Two Englishmen got drunk in Texas, got lost and walked up the path to a front door to ask the way - at 2am. The owner shot them dead without asking questions. He was acquitted in court. About five years ago.
In the UK, "liberal" does not equal gun control. Many UK liberals also want gun control, but in your parlance the two are not the same, which is my point. On the contrary, a true liberal wants the freedom to have guns - balanced by the requirement to keep your guns safe. It is US parlance that a liberal is one who restricts the freedom to own guns.
Which shows how the meaning of the word varies. To me, liberal has little to do with government at the first level. Liberal means that you give people free choices - over their sex lives, use of drugs, worship, strange hobbies and clothes etc. So liberal interacts with government only by saying that government should not make rules about how people should behave unless they affect other people.
The current, widely accepted IN THE US use. In the UK, it still retains much of it original meaning.
The distinction that I came across between liberals and libertarians, which I think has some value, is that the liberal, while believing in personal freedom, also believes in social constructs, whereas the libertarian believes in rugged individuality. So a libertarian shoots trespassers on his first land and asks questions later, whereas a liberal checks if they are lost, ill, or some other socially acceptable reason, and only shoots when they are proved to be aggressors. The libertarian accepts that he will occasionally kil the innocent, the liberal that he will occasionally be to slow and get hurt himself.
Who is the government protecting in this case exactly? government is intervening on behalf of microsoft for "the good of the people", no doubt about it.
Advertisers. If Google is the only source of ads for all the websites in the world, advertisers have to go through Google and pay any price they ask. You need competition in the channels for advertising so that I have more than one place to go to advertise my Viagra.
Nonetheless, anti-trust law says that someone who already has a large fraction of a market is not allowed to takeover another significant competitor. The principle is that a monopolist can crush competitors by sheer power: while you *can* go to other ad suppliers, if Google has a huge slice of the market, all the advertisers will go to Google and alternatives won't have the ads to place if web-site owners want them.
RTFA. The computer was being fed random and wildly varying attitude inputs. It first pitched up, then dived, presumable responding to different random attitude inputs.
Regarding the earlier point: ATC people say they regularly hear the distinctive "ditda ditda" of an active cellphone on their channel because the pilots haven't turned off their own cellphones. So (a) active cellphones are failing to crash planes, even on presumably the most sensitive part of the craft, the flight deck, and (b) pilots know it and don't care.
The first time I saw the original Multipla, I seriously thought it was a clown car or some sort of spoof. The idea that somebody would seriously want a car to look like that did not cross my mind.
Various synchronous protocols which are not IT related at all. Before the migration to IP, telecoms networks were completely different from networking ptotocols and woild never be seen inside a computer. They were based on a digital equivalent of the original analog system ogf connecting together a lot of ire pairs, so a a single conductor led from one end to the other. Teleom protocols created a logical conductor consisting of reserved bits in packets into which your data was fitted. Call setup required reserving these bit in all the packet-based links between source and destination.
Airbus will not "take over", but it will clamp what it sees as out-of-range inputs.
The crash you are thinking of it the Habsheim one, where Airbus was doing a very low, slow pass in front of the crowd over a runway that was actually too short for it to use. The pilot was actually using the behaviour you describe: he had told the plane to go very slow and was depending on the software to keep it above stalling speed - which it did. But he was flying below tree height - and the software could not see the trees. The pilot forgot that the engines take 10 seconds to spool up from the low power used in near-stall to enough power to climb above the trees. So when he ordered climb power and nose up, the software refused to try to climb until the engines were delivering enough power to do so safely. Unfortunately, by this time the aircraft had hit the trees.
Basically, the pilot had flown into a very wide, shallow hole, and didn't have the power to climb out. A classic case of software-induced complacency. The software performed exactly according to the spec. Whether the spec was right is another question.
I would say that the common ancestor we shared with the other apes (Chimp, bonobo, gorilla, orang) would be described by most taxonomists as an ape. Not any living species of ape, but having enough commonality with its descendants to be classified as an ape. It would have probably shared the common characteristics by which we group its descendants - tailless, grasping hands and feet, relatively large brain etc.
This is indeed a factor in positioning data centres not: given the choice, they put them in a cold climate, and some of them are operating a shared heating system.
That doesn't work. It may be obvious that patents don't exist, but it is not obvious what the patents that fill the space would be. There are probably few patents on time machines and matter transmitters. But knowing that doesn't tell me how to invent one to get a patent to fill the space.
A bit like cryptography. I may have an encrypted message, and I may know which algorithm it was encrypted with, but the key is hard to find, and until I have it I know nothing.
I recall having to work out a complicated formula to show that the very ordinary CPU in a product we were about to ship was under some critical limit for export. Civil servants work on a much slower timescale than Moore's law, so it would not surprise me at all if a latest-generation console had more bogomips than some arbitrary level set, say, eight years ago. The Cell processors in the PS3 amount to an impressive amount of crunch - some universities have already been linking them for DIY supercomputers.
But that is Moore's law for you. I was recently looking up a cheap microcomputer for a simple job. The one I found cost $3 in quantity, and is more powerful than computers costing many tens of thousands that I worked on thirty years ago.
I think that is incorrect. ISTR people working out the minimum quantun of energy to change a bit. It is many orders of mangnitude below what we use now, but any change required energy. Viruses may exist without energy, but cannot travel or reproduce without it.
But my use for energy is to drive the evolution engine. While onecan hypothesise a lifeform which did not need energy to exist, the evolution engine needs energy to drive it. While you may hypothesise energy-less life, the life that actually develops is fundamentally a parasite on energy flows.
I would agree that if there is life, it is certainly not life as we know it.
But IMO the fundamental thing needed for life is an energy flow. Possibly you also need a state of matter corresponding to what we regard as solid i.e. one in which components tend to stay put without needing to expend energy. Given those two components, and enough time, I think that something that we could tentatively call life will emerge, occasionally, anywhere. How long it will take to get past the bacterial level is a much more complex question.
Macdonalds did actually chase after someone with a domain something like McHealth.com, despite the fact that the owners were ex-employees of management consultants McKinsey and derived their "Mc" from that source, without any intention of referencing Macdonalds. I don't know the outcome of that case.
Nonsense. Google has a patent application. Which means that someone, somewhere, inside Google had this nifty idea, and a patent search thought it might be original. In corporations these days, the standing instructions are that if an idea is patentable, patent it - even if it is stupid or appears unworkable. This idea may be no more than bullshit round the water cooler.
Corporations want to build up a big patent portfolio. Financial types see that as good, which ups the stock price. And they want lots of patents in their pocket for when you get to a patent shoot-out (or to be so dangerous that one is pre-empted. The idea is that when someone accuses you of infringing a patent, you dump a huge pile of patents on the table and say "I bet you're infringing one of these".
So this article is a massive hype from a straw in the wind. Google is always thinking about datacentres, and this is a patent on an original, if not vary practical, thought.
A ship HAS to be registered and carry the flag of SOME nation, and it will be subject to the laws of that country.
Not strictly true, unless it wants to come into port, when the port will demand some kind of provenance. Admittedly, as you say, it would be fair game for any passing pirate with no host mation to appeal to. But whose navy defends the vast Liberian and Panamanian fleets? Not their host countries, I think.
They could, except that it would be a PITA. You would have to have accounts open on all the exchanges which traded the security you want to deal in, and check round every time you wanted to do a deal. And so would everybody else who wanted to do the same thing. It is a bit like supermarkets doing their own price comparisons against the opposition. It is simply more efficient for half a dozen arbitrageurs to do that kind of repeated checking around than 5,000 insurers, pension funds and banks to do so. Arbitrageurs typically make of the order of 1% on their transactions, and it is not worth the other investors scavenging this tiny percentage. If price differences rise above tiny, the investors would certainly shop around. But, basically, if it is worth a busy investor with other things on his mind than shopping around, it even more worth an arbitrageur doing so. It is no more parasitic, to my mind, than a retailer buying in bulk and selling on at a higher price. The end user always has the option of buying in bulk, but usually doesn't want to.
It is not inserting into a trade, it is creating a trade when a difference in value is noticed. Arbitrage levels out prices between different exchanges, allowing people to trade on either without worrying if they would be getting a better price elsewhere. It is parasitic in the same sense that the oil pump is parasitic in a car - it doesn't add any power, but things turn much more freely with it in place, and it exacts a charge for doing so. Essentially, an arbitrageur is constantly shopping around for bargains an evening them out, meaning that ordinary traders don't need to do so.
Having slightly met Monty W, he is a true nerd. He didn't build a billion dollar company, he built a database that did what he thought databases should do. Many people do not exactly agree with him (see arguments on/. ad nauseam). But other people built a billion dollar company on that database. It deos not surprise me at all that he has taken his share of that billion dollars and walked off into the sunset. Maybe it is to Fiji, but even if it is, I would hazard a guess he will still be playing with databases on the beach.
The AMA and the ABA are not unions, they are professional associations, which are a very different things. Whatever the rights and wrongs of such, I will not deal with them
Unions are needed when they employer can truthfully say to the employee "I could replace you tomorrow". If the employee tries to improve his/her position, the employer can fire him and employ another. By employing successively the weakest and least able to fight back of the pool of potential employees, the employer can force all the employees to work for the worst conditions that any of them will accept. Unless they join together and refuse to work without reasonable compensation. Which is great, until you try to define reasonable. Which brings more problems, but at least the arm-wrestling is symmetric.
But if your departure is going significantly to harm the company, because your particular skills are difficult/impossible to replace, you have personal bargaining power with the employer and the arm-wrestle starts on equal terms.
At the moment, IT seems to me to be headed for even more diversity, which means that there ever more diverse skill sets and individuals are less and less replaceable. If you know of more than a tiny handful of people with whom you could switch jobs and there would be no problems after a few weeks, then you are replaceable. This is the case for, say, bus drivers, waiters, cleaners etc., and hence they need unions. But most IT people, in terms of skills and experience, are hard to replace and hance have little need of unions.
Slashdot Mirror
Two Englishmen got drunk in Texas, got lost and walked up the path to a front door to ask the way - at 2am. The owner shot them dead without asking questions. He was acquitted in court. About five years ago.
In the UK, "liberal" does not equal gun control. Many UK liberals also want gun control, but in your parlance the two are not the same, which is my point. On the contrary, a true liberal wants the freedom to have guns - balanced by the requirement to keep your guns safe. It is US parlance that a liberal is one who restricts the freedom to own guns.
Which shows how the meaning of the word varies. To me, liberal has little to do with government at the first level. Liberal means that you give people free choices - over their sex lives, use of drugs, worship, strange hobbies and clothes etc. So liberal interacts with government only by saying that government should not make rules about how people should behave unless they affect other people.
The current, widely accepted IN THE US use. In the UK, it still retains much of it original meaning.
The distinction that I came across between liberals and libertarians, which I think has some value, is that the liberal, while believing in personal freedom, also believes in social constructs, whereas the libertarian believes in rugged individuality. So a libertarian shoots trespassers on his first land and asks questions later, whereas a liberal checks if they are lost, ill, or some other socially acceptable reason, and only shoots when they are proved to be aggressors. The libertarian accepts that he will occasionally kil the innocent, the liberal that he will occasionally be to slow and get hurt himself.
Who is the government protecting in this case exactly? government is intervening on behalf of microsoft for "the good of the people", no doubt about it.
Advertisers. If Google is the only source of ads for all the websites in the world, advertisers have to go through Google and pay any price they ask. You need competition in the channels for advertising so that I have more than one place to go to advertise my Viagra.
Nonetheless, anti-trust law says that someone who already has a large fraction of a market is not allowed to takeover another significant competitor. The principle is that a monopolist can crush competitors by sheer power: while you *can* go to other ad suppliers, if Google has a huge slice of the market, all the advertisers will go to Google and alternatives won't have the ads to place if web-site owners want them.
RTFA. The computer was being fed random and wildly varying attitude inputs. It first pitched up, then dived, presumable responding to different random attitude inputs.
Regarding the earlier point: ATC people say they regularly hear the distinctive "ditda ditda" of an active cellphone on their channel because the pilots haven't turned off their own cellphones. So (a) active cellphones are failing to crash planes, even on presumably the most sensitive part of the craft, the flight deck, and (b) pilots know it and don't care.
The first time I saw the original Multipla, I seriously thought it was a clown car or some sort of spoof. The idea that somebody would seriously want a car to look like that did not cross my mind.
Various synchronous protocols which are not IT related at all. Before the migration to IP, telecoms networks were completely different from networking ptotocols and woild never be seen inside a computer. They were based on a digital equivalent of the original analog system ogf connecting together a lot of ire pairs, so a a single conductor led from one end to the other. Teleom protocols created a logical conductor consisting of reserved bits in packets into which your data was fitted. Call setup required reserving these bit in all the packet-based links between source and destination.
Airbus will not "take over", but it will clamp what it sees as out-of-range inputs.
The crash you are thinking of it the Habsheim one, where Airbus was doing a very low, slow pass in front of the crowd over a runway that was actually too short for it to use. The pilot was actually using the behaviour you describe: he had told the plane to go very slow and was depending on the software to keep it above stalling speed - which it did. But he was flying below tree height - and the software could not see the trees. The pilot forgot that the engines take 10 seconds to spool up from the low power used in near-stall to enough power to climb above the trees. So when he ordered climb power and nose up, the software refused to try to climb until the engines were delivering enough power to do so safely. Unfortunately, by this time the aircraft had hit the trees.
Basically, the pilot had flown into a very wide, shallow hole, and didn't have the power to climb out. A classic case of software-induced complacency. The software performed exactly according to the spec. Whether the spec was right is another question.
I would say that the common ancestor we shared with the other apes (Chimp, bonobo, gorilla, orang) would be described by most taxonomists as an ape. Not any living species of ape, but having enough commonality with its descendants to be classified as an ape. It would have probably shared the common characteristics by which we group its descendants - tailless, grasping hands and feet, relatively large brain etc.
This is indeed a factor in positioning data centres not: given the choice, they put them in a cold climate, and some of them are operating a shared heating system.
James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, published it in 1650, which is post-Medieval.
That doesn't work. It may be obvious that patents don't exist, but it is not obvious what the patents that fill the space would be. There are probably few patents on time machines and matter transmitters. But knowing that doesn't tell me how to invent one to get a patent to fill the space.
A bit like cryptography. I may have an encrypted message, and I may know which algorithm it was encrypted with, but the key is hard to find, and until I have it I know nothing.
I recall having to work out a complicated formula to show that the very ordinary CPU in a product we were about to ship was under some critical limit for export. Civil servants work on a much slower timescale than Moore's law, so it would not surprise me at all if a latest-generation console had more bogomips than some arbitrary level set, say, eight years ago. The Cell processors in the PS3 amount to an impressive amount of crunch - some universities have already been linking them for DIY supercomputers.
But that is Moore's law for you. I was recently looking up a cheap microcomputer for a simple job. The one I found cost $3 in quantity, and is more powerful than computers costing many tens of thousands that I worked on thirty years ago.
I think that is incorrect. ISTR people working out the minimum quantun of energy to change a bit. It is many orders of mangnitude below what we use now, but any change required energy. Viruses may exist without energy, but cannot travel or reproduce without it.
But my use for energy is to drive the evolution engine. While onecan hypothesise a lifeform which did not need energy to exist, the evolution engine needs energy to drive it. While you may hypothesise energy-less life, the life that actually develops is fundamentally a parasite on energy flows.
To which all I can say is http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml
I would agree that if there is life, it is certainly not life as we know it.
But IMO the fundamental thing needed for life is an energy flow. Possibly you also need a state of matter corresponding to what we regard as solid i.e. one in which components tend to stay put without needing to expend energy. Given those two components, and enough time, I think that something that we could tentatively call life will emerge, occasionally, anywhere. How long it will take to get past the bacterial level is a much more complex question.
I think it wasn't clothes, it was a snazzy laptop bag, and it wasn't France, it was French-speaking Canada.
Macdonalds did actually chase after someone with a domain something like McHealth.com, despite the fact that the owners were ex-employees of management consultants McKinsey and derived their "Mc" from that source, without any intention of referencing Macdonalds. I don't know the outcome of that case.
Google has pending plans...
Nonsense. Google has a patent application. Which means that someone, somewhere, inside Google had this nifty idea, and a patent search thought it might be original. In corporations these days, the standing instructions are that if an idea is patentable, patent it - even if it is stupid or appears unworkable. This idea may be no more than bullshit round the water cooler.
Corporations want to build up a big patent portfolio. Financial types see that as good, which ups the stock price. And they want lots of patents in their pocket for when you get to a patent shoot-out (or to be so dangerous that one is pre-empted. The idea is that when someone accuses you of infringing a patent, you dump a huge pile of patents on the table and say "I bet you're infringing one of these".
So this article is a massive hype from a straw in the wind. Google is always thinking about datacentres, and this is a patent on an original, if not vary practical, thought.
A ship HAS to be registered and carry the flag of SOME nation, and it will be subject to the laws of that country.
Not strictly true, unless it wants to come into port, when the port will demand some kind of provenance. Admittedly, as you say, it would be fair game for any passing pirate with no host mation to appeal to. But whose navy defends the vast Liberian and Panamanian fleets? Not their host countries, I think.
They could, except that it would be a PITA. You would have to have accounts open on all the exchanges which traded the security you want to deal in, and check round every time you wanted to do a deal. And so would everybody else who wanted to do the same thing. It is a bit like supermarkets doing their own price comparisons against the opposition. It is simply more efficient for half a dozen arbitrageurs to do that kind of repeated checking around than 5,000 insurers, pension funds and banks to do so. Arbitrageurs typically make of the order of 1% on their transactions, and it is not worth the other investors scavenging this tiny percentage. If price differences rise above tiny, the investors would certainly shop around. But, basically, if it is worth a busy investor with other things on his mind than shopping around, it even more worth an arbitrageur doing so. It is no more parasitic, to my mind, than a retailer buying in bulk and selling on at a higher price. The end user always has the option of buying in bulk, but usually doesn't want to.
It is not inserting into a trade, it is creating a trade when a difference in value is noticed. Arbitrage levels out prices between different exchanges, allowing people to trade on either without worrying if they would be getting a better price elsewhere. It is parasitic in the same sense that the oil pump is parasitic in a car - it doesn't add any power, but things turn much more freely with it in place, and it exacts a charge for doing so. Essentially, an arbitrageur is constantly shopping around for bargains an evening them out, meaning that ordinary traders don't need to do so.
Having slightly met Monty W, he is a true nerd. He didn't build a billion dollar company, he built a database that did what he thought databases should do. Many people do not exactly agree with him (see arguments on /. ad nauseam). But other people built a billion dollar company on that database. It deos not surprise me at all that he has taken his share of that billion dollars and walked off into the sunset. Maybe it is to Fiji, but even if it is, I would hazard a guess he will still be playing with databases on the beach.
The AMA and the ABA are not unions, they are professional associations, which are a very different things. Whatever the rights and wrongs of such, I will not deal with them
Unions are needed when they employer can truthfully say to the employee "I could replace you tomorrow". If the employee tries to improve his/her position, the employer can fire him and employ another. By employing successively the weakest and least able to fight back of the pool of potential employees, the employer can force all the employees to work for the worst conditions that any of them will accept. Unless they join together and refuse to work without reasonable compensation. Which is great, until you try to define reasonable. Which brings more problems, but at least the arm-wrestling is symmetric.
But if your departure is going significantly to harm the company, because your particular skills are difficult/impossible to replace, you have personal bargaining power with the employer and the arm-wrestle starts on equal terms.
At the moment, IT seems to me to be headed for even more diversity, which means that there ever more diverse skill sets and individuals are less and less replaceable. If you know of more than a tiny handful of people with whom you could switch jobs and there would be no problems after a few weeks, then you are replaceable. This is the case for, say, bus drivers, waiters, cleaners etc., and hence they need unions. But most IT people, in terms of skills and experience, are hard to replace and hance have little need of unions.