Please, could you provide some specific examples of bias and uninformed reporting by the BBC?
The allegation you make is serious, either provide some supporting evidence, or shut up.
Incidentally, I notice that nobody from the UK has mentioned yet that you get a discount on the TV licence if you're registered blind.
"The BBC is run in the interests of its viewers and listeners. Twelve governors act as trustees of the public interest and regulate the BBC. They are appointed by the Queen on advice from ministers.
The BBC's governors safeguard its independence, set its objectives and monitor its performance. They are accountable to its licence payers and Parliament, and publish an Annual Report assessing the BBC's performance against objectives.
Day-to-day BBC operations are run by 16 divisions. Their directors report to the director-general, forming the Executive Committee. It answers to the Board of Governors."
If anyone wants proof that the BBC is not controlled by the UK government, they need look no further than here.
We decided to try the superglue method, which seemed to have something going for it. However, when that failed we resorted to using a lever through the pci slot in the case (with a fulcrum outside the case), and a screwdriver with superglue.
Thanks to anyoone that posted ideas, we're very grateful.
Surely it'd be easier and more elegant to design a reaction vessel with probes/sampling ports built in. You could then seal the apparatus at the start of the experiment an have a fair degree of confidence that it would stay sealed until you ended the experiment.
If you want a simple experiment into keeping things sterile and uncontaminated, google for Pasteur's experiments with swan-necked flasks. These were originally designed to disprove the theory that bacteria and moulds (and indeed worms, beetles, etc) would spontaneously form and begin multiplying in dead organic matter. Very simple, very elegant, and proves the point very nicely.
If you're using Linux to save costs, and it fries its power supply, you're SOL.
If you're using Linux to save costs, and the hardware fries it's PSU, how will they find out before they replace the PSU and try to power the unit up again?
I know they probably ask questions like that, but until the hardware boots up, they only have your say-so as to what's installed on it.
GBP == Great Britain Pounds - some systems can have trouble with the £ symbol (if you have a question mark, blank space or empty rectangle, that's you).
At the time (I was 13) I got GBP25 per month off my folks and about GBP7 per week delivering papers morning, evening and Sundays. Ok, so it's not like I spent money on much else except for junk food, but that gives you some idea of my wealth at the time.
They also reduced the number of figures in a standard blister from 5 to 4, whilst using army lists based around 10 figure squads.
This was an overnight 66% price rise (60p per figure to GBP1 per figure) at the same time that the price of lead was falling (as I mentioned at the time, minatures have huge economies of scale, the main expense is metal, closely followed by packaging/transport when you produce them in the quantity GW do). Even as a 13 year old I figured this out, and as I've never liked people trying to exploit me, I withdrew my custom in favour of other manufacturers.
Thought I'd take the opportunity to put my (british) 2p in. I used to play Warhammer 40k, dabbled with Adeptus Titanicus (think Mechwarrior but bigger and darker), and a number of the other GW games. Collected White Dwarf until about issue 130, with back issues down to about #20.
I gave up wargaming altogether at about age 13 when a blister of overscale lead minatures went from GBP 3 to GBP 4 overnight. I still think Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has one of the richest and most interesting backgrounds of any RPG (renaissance fantasy with Lovecraftian undertones would be the best description I can think of).
I do know a fair bit of the history of GW, both gleaned from the trade press and from conversations I've had with people who've met Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (not the Steve Jackson of Illuminati:NWO, Car Wars, GURPS, etc fame). I've also met people who've applied for jobs with GW, both retail and creative. (I live in Birmingham, about an hour or so from GW's headquarters and design studios in Nottingham, UK.)
It would probably be fair to say that GW started the Apple of the gaming world, before morphing into the Microsoft-equivalent. It was started by a pair of hippies in a flat in London, making wooden chess and backgammon boards. I'm not too sure about the early years, but by the mid 1980's White Dwarf magazine was probably the best general roleplaying magazine available in the world, it covered AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest and many others large and small. The GW chain of shops stocked roleplaying games from a range of publishers, and minatures from Citadel (GW's subsidiary), and others. At some point Warhammer Battle appeared, as did a few other gems like UK editions of Call of Cthulhu, and Runequest; the Judge Dredd roleplaying game; and wonderful boardgames like Fury of Dracula, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, and Blockmania. At this point in time they were seriously good roleplaying/wargaming shops, with a bloody good design studio turning out a range of quality product.
The aforementioned pair of hippies, Steve Jackson and Iain Livingstone got themselves a new hobby: writing Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books. This proved to be a fair bit more lucrative than running Games Workshop, so at some point in the mid to late 80's they sold up and over three or four years GW became the company you see today.
The basic marketing idea GW use these days is to catch'em young, preferably before the age of 10, and try to convince these kids that GW comprise the the known gaming universe. Hence the attempt to restrict distribution to sites that they control, to prevent impressionable young minds from realising that companies and people other than Games Workshop make cool and interesting games and minatures.
Even after switching all of their production over to lead-free metal a few years ago, which was a major re-tooling effort, the mark-up on minatures is pretty huge, especially when you have that much market share (kids pocket money is big business these days) and control over what minatures are fielded in competition/leagues, which are admittedly a good way to chill and meet people when you're a young geek. The move to more plastic minatures was mainly a cost-saving issue, as well as a way to break into a slightly younger market.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was licensed to Hogshead publishing, which was the best thing that ever happened to it (I was one of the people who waited 15 years for a supplement described in the first edition of the rulebook as 'in progress').
Anyway, I hope that gives you a little more insight into GW, personally I got back into minatures when I saw Flintloque, dammn good fun and easy to get started (between 6-12 minatures a side is a good skirmish, the rules work well with more players, each person controls their own squad of minatures. Plus, the minatures are way cool, Orc redcoats and Elven Voltigeurs, wargaming was meant to be this way.
I've also been building a system for audio work, Thermalright heatsinks (the one you can clip an 80mm fan to), 4 Papst silent 80mm fans (two on the dual Duron 1.3GHz, two in the case), Enermax silent PSU, and three IDE disks with fluid dynamic bearings.
End result: a dual CPU AMD-based machine with three hard disks that's so quiet I have to look at the lights/fans to check it's running, even with the case off. I should also mention that we lined the case with sound deadening material (sheets of cork/other stuff I'm not sure of the details on), but I think you can get away with just putting a layer under the motherboard, as that seems to stop a lot of the transmitted vibration from the CPU fans.
Of course, no matter how well Apache runs on NT Workstation, you're still artificially restricted to 10 concurrent inbound connnections, as that's hard-coded into the Workstation versions of NT, 2000, and XP (I think).
They do exist, but are fairly expensive. I've never seen one but everything I've read says they go like shit off a shovel, not sure how good they are for long term storage though.
This is way cool, I remember being in the first year of Junior school (aged about 8) and doing a project on Romans. I was off school ill and my Mum (Physics lecturer and Chartered Engineer)and I built an Onager using legos and a couple of decent elastic bands.
For those who don't already know, an Onager was another type of siege engine, using twisted cord to store energy rather than raising a heavy weight. It didn't have a sling, so it didn't get much distance, but it was pretty cool at the time. i'm just annoyed that I didn't get any pictures before I dismatled it.
I'll add my voice to this, I used to use Scan but got burned a couple of times when I recommended them to other people.
I tend to buy bits from dabs.com, overclockers.co.uk, and a few others, but my last few purchases have been from computer fairs (I live in Birmingham, so there's one every week or two somewhere close), low prices, good service and I've never had a problem yet.
Lynx is OK, but Links is better.
Support for frames and tables in a text-based browser, it makes browsing online documentation and downloading new software from the command line much more pleasant.
OK, so the Apple will come with OSX, but at least it's UNIX, contains a fair bit of Open Source code and seems to do the job pretty well. The UltraSPARC comes with Solaris, also a pretty good start, I imagine you could get Linux or NetBSD onto either one with a bit of work (I must admit I've not done it myself).
My last job as a convention troll was to demo it at EuroGenCon '97. I seem to remember it had some really nice background, but the system required buckets of D20.
Then again, I actually like and occasionally run Deadlands, an rpg that uses 6 types of dice, numerous packs of playing cards and poker chips to randomise stuff. It seemed pretty complex but it worked, I especially liked the way magic was dependant on the magician getting a good poker hand.
And if we're talking obscure games, what about SLA Industries? A very cool sci-fi/horror rpg with a unique setting, plus it was produced and typeset on an Atari Falcon.
What about Hogshead Publishing, currently producing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, still one of the best fantasy RPGs ever IMHO (our group has just started playing the Enemy Within campaign, the best published RPG campaign ever, also IMHO). (I ran it when I was 13 but haven't looked at it since, so I'm playing it this time).
Also, there's Chasosium, publishers of the venerable but still amazingly cool Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon. I believe Runequest is still going but I think Chaosium sold it to somebody else.
As a last note, there's also a cool publisher of Call of Cthulhu material called Pagan Publishing who produce material for Call of Cthulhu, they can be found here:
http://www.tccorp.com/pagan/index.html
I've never been disappointed with anything they've produced, including plush Cthulhu dolls!
Licencing issues are actually quite easy, each connected client will require a client access licence and an Office licence at the very least, then you need to sort out the Citrix licencing. Even if you use VNC instead of Citrix you still have to pay Microsoft plenty.
This is a good idea for many reasons, but it won't be cheap and still involves using large amounts of M$ second-rate crudware.
As somebody who wants to learn to code, but is having many of the problems mentioned here, I think that's probably a very good point.
However, could you, or indeed anybody else who has already learned the basics of analysis/design recommend some good introductory material for somebody who would like to learn it. If not, then it seems like the original poster has found a niche in the market.
IMHO, however, I almost always compile from source, especially with a new piece of software, though if you're running less powerful hardware it can be a bit of a drag.
This is, of course, one reason why the post-war Japanese economy was so successful for most of the second half of the 20th century. whilst we were pouring all available resources into 'defence' research, they were getting on with something a litle more useful and productive.
It seems a largely successful strategy and it might be better if more countries were to consider it.
Just a little point, but I think that only applies if you want Google to remove your own pages. I don't think you can just ask them to take down links to pages you don't like.
In this case, Deutsche Bahn is trying to censor a website hosted on a Dutch server, who's content is perfectly legal under Dutch law (IANAL, and I've not studied the pages in question, but as far as I'm aware).
If you read the article, the CaO is in solution, with the CaCO3 precipitating out, so the dust problem should be adequately controlled.
I do agree with you about the amount of energy required to convert the CaCO3 back to CaO, I wonder if that will be from renewable sources that do not produce CO2?
IANAL, but as I understand it, in the UK I am entitled to use 'reasonable force' to defend 'life or property' (I believe those are the legal terms, but couldn't be certain). Exactly how reasonable the force used is, is a matter for the first the Police, then the Crown Prosecution Service, and then a Jury, if it ever gets to trial.
There was a recent case in the UK where a Norfolk farmer called Tony Martin was convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal, for shooting two burglars with an illegally held shotgun, killing one of them.
Links to news items here and here, as well as the Tony Martin Support Group here.
I don't want to comment on that case in particular, but it does show you that, whilst you don't have to be defenceless, you do have to think a bit about what you do.
I, and I would hope many Slashdotters are also, familiar with the term 'hygroscopic', meaning a substance, normally crystaline, that takes up water from it's surroundings.
I think that concrete probably damages skin in all three ways simultaneously, drying it out, potentailly burning/scalding and chemical attack.
In short, not very pleasant stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing what an anti-virus program (or indeed any program) does, and access to it's source code is not the same as being able to get around it.
Any potential exploits might be noticed by virus writers. However, they may also be noticed and patched by users or developers of the software.
Please, could you provide some specific examples of bias and uninformed reporting by the BBC? The allegation you make is serious, either provide some supporting evidence, or shut up. Incidentally, I notice that nobody from the UK has mentioned yet that you get a discount on the TV licence if you're registered blind.
To quote from the BBC website:
"The BBC is run in the interests of its viewers and listeners. Twelve governors act as trustees of the public interest and regulate the BBC. They are appointed by the Queen on advice from ministers.
The BBC's governors safeguard its independence, set its objectives and monitor its performance. They are accountable to its licence payers and Parliament, and publish an Annual Report assessing the BBC's performance against objectives.
Day-to-day BBC operations are run by 16 divisions. Their directors report to the director-general, forming the Executive Committee. It answers to the Board of Governors."
If anyone wants proof that the BBC is not controlled by the UK government, they need look no further than here.
We decided to try the superglue method, which seemed to have something going for it. However, when that failed we resorted to using a lever through the pci slot in the case (with a fulcrum outside the case), and a screwdriver with superglue. Thanks to anyoone that posted ideas, we're very grateful.
Why bother taking the probe out at all?
Surely it'd be easier and more elegant to design a reaction vessel with probes/sampling ports built in. You could then seal the apparatus at the start of the experiment an have a fair degree of confidence that it would stay sealed until you ended the experiment.
If you want a simple experiment into keeping things sterile and uncontaminated, google for Pasteur's experiments with swan-necked flasks. These were originally designed to disprove the theory that bacteria and moulds (and indeed worms, beetles, etc) would spontaneously form and begin multiplying in dead organic matter. Very simple, very elegant, and proves the point very nicely.
If you're using Linux to save costs, and it fries its power supply, you're SOL.
If you're using Linux to save costs, and the hardware fries it's PSU, how will they find out before they replace the PSU and try to power the unit up again?
I know they probably ask questions like that, but until the hardware boots up, they only have your say-so as to what's installed on it.
GBP == Great Britain Pounds - some systems can have trouble with the £ symbol (if you have a question mark, blank space or empty rectangle, that's you). At the time (I was 13) I got GBP25 per month off my folks and about GBP7 per week delivering papers morning, evening and Sundays. Ok, so it's not like I spent money on much else except for junk food, but that gives you some idea of my wealth at the time. They also reduced the number of figures in a standard blister from 5 to 4, whilst using army lists based around 10 figure squads. This was an overnight 66% price rise (60p per figure to GBP1 per figure) at the same time that the price of lead was falling (as I mentioned at the time, minatures have huge economies of scale, the main expense is metal, closely followed by packaging/transport when you produce them in the quantity GW do). Even as a 13 year old I figured this out, and as I've never liked people trying to exploit me, I withdrew my custom in favour of other manufacturers.
Thought I'd take the opportunity to put my (british) 2p in. I used to play Warhammer 40k, dabbled with Adeptus Titanicus (think Mechwarrior but bigger and darker), and a number of the other GW games. Collected White Dwarf until about issue 130, with back issues down to about #20.
I gave up wargaming altogether at about age 13 when a blister of overscale lead minatures went from GBP 3 to GBP 4 overnight. I still think Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has one of the richest and most interesting backgrounds of any RPG (renaissance fantasy with Lovecraftian undertones would be the best description I can think of).
I do know a fair bit of the history of GW, both gleaned from the trade press and from conversations I've had with people who've met Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (not the Steve Jackson of Illuminati:NWO, Car Wars, GURPS, etc fame). I've also met people who've applied for jobs with GW, both retail and creative. (I live in Birmingham, about an hour or so from GW's headquarters and design studios in Nottingham, UK.)
It would probably be fair to say that GW started the Apple of the gaming world, before morphing into the Microsoft-equivalent. It was started by a pair of hippies in a flat in London, making wooden chess and backgammon boards. I'm not too sure about the early years, but by the mid 1980's White Dwarf magazine was probably the best general roleplaying magazine available in the world, it covered AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest and many others large and small. The GW chain of shops stocked roleplaying games from a range of publishers, and minatures from Citadel (GW's subsidiary), and others. At some point Warhammer Battle appeared, as did a few other gems like UK editions of Call of Cthulhu, and Runequest; the Judge Dredd roleplaying game; and wonderful boardgames like Fury of Dracula, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, and Blockmania. At this point in time they were seriously good roleplaying/wargaming shops, with a bloody good design studio turning out a range of quality product.
The aforementioned pair of hippies, Steve Jackson and Iain Livingstone got themselves a new hobby: writing Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books. This proved to be a fair bit more lucrative than running Games Workshop, so at some point in the mid to late 80's they sold up and over three or four years GW became the company you see today.
The basic marketing idea GW use these days is to catch'em young, preferably before the age of 10, and try to convince these kids that GW comprise the the known gaming universe. Hence the attempt to restrict distribution to sites that they control, to prevent impressionable young minds from realising that companies and people other than Games Workshop make cool and interesting games and minatures.
Even after switching all of their production over to lead-free metal a few years ago, which was a major re-tooling effort, the mark-up on minatures is pretty huge, especially when you have that much market share (kids pocket money is big business these days) and control over what minatures are fielded in competition/leagues, which are admittedly a good way to chill and meet people when you're a young geek. The move to more plastic minatures was mainly a cost-saving issue, as well as a way to break into a slightly younger market.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was licensed to Hogshead publishing, which was the best thing that ever happened to it (I was one of the people who waited 15 years for a supplement described in the first edition of the rulebook as 'in progress').
Anyway, I hope that gives you a little more insight into GW, personally I got back into minatures when I saw Flintloque, dammn good fun and easy to get started (between 6-12 minatures a side is a good skirmish, the rules work well with more players, each person controls their own squad of minatures. Plus, the minatures are way cool, Orc redcoats and Elven Voltigeurs, wargaming was meant to be this way.
I've also been building a system for audio work, Thermalright heatsinks (the one you can clip an 80mm fan to), 4 Papst silent 80mm fans (two on the dual Duron 1.3GHz, two in the case), Enermax silent PSU, and three IDE disks with fluid dynamic bearings.
End result: a dual CPU AMD-based machine with three hard disks that's so quiet I have to look at the lights/fans to check it's running, even with the case off. I should also mention that we lined the case with sound deadening material (sheets of cork/other stuff I'm not sure of the details on), but I think you can get away with just putting a layer under the motherboard, as that seems to stop a lot of the transmitted vibration from the CPU fans.
Of course, no matter how well Apache runs on NT Workstation, you're still artificially restricted to 10 concurrent inbound connnections, as that's hard-coded into the Workstation versions of NT, 2000, and XP (I think).
They do exist, but are fairly expensive. I've never seen one but everything I've read says they go like shit off a shovel, not sure how good they are for long term storage though.
This is way cool, I remember being in the first year of Junior school (aged about 8) and doing a project on Romans. I was off school ill and my Mum (Physics lecturer and Chartered Engineer)and I built an Onager using legos and a couple of decent elastic bands.
For those who don't already know, an Onager was another type of siege engine, using twisted cord to store energy rather than raising a heavy weight. It didn't have a sling, so it didn't get much distance, but it was pretty cool at the time. i'm just annoyed that I didn't get any pictures before I dismatled it.
I'll add my voice to this, I used to use Scan but got burned a couple of times when I recommended them to other people.
I tend to buy bits from dabs.com, overclockers.co.uk, and a few others, but my last few purchases have been from computer fairs (I live in Birmingham, so there's one every week or two somewhere close), low prices, good service and I've never had a problem yet.
Lynx is OK, but Links is better. Support for frames and tables in a text-based browser, it makes browsing online documentation and downloading new software from the command line much more pleasant.
You could always look at a non-intel laptop:
PowerPC G4
UltraSPARC IIe
OK, so the Apple will come with OSX, but at least it's UNIX, contains a fair bit of Open Source code and seems to do the job pretty well. The UltraSPARC comes with Solaris, also a pretty good start, I imagine you could get Linux or NetBSD onto either one with a bit of work (I must admit I've not done it myself).
Is Fading Suns still going?
My last job as a convention troll was to demo it at EuroGenCon '97. I seem to remember it had some really nice background, but the system required buckets of D20.
Then again, I actually like and occasionally run Deadlands, an rpg that uses 6 types of dice, numerous packs of playing cards and poker chips to randomise stuff. It seemed pretty complex but it worked, I especially liked the way magic was dependant on the magician getting a good poker hand.
And if we're talking obscure games, what about SLA Industries? A very cool sci-fi/horror rpg with a unique setting, plus it was produced and typeset on an Atari Falcon.
What about Hogshead Publishing, currently producing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, still one of the best fantasy RPGs ever IMHO (our group has just started playing the Enemy Within campaign, the best published RPG campaign ever, also IMHO). (I ran it when I was 13 but haven't looked at it since, so I'm playing it this time).
Also, there's Chasosium, publishers of the venerable but still amazingly cool Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon. I believe Runequest is still going but I think Chaosium sold it to somebody else.
As a last note, there's also a cool publisher of Call of Cthulhu material called Pagan Publishing who produce material for Call of Cthulhu, they can be found here:
http://www.tccorp.com/pagan/index.html
I've never been disappointed with anything they've produced, including plush Cthulhu dolls!
Licencing issues are actually quite easy, each connected client will require a client access licence and an Office licence at the very least, then you need to sort out the Citrix licencing. Even if you use VNC instead of Citrix you still have to pay Microsoft plenty.
This is a good idea for many reasons, but it won't be cheap and still involves using large amounts of M$ second-rate crudware.
As somebody who wants to learn to code, but is having many of the problems mentioned here, I think that's probably a very good point.
However, could you, or indeed anybody else who has already learned the basics of analysis/design recommend some good introductory material for somebody who would like to learn it. If not, then it seems like the original poster has found a niche in the market.
Isn't that what the Linux Standards Base is for?
IMHO, however, I almost always compile from source, especially with a new piece of software, though if you're running less powerful hardware it can be a bit of a drag.
This is, of course, one reason why the post-war Japanese economy was so successful for most of the second half of the 20th century. whilst we were pouring all available resources into 'defence' research, they were getting on with something a litle more useful and productive.
It seems a largely successful strategy and it might be better if more countries were to consider it.
Just a little point, but I think that only applies if you want Google to remove your own pages. I don't think you can just ask them to take down links to pages you don't like.
In this case, Deutsche Bahn is trying to censor a website hosted on a Dutch server, who's content is perfectly legal under Dutch law (IANAL, and I've not studied the pages in question, but as far as I'm aware).
If you read the article, the CaO is in solution, with the CaCO3 precipitating out, so the dust problem should be adequately controlled.
I do agree with you about the amount of energy required to convert the CaCO3 back to CaO, I wonder if that will be from renewable sources that do not produce CO2?
IANAL, but as I understand it, in the UK I am entitled to use 'reasonable force' to defend 'life or property' (I believe those are the legal terms, but couldn't be certain). Exactly how reasonable the force used is, is a matter for the first the Police, then the Crown Prosecution Service, and then a Jury, if it ever gets to trial.
There was a recent case in the UK where a Norfolk farmer called Tony Martin was convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal, for shooting two burglars with an illegally held shotgun, killing one of them.
Links to news items here and here, as well as the Tony Martin Support Group here.
I don't want to comment on that case in particular, but it does show you that, whilst you don't have to be defenceless, you do have to think a bit about what you do.
I, and I would hope many Slashdotters are also, familiar with the term 'hygroscopic', meaning a substance, normally crystaline, that takes up water from it's surroundings. I think that concrete probably damages skin in all three ways simultaneously, drying it out, potentailly burning/scalding and chemical attack. In short, not very pleasant stuff.