine-specific, which is why all PC BIOS's handle most of that stuff for you and let you load the bootloader of choice for the rest. After the bootloader, that's why you can provide a more standard interface to boot anything from Linux to Windows without them having to know about the machine.
Go find elilo for your personal need. Or read your manufacturer's instructions on how to manage your UEFI boot sequence.
But an in-kernel bootloader is like an in-car spare car key. Pointless if you can't get that far without it anyway.
Every few hundred metres, you need a ventilation hole of some kind anyway. London is riddled with historical vertical vent holes - sometimes small, sometimes large. One example had a building put on top of it (near the Embankment, I think) that you used to be able to use to go down to track level for maintenance.
All you have to do is line up correctly to where you want the next one. More interesting is that Shenfield is WAY out of London in Essex, and Maidenhead is technically in Kent, and there's the Thames in the middle of all that.
My first question would be: If we can do this, why can't we just build double-tunnels or bypass tunnels for everything on the Underground so that a SINGLE stopped train on the entire system doesn't bring the whole of the city to a grinding halt (i.e. every single day).
My second would be: Why the hell are we still relying on TWO car ferries (one of which is almost permanently out of action on any given day) at one crossing, and a few bridges to traverse north/south in a major capital city, when we could be tunnelling under the Thames and solving the problem, Belgian-style?
We learned, after eventually getting our arses kicked several times and seeing defeat on the horizon, that imposing your culture on other countries by force doesn't work long-term. Sure, you can rule their country for a decade but they'll turn around and bite you the second there's no longer a perceived need for you.
Hence, the US.
And what's more, even after this, they are likely to use those same principles and technology back towards yourself. The US still hasn't learned this lesson despite emerging from it once themselves.
We never spread peace, or prosperity, for anyone except ourselves. And the US bitchslapped nobody. You're like the school bully who's steaming into the little geeky kid with punches and won't pull back and won't stop kicking him in the head even when he's down and dead and everyone is looking on and going "Did that really just happen?". You walked into foreign countries and tried to impose your rule (and dragged us into it, I'd like to add).
But the worst US trait is, of course, expecting to always be the best and thinking you are. It's ironic, because you are so far from it, it's laughable. At least the English have a grasp of modern reality.
Terrible economic crisis. Yeah, must be hard for you, in your country with free benefit payments, etc. when you lose the 4-bedroom house and have to cash in the SUV. How awful for you.
I'm English, and we had the same - if not worse - impact as you did. You know what? I'd be embarrassed to refer to it as a crisis. Petrol (gas) went up a few pence, a few tens of thousands lost their jobs (while job vacancies are now at an all-time high, and you get guaranteed minimum wage, guaranteed human rights, and the actual *PERCENTAGE* unemployed stayed the same all that time "Unemployment has not been higher since 1995" - so, like, 20 years ago, before all the "economic crisis") and we just had to throw 1/3rd off long-term disability benefits because they were actually able to work all along.
The US started their wars, we'd like to point out, and prolonged them about 10 years longer than necessary and STILL can't recognise basic human rights for non-Americans. Who did that? The guy you chose because he said he wouldn't do that. What are you more concerned with? Could he be non-American and how dare he try to get people into medical treatment if they have no money?
When you elect someone that actually stops your country obliterating citizens in other countries and denying them their basic human rights that almost every other country in the world has signed up to, then you can take the moral high ground. In the meantime, you've elected a warlord who you keep in power because he tries to keep petrol cheap.
Because your credit charges, card fees and interest rates will end up directly reflecting the amount of fraud that occurs.
It's already started with companies charging X% for different cards because they have been forced to absorb the fraud (since the Chip-and-PIN introduction in the EU, for example, which pushed liability to the retailer), every charge you get made against you ends up costing everyone involved - retailer, bank, card company, intermediate suppliers and, eventually, you.
You think that free money that's obtained by the people who commit fraud materialises out of nowhere once your credit card refunds you?
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, look at the terms themselves.
If you (or your job) has been "made redundant", it means - quite literally - that they no longer have a use for you. It doesn't matter what version of English you speak, that's the meaning of the word. It may not specifically state that would mean losing your job, but the context is there and useful - and differs from "being sacked/fired" quite significantly. It wasn't that they sacked you, they didn't need you any more. It was NOTHING you did wrong. You were simply redundant to the business. We even use terms like "redundancy money" where the business compensates you when it stops your contract because it *COULDN'T* find a use for you any more.
And to "enter administration". That means that some process has taken over to administer the business. Not bankruptcy, because we have that word too and that wouldn't be administration of the business but a final "winding up", but someone is there to administer things - presumably because they can't do it themselves.
Though the terms are not clear-as-day, they are no worse than any other English phrasing and at least hint at what they mean (I'd expect most people to understand them by the context they are used and the inference of the meaning of the words). I don't see why you can't pick up those words from context, to be honest, or just from their meaning - especially when I spend a LOT of my time looking up what the hell certain Americanisms mean because they're not at all obvious (John Doe? Really? You can't just say you don't know their names?).
Company enters Chapter Whatever? What the hell does that mean. The fifth amendment? Eh? Which one's that? What does it say? Amendment to what? Do the other 4 take precedence?
Although the answers are easy to find, they aren't anywhere near easy to infer just from the context given. English is one of the most poetic, cross-culture, verbose and diverse languages. Use it and the facilities available within it, and people can infer what you mean. Numbering everything is only logical if everyone has a reference list of what those numbers refer to and memorises it. But the word "redundant" is present and means the same in both languages - it's just a particular instance of it that doesn't fully explain the implications of your "redundancy" but that the context does.
Don't even get me started on navigation in America. Xing-Ped (Someone had to TELL me what it meant, and that it was "backwards" and I only speak English!) and 49th/50th/51st/52nd street drive me mad. It's abuse of language where it's not necessary, no imagination, nothing to make anything or anyone stand out and not using meanings have been attached to words for centuries.
The American customer service model does not work well in Britain. A lot of American chains forget that when they come over here. If an Englishman wants help, he'll come and find you and ask. Otherwise, leave him the hell alone.
If you come up to me all smiles and "Hello Sir, can I help you", I don't think "Oh, that's nice", I think "What are you trying to sell?" and "How can I get rid of you?". If you try to learn my name, or start trying to steer me towards products, I actually feel more like a number, not like you're helping. And English sales assistants can't do smalltalk well at all, and you find them approaching you with an offhand comment about the weather before launching into sales patter as an example of their "engaging" with the customer.
If you approach me in a shop as a member of staff, you will be politely turned away. If you're persistent, I will just walk unless I really *NEED* the thing I'm trying to buy - I've done it several times. I *KNOW* whether I need your help or not, so listen to me when I tell you. If I look incredibly baffled, of course you can try to ask, but chances are that most geeks and kids will say they're fine and want to carry on on their own. And, kid, I was writing computer games before you were even born - don't try to tell me "What you really want is...". If you haven't got what I want, tell me. Hell, point me to your competitor. Because you won't make any money out of me, I'm costing you valuable sales time AND I will return if you're honest and help me buy what I want rather than what YOU want me to buy.
To be honest, it baffles me even in Europe, and is a small part of the reason why the English are considered rude abroad. You can spend 30 minutes talking to a pharmacist in Europe (even as a native) when all you wanted is some sunscreen, and they will deliberately put things out of reach or on counters that deter browsing just so they *can* talk to you.
In England, walk up to the shelf, pick it up, buy it. There's usually a nice assistant available if necessary but if she says more than "Hello", she's getting in your way. The English sometimes see such "personal" service as fake because - well, we don't have it and don't understand it, and a lot of the time it is completely fake. Do I really believe that spotty oik #8 cares about me leaving his shop with what I wanted to buy, even if it's only a £5 game?
GAME were incredibly annoying for this. "Do you need help?" four or five times per visit. Not buggering off when I don't. When I do (or the person I'm with stupidly launches into a ten minute explanation of why we're there), they steer you to things that you just said you DON'T want (whether because of sheer stupidity, high sales pressure, or just bad knowledge of their industry area) and hassle you to buy a DS when you only went in for a £5 PC game. And NO imagination over what to stock. Top-end £50 Wii-titles and nothing else, tiny PC section at the back with top-end £50 AAA titles that need Steam accounts of GfW to activate anyway. Where's the budget section? Where are the indie games? Where's the stuff that people WOULD want to buy on impulse?
They also had high prices compared to online sales and, I'm sorry, nothing that I'd actually buy. I used to be in there all the time as a teenager, but haven't bought anything in one for literally YEARS. The pre-owned section gets the most attention from other customers, and the only time they're busy and not just a small shop of geeks and kids is when Christmas is coming and they've secured a few units of whatever the next big thing is. They remind me a lot of the Games Workshop stores - from outside it's all kids and geeks, which is enough to put off e.g. girlfriends, mothers, grandparents, etc. but at least Games Workshop have half-decent service and sell them what they wanted.
In comparison, the other geek/kid hangout of the local exchange shop (Cash Convertors, CEX or some local equivalent) had lots of customers
When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt being more than EVERYTHING already out there, hydro-wise?
No. Really. The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
One step, maybe.
Only several billion more to go.
That's the problem with reporting things so early. Nobody knows if this has even been narrowed to be caused by the procedures that they suggest it is (and not random variation or other causes) or that ANYTHING will happen at all even in another species of mouse, let alone humans.
Or that it won't kill them a month after the cancer would have killed them. Sure, all little steps forward, but not necessarily getting you any closer to your goal, and certainly not getting you *SIGNIFICANTLY* closer to claiming you could do even something simple with it yet.
Sir David Attenborough (a famous naturalist, and someone whom I admire) basically says the same.
Whenever asked if he believes in God, the answer is vehemently not. His usual anecdote is about seeing a child in Africa with a worm that was slowly burrowing into their eye and blinding them:
"Are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball?"
It's a similar argument. If God is wonderful and created everything, he created rapists, murderers, child molestors, pain, suffering, and every disease we see. Deliberately. Knowingly. And seeing all that they would do.
And if you think you're divinely favoured, and such things (e.g. AIDS, HIV, etc.) are targeted only at "sinners" (e.g. homosexuals, drug-users, deviants, etc. and that's NOT my definition but some Christian groups!), then I suggest you go kiss their wounds and bleeding sores in the spirit of Christian easing of their suffering and see how long he favours you, too.
If you're in science just for the credit, you shouldn't be.
If you're in science to provide breakthroughs and build and rely on others work, with the assistance of similar people, then having 44 authors on a paper gives it approximately 44 times more weight than a single name. And you *can* still say "I worked on Project X" when you want to use it as a job-seeking tool. The people who care about that will find out exactly what you did on the project, I assure you.
So much science, nowadays, CANNOT be done by a lone crank working out of a hermit-like existence, especially where it concerns medical trials and sharing information.
In maths, yes, 44 names on a paper would reek of "Put my name on that because I helped you changed the font size", but in medicine? I don't think I'd believe anything without a significant trial and, thus, weight of names behind a paper. But WHO those 44 are matters infinitely more than how many there are.
"Gerson's therapy has not been independently tested or subjected to randomized controlled trials"
"Evidence for the effectiveness of the Budwig diet is limited as most research has only been done on cell culture studies and experiments on rats and mice with inconsistent results"
"Cellect has not been studied in clinical trials and there is no evidence that it can be used to prevent or treat any diseases in humans. We do not support using this product as a cancer treatment." (By the report LINKED TO on the Cellect page that they then try to spin positively!)
The other two examples, I can't find nice quotes for because they ONLY come up on cancer-cure-crank sites that provide absolutely no medical trial information at all.
They are also both things that we would notice having an effect in the SIMPLEST of trials, if true. People who ate apricot seeds (or maybe even just lots of apricots!) would have a lovely, positive reaction above placebo. And pancreatin is a naturally occurring substance in the body anyway, so we'd notice portions of the population who were more or less likely to develop cancer just because of their naturally high/low levels of pancreatin. We don't.
Just because something is sidelined and condemned doesn't mean it ISN'T just a waste of time. A conspiracy is easier to believe than the fact that these people (and the websites that promote these items) ARE JUST LYING TO YOU in order to make money. They have no idea what they can or can't do, or how effective they are and they CERTAINLY have zero proof that would convince even a small minority of independent and reliable cancer charities / scientists.
There are plenty of examples of cancer-fighting products that just never made it through certification even WITH proven effectiveness, too. It's not like there aren't hundreds put through certification and trials EVERY SINGLE YEAR. The problem is, the people certifiying and trialling them are NOT the people who "discovered", "invented" or stand to gain financially from them - so they have no impetus to push something through or not and the smallest paper from the smallest post-grad researcher with dubious reproducibility can kill an active trial or a product reaching approval.
Just because someone is a Dr, PhD, etc. DOES NOT MEAN they aren't lying to you. Otherwise we'd all be having free energy by now, and cold-fusion, and no diseases, and we'd all lose weight just by eating the right diet.
Okay.
THIS THERAPY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
And the American Cancer Society, several prominent, qualified (and non-controversial) scientists working in that area, Cancer Research UK, the National Cancer Institute, the British Medical Journal, and several patients and organisations who've sued him for saying such things (some while dying of cancer) WITHOUT REPRODUCIBLE PROOF would probably agree with me.
I can find you a mother that claims unicorns and crystals helped heal her cancerous son. Just because she's thick and stubborn doesn't mean she's correct, or that we should be certifying faith healers or sourcing Unicorn droppings.
When you can reproduce the results and a SINGLE independent and well-known cancer research organisation gets behind the research with their own scientists, then you can get bolshy and claim he's an outcast.
At the moment, he's an outcast because he's a fecking idiot that's encouraging people to try an unlicensed treatment that REPEATEDLY and VERIFIABLY DOES NOT WORK. Not for any other reason.
-- Person living with someone who has spent their life researching leukaemia and other cancers
Because what I *really* want in an Instant Messaging provider when I could use ANY of the dozens there are in the world (including a roll-your-own using Jabber), is for them to start reading my messages, deciding if they are appropriate and censoring links automatically.
Fortunately, I use Pidgin, which lets me use any of the others right alongside it in the same program and not even care. In fact, I can't remember the last time I used an MSN connection (it's possible, because some of my contacts also use Pidgin and have 5+ accounts on different servers, but it wouldn't have been a deliberate choice on my part).
And if I really HAD to use MSN to do that, then it's not hard to obscure or encrypt the conversation to bypass their pathetic filtering effort here. So all they've really achieved is to inconvenience their own customers (especially if no-ip is blocked too) at the behest of (presumably) some organisation that disapproves of a certain website, or some stupid algorithm that they don't appear to want to override.
Fortunately, I don't trust these people with my IM or email any more, though I did for years. Seems a silly thing to do as IM is so competitive and in change at the moment (e.g. BBIM, etc.). Nice way to distinguish yourself from the competition.
Probably because he's a fraud:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Burzynski
Miraculous claims require miraculous proofs. And doctors aren't just sitting on the sidelines waiting to be paid more to kill more people, despite what you might think.
Driving with an airbag but without a seatbelt is suicide. Honestly. Only America really does it routinely.
All EU cars have seatbelts mandated, and airbags mandated, and the airbag system even has seat-belt pretensioners to make sure you are pulled *AWAY* from the bag as much as possible. Most modern cars won't even fire the bag, no matter what you do, if you have the seatbelt warning light on, for exactly this reason.
Airbags *were* designed for seatbelts. It's only the idiots that insist on driving without belts, and thus funding cars with different (and less effective) airbags to compensate, that are raising their risk of death.
And I don't see what's so wrong with an EXTRA 5% of safety for that minority of accidents that seat-belt alone cannot cope with.
If you're ever in an accident where an air-bag sees fit to deploy, you're already in trouble - probably trouble that belt alone won't ever save you (especially "low and snug" - it's your shoulder that matters not the lap-belt, which just cuts you in half). In that kind of accident, it's a choice of the lesser of two evils. Broken nose, possible unconsciousness, and damage to any extremities in the way is the BETTER trade-off should it deploy correctly.
If your head is flung far enough forward to contact solid matter (which isn't difficult in a collision), the airbag will hurt you - of course it will - but with a certainty much less than the steering wheel would have.
My first thoughts on reading the article were: You know what? If my airbag goes off, the location of my hands on the steering wheel won't matter one iota compared to having kept the car straight / out of trouble in the first place. By the time the bag deploys, I've already lost control, hit something solid that I couldn't avoid and have no further control of the vehicle anyway and likely my legs are going to get crushed first by the engine being thrust into them. What happens to my arms? Who cares? I'd be more worried about my brains at that point, and puncture wounds from the steering column.
You have to *REALLY* go some to deploy an airbag, beyond even the strongest brake your car is capable of (which is already enough to throw rear-passenger adults into the front seat and crack the windscreen if they're not buckled up). Of course, poorly maintained cars are more likely to have "false" firings, but that's true of anything at all and the reason those little lights flash up and the system is checked EVERY time you start the engine (or, in my 15+ year old car, every time you brake hard too - because I have seen that warning light come on after a really sharp brake, so I assume it "prepares" the airbag just-in-case and notices it wouldn't fire). A car with a faulty fuel line, or no brake fluid, is infinitely more dangerous and much easier to happen (airbags tend to be closed systems that self-check AND that even the most skilled mechanic is wary of even the most basic tampering with).
In my country, disabling the airbag on a model fitted with one is an instant test failure on your annual check. And disabling it without reason (or just "it didn't work", which means an improperly maintained vehicle not up-to-standard) will significantly affect any insurance payout if the accident wasn't my fault. I don't live in a country with medical insurance but I imagine it's a factor there too. You going to go put the bulb back in after you've wrecked your car and it's near-killed you? And what do you think your insurers will say about the near-fatal (or even fatal) injuries you sustained after having deliberately disabled a required safety function of the car that's logged and checked by the OBD all the time?
My father works in the automotive repair game and has done for 30+ years. He drives a car with an airbag. That's good enough for me. Hell, yes, he's paranoid about disabling the thing in my car too before we touch the steering column, and of course he prefers cars without lots of electronics to them. But he wouldn't turn off his airbag.
Between us, we know about 1 person who was injured by their airbag (and only a handful where they actually deployed at all). That person WAS an amateur boxer (who lost every fight I ever saw him in) many years ago, driving a car which was, let's say, of dubious roadworthiness. They punched the steering wheel while in traffic, with their head basically resting on the steering wheel. The bag deployed. It knocked him out, for about a minute. The "it-will-kill-you" rhetoric isn't exactly true and, of course, it's a trade-off. You can say "he was a boxer" and that's why he survived but he was the skinniest little runt in the lowest class and hadn't trained in ten years. That makes it no different to the average guy in the driving seat in terms of resistance.
But you're a
Hunt down an online programmer in another country.
Pay them a few hundred.
They will knock up an app that's better, works on everything, and can be extended and customised later and you'll have the source too.
The problem here is not the app or some "big bad company", but that the legalities mean that your app will always be at risk and specialist support apps are INCREDIBLY expensive and crap (ask Stephen Hawking).
Whether the patent is valid or not, you'll never know. They could really have a legitimate legal claim and the app-maker could have deliberately infringed their patents in order to make a quick buck. You don't know and can't guarantee anything.
I've worked in schools that have paid thousands for a simple flashcard app for hearing-impaired children. It was literally a VB4 app that I could replicate in an afternoon if I sat down with a licensed clipart library. But if I made one, I wouldn't be able to sell it because schools would only ever buy from established, recognised institutions, etc.
Get yourself a programmer. In fact, turn the blog post into a plea for someone to create the programme for you. If they create it in a country that doesn't recognise software patents, there is NOTHING they can do about it and the author can put it on their website and charge what they like and you can tell all your friends to buy it from him. Plus, you'll get EXACTLY what you want.
Don't fight the patents - you don't have the money or inclination, just a single sob-story that has zero real weight. Sidestep the patents instead, and also hit that company where it hurts at the same time. And as your child grows, make the app grow with her and fix the problems she experiences.
If something is crap, expensive, liable to infringement / removal, etc. then you get around this by using SOMETHING ELSE.
I don't think it would, because of your assumption.
Affordable or not, at some point you have to do a cost/value trade-off and it will be a LONG time after they become technically affordable before they give you a manufacturing tradeoff that's *worth* throwing away the 40p fan we use at the moment.
Like SSD's - been around for YEARS, but still not viable for everything, or even close to it.
You are not their customer.
The people who pay for Ads are. That's why Google makes billions from ads every single you. In fact, you are their PRODUCT that they sell to their customers (advertisers).
Slashvertisement, too.
I laughed when I saw the Humble Bundle post just now. Seriously? The first one was "news" if you stretched the definition but now? And then it was Raspberry Pi. Hell, I'm a pre-orderer of that device but it was too much even for me.
I have officially tried for the third time to filter this type of crud out by removing editors and categories. I think that's my limit, really. I now can't remember the last time I saw something on Slashdot first, either.
Yeah. Time to remove this site from my browser's initial saved session of windows, I think. I'll probably pop back now and then but only when I remember to type in the full URL rather than it being one of my "daily-check" sites.
Make your 3D printer out of Lego, provide some automation - hey, presto - self-replicating robots who "feed" on the source plastic.
Bonus points for 3-laws interpretations, and not forgetting to put in a "kill switch" somewhere.
According to a quick Google:
Half a million PAYING subscribers is in line with the number of people with an Iridium satellite phone, the number of people who use MuveMusic on their smartphone, or the number of people who pay to play Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, etc.
I.e. statistically insignificant, especially if you only count the US. I can't name anyone in the above groups, for example, and it's the amount of people Spotify attract in just two months.
I can't remember the last time I saw an NYT article (despite, a few years ago, coming across them all the time online). I certainly can't remember the last time I tried to "bypass" anything to see a website like that. Or the last time I subscribed to any website (I did have a subscription to LWN.net - and Slashdot - at one point but more as a donation to them than providing any benefit to me).
Hell, the last time I actually bought a paper, there *wasn't* a decent online version of any UK paper (but I was still getting all my news from the Internet), and the paper wasn't even for me.
You can try singing about your paywall all you like but the more restrictions you put on non-paywall activities, the more it confirms my suspicion - they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers, if they aren't already dying. If they were happy and comfortable and making lots of profit, they wouldn't care about the article limit, or they'd raise it, or they'd have "free" versions and "premium" versions and not have to crowbar you into the premium version all the time.
My granddad's generation - who took whatever news was fed to them - would probably be that loyal to a paper, or even a political party, without thinking. Nowadays? If you don't put your news online where I can see it, it won't get seen.
In some countries, 35mpg IS a gas-guzzler.
-- An Englishman who drives a 16-year-old car that gets 40mpg without even trying (for the past three years, zero testing issues), and cost £300 second-hand. I get charged slightly higher road tax and insurance because it's considered a "large" engine (1.8) that's not very green.
That car existed before I turned of legal age to drive and gets more than 35mpg without having to use premium fuels, hybrid fuels, LPG, etc. I had an LPG quote last year. £800 for the entire conversion. Nearly three times what I paid for it, but still less than half what I spend on fuel each year.
How would you boot the boot-loader?
That's the point, the boot-loader is custom-made to the computer in question. It's not even as simple as a configuration option enabled by selecting, say, an ARM-build or something - and you have an UEFI BIOS and I don't, so that'd be another config option to select during kernel compilation (and a recompile if you moved machines).
Literally, the boot-loader is THE lowest denominator when it comes to interfacing with the hardware. It has to find and supply disk access to any and all disks you wish to boot a kernel from using only BIOS calls, load things from disk into memory (which often requires paging tricks), and all sorts. That's inherently machine-specific, which is why all PC BIOS's handle most of that stuff for you and let you load the bootloader of choice for the rest. After the bootloader, that's why you can provide a more standard interface to boot anything from Linux to Windows without them having to know about the machine.
Go find elilo for your personal need. Or read your manufacturer's instructions on how to manage your UEFI boot sequence.
But an in-kernel bootloader is like an in-car spare car key. Pointless if you can't get that far without it anyway.
Every few hundred metres, you need a ventilation hole of some kind anyway. London is riddled with historical vertical vent holes - sometimes small, sometimes large. One example had a building put on top of it (near the Embankment, I think) that you used to be able to use to go down to track level for maintenance.
All you have to do is line up correctly to where you want the next one. More interesting is that Shenfield is WAY out of London in Essex, and Maidenhead is technically in Kent, and there's the Thames in the middle of all that.
My first question would be: If we can do this, why can't we just build double-tunnels or bypass tunnels for everything on the Underground so that a SINGLE stopped train on the entire system doesn't bring the whole of the city to a grinding halt (i.e. every single day).
My second would be: Why the hell are we still relying on TWO car ferries (one of which is almost permanently out of action on any given day) at one crossing, and a few bridges to traverse north/south in a major capital city, when we could be tunnelling under the Thames and solving the problem, Belgian-style?
We learned, after eventually getting our arses kicked several times and seeing defeat on the horizon, that imposing your culture on other countries by force doesn't work long-term. Sure, you can rule their country for a decade but they'll turn around and bite you the second there's no longer a perceived need for you.
Hence, the US.
And what's more, even after this, they are likely to use those same principles and technology back towards yourself. The US still hasn't learned this lesson despite emerging from it once themselves.
We never spread peace, or prosperity, for anyone except ourselves. And the US bitchslapped nobody. You're like the school bully who's steaming into the little geeky kid with punches and won't pull back and won't stop kicking him in the head even when he's down and dead and everyone is looking on and going "Did that really just happen?". You walked into foreign countries and tried to impose your rule (and dragged us into it, I'd like to add).
But the worst US trait is, of course, expecting to always be the best and thinking you are. It's ironic, because you are so far from it, it's laughable. At least the English have a grasp of modern reality.
Terrible economic crisis. Yeah, must be hard for you, in your country with free benefit payments, etc. when you lose the 4-bedroom house and have to cash in the SUV. How awful for you.
I'm English, and we had the same - if not worse - impact as you did. You know what? I'd be embarrassed to refer to it as a crisis. Petrol (gas) went up a few pence, a few tens of thousands lost their jobs (while job vacancies are now at an all-time high, and you get guaranteed minimum wage, guaranteed human rights, and the actual *PERCENTAGE* unemployed stayed the same all that time "Unemployment has not been higher since 1995" - so, like, 20 years ago, before all the "economic crisis") and we just had to throw 1/3rd off long-term disability benefits because they were actually able to work all along.
The US started their wars, we'd like to point out, and prolonged them about 10 years longer than necessary and STILL can't recognise basic human rights for non-Americans. Who did that? The guy you chose because he said he wouldn't do that. What are you more concerned with? Could he be non-American and how dare he try to get people into medical treatment if they have no money?
When you elect someone that actually stops your country obliterating citizens in other countries and denying them their basic human rights that almost every other country in the world has signed up to, then you can take the moral high ground. In the meantime, you've elected a warlord who you keep in power because he tries to keep petrol cheap.
Because your credit charges, card fees and interest rates will end up directly reflecting the amount of fraud that occurs.
It's already started with companies charging X% for different cards because they have been forced to absorb the fraud (since the Chip-and-PIN introduction in the EU, for example, which pushed liability to the retailer), every charge you get made against you ends up costing everyone involved - retailer, bank, card company, intermediate suppliers and, eventually, you.
You think that free money that's obtained by the people who commit fraud materialises out of nowhere once your credit card refunds you?
First question:
Would you stick your card into that device and/or type you PIN into a random Android mobile?
I think that should tell you everything you need to know about how much that will get used.