Seen from a European perspective, this linking of anit-evolution with religion is rather strange. The Pope is happy with evolution, so is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and indeed all the mainstream Christian churches. As an aside: how they reconcile their bible and the observable facts doesn't bear inquiring in too closely, but they all claim to accept evolution as scientific fact.
So the fact that maybe 50% of europeans call themselves religious isn't incompatible with the fact that something over 80% of europeans accept evolution. I don't understand why things are different in the USA.
Thanks for that comment. I thought that it must be something like that. But a contact lens that blocks out almost all visible light except a tiny bit at the red end must make the user almost without usable sight. Wouldn't someone banging into the furniture in a casino and groping around them all the itme make someone suspicious? I retain a profoud scepticism that that there is anything in this story at all.
I can see that they are for sale, at an extraordinary price, on the web. But that doesn't mean much: it may just be that gullible buyers exist.
The real question is do they really work, and if so how? I'm not aware of any technology that is capable of converting infra-red to visible light except with a significant input of power, which is obviously not available in the case of contact lenses.
Whatever you do in the US, don't do the metrication half-way like we've done in the UK. We buy gasoline and milk in litres, but beer in pints. If you go to a DIY store you can find some sheets of plywood etc with dimensions stated: 6 feet by 3 feet by 5 mm.
People tend to measure their height in feet and inches but their weight in kilograms - that makes the BMI figure quite interesting.
We've taken over a century to do our metric conversion, and it's still under way, unfortunately.
As someone who has been forced to use the chip-and-pin system for some years (because I live in the UK) I can tell you that it's not that much more secure. The intrepid researchers in the Computer Science Dept at Cambridge have shown that there are many ways in which it can be compromised. The reason our banks are so keen on chip-and-pin is that if your card is misused you, the customer, have to foot the bill. When we had to sign credit card slips and someone forged your signature it was the bank (or other credit card issuer) which was liable. Shops also like it because the banks charge them a tiny bit less commission.
What you in the USA should get rid of is your ridiculous system of requiring input of a zip code at gasoline stations. I can never use my non-US credit card to get gasoline in the US because I don't have a US zip code, and the machines appear to have no fall-back system as an alternative. I can't believe that the system gives you any significant amount of extra security.
Absolutely right. But you didn't bother to post the only international number, which is 112. This works throughout the EU and in quite a number of other countries besides from land-lines, and on all mobile phones using the GSM system (which is most of them, maybe nearly all). This is the number to teach children, and to use in articles about emergency calls.
One very useful thing that the new digital text service doesn't have is the accurate time. Old analogue teletext had a display of hours minutes and seconds. New one has only hours and minutes, and because of decoding delays etc. even the minutes don't change right on the 0 seconds point. I have to find another way to check my watch.
Maybe it's going to be a slow process, but there have quite a number of news stories recently saying that both Visa and Mastercard are going to introduce them quite soon, e.g. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399772,00.asp
For those of us with credit cards issued in other parts of the world, where we have put up with the infernal system for some time, at least it might mean the end of being faced with gas stations insisting that we enter our Zip Code (which we don't have) before we can get gas.
I would have thought that the change to chip-and-pin cards in the US would have forced most places to invest in new POS infrastructure. That's certainly what has been going on in Europe over the last few years. Restaurants, especially, have had to invest in lots of new wireless POS terminals so they can take their machine to your card at the table. Maybe IBM doesn't think there's much money in all this new hardware, but somebody obviously does.
The only reason I have a current Motorola phone is because it's GSM 4-band (which one needs to use it in North America and the rest of the world), and because it has a clamshell design, which means the buttons don't get pressed by accident when it's in my pocket or a briefcase. Losing the latter, is crazy, as it was the only really good feature, and one which you can't get from otherwise decent phone manufacturers like Nokia.
I won't buy a smartphone until they come out with one having a design which protects the display and the buttons when it's in my pocket along with keys, loose change, pocket knife, and whatever.
Hopefully gas station pumps can continue to ask for a ZIP rather than a PIN. Just a personal preference.
That is really annoying for those who don' t live in the USA so have no zip code. It means two extra trips to the booth to get your credit card read and approved, and then debited with the actual amount of gas used. Almost all other countries use a PIN number (typically 4 digits) to approve credit card purchases done by machine but machines in the USA don't seem to be able to read them. I can't wait for the USA to catch up with the rest of the world.
But I suppose one can't expect any more of the only part of the world not to use International Standard road signs, A4 paper, 00 as the international dialling prefix, 230/240 volt mains, and metric units.
Because of the toolbar at the top, page down scrolls too far (using latest Mozilla) so I keep on having to press page down then the arrow to go up a line or two that has been missed.
The serious side-effect is that it makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for visitors buy a local SIM card for their mobile phone in order to avoid the rip-off charges that nearly all mobile phone companies charge for roaming. I guess governments are in league with the mobile phone companies in this respect.
When I visited Australia and bought a local SIM card it took me ages on the phone to register, since I didn't have whatever the Australian equivalent was of an SSN number, and the whole process cost me a lot of time and money, making the SIM-card purchase only marginally worth-while.
Fortunately the UK doesn't (at present) require SIM card registration, so visitors to here shouldn't have that particular problem.
The obvious answer is to use a database but only for the metadata, that is the items that describe the main dataset, such as filename, date of collection, dates of processing etc, shape, size, important parameters. Leave the data in the files so you can use your usual software packages, but use the database to organise the data collection. On the whole that gets you the best of both worlds.
But one thing you will find is that you have to use SQL to get the best out of any relational database, and this involves thinking in a new way - it's basically set-oriented - rather than sequentially row by row. This takes a bit of effort, but can be rewarding, as you will discover new ways of achieving some of the things you want to do.
As it happens I'm also in space research. My feeling is that what approach you take depends a lot on what sort of operations you need to carry out. Databases are good at sorting, searching, grouping, and selecting data, and joining one table with another. Getting your data into a database and extracting it is always a pain, and for practical purposes we found nothing to beat converting to CSV format (comma-separated-value). We ended up using Postgres as it had the best spatial (2-d) indexing, beating MySQL at the time. The expensive commercial DBMS like Oracle didn't have anything that the open-source ones did for modest-sized scientific datasets. I found Postgres was fine for our tables, which were no bigger than around 10 million rows long and 300 columns wide. You might well get better performance using something like HDF but you'll probably spend a lot more time programming to do that, and it won't be as flexible. The only thing you can be sure of in scientific data handling is that the requirements will change often, so flexibility is important.
If your scientific data are smallish in volume and pretty consistent in format from one run to the next, you might consider storing the data in the database, in a BLOB (binary large object) if no other data type seems to suit. But a fairly good alternative is just to store the metadata in the database, e.g. filename, date of observation, size, shape, parameters, etc and leave the scienficic data in the files. You can then use the database to select the files you need according to the parameters of the observation or experiment.
In Italy is worse than that, if you are a foreign tourist you cannot buy a SIM. Simple as that. To buy one you are required to provide your social security number card. I didn't have mine a few years ago while visiting and I had to return with my mother so that she could purchase it for me on her name.
That is undoubtedly a voiolation of European Union laws because it is discrimination against other EU citizens. But who is going to take it to the EU Court of Justice just to buy a SIM in Italy? Or even raise it with your MEP? It is such a pity that such petty restrictions still exist all over Europe.
I didn't know that the USA prohibited curved wing/door mirrors - that explains a lot. Every time I've rented a car in the USA I have found it very hard to set the mirrors so I can see vehicles which are nearly alongside - a few times I've nearly pulled out in front of them. In Europe I don't have the same problem. It seems a very dangerous law.
I'm amazed that you never heard complaints. I was with them for 14 years, but left a few months ago, as their service deteriorated to a level that was completely intolerable. The original company was good, but was successively taken over several times, and all the competent people left. Have a look at the Usenet newsgroup demon.service and you will find plenty of complaints...
Yes, most things work in Vista, just very slowly. My wife bought a new laptop nearly 2 years ago because her old one was failing mechanically. It had compulsory Vista, and an upgrade to XP would have meant throwing even more money in the direction of Microsoft.
It's much more powerful than my laptop, yet runs very much more slowly. The reason is that it has a host of "services" which run all the time which absorb a lot of cpu power and disc channel capacity - I've managed to stop a lot of them, as they do't do anything useful, but not all. In addition, several applications that she needed weren't available for Vista until some months after she got the new machine (we didn't realise at the time that so many XP apps would not simply not run on Vista).
With hindsight, I wish we'd spent the money on an "upgrade" to Win-XP, or hunted around for one of the few laptops which were still available with XP pre-installed.
The compulsory nature of Vista must have reduced hardware sales - I have considered buying a new laptop myself, but can't find one that I like that still uses XP, so I won't buy.
I have used file-sharing software and I'm in the UK. I downloaded the BBC I-player, and have used it a few times. That may well account for most of the 11% of users who admit to using file-sharing software
I'm not surprised. I'm using Win-XP SP2 and normally use Firefox, but keep IE6 installed just for the small number of websites which don't work with Firefox. I'd be happy to upgrade to IE7 or later but have not found a way to do that without agreeing to install WGA. I have a fully licenced Windows machine but don't want to install something as potentially dangerous as this. So I'm stuck with IE6. Maybe Microsoft's approval is yet another attempt to get WGA distributed widely?
Do any of the web based wordprocessors have a decent equation editor?
Zoho writer has an equation editor which is usable - you should try it and see if you think it's "decent". The author of the software seems to be a Latex enthusiast.
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Seen from a European perspective, this linking of anit-evolution with religion is rather strange. The Pope is happy with evolution, so is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and indeed all the mainstream Christian churches. As an aside: how they reconcile their bible and the observable facts doesn't bear inquiring in too closely, but they all claim to accept evolution as scientific fact. So the fact that maybe 50% of europeans call themselves religious isn't incompatible with the fact that something over 80% of europeans accept evolution. I don't understand why things are different in the USA.
Thanks for that comment. I thought that it must be something like that. But a contact lens that blocks out almost all visible light except a tiny bit at the red end must make the user almost without usable sight. Wouldn't someone banging into the furniture in a casino and groping around them all the itme make someone suspicious? I retain a profoud scepticism that that there is anything in this story at all.
The real question is do they really work, and if so how? I'm not aware of any technology that is capable of converting infra-red to visible light except with a significant input of power, which is obviously not available in the case of contact lenses.
Whatever you do in the US, don't do the metrication half-way like we've done in the UK. We buy gasoline and milk in litres, but beer in pints. If you go to a DIY store you can find some sheets of plywood etc with dimensions stated: 6 feet by 3 feet by 5 mm. People tend to measure their height in feet and inches but their weight in kilograms - that makes the BMI figure quite interesting. We've taken over a century to do our metric conversion, and it's still under way, unfortunately.
As someone who has been forced to use the chip-and-pin system for some years (because I live in the UK) I can tell you that it's not that much more secure. The intrepid researchers in the Computer Science Dept at Cambridge have shown that there are many ways in which it can be compromised. The reason our banks are so keen on chip-and-pin is that if your card is misused you, the customer, have to foot the bill. When we had to sign credit card slips and someone forged your signature it was the bank (or other credit card issuer) which was liable. Shops also like it because the banks charge them a tiny bit less commission. What you in the USA should get rid of is your ridiculous system of requiring input of a zip code at gasoline stations. I can never use my non-US credit card to get gasoline in the US because I don't have a US zip code, and the machines appear to have no fall-back system as an alternative. I can't believe that the system gives you any significant amount of extra security.
Absolutely right. But you didn't bother to post the only international number, which is 112. This works throughout the EU and in quite a number of other countries besides from land-lines, and on all mobile phones using the GSM system (which is most of them, maybe nearly all). This is the number to teach children, and to use in articles about emergency calls.
One very useful thing that the new digital text service doesn't have is the accurate time. Old analogue teletext had a display of hours minutes and seconds. New one has only hours and minutes, and because of decoding delays etc. even the minutes don't change right on the 0 seconds point. I have to find another way to check my watch.
Maybe it's going to be a slow process, but there have quite a number of news stories recently saying that both Visa and Mastercard are going to introduce them quite soon, e.g. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399772,00.asp For those of us with credit cards issued in other parts of the world, where we have put up with the infernal system for some time, at least it might mean the end of being faced with gas stations insisting that we enter our Zip Code (which we don't have) before we can get gas.
I would have thought that the change to chip-and-pin cards in the US would have forced most places to invest in new POS infrastructure. That's certainly what has been going on in Europe over the last few years. Restaurants, especially, have had to invest in lots of new wireless POS terminals so they can take their machine to your card at the table. Maybe IBM doesn't think there's much money in all this new hardware, but somebody obviously does.
The only reason I have a current Motorola phone is because it's GSM 4-band (which one needs to use it in North America and the rest of the world), and because it has a clamshell design, which means the buttons don't get pressed by accident when it's in my pocket or a briefcase. Losing the latter, is crazy, as it was the only really good feature, and one which you can't get from otherwise decent phone manufacturers like Nokia. I won't buy a smartphone until they come out with one having a design which protects the display and the buttons when it's in my pocket along with keys, loose change, pocket knife, and whatever.
Susan Greenfield has a history of making these claims, without a scrap of evidence to back them up. For a more sceptical treatment of the subject, see Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column of a couple of weeks ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/bad-science-publishing-claims
Hopefully gas station pumps can continue to ask for a ZIP rather than a PIN. Just a personal preference.
That is really annoying for those who don' t live in the USA so have no zip code. It means two extra trips to the booth to get your credit card read and approved, and then debited with the actual amount of gas used. Almost all other countries use a PIN number (typically 4 digits) to approve credit card purchases done by machine but machines in the USA don't seem to be able to read them. I can't wait for the USA to catch up with the rest of the world.
But I suppose one can't expect any more of the only part of the world not to use International Standard road signs, A4 paper, 00 as the international dialling prefix, 230/240 volt mains, and metric units.
Because of the toolbar at the top, page down scrolls too far (using latest Mozilla) so I keep on having to press page down then the arrow to go up a line or two that has been missed.
When I visited Australia and bought a local SIM card it took me ages on the phone to register, since I didn't have whatever the Australian equivalent was of an SSN number, and the whole process cost me a lot of time and money, making the SIM-card purchase only marginally worth-while.
Fortunately the UK doesn't (at present) require SIM card registration, so visitors to here shouldn't have that particular problem.
But one thing you will find is that you have to use SQL to get the best out of any relational database, and this involves thinking in a new way - it's basically set-oriented - rather than sequentially row by row. This takes a bit of effort, but can be rewarding, as you will discover new ways of achieving some of the things you want to do.
As it happens I'm also in space research. My feeling is that what approach you take depends a lot on what sort of operations you need to carry out. Databases are good at sorting, searching, grouping, and selecting data, and joining one table with another. Getting your data into a database and extracting it is always a pain, and for practical purposes we found nothing to beat converting to CSV format (comma-separated-value). We ended up using Postgres as it had the best spatial (2-d) indexing, beating MySQL at the time. The expensive commercial DBMS like Oracle didn't have anything that the open-source ones did for modest-sized scientific datasets. I found Postgres was fine for our tables, which were no bigger than around 10 million rows long and 300 columns wide. You might well get better performance using something like HDF but you'll probably spend a lot more time programming to do that, and it won't be as flexible. The only thing you can be sure of in scientific data handling is that the requirements will change often, so flexibility is important. If your scientific data are smallish in volume and pretty consistent in format from one run to the next, you might consider storing the data in the database, in a BLOB (binary large object) if no other data type seems to suit. But a fairly good alternative is just to store the metadata in the database, e.g. filename, date of observation, size, shape, parameters, etc and leave the scienficic data in the files. You can then use the database to select the files you need according to the parameters of the observation or experiment.
In Italy is worse than that, if you are a foreign tourist you cannot buy a SIM. Simple as that. To buy one you are required to provide your social security number card. I didn't have mine a few years ago while visiting and I had to return with my mother so that she could purchase it for me on her name.
That is undoubtedly a voiolation of European Union laws because it is discrimination against other EU citizens. But who is going to take it to the EU Court of Justice just to buy a SIM in Italy? Or even raise it with your MEP? It is such a pity that such petty restrictions still exist all over Europe.
I didn't know that the USA prohibited curved wing/door mirrors - that explains a lot. Every time I've rented a car in the USA I have found it very hard to set the mirrors so I can see vehicles which are nearly alongside - a few times I've nearly pulled out in front of them. In Europe I don't have the same problem. It seems a very dangerous law.
I'm amazed that you never heard complaints. I was with them for 14 years, but left a few months ago, as their service deteriorated to a level that was completely intolerable. The original company was good, but was successively taken over several times, and all the competent people left. Have a look at the Usenet newsgroup demon.service and you will find plenty of complaints...
Yes, most things work in Vista, just very slowly. My wife bought a new laptop nearly 2 years ago because her old one was failing mechanically. It had compulsory Vista, and an upgrade to XP would have meant throwing even more money in the direction of Microsoft. It's much more powerful than my laptop, yet runs very much more slowly. The reason is that it has a host of "services" which run all the time which absorb a lot of cpu power and disc channel capacity - I've managed to stop a lot of them, as they do't do anything useful, but not all. In addition, several applications that she needed weren't available for Vista until some months after she got the new machine (we didn't realise at the time that so many XP apps would not simply not run on Vista). With hindsight, I wish we'd spent the money on an "upgrade" to Win-XP, or hunted around for one of the few laptops which were still available with XP pre-installed. The compulsory nature of Vista must have reduced hardware sales - I have considered buying a new laptop myself, but can't find one that I like that still uses XP, so I won't buy.
I have used file-sharing software and I'm in the UK. I downloaded the BBC I-player, and have used it a few times. That may well account for most of the 11% of users who admit to using file-sharing software
I don't know what you mean by 12 pm - do you mean noon?
I'm not surprised. I'm using Win-XP SP2 and normally use Firefox, but keep IE6 installed just for the small number of websites which don't work with Firefox. I'd be happy to upgrade to IE7 or later but have not found a way to do that without agreeing to install WGA. I have a fully licenced Windows machine but don't want to install something as potentially dangerous as this. So I'm stuck with IE6. Maybe Microsoft's approval is yet another attempt to get WGA distributed widely?
My first reaction was to ask why a simple media player needed to know the date and time? Can anyone explain this?
Do any of the web based wordprocessors have a decent equation editor?
Zoho writer has an equation editor which is usable - you should try it and see if you think it's "decent". The author of the software seems to be a Latex enthusiast.