And in evolution, the innovations are few and far between with millions of crackpot ideas that never turn out right happening all the time (i.e. genetic defects). And it's no use saying "Hey, solar is there, let's use it!" because evolution doesn't work like that. It takes a completely random chance for an extraordinary event to happen that confers a significant advantage to the creature involved such that it will stand more chance of mating and passing said effect onwards (or at least, not detrimentally affecting the organism's normal operation) - at some point, some species of that hornet got a genetic defect that, say, allowed the sun to warm his body up a little better because he was slightly whiter than normal by a fraction of a Pantone colour difference.
Cue several thousand or million generations later and we have a hornet that can just about absorb some energy from the sun in a purely incidental fashion with an extremely slowly crafted biological pigment (which presumably has to be "synthesized" in the hornet's body and replaced by its normal growth mechanisms) in a tiny part of its body. Chances are that solar just *isn't* that much cop compared to drinking nectar, or eating bugs, or even just eating the plants that *are* solar-powered themselves, the same thing we've discovered in terms of solar energy - although abundant, it's in a not-directly-useful form that's extremely hard to harness with even the best materials in the world designed in the best shapes and oriented in the most sunlit locations. Even the best plants in the world absorb energy at enormously slow rates per square metre and we have to cut them down by the acre after hundreds of years of growth in order to get useful energy out of them. Thus it's actually a complete fluke that a species has got to the point where they can collect enough energy in this fashion to make a use of it - because the mutation that allowed tiny, tiny fractions of a joule hit the bodies of the previous million or so generations collected managed to survive even though it was massively outweighed by every other energy source available to it. It's much more likely that it didn't confer *any* advantage for millions of years, but wasn't a disadvantage either, to get to this stage.
And then the *majority* of what keeps an organism going isn't direct energy (which actually tends to kill it through exposure to radiation over time) but fats and sugars (which plants *can* helpfully generate for us from sunlight, soil and air). So it's like wondering why the hornets, or anything else, haven't yet evolved to the point where they just need to sit in a sunny spot and never eat, or why humans can't live off arsenic. Although possible, the extraordinary chain of events to combine several billion years of evolution from a myriad of unrelated organisms through ONLY a series of small random chances over time (at the rate of one or slightly more random mutations per generation) of a single organism, basically make it so unlikely that it wouldn't happen in a billion universes in that short timescale.
Evolution is bloody complex. It's embarrassing that some people think we can "just copy" the end result of billions of years of evolution to solve problems, or transplant things from one species to another. It took billions of years to get it to work reliably for a reason and although there's fabulous things you can do by designing to a known plan, nothing that humans have ever constructed can even match the most basic of functions of the tiniest insect in their sustainability, efficiency or just damn intricacy. We play at "simulating" ants with the most complex supercomputers in the world and don't get close to simulating even their most basic functions - there has been millions of hours of supercomputer time dedicated to working out how to make a robot walk on two legs and still it's cutting-edge to make it do that once, reliably with materials far superior to that in any organism's leg.
Evolution isn't something simple, or has a result that can be appli
Our nuclear systems require US co-operation / hardware to fire. Not many other countries have such an agreement. Most of our nuclear capability is leased / designed / maintained from the US and have been for several *decades* and for some strange reason we never manage to scrap them and replace them because US ambassadors visit whenever we talk about that and it gets buried *again* (seriously - look up the Trident missile systems, we have been talking about scrapping them since the 1970's, evidenced even in TV sitcoms, because it's so expensive for us and we are given substandard hardware and yet we have to beg the US to "upgrade" us to newer missiles each time and still we have a pretty pitiful system for a modern nuclear-capable military). Our special forces have historically been used to do the US's dirty work, because of certain restrictions which aren't present in the UK military law - specifically when the US has caused a fuss in a foreign country and needs someone suppressed, hence we become your fall guy when it comes to high-end insurgency. You don't find out about it because our special forces tend to be incredibly secretive and actually operate in some form of stealth (it's generally acknowledged that US special forces stealth consists of NOT yelling "DIE FOREIGN SCUM" before charging in with guns blazing, even among the military). It's about the only influence we have where you have to ask favours - the other is that we host some US ICBM detection bases on UK soil, though they are of dubious effectiveness and we're never quite sure what it is you *actually* are using those bases for. The question has been raised several times in parliament.
The UK government are basically coerced into following US policy by a series of complex trade agreements, the revocation of our entire nuclear capability on a whim, and other such factors. It's not a friendly agreement, it's a hands-behind-our-back lock-in, dating to even World War loans (one of which we only JUST paid off to the US about two years ago). The UK government *are* stupid, that's pretty much the definition of a government or any collection of people en masse, but that doesn't mean the US isn't twisting our arm when it doesn't need to, or isn't using its leverage to command everything from wars (that the EU generally dissented on supporting, but we were made to support, to no benefit of our own) to trade.
There are little benefits along the way, but few. In ambassadorial circles, the US does not giveth, he only taketh away. Hell, we're importing US laws bit-by-bit at the moment, extraditing confirmed nutters because the US thinks they "hacked" into the defence networks (McKinnon - never was a man more certifiable, or less able to be extradited through their certifiability) that had no passwords or basic security precautions, and failing to do anything about British citizens detained, tortured and then released to the UK (where they were freed within hours because of the complete lack of any evidence of wrongdoing) from Guantanamo - despite joint parliamentary statements saying the entire place is an affront to democracy and a condemnation of the US.
We're the US's annoying younger brother. If we play nice and do what we're told, we get to play with our toys and the big boys don't take them away. Meanwhile, playing nice basically consists of trying to stop the US bombing innocents in the Middle East while getting hit by the bombings ourselves.
Yeah, it's not like they modified Windows 3.1 to pretend to not run under DR DOS. And it's not like you're not authorised to use DirectX 10 on Windows XP. And it's not like they support the use of BIOS-reading licensing that fails to work on other machines. And it's not like they support, use and rely on TPM features in modern systems. And it's not like certain Steam modifications can ban your entire account. And it's not like scanning money into Adobe Photoshop applications is detected and denied.
With any device, software or anything else - ignore the technology. Look at the contracts you've agreed to (or failed to contest) - if the agreement says that Apple decides on your behalf, or that you aren't authorised to do certain things, or that you can't resell the item, then that's a contract that can *easily* be seen as legally binding (and at best, one that will cost you an AWFUL lot of money to wriggle out of in a court). It doesn't matter if you signed the hire-purchase agreement on your car that says you may only use Esso petrol, or whether you agreed to an EULA that says you won't jailbreak your phone, or whether you agreed that your email could be printed in large print on the moon when you signed up to a website - that agreement is legally binding if you agreed to it, had a reasonable opportunity NOT to agree to it, and don't contest it later. Even if it's deemed unfair later in court, you still have to spend YEARS getting that far before you get your way.
Or you could just NOT agree to stupid contracts on things that you buy - either by not buying them, returning them, or contesting them. The idiot is not the person that bans the app from the iPhone Store. The idiot is the one that, when their app is banned, has ALREADY agreed months before that such decisions could be taken and would be binding. Sure, you can fight unfair contract terms in court but that's something you should have done FIRST, not after the event actually affects you.
If you agree to a contract that says your car may only be used on Tuesdays, or only be turned on if BMW allow it, or only for non-racing events - all of those are *identical* contract terms in terms of enforceability. The last one is actually written on my car insurance, which I've agreed to, so it's just a question of what you are dumb enough to agree to when you buy a product, agree to the EULA, and then continue to use the product/service/license under those terms.
Caveat emptor. Don't agree to stupid shit that you disagree with just in order to use a product. Instead, don't agree and DON'T use that product.
Do they have limited ammo with a cool retro yellow-black interface, which ticks down to zero with appropriate warnings, is fooled by throwing an empty bucket in front of it, and which exhausts its entire ammo supply in under 30 seconds?
Either way, the Aliens:Special Edition guys probably would like to have a look at them.
"Supposed" refers to the fact that they dragged us into a pretty unrelated "war" (which wasn't a war, then it was, then people don't get prisoner of war rights, then you're allowed to shoot people without it being murder, and if they threaten you it's an act of war, etc.) and then left us there holding the fort and trying to defend some other country's actions - we've been dealing with terrorism for the last forty years and *nothing*. The US has one incident (that our intelligence has been warning you about for decades, and our airport security guys were telling you would happen - even just weeks before it did) and suddenly we have to get into a very dubiously-authorised "war/not war" in the Middle East. Then the US tortured people (including some of our citizens) and we're left to pick up the pieces because we were complicit in that (and damn right we were, and damn right we have to deal with the mess, and damn right we should've disowned the US there and then). That's *before* you get into friendly fire, leaking our private communique to the world and basically setting back the last 25 years of Middle East peace processes for a bug-hunt that never caught so much as a gnat.
The US is the playground bully. The UK is the little guy, middle-ranking, who gets sent to do the dirty jobs and stick up for the bully because if they don't, they'll be the next target. And their cousins know each other or something. We hit the other kids because you basically force us to under threat of removing the "special relationship", then we get into trouble for it and are expected to suck it up and take all the blame. Then *we* get pounded on by the US afterwards.
Most Americans I know would be *shocked* of the actual, UK man-in-the-street opinion of the US, even before all that happened. "Special relationship"? Take what you want and give nothing back, basically.
In all, the UK opinion of the US can be summed up in the short speech that Hugh Grant gives in the movie Love Actually. Just a shame we don't have a PM with the balls to say it.
He's Australian. He is in Britain. In general, we don't waterboard our prisoners or humiliate them while they are in prison without trial for YEARS after their initial arrest (how many people still in that "US prison" abroad?) so he was able to hand himself in in the knowledge that we would require certain things of the Swedish government (an EU member) in their handling of him. Also, because he *was* in Britain and because he has deliberately made himself known to the authorities ever since arriving, when an international arrest warrant comes through from a friendly EU country with good human rights record we are absolutely legally obliged to follow it to the letter - so much so that we sent the last one back that they sent the UK police the other week because it wasn't filled in properly.
It doesn't matter *his* nationality. He's afforded no special favours just because he's from Australia, we have no particular agreements with Australia except for the standard ones - an EU citizen would have twice as many rights, for instance. But equally we can't hide him either because another respected country that has signed many binding agreements with us as part of the EU has now correctly and legally asked for his extradition on charges entirely unrelated to UK law at all, for an alleged crime that's happened on Swedish soil that isn't subject to UK law and for which the correct and legal court and extradition processes have now been followed. It doesn't matter if he was done for stealing a penny sweet or murdering thousands - we can only do what the law says we can (unlike some countries that like to conveniently rewrite or ignore their own laws at will and apply them retroactively - that's aimed at BOTH the US and Sweden).
The UK? We really don't care. The US is a supposed ally, sure, but the EU is too and we have *much* more in the way of binding agreements to them (plus they live next door and give us most of our electricity). We've pretty much stayed out of this whole embarrassment because it's just hilarious that a private in an army can cause so much embarrassment (mainly through the US's own reaction to the event, which would have been out of the news within a couple of days in the UK if it wasn't for the US constantly blathering about it) for supposedly the world's most powerful country. So to us, it's a question of who ticks all the paperwork boxes first, and the Swedish did so (on their second attempt) so they get him - if he was an EU citizen, it would be pretty much the same but there'd probably be more paperwork (e.g. he could be tried in the UK under Swedish law). The US would have had a MUCH more difficult time justifying his extradition to the US for any reason whatsoever but the Swedish have (for all we know) valid reasons, complete paperwork, a working legal system, and only judicial intent at heart. They also have pretty much the same laws as us with regards to treating him well, or passing him on to other authorities who might not.
Some countries abide by their laws, even if that means having to draft a couple of dubious ones first. You can always challenge a law that's unfair, but ignoring it is as good as breaking it. The US would be well put to remember such things in the future.
Seriously? You're quoting the Daily Mail for facts?
Personally, I'm very, very bored of the whole "story" by now but you're quoting SERIOUSLY deficient "sources" and also assume (I have no idea if it's true in this case) that people are uncorruptable or can't start one thing in public while having an ulterior motive contrary to that. Also - read the damn article you cite - there are a million and one pointers in even that unresearched, rumour-ridden heap of journalistic crap to find at least 20 alibis and explanations that clear the guy, but somehow a court ends up issuing an international arrest warrant in full public view during the middle of a PR crisis? Somehow, that seems unlikely unless there is a factor pushing that. Stupidity is the usual explanation for anything in government, but it's not the only one.
I don't care if there is or isn't an inter-government conspiracy to get this guy - it wouldn't really surprise me either way. I don't care if he's arrested, deported, charged or not. What worries me more is that the US aren't hideously embarrassed and resolving to tighten things up on their end but instead out to quell a single proponent of the discovered material. "Our systems failed and this guy got hold of it - I know, let's threaten to kill this guy and / or make his life hell!" not "Okay, let's fix this system".
Yet again, the US shows that it can't be seen as "wrong", only other people/countries are ever wrong. These were supposedly private communique that were intercepted, stored, disseminated and publicised on every country's national TV networks - by a PRIVATE in their army. Says a lot for the US military / diplomacy process and the other militaries working alongside them - to me, it's just a warning not to deal with or trust the US military until they've cleaned their act up. To them, it's a case of making some Australian "freedom" nutter out to be public enemy No 2 (behind that other bloke that they never caught / can't prove is dead).
(P.S. I find *every* single piece of leaked material entirely boring, uninteresting and unsurprising. Hell, I was expecting something *juicy* to come out of that lot and there was absolutely nothing. I'd be shocked if that's *all* my military had to hide, and I'd be embarrassed for them if anything *juicy* had actually come out. The US's reaction has made this a news story, not anything posted on the website in question)
I happen to agree with the general idea of that thread - goto is powerful, even in good code, but it easily misused to create spaghetti code. The choices then available are: Remove goto from the language / never use goto, or careful audit each use of goto to make sure it provides sufficient advantages and *doesn't* make the silly mistakes possible.
The languages that remove things that provide complications to inept programmers (e.g. pointers, goto etc.) tend to be the ones that are hardest to program with predictable efficiency for.
There's nothing wrong with goto. Just don't lob it into code without thinking about it.
For the UK customers, you will know this phenomenon by the Cillit Bang adverts... "HI! I'M BARRY SCOTT!" - which were taken off air and replaced with a much more mild (and British) advert with the same guy NOT having to shout his name at me, because the company image was going down the pan exactly because of the stupid advert being too loud and yelling.
And the UK passed one of these rules years ago, I believe, and that was with only a year or two of stupidly loud adverts on some satellite channels.
The British are used to yelling - I posted about that very thing only a day or two ago - but what we're not used to is being yelled at by someone who wants us to buy something. When that happens, it's almost inevitable that your sales will suffer.
I have no idea about lithium but just a common-sense reasoning would provide some (plausible) explanations: The lithium isn't in the right form, it isn't pure enough, it's not found in large enough concentrations, mining it is not commercially viable until lithium is a lot rarer, there are mining hazards associated with extracting lithium ores (lithium-ore-dust is incredibly bad for you), maybe there's an artificial scarcity that can't be overcome on the international markets (e.g. Diamonds) etc.
Lithium isn't a "thing" that you can get out of rocks and put into pharmaceuticals or batteries. There are isotopes, molecules, extractions, filtrations, reactions, and all sorts. For a start, pure lithium ignites extremely easily and has to be stored in oil. How does that sit with the 230bn tonnes of lithium in seawater? Most of the world's gold is in seawater, that doesn't mean it's anywhere near practical to extract it from there, or that it'll be a pure gold element and not some isotope (I'd say oxide but that's not always relevant to gold, however lithium has all sorts of oxidation and other derivatives).
Carbon is everywhere, so I can just use a pencil lead to make my girlfriend's wedding ring? In theory, yes. In practice, it costs VASTLY more than just hoping someone in South Africa will hit a particularly nice-sized gemstone in a rock somewhere.
The largest lithium mine in the world produces 7,400 tonnes per year. To me, that sounds TINY and you'd probably need a whole mine just to keep one car manufacturer supplied with lithium-ion batteries. Not everything is as clear-cut as weighing the world and saying there's plenty left. By that count, there's enough oil to keep us going for centuries when, in fact, it's probably much sooner than that that we have to start raises prices to make it basically a luxury, not a commodity.
"Please place the weapon the floor, pretty please, and then we'll put you in these nice, shiny handcuffs"
"I would very much appreciate it if you didn't cross that safety barrier that you're now crossing, thank you very much."
Nobody should be subjected to anything *unnecessarily* but this is a judge dealing with witnesses who broke the law while collecting evidence, jury-tampering and a prosecution that doesn't see the harm in what they did and continually asserts that to the court and doesn't see the severity. He's probably also extremely annoyed at how a valid court case in quickly turning into a farce at tax-payers expense.
Shouting is not about aggression - it's about tone of voice, volume, and choice of words. If you're shouting in someone's face directly, or pushing forward towards them, that's just rude and confrontational. But it doesn't mean you can't *shout* at them without doing that, only making them realise your displeasure through their own obstinacy and yet not feel threatened.
Shouting at someone, especially someone who should know how irate people behave and be performing their *own* simple professional duty, won't kill them. Teachers shout at kids in school. I shouted at my letting agent last year (and without that, I wouldn't have working plumbing, or my landlord removing their contract, reporting them for breach of contract, extracting *my* deposit from them via a legal process, and dealing with me direct for even the most minor of problems and actually doing a better job). Parents shout at their children in supermarkets. I'm actually *glad* when some kids get told off because it means that the parent is paying attention to their actions and cares about the outcome for everyone - those parents who just say "Come on, now. I won't tell you again. No, really, come on. This is the last time I'll ask you. Please come on, Jack. Jack, if you come now, I'll give you sweeties" REALLY, REALLY need to have a room full of other parents shout at them until they understand why that doesn't work.
It's not a first resort, but it's the last (legal) resort of the ordinary man. We can't all be martyrs and speak perfectly calmly no matter how annoyed we are, and the *WORST* we can do without committing a crime is shout at someone. It's also, generally, incredibly effective. Try politely asking someone on a complaints desk to get their supervisor. In quite a lot of cases it won't happen, especially if they know they are in the wrong. Without shouting, you end in the the same position. Now try shouting only AFTER they refuse to do that. Now try being obstinate and refusing to leave the building until your problem is solved. Now try shouting some more. Nobody gets hurt, injured, threatened or abused, they just get talked to in a loud and certain tone. It has a surprisingly greater result at no significant psychological cost and it's the most you can *legally* do (I do not in any way condone actually threatening or hurting people - by that point, you've lost the argument and sight of what you're trying to achieve).
If you're really that devastated by someone shouting at you, it makes me wonder just how much of global life you're ready for, what your parents did when you ran into the road, and what attention your teachers were paying to you at school.
Shouting *is* the non-aggressive alternative here. The judge is showing that the lawyers are on their last chance and if they don't buck their ideas up, he'll be seeking sanctions against them. This is his way of warning them, and if it was done in a polite note about "The court disagrees with the prosecution", no-one would pay it any attention and if sanctions were then applied, the lawyers would claim there was no way they could see it coming. The judge has been definite, assertive, perfectly clear, aired all his concerns, indicated the seriousness of this to everyone and yet NOT ONE PERSON has been hurt in any way. I just wish a few more parents were like him, really.
Touchscreen rarely has the necessary responsiveness to enable you to type as you would on a keyboard.
Even writing this, I'm writing 10-15 characters a second, spread all over the keyboard, with only a tiny gap between each. My fingers know when to "bounce" up because they feel the button hit bottom. Touchscreen generally can't handle anywhere near that speed, accuracy, or tactile response (the biggest problem with even the most expensive touchscreens on public display - watch old grannies stab at the thing like it's a disobedient child because it just doesn't feel like the clicks are registering).
It won't work. Won't fly in schools (vertical surface = interference with eye contact and/or that they have to be placed only along the walls, mucky fingers, expensive hardware, etc.). Won't fly in business (two clunky and huge and expensive, RSI would be terrible working at something that physical for 8 hours a day). Won't fly in public kiosks (too pointless when a flat screen would do the same).
And to be honest, why does it have to be curved at all? It could just be two projected displays at right angles and nobody would care.
Actually, it's more like saying "I've compiled a listing of what other people on the Internet (who themselves are often respected by visitors for being "relevant" to musical top 10) think should be in the Top 10" and then being told off because one of your own songs is in that list.
Nope. But it could be seen as anticompetitive. There doesn't have to be a specific written law against everything imaginable - a lot of laws are generic enough that they can be extended by case law etc. to actually incorporate lots of "new" things.
Every country in the world has considered it, don't think they haven't. The problem is that there's no way to know what will actually happen and most people think it can't possibly operate in the manner those companies want for very long. That's why the UK has said "It's up to the ISP's" and not one ISP has actually jumped ship yet. And also, many UK ISP's have things like BBC iPlayer-supplied caching boxes so they don't overstretch their lines for BBC iPlayer. Is that somehow biasing them already?
The problem, really, is convincing people to use the content you want. If there's a single ISP that isn't subject to it, chances are most people (sooner or later) will end up with that ISP. It's not a question of "who jumps first" (like in the paywall on the Times website, for example), it's a question of "who doesn't want to be last?". Whoever doesn't do this ends up with more controlling power than any single content provider.
Nobody viewing your content = no income. The traditional means has been a popularity contest - whoever has the best content ended up attracting the most viewers from people who basically watched it for free (TV licensing aside, because it's a negligible amount that actually ends up in content provider's pockets for producing more programmes). Now people want to introduce a "pay us and we'll put you on TV more" kind of system which means you'd end up with the Internet equivalent of adverts. The problem there is that it's almost certain that while one ISP holds the rights to company X's services, another ISP will hold the rights to company Y's services, and unless you expect people to subscribe to BOTH, they will sacrifice one for another. Thus you end up in a little cliques - yeah, a connection that gives me good BBC iPlayer speeds compared to ITV is good if you like BBC - but if you're a casual viewer rather than a die-hard, you're just going to ignore it whereas before you were a casual consumers. There aren't enough hard-core fans of particular sites / services to justify running an ISP that gives them preferential treatment, because you will lose thousands of casuals for every hardcore fan you attract.
If BBC iPlayer announced tomorrow that you can only access bits of their content through, say, BT Broadband then the BT Broadband customers won't care. The one's not on BT Broadband are unlikely to change unless pushed or the content is *really* that good. But most people will just say "Oh" and go elsewhere (probably pirating BBC content from other websites). It's not a clear win at all.
The reason you can let the market decide is that, yes there might be turbulence for a year or two, but overall without you having to do anything it'll pretty much stay as it is. If the average broadband bill goes up, then people will end up asking for more on things like benefits (because internet access is pretty much seen as a useful thing for everything from paying bills to calculating tax nowadays) and the government lose unless they tax it even higher - chances are that *overall* taxable profit will stay roughly the same because those companies won't *each* be making more money. But if the decision is made to *not* split the Internet, then they haven't needed to do *anything* costly and administrative to enforce that and still don't lose out.
The markets deciding is actually quite sensible. That doesn't mean that the market's decision will be sensible, nor that the next few years will be sensible. But then, I already have an "Unlimited * " broadband connection, I already am subject to the whims of a 3rd-party quango's filtering on my Internet connection (the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklists), I'm already subject to the whims of potentially dozens of 3rd-parties when it comes to sending email to a friend on a different ISP, so you won't really notice that much difference.
The first ISP to offer "exclusive", or superior, access to something online will fragment the market into companies who *ALL* have some kind of exclusivity / priority and backhander,
It is illegal to deliberately read another's mail. But a tear doesn't mean it was human-induced, or even deliberately done. Holding a box by the only bit of tape / corner of cardboard that you can grab in between two knuckles while holding two others in your hands will cause heavy boxes to tear and rip and shred and that's without even thinking of the numerous journeys by boat, rail, plane, car, bike and human they have gone on before they get to you.
And in some cases, they can open the mail - for instance if the addressee isn't clear (and then they often post you back the opened envelope in another (sealed) envelope once they can read the address from the top of the letter inside, or if the parcel is suspicious, and customs routinely open international mail and can do just about anything they like to it in order to make sure it's genuine (even read the letters inside and check with those people that they know you, if it hints of criminal activity).
If your parcel was *genuinely* opened then the only problems are breach of privacy within the mail system (so you would have to PROVE in a court of law that the action was deliberate and to what end they wanted to see your boots), or if something is damaged / stolen - in which case it's much easier to prove and you SHOULD have followed it through to a court of law and/or insurance claim. But because there was a tear in the box that they at least tried to repair, doesn't mean it was done deliberately.
I've had that happen with any number of carriers - most prominently Royal Mail - but never any one more than another, and never to the extent that I get suspicious they might be opening my parcels deliberately. I don't think I've had anything "lost in the mail" that I sent / expected in the 15 years I've been posting items (including several thousand items on eBay back and forth as buyer / seller). Tell a lie - I think that, once, the water-logged, blurry, soggy, remains of an envelope that arrived from a flooded post-office with an apology and a special delivery to forward it on as best they could was missing a return envelope for the junk mail inside.
Shoulda thought of that several years ago when you started pushing electric cars, and I would blame the car manufacturers and electric stations equally - if you have 100amps into the house, you should be able to pull 100 amps. If you don't, then you need to contact the electricity company who are then suitably forewarned. Also, the car companies never mention just how much power a car pulls (but yet we're told to worry about 40W bulbs being on for five minutes more than usual!) or that it might need specialised equipment to charge.
I worked in an inner-city school a few years back. We blew the street fuse by plugging in a laptop trolley with 16 90W adaptors. Did we blame the laptop manufacturer's? The school electrician? No, we blamed the electricity company for being so stupid that the *specified* maximum current available for our site was nowhere near what blew the street fuse for the ENTIRE street.
Sort it out, like you should have always have sorted it out. And charge people more if they place a burden on your system and make them get specialised lines that cost more. Problem solved (and it'll also keep electric cars in the bin where they should be - what we *really* need from an ecological point of view is a lithium shortage right now).
Get a huge hard disk. Enormous. 1.5Tb or something only costs as much as a game or two now.
Dig out all the old CD's of games that you used to play, buy them off Gog.com or Steam if you don't have them any more. Read all the iso's onto the disk and / or install the Steam/GOG games onto there.
Remember all the games / systems that you've ever played. Find emulators for them all.
Have everything set up so that you can run any of those games from a couple of clicks and no technical hassle (nothing kills a gaming session more than having to diagnose your PC in the middle of it). By the time you get here, you'll have remembered several games that you never completed but loved. You'll have got back into playing all sorts of older games. You'll remember hearing of their sequels / prequels and want to try them out. You'll have been exposed to numerous games on Steam / GOG.com that you find interesting, and also others for the systems you are emulating (even if that's only DOS).
I did this and it's great. No more cutting-edge PC required, just double-click and go. A quick game of Chaos on the Spectrum followed by learning how nice a game Comix Zone was on the Megadrive (bought it on Steam because it came with some other Megadrive games that I wanted for free), followed by a quick bash through a handful of indie games. Hell, I have 200 games on my Steam account now and most of those have been purchased since I did this.
Most importantly - stop buying those headline games until a year or so after release. Headline games are only good for "I got it first" arguments among kids. It takes a year or so to realise whether a game is actually any good or just another FPS and you could have saved your money.
Browse through the Steam store's less than £4 section. Some wonderful things in there and if you click through you can often get a whole series of games for the price of a single modern one. Don't buy *everything*, just buy yourself a couple of things that seem relevant. Demos are always good here. If it doesn't have a demo, wants a brand-new PC, or has some icky DRM attached to it - ignore it for a year until those problems go away. Suggestions from others for particular games are unlikely to inspire and most of those games are only purchased if you come back to it later and decide that *you* want it.
Just get back into the gaming mindset - don't spend forever on purchases, don't await hyped-out games, don't struggle to run the latest games, don't wait for the 10 minute intros to cut through. Just get into the game (even if that's a slow-paced adventure) at a double-click whenever you like. All that matters is the time on the game, not all the related gumph. And if you get frustrated with something, kick back to a game you last played when you were a kid at the touch of a button.
My brother is an astrophysicist. The way he explained it to me is thus (and I believe this is pretty accurate, but dumbed down for the non-physicist in me):
There's a variable in the calculations that determine what happens in between "Big Bangs".
If the variable is less than 1, then the universe contracts to a point, and then explodes again, forever exploding and then crunching.
If the variable is more than 1, then the universe expands forever, getting cooler and cooler and never shrinks back even when there's a billion billion light years between the nearest two particles.
If the variable is exactly 1, then the universe expands to a point and stops expanding, staying at that size / temperature forever.
All current measurements put that variable at 1. With an error margin of about 5.
To me, that just about sums up human understanding of the universe perfectly (i.e. the amount of a potentially-infinite space-time entity - of which we inhabit precisely nothing - that can be understood by a short-lived squelchy collection of cells, most of which are dedicated to staying alive for a handful of decades, and that would fit into a small handbag).
Please walk into my local newsagents. The top shelf is ALL pornography. Sometimes the gits who read it in the shop don't bother to put it back where it came from. Sometimes the tall kids get it down so they can all giggle at it until the security guard comes over. The security mechanism to stop you looking at women in explicit poses is a height limit (when kids are generally taller than I am now) and the hope that someone will challenge them.
Underneath that, on the bottom shelf, are piles of papers. Some barely have photographs in them at all, others have boobs on every page. Quite often they are of celebrities, even sometimes pop stars that kids adore. Nobody ever queries them.
In between you have the "men's magazines" with scantily-clad, oiled ladies baring everything they can legally bare without having to be placed on the top shelf and articles like "How to turn that feminist into a slut". Cosmopolitan sits next door to it with sex-toy reviews and advise on orgasms and sexual positions. Even the Metro (a free London paper handed out on the London underground) has sex-toy reviews in it. When I was 8, someone brought a "Just Seventeen" magazine in from their older sister's stash. We all got in trouble for reading an article about a girl in a club putting her hand down a man's trousers.
Switch on the TV and even excluding the "ten minute Freeview", there are sexual-suggestive channels that broadcast sex chat lines and try to stay within their censorship by clever camera angles and euphemisms. Switch to the music channels and watch Katy Perry or Britney Spears gyrate in skin-tight catsuits and sexually suggestive poses with explicit lyrics (and, just lately, almost every song seems to have a "sshhhh.."ed swearword - i.e. the word is obviously a swear word because it rhymes with the previous line but they can't say it so they suggest it instead - Britney has a song about having a threesome, even). If it's not that, it's gangster-rap talking about the bitches and hoes that they "own".
Walk down the street - in even the quietest British town there's usually an Ann Summers (or similar) shop which, at the rear, has a selection of sex toys. Even when I was a kid they were there and girls told me that they would go into them in little gangs so they could have a giggle at the fake penises. The pound-shop near me has fake rubber boobs, handcuffs, chocolate willies and all manner of similar things. Even the fancy-dress stores are swimming in erotic imagery now - there isn't one that *doesn't* stock a French Maid or Playboy Bunny outfit.
And then go to Spain, or many other European cities, where all this is in EVERY shop and the red-light districts are clearly marked with 50-foot signs advertising sex shops. The only prostitute I've ever seen was actually in Italy, and I live in London.
Now you can say that this is "soft" porn but look at the ubiquity. It's incredibly simple for anyone to stumble across some sexual activity, even if that's just an amorous couple at the local park. The difference is the way you allow your child to absorb that information, the same way as you allow them to absorb other "undesirable" parts of culture for their age.
People swear in front of my child. My child knows that it's a "naughty" word and she's not to use it back. By the time she gets to secondary school I quite expect her to be swearing with her friends but I would hope that she keeps it in context - in fact, I'm more likely to tell her off for using an incorrect or too-obscene word for the situation than I am for swearing at all. However, in front of me, she will not swear. When I was eight, I was told off for calling someone a dildo. I didn't know what it meant, it was just a funny word. I doubt I would have understood if you'd explained it to me.
My child will also, at some point in her life, witness sex in many forms - television, computer games (I've fixed the PC's of parents who didn't realise that the South Park computer racing game was about firing dildos at ea
You use the same points that I always do. And in fact the IRA are infinitely more likely to kill me than any radicalist from the Middle East (in fact, the 9/11 bombers were about as close to a bunch of random US citizens as you can get - they all had valid US ID for a start), and I live in the UK too. I've only to have got on the wrong train in the 80's / 90's and I wouldn't be here.
The USA just want to dictate because they think that curing the symptom is curing the problem and they're never wrong. During 9/11 (literally while the news was showing it happen), one of the UK channels brought out an airport security expert who'd advised Heathrow, Gatwick, etc. He'd been to the US just a few months before to help them implement their security. Everything he pointed out, he was told "You worry too much" and "The trouble you guys have with the IRA will never happen in the US". *That's* how they got attacked. *Why* they got attacked is even easier to see in even the current ongoing response to that one incident (Released the Guantanamo prisoners yet? Or even given them a fair trial? What about their Geneva-convention-mandated human rights? *THAT* is why countries hate you).
The USA has absolutely zero idea how to handle people. They are the bully in the playground. That's fine for them, until one day they realise there's a bigger bully, or everyone they bully has grown up and isn't scared any more. Sadly, the US citizens I have spoken to are all pretty much ignorant of much of the bad things the US does (the UK does the same and worse throughout its history but we don't pretend otherwise) and think it's acceptable not to apply the rules they hold so dearly to anyone outside the US.
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And in evolution, the innovations are few and far between with millions of crackpot ideas that never turn out right happening all the time (i.e. genetic defects). And it's no use saying "Hey, solar is there, let's use it!" because evolution doesn't work like that. It takes a completely random chance for an extraordinary event to happen that confers a significant advantage to the creature involved such that it will stand more chance of mating and passing said effect onwards (or at least, not detrimentally affecting the organism's normal operation) - at some point, some species of that hornet got a genetic defect that, say, allowed the sun to warm his body up a little better because he was slightly whiter than normal by a fraction of a Pantone colour difference.
Cue several thousand or million generations later and we have a hornet that can just about absorb some energy from the sun in a purely incidental fashion with an extremely slowly crafted biological pigment (which presumably has to be "synthesized" in the hornet's body and replaced by its normal growth mechanisms) in a tiny part of its body. Chances are that solar just *isn't* that much cop compared to drinking nectar, or eating bugs, or even just eating the plants that *are* solar-powered themselves, the same thing we've discovered in terms of solar energy - although abundant, it's in a not-directly-useful form that's extremely hard to harness with even the best materials in the world designed in the best shapes and oriented in the most sunlit locations. Even the best plants in the world absorb energy at enormously slow rates per square metre and we have to cut them down by the acre after hundreds of years of growth in order to get useful energy out of them. Thus it's actually a complete fluke that a species has got to the point where they can collect enough energy in this fashion to make a use of it - because the mutation that allowed tiny, tiny fractions of a joule hit the bodies of the previous million or so generations collected managed to survive even though it was massively outweighed by every other energy source available to it. It's much more likely that it didn't confer *any* advantage for millions of years, but wasn't a disadvantage either, to get to this stage.
And then the *majority* of what keeps an organism going isn't direct energy (which actually tends to kill it through exposure to radiation over time) but fats and sugars (which plants *can* helpfully generate for us from sunlight, soil and air). So it's like wondering why the hornets, or anything else, haven't yet evolved to the point where they just need to sit in a sunny spot and never eat, or why humans can't live off arsenic. Although possible, the extraordinary chain of events to combine several billion years of evolution from a myriad of unrelated organisms through ONLY a series of small random chances over time (at the rate of one or slightly more random mutations per generation) of a single organism, basically make it so unlikely that it wouldn't happen in a billion universes in that short timescale.
Evolution is bloody complex. It's embarrassing that some people think we can "just copy" the end result of billions of years of evolution to solve problems, or transplant things from one species to another. It took billions of years to get it to work reliably for a reason and although there's fabulous things you can do by designing to a known plan, nothing that humans have ever constructed can even match the most basic of functions of the tiniest insect in their sustainability, efficiency or just damn intricacy. We play at "simulating" ants with the most complex supercomputers in the world and don't get close to simulating even their most basic functions - there has been millions of hours of supercomputer time dedicated to working out how to make a robot walk on two legs and still it's cutting-edge to make it do that once, reliably with materials far superior to that in any organism's leg.
Evolution isn't something simple, or has a result that can be appli
Our nuclear systems require US co-operation / hardware to fire. Not many other countries have such an agreement. Most of our nuclear capability is leased / designed / maintained from the US and have been for several *decades* and for some strange reason we never manage to scrap them and replace them because US ambassadors visit whenever we talk about that and it gets buried *again* (seriously - look up the Trident missile systems, we have been talking about scrapping them since the 1970's, evidenced even in TV sitcoms, because it's so expensive for us and we are given substandard hardware and yet we have to beg the US to "upgrade" us to newer missiles each time and still we have a pretty pitiful system for a modern nuclear-capable military). Our special forces have historically been used to do the US's dirty work, because of certain restrictions which aren't present in the UK military law - specifically when the US has caused a fuss in a foreign country and needs someone suppressed, hence we become your fall guy when it comes to high-end insurgency. You don't find out about it because our special forces tend to be incredibly secretive and actually operate in some form of stealth (it's generally acknowledged that US special forces stealth consists of NOT yelling "DIE FOREIGN SCUM" before charging in with guns blazing, even among the military). It's about the only influence we have where you have to ask favours - the other is that we host some US ICBM detection bases on UK soil, though they are of dubious effectiveness and we're never quite sure what it is you *actually* are using those bases for. The question has been raised several times in parliament.
The UK government are basically coerced into following US policy by a series of complex trade agreements, the revocation of our entire nuclear capability on a whim, and other such factors. It's not a friendly agreement, it's a hands-behind-our-back lock-in, dating to even World War loans (one of which we only JUST paid off to the US about two years ago). The UK government *are* stupid, that's pretty much the definition of a government or any collection of people en masse, but that doesn't mean the US isn't twisting our arm when it doesn't need to, or isn't using its leverage to command everything from wars (that the EU generally dissented on supporting, but we were made to support, to no benefit of our own) to trade.
There are little benefits along the way, but few. In ambassadorial circles, the US does not giveth, he only taketh away. Hell, we're importing US laws bit-by-bit at the moment, extraditing confirmed nutters because the US thinks they "hacked" into the defence networks (McKinnon - never was a man more certifiable, or less able to be extradited through their certifiability) that had no passwords or basic security precautions, and failing to do anything about British citizens detained, tortured and then released to the UK (where they were freed within hours because of the complete lack of any evidence of wrongdoing) from Guantanamo - despite joint parliamentary statements saying the entire place is an affront to democracy and a condemnation of the US.
We're the US's annoying younger brother. If we play nice and do what we're told, we get to play with our toys and the big boys don't take them away. Meanwhile, playing nice basically consists of trying to stop the US bombing innocents in the Middle East while getting hit by the bombings ourselves.
But, Christ! They're wall-to-wall in there!
P.S. Also stick an automated gun turret in the false ceiling.
Yeah, it's not like they modified Windows 3.1 to pretend to not run under DR DOS.
And it's not like you're not authorised to use DirectX 10 on Windows XP.
And it's not like they support the use of BIOS-reading licensing that fails to work on other machines.
And it's not like they support, use and rely on TPM features in modern systems.
And it's not like certain Steam modifications can ban your entire account.
And it's not like scanning money into Adobe Photoshop applications is detected and denied.
With any device, software or anything else - ignore the technology. Look at the contracts you've agreed to (or failed to contest) - if the agreement says that Apple decides on your behalf, or that you aren't authorised to do certain things, or that you can't resell the item, then that's a contract that can *easily* be seen as legally binding (and at best, one that will cost you an AWFUL lot of money to wriggle out of in a court). It doesn't matter if you signed the hire-purchase agreement on your car that says you may only use Esso petrol, or whether you agreed to an EULA that says you won't jailbreak your phone, or whether you agreed that your email could be printed in large print on the moon when you signed up to a website - that agreement is legally binding if you agreed to it, had a reasonable opportunity NOT to agree to it, and don't contest it later. Even if it's deemed unfair later in court, you still have to spend YEARS getting that far before you get your way.
Or you could just NOT agree to stupid contracts on things that you buy - either by not buying them, returning them, or contesting them. The idiot is not the person that bans the app from the iPhone Store. The idiot is the one that, when their app is banned, has ALREADY agreed months before that such decisions could be taken and would be binding. Sure, you can fight unfair contract terms in court but that's something you should have done FIRST, not after the event actually affects you.
If you agree to a contract that says your car may only be used on Tuesdays, or only be turned on if BMW allow it, or only for non-racing events - all of those are *identical* contract terms in terms of enforceability. The last one is actually written on my car insurance, which I've agreed to, so it's just a question of what you are dumb enough to agree to when you buy a product, agree to the EULA, and then continue to use the product/service/license under those terms.
Caveat emptor. Don't agree to stupid shit that you disagree with just in order to use a product. Instead, don't agree and DON'T use that product.
Do they have limited ammo with a cool retro yellow-black interface, which ticks down to zero with appropriate warnings, is fooled by throwing an empty bucket in front of it, and which exhausts its entire ammo supply in under 30 seconds?
Either way, the Aliens:Special Edition guys probably would like to have a look at them.
"Supposed" refers to the fact that they dragged us into a pretty unrelated "war" (which wasn't a war, then it was, then people don't get prisoner of war rights, then you're allowed to shoot people without it being murder, and if they threaten you it's an act of war, etc.) and then left us there holding the fort and trying to defend some other country's actions - we've been dealing with terrorism for the last forty years and *nothing*. The US has one incident (that our intelligence has been warning you about for decades, and our airport security guys were telling you would happen - even just weeks before it did) and suddenly we have to get into a very dubiously-authorised "war/not war" in the Middle East. Then the US tortured people (including some of our citizens) and we're left to pick up the pieces because we were complicit in that (and damn right we were, and damn right we have to deal with the mess, and damn right we should've disowned the US there and then). That's *before* you get into friendly fire, leaking our private communique to the world and basically setting back the last 25 years of Middle East peace processes for a bug-hunt that never caught so much as a gnat.
The US is the playground bully. The UK is the little guy, middle-ranking, who gets sent to do the dirty jobs and stick up for the bully because if they don't, they'll be the next target. And their cousins know each other or something. We hit the other kids because you basically force us to under threat of removing the "special relationship", then we get into trouble for it and are expected to suck it up and take all the blame. Then *we* get pounded on by the US afterwards.
Most Americans I know would be *shocked* of the actual, UK man-in-the-street opinion of the US, even before all that happened. "Special relationship"? Take what you want and give nothing back, basically.
In all, the UK opinion of the US can be summed up in the short speech that Hugh Grant gives in the movie Love Actually. Just a shame we don't have a PM with the balls to say it.
He's Australian. He is in Britain. In general, we don't waterboard our prisoners or humiliate them while they are in prison without trial for YEARS after their initial arrest (how many people still in that "US prison" abroad?) so he was able to hand himself in in the knowledge that we would require certain things of the Swedish government (an EU member) in their handling of him. Also, because he *was* in Britain and because he has deliberately made himself known to the authorities ever since arriving, when an international arrest warrant comes through from a friendly EU country with good human rights record we are absolutely legally obliged to follow it to the letter - so much so that we sent the last one back that they sent the UK police the other week because it wasn't filled in properly.
It doesn't matter *his* nationality. He's afforded no special favours just because he's from Australia, we have no particular agreements with Australia except for the standard ones - an EU citizen would have twice as many rights, for instance. But equally we can't hide him either because another respected country that has signed many binding agreements with us as part of the EU has now correctly and legally asked for his extradition on charges entirely unrelated to UK law at all, for an alleged crime that's happened on Swedish soil that isn't subject to UK law and for which the correct and legal court and extradition processes have now been followed. It doesn't matter if he was done for stealing a penny sweet or murdering thousands - we can only do what the law says we can (unlike some countries that like to conveniently rewrite or ignore their own laws at will and apply them retroactively - that's aimed at BOTH the US and Sweden).
The UK? We really don't care. The US is a supposed ally, sure, but the EU is too and we have *much* more in the way of binding agreements to them (plus they live next door and give us most of our electricity). We've pretty much stayed out of this whole embarrassment because it's just hilarious that a private in an army can cause so much embarrassment (mainly through the US's own reaction to the event, which would have been out of the news within a couple of days in the UK if it wasn't for the US constantly blathering about it) for supposedly the world's most powerful country. So to us, it's a question of who ticks all the paperwork boxes first, and the Swedish did so (on their second attempt) so they get him - if he was an EU citizen, it would be pretty much the same but there'd probably be more paperwork (e.g. he could be tried in the UK under Swedish law). The US would have had a MUCH more difficult time justifying his extradition to the US for any reason whatsoever but the Swedish have (for all we know) valid reasons, complete paperwork, a working legal system, and only judicial intent at heart. They also have pretty much the same laws as us with regards to treating him well, or passing him on to other authorities who might not.
Some countries abide by their laws, even if that means having to draft a couple of dubious ones first. You can always challenge a law that's unfair, but ignoring it is as good as breaking it. The US would be well put to remember such things in the future.
Seriously? You're quoting the Daily Mail for facts?
Personally, I'm very, very bored of the whole "story" by now but you're quoting SERIOUSLY deficient "sources" and also assume (I have no idea if it's true in this case) that people are uncorruptable or can't start one thing in public while having an ulterior motive contrary to that. Also - read the damn article you cite - there are a million and one pointers in even that unresearched, rumour-ridden heap of journalistic crap to find at least 20 alibis and explanations that clear the guy, but somehow a court ends up issuing an international arrest warrant in full public view during the middle of a PR crisis? Somehow, that seems unlikely unless there is a factor pushing that. Stupidity is the usual explanation for anything in government, but it's not the only one.
I don't care if there is or isn't an inter-government conspiracy to get this guy - it wouldn't really surprise me either way. I don't care if he's arrested, deported, charged or not. What worries me more is that the US aren't hideously embarrassed and resolving to tighten things up on their end but instead out to quell a single proponent of the discovered material. "Our systems failed and this guy got hold of it - I know, let's threaten to kill this guy and / or make his life hell!" not "Okay, let's fix this system".
Yet again, the US shows that it can't be seen as "wrong", only other people/countries are ever wrong. These were supposedly private communique that were intercepted, stored, disseminated and publicised on every country's national TV networks - by a PRIVATE in their army. Says a lot for the US military / diplomacy process and the other militaries working alongside them - to me, it's just a warning not to deal with or trust the US military until they've cleaned their act up. To them, it's a case of making some Australian "freedom" nutter out to be public enemy No 2 (behind that other bloke that they never caught / can't prove is dead).
(P.S. I find *every* single piece of leaked material entirely boring, uninteresting and unsurprising. Hell, I was expecting something *juicy* to come out of that lot and there was absolutely nothing. I'd be shocked if that's *all* my military had to hide, and I'd be embarrassed for them if anything *juicy* had actually come out. The US's reaction has made this a news story, not anything posted on the website in question)
I happen to agree with the general idea of that thread - goto is powerful, even in good code, but it easily misused to create spaghetti code. The choices then available are: Remove goto from the language / never use goto, or careful audit each use of goto to make sure it provides sufficient advantages and *doesn't* make the silly mistakes possible.
The languages that remove things that provide complications to inept programmers (e.g. pointers, goto etc.) tend to be the ones that are hardest to program with predictable efficiency for.
There's nothing wrong with goto. Just don't lob it into code without thinking about it.
Er, yeah - any decent hosting setup should have all unused ports firewalled off, hopefully on a separate device.
Again, poor configuration is the target, not any weakness in the actual technology.
For the UK customers, you will know this phenomenon by the Cillit Bang adverts... "HI! I'M BARRY SCOTT!" - which were taken off air and replaced with a much more mild (and British) advert with the same guy NOT having to shout his name at me, because the company image was going down the pan exactly because of the stupid advert being too loud and yelling.
And the UK passed one of these rules years ago, I believe, and that was with only a year or two of stupidly loud adverts on some satellite channels.
The British are used to yelling - I posted about that very thing only a day or two ago - but what we're not used to is being yelled at by someone who wants us to buy something. When that happens, it's almost inevitable that your sales will suffer.
I have no idea about lithium but just a common-sense reasoning would provide some (plausible) explanations: The lithium isn't in the right form, it isn't pure enough, it's not found in large enough concentrations, mining it is not commercially viable until lithium is a lot rarer, there are mining hazards associated with extracting lithium ores (lithium-ore-dust is incredibly bad for you), maybe there's an artificial scarcity that can't be overcome on the international markets (e.g. Diamonds) etc.
Lithium isn't a "thing" that you can get out of rocks and put into pharmaceuticals or batteries. There are isotopes, molecules, extractions, filtrations, reactions, and all sorts. For a start, pure lithium ignites extremely easily and has to be stored in oil. How does that sit with the 230bn tonnes of lithium in seawater? Most of the world's gold is in seawater, that doesn't mean it's anywhere near practical to extract it from there, or that it'll be a pure gold element and not some isotope (I'd say oxide but that's not always relevant to gold, however lithium has all sorts of oxidation and other derivatives).
Carbon is everywhere, so I can just use a pencil lead to make my girlfriend's wedding ring? In theory, yes. In practice, it costs VASTLY more than just hoping someone in South Africa will hit a particularly nice-sized gemstone in a rock somewhere.
The largest lithium mine in the world produces 7,400 tonnes per year. To me, that sounds TINY and you'd probably need a whole mine just to keep one car manufacturer supplied with lithium-ion batteries. Not everything is as clear-cut as weighing the world and saying there's plenty left. By that count, there's enough oil to keep us going for centuries when, in fact, it's probably much sooner than that that we have to start raises prices to make it basically a luxury, not a commodity.
"Please place the weapon the floor, pretty please, and then we'll put you in these nice, shiny handcuffs"
"I would very much appreciate it if you didn't cross that safety barrier that you're now crossing, thank you very much."
Nobody should be subjected to anything *unnecessarily* but this is a judge dealing with witnesses who broke the law while collecting evidence, jury-tampering and a prosecution that doesn't see the harm in what they did and continually asserts that to the court and doesn't see the severity. He's probably also extremely annoyed at how a valid court case in quickly turning into a farce at tax-payers expense.
Shouting is not about aggression - it's about tone of voice, volume, and choice of words. If you're shouting in someone's face directly, or pushing forward towards them, that's just rude and confrontational. But it doesn't mean you can't *shout* at them without doing that, only making them realise your displeasure through their own obstinacy and yet not feel threatened.
Shouting at someone, especially someone who should know how irate people behave and be performing their *own* simple professional duty, won't kill them. Teachers shout at kids in school. I shouted at my letting agent last year (and without that, I wouldn't have working plumbing, or my landlord removing their contract, reporting them for breach of contract, extracting *my* deposit from them via a legal process, and dealing with me direct for even the most minor of problems and actually doing a better job). Parents shout at their children in supermarkets. I'm actually *glad* when some kids get told off because it means that the parent is paying attention to their actions and cares about the outcome for everyone - those parents who just say "Come on, now. I won't tell you again. No, really, come on. This is the last time I'll ask you. Please come on, Jack. Jack, if you come now, I'll give you sweeties" REALLY, REALLY need to have a room full of other parents shout at them until they understand why that doesn't work.
It's not a first resort, but it's the last (legal) resort of the ordinary man. We can't all be martyrs and speak perfectly calmly no matter how annoyed we are, and the *WORST* we can do without committing a crime is shout at someone. It's also, generally, incredibly effective. Try politely asking someone on a complaints desk to get their supervisor. In quite a lot of cases it won't happen, especially if they know they are in the wrong. Without shouting, you end in the the same position. Now try shouting only AFTER they refuse to do that. Now try being obstinate and refusing to leave the building until your problem is solved. Now try shouting some more. Nobody gets hurt, injured, threatened or abused, they just get talked to in a loud and certain tone. It has a surprisingly greater result at no significant psychological cost and it's the most you can *legally* do (I do not in any way condone actually threatening or hurting people - by that point, you've lost the argument and sight of what you're trying to achieve).
If you're really that devastated by someone shouting at you, it makes me wonder just how much of global life you're ready for, what your parents did when you ran into the road, and what attention your teachers were paying to you at school.
Shouting *is* the non-aggressive alternative here. The judge is showing that the lawyers are on their last chance and if they don't buck their ideas up, he'll be seeking sanctions against them. This is his way of warning them, and if it was done in a polite note about "The court disagrees with the prosecution", no-one would pay it any attention and if sanctions were then applied, the lawyers would claim there was no way they could see it coming. The judge has been definite, assertive, perfectly clear, aired all his concerns, indicated the seriousness of this to everyone and yet NOT ONE PERSON has been hurt in any way. I just wish a few more parents were like him, really.
Touchscreen rarely has the necessary responsiveness to enable you to type as you would on a keyboard.
Even writing this, I'm writing 10-15 characters a second, spread all over the keyboard, with only a tiny gap between each. My fingers know when to "bounce" up because they feel the button hit bottom. Touchscreen generally can't handle anywhere near that speed, accuracy, or tactile response (the biggest problem with even the most expensive touchscreens on public display - watch old grannies stab at the thing like it's a disobedient child because it just doesn't feel like the clicks are registering).
It won't work. Won't fly in schools (vertical surface = interference with eye contact and/or that they have to be placed only along the walls, mucky fingers, expensive hardware, etc.). Won't fly in business (two clunky and huge and expensive, RSI would be terrible working at something that physical for 8 hours a day). Won't fly in public kiosks (too pointless when a flat screen would do the same).
And to be honest, why does it have to be curved at all? It could just be two projected displays at right angles and nobody would care.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_library
Your wish has been granted. Just not in your country (I assume).
Actually, it's more like saying "I've compiled a listing of what other people on the Internet (who themselves are often respected by visitors for being "relevant" to musical top 10) think should be in the Top 10" and then being told off because one of your own songs is in that list.
Nope. But it could be seen as anticompetitive. There doesn't have to be a specific written law against everything imaginable - a lot of laws are generic enough that they can be extended by case law etc. to actually incorporate lots of "new" things.
Every country in the world has considered it, don't think they haven't. The problem is that there's no way to know what will actually happen and most people think it can't possibly operate in the manner those companies want for very long. That's why the UK has said "It's up to the ISP's" and not one ISP has actually jumped ship yet. And also, many UK ISP's have things like BBC iPlayer-supplied caching boxes so they don't overstretch their lines for BBC iPlayer. Is that somehow biasing them already?
The problem, really, is convincing people to use the content you want. If there's a single ISP that isn't subject to it, chances are most people (sooner or later) will end up with that ISP. It's not a question of "who jumps first" (like in the paywall on the Times website, for example), it's a question of "who doesn't want to be last?". Whoever doesn't do this ends up with more controlling power than any single content provider.
Nobody viewing your content = no income. The traditional means has been a popularity contest - whoever has the best content ended up attracting the most viewers from people who basically watched it for free (TV licensing aside, because it's a negligible amount that actually ends up in content provider's pockets for producing more programmes). Now people want to introduce a "pay us and we'll put you on TV more" kind of system which means you'd end up with the Internet equivalent of adverts. The problem there is that it's almost certain that while one ISP holds the rights to company X's services, another ISP will hold the rights to company Y's services, and unless you expect people to subscribe to BOTH, they will sacrifice one for another. Thus you end up in a little cliques - yeah, a connection that gives me good BBC iPlayer speeds compared to ITV is good if you like BBC - but if you're a casual viewer rather than a die-hard, you're just going to ignore it whereas before you were a casual consumers. There aren't enough hard-core fans of particular sites / services to justify running an ISP that gives them preferential treatment, because you will lose thousands of casuals for every hardcore fan you attract.
If BBC iPlayer announced tomorrow that you can only access bits of their content through, say, BT Broadband then the BT Broadband customers won't care. The one's not on BT Broadband are unlikely to change unless pushed or the content is *really* that good. But most people will just say "Oh" and go elsewhere (probably pirating BBC content from other websites). It's not a clear win at all.
The reason you can let the market decide is that, yes there might be turbulence for a year or two, but overall without you having to do anything it'll pretty much stay as it is. If the average broadband bill goes up, then people will end up asking for more on things like benefits (because internet access is pretty much seen as a useful thing for everything from paying bills to calculating tax nowadays) and the government lose unless they tax it even higher - chances are that *overall* taxable profit will stay roughly the same because those companies won't *each* be making more money. But if the decision is made to *not* split the Internet, then they haven't needed to do *anything* costly and administrative to enforce that and still don't lose out.
The markets deciding is actually quite sensible. That doesn't mean that the market's decision will be sensible, nor that the next few years will be sensible. But then, I already have an "Unlimited * " broadband connection, I already am subject to the whims of a 3rd-party quango's filtering on my Internet connection (the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklists), I'm already subject to the whims of potentially dozens of 3rd-parties when it comes to sending email to a friend on a different ISP, so you won't really notice that much difference.
The first ISP to offer "exclusive", or superior, access to something online will fragment the market into companies who *ALL* have some kind of exclusivity / priority and backhander,
It is illegal to deliberately read another's mail. But a tear doesn't mean it was human-induced, or even deliberately done. Holding a box by the only bit of tape / corner of cardboard that you can grab in between two knuckles while holding two others in your hands will cause heavy boxes to tear and rip and shred and that's without even thinking of the numerous journeys by boat, rail, plane, car, bike and human they have gone on before they get to you.
And in some cases, they can open the mail - for instance if the addressee isn't clear (and then they often post you back the opened envelope in another (sealed) envelope once they can read the address from the top of the letter inside, or if the parcel is suspicious, and customs routinely open international mail and can do just about anything they like to it in order to make sure it's genuine (even read the letters inside and check with those people that they know you, if it hints of criminal activity).
If your parcel was *genuinely* opened then the only problems are breach of privacy within the mail system (so you would have to PROVE in a court of law that the action was deliberate and to what end they wanted to see your boots), or if something is damaged / stolen - in which case it's much easier to prove and you SHOULD have followed it through to a court of law and/or insurance claim. But because there was a tear in the box that they at least tried to repair, doesn't mean it was done deliberately.
I've had that happen with any number of carriers - most prominently Royal Mail - but never any one more than another, and never to the extent that I get suspicious they might be opening my parcels deliberately. I don't think I've had anything "lost in the mail" that I sent / expected in the 15 years I've been posting items (including several thousand items on eBay back and forth as buyer / seller). Tell a lie - I think that, once, the water-logged, blurry, soggy, remains of an envelope that arrived from a flooded post-office with an apology and a special delivery to forward it on as best they could was missing a return envelope for the junk mail inside.
Paranoid much?
Quick! Don't think of a purple rhino!
Shoulda thought of that several years ago when you started pushing electric cars, and I would blame the car manufacturers and electric stations equally - if you have 100amps into the house, you should be able to pull 100 amps. If you don't, then you need to contact the electricity company who are then suitably forewarned. Also, the car companies never mention just how much power a car pulls (but yet we're told to worry about 40W bulbs being on for five minutes more than usual!) or that it might need specialised equipment to charge.
I worked in an inner-city school a few years back. We blew the street fuse by plugging in a laptop trolley with 16 90W adaptors. Did we blame the laptop manufacturer's? The school electrician? No, we blamed the electricity company for being so stupid that the *specified* maximum current available for our site was nowhere near what blew the street fuse for the ENTIRE street.
Sort it out, like you should have always have sorted it out. And charge people more if they place a burden on your system and make them get specialised lines that cost more. Problem solved (and it'll also keep electric cars in the bin where they should be - what we *really* need from an ecological point of view is a lithium shortage right now).
Get a huge hard disk. Enormous. 1.5Tb or something only costs as much as a game or two now.
Dig out all the old CD's of games that you used to play, buy them off Gog.com or Steam if you don't have them any more. Read all the iso's onto the disk and / or install the Steam/GOG games onto there.
Remember all the games / systems that you've ever played. Find emulators for them all.
Have everything set up so that you can run any of those games from a couple of clicks and no technical hassle (nothing kills a gaming session more than having to diagnose your PC in the middle of it). By the time you get here, you'll have remembered several games that you never completed but loved. You'll have got back into playing all sorts of older games. You'll remember hearing of their sequels / prequels and want to try them out. You'll have been exposed to numerous games on Steam / GOG.com that you find interesting, and also others for the systems you are emulating (even if that's only DOS).
I did this and it's great. No more cutting-edge PC required, just double-click and go. A quick game of Chaos on the Spectrum followed by learning how nice a game Comix Zone was on the Megadrive (bought it on Steam because it came with some other Megadrive games that I wanted for free), followed by a quick bash through a handful of indie games. Hell, I have 200 games on my Steam account now and most of those have been purchased since I did this.
Most importantly - stop buying those headline games until a year or so after release. Headline games are only good for "I got it first" arguments among kids. It takes a year or so to realise whether a game is actually any good or just another FPS and you could have saved your money.
Browse through the Steam store's less than £4 section. Some wonderful things in there and if you click through you can often get a whole series of games for the price of a single modern one. Don't buy *everything*, just buy yourself a couple of things that seem relevant. Demos are always good here. If it doesn't have a demo, wants a brand-new PC, or has some icky DRM attached to it - ignore it for a year until those problems go away. Suggestions from others for particular games are unlikely to inspire and most of those games are only purchased if you come back to it later and decide that *you* want it.
Just get back into the gaming mindset - don't spend forever on purchases, don't await hyped-out games, don't struggle to run the latest games, don't wait for the 10 minute intros to cut through. Just get into the game (even if that's a slow-paced adventure) at a double-click whenever you like. All that matters is the time on the game, not all the related gumph. And if you get frustrated with something, kick back to a game you last played when you were a kid at the touch of a button.
My brother is an astrophysicist. The way he explained it to me is thus (and I believe this is pretty accurate, but dumbed down for the non-physicist in me):
There's a variable in the calculations that determine what happens in between "Big Bangs".
If the variable is less than 1, then the universe contracts to a point, and then explodes again, forever exploding and then crunching.
If the variable is more than 1, then the universe expands forever, getting cooler and cooler and never shrinks back even when there's a billion billion light years between the nearest two particles.
If the variable is exactly 1, then the universe expands to a point and stops expanding, staying at that size / temperature forever.
All current measurements put that variable at 1. With an error margin of about 5.
To me, that just about sums up human understanding of the universe perfectly (i.e. the amount of a potentially-infinite space-time entity - of which we inhabit precisely nothing - that can be understood by a short-lived squelchy collection of cells, most of which are dedicated to staying alive for a handful of decades, and that would fit into a small handbag).
Please walk into my local newsagents. The top shelf is ALL pornography. Sometimes the gits who read it in the shop don't bother to put it back where it came from. Sometimes the tall kids get it down so they can all giggle at it until the security guard comes over. The security mechanism to stop you looking at women in explicit poses is a height limit (when kids are generally taller than I am now) and the hope that someone will challenge them.
Underneath that, on the bottom shelf, are piles of papers. Some barely have photographs in them at all, others have boobs on every page. Quite often they are of celebrities, even sometimes pop stars that kids adore. Nobody ever queries them.
In between you have the "men's magazines" with scantily-clad, oiled ladies baring everything they can legally bare without having to be placed on the top shelf and articles like "How to turn that feminist into a slut". Cosmopolitan sits next door to it with sex-toy reviews and advise on orgasms and sexual positions. Even the Metro (a free London paper handed out on the London underground) has sex-toy reviews in it. When I was 8, someone brought a "Just Seventeen" magazine in from their older sister's stash. We all got in trouble for reading an article about a girl in a club putting her hand down a man's trousers.
Switch on the TV and even excluding the "ten minute Freeview", there are sexual-suggestive channels that broadcast sex chat lines and try to stay within their censorship by clever camera angles and euphemisms. Switch to the music channels and watch Katy Perry or Britney Spears gyrate in skin-tight catsuits and sexually suggestive poses with explicit lyrics (and, just lately, almost every song seems to have a "sshhhh.."ed swearword - i.e. the word is obviously a swear word because it rhymes with the previous line but they can't say it so they suggest it instead - Britney has a song about having a threesome, even). If it's not that, it's gangster-rap talking about the bitches and hoes that they "own".
Walk down the street - in even the quietest British town there's usually an Ann Summers (or similar) shop which, at the rear, has a selection of sex toys. Even when I was a kid they were there and girls told me that they would go into them in little gangs so they could have a giggle at the fake penises. The pound-shop near me has fake rubber boobs, handcuffs, chocolate willies and all manner of similar things. Even the fancy-dress stores are swimming in erotic imagery now - there isn't one that *doesn't* stock a French Maid or Playboy Bunny outfit.
And then go to Spain, or many other European cities, where all this is in EVERY shop and the red-light districts are clearly marked with 50-foot signs advertising sex shops. The only prostitute I've ever seen was actually in Italy, and I live in London.
Now you can say that this is "soft" porn but look at the ubiquity. It's incredibly simple for anyone to stumble across some sexual activity, even if that's just an amorous couple at the local park. The difference is the way you allow your child to absorb that information, the same way as you allow them to absorb other "undesirable" parts of culture for their age.
People swear in front of my child. My child knows that it's a "naughty" word and she's not to use it back. By the time she gets to secondary school I quite expect her to be swearing with her friends but I would hope that she keeps it in context - in fact, I'm more likely to tell her off for using an incorrect or too-obscene word for the situation than I am for swearing at all. However, in front of me, she will not swear. When I was eight, I was told off for calling someone a dildo. I didn't know what it meant, it was just a funny word. I doubt I would have understood if you'd explained it to me.
My child will also, at some point in her life, witness sex in many forms - television, computer games (I've fixed the PC's of parents who didn't realise that the South Park computer racing game was about firing dildos at ea
You use the same points that I always do. And in fact the IRA are infinitely more likely to kill me than any radicalist from the Middle East (in fact, the 9/11 bombers were about as close to a bunch of random US citizens as you can get - they all had valid US ID for a start), and I live in the UK too. I've only to have got on the wrong train in the 80's / 90's and I wouldn't be here.
The USA just want to dictate because they think that curing the symptom is curing the problem and they're never wrong. During 9/11 (literally while the news was showing it happen), one of the UK channels brought out an airport security expert who'd advised Heathrow, Gatwick, etc. He'd been to the US just a few months before to help them implement their security. Everything he pointed out, he was told "You worry too much" and "The trouble you guys have with the IRA will never happen in the US". *That's* how they got attacked. *Why* they got attacked is even easier to see in even the current ongoing response to that one incident (Released the Guantanamo prisoners yet? Or even given them a fair trial? What about their Geneva-convention-mandated human rights? *THAT* is why countries hate you).
The USA has absolutely zero idea how to handle people. They are the bully in the playground. That's fine for them, until one day they realise there's a bigger bully, or everyone they bully has grown up and isn't scared any more. Sadly, the US citizens I have spoken to are all pretty much ignorant of much of the bad things the US does (the UK does the same and worse throughout its history but we don't pretend otherwise) and think it's acceptable not to apply the rules they hold so dearly to anyone outside the US.