So, should cops be also subject to law enforcement ? Here's an on-topic story: While working in Italy I hit the bars with a bunch of colleagues and their friends, one of whom was a cop (polizioto). Italy also has a second type of police, the carabinieri, who is military, and their status overlap broadly, so there's often competition between them. So the guy tells his story, that he's in an unmarked car with his team when they get stopped by the carabinieri for going over the speed limit. They flash their cop card, but the carabiniere is unfazed: "the law is the same for everyone, here's you ticket". So the cops take the piss, come out of their car and start reviewing the others' car: dead tail light, pressure of the tires too low, expired driver's license, wrong number of stamps on the insurance form and whatnot; with the other side doing the same, obviously. In the end 15 tickets between 2 cars, 3 carabinieri and 4 cops !
I'll add my 2 cents.
In my lab we manage hundreds of PCs for scientific applications. It is currently forbidden to plug a Vista PC on the local net (well, you can, but you end up with very limited access). And there's no plan to change that: it's Win2K, WinXP and Linux (limited Macs). We are currently shifting our driver and hardware development projects to Linux: nice move Microsoft !!!
Yes, your reaction is the same as mine. I wish there was a law to ensure all bumpers are at the same height off the ground. Makes perfect sense too, in case of accident, bumper against bumper is the first line of protection.... otherwise what are bumpers for ? I was always scared in the US when I'm waiting at a light and all I see in my rearview mirror is a large bumper or grill closing in fast...
I'd like to add something to the 'big car' debate. It's not only a moacho thing. I have friends in the US who got hit by a SUV while in a small car and were lucky to escape alive. Then they decided that from then on they would only purchase large SUVs. If we all followed this logic, we'd all be driving tanks...
In Europe this is not an issue as most cars are smaller and people seek fuel efficiency as a prime determinant during the acquisition of a car (you bet, with fuel costing 3 times as much as in the US !). So those light fuel efficient cars will first find a market here. Then hopefuly they'll make it to the US after the latest round of wars has raised thee price of fuel high enough...
I've actually seen this principle used on some prototype helmets worn by mountain rescue teams. The mike is in the strap holding the helmet, closet to the jawbone and tunes to pick up bone-transmitted vibrations (and not the sound which is very bad when you have a chopper hovering 10 meters above you). The headphone is aptly named for once since it sits on top of the head, transmitting yet again via bone conduction. The main problem is that in order to work it needs to be pretty tight and is thus quite uncomfortable. I don't know who makes them.
This is exactly the reason that many businesses make it a fire-able offense to discuss wages with other employees.
Whoa, really ?!? I've always wondered why it's not the opposite: every employees' wage written in plain sight, from garbage cleaner to CEO. I mean, if your work is more important than others, it's fine to earn more. If not... the company has only to gain in reassessing the wages. Why isn't it customary to publicize wages ?
That's what I thought until an asshole ran into our car while stopped in traffic. At high speed. The car exploded into a fireball with us inside, although we suffered only minor burns and lacerations from the broken glass. 8 cars burnt into the fireball. And that was the last day of our honeymoon (picture of the car at the bottom of the page) !!! Maybe the very high heat of that day played a role. The car was packed to the roof so most of the flame was fortunately directed outside.
If I may add something about the altitude, running in an O2 reduced environment would be much better. As someone who's run a bunch of servers at high altitude (3300m, 11000ft), I can say it's not a good idea. The lower pressure also means that you get less heat exchange, and a result of that is overheating components. In one year of operation we lost half our hard drives and fans while about 25% of our mobos and graphic cards failed. Strangely I don't recall any failed processors.
Producing a child under such circumstances isn't love, it's just selfishness.
I thought producing a child was always meant to be "I want a backup copy of half of my genes somewhere as the only known safegard against mortality". In other words, the ultimate selfishness, but then again you pay dearly for it for the next 20 years...
Related to this, can anyone tell me about the reliability of internal SATA connectors. Maybe I got shitty cables with my TYAN mobo, but if I as much as touch the cable during PC operation, the system will loose the disk and crash. The connector is flimsy. Is this a general issue or should I look for different cabbles ?
No matter what it was, in two years it'd be obsolete. The machine would have to come with a support contract that said, "Every year the machine is replaced with a top of the line model."
Hey, maybe there's an idea:
start a company that sells top of the line systems to subscribers
every year you receive new top of the line replacements for whatever mobo, mem or disk is faster and yo send back the old part
I'm curious to know what is in place in the US courtroom practice in case of very large difference between lawyer powers. I mean if one side has a crack team of twenty 2500$/h lawyers vs a law grad student working pro-bono on the other side, can anything be done to make the difference less obvious (regardless of who wins or looses) ?
No, use gaffer tape instead: it's just as strong (fabric based), repositionable, reusable and doesn't leave nasty glue residues on everything it touches.
I imagine computer programming competitions and math challenges are okay in your book
Yes, but above all because you can't get the shit blown out of me in a math contest no matter how poorly you perform. And I'm not bad at sport, indeed if you look at my site you'll see things that most people wouldn't dream of (The Nose in a day, Cho Oyu without oxygen, 5 Antarctic expeditions...). But you are right, getting beat up by some of my own 'team' members because I didn't pass the ball fast enough to those mouth-breathing fucktards does not provide for good childhood memories.
I played rugby for exactly 10 seconds in my life and woke up on the stretcher after hearing the coach say 'stop him'. Soccer is even worse (hands only good for punching), and don't get me started about waving a stick at a stone-hard ball like a caveman.
There has been a lot of backlash over the growth hormones in meat and milk. It's why so many "organic" products are hitting the shelves. It does make a difference [...] But a factor not so many know about are all the hormones injected into animals and added to their food so they get nice, fat, and juicy faster and on less food. Humans also respond to a lot of those hormones. Just the way the animals do.
I saw that first hand in the 70s before growth hormones were made illegal in livestock in Europe. At the time my father, a veterinarian, was so disgusted by those practises that we were forbidden to eat veal in the family.
Need I remind you that growth hormones are in widespread use in the US and it's one of the big economical/market war currently going on between the old and new continent: Europe DOESN'T want to buy your beefed up beef. Meat may be a little tougher to chew here, but it's also a lot more tasty and healthy. Meat in US grill restaurants feel like some weird marshmallow: just water and fat held together by a minimal amount of muscle fibers.
Competition may be frustrating for people who continuously lose, but getting rid of it makes the games boring for everyone. The trick is to segregate them into groups of equivalent skill without singling out anyone into the "loser's league."
No. Better get rid of sports that encourage competition. When you are a smaller kid you are always gonna get beaten in any kind of 'team' (what a misleading term) or competition sport. Why not practice a sport for the sake of it ? Maybe that's my climbing took off so well in France, there's been walls in every school for the last 15 years. There your only goal is reaching the top and no matter your level you can always find a climb that's fun.
There are several other sports like that but not too many as the emphasis is always on those mind-numbingly stupid and brutish 'team' sports. Like I always say: if a dog is stupid enough to play with a ball, maybe a human shouldn't.
I second your recommendations of KSR and Forward's books, in particular Rocheworld about the first interstellar mission with today's (or almost) technologies.
OCR is also an option. Because of the lack of serious font support in HTML, most business names are in images. I've been trying OCR on those, and it usually works if the background is uncluttered.
Yes, and it should work like that too. If the background is so cluttered as to make the OCR difficult, then chances are the human will have trouble reading it too. I suggested that during a job interview witha *cough* serious search engine: use a secondary crawler reporting as a normal IE/firefox, load a page using the usual IE/firefox rendering engine, OCR the text (this way all white on white, display:none and size:1 goes away) with some color tolerance (make sure violet on red goes away too !) and compare with the normal crawler. If the result is too different, flag it as a potential spamming site.
PDF is fine for what is was designed for: creating print documents. But I hate pdf when reading it on the screen as it won't fit my window width: either you have to scroll back and forth every line or the characters are too small to read. Is there any app that can 'uncompile' a pdf and fit it on a screen width ? Might be a great app for reading docs on a laptop/pda/cell phone.
They can't tell the difference between the internet and American Online. You expect these people to start installing p2p software and start downloading files for their use
Well, you might be surprised by how selective people can be. I've seen people who couldn't understand the concept of a folder/directory but who could install kazaa and grab some mp3 and avi without trouble (unless you count as 'trouble' the fact of turning the machine into a 'bot and then calling me to fix it).
Time for an old classic:
How to prove that all odd numbers are prime?
Well, this problem has different solutions whether you are a:
Mathematician:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and by induction we have that all the odd integers are prime.
Physicist:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error...
Engineer:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime...
Chemist:
3 is prime, 5 is prime... hey, let's publish!
Modern physicist using renormalization:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... 9/3 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is... 15/3 is prime, 17 is prime, 19 is prime, 21 is... 21/3 is prime...
Quantum Physicist:
All numbers are equally prime and non-prime until observed.
Professor:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and the rest are left as an exercise for the student.
Confused Undergraduate:
Let p be any prime number larger than 2. Then p is not divisible by 2, so p is odd. QED
Measure nontheorist:
There are exactly as many odd numbers as primes (Euclid, Cantor), and exactly one even prime (namely 2), so there must be exactly one odd nonprime (namely 1).
Cosmologist:
3 is prime, yes it is true....
Computer Scientist:
10 is prime, 11 is prime, 101 is prime...
Programmer:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be fixed in the next release,...
C programmer:
03 is prime, 05 is prime, 07 is prime, 09 is really 011 which everyone knows is prime,...
BASIC programmer:
What's a prime?
COBOL programmer:
What's an odd number?
Windows programmer:
3 is prime. Wait...
Mac programmer:
Now why would anyone want to know about that? That's not user friendly. You don't worry about it, we'll take care of it for you.
Bill Gates:
1. No one will ever need any more than 3.
ZX-81 Computer Programmer:
3 is prime, Out of Memory.
Pentium owner:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 8.9999978 is prime...
GNU programmer:
% prime
usage: prime [-nV] [--quiet] [--silent] [--version] [-e script] --catenate --concatenate | c --create | d --diff --compare | r --append | t --list | u --update | x -extract --get [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --block-size N ] [ -B, --read-full-blocks ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [--checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ --force-local ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [-G, --incremental ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --absolute-paths ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --record-number ] [ [-f script-file] [--expression=script] [--file=script-file] [file...]
prime: you must specify exactly one of the r, c, t, x, or d options
For more information, type "prime --help''
Unix programmer:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,...
Segmentation fault, Core dumped.
Computer programmer:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is... Oops, let's try that again:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... 3 is... Um, right. Okay, how about this:
3 is not prime, 5 is not prime, 7 is not prime, 9 is not prim
People who forget history are bound to repeat it goes the saying. At the very begining of the WWW, not everyone had access to web browsers so various systems were developped, including web to mail portals. You would sent an email to a specific address with a GET request, and you'd get the page in return. Some of those servers are still in use to get around censorship or very limited conectivity, which was my case last year in Antarctica. I read slashdot thanks to a daily email connection, text only, and the agora web-to-mail portal.
On a side note, don't you just love those British 3-prong plugs? Just be careful not to step on one in the middle of the night barefoot!:-)
Well, I've travelled extensively and there are so many different power plugs as to drive youcrazy, but the most useless one is definately the US one. It's the easiest to rip off the wall (sometimes the sheer weight of the cable+adapter is enough), the easiest for a kid to put the fingers in, the lousiest contact (often sparks when being plugged or unplugged)... But there's no winner, although the Euro plugs seem the most resistent.
Slashdot Mirror
So, should cops be also subject to law enforcement ? Here's an on-topic story:
While working in Italy I hit the bars with a bunch of colleagues and their friends, one of whom was a cop (polizioto). Italy also has a second type of police, the carabinieri, who is military, and their status overlap broadly, so there's often competition between them. So the guy tells his story, that he's in an unmarked car with his team when they get stopped by the carabinieri for going over the speed limit. They flash their cop card, but the carabiniere is unfazed: "the law is the same for everyone, here's you ticket". So the cops take the piss, come out of their car and start reviewing the others' car: dead tail light, pressure of the tires too low, expired driver's license, wrong number of stamps on the insurance form and whatnot; with the other side doing the same, obviously. In the end 15 tickets between 2 cars, 3 carabinieri and 4 cops !
I'll add my 2 cents. In my lab we manage hundreds of PCs for scientific applications. It is currently forbidden to plug a Vista PC on the local net (well, you can, but you end up with very limited access). And there's no plan to change that: it's Win2K, WinXP and Linux (limited Macs). We are currently shifting our driver and hardware development projects to Linux: nice move Microsoft !!!
Yes, your reaction is the same as mine. I wish there was a law to ensure all bumpers are at the same height off the ground. Makes perfect sense too, in case of accident, bumper against bumper is the first line of protection.... otherwise what are bumpers for ? I was always scared in the US when I'm waiting at a light and all I see in my rearview mirror is a large bumper or grill closing in fast...
In Europe this is not an issue as most cars are smaller and people seek fuel efficiency as a prime determinant during the acquisition of a car (you bet, with fuel costing 3 times as much as in the US !). So those light fuel efficient cars will first find a market here. Then hopefuly they'll make it to the US after the latest round of wars has raised thee price of fuel high enough...
I've actually seen this principle used on some prototype helmets worn by mountain rescue teams. The mike is in the strap holding the helmet, closet to the jawbone and tunes to pick up bone-transmitted vibrations (and not the sound which is very bad when you have a chopper hovering 10 meters above you). The headphone is aptly named for once since it sits on top of the head, transmitting yet again via bone conduction. The main problem is that in order to work it needs to be pretty tight and is thus quite uncomfortable. I don't know who makes them.
Warning: their checkout is buggy. Upon confirmation, it gave me the info of someone in India... Don't order until they iron out the bugs !
Arf, I go barely once a month nowadays... Get back to work now !
If I may add something about the altitude, running in an O2 reduced environment would be much better. As someone who's run a bunch of servers at high altitude (3300m, 11000ft), I can say it's not a good idea. The lower pressure also means that you get less heat exchange, and a result of that is overheating components. In one year of operation we lost half our hard drives and fans while about 25% of our mobos and graphic cards failed. Strangely I don't recall any failed processors.
Related to this, can anyone tell me about the reliability of internal SATA connectors. Maybe I got shitty cables with my TYAN mobo, but if I as much as touch the cable during PC operation, the system will loose the disk and crash. The connector is flimsy. Is this a general issue or should I look for different cabbles ?
I'm curious to know what is in place in the US courtroom practice in case of very large difference between lawyer powers. I mean if one side has a crack team of twenty 2500$/h lawyers vs a law grad student working pro-bono on the other side, can anything be done to make the difference less obvious (regardless of who wins or looses) ?
No, use gaffer tape instead: it's just as strong (fabric based), repositionable, reusable and doesn't leave nasty glue residues on everything it touches.
I played rugby for exactly 10 seconds in my life and woke up on the stretcher after hearing the coach say 'stop him'. Soccer is even worse (hands only good for punching), and don't get me started about waving a stick at a stone-hard ball like a caveman.
Need I remind you that growth hormones are in widespread use in the US and it's one of the big economical/market war currently going on between the old and new continent: Europe DOESN'T want to buy your beefed up beef. Meat may be a little tougher to chew here, but it's also a lot more tasty and healthy. Meat in US grill restaurants feel like some weird marshmallow: just water and fat held together by a minimal amount of muscle fibers.
There are several other sports like that but not too many as the emphasis is always on those mind-numbingly stupid and brutish 'team' sports. Like I always say: if a dog is stupid enough to play with a ball, maybe a human shouldn't.
I second your recommendations of KSR and Forward's books, in particular Rocheworld about the first interstellar mission with today's (or almost) technologies.
PDF is fine for what is was designed for: creating print documents. But I hate pdf when reading it on the screen as it won't fit my window width: either you have to scroll back and forth every line or the characters are too small to read. Is there any app that can 'uncompile' a pdf and fit it on a screen width ? Might be a great app for reading docs on a laptop/pda/cell phone.
Time for an old classic: How to prove that all odd numbers are prime? ... 9/3 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is ... 15/3 is prime, 17 is prime, 19 is prime, 21 is ... 21/3 is prime...
Quantum Physicist:
All numbers are equally prime and non-prime until observed.
Professor:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and the rest are left as an exercise for the student.
Confused Undergraduate:
Let p be any prime number larger than 2. Then p is not divisible by 2, so p is odd. QED
Measure nontheorist:
There are exactly as many odd numbers as primes (Euclid, Cantor), and exactly one even prime (namely 2), so there must be exactly one odd nonprime (namely 1).
Cosmologist:
3 is prime, yes it is true....
Computer Scientist:
10 is prime, 11 is prime, 101 is prime...
Programmer:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be fixed in the next release, ...
C programmer:
03 is prime, 05 is prime, 07 is prime, 09 is really 011 which everyone knows is prime, ...
BASIC programmer:
What's a prime?
COBOL programmer:
What's an odd number?
Windows programmer:
3 is prime. Wait...
Mac programmer:
Now why would anyone want to know about that? That's not user friendly. You don't worry about it, we'll take care of it for you.
Bill Gates:
1. No one will ever need any more than 3.
ZX-81 Computer Programmer:
3 is prime, Out of Memory.
Pentium owner:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 8.9999978 is prime...
GNU programmer:
% prime ... ... ... 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... 3 is ...
Well, this problem has different solutions whether you are a: Mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and by induction we have that all the odd integers are prime. Physicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error... Engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime... Chemist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime... hey, let's publish! Modern physicist using renormalization: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is
usage: prime [-nV] [--quiet] [--silent] [--version] [-e script] --catenate --concatenate | c --create | d --diff --compare | r --append | t --list | u --update | x -extract --get [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --block-size N ] [ -B, --read-full-blocks ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [--checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ --force-local ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [-G, --incremental ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --absolute-paths ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --record-number ] [ [-f script-file] [--expression=script] [--file=script-file] [file...]
prime: you must specify exactly one of the r, c, t, x, or d options
For more information, type "prime --help'' Unix programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,
Segmentation fault, Core dumped. Computer programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is
Oops, let's try that again:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is
Um, right. Okay, how about this:
3 is not prime, 5 is not prime, 7 is not prime, 9 is not prim
People who forget history are bound to repeat it goes the saying. At the very begining of the WWW, not everyone had access to web browsers so various systems were developped, including web to mail portals. You would sent an email to a specific address with a GET request, and you'd get the page in return. Some of those servers are still in use to get around censorship or very limited conectivity, which was my case last year in Antarctica. I read slashdot thanks to a daily email connection, text only, and the agora web-to-mail portal.