An imperial minute is precisely 144 imperial seconds; this allows the minute to be conveniently subdivided into 12 periods of 12 seconds each. However, the US second, confusingly called the British second by Americans, is slightly longer than the standard imperial second; this is because the US is nearer the equator than the UK, and so the spin of the Earth reduces the apparent strength of the gravitational field. This marginally slowed pendulum clocks in the days before modern timekeeping, and led to the divergence in units we see here.
It's only as a result of this that people consider imperial time to be a clumsy and inconvenient system.
After Patent Apocalypse sends the American software industry back to year zero.
It's only a matter of time before a major corporation with a massive patent portfolio starts failing, and looks like going out of business. Doesn't really matter who. But they'll have an option open: give up producing software and pursue patent litigation. Become SCO writ large.
What happens to the industry in the USA when that happens? What if it goes further - what if there's a full-scale patent war between the big players?
Answer: total havoc. Everything infringes on someone's patent. When the entire industry in the USA grinds to a halt, but all is well in Europe, that's when the US will repent.
Ah, text adventures... I got into them years ago when my PC's monitor started slowly getting worse and worse contrast, to the extent that most games were unplayable because they were too dark, and I couldn't afford a new screen. Text, though: not a problem.
I still have my home-made maps of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike, some of which are even accurate. And my blood pressure has never quite recovered from Bureaucracy...
I remember when I first encountered the Babel Fish Puzzle. Some people screamed bloody murder; I got to laughing. Being denied the fish by yet another absurd circumstance was fine comedy. The line in the hints file 'At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry' just added to the humour.
That said, never mind Infocom. The greatest text adventure of all time has to be Planescape: Torment. The graphics were really just a pretty background in that game...
Actually, part of Ireland (the island) and of Ireland (the country) are in the UK. None of Ireland (the republic) is in the UK.
Ireland is still one country, even though divided between two regimes, just as Germany was one country even when it came in East and West flavours...
Irish reunification would be... well, really nice. Unfortunately, every fuckwit with a rifle and bag of Semtex only manages to move that day further and further away.
The search function works in Ireland, as long as you're only passing through. You can plot a route from a mainland city to Belfast, no problem, and if appropriate you'll get a boat to Dublin and a neatly planned route through the Republic... but if your destination happens to be Dublin, you're out of luck.
How long before asking for directions between locations in different countries, such as your house in the UK and a hotel in the US, and google gives you details of flights between the nearest appropriate airports?
I played with this a bit. Plan a route from, say, Bristol to Belfast, and Google will include the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. So, my guess: not very long at all.
Bugger me. Well, that's the end of the great British pub quiz, then...
I think we have to just accept it now. Google is on course to evolve into an Overmind and rule the world. Suddenly I've got an information source in my pocket that makes the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy look feeble...
Cool. I'm going to Ireland this summer. I'll be in Westport, on the Atlantic coast, and last time I was there there was this really great pub... let's see if it can be found.
tactactac... Pubs in Westport...
Ah, lots! But all in New York... Is it a bad idea to attempt to swim the Atlantic after a hard night on the Guinness?
How would have using non-root privileges prevented you to do the mistake, without preventing you to do the task at all?
Not the point. We're all competent geeks who would never run as root unless we had good reason to do so and yet we've all still got horror stories to tell about the rm that went wrong.
If we ran as root the whole time there'd be a whole lot more stories like that. People would wipe out their systems when they meant to back up their mp3 collection. Worse, if Joe Schmo ran as root the whole time... well, look at the Windows world for just some of the horrors we can expect.
Or is this more a case of "it will last my lifetime, and the next generation be damned"?
(from memory, sorry if I'm a little off)
"Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? Let us reach out and take what is ours, eat and drink our fill."
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
the blurring of the vastness of space overpowers the tiny points of light from stars in a monochrome camera
Not quite... Actually, it's the glare of the lunar landscape. The terrain is so bright that it completely drowns out the stars. If you stood on the Moon and pointed the camera at the sky, with no land in the frame, you could photograph stars, but the astronauts were more interested in photographing the Moon and themselves on it - something new - rather than the same stars we see every night from Earth.
Well... she was originally famous, or rather, notorious, as a really awful plastic pop star.
That didn't last; she proceeded to marry Chris Evans, an annoying radio DJ once enormously popular as a TV presenter but by that stage in deep decline - oh, and far older than her, so much so that it was really a bit creepy. They were a popular couple in the sort of paper that likes celebrity news. Of course it didn't last.
However, from what I've seen of her acting she hasn't been too bad...
I'd definitely go with a largely American cast for this film.
Consider: much of the comedy derives from Arthur Dent's culture shock. Here he is, Englishness personified, tea drinker, cricket fan, works in local radio, lives in a country cottage up the road from the Horse and Groom pub...
Suddenly he finds himself thrown into a completely different culture, one which will happily wipe out entire civilisations in order to build bypasses, in which people give up on discovering fundamental truths and simply make something up that would sound good when they appear on chat shows, in which psychotherapy is such a profitable business that they manipulate politicians, in which the end of the Universe is an opportunity for a rather tacky catering venture, a culture so materialistic that the Cathedral of Chalesm was retrospectively eliminated from history to build an ion refinery, so shallow that the greatest poet of history became a chat show celebrity and never actually got around to writing any poems... A culture in which the only things of any value whatever are profit and celebrity.
Damn it, these people are Americans, every one of them! Or at least an exaggerated English view of Americans, just as Arthur himself is an exaggeratedly English Englishman. To stay faithful to the spirit of the Guide mythos, they should not only be American, but the very loudest, brashest, most annoying Americans that can be found!
Tim Curry, dressed as he was in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (and I'd already posted that idea in response to a previous story). Actually, he'd probably be a bit old for that now.
Drop the transvestism, but keep the camp eccentricity, and Tim Curry would make a terrific Doctor. The Doctor needn't be a young man; the first three were all older gentlemen, and Tom Baker wasn't exactly young.
I generally concur. Using oggenc at default quality, I can't hear the difference. Not on headphones from my portable player (iHP-140) and not on PC speakers.
This is probably because I've damaged my hearing already. The way I carry on I'll be deaf by 40;-)
There's also a new type of speed camera, which recognises your numberplate as you pass fixed locations on motorways, and issues a speeding ticket if your average speed between two such points exceeds the limit. (Which is fair, but worrying for the privacy implications.)
If they started using those on a large scale, then everyone would get ticketed. Except when the motorway is pretty heavily congested, the typical speed is eighty-ish and the people on the right hand lane are doing a hundred. Not that I'd know, never having exceeded 70 and scarcely ever got out of the left lane, honestly officer...
In such circumstances, you'd have to raise the speed limit to something realistic. Maybe 95 for motorways; 100 is excessive, I admit, fun though it is:-)
He predicted that another large earthquake (around 8 richter) would hit indonesia before the end of March. Sure enough, it just happened. It could've been a well-informed or lucky guess. I tend to think he genuinely remote viewed the event however.
I tend to think he got it the same way as John McCloskey of the University of Ulster.
Reported on in the New Scientist a few weeks ago, and based on similarities with the plate tectonics of other major earthquakes, he warned that a quake of ~8.5 might hit Indonesia within a few months of Boxing Day.
Of course, your man might have been remote viewing. But, like most psychics, if that's so then he did it the hard way...
Slashdot Mirror
An imperial minute is precisely 144 imperial seconds; this allows the minute to be conveniently subdivided into 12 periods of 12 seconds each. However, the US second, confusingly called the British second by Americans, is slightly longer than the standard imperial second; this is because the US is nearer the equator than the UK, and so the spin of the Earth reduces the apparent strength of the gravitational field. This marginally slowed pendulum clocks in the days before modern timekeeping, and led to the divergence in units we see here.
It's only as a result of this that people consider imperial time to be a clumsy and inconvenient system.
After Patent Apocalypse sends the American software industry back to year zero.
It's only a matter of time before a major corporation with a massive patent portfolio starts failing, and looks like going out of business. Doesn't really matter who. But they'll have an option open: give up producing software and pursue patent litigation. Become SCO writ large.
What happens to the industry in the USA when that happens? What if it goes further - what if there's a full-scale patent war between the big players?
Answer: total havoc. Everything infringes on someone's patent. When the entire industry in the USA grinds to a halt, but all is well in Europe, that's when the US will repent.
I still have my home-made maps of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike, some of which are even accurate. And my blood pressure has never quite recovered from Bureaucracy...
I remember when I first encountered the Babel Fish Puzzle. Some people screamed bloody murder; I got to laughing. Being denied the fish by yet another absurd circumstance was fine comedy. The line in the hints file 'At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry' just added to the humour.
That said, never mind Infocom. The greatest text adventure of all time has to be Planescape: Torment. The graphics were really just a pretty background in that game...
Ireland is still one country, even though divided between two regimes, just as Germany was one country even when it came in East and West flavours...
Irish reunification would be... well, really nice. Unfortunately, every fuckwit with a rifle and bag of Semtex only manages to move that day further and further away.
The search function works in Ireland, as long as you're only passing through. You can plot a route from a mainland city to Belfast, no problem, and if appropriate you'll get a boat to Dublin and a neatly planned route through the Republic... but if your destination happens to be Dublin, you're out of luck.
I played with this a bit. Plan a route from, say, Bristol to Belfast, and Google will include the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. So, my guess: not very long at all.
Bugger me. Well, that's the end of the great British pub quiz, then... I think we have to just accept it now. Google is on course to evolve into an Overmind and rule the world. Suddenly I've got an information source in my pocket that makes the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy look feeble...
tactactac... Pubs in Westport...
Ah, lots! But all in New York... Is it a bad idea to attempt to swim the Atlantic after a hard night on the Guinness?
I think you'll find it's spelled 'Vanitas'...
Not the point. We're all competent geeks who would never run as root unless we had good reason to do so and yet we've all still got horror stories to tell about the rm that went wrong.
If we ran as root the whole time there'd be a whole lot more stories like that. People would wipe out their systems when they meant to back up their mp3 collection. Worse, if Joe Schmo ran as root the whole time... well, look at the Windows world for just some of the horrors we can expect.
Homeland Security will have a fit!
(from memory, sorry if I'm a little off)
"Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? Let us reach out and take what is ours, eat and drink our fill."
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
Since when was this a problem for Xeelee?
Homeland Security will have a fit!
I think most people who play FreeCiv dig out their old Civ2 CD and import the graphics from that. Not quite 1989... more like 1994 :-)
Not quite... Actually, it's the glare of the lunar landscape. The terrain is so bright that it completely drowns out the stars. If you stood on the Moon and pointed the camera at the sky, with no land in the frame, you could photograph stars, but the astronauts were more interested in photographing the Moon and themselves on it - something new - rather than the same stars we see every night from Earth.
I bet when they patent it it'll be broad enough that both the above are covered.
Thank you for making a simple meal very happy.
That didn't last; she proceeded to marry Chris Evans, an annoying radio DJ once enormously popular as a TV presenter but by that stage in deep decline - oh, and far older than her, so much so that it was really a bit creepy. They were a popular couple in the sort of paper that likes celebrity news. Of course it didn't last.
However, from what I've seen of her acting she hasn't been too bad...
Consider: much of the comedy derives from Arthur Dent's culture shock. Here he is, Englishness personified, tea drinker, cricket fan, works in local radio, lives in a country cottage up the road from the Horse and Groom pub...
Suddenly he finds himself thrown into a completely different culture, one which will happily wipe out entire civilisations in order to build bypasses, in which people give up on discovering fundamental truths and simply make something up that would sound good when they appear on chat shows, in which psychotherapy is such a profitable business that they manipulate politicians, in which the end of the Universe is an opportunity for a rather tacky catering venture, a culture so materialistic that the Cathedral of Chalesm was retrospectively eliminated from history to build an ion refinery, so shallow that the greatest poet of history became a chat show celebrity and never actually got around to writing any poems... A culture in which the only things of any value whatever are profit and celebrity.
Damn it, these people are Americans, every one of them! Or at least an exaggerated English view of Americans, just as Arthur himself is an exaggeratedly English Englishman. To stay faithful to the spirit of the Guide mythos, they should not only be American, but the very loudest, brashest, most annoying Americans that can be found!
Drop the transvestism, but keep the camp eccentricity, and Tim Curry would make a terrific Doctor. The Doctor needn't be a young man; the first three were all older gentlemen, and Tom Baker wasn't exactly young.
This is probably because I've damaged my hearing already. The way I carry on I'll be deaf by 40 ;-)
Sounds more like Windows XP to me.
If they started using those on a large scale, then everyone would get ticketed. Except when the motorway is pretty heavily congested, the typical speed is eighty-ish and the people on the right hand lane are doing a hundred. Not that I'd know, never having exceeded 70 and scarcely ever got out of the left lane, honestly officer...
In such circumstances, you'd have to raise the speed limit to something realistic. Maybe 95 for motorways; 100 is excessive, I admit, fun though it is :-)
I tend to think he got it the same way as John McCloskey of the University of Ulster.
Reported on in the New Scientist a few weeks ago, and based on similarities with the plate tectonics of other major earthquakes, he warned that a quake of ~8.5 might hit Indonesia within a few months of Boxing Day.
Of course, your man might have been remote viewing. But, like most psychics, if that's so then he did it the hard way...