I love this! You free up information, allow the unwashed masses access to it, and people find hidden treasure. Think how much we'd never know if all this was DRMed, locked and restricted!
If you lot had DRM'd all this stuff up, that treasure would have been ours. See you in court.
Pounds, miles, hogsheads etc are not "English" units. Please call them by their correct name "Imperial Units". This is not a joke name, it is what I was taught to call them when I was a child.
There's a difference in some cases. For instance, the English pint, as used by Americans, is significantly smaller than the Imperial pint, as used by the English. To be fair, if you had to drink their beer, would YOU want a larger glass?
And then there are at least three different definitions of the mile to contend with...
Interesting... which bank was this? I'm pretty sure that with mine (NatWest, UK) if my card is stolen or cloned or otherwise fraudulently used, the bank will eat any losses over £50, provided that I haven't been bloody stupid (e.g. written the PIN number on the card, or something like that...)
My approach would be to take the money from the fines - which is a heck of a lot - and throw it to the best grad students in the East to work on open source projects. Sponsor comp.sci. PhDs. With all the money MS are going to have to cough up over this one, and with the low cost of living in eastern Europe, you could sponsor a lot of hackers for several years.
They get their PhD, the relatively impoverished Eastern nations get the nucleus of an IT industry, and sourceforge winds up full of incredibly useful free software derived from projects by obscure grad students in some European country you've never heard of.
Imagine an army of Linuses. All paid for by MS. Sweet, sweet karma, eh?
You don't like the terms? Stop paying them and go somewhere else. That's your right and your choice. They can be as discriminatory as they want and while it may piss some people off, that's their perogative.
Yeah! Right on! And the same goes for Alabama bus services, right? If you don't like the seating arrangements, then go take a cab!
True Faggot? That's a new one on me. I've seen chaotic good, awful evil, True Neutral... is True Faggot something unique to WoW?
Everyone knows what dark elves are like anyway. Filthy sods. Hell, elves are all a bit morally questionable. I mean, you never see a half-dwarf. Or a half-hobbit. Unless they're called Quarterlings or something.
Besides, it should come as no great shock that Microsoft do not tolerate dual booting systems anyway - look at how easily Windows wipes over the boot block when you reinstall it on a PC where you're booting Linux also.
Does Windows still do that? I certainly remember much annoyance when Win98 wiped out lilo, but when I upgraded that to Win2K it didn't touch anything. No damage. Up comes the bootloader, pick 'windows', up it comes no problem...
Do the NT versions behave better in dual-boot configurations, or was I just incredibly weirdly lucky?
Also, it's not cool anymore for Americans to donate money to terrorists/freedom fighters so the IRA doesn't have as much cash.
I recall back in 2001, watching the shit hit the fan live on worldwide TV, and actually making this comment. 'Well, on the bright side,' said I, 'that's the IRA well and truly fucked. How are they going to get the Yanks to pay for terrorism now?'
By then of course it was something like four years since the Good Friday Agreement, but it was good to know that there was now no way they could possibly go back to their old ways. There simply wouldn't be the cash for it.
It should be noted that Enceladus is a moon of the planet Saturn. Yeah, I know a *true geek* such as typically is found on/. will know this without looking it up, but for those afraid to ask...
A true geek might not be expected to know all the moons of the Solar System - I confess I would have had only a 50% chance of getting Enceladus right - but he would certainly be expected to know that the Cassini spacecraft is in orbit around Saturn. Has been for about five years, IIRC. Thus we are unlikely to hear reports of major discoveries made by Cassini about moons of Jupiter, or perhaps of Neptune.
The British and Irish were at war, but the Irish couldn't fight against a nuclear power with conventional means.
We were never at war with Ireland. That's absurd; if that had been the case then Dublin could have been flattened within hours. The Irish government never had anything to do with the (current) IRA; in fact, London and Dublin collaborated on intelligence and enforcement for years.
I don't actually recall either government using the rhetoric of war about the whole business, either. That was always the IRA's line. Wherever possible, IRA men (and for that matter Unionist paramilitaries) were treated as common criminals - as the murderers they were, not as soldiers. This principle has since been abandoned - as part of the peace process, we've had something of an amnesty and let a lot of IRA prisoners go, but it's definitely worth it. We pretend Sinn Fein are a legitimate political party entirely not connected with the IRA (and Gerry Adams was never on the Army Council, oh no...) and we pretend the IRA prisoners are soldiers and therefore to be released once a peace deal is made.
The peace deal seems to have worked by buying off key figures with promises of power, and sidelining hardliners. We've corrupted the IRA leadership. They're too comfortable now, in their influential political positions. Too respectable. Can't be associated with semi-literate hardmen any more, oh no...
Worse still these messages are encrypted...talk of a cold winter might mean the delivery of some important ingredients for some project.
But this sort of thing has been going on for centuries. And the methods by which we establish who is a conspirator and who is not are just as accurate.
"It is first agreed and settled among them, what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then, effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. These papers are delivered to a set of artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters: for instance, they can discover a close stool, to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber pot, a committee of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running sore, the administration.
"When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Thus N, shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; L, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, 'Our brother Tom has just got the piles,' a skilful decipherer would discover, that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following words, 'Resist--, a plot is brought home--The tour.'"
I do a lot of quick-hack Access / VBA stuff at work. Usually I start by designing the tables, relationships, queries, reports etc, and then put together a GUI afterwards. I prefer to keep as much code as possible in separate modules rather than in the form itself - mainly because I forget the stuff's there otherwise, and you wind up with fossil code left behind from long-since deleted controls - but the grandparent sounds like he's doing similar things.
Apart from its inherent inadequacies compared to 'real' databases, what's the big disaster area about Access? What do people do horribly wrong, and what's the wonderfully better approach?
This is energy that has been stored in the ground and built up over millenia, and it is being released into our atmosphere over decades - you think that's not heating our environment?
Actually, that energy was stored for the entire history of the Earth, but it was built up in a matter of seconds by the enormous neutron flux in a supernova. We're releasing the energy over a much larger timescale than it was built up over... in reactors, at least.
Have you really thought this through? You want to create superintelligent laboratory mice whose genes have been spliced? If you make them too smart, who knows what they'll attempt in order to prove their mousey worth?
Oh, OK, fine... so, what are we going to do tonight, then?
Are humans any nicer or friendlier than they were 5,000 years ago? Or has that held constant?
My guess would be that we're getting nastier. I meet somebody, I have to decide whether to be nice or nasty. My decision will be governed by whether I'm ever likely to meet him again. If I know I'll never see the guy again, I'll be nasty. If I know I'll be seeing him on a daily basis for years, I'll be nice.
5,000 years ago we lived in far smaller communities. Most people you met you'd be likely to meet again. So your assumption will be 'be nice' and that may well become a genetic predisposition over time. Nowadays, we live in huge communities of millions. I meet a stranger and I can have good odds that I'll never see him again. So I may as well be nasty...
No, as we discover more about genetic diversity we learn which genes have greater tendencies in certain ethnic groups.
But what's in the DNA doesn't correlate particularly well with what we have culturally labelled 'races'. The genetic difference between a European, an Arab, an Indian, a Chinaman, an aboriginal, and a native American isn't all that much, compared to the genetic difference between African tribe A and African tribe B. And yet we consider David Smith and Tanaka Jiro to be of different 'races', while two Africans of far greater genetic diversity from each other we lump together as 'black'.
It's obvious that we, as a species, should ever so slightly more alcohol-resistant, because drunk driving kills a lot of young people before they can reproduce.
Probably wouldn't help. Alcohol resistance, if you're drinking with intent to get drunk, just means you drink more, which costs you more economically. There's an advantage to this insofar as being able to drink like that might be considered a mating display, but the disadvantages of spending so much on drink are obvious. And you won't be any safer driving afterwards.
Most Europeans are very alcohol resistant already, thanks to centuries of drinking ale instead of water because it was less likely to contain a horrible infection. Look at what alcohol did to the Americans once the Europeans landed to see the extent of that bit of evolution.
What ever happened to the theory of root races and our religious traditions? Adam and Eve?
The summary text asks, perhaps rhetorically, "What made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?" I think it's a hangover from obsolete religious thinking - the great chain of being, the lower and higher forms of life, with Man at the pinnacle, made in God's own image, the crowning achievement of Creation.
Most Christians seem to have managed to accept evolution as a historical fact, but still wish to give Man special status. Evolution is how God created us, eh? But that still makes us the aim and end purpose of evolution, the special species, the one beloved of God and made in his image. No wonder the idea is widespread that evolution has somehow stopped, or finished, having now produced us.
Of course evolution hasn't finished; we're still evolving, along with everything else that's alive. But that means that in time we'll be gone, perhaps replaced by one or more descendant species, perhaps merely extinct and forgotten save for a few relics in deep space and a thin layer of mildly radioactive isotopes to be discovered by future geologists. It means that there's nothing special about us, we're just a blink of an eye in the Earth's history... Not something most people are too happy to believe.
What is the use of a blog, period? Does anybody actually read these damn things?
I gather there's a guy by the name of CmdrTaco whose blog has a pretty impressive readership. Always some interesting reader commentary following every article, too... I'd link to it, but I forget the url.
You trail in political understanding far behind your European brothers who went through that fascist nightmare of out of control state power in World War II
Don't forget that many Europeans have much more recent memories of out-of-control totalitarianism than that. Several of the EU member states were part of the Soviet bloc. Spain was a Fascist dictatorship until the 1970s - Hitler and Mussolini were removed, but Franco was left in place because he never made a nuisance of himself. I believe Portugal underwent something similar, and Greece was run by a military junta until not so long ago.
And the Americans wonder why we're beginning to get nervous about the way they've been acting. I recall a joke from Not the Nine O'Clock News years ago, suggesting that it was because they intended to make up for having been late for the last two world wars by being bloody punctual this time...
Humiliation of having the president tried at the ICC for war crimes and hung.
Hanged. But AFAIK the ICC doesn't impose the death penalty. And, unfortunately, the US never signed up to the treaties that would be necessary for Americans to be tried, so Bush has immunity from prosecution.
Hey, that chart was levelling off. A classic S-shaped curve, exponential growth hitting limits and slowing to a new equilibrium. I'd guess that in mid-2000 things were looking pretty good. Then in 2001 it's up again, and every year since then it's gone up, and up, and up some more.
What the hell went wrong in late 2000, guys? What changed?
Slashdot Mirror
If you lot had DRM'd all this stuff up, that treasure would have been ours. See you in court.
-- The Dentist
There's a difference in some cases. For instance, the English pint, as used by Americans, is significantly smaller than the Imperial pint, as used by the English. To be fair, if you had to drink their beer, would YOU want a larger glass?
And then there are at least three different definitions of the mile to contend with...
Interesting... which bank was this? I'm pretty sure that with mine (NatWest, UK) if my card is stolen or cloned or otherwise fraudulently used, the bank will eat any losses over £50, provided that I haven't been bloody stupid (e.g. written the PIN number on the card, or something like that...)
They get their PhD, the relatively impoverished Eastern nations get the nucleus of an IT industry, and sourceforge winds up full of incredibly useful free software derived from projects by obscure grad students in some European country you've never heard of.
Imagine an army of Linuses. All paid for by MS. Sweet, sweet karma, eh?
Yeah! Right on! And the same goes for Alabama bus services, right? If you don't like the seating arrangements, then go take a cab!
Fuckwit.
True Faggot? That's a new one on me. I've seen chaotic good, awful evil, True Neutral... is True Faggot something unique to WoW?
Everyone knows what dark elves are like anyway. Filthy sods. Hell, elves are all a bit morally questionable. I mean, you never see a half-dwarf. Or a half-hobbit. Unless they're called Quarterlings or something.
Does Windows still do that? I certainly remember much annoyance when Win98 wiped out lilo, but when I upgraded that to Win2K it didn't touch anything. No damage. Up comes the bootloader, pick 'windows', up it comes no problem...
Do the NT versions behave better in dual-boot configurations, or was I just incredibly weirdly lucky?
I recall back in 2001, watching the shit hit the fan live on worldwide TV, and actually making this comment. 'Well, on the bright side,' said I, 'that's the IRA well and truly fucked. How are they going to get the Yanks to pay for terrorism now?'
By then of course it was something like four years since the Good Friday Agreement, but it was good to know that there was now no way they could possibly go back to their old ways. There simply wouldn't be the cash for it.
A true geek might not be expected to know all the moons of the Solar System - I confess I would have had only a 50% chance of getting Enceladus right - but he would certainly be expected to know that the Cassini spacecraft is in orbit around Saturn. Has been for about five years, IIRC. Thus we are unlikely to hear reports of major discoveries made by Cassini about moons of Jupiter, or perhaps of Neptune.
* fires up a few favourite porno bookmarks *
Er, yes. Yes, definitely. They can lick my balls any time they like.
n mln = (10^-3) * ln(n). It's short for 'milli-log-natural'.
He-e-ey, we don't want to fight no more! Hey-e-e-e-ey, we don't want to fight no more!
We were never at war with Ireland. That's absurd; if that had been the case then Dublin could have been flattened within hours. The Irish government never had anything to do with the (current) IRA; in fact, London and Dublin collaborated on intelligence and enforcement for years.
I don't actually recall either government using the rhetoric of war about the whole business, either. That was always the IRA's line. Wherever possible, IRA men (and for that matter Unionist paramilitaries) were treated as common criminals - as the murderers they were, not as soldiers. This principle has since been abandoned - as part of the peace process, we've had something of an amnesty and let a lot of IRA prisoners go, but it's definitely worth it. We pretend Sinn Fein are a legitimate political party entirely not connected with the IRA (and Gerry Adams was never on the Army Council, oh no...) and we pretend the IRA prisoners are soldiers and therefore to be released once a peace deal is made.
The peace deal seems to have worked by buying off key figures with promises of power, and sidelining hardliners. We've corrupted the IRA leadership. They're too comfortable now, in their influential political positions. Too respectable. Can't be associated with semi-literate hardmen any more, oh no...
But this sort of thing has been going on for centuries. And the methods by which we establish who is a conspirator and who is not are just as accurate.
"It is first agreed and settled among them, what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then, effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. These papers are delivered to a set of artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters: for instance, they can discover a close stool, to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber pot, a committee of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running sore, the administration.
"When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Thus N, shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; L, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, 'Our brother Tom has just got the piles,' a skilful decipherer would discover, that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following words, 'Resist--, a plot is brought home--The tour.'"
-- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Apart from its inherent inadequacies compared to 'real' databases, what's the big disaster area about Access? What do people do horribly wrong, and what's the wonderfully better approach?
Actually, that energy was stored for the entire history of the Earth, but it was built up in a matter of seconds by the enormous neutron flux in a supernova. We're releasing the energy over a much larger timescale than it was built up over... in reactors, at least.
Have you really thought this through? You want to create superintelligent laboratory mice whose genes have been spliced? If you make them too smart, who knows what they'll attempt in order to prove their mousey worth?
Oh, OK, fine... so, what are we going to do tonight, then?
My guess would be that we're getting nastier. I meet somebody, I have to decide whether to be nice or nasty. My decision will be governed by whether I'm ever likely to meet him again. If I know I'll never see the guy again, I'll be nasty. If I know I'll be seeing him on a daily basis for years, I'll be nice.
5,000 years ago we lived in far smaller communities. Most people you met you'd be likely to meet again. So your assumption will be 'be nice' and that may well become a genetic predisposition over time. Nowadays, we live in huge communities of millions. I meet a stranger and I can have good odds that I'll never see him again. So I may as well be nasty...
But what's in the DNA doesn't correlate particularly well with what we have culturally labelled 'races'. The genetic difference between a European, an Arab, an Indian, a Chinaman, an aboriginal, and a native American isn't all that much, compared to the genetic difference between African tribe A and African tribe B. And yet we consider David Smith and Tanaka Jiro to be of different 'races', while two Africans of far greater genetic diversity from each other we lump together as 'black'.
Probably wouldn't help. Alcohol resistance, if you're drinking with intent to get drunk, just means you drink more, which costs you more economically. There's an advantage to this insofar as being able to drink like that might be considered a mating display, but the disadvantages of spending so much on drink are obvious. And you won't be any safer driving afterwards.
Most Europeans are very alcohol resistant already, thanks to centuries of drinking ale instead of water because it was less likely to contain a horrible infection. Look at what alcohol did to the Americans once the Europeans landed to see the extent of that bit of evolution.
The summary text asks, perhaps rhetorically, "What made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?" I think it's a hangover from obsolete religious thinking - the great chain of being, the lower and higher forms of life, with Man at the pinnacle, made in God's own image, the crowning achievement of Creation.
Most Christians seem to have managed to accept evolution as a historical fact, but still wish to give Man special status. Evolution is how God created us, eh? But that still makes us the aim and end purpose of evolution, the special species, the one beloved of God and made in his image. No wonder the idea is widespread that evolution has somehow stopped, or finished, having now produced us.
Of course evolution hasn't finished; we're still evolving, along with everything else that's alive. But that means that in time we'll be gone, perhaps replaced by one or more descendant species, perhaps merely extinct and forgotten save for a few relics in deep space and a thin layer of mildly radioactive isotopes to be discovered by future geologists. It means that there's nothing special about us, we're just a blink of an eye in the Earth's history... Not something most people are too happy to believe.
I gather there's a guy by the name of CmdrTaco whose blog has a pretty impressive readership. Always some interesting reader commentary following every article, too... I'd link to it, but I forget the url.
Don't forget that many Europeans have much more recent memories of out-of-control totalitarianism than that. Several of the EU member states were part of the Soviet bloc. Spain was a Fascist dictatorship until the 1970s - Hitler and Mussolini were removed, but Franco was left in place because he never made a nuisance of himself. I believe Portugal underwent something similar, and Greece was run by a military junta until not so long ago.
And the Americans wonder why we're beginning to get nervous about the way they've been acting. I recall a joke from Not the Nine O'Clock News years ago, suggesting that it was because they intended to make up for having been late for the last two world wars by being bloody punctual this time...
Hanged. But AFAIK the ICC doesn't impose the death penalty. And, unfortunately, the US never signed up to the treaties that would be necessary for Americans to be tried, so Bush has immunity from prosecution.
Hey, that chart was levelling off. A classic S-shaped curve, exponential growth hitting limits and slowing to a new equilibrium. I'd guess that in mid-2000 things were looking pretty good. Then in 2001 it's up again, and every year since then it's gone up, and up, and up some more.
What the hell went wrong in late 2000, guys? What changed?