I don't regard this as even a question that should need asking. If it isn't already, the name Debian should be a trademark. And if it can't be on its own, then they should get in touch with Linus, agree to recognise one another's marks, and trademark Debian Linux as a TM.
In the meantime, signal your intentions by updating every internal and external document you can find to read Debian(TM). Same goes for Ubuntu.
Remember: a trademark protects the name, not the content. Trademarking the name of a distro does not attempt to take away or add anything to the copyright or software licences of any component. It just prevents evil corporate bastard or pakistani virus spreader from calling his CD of spyware, viruses and trojans "Debian".
Is there any trademark attorney out there who would help these people pro bono or at reduced rate? If there is an appeal, I would certainly contribute to the filing costs.
I have yet to lose any work or have an unrecoverable error as a result of using 2.0 beta. Myself, I avoid producing hugely formatted badly designed documents (coming from an engineering background). I frequently need to read bloatware from people who confuse Word with a DTP system and think that putting a short article into hugely complicated PowerPoint helps get the message across, and I have never failed to get out the information I actually needed even if occasionally there were minor issues like mislocated images.
In any case, my final output is PDFs, which means that by the time I have generated a document and finalised it, Office compatibility is not an issue.
How big is that in terms of the standard SI unit of size (VW Beetles)? How small is it in the standard SI unit of smallness (iPod nanos)? Is that US washing machines, in which case it's pretty big, or European washing machines in which case it could be almost any size?
Actually, given the dimensions and capability of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, it would be interesting to know how it compares. It would be amusing if the second space race - the race to be cheap, not to do things regardless of cost - was basically being led by a new generation of Sputniks on top of a new generation of Russian rockets.
Your link is not a scientific paper, but to a diatribe published by the Cato Institute, an extreme right-wing free market organisation. This non-peer reviewed paper is by an elderly scientist who is employed by NASA and the JPL, both of whom have a vested interest in preserving the right to burn large amounts of fossil fuels. Even Lindzen, though he seeks to find every possible reason to minimise it, cannot actually deny the greenhouse effect. His paper basically seeks to minimise or deny every factor that might increase the effect of greenhouse gases, while equally giving significance to every factor which might mitigate their effects.
Unfortunately, the Catos are not around to tell us what they think of having their name appropriated by the Cato Institute. But then nor is Jesus around to give us his views on current Christianity.
What all the "climate change happens naturally, wtf" posters seem to miss is that if, as a result of changes in the sun, there is a general increase in the solar energy reaching Earth, we should be making MORE attempts to minimise our release of greenhouse gases because the effects will combine. I don't react to the temperature rise in summer by putting on thicker clothes.
I have yet to find a scientist (I mean a real one with a science degree, not a PR person or a journalist) who would disagree that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is increasing the greenhouse effect. If the sun is getting hotter, that does not give us a license to ignore the problem.
So what applications are these, that you cannot do better with MySQL, PostgreSQL, or even MSDE? It isn't rocket science to ODBC a spreadsheet to a database.
Hemp (which is commercially grown in Europe, by the way) is a low-pesticide, low fertiliser crop. It makes excellent rope, good quality clothing (though different in look and feel from the cotton and polyester based stuff we've become used to). And it makes oil. Its properties have been known for a long time: in the 1500s the Franciscan friar and medical doctor Francois Rabelais tried to promote it because of its many uses, including its medical use.
Cotton needs loads of pesticides. It's a pork barrel product for the Southern states which also benefits agribusiness. So (apply tinfoil hat) growing hemp is illegal.
By the way, I totally agree with your post. Hemp, rapeseed,corn oil, sunflower oil can all be used to power Diesel engines, especially if you grow sugar beet to add the alcohol required in the mix. Growing oil in the US and importing food from the Third World would reduce US dependence on imported oil while diverting US dollars from corrupt Middle East regimes to poor farmers in S. America and Africa. But, if you were an oil company, would you want people to use a product that any farmer can produce on his farm and sell from pumps without needing the oil industry? Farmer-produced oil threatens the entire industry model. And we know how well that goes down (e.g. RIAA)
It says only 35% of fuel is burned in conventional gas engine. This is pure bullshit. Only 35% of the combustion energy of the fuel is turned into useful work - quite different. This arises simply from the physics of the gas engine cycle, which says that the percentage of the burn energy that can be turned into work depends on the difference between the temperatures at which heat is supplied and rejected. In a modern gasoline engine, 90% plus of the fuel is burned effectively. The waste is due to gas mixture going out of the exhaust during valve overlap, failed ignition, gas shielding in squish areas. The 35% efficiency is the thermal cycle efficiency, with 65% of the heat being lost through the cylinder walls, cylinder head, and exhaust.
The problem is that to maximise the T1-T2 difference, heat loss must be minimised, and the compression ratio needs to be high since the gas expansion is what drives the temperature change. Spark ignition engines cannot run at very high compression ratios due to the phenomenon of pre-ignition, and this limits their efficiency. Diesels can run at very high compression ratios indeed, because the fuel only burns when it is injected. Their burn cycle also reduces heat loss. That is the reason why Diesels are more efficient than spark ignition engines. Direct injection gas engines (semi-Diesels with auxiliary spark ignition) have been developed by the Japanese but they still require a fuel that costs more to refine than Diesel, and are no more thermally efficient.
Adding hydrogen can promote more complete combustion and perhaps allow a slightly higher compression ratio, but it still does not get you anything like Diesel efficiency. (You can actually raise the compression ratio a little by injecting ordinary water, but the complication -DI water, extra tanks adding weight, injection gear- outweighs the advantages.) And anyone who has spent time fighting, as my R&D dept did over a period, with those water/KOH hydrogen generators will be aware of the problems. Like keeping the KOH out of the output gas stream.
In short, sorry, nothing to see here, Sir Harry Ricardo did all this stuff so long ago it was already old when I went to U and I'm over 50. There is no cheap fix to the internal combustion engine, but lots of expensive R&D is producing ever cleaner and more efficient Diesels at ever more competitive prices. Just as fuel cells advance a notch, so do Diesels in lockstep which is one reason why fuel cell tech is always just around the corner. Dr. Diesel's invention is not glamorous, it is perceived as being dirty, noisy, old tech but with companies like VW, Daimler Chrysler, Peugeot Citroen and BMW betting the farm on it, perhaps they know something small inventors don't.
The Wildberger version is harder to understand because most school students will never understand mathematical theory, they will understand only things that relate to real world examples. And squaring distance and angle is not a concept that is easy to relate to the real world. I taught math for some years before finding that engineering paid a lot better for less stress, and while the more gifted pupils would understand this stuff, they were also the ones who did not find sines and cosines hard. For the majority who will not become mathematicians and physicists, abstracting mathematical ideas away from real world experience will not be beneficial.
In fact, you give away your attitude a bit by mentioning Prince Charles. I'm a republican myself but I think you misrepresent his views. He appears to believe that people should live in human scale buildings designed to give a sense of community, and not live in buildings designed to return the maximum income to the shareholders in developers (who don't have to live in the buildings that bring in that income, and wouldn't want to.) He also appears to believe that many architects produce stuff intended to glorify themselves and their clients regardless of their fit with the landscape and the environment. This is a neat parallel to the idea that mathematics teaching for the majority should reflect concepts that tie back to the real world so they will be useful, and that people who propose radical changes are often more interested in their own fame and reputation than the real benefits.
Well, nearly. The reason that Newton is regarded as the originator of modern kinetics is that he derived the formulae that link acceleration,mass,velocity and time. In fact, Galileo got part of the way there but his unit of "speed" was the square of velocity. This meant that his comments about the relation between acceleration, time and mass were correct but his velocity unit was not useful, because in the real world we most typically want to be able to use the simple relationship between velocity and time. If car speedos were calibrated in metres per second squared, we would not be able easily to work out how long it takes to travel a given distance.
In the same way, as I understand it based on the sites referenced in the story, this guy makes use of an angle replacement that is not useful to most people. If I want to divide a circular cake into n portions, using spread will not be helpful. Although degrees are a unit with no rational basis(there are not 360 days in a year, and 480 might be better-divisible by 5,3 and powers of 2) they are relatively easy to use for circle division, which is all the circle math that most people need to do most of the time.
Unfortunately, mathematics lectures at Cambridge left me with the permanent belief that mathematicians' ideas of what is simple and what is complex merely illustrate the fact that physics and engineering use math, but they use a useful subset (which changes with time) and do not necessarily buy into ideas which mathematicians regard as self-evident.
In fact I originally wrote (but deleted) a suggestion that the answer was to follow Microsoft and trademark e.g. "Linux 2.6". The problem is that distros aren't numbered by kernel version, and I can't see people wanting to call them things like "Red Hat Linux 2.8 Enteprise Server 10" or whatever. But you are right. Another option would be to trademark a phrase like "Linus approved Linux".
But knowing what Torvalds thinks about Slashdot posters, I decided not to bother.
I've written before about trademarks on Slashdot, and although IANAL, I have done enough trademarks unassisted that I might just have a clue...
The point about a trademark is that it is YOUR mark that indicates that something is in some way YOUR product. As I have said before, I believe that there is no incompatibility between FOSS, GNU and trademarks because trademarks are just a way of identifying the source of things - they are totally different from patents and copyright. In principle, it is absolutely right that Linus, who originated it, should be able to trademark the name Linux. By enforcing the trademark, he can effectively "quality check" or stamp things with his imprimatur. If someone else produces a crappy Linux/Gnu distribution, he should have the right to stop them calling it Linux. They can still publish it and say "Uses Linux(TM) Kernel 2.6. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds". They just can't call the product Shit Linux, or whatever. Equally, if someone else produces a good distro, he should be able to exchange pieces of paper which basically say "So long as you are good guys and recognise my principles, you can call your distro Nice Linux", and one from the supplier saying "Dear Mr. Torvalds, we recognise your trademark, thank you for allowing us to use it." If you think about it, this is clearly a Good Thing. It helps create a community of trust based around a government agency, at relatively low cost.
So what went wrong in Oz? Well, IMHO the error Linus made was in not making use of the name Linux as a trademark earlier, which means that it has in reality become generic in many places. He needs to show that it really does connect back to him. Submitting letters from suppliers of Linux distributions available in Australia saying "We recognise that Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, he licenses us to use it, and we are very unhappy about these people who use the name without permission" would be a start. But in practice, if the name has been in general use for years and has not been defended, it would be a hard case.
Actually I have two: A Siemens, and a slightly simpler Widex as backup. They are both excellent and I would strongly recommend them. The Siemens is more sophisticated, has wider bandwidth and more power, and longer battery life, but is physically larger. The Widex is smaller, the audio is not quite so good, but is better for active environments.
Oh, and I don't need any sympathy. The truth is, I am not a lot more deaf than many people of my age. I'm just willing to admit it and get it fixed. My mother wouldn't admit it till she was 82, and it caused her a lot of problems. I get a lot less inconvenience from the hearing aid than the glasses I use for driving. Looking at other people fiddling about with Bluetooth headsets, iPod earpieces and so on, I basically plug in in the morning, put my phone in my top pocket with its loopset, and then the most complicated thing I do all day is switch to noise cancelling mode if the phone rings in the office. If manufacturers were really interested in a clever product, they would make devices with the same functionality as in the ear hearing aids which similarly communicated with phones, iPods and the like. Hands free, cable free, but I do get looked at as if I'm mad as I walk round making a phone call with no visible phone, no bluetooth headset...it's only a downside if you don't like people giving you extra room on the sidewalk.
I'm deliberately starting a new top level thread because the previous poster on this is getting negative moderation on some of the replies, and there is then no point in responding to them.
Noise cancelling headphones if correctly implemented are rather more complex than just inserting an inverted signal. For the record, I am deaf (artillery and large engines, as if you care) and because of the strange hole in my hearing response I use a digital hearing aid. The configuration screen for programming this runs to a number of pages, and I can have it set to include or exclude things like refrigerator and fan noise. In fact, I have one program that does optimised noise cancelling to get the best speech response, and another that does no noise cancelling which is useful for music and for checking that things like HDDs are making the right noises. Noise cancelling technology is already used in professional telephone headsets, and I am surprised that it is missing from iPods and the like. It would be easy enough to have a button which switched between cancelling and not cancelling external noise sources and which, like my hearing aid, has a setting which allows through a sudden loud noise when in N/C mode, as a safety factor in traffic. This would mean the ability to listen at lower volume levels in noisy conditions.
I have a local inductive loopset (one of the few good things to come out of Nokia in my view) which allows me to use the cell phone and to inject another sound source. With the hearing aid switched to inductive pickup only, and to block external sound, I can make a phone call in noisy conditions without difficulty.
Conclusion: the technology exists to fix these problems and enable people to listen at lower volumes, manufacturers just can't be bothered.
In the 20s and the 30s useful idiots told everybody how the Soviet Union was unstoppable and unbeatable, and how its tremendous resources and central planning would enable it to overtake the rest of the world. As Krushchev told the US, we will attend your funeral...almost correct, just the wrong way round. Chinese success stories? Taiwan - er, covertly US supported, not part of Chinese empire yet. Hong Kong - er, UK administered free market until very recently. Shanghai - interesting history, not really part of mainland Chinese economy. Beijing - well, I'd better not give identifiable information about contacts there, but don't try running a business without regular "donations" to the local party official. The giant Chinese economy? The one that's being funded by US indebtedness. The Chinese economic boom is already starting to strangle itself because they are not producing the necessary materials and resources themselves, so the price of oil, steel, copper and concrete has been rising rapidly. Unlike the former Soviet Union, which actually produced huge excesses of raw materials, the Chinese boom is credit and resource constrained. And all the investors are afraid to say so for fear of a lack of business confidence (i.e. exposure to reality.) I'm probably wrong, as about a lot of things, but to my mind the axis to watch is Russia/India. Russia has the resources. India has the people and the education. India also has a huge business presence in England which gives them access to the EU. Russia and India go back a long way together (the only successful communist governments in the world were in India.) Unless the US deliberately moves its economic and military power to support China, in an effort to stave off economic collapse, I know where I'd invest.
The Soviet Union could build nukes but it could not build refrigerated trucks so most of its vegetables never made it to market. Centralized systems frequently fail to do important things, or put vast effort into spectacularly stupid things because there is no system of checks and balances. If China deflects its modernisation plans into space exploration, it may just run out of resource and collapse like the Soviet Union did. The Cultural Revolution hardly bodes well as an example of Chinese centralized planning!
Yes, you do need to use them regularly, otherwise the cartridges can dry up on you. Unfortunately with Photosmarts you probably do need to use HP's expensive ink. The important thing is you do not need to do a large print to keep them running. Printing a thumbnail-size photo every few days is all you need.
With low-use inkjets it's possible to use more ink in the head cleaning process than in actual printing. For anybody else reading this, the real bargain in inkjets is an HP Business Inkjet. The quality isn't as good as the consumer models but it isn't bad, and they are almost as cheap as lasers to run. I couldn't possibly comment on the (totally unfounded) idea that HP could probably produce an inkjet as fast and cheaper to run than a laser, with better color, but doesn't want to because they want to get the full amortisation out of all their laser families first.
Federal subsidies for private enterprise? Kindly explain why my taxes should go to make money for someone who may be my business competitor. As soon as tax dollars go to bolster company profits they cease to be private enterprise - and there is not the same oversight as with properly accountable government bodies.
Since this is basically already how NASA works, giving money to private companies to supply goods and services, then giving a larger proportion of that cash direct to private enterprise is going to result in still bigger abuse.
The reason there is not a private spaceflight industry is because it does not make business sense. If it did,it would already have happened. As it is, the gains are purely speculative, the insurance risks enormous, and the cashflow projections laughable.
On the other hand the costs of Hubble are negligible compared to many wasteful government programs, and this is one case where a referendum might be a good idea. Ask taxpayers the simple question - do you think that a dollar a year of your taxes (or whatever minute amount it is) should go to improving our understanding of the universe by maintaining the Hubble space telescope.
If you are a college user, bet you hardly use printers at all. (BTW I work for a printing consultancy, and I do happen to know what I'm talking about.) A cheap laser printer is typically designed to last for a couple of hundred thousand pages, a Kyocera will do 350-400000 before even the drum needs replacing, and HP LaserJet 5 and 5M, and the 4000 series, will just soldier on and on. A good ballpark is that a printer is close to optimal loading if it goes through an ink cartridge or a toner a month, and under those conditions with minimal care you are likely to throw it away only when you get tired of it for some reason.
The probable cause of your problem is that you don't use your printer very much and it dries out/gets full of dust/gets dropped.
Most cheap all-in-ones are actually designed for low use SOHO owners, but a Canon LIDE series scanner, a cheap base model photo printer and a basic laser together are more capable, more reliable, and cheap to fix if something goes wrong (replacing one item is cheaper than buying the extended warranty on the all-in-one.)
Version 4.1 throws all the data truncation warnings you could wish for. Someone else has already commented on the use of NULL rather than NOT IN. I don't think there is any particular merit or demerit in different syntactical variations between database engines, other than being a pain in the butt to port. I just try and use MySQL where appropriate, and for some things it's very appropriate. It's just that, if you have to work with several different engines, you can get more error prone owing to minor variations. It's also often erroneous to compare databases on the basis of problems with certain queries, because the optimisations might be such that a variant query would give the reverse result. It's better (IMHO) to stick with what you got, and use indexing or temporary tables intelligently to optimise complex queries.
Why do we keep building on flood plains and omitting the obvious - that they will flood? From an agrarian point of view the answer is obvious - river floodplain silt is usually excellent for growing (ask the Egyptians and the Dutch.) But how many of the people trapped in New Orleans were agriculturalists? I suspect none.
Living as I do at an elevation of 80M above mean sea level, on a slope with excellent drainage, I take a very philosophical view of this. But I can't help thinking that we are still organising our world according to the preoccupations of much less advanced societies- and that the time to start doing something was over a hundred years ago, but the longer we leave it the worse it will get. London and New York could suffer various degrees of damage when the Azores slippage occurs. The effect of losing two of the world's major financial markets would not be good, considerably worse than losing some refinery capability (if Bush wasn't making so much money out of the windfall profits to the oil companies, he _could_ ration US fuel supplies and reduce prices, but you cannot dole out access to cash and credit and keep a modern society running.) How much would it actually cost in real money - not virtual profits - to plan to relocate the world's major financial and trade centers to safer locations?
The present situation is predicated on the idea that the rich will always suffer minimally in disasters. If my house is swept away or flattened I will have several options as to where to live while it is rebuilt, while the poor won't. But there are disaster scenarios that impact the rich as well as the poor, by making their savings and investment worthless and creating a breakdown in society which will enable criminals to steal possessions - think of the Jews in 30s Germany. If we don't guard against these, we are truly asking for it.
It's about understanding how the Universe ended up the way it is. And yes, unless you really want us just to keep knocking the rocks together, that's important.
But yes, deuterium is useful. It keeps your local star going when the base hydrogen fuel is getting exhausted. It acts as a handy intermediate step on the way to all those useful heavy elements produced by your local supernova, which can the collapse under gravity to give you a handy planet to live on which has something in it a bit more varied than plain old hydrogen. And, if you find a star a bit inconveniently large to use as a heat source, you can use deuterium oxide as a moderator when you invent fission reactors, and generate useful amounts of electricity without blowing things up too often. The Deuterium Marketing Board (a division of Intelligent Design Industries) has the slogan "Deuterium: it's part of why you're here to read about it."
Mind you, if you're a carbon based life form, you can have more fun mutating your genetic sequence if you use tritium.
From the article, I have the impression that to get anything out of it, you need good manual pen manipulation skills and the ability to write clearly. The problem looks like it is probably too big for the target audience- I would hate to have to write with an electric toothbrush size pen, and I have normal size hands.
If this thing could work so as to encourage children who cannot be bothered to learn to write clearly or draw even simple lines, it could actually be useful at one stage of development. Anyone who thinks to ask for hand-written applications for jobs nowadays will realise that many people cannot write properly, and there are still places where this is essential. Those of us who were educated before progressive education will remember how we were forced to learn to write letters and numbers clearly, use rulers and compasses etc.(and how long it took) Nowadays forcing children does not seem to be an option, but the simple ability to write does not motivate them to learn unless they have very involved parents. So, given the number of parents who are too busy or cannot be bothered, perhaps this thing or a derivative has a place.
Slashdot Mirror
In the meantime, signal your intentions by updating every internal and external document you can find to read Debian(TM). Same goes for Ubuntu.
Remember: a trademark protects the name, not the content. Trademarking the name of a distro does not attempt to take away or add anything to the copyright or software licences of any component. It just prevents evil corporate bastard or pakistani virus spreader from calling his CD of spyware, viruses and trojans "Debian".
Is there any trademark attorney out there who would help these people pro bono or at reduced rate? If there is an appeal, I would certainly contribute to the filing costs.
In any case, my final output is PDFs, which means that by the time I have generated a document and finalised it, Office compatibility is not an issue.
Actually, given the dimensions and capability of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, it would be interesting to know how it compares. It would be amusing if the second space race - the race to be cheap, not to do things regardless of cost - was basically being led by a new generation of Sputniks on top of a new generation of Russian rockets.
Unfortunately, the Catos are not around to tell us what they think of having their name appropriated by the Cato Institute. But then nor is Jesus around to give us his views on current Christianity.
I have yet to find a scientist (I mean a real one with a science degree, not a PR person or a journalist) who would disagree that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is increasing the greenhouse effect. If the sun is getting hotter, that does not give us a license to ignore the problem.
So what applications are these, that you cannot do better with MySQL, PostgreSQL, or even MSDE? It isn't rocket science to ODBC a spreadsheet to a database.
Cotton needs loads of pesticides. It's a pork barrel product for the Southern states which also benefits agribusiness. So (apply tinfoil hat) growing hemp is illegal.
By the way, I totally agree with your post. Hemp, rapeseed,corn oil, sunflower oil can all be used to power Diesel engines, especially if you grow sugar beet to add the alcohol required in the mix. Growing oil in the US and importing food from the Third World would reduce US dependence on imported oil while diverting US dollars from corrupt Middle East regimes to poor farmers in S. America and Africa. But, if you were an oil company, would you want people to use a product that any farmer can produce on his farm and sell from pumps without needing the oil industry? Farmer-produced oil threatens the entire industry model. And we know how well that goes down (e.g. RIAA)
The 35% efficiency is the thermal cycle efficiency, with 65% of the heat being lost through the cylinder walls, cylinder head, and exhaust.
The problem is that to maximise the T1-T2 difference, heat loss must be minimised, and the compression ratio needs to be high since the gas expansion is what drives the temperature change. Spark ignition engines cannot run at very high compression ratios due to the phenomenon of pre-ignition, and this limits their efficiency. Diesels can run at very high compression ratios indeed, because the fuel only burns when it is injected. Their burn cycle also reduces heat loss. That is the reason why Diesels are more efficient than spark ignition engines. Direct injection gas engines (semi-Diesels with auxiliary spark ignition) have been developed by the Japanese but they still require a fuel that costs more to refine than Diesel, and are no more thermally efficient.
Adding hydrogen can promote more complete combustion and perhaps allow a slightly higher compression ratio, but it still does not get you anything like Diesel efficiency. (You can actually raise the compression ratio a little by injecting ordinary water, but the complication -DI water, extra tanks adding weight, injection gear- outweighs the advantages.) And anyone who has spent time fighting, as my R&D dept did over a period, with those water/KOH hydrogen generators will be aware of the problems. Like keeping the KOH out of the output gas stream.
In short, sorry, nothing to see here, Sir Harry Ricardo did all this stuff so long ago it was already old when I went to U and I'm over 50. There is no cheap fix to the internal combustion engine, but lots of expensive R&D is producing ever cleaner and more efficient Diesels at ever more competitive prices. Just as fuel cells advance a notch, so do Diesels in lockstep which is one reason why fuel cell tech is always just around the corner. Dr. Diesel's invention is not glamorous, it is perceived as being dirty, noisy, old tech but with companies like VW, Daimler Chrysler, Peugeot Citroen and BMW betting the farm on it, perhaps they know something small inventors don't.
In fact, you give away your attitude a bit by mentioning Prince Charles. I'm a republican myself but I think you misrepresent his views. He appears to believe that people should live in human scale buildings designed to give a sense of community, and not live in buildings designed to return the maximum income to the shareholders in developers (who don't have to live in the buildings that bring in that income, and wouldn't want to.)
He also appears to believe that many architects produce stuff intended to glorify themselves and their clients regardless of their fit with the landscape and the environment. This is a neat parallel to the idea that mathematics teaching for the majority should reflect concepts that tie back to the real world so they will be useful, and that people who propose radical changes are often more interested in their own fame and reputation than the real benefits.
In the same way, as I understand it based on the sites referenced in the story, this guy makes use of an angle replacement that is not useful to most people. If I want to divide a circular cake into n portions, using spread will not be helpful. Although degrees are a unit with no rational basis(there are not 360 days in a year, and 480 might be better-divisible by 5,3 and powers of 2) they are relatively easy to use for circle division, which is all the circle math that most people need to do most of the time.
Unfortunately, mathematics lectures at Cambridge left me with the permanent belief that mathematicians' ideas of what is simple and what is complex merely illustrate the fact that physics and engineering use math, but they use a useful subset (which changes with time) and do not necessarily buy into ideas which mathematicians regard as self-evident.
But knowing what Torvalds thinks about Slashdot posters, I decided not to bother.
The point about a trademark is that it is YOUR mark that indicates that something is in some way YOUR product. As I have said before, I believe that there is no incompatibility between FOSS, GNU and trademarks because trademarks are just a way of identifying the source of things - they are totally different from patents and copyright. In principle, it is absolutely right that Linus, who originated it, should be able to trademark the name Linux. By enforcing the trademark, he can effectively "quality check" or stamp things with his imprimatur. If someone else produces a crappy Linux/Gnu distribution, he should have the right to stop them calling it Linux. They can still publish it and say "Uses Linux(TM) Kernel 2.6. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds". They just can't call the product Shit Linux, or whatever. Equally, if someone else produces a good distro, he should be able to exchange pieces of paper which basically say "So long as you are good guys and recognise my principles, you can call your distro Nice Linux", and one from the supplier saying "Dear Mr. Torvalds, we recognise your trademark, thank you for allowing us to use it." If you think about it, this is clearly a Good Thing. It helps create a community of trust based around a government agency, at relatively low cost.
So what went wrong in Oz? Well, IMHO the error Linus made was in not making use of the name Linux as a trademark earlier, which means that it has in reality become generic in many places. He needs to show that it really does connect back to him. Submitting letters from suppliers of Linux distributions available in Australia saying "We recognise that Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, he licenses us to use it, and we are very unhappy about these people who use the name without permission" would be a start.
But in practice, if the name has been in general use for years and has not been defended, it would be a hard case.
Oh, and I don't need any sympathy. The truth is, I am not a lot more deaf than many people of my age. I'm just willing to admit it and get it fixed. My mother wouldn't admit it till she was 82, and it caused her a lot of problems. I get a lot less inconvenience from the hearing aid than the glasses I use for driving. Looking at other people fiddling about with Bluetooth headsets, iPod earpieces and so on, I basically plug in in the morning, put my phone in my top pocket with its loopset, and then the most complicated thing I do all day is switch to noise cancelling mode if the phone rings in the office. If manufacturers were really interested in a clever product, they would make devices with the same functionality as in the ear hearing aids which similarly communicated with phones, iPods and the like. Hands free, cable free, but I do get looked at as if I'm mad as I walk round making a phone call with no visible phone, no bluetooth headset...it's only a downside if you don't like people giving you extra room on the sidewalk.
Noise cancelling headphones if correctly implemented are rather more complex than just inserting an inverted signal. For the record, I am deaf (artillery and large engines, as if you care) and because of the strange hole in my hearing response I use a digital hearing aid. The configuration screen for programming this runs to a number of pages, and I can have it set to include or exclude things like refrigerator and fan noise. In fact, I have one program that does optimised noise cancelling to get the best speech response, and another that does no noise cancelling which is useful for music and for checking that things like HDDs are making the right noises.
Noise cancelling technology is already used in professional telephone headsets, and I am surprised that it is missing from iPods and the like. It would be easy enough to have a button which switched between cancelling and not cancelling external noise sources and which, like my hearing aid, has a setting which allows through a sudden loud noise when in N/C mode, as a safety factor in traffic. This would mean the ability to listen at lower volume levels in noisy conditions.
I have a local inductive loopset (one of the few good things to come out of Nokia in my view) which allows me to use the cell phone and to inject another sound source. With the hearing aid switched to inductive pickup only, and to block external sound, I can make a phone call in noisy conditions without difficulty.
Conclusion: the technology exists to fix these problems and enable people to listen at lower volumes, manufacturers just can't be bothered.
In the 20s and the 30s useful idiots told everybody how the Soviet Union was unstoppable and unbeatable, and how its tremendous resources and central planning would enable it to overtake the rest of the world. As Krushchev told the US, we will attend your funeral...almost correct, just the wrong way round.
Chinese success stories? Taiwan - er, covertly US supported, not part of Chinese empire yet. Hong Kong - er, UK administered free market until very recently. Shanghai - interesting history, not really part of mainland Chinese economy. Beijing - well, I'd better not give identifiable information about contacts there, but don't try running a business without regular "donations" to the local party official.
The giant Chinese economy? The one that's being funded by US indebtedness. The Chinese economic boom is already starting to strangle itself because they are not producing the necessary materials and resources themselves, so the price of oil, steel, copper and concrete has been rising rapidly. Unlike the former Soviet Union, which actually produced huge excesses of raw materials, the Chinese boom is credit and resource constrained. And all the investors are afraid to say so for fear of a lack of business confidence (i.e. exposure to reality.)
I'm probably wrong, as about a lot of things, but to my mind the axis to watch is Russia/India. Russia has the resources. India has the people and the education. India also has a huge business presence in England which gives them access to the EU. Russia and India go back a long way together (the only successful communist governments in the world were in India.) Unless the US deliberately moves its economic and military power to support China, in an effort to stave off economic collapse, I know where I'd invest.
The Soviet Union could build nukes but it could not build refrigerated trucks so most of its vegetables never made it to market. Centralized systems frequently fail to do important things, or put vast effort into spectacularly stupid things because there is no system of checks and balances. If China deflects its modernisation plans into space exploration, it may just run out of resource and collapse like the Soviet Union did. The Cultural Revolution hardly bodes well as an example of Chinese centralized planning!
With low-use inkjets it's possible to use more ink in the head cleaning process than in actual printing. For anybody else reading this, the real bargain in inkjets is an HP Business Inkjet. The quality isn't as good as the consumer models but it isn't bad, and they are almost as cheap as lasers to run. I couldn't possibly comment on the (totally unfounded) idea that HP could probably produce an inkjet as fast and cheaper to run than a laser, with better color, but doesn't want to because they want to get the full amortisation out of all their laser families first.
Since this is basically already how NASA works, giving money to private companies to supply goods and services, then giving a larger proportion of that cash direct to private enterprise is going to result in still bigger abuse.
The reason there is not a private spaceflight industry is because it does not make business sense. If it did,it would already have happened. As it is, the gains are purely speculative, the insurance risks enormous, and the cashflow projections laughable.
On the other hand the costs of Hubble are negligible compared to many wasteful government programs, and this is one case where a referendum might be a good idea. Ask taxpayers the simple question - do you think that a dollar a year of your taxes (or whatever minute amount it is) should go to improving our understanding of the universe by maintaining the Hubble space telescope.
The probable cause of your problem is that you don't use your printer very much and it dries out/gets full of dust/gets dropped.
Most cheap all-in-ones are actually designed for low use SOHO owners, but a Canon LIDE series scanner, a cheap base model photo printer and a basic laser together are more capable, more reliable, and cheap to fix if something goes wrong (replacing one item is cheaper than buying the extended warranty on the all-in-one.)
Pre-upgraded. Think about it. Double plus ungood. If you think too hard about it, your brain starts to leak out of your ears.
what P J O'Rourke said about Germans, that they are just like Americans only they speak better English.
Version 4.1 throws all the data truncation warnings you could wish for. Someone else has already commented on the use of NULL rather than NOT IN. I don't think there is any particular merit or demerit in different syntactical variations between database engines, other than being a pain in the butt to port. I just try and use MySQL where appropriate, and for some things it's very appropriate. It's just that, if you have to work with several different engines, you can get more error prone owing to minor variations. It's also often erroneous to compare databases on the basis of problems with certain queries, because the optimisations might be such that a variant query would give the reverse result. It's better (IMHO) to stick with what you got, and use indexing or temporary tables intelligently to optimise complex queries.
From an agrarian point of view the answer is obvious - river floodplain silt is usually excellent for growing (ask the Egyptians and the Dutch.) But how many of the people trapped in New Orleans were agriculturalists? I suspect none.
Living as I do at an elevation of 80M above mean sea level, on a slope with excellent drainage, I take a very philosophical view of this. But I can't help thinking that we are still organising our world according to the preoccupations of much less advanced societies- and that the time to start doing something was over a hundred years ago, but the longer we leave it the worse it will get. London and New York could suffer various degrees of damage when the Azores slippage occurs. The effect of losing two of the world's major financial markets would not be good, considerably worse than losing some refinery capability (if Bush wasn't making so much money out of the windfall profits to the oil companies, he _could_ ration US fuel supplies and reduce prices, but you cannot dole out access to cash and credit and keep a modern society running.) How much would it actually cost in real money - not virtual profits - to plan to relocate the world's major financial and trade centers to safer locations?
The present situation is predicated on the idea that the rich will always suffer minimally in disasters. If my house is swept away or flattened I will have several options as to where to live while it is rebuilt, while the poor won't. But there are disaster scenarios that impact the rich as well as the poor, by making their savings and investment worthless and creating a breakdown in society which will enable criminals to steal possessions - think of the Jews in 30s Germany. If we don't guard against these, we are truly asking for it.
But yes, deuterium is useful. It keeps your local star going when the base hydrogen fuel is getting exhausted. It acts as a handy intermediate step on the way to all those useful heavy elements produced by your local supernova, which can the collapse under gravity to give you a handy planet to live on which has something in it a bit more varied than plain old hydrogen. And, if you find a star a bit inconveniently large to use as a heat source, you can use deuterium oxide as a moderator when you invent fission reactors, and generate useful amounts of electricity without blowing things up too often. The Deuterium Marketing Board (a division of Intelligent Design Industries) has the slogan "Deuterium: it's part of why you're here to read about it."
Mind you, if you're a carbon based life form, you can have more fun mutating your genetic sequence if you use tritium.
If this thing could work so as to encourage children who cannot be bothered to learn to write clearly or draw even simple lines, it could actually be useful at one stage of development. Anyone who thinks to ask for hand-written applications for jobs nowadays will realise that many people cannot write properly, and there are still places where this is essential. Those of us who were educated before progressive education will remember how we were forced to learn to write letters and numbers clearly, use rulers and compasses etc.(and how long it took) Nowadays forcing children does not seem to be an option, but the simple ability to write does not motivate them to learn unless they have very involved parents. So, given the number of parents who are too busy or cannot be bothered, perhaps this thing or a derivative has a place.