I should have added to my list of things we can't fix yet "adequate space collision defense shield". We could surely do that without sending humans into space.
But I don't agree with you about colonies. There is no particular reason why we more than any other lifeform especially deserves to survive as a species. However, the idea that a small number of us might preserve our genes by going to some other rock in case the Earth gets it seems to me like pure science fiction. The human race isn't just a collection of genes. It's civil societies and the artefacts they create, including ideas. Surely it's worth putting more effort into protecting those? A few people living in an artificial environment on Mars at huge expense is no substitute for New York, or Venice, or the English Lakes, or any of the other threatened places of the Earth. (FI, I'm thinking of the risk of destruction of NY by tsunami, not terrorism).
As for the other poster's comment that Nasa is 0.7% of federal budget, what proportion of R&D is it? In other words, what percentage of the best brains does it occupy on manned spaceflight? I'm suggesting scientific and engineering skills be focussed on the real problems.
By going back to older technology. Both H G Well and Jules Verne proposed methods of space exploration, one of which simply involved firing astronauts out of a giant cannon, and the other merely required the discovery of a simple anti-gravity material. Clearly all that is needed is a really strong cup of tea, a few dedicated scientists who don't get invited to parties, and NASA can stop messing around with those expensive and unreliable rockets.
And, at the very least, we can stop wasting taxpayers'money on my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours space programs while the research is going on. Come on folks, we can't even organise ourselves on Earth to prevent avoidable damage from hurricanes and earthquakes, we can't agree on whether we are causing climate change by producing greenhouse gases, we are faced with an influenza pandemic that no-one really knows how to deal with, and we still have R&D money to spend on sending people to the moon and Mars?
Unfortunately, most people won't be able to pronounce them. Or spell them consistently, since there are different ways of transliterating Hebrew into the Latin alphabet. (I was taught the system that starts Alev).
However, if we have THAT many tropical storms in a year, we will have more to worry about than nomenclature.
For information, I have experience working for technology companies in the UK, the US, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and India. Oh, and I don't post as an AC. Why do you need to? I'm hardly likely to come and bite you.
Of them all, the UK is the one where, in my experience, the biggest failures either to capitalise on R&D or to fund projects adequately have taken place. I firmly believe that this is because the UK is still, after so many years, run by the aristocracy and its relatives. (For information, the current Prime Minister, despite pretences to the contrary, comes from a well-off Scots family and went to the top Scots private school: the most likely next leader of the Opposition is the son of an aristocrat and went to Eton. Neither of them would recognise a law of physics if it came and bit them in the testicles.) As a result, British scientists mostly work abroad, the British defense industry is either French-owned or part of a company which is heavily invested in the US (BAE Systems), the Internet infrastructure is held back by the near-monopoly of the old style telecoms provider BT, and any space research is done on an absolute shoestring (Beagle 2.) It's therefore laughable to suggest that the UK is likely to send astronauts anywhere soon.
Much of the British aristocracy is where it is because of large scale land theft - in India, the West Indies, and Africa. (Some people would add the US, Canada and Australia to that list...). Hence my unkind suggestion about the only thing that would get them interested in space programs.
On the other hand the UK is very good at biotechnology. Given the challenges facing the world, that's where I would invest UK PLC's R&D money.
Fortunately, the size of the UK economy and its loss of virtually all its technological leadership abroad (except in biosciences) means there is little risk of a party of British astronauts landing anywhere outside Earth and accidentally carrying out a military takeover (see the history of the British Empire, from Clive on.)
In fact, with the success rate to date, from Blue Streak to Beagle 2, the chance of a British astronaut getting out of the atmosphere in one piece is so low that anybody volunteering for a space program needs a quick trip to a secure mental health unit instead.
There are downsides to working for British Intelligence and leaving. A friend did leave after realising he would never be promoted beyond a certain low level because he had not been to public (i.e. private, this is UK-speak) school. Several years later, having become a US citizen, he was being interviewed by a US security organisation as part of being recruited for a sensitive government project
Security person: "We'll have to do background checks on you going back to the UK".
Friend: "That's OK, I have full positive vetting from the British security services."
Security person: Silence then "Shit, that's going to be a problem. All those guys are commie faggots"
In the end he did get clearance. Or he may not have done. People in that sort of business, you never know when they are telling the truth.
As far as I know there is no direct British equivalent. Chapter 11 is a way of potentially avoiding bankruptcy. I know personally of at least one medium sized company that not only emerged from Chapter 11, but then proceeded to steal the market of their (fat, bloated) competitor who hadn't learned financial discipline the hard way. Having a successful path out of Chapter 11 is a big plus on a CEO (or CFO) CV.
The British equivalent is probably "do a runner and start up in a dodgy tax haven like the Isle of Man or Gibraltar". Let's see if anyone bothers to read this, and if so moderates it flamebait.
Anyway, the point is that neither the original post nor the reply appear to be by people who actually understand very much about business, on either side of the Atlantic. And they've been moderated up, presumably by equally ill-informed people.
Having had good experiences to date, all our mobile workers who need number crunching power (which is in fact all of them...) are now getting AMD64 laptops using Turion processors. The bang for buck is very good, the battery life and heat buildup are also good. Mind you, for the moment we will buy Pentium D for developer workstations, because the cache is bigger than it is for the Athlon dual core units. It's a tradeoff based on the kind of work you are doing.
Well, OK, "Hamburger" might be mildly amusing as a synonym for "Berliner" (A hamburger is a rissole in a bun, a Berliner is a cream cake) but actually the dear old Guardian has stolen a massive march on News International. It now has a full color press that produces a larger format than the partial color tabloid presses used by NI. If you look at the newsstands, the G stands out compared to the Times, the Independent and the (grey-looking) Telegraph.
So, far from going against this trend, they are actually ahead of it. They have just raised the stakes in daily print media - and Rupe is now trying to find a suitable site to build his own color press. Which will take at least 18 months of unwelcome competition. Given the innate conservatism of serious newspaper readers, and the realistic rate of adoption of e-paper, the Guardian's press is likely to have an effective life of at least 10 years. That sounds like a good investment decision to me.
Disclaimer - I work for a print consultancy but my views do not necessarily reflect those of the business.
Look for power coalescing around a resource, then acquire the resource and control access to it so they get the power. Which, come to think of it, is just what most of the human race does, given the opportunity. Including the recording industry, Rupert Murdoch, and your friendly neighborhood crack dealer.
Unfortunately, the function of scientists and engineers is to have good ideas, make them work, and then watch the wealth obsessed and power mad take them over. It's a pity really. If we had the ability to organise, we could collectively hold the politicians to ransom - but it's not in our nature to do it, while it is in their nature to exploit.
People criticise fine art and serious musicians for being elitist, but television and the recording industry show what happens when you have a non-elitist entertainment industry. Specifically, you get crap. Lots of it. I'm amazed at the apparently intelligent people who denounce anything that might restrict advertising or business as "communism" when nothing could be more typical of Communist regimes than a constant outpouring of propaganda produced by the rulers and aimed at the mob, with the intention of keeping the mob quiet, obedient, nad ignorant of who pulls their strings.
At one point the Internet looked like providing a fix, at least for the literate, in terms of supplying information. But even there the good stuff is increasingly subject to Gresham's Law - it's being buried under the piles of shit. And now that Rupert Murdoch has suddenly discovered the interthingy, and is moving the centre of his empire to the US, it won't get better any time soon. But cheer up! The Roman Empire ran on panem et circenses; it's just a social cycle and eventually it will collapse. Probably when the barbarian hordes from China invade, steal all the electronic goods, and put the population of the US to work building giant terracotta statues.
I'd question the judgement of anyone who doesn't know that Pentax is a major optical manufacturer, with more experience than even Canon in making small short focal length lenses of the kind required for digital cameras. They do, however, have a short history of making digital cameras and I suspect that this is part of the reliability issue. I can only say that I have one of their small, ruggedised water resistant cameras for marine use and it hasn't broken yet - but that's just anecdotal.
However, the real point I'd like to make is this. By their nature, consumer satisfaction reports tend to be way out of date. This is because the records relate to models that have been around for a while, which in a rapidly moving industry means they may not relate to what is on the shelves at all. A case in point from another industry was Volvo, which at one time enjoyed a totally unwarranted reputation for reliability based on the longevity and reliability of one of its post-war models which shared very few parts with later models. (I know this is true because the girlfriend of a friend had one of the reliable Volvos, and side by side you could easily see it was built to a totally different standard from the later ones. It was wrecked by collision with a truck at 132000 miles, at which point the seats were just getting slightly tatty.)
Nowadays it is indeed possible to predict how long a car will last because so much effort has been put into reliability engineering, and it is relatively easy to see what is under the hood and make an evaluation. But for things like digital cameras this is virtually impossible because the technology is changing fast.It's possible to evaluate things like the robustness of doors, the protection of the lens, scratch resistance of LCD covers etc., but you know nothing about the internal mechanisms or the reliability of the electronics. I suspect that it is not even necessarily true that you get what you pay for because in electronics cost is so volume sensitive.
My conclusion? Don't worry. Choose on the basis of your preferred mix of features, compatibility, optical quality and weight, and be sure you get a reasonable warranty. But my own preference would always be to buy from a manufacturer who really understands small cameras and short focus lenses. That means Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Leitz (acquired Minox), Pentax and Minolta. Fuji's camera superiority is in medium format. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba are electronics manufacturers and dependent on the optical people for lenses and expertise in areas like ergonomics.
So how exactly is a short range magnetic field going to give you brain cancer?
The efficiency is probably not at all bad; the magnetic field is short range and, in the absence of a receiver, the only thing in the magnetic circuit to absorb energy is the hysteresis of the inductor in the transmitter. Which, with modern ferrites, can be pretty small, unless of course they are using a purely air-cored system at the transmitter end, in which case it's tiny.
The huge potential benefit of this system is that it eliminates the second most unreliable part of electronic systems: connectors. Anyone who has worked at the sharp end of electronics knows that connectors suck, big time. Designs proliferate. There are far too many of them and they are far too unstandardised. And connectors designed to be repeatedly made and broken are the worst of the lot. Although the designs have come a long way (the fact that gigabit copper Ethernet connectors work is a small electronic miracle in itself) they are still the worst part of any system, after the batteries. So here we have a system which if widely adopted allows most of the tiny connectors used in portable devices to disappear, and possibly reduces the demands on batteries because people will find recharging easier. Those are big pluses.
Clearly some people very much dislike my posts on this. I wonder why? The reference to China or the opposition to the right of ACs to libel and slander anonymously?
To make you waste some more mod points, let me point out today that in the Guardian today is an article by Helen Steel and Dave Morris (The McLibel Two.) They stood up, on the record, for their beliefs. McDonalds had the most pyrrhic victory imaginable, and European courts decided that the trial was unfair because of the failure of the UK government to enable Steel and Morris to be adequately represented. The UK has much poorer protection of freedom of speech than the US, but the EU seems to have some judges with a clue or two.
Steel and Morris are heroes of dissent. And Proud Citizen has nothing to be proud of.
If the "ordinary joe" has an important piece of information that would discredit a public person, (s)he should go to the respectable Press who will investigate and publish if they and their lawyers think it justified. That's what they are for and why they have special rights. (And why it is wrong that Murdoch should be allowed to control so much of world media, but that's another issue.)
IANAL, but surely the First Amendment protects freedom of speech but not anonymity? First Amendment protection in effect should enable me not to need anonymity in speaking truth to power because my right to do so is protected. The laws of slander and libel can only work if the person slandering or libelling is identifiable.
If a reporter in a newspaper quotes an anonymous source and thereby commits libel, the newspaper can be sued. It seems to me the ISP is on a hiding to nothing here. If journalistic standards are applied, the owner of the website is surely a publisher not a carrier, and can be sued. If the website is the equivalent of a freely available notice board, then anybody pasting a libel on it should not expect to avoid being identified.
The initial posts seem to support the position of "Proud Citizen", but he appears to be a socially dysfunctional individual with a nasty mind. I do not see why he deserves any anonymity at all. If only so the Cahills can assert THEIR first amendment rights and say in public what they think of them.
The point is that in the US freedom of speech is protected and anonymity is not needed, whereas in China (why on Earth do we have anything to do with that scumbag government?) freedom of speech is banned and so everything should be done to protect the anonymity of legitimate critics of government.
The Earth is flat and the sun goes under the earth at night
The Earth is a sphere. OK, Eratosthenes, why don't we fall off?
The sun,moon and stars are perfect bodies made of a substance that does not occur on Earth. That's why they don't fall down. Mind you, the moon is a bit of a problem. Anyway, the Earth is the centre of the universe.
Actually the Earth might go round the Sun rather than vice versa. Watch it, Kupfernigk. The church won't like that. Call it a hypothesis and publish when you're dead.
The Earth moves, and Jupiter has moons, and there are spots on the sun. Put him under house arrest, we don't want lunatics like Galileo spreading nonsense.
The Earth is more than 6000 years old.Blasphemy!
The Earth is millions of years old(Actually, at this point in the 19th century the clergy at Cambridge were not only alongside the idea, they were doing the research. Religious people are not always backward.)
Man and apes share a common ancestor.Rubbish him! Misrepresent his ideas! After all, black people aren't really human, so how can monkeys be?
Anyway, even if the Earth is just another planet going round a so-so star in an enormous universe, and the human race is more than 98% the same genetically as chimpanzees, we are unique because there isn't life anywhere else in the universe! Yes, in all that huge old universe with trillions of stars WE ARE UNIQUE!
The simple fact is that to any reasonably educated scientist who understands roughly how the Earth fits into the universe, there is nothing unique or special about our position. As such, if life has evolved on Earth, it would be expected a priori to evolve anywhere else where suitable conditions existed. It will be very difficult to prove the falsifying hypothesis - that there is no life on Mars - but, given the existence of life on Earth, that is the hypothesis that needs to be proved. Anybody who lets their religion get in the way of their understanding of the universe deserves to be tied to a chair and lectured by Richard Dawkins for a few hours (now, sadly, Jay Gould is dead.) Unfortunately, like the animals in Animal Farm, I increasingly find myself looking from fundamentalist Muslim to fundamentalist Christian and being less and less sure of the difference.
There is no reason why such a service needs to be hosted by Google. If they developed such an app - or if anybody did - it would be saleable as a standalone system. Google is already selling search appliances in physical boxes, after all.
There is absolutely no reason why a web server with this functionality enabled should not be deployed by different organisations with different security requirements. Google itself could offer a free service using context sensitive advertising, a paid for service without...and so create the bandwagon that would get corporates interested. How much would the DOD pay Google for an armed forces wide secure document solution? How much would a large corporate pay to be sure its employees were able to work on shared documents efficiently without all that emailing of stuff around the place, loss of version control, islands of secret knowledge? So far, document management systems have failed to deliver on simplicity, efficiency etc., but the opportunity must be out there.
Er, no, it doesn't. "Satellite" is a made up word caused by illiteracy in Latin. In which language a "Satelles" is an inferior who waits upon a greater. The plural is "satellites" which is actually pronounced "sat-ell-i-tees". However, in his "Essay on Man" the poet Pope used the word to describe the recently discovered small bodies orbiting Jupiter, "Jove's satellites are less than Jove", and the name stuck, though with the incorrect singular "Satellite".
A contributor to Wikipedia, by the way, has amusingly recognised this and posted the following definition (and no, it wasn't me, my Latin is not nearly good enough)
Satelles dicitur corpus caeleste naturale quod circum planetam vel asteroidam revolvitur et ipsum non lucet
(S?)he defines it as a natural body which revolves around a planet or an asteroid. I disagree with the "natural", but at least I'm not alone in the world on this!
Anything that a state employee actually needs to do using an Office suite that cannot be handled reasonably by OpenOffice?
We are paying government employees to deliver services at (supposedly) controlled cost. This does not need to involve over formatted "pretty" documents. The truth is, there are probably very few document needs that could not be carried out with sufficient efficiency using WordPad (or Kate,say), few reporting needs that cannot be carried out using simple SQL statements, and few presentation requirements that could not be met efficiently with hand drawn pictures and a scanner.
If people cannot supply government with simply and efficiently formatted documents, they should not be in business. The whole concept that you need to be a skilled typesetter and graphic designer in order to produce a simple office document is actually Microsoft's greatest marketing success.
I take your point. The Titanic was compliant with BOT regulations. My own boat is compliant with the regulations, but I've added additional safety measures to deal with minor issues of non-standard design. Any competent boat designer and fitter should do this. In fact, as The Spectator said at the time "Most people have learned with astonishment that is is possible for a ship like the Titanic to pass the Board of Trade tests with an insufficient number of boats. They had supposed hitherto that the invariable rule was "boat-room for every passenger". They went on to point out that the Titanic was nearly five times larger than the largest ship envisaged when the Regulations were drawn up.
However, the Titanic sank and the passengers died in large numbers because it was built down to a price. The builders did not do due diligence in considering whether the Regulations were appropriate, and the owners did not consider the hazards of operating so far north at the time of year. The failure of the Titanic was due to a failure of imagination as much as anything.
An Enterprise FOSS operating system is supposed to be accessible to review in a way which a closed source solution isn't. However, as the superstructure built around Linux is more corporatised, this review and exposure gets harder and, because of the constraint of commercial issues, the amount of review and testing is likely to be limited. So, FWIW, I do feel there is a risk of the fate of the Titanic overtaking supposedly secure Linuxes.
It was a basically flawed design from the start, and failed to withstand an obvious hazard that would not have sunk one of Brunel's much earlier iron ships. So it's quite different from Windows 2000 which is not a basically flawed design...er, what am I saying?
I just installed 5.10 on a very old G3 600MHz iMac. I now have a box that is working too slowly to do anything, and I can't eject the CD.
So I tried to install on a 700MHz eMac. Install runs perfectly then screen goes blank. And stays blank. Boot runs perfectly till screen goes blank and stays blank.
Yes, I know, useless newbie etc. etc, hasn't RTFM...but "just works" doesn't. On the eMac I can't even find a way of switching to runlevel 3 so I can try and find why the video is down.
I guess this is where a pair of old Macs are heading for a dumpster experience, because they are too slow to run OS X sensibly.
I am a foreign judge who urgently requires training in intellectual property laws. Unfortunately I need to bribe dishonest officials to obtain exit visa so I can attend Harvard Business School. Five million dollars in unmarked gold bullion should pay for it nicely. Any laws you want made on my return, just ask.
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But I don't agree with you about colonies. There is no particular reason why we more than any other lifeform especially deserves to survive as a species. However, the idea that a small number of us might preserve our genes by going to some other rock in case the Earth gets it seems to me like pure science fiction. The human race isn't just a collection of genes. It's civil societies and the artefacts they create, including ideas. Surely it's worth putting more effort into protecting those? A few people living in an artificial environment on Mars at huge expense is no substitute for New York, or Venice, or the English Lakes, or any of the other threatened places of the Earth. (FI, I'm thinking of the risk of destruction of NY by tsunami, not terrorism).
As for the other poster's comment that Nasa is 0.7% of federal budget, what proportion of R&D is it? In other words, what percentage of the best brains does it occupy on manned spaceflight? I'm suggesting scientific and engineering skills be focussed on the real problems.
And, at the very least, we can stop wasting taxpayers'money on my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours space programs while the research is going on. Come on folks, we can't even organise ourselves on Earth to prevent avoidable damage from hurricanes and earthquakes, we can't agree on whether we are causing climate change by producing greenhouse gases, we are faced with an influenza pandemic that no-one really knows how to deal with, and we still have R&D money to spend on sending people to the moon and Mars?
However, if we have THAT many tropical storms in a year, we will have more to worry about than nomenclature.
Of them all, the UK is the one where, in my experience, the biggest failures either to capitalise on R&D or to fund projects adequately have taken place. I firmly believe that this is because the UK is still, after so many years, run by the aristocracy and its relatives. (For information, the current Prime Minister, despite pretences to the contrary, comes from a well-off Scots family and went to the top Scots private school: the most likely next leader of the Opposition is the son of an aristocrat and went to Eton. Neither of them would recognise a law of physics if it came and bit them in the testicles.) As a result, British scientists mostly work abroad, the British defense industry is either French-owned or part of a company which is heavily invested in the US (BAE Systems), the Internet infrastructure is held back by the near-monopoly of the old style telecoms provider BT, and any space research is done on an absolute shoestring (Beagle 2.) It's therefore laughable to suggest that the UK is likely to send astronauts anywhere soon.
Much of the British aristocracy is where it is because of large scale land theft - in India, the West Indies, and Africa. (Some people would add the US, Canada and Australia to that list...). Hence my unkind suggestion about the only thing that would get them interested in space programs.
On the other hand the UK is very good at biotechnology. Given the challenges facing the world, that's where I would invest UK PLC's R&D money.
In fact, with the success rate to date, from Blue Streak to Beagle 2, the chance of a British astronaut getting out of the atmosphere in one piece is so low that anybody volunteering for a space program needs a quick trip to a secure mental health unit instead.
Security person: "We'll have to do background checks on you going back to the UK".
Friend: "That's OK, I have full positive vetting from the British security services."
Security person: Silence then "Shit, that's going to be a problem. All those guys are commie faggots"
In the end he did get clearance. Or he may not have done. People in that sort of business, you never know when they are telling the truth.
The British equivalent is probably "do a runner and start up in a dodgy tax haven like the Isle of Man or Gibraltar". Let's see if anyone bothers to read this, and if so moderates it flamebait.
Anyway, the point is that neither the original post nor the reply appear to be by people who actually understand very much about business, on either side of the Atlantic. And they've been moderated up, presumably by equally ill-informed people.
Having had good experiences to date, all our mobile workers who need number crunching power (which is in fact all of them...) are now getting AMD64 laptops using Turion processors. The bang for buck is very good, the battery life and heat buildup are also good. Mind you, for the moment we will buy Pentium D for developer workstations, because the cache is bigger than it is for the Athlon dual core units. It's a tradeoff based on the kind of work you are doing.
So, far from going against this trend, they are actually ahead of it. They have just raised the stakes in daily print media - and Rupe is now trying to find a suitable site to build his own color press. Which will take at least 18 months of unwelcome competition. Given the innate conservatism of serious newspaper readers, and the realistic rate of adoption of e-paper, the Guardian's press is likely to have an effective life of at least 10 years. That sounds like a good investment decision to me.
Disclaimer - I work for a print consultancy but my views do not necessarily reflect those of the business.
Unfortunately, the function of scientists and engineers is to have good ideas, make them work, and then watch the wealth obsessed and power mad take them over. It's a pity really. If we had the ability to organise, we could collectively hold the politicians to ransom - but it's not in our nature to do it, while it is in their nature to exploit.
At one point the Internet looked like providing a fix, at least for the literate, in terms of supplying information. But even there the good stuff is increasingly subject to Gresham's Law - it's being buried under the piles of shit. And now that Rupert Murdoch has suddenly discovered the interthingy, and is moving the centre of his empire to the US, it won't get better any time soon. But cheer up! The Roman Empire ran on panem et circenses; it's just a social cycle and eventually it will collapse. Probably when the barbarian hordes from China invade, steal all the electronic goods, and put the population of the US to work building giant terracotta statues.
However, the real point I'd like to make is this. By their nature, consumer satisfaction reports tend to be way out of date. This is because the records relate to models that have been around for a while, which in a rapidly moving industry means they may not relate to what is on the shelves at all. A case in point from another industry was Volvo, which at one time enjoyed a totally unwarranted reputation for reliability based on the longevity and reliability of one of its post-war models which shared very few parts with later models. (I know this is true because the girlfriend of a friend had one of the reliable Volvos, and side by side you could easily see it was built to a totally different standard from the later ones. It was wrecked by collision with a truck at 132000 miles, at which point the seats were just getting slightly tatty.)
Nowadays it is indeed possible to predict how long a car will last because so much effort has been put into reliability engineering, and it is relatively easy to see what is under the hood and make an evaluation. But for things like digital cameras this is virtually impossible because the technology is changing fast.It's possible to evaluate things like the robustness of doors, the protection of the lens, scratch resistance of LCD covers etc., but you know nothing about the internal mechanisms or the reliability of the electronics. I suspect that it is not even necessarily true that you get what you pay for because in electronics cost is so volume sensitive.
My conclusion? Don't worry. Choose on the basis of your preferred mix of features, compatibility, optical quality and weight, and be sure you get a reasonable warranty. But my own preference would always be to buy from a manufacturer who really understands small cameras and short focus lenses. That means Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Leitz (acquired Minox), Pentax and Minolta. Fuji's camera superiority is in medium format. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba are electronics manufacturers and dependent on the optical people for lenses and expertise in areas like ergonomics.
The efficiency is probably not at all bad; the magnetic field is short range and, in the absence of a receiver, the only thing in the magnetic circuit to absorb energy is the hysteresis of the inductor in the transmitter. Which, with modern ferrites, can be pretty small, unless of course they are using a purely air-cored system at the transmitter end, in which case it's tiny.
The huge potential benefit of this system is that it eliminates the second most unreliable part of electronic systems: connectors. Anyone who has worked at the sharp end of electronics knows that connectors suck, big time. Designs proliferate. There are far too many of them and they are far too unstandardised. And connectors designed to be repeatedly made and broken are the worst of the lot. Although the designs have come a long way (the fact that gigabit copper Ethernet connectors work is a small electronic miracle in itself) they are still the worst part of any system, after the batteries.
So here we have a system which if widely adopted allows most of the tiny connectors used in portable devices to disappear, and possibly reduces the demands on batteries because people will find recharging easier. Those are big pluses.
To make you waste some more mod points, let me point out today that in the Guardian today is an article by Helen Steel and Dave Morris (The McLibel Two.) They stood up, on the record, for their beliefs. McDonalds had the most pyrrhic victory imaginable, and European courts decided that the trial was unfair because of the failure of the UK government to enable Steel and Morris to be adequately represented. The UK has much poorer protection of freedom of speech than the US, but the EU seems to have some judges with a clue or two.
Steel and Morris are heroes of dissent. And Proud Citizen has nothing to be proud of.
If the "ordinary joe" has an important piece of information that would discredit a public person, (s)he should go to the respectable Press who will investigate and publish if they and their lawyers think it justified. That's what they are for and why they have special rights. (And why it is wrong that Murdoch should be allowed to control so much of world media, but that's another issue.)
If a reporter in a newspaper quotes an anonymous source and thereby commits libel, the newspaper can be sued. It seems to me the ISP is on a hiding to nothing here. If journalistic standards are applied, the owner of the website is surely a publisher not a carrier, and can be sued. If the website is the equivalent of a freely available notice board, then anybody pasting a libel on it should not expect to avoid being identified.
The initial posts seem to support the position of "Proud Citizen", but he appears to be a socially dysfunctional individual with a nasty mind. I do not see why he deserves any anonymity at all. If only so the Cahills can assert THEIR first amendment rights and say in public what they think of them.
The point is that in the US freedom of speech is protected and anonymity is not needed, whereas in China (why on Earth do we have anything to do with that scumbag government?) freedom of speech is banned and so everything should be done to protect the anonymity of legitimate critics of government.
The simple fact is that to any reasonably educated scientist who understands roughly how the Earth fits into the universe, there is nothing unique or special about our position. As such, if life has evolved on Earth, it would be expected a priori to evolve anywhere else where suitable conditions existed. It will be very difficult to prove the falsifying hypothesis - that there is no life on Mars - but, given the existence of life on Earth, that is the hypothesis that needs to be proved. Anybody who lets their religion get in the way of their understanding of the universe deserves to be tied to a chair and lectured by Richard Dawkins for a few hours (now, sadly, Jay Gould is dead.) Unfortunately, like the animals in Animal Farm, I increasingly find myself looking from fundamentalist Muslim to fundamentalist Christian and being less and less sure of the difference.
There is absolutely no reason why a web server with this functionality enabled should not be deployed by different organisations with different security requirements. Google itself could offer a free service using context sensitive advertising, a paid for service without...and so create the bandwagon that would get corporates interested. How much would the DOD pay Google for an armed forces wide secure document solution? How much would a large corporate pay to be sure its employees were able to work on shared documents efficiently without all that emailing of stuff around the place, loss of version control, islands of secret knowledge? So far, document management systems have failed to deliver on simplicity, efficiency etc., but the opportunity must be out there.
- Well documented widespread use of drugs among execs and performers
- Alleged extensive use of bribery to ensure air time
- Women singers expected to look like prostitutes
- Male performers expected to look like and behave like violent criminals
- Large output of music advocating abuse of women, carrying and use of guns to settle disputes, drug taking and attacks on police.
In what way are the members of the RIAA NOT like organised criminal and racketeers?A contributor to Wikipedia, by the way, has amusingly recognised this and posted the following definition (and no, it wasn't me, my Latin is not nearly good enough)
Satelles dicitur corpus caeleste naturale quod circum planetam vel asteroidam revolvitur et ipsum non lucet
(S?)he defines it as a natural body which revolves around a planet or an asteroid. I disagree with the "natural", but at least I'm not alone in the world on this!
We are paying government employees to deliver services at (supposedly) controlled cost. This does not need to involve over formatted "pretty" documents. The truth is, there are probably very few document needs that could not be carried out with sufficient efficiency using WordPad (or Kate,say), few reporting needs that cannot be carried out using simple SQL statements, and few presentation requirements that could not be met efficiently with hand drawn pictures and a scanner.
If people cannot supply government with simply and efficiently formatted documents, they should not be in business. The whole concept that you need to be a skilled typesetter and graphic designer in order to produce a simple office document is actually Microsoft's greatest marketing success.
In fact, as The Spectator said at the time "Most people have learned with astonishment that is is possible for a ship like the Titanic to pass the Board of Trade tests with an insufficient number of boats. They had supposed hitherto that the invariable rule was "boat-room for every passenger". They went on to point out that the Titanic was nearly five times larger than the largest ship envisaged when the Regulations were drawn up.
However, the Titanic sank and the passengers died in large numbers because it was built down to a price. The builders did not do due diligence in considering whether the Regulations were appropriate, and the owners did not consider the hazards of operating so far north at the time of year. The failure of the Titanic was due to a failure of imagination as much as anything.
An Enterprise FOSS operating system is supposed to be accessible to review in a way which a closed source solution isn't. However, as the superstructure built around Linux is more corporatised, this review and exposure gets harder and, because of the constraint of commercial issues, the amount of review and testing is likely to be limited. So, FWIW, I do feel there is a risk of the fate of the Titanic overtaking supposedly secure Linuxes.
It was a basically flawed design from the start, and failed to withstand an obvious hazard that would not have sunk one of Brunel's much earlier iron ships. So it's quite different from Windows 2000 which is not a basically flawed design...er, what am I saying?
So I tried to install on a 700MHz eMac. Install runs perfectly then screen goes blank. And stays blank. Boot runs perfectly till screen goes blank and stays blank.
Yes, I know, useless newbie etc. etc, hasn't RTFM...but "just works" doesn't. On the eMac I can't even find a way of switching to runlevel 3 so I can try and find why the video is down.
I guess this is where a pair of old Macs are heading for a dumpster experience, because they are too slow to run OS X sensibly.
I am a foreign judge who urgently requires training in intellectual property laws. Unfortunately I need to bribe dishonest officials to obtain exit visa so I can attend Harvard Business School. Five million dollars in unmarked gold bullion should pay for it nicely. Any laws you want made on my return, just ask.