Am I missing something? TFA is so vague that I can only assume it was written by someone who doesn't understand basic optics.
The reason light bends the way it does "in the natural world" is because of the relative refractive indices of the two media, so light travelling from water into air bends in the the opposite direction compared to light travelling from air into water.
How does this "super-lens" differ from placing the target in a high (>1) refractive index fluid or solid and using, for example, an air bubble as a lens?
------------ Situation Vacant Position: Science Correspondent Education: Media studies or English preferred. Description: The successful applicant will be expected to re-write scientific press releases, replacing all genuine information with pseudo-scientific fluff. Understanding of any science, logic or statistics is undesirable for this post. Salary: Far more than you will deserve.
Those points may have some truth, but the point is that only the US population persists in claiming to be free with such zealous fervour, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. To those outside the sphere of indoctrination, this tiresome tub-thumping is akin to listening to someone continually declaring themselves to be the most humble person in the world - it's clearly false and quite pitiable.
I don't suggest that the US population is as badly off as those in other countries such as Myanmar (formerly Burma), but they are certainly deluded about the extent of their own freedom. Having a President brought to power by elections rigged by widespread disenfranchisement is not a good basis for freedom and democracy. Being prepared to overlook this obscenely anti-democratic act and legitimise his second term simply underlines the degree to which the population has been subjugated, Government of the people, by the corrupt for the wealthy sums it up.
Once Bush has swung the balance of power on the Supreme Court, the true extent of the erosion of US freedom will soon become clear to all.
if you are speaking of iraq, i would like to point out that it's people that are shooting at our army troops that get killed. other than that, who have we been killing?
Oh come on! You must be a Fox viewer. The more objective media has been reporting thousands of Iraqi civilians dying directly at tbe hands of the US. A 1000 pound bomb, even if it's accurately guided by laser, causes massive destruction to the surrounding area, guaranteeing large numbers of "accidental" deaths of civilians. This does not include the many thousands that have died, as a direct result of the US foreign policy, at the hands of the suicide bombers that (rightly) consider the US/UK occupation illegal.
In case you haven't worked it out, the US and UK illegally declared war on Iraq. The UN declaration cited as justification definitely did not authorise the use of force. Bush tried desperately to get a resolution that would grant automatic authorisation, but he couldn't get it.
Just for the record, I'm no Saddam apologist. I was campaigning against him, the Baath Party and the governments that supported them back in 1982 when the US was busy selling him arms (including chemical weapons).
You clearly have little understanding of modern telecomm networks. It is now much easier to tap a phone than it used to be. The authorities don't even need to leave the office, let alone gain entry to your home. All it takes now is a (computer activated) switch to be thrown at the exchange. This may require the cooperation of the exchange operator, but this is a beaurocratic restriction, not a technical one.
Incidentally, the same modern network technology also means that tracing calls is now virtually instant, much to the chagrin of lazy Hollywood scriptwriters.
Wow! That blog explains so much of the grief that Word has caused me over the years - e.g. numbered list have never worked from day 1, pasting from one doc to another frequently trashes the formatting (often irreparably), page numbering is often screwed and updating contents pages should only be done with plenty of Valium at hand.
It also explains why my colleagues can't edit a shared document if I've copied text from it, and why my filesystem is full of temporary files.
The problem is, as I've suspected for a long time, the fundamental "design". Complexity is built into the codebase - not, as the article suggests, because of the large number of functions available (like most users, I only use a tiny subset), but by the underlying data format virtually guaranteeing undesired interactions.
This brings us back to the headline topic. Get the document data structure right, and the code almost writes itself. Get it wrong, and you end up with kludge upon kludge.
From what I've seen (not much I must confess), the MS proposed alternative standard shows little respect for the writers' notion of the document structure, but virtually ensures your document will end up in pieces, stuck together into a structured file. In contrast, the OOo format inherently expresses the writers' structure.
Summary: this is a wheel invented by Microsoft. It's a square with the corners rounded off and curved bits added onto each edge to smooth out the bumps. It'll fall apart as soon as it's placed under stress. They'll fix it by adding more and more bracing so that it'll eventually work, but it'll never be pretty.
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NASA seek Geordie crew for first manned flight to Pluto. (T-shirts will be provided)
Am I missing something? TFA is so vague that I can only assume it was written by someone who doesn't understand basic optics.
The reason light bends the way it does "in the natural world" is because of the relative refractive indices of the two media, so light travelling from water into air bends in the the opposite direction compared to light travelling from air into water.
How does this "super-lens" differ from placing the target in a high (>1) refractive index fluid or solid and using, for example, an air bubble as a lens?
------------
Situation Vacant
Position: Science Correspondent
Education: Media studies or English preferred.
Description: The successful applicant will be expected to re-write scientific press releases, replacing all genuine information with pseudo-scientific fluff. Understanding of any science, logic or statistics is undesirable for this post.
Salary: Far more than you will deserve.
Those points may have some truth, but the point is that only the US population persists in claiming to be free with such zealous fervour, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. To those outside the sphere of indoctrination, this tiresome tub-thumping is akin to listening to someone continually declaring themselves to be the most humble person in the world - it's clearly false and quite pitiable.
I don't suggest that the US population is as badly off as those in other countries such as Myanmar (formerly Burma), but they are certainly deluded about the extent of their own freedom. Having a President brought to power by elections rigged by widespread disenfranchisement is not a good basis for freedom and democracy. Being prepared to overlook this obscenely anti-democratic act and legitimise his second term simply underlines the degree to which the population has been subjugated, Government of the people, by the corrupt for the wealthy sums it up.
Once Bush has swung the balance of power on the Supreme Court, the true extent of the erosion of US freedom will soon become clear to all.
if you are speaking of iraq, i would like to point out that it's people that are shooting at our army troops that get killed. other than that, who have we been killing?
Oh come on! You must be a Fox viewer. The more objective media has been reporting thousands of Iraqi civilians dying directly at tbe hands of the US. A 1000 pound bomb, even if it's accurately guided by laser, causes massive destruction to the surrounding area, guaranteeing large numbers of "accidental" deaths of civilians. This does not include the many thousands that have died, as a direct result of the US foreign policy, at the hands of the suicide bombers that (rightly) consider the US/UK occupation illegal.
In case you haven't worked it out, the US and UK illegally declared war on Iraq. The UN declaration cited as justification definitely did not authorise the use of force. Bush tried desperately to get a resolution that would grant automatic authorisation, but he couldn't get it.
Just for the record, I'm no Saddam apologist. I was campaigning against him, the Baath Party and the governments that supported them back in 1982 when the US was busy selling him arms (including chemical weapons).
No. Is trivial.
You clearly have little understanding of modern telecomm networks. It is now much easier to tap a phone than it used to be. The authorities don't even need to leave the office, let alone gain entry to your home. All it takes now is a (computer activated) switch to be thrown at the exchange. This may require the cooperation of the exchange operator, but this is a beaurocratic restriction, not a technical one.
Incidentally, the same modern network technology also means that tracing calls is now virtually instant, much to the chagrin of lazy Hollywood scriptwriters.
Merry Christmas
Wow! That blog explains so much of the grief that Word has caused me over the years - e.g. numbered list have never worked from day 1, pasting from one doc to another frequently trashes the formatting (often irreparably), page numbering is often screwed and updating contents pages should only be done with plenty of Valium at hand.
It also explains why my colleagues can't edit a shared document if I've copied text from it, and why my filesystem is full of temporary files.
The problem is, as I've suspected for a long time, the fundamental "design". Complexity is built into the codebase - not, as the article suggests, because of the large number of functions available (like most users, I only use a tiny subset), but by the underlying data format virtually guaranteeing undesired interactions.
This brings us back to the headline topic. Get the document data structure right, and the code almost writes itself. Get it wrong, and you end up with kludge upon kludge.
From what I've seen (not much I must confess), the MS proposed alternative standard shows little respect for the writers' notion of the document structure, but virtually ensures your document will end up in pieces, stuck together into a structured file. In contrast, the OOo format inherently expresses the writers' structure.
Summary: this is a wheel invented by Microsoft. It's a square with the corners rounded off and curved bits added onto each edge to smooth out the bumps. It'll fall apart as soon as it's placed under stress. They'll fix it by adding more and more bracing so that it'll eventually work, but it'll never be pretty.