Allowing David Cameron to honour his own manifesto promises is hardly a 'spectacular' result, just a natural consequence of coalition. The Lib Dems are thrown the occasional bone to keep the rump of their core support happy, but in most of the important areas of disagreement the view of the senior partners has, quite predictably, prevailed.
The tuition fee debacle is something of a special case. This was not just a manifesto promise that might reasonably be taken with a pinch of salt, but a flagship issue that was, uniquely, the subject of a personal pledge made by every candidate to vote in a specific way. Nobody expected the Lib Dems to actually form a government by themselves and implement this policy unilaterally, but quite a lot of people really believed their own MPs would stick to their guns on this issue (which an honourable minority did). In university towns it would have been a significant vote winner. Of course we now know the party leadership had absolutely no intention of keeping this promise if it proved a barrier to power:
If the LibDems had ended up with a majority he might have been able to deliver on that promise. They didn't, so it was not within their power to keep all their promises.The coalition agreement decided which promises stayed and which had to go, and once that agreement was made he was right to stick by it rather than break the coalition over something he had previously agreed to.
Yes, much better to break the promises they made to the voters rather than those they made to their coalition 'partners'. After all, the voters are never likely to give them any significant power in their own right (especially now); only their new friends can do that. And no matter that the solemn pledge signed by every elected LibDem MP ('I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative'), and which many voters were naive enough to take literally, did not require (or assume) they'd be in power, just that they'd use their votes against such an increase. Power, after all, is much more important than worrying about the trivial concerns of voters, especially Power wielded purely in the Public Interest in These Difficult Times.
The summary doesn't tell us the slightest thing about the job or the work environment...What sort of software is it?...There's simply not enough information up there to form an opinion.
Product Security Team at Adobe, with special responsibility for Flash and Acrobat?
In a fight between Admiral James T. Kirk (as played by you in 'Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan') and Capt. James T. Kirk (as played by that guy from 'The Princess Diaries 2' in 'Star Trek 2009'), who would win..?
Also, the rack in the background looks messy, and not well thought-through.
Even worse, there's an entire PC World shop in the background, with all the aesthetics you'd expect from a shed full of overpriced printer cartridges and copies of Norton Antivirus at the grimmer end of Tottenham Ct Rd - there's a reason why most fashion boutiques do not open 'pop-up shops' in branches of Lidl or Walmart:
Presumably the main job of the Google employees will be desperately trying to steer the customers away from the cheaper fully-functional netbooks 50 feet away in the main shop.
Incidentally, this is not the first 'Chrome Zone':
VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions. On that basis, nobody has the right to publish an iOS App Store version without the consent of all contributors.
No, VLC is GPL2 (check your COPYING.txt). Only GPL3 has an explicit Tivoisation clause, which makes it clearly incompatible with the App Store, but the FSF and others (including one of the VLC programmers) have argued that Section 6 of GPL2 is also violated by Apple's additional restrictions, making even GPL2 apps incompatible.
So far as I understand it, British universities could claim copyright on a thesis but typically don't - but they'd certainly be quite pissed off if you published commercially.
I don't believe this is normally the case, e.g.:
"I understand that the rights granted to the UCL Institutional Repository through this agreement are entirely non-exclusive and royalty free and that I am free to publish the Work in its present version or future versions elsewhere."
or:
"Rights granted to the University of Warwick and the British Library and the user of the thesis through this agreement are non-exclusive. I retain all rights in the thesis in its present version or future versions."
or:
"Copyright in the thesis usually rests with the author: this does not change when you deposit your thesis in ORA. No ownership is assumed by the Bodleian Libraries over the work."
Universities are generally more concerned about any material you include (e.g. a figure) in which the copyright is held by a third party (this might even include your own work if you include, say, a paper where you've signed over copyright to a journal). This sort of material can be included under a copyright exemption for the purposes of examination (if properly attributed!), but can't be further distributed by the institutional repository without permission.
The starter edition of the first one is free, and amongst other things includes a classic menu interface for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The others need paid licences for business use, but also support 2010, and the third one has versions that support Access, Outlook, etc.
The studio musicians on Milli Vanilli's album not only knew what was up, but willingly did it. And it's not like MV went and grabbed tracks from existing albums or audio libraries, everything was recorded fresh
Yes, this one sounds closer to the Joyce Hatto case, where (classical piano) recordings by other artists were shamelessly plundered, obviously without consent:
Do you honestly think that Microsoft would abandon their largest market area, ie. business users for something that only works with tablets?
Yes, absolutely no chance that MS would inflict some random unintuitive user interface on their business users that completely discards well over a decade's worth of experience with the existing GUI, for no good reason except that it 'looks modern', and with no option to revert to a 'classic mode'. They'd never do anything that crazy!
I don't understand these sorts of replies. You may think it's a waste of time, but this guy clearly enjoys fiddling around with electronics, using his hands to craft something unique and using his head to make sure everything works out.
I guess it's because, historically, this sort of approach doesn't always end well:
"He promises to remain part of the Slashdot community (he's still user No. 1, after all)"
Well, that's 'Who is Number 1?" answered, but how about "Why did you resign?". Rob should not be surprised to wake up tomorrow wearing a number in a mysterious seaside Village patrolled by weather balloons, and kept there until this question is answered definitively...
Tough fabric, nice designs and less boxy than much of the competition (though this means that clearances can be tight, so make sure your gear will actually fit). Some are designed so that the main compartment can only be accessed when the pack is removed, which makes things more difficult for pickpockets.
Also, in most of the World (possibly not the US!) you can buy a PAYG Android phone complete with Market for less than the price of an iPod Touch. The extra phone components are cheap, and there's really no incentive to make a less functional device. Apple can get away with selling a 'smartphone without the phone' because of its brand recognition, nice design, iTunes infrastructure and high profile App Store. Nobody else can. Apple isn't competing at the low end of the market, which leaves a niche they can fill with the iTouch while preserving a lucrative price differential with the iPhone. With Android, this niche is already filled with actual phones, at least where I live.
The world's most expensive iPod dock and it doesn't even come with speakers:-)
How are you finding it? Looks useful for smaller -scale (subgenomic or bug) projects where the capacity of a bigger machine would be wasted. And the concept of a 'massively parallel pH meter' is certainly cool.
For human whole-genome stuff there are already relatively cheap options. Illumina now offers a genome service for $4000 per sample in quantity:
So the '$1000 genome' can't be far off, and may well be available as a commercial service before Ion Torrent can offer a competing solution for their machine. They already have a bit of a reputation for hype:
Note that the original article is misleading about the competing technologies, implying that the (existing) Ion Torrent costs $49000 because it uses 'optical based' technology. In fact the Ion Torrent (unlike the Illumina system, which does use an optical system) has always been semiconductor-based:
The key issue, of course, is the cost and sequencing capacity of the (disposable) chips it uses, not the one-time cost of the machine. Right now, the comsumable costs are pretty high per sequenced base when compared to Illumina's. The Ion Torrent chip technology needs to be scaled up substantially if they want to offer a viable genome solution.
Polaroid claimed Kodak infringed on their instant film patents and claimed $12 billion. They ended up settling for under a billion, but the entire range of Kodak instant print cameras and films was taken off the market permanently.
Slashdot Mirror
What proportion of this '60% of their policies' falls into the category of 'stuff the Tories were going to do anyway'?:
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/aposcommon%2Bgroundapos%2Band%2Bconflict%2Bbetween%2Bparties/3641187.html
Allowing David Cameron to honour his own manifesto promises is hardly a 'spectacular' result, just a natural consequence of coalition. The Lib Dems are thrown the occasional bone to keep the rump of their core support happy, but in most of the important areas of disagreement the view of the senior partners has, quite predictably, prevailed.
The tuition fee debacle is something of a special case. This was not just a manifesto promise that might reasonably be taken with a pinch of salt, but a flagship issue that was, uniquely, the subject of a personal pledge made by every candidate to vote in a specific way. Nobody expected the Lib Dems to actually form a government by themselves and implement this policy unilaterally, but quite a lot of people really believed their own MPs would stick to their guns on this issue (which an honourable minority did). In university towns it would have been a significant vote winner. Of course we now know the party leadership had absolutely no intention of keeping this promise if it proved a barrier to power:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/12/lib-dems-tuition-fees-clegg
Even by the standards of UK party politics, this is remarkably cynical.
If the LibDems had ended up with a majority he might have been able to deliver on that promise. They didn't, so it was not within their power to keep all their promises.The coalition agreement decided which promises stayed and which had to go, and once that agreement was made he was right to stick by it rather than break the coalition over something he had previously agreed to.
Yes, much better to break the promises they made to the voters rather than those they made to their coalition 'partners'. After all, the voters are never likely to give them any significant power in their own right (especially now); only their new friends can do that. And no matter that the solemn pledge signed by every elected LibDem MP ('I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative'), and which many voters were naive enough to take literally, did not require (or assume) they'd be in power, just that they'd use their votes against such an increase. Power, after all, is much more important than worrying about the trivial concerns of voters, especially Power wielded purely in the Public Interest in These Difficult Times.
The summary doesn't tell us the slightest thing about the job or the work environment...What sort of software is it?...There's simply not enough information up there to form an opinion.
Product Security Team at Adobe, with special responsibility for Flash and Acrobat?
To stay under for 3000 years you need rising sea, sinking ground, or perhaps a sea breaking into a previously dry area below sea level.
...or non-Euclidean geometry loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll get them back when it comes home!:
http://xkcd.com/695/
But what we really want to know is:
In a fight between Admiral James T. Kirk (as played by you in 'Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan') and Capt. James T. Kirk (as played by that guy from 'The Princess Diaries 2' in 'Star Trek 2009'), who would win..?
Also, the rack in the background looks messy, and not well thought-through.
Even worse, there's an entire PC World shop in the background, with all the aesthetics you'd expect from a shed full of overpriced printer cartridges and copies of Norton Antivirus at the grimmer end of Tottenham Ct Rd - there's a reason why most fashion boutiques do not open 'pop-up shops' in branches of Lidl or Walmart:
http://www.talkandroid.com/48645-pc-world-will-have-the-samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-starting-august-3/
http://www.t3.com/news/worlds-first-google-chrome-zone-opens-in-london
Presumably the main job of the Google employees will be desperately trying to steer the customers away from the cheaper fully-functional netbooks 50 feet away in the main shop.
Incidentally, this is not the first 'Chrome Zone':
http://www.virginamerica.com/vx/chromezone
VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions. On that basis, nobody has the right to publish an iOS App Store version without the consent of all contributors.
No, VLC is GPL2 (check your COPYING.txt). Only GPL3 has an explicit Tivoisation clause, which makes it clearly incompatible with the App Store, but the FSF and others (including one of the VLC programmers) have argued that Section 6 of GPL2 is also violated by Apple's additional restrictions, making even GPL2 apps incompatible.
The sample was 100 years old (from a period when there was less admixture with non-Aboriginal populations).
So far as I understand it, British universities could claim copyright on a thesis but typically don't - but they'd certainly be quite pissed off if you published commercially.
I don't believe this is normally the case, e.g.:
"I understand that the rights granted to the UCL Institutional Repository through this agreement are entirely non-exclusive and royalty free and that I am free to publish the Work in its present version or future versions elsewhere."
or:
"Rights granted to the University of Warwick and the British Library and the user of the thesis through this
agreement are non-exclusive. I retain all rights in the thesis in its present version or future versions."
or:
"Copyright in the thesis usually rests with the author: this does not change when you deposit your thesis in ORA. No ownership is assumed by the Bodleian Libraries over the work."
Universities are generally more concerned about any material you include (e.g. a figure) in which the copyright is held by a third party (this might even include your own work if you include, say, a paper where you've signed over copyright to a journal). This sort of material can be included under a copyright exemption for the purposes of examination (if properly attributed!), but can't be further distributed by the institutional repository without permission.
Or they could just ask Charlie Brown, who is slightly easier to find:
http://web.mac.com/jimgerard/AFGAS/pages/apollo/A-10.html
http://www.london-attractions.info/london-blog/2011/apollo-10-command-module-charlie-brown-at-the-science-museum.htm
I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office, and neither is everyone else in my department.
It might be worth deploying one of these if you want your sane interfaces back:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/featuretourpart3.php
http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
http://www.addintools.com/index.html
The starter edition of the first one is free, and amongst other things includes a classic menu interface for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The others need paid licences for business use, but also support 2010, and the third one has versions that support Access, Outlook, etc.
The studio musicians on Milli Vanilli's album not only knew what was up, but willingly did it. And it's not like MV went and grabbed tracks from existing albums or audio libraries, everything was recorded fresh
Yes, this one sounds closer to the Joyce Hatto case, where (classical piano) recordings by other artists were shamelessly plundered, obviously without consent:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/joyce-hatto-the-great-piano-swindle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Hatto
Do you honestly think that Microsoft would abandon their largest market area, ie. business users for something that only works with tablets?
Yes, absolutely no chance that MS would inflict some random unintuitive user interface on their business users that completely discards well over a decade's worth of experience with the existing GUI, for no good reason except that it 'looks modern', and with no option to revert to a 'classic mode'. They'd never do anything that crazy!
http://blog.schauderhaft.de/2009/01/08/the-ribbon-sucks/
I don't understand these sorts of replies. You may think it's a waste of time, but this guy clearly enjoys fiddling around with electronics, using his hands to craft something unique and using his head to make sure everything works out.
I guess it's because, historically, this sort of approach doesn't always end well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSCBvu_kijo
It's actually all part of a carefully planned, coherent strategy:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904787404576535211589514334.html
"He promises to remain part of the Slashdot community (he's still user No. 1, after all)"
Well, that's 'Who is Number 1?" answered, but how about "Why did you resign?". Rob should not be surprised to wake up tomorrow wearing a number in a mysterious seaside Village patrolled by weather balloons, and kept there until this question is answered definitively...
"Would it have taken off in the same manner if it had actually been called Freax? Names do matter."
I think you'll find the correct name is GNU/Freax (a terrific platform for GIMP, git and Iceweasel!).
This looks rather like one of the 'Minutemen' group photos from 'Watchmen':
http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CopperMan1.jpg
Yes, Crumpler has a very nice range of these things:
http://www.crumpler.com/us/Camera-Bags/Camera-Backpacks.html
Tough fabric, nice designs and less boxy than much of the competition (though this means that clearances can be tight, so make sure your gear will actually fit). Some are designed so that the main compartment can only be accessed when the pack is removed, which makes things more difficult for pickpockets.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time".
But be sure to remember and apply them aggressively the other INT PI % of the time:
http://heavenly-dorks.livejournal.com/845375.html
Also, in most of the World (possibly not the US!) you can buy a PAYG Android phone complete with Market for less than the price of an iPod Touch. The extra phone components are cheap, and there's really no incentive to make a less functional device. Apple can get away with selling a 'smartphone without the phone' because of its brand recognition, nice design, iTunes infrastructure and high profile App Store. Nobody else can. Apple isn't competing at the low end of the market, which leaves a niche they can fill with the iTouch while preserving a lucrative price differential with the iPhone. With Android, this niche is already filled with actual phones, at least where I live.
The world's most expensive iPod dock and it doesn't even come with speakers :-)
How are you finding it? Looks useful for smaller -scale (subgenomic or bug) projects where the capacity of a bigger machine would be wasted. And the concept of a 'massively parallel pH meter' is certainly cool.
For human whole-genome stuff there are already relatively cheap options. Illumina now offers a genome service for $4000 per sample in quantity:
http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/05/09/2011/Illumina-announces-five-thousand-dollar-genome.html
So the '$1000 genome' can't be far off, and may well be available as a commercial service before Ion Torrent can offer a competing solution for their machine. They already have a bit of a reputation for hype:
http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/2010/12/ion-torrent-hype-cycle-status-disappointment/
Note that the original article is misleading about the competing technologies, implying that the (existing) Ion Torrent costs $49000 because it uses 'optical based' technology. In fact the Ion Torrent (unlike the Illumina system, which does use an optical system) has always been semiconductor-based:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_semiconductor_sequencing
The key issue, of course, is the cost and sequencing capacity of the (disposable) chips it uses, not the one-time cost of the machine. Right now, the comsumable costs are pretty high per sequenced base when compared to Illumina's. The Ion Torrent chip technology needs to be scaled up substantially if they want to offer a viable genome solution.
"Small companies have always been better at innovating than big companies"
Not always:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_developments
Here's an example from the analogue era:
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-07-16/business/fi-2502_1_polaroid-case
Polaroid claimed Kodak infringed on their instant film patents and claimed $12 billion. They ended up settling for under a billion, but the entire range of Kodak instant print cameras and films was taken off the market permanently.