Coders will be growing illicit high-strength skunk coffee beans under arc lights in their basements.
Someone needs to look at what the whole drive for effectless "drugs" tells us about society. THC free hemp yes, because hemp is a useful plant (makes good cloth,easier to grow than cotton). But surely the sole purpose of coffee beans is to produce...coffee? If you don't like the side effects, there are any number of alternatives. Decaffeinated coffee is like devaluing the brand name.
Or perhaps I've missed the business implications. Perhaps I should just patent my new process for making alcohol free vodka, and get rich.
In the French Revolutionary phrase "liberty, equality and fraternity", the equality means equal under the law. At the moment in most developed countries the rich, or those with media access, are a lot more equal than everybody else. Even if there are flaws in the proposed legislation, it does seek to address an inequity in free speech, which is that the rich, or the media-savvy, can make their free speech heard while the poor cannot. When the US Constitution was written, the range of most people's free speech was the size of the town square. Its drafters didn't imagine a world in which a lie could be spread everywhere in just a few minutes.
SCO is basically following the principle that if you throw enough mud for long enough, some of it will stick. Even if (when) they lose in court, they hope that IBM et al will have suffered some kind of long term, even if relatively minor, damage. And people will remember, long after everything is forgotten, who it was that shouted so loud for so long.
I do wonder if Mr. McBride is actually trying to impress a Redmond business (or the RIAA) with his determination and application, hoping to get a good job as VP in charge of IP. Perhaps the message he's trying to send is "If he tries so hard with crap like that, what can he do if he's given a real case?"
In which case his tactics are not necessarily at all bad. He's trying to head off complaints from SCO shareholders by showing commitment, while investing in his next potential job.
The definition of SELV (safety extra low voltage) is up to 60V peak, insulated and isolated in such a way that higher voltages cannot get superimposed on it. Allowing the usual overvoltage when charging lead accumulators (the max for a 12V battery is around 15.5V) 42V nominal = about 54V, safely within the limit.
Years ago I had a teacher in civics classes who made what I still think was an excellent point by getting us to discuss the question "If a dictatorship was more efficient at delivering goods, services, medical aid and so on than a democracy, should we prefer the dictatorship over the democracy?" - as I recall, we had been reading "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.
This is really the same question. If a dictatorship (an unelected body backed up by, say, international law) controls software which is more efficient than current 'democratic' software, should we use the more efficient software?
Of course, you need to look at the broader issues. Dictatorships have a low life expectancy - the people at the top become more and more corrupt, siphon off more and more money until the whole thing collapses. The people being dictated to lose their ability to think and act constructively, so when the collapse comes anarchy results. Soviet Union, now Iraq. In the same way, countries without an indigenous software industry risk are exposed to the fallout as the suppliers fight among themselves somewhere else in the world. Brazil must be worried about what will happen to the likes of Sun, and the future trend in Microsoft licensing and compatibility. But they cannot control it.
Now, because of the WTO, I suspect that Brazil cannot enforce local sourcing: that would be contrary to internationalisation rules. But they can support OSS, because that is a level playing field around the world.
So my answer to the question about mandating (even though it does not seem to be any such thing) would be that governments have a right to have policies. If the best tool for the job is not currently OSS, someone can try to provide it. That's no different from any other bespoke government software project. The contractor has to agree to some kind of OSS licence. That's just a contract term. If, say, Microsoft wants to bid to build a large government system, they can do so provided they agree to the contract terms. If they choose not to tender, that is their decision.
Many Third World countries have very young populations. Most of their workforce have never been exposed to computers. The argument that installed base prevents migration is not valid as it may be in mature economies. I have long believed that Linux will have its fastest percentage penetration in the Third World, even is this is not the largest in terms of units for some time. Perhaps I'm right.
You would be correct if the main risk was of leaking through porosity, but in my own experience the main problems were joint leakage and using the wrong materials (not everyone knows this, but the design of tubes to contain high pressure and vacuum can be very different.) This could perhaps be detected with a low concentration of e.g. ammonia. The same problem exists with conventional fuels, where the seals required for gasoline are different for those required for, say, methanol. Typically, concern over hydrogen leakage in the past has focussed on the risk of building up flammable or explosive concentrations. If the result of the research is that any significant leakage is to be avoided, it may be necessary to reconsider this. I don't pretend to be an expert, only someone who has had to spend some time researching the subject to deal with a specific issue in a specific facility.
I spent some time some years ago in a facility that handled a hydrogen mixture.
It is indeed very hard to prevent hydrogen leaks (the small molecule goes straight through
even slightly porous metal) and it is difficult to detect, except when you get up to a couple of percent when
a very small spark can cause a very interesting experience (like the roof being embedded in
the car park.) On the other hand, that's the reason why a lot of work has to go into
preventing gross leaks.
The same problem existed with the original town gas, which was practically
odorless (CO + hydrogen + nitrogen) and of course the solution was to put in an odorous
tracer gas. I am sure that with modern sensor technology a suitable tracer could be found that
would be detectable in even minute quantities
Given that in the past we've been cavalier about
low BP compounds and their ill effects - benzene in gas, CFCs, - it would be really good if
this time governments and environmental scientists got their act together in advance. Leakage is
not a reason not to use hydrogen, any more than the possibility of a leak is a reason not
to put in plumbing. It's just a potential problem to be prevented.
Galactic Commissioner Tharg arrived to Earth to indict homo sapiens sapiens for genocide of homo sapiens neanderthalensis, in or about 30000BCE. The United States refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the Galactic War Crimes Tribunal and has been vaporised. The rest of the human race is in hiding somewhere in Afghanistan, or perhaps Pakistan. Mohammed Al Sayeed has appeared on al-Jazeera and announced that the other 3 million inhabited worlds of the Galaxy will be destroyed if they attempt to land on Earth.
For your information, I completely support Salman Rushdie. I have a copy of the Satanic Verses and I encourage people to read it. Rushdie is strongly critical of fundamentalist Islam and has every right to be. But he is an individual, not a government with wider responsibilities.
I'm not surprised by the Egyptian reaction. It was frankly stupid and insensitive for the makers of Matrix reloaded to use emotive words with years of history like Zion and Trinity. Wars have been fought over the definition of both of them. Sadly, as someone with connections to Reform Judaism and non-Trinitarian Christianity, I believe that the present Government of Israel (and not, please, Jews or the bulk of the Israeli people) has so disgraced the word "Zion" that its use should be subject to the greatest care.
To give an example, how would US fundamentalists react if the Egyptians made a film in which evil Southern baptists launched an attack on a society presented as being good but called "The Third Reich"? Not, I guess, favorably.
Anyone who has read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses will know how difficult the whole area is. Although it was ostensibly attacked by Iran for being blasphemous, the real reason for the attack was Rushdie's description of an Ayatollah in exile, which was uncomplimentary to say the least. Mubarak may not be a democrat or hugely lovable by Western standards, but he has largely held Egypt together without it collapsing into fundamentalism. Egypt is a better society than much of the Middle East. The last thing he needs is Taliban inspired crazies going berserk over a movie that presents "Zion" as the good guys, and using this as a lever to attack the government. I suggest that college-age kids who don't get this probably need to obtain passports and visit the region, and LISTEN. Perhaps if enough of them do, one day we'll get a government with a clue about the Middle East. But I'm not holding my breath.
I'm replying to this late and it may not get read - but how can I fail to reply to a post so supportive.
My own experiences with SO6 have been less problematic. I am deliberately using it in an Office environment to find out where it breaks. In fact, I am readily able to edit Word 2000 documents I receive containing complex nested tables, though occasionally I have a printing problem which is often due to font substitution.
What I find is that Word documents often turn out to be very dirty. By this I mean that attributes are nested redundantly (in the worst case in my collection, a piece of text was nested 5 layers deep with US English enclosing British English which enclosed US English, and with a nonstandard face (futura)). The flexibility of Word and its ease of use allows monstrosities like this (though RTF allows exactly the same mess to occur). Without going into the analysis, I suspect that some of the incompatibilities between OO and Word are caused by inconsistent rendering in Word just as often as with OO. Hence my comment about the need for vendor-neutral standards. Enterprises will always tend to try and subvert standards to their own ends, but that is no reason for governments not to mandate standards for the features of documents that they require, and require that software be able to handle those standards. In the end this tends to happen with most technologies - as they become universal, so more and more of the features are mandated by governments. The fact that Microsoft, or any other vendor, has an overwhelming market share does not mean that it should be allowed to set standards for everybody.
Reading this, it isn't very well put, but I hope the gist of the position I'm taking is clear.
Er. no.
It's the tuned intermediate frequency amplifiers that create the EM waves - and they are effectively small radio transmitters.
But if you were building a military or avionics grade receiver, you would not only shield the case against those IF signals, you would filter them from being back-emitted via the antenna connection. The signals come out of the home radio because it's designed to be cheap and light, and proper shielding is expensive. In exactly the same way, well designed PCs have cases with spring connection fingers so as to shield them effectively, and ferrite beads on some of the ports to prevent the emission of radiation, while cheap ones or case mods with windows have large shielding holes and emit all kinds of crap.
Now, do you want to fly in an aircraft with cheap leaky avionics or well designed shielded wiring systems and boxes? I know which I'd prefer.
That was one patronising reply. I suggest you save being patronising for people who don't have a few years of experience with RF, EMC, and signal detection. At the risk of being patronising right back, yes I do know about things like inverse square laws (even as modified by antennae) and I suspect I was working with things like klystrons and magnetrons before you were born.
Your reply shows that you didn't actually read what I was writing or understand the point about the need for standards, or what standards are (they are not the same as rules...). It's nothing to do with using phones on aircraft (which I don't do anyway) and everything to do with the need to ensure that critical systems are properly shielded, suitably frequency selective and degrade gracefully, and that the spectrum is not overused so that the risks of interference become unacceptable.
No, it was British politicians and journalists. British scientists good ( think magnetrons, radar, penicillin ) British politicians useless (think WW1, WW2, dithering on whether closer to US/Europe - hint, guys, 3000 miles versus 20 - crime, vandalism, economic backwardness). British journalists - don't get me started.
This really emphasises why there is a need for standards, and why vendors alone cannot be allowed to create them. The various bodies concerned with EMC seem to have failed to cooperate to ensure that one set of widely available systems (avionics) is compatible with another (mobile phones).
There are already compatibility problems between cell phones and cordless phones (at least, I and others I know can't use both simultaneously because of interference)and I'm sure other problems will surface with the flavors of 802.11. But wireless technology just keeps advancing without much assessment of the risks, and the FCC seems more concerned with spectrum selloff and taxing modems than with the actual effects of the technology.
I also wonder, given the apparent senstivity of aircraft to the weak signals from cellphones, how safe are they really when powerful radar systems lock onto them? In the past, I have come across (ground-based) cases where directional radar caused severe interference and the military simply denied the existence of the radar (sorry, guys, panoramic receivers and signal strength meters are more reliable than base spokesmen.)It looks like this whole issue needs a lot more transparency and joint investigation. It isn't good enough just to say "OK, can't take this, switch them off". If there is an EMC problem with current aircraft, it needs to be investigated properly and we need to be told about it.
Just to add to your indecision, look at SuSE Enterprise Server 8. Runs on just about everything, up to 32 processors/64GByte, costs around $750/year per server including maintenance. And SCO may have a hard time with SuSE.
Oh come now...ever since APL and C the geek community has relied on write-only, only-original-author-understands languages. This is just maintaining the great tradition.
The argument that SO/OO doesn't have the ability to convert all MSOffice documents seamlessly is possibly not that valid. Local government generally is not pushing the envelope in IT usage, partly due to budgetary constraints and partly due to the kind of people it employs (and no, this is not a criticism.) In fact, the best way to control costs and improve productivity is to discourage users from producing over-complex documents, and to ensure that applications are not used improperly (e.g. managers designing hugely complex spreadsheets which are impossible to synchronise to live data, rather than having a skilled database engineer produce a properly scoped report.) I hope the consultants are working on these lines rather than just doing the "can we do everything we do not with a different technology".
The biggest problem is likely to be user retraining - and this is where educational policy needs to be looked at. Schools don't teach Gallimard French or General Motors physics. We expect school subjects to be vendor-neutral. Yet IT is often far from it. Hardware has to be made by somebody, but surely education software should be fully standards compliant and vendor neutral. Potentially, this should level the playing field for students, employers and vendors, and allow companies and local authorities planning long term strategy to make market-independent assessments of needs. I believe that UK local authorities share some responsibility for education with the central government. If so, that's an area of policy they might want to influence.
I built an aerial just like the French one in college, though somewhat larger ( 1GHz band) It was for a transmitter that used a tunnel diode (Esaki diode) as the frequency generator, and the objective was to be able to transmit audio from the tape deck in my room to the Leak amp and Quad speaker array two doors down, at a frequency which would be undetectable on any normal radio equipment. Which I guess proves that technologies come and go, but geeks just go on trying to download music.
My IQ just dropped by 10 percentage points as a result of trying to digest the meaningless marketspeak./. urgently needs a real lameness filter that will take stuff like this and reduce it to the bits that actually have meaning.
But perhaps there is one already, and the output from stuff like this is the ASCII cow art. Or, Heaven forbid, goatse.
Re:Liquid that really flows uphill...kind of
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 1
I know, I shouldn't reply to my own posts...but I missed out a critical number. It should have been "Liquid helium 3", it's the isotope of mass 3 that does it. See this Finnish site for more than you ever wanted to know on the subject.
Lawrence Livermore and bullets
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 1
A pity the researchers seem determined to pander to the rednecks by doing experiments in which they fire bullets at crystals. It sounds a bit too much like those fusion machines at LL that either don't work or are now covered in secrecy (fire lasers at deuterium/tritium pellets...). That's the bit of the article I'd have left out if I wanted to be taken seriously. Terahertz imaging might be safer than X-rays, but not if the medic comes in clutching his assault rifle ("OK, we're going to shine a light on your head, then I'm just going to let a few rounds off at this here photonic crystal and we'll have some nice pictures of the inside of your skull.")
Being a little more serious, though, clearly I should have paid a lot more attention in those lectures on abnormal refraction in crystals. Thanks to my lecturers for making crystallography boring all those years ago, when nowadays it's just about the most important set of technologies out.
Re:Liquid that really flows uphill...kind of
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Liquid helium at close to absolute zero. It doesn't flow uphill, it displays enormous capillary effect which can pull it right out of a container.
Others think so too You might like to tell the DPA they are well funded. That wasn't what I got told.
You might also like to consider that there is a huge difference between registering the types and reason for data, and the actual data being stored. Also, you do not have access to a database listing every company that holds information about you (and, if you did, its existence would be worrying). It is up to you to identify possible data holders and contact them.
I am not knocking Richard Thomas, but both he and his predecessor have a thankless task.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to look at what the whole drive for effectless "drugs" tells us about society. THC free hemp yes, because hemp is a useful plant (makes good cloth,easier to grow than cotton). But surely the sole purpose of coffee beans is to produce...coffee? If you don't like the side effects, there are any number of alternatives. Decaffeinated coffee is like devaluing the brand name.
Or perhaps I've missed the business implications. Perhaps I should just patent my new process for making alcohol free vodka, and get rich.
In the French Revolutionary phrase "liberty, equality and fraternity", the equality means equal under the law. At the moment in most developed countries the rich, or those with media access, are a lot more equal than everybody else. Even if there are flaws in the proposed legislation, it does seek to address an inequity in free speech, which is that the rich, or the media-savvy, can make their free speech heard while the poor cannot. When the US Constitution was written, the range of most people's free speech was the size of the town square. Its drafters didn't imagine a world in which a lie could be spread everywhere in just a few minutes.
I do wonder if Mr. McBride is actually trying to impress a Redmond business (or the RIAA) with his determination and application, hoping to get a good job as VP in charge of IP. Perhaps the message he's trying to send is "If he tries so hard with crap like that, what can he do if he's given a real case?"
In which case his tactics are not necessarily at all bad. He's trying to head off complaints from SCO shareholders by showing commitment, while investing in his next potential job.
The definition of SELV (safety extra low voltage) is up to 60V peak, insulated and isolated in such a way that higher voltages cannot get superimposed on it. Allowing the usual overvoltage when charging lead accumulators (the max for a 12V battery is around 15.5V) 42V nominal = about 54V, safely within the limit.
This is really the same question. If a dictatorship (an unelected body backed up by, say, international law) controls software which is more efficient than current 'democratic' software, should we use the more efficient software?
Of course, you need to look at the broader issues. Dictatorships have a low life expectancy - the people at the top become more and more corrupt, siphon off more and more money until the whole thing collapses. The people being dictated to lose their ability to think and act constructively, so when the collapse comes anarchy results. Soviet Union, now Iraq. In the same way, countries without an indigenous software industry risk are exposed to the fallout as the suppliers fight among themselves somewhere else in the world. Brazil must be worried about what will happen to the likes of Sun, and the future trend in Microsoft licensing and compatibility. But they cannot control it.
Now, because of the WTO, I suspect that Brazil cannot enforce local sourcing: that would be contrary to internationalisation rules. But they can support OSS, because that is a level playing field around the world.
So my answer to the question about mandating (even though it does not seem to be any such thing) would be that governments have a right to have policies. If the best tool for the job is not currently OSS, someone can try to provide it. That's no different from any other bespoke government software project. The contractor has to agree to some kind of OSS licence. That's just a contract term. If, say, Microsoft wants to bid to build a large government system, they can do so provided they agree to the contract terms. If they choose not to tender, that is their decision.
Many Third World countries have very young populations. Most of their workforce have never been exposed to computers. The argument that installed base prevents migration is not valid as it may be in mature economies. I have long believed that Linux will have its fastest percentage penetration in the Third World, even is this is not the largest in terms of units for some time. Perhaps I'm right.
Yeah, well, it was easy then. God didn't have to have to code for the I386 architecture and he didn't have to have Office file format compatibility.
You would be correct if the main risk was of leaking through porosity, but in my own experience the main problems were joint leakage and using the wrong materials (not everyone knows this, but the design of tubes to contain high pressure and vacuum can be very different.) This could perhaps be detected with a low concentration of e.g. ammonia. The same problem exists with conventional fuels, where the seals required for gasoline are different for those required for, say, methanol. Typically, concern over hydrogen leakage in the past has focussed on the risk of building up flammable or explosive concentrations. If the result of the research is that any significant leakage is to be avoided, it may be necessary to reconsider this. I don't pretend to be an expert, only someone who has had to spend some time researching the subject to deal with a specific issue in a specific facility.
It is indeed very hard to prevent hydrogen leaks (the small molecule goes straight through even slightly porous metal) and it is difficult to detect, except when you get up to a couple of percent when a very small spark can cause a very interesting experience (like the roof being embedded in the car park.) On the other hand, that's the reason why a lot of work has to go into preventing gross leaks.
The same problem existed with the original town gas, which was practically odorless (CO + hydrogen + nitrogen) and of course the solution was to put in an odorous tracer gas. I am sure that with modern sensor technology a suitable tracer could be found that would be detectable in even minute quantities
Given that in the past we've been cavalier about low BP compounds and their ill effects - benzene in gas, CFCs, - it would be really good if this time governments and environmental scientists got their act together in advance. Leakage is not a reason not to use hydrogen, any more than the possibility of a leak is a reason not to put in plumbing. It's just a potential problem to be prevented.
Galactic Commissioner Tharg arrived to Earth to indict homo sapiens sapiens for genocide of homo sapiens neanderthalensis, in or about 30000BCE. The United States refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the Galactic War Crimes Tribunal and has been vaporised. The rest of the human race is in hiding somewhere in Afghanistan, or perhaps Pakistan. Mohammed Al Sayeed has appeared on al-Jazeera and announced that the other 3 million inhabited worlds of the Galaxy will be destroyed if they attempt to land on Earth.
For your information, I completely support Salman Rushdie. I have a copy of the Satanic Verses and I encourage people to read it. Rushdie is strongly critical of fundamentalist Islam and has every right to be. But he is an individual, not a government with wider responsibilities.
To give an example, how would US fundamentalists react if the Egyptians made a film in which evil Southern baptists launched an attack on a society presented as being good but called "The Third Reich"? Not, I guess, favorably.
Anyone who has read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses will know how difficult the whole area is. Although it was ostensibly attacked by Iran for being blasphemous, the real reason for the attack was Rushdie's description of an Ayatollah in exile, which was uncomplimentary to say the least. Mubarak may not be a democrat or hugely lovable by Western standards, but he has largely held Egypt together without it collapsing into fundamentalism. Egypt is a better society than much of the Middle East. The last thing he needs is Taliban inspired crazies going berserk over a movie that presents "Zion" as the good guys, and using this as a lever to attack the government. I suggest that college-age kids who don't get this probably need to obtain passports and visit the region, and LISTEN. Perhaps if enough of them do, one day we'll get a government with a clue about the Middle East. But I'm not holding my breath.
My own experiences with SO6 have been less problematic. I am deliberately using it in an Office environment to find out where it breaks. In fact, I am readily able to edit Word 2000 documents I receive containing complex nested tables, though occasionally I have a printing problem which is often due to font substitution.
What I find is that Word documents often turn out to be very dirty. By this I mean that attributes are nested redundantly (in the worst case in my collection, a piece of text was nested 5 layers deep with US English enclosing British English which enclosed US English, and with a nonstandard face (futura)). The flexibility of Word and its ease of use allows monstrosities like this (though RTF allows exactly the same mess to occur). Without going into the analysis, I suspect that some of the incompatibilities between OO and Word are caused by inconsistent rendering in Word just as often as with OO. Hence my comment about the need for vendor-neutral standards. Enterprises will always tend to try and subvert standards to their own ends, but that is no reason for governments not to mandate standards for the features of documents that they require, and require that software be able to handle those standards. In the end this tends to happen with most technologies - as they become universal, so more and more of the features are mandated by governments. The fact that Microsoft, or any other vendor, has an overwhelming market share does not mean that it should be allowed to set standards for everybody.
Reading this, it isn't very well put, but I hope the gist of the position I'm taking is clear.
It's the tuned intermediate frequency amplifiers that create the EM waves - and they are effectively small radio transmitters.
But if you were building a military or avionics grade receiver, you would not only shield the case against those IF signals, you would filter them from being back-emitted via the antenna connection. The signals come out of the home radio because it's designed to be cheap and light, and proper shielding is expensive. In exactly the same way, well designed PCs have cases with spring connection fingers so as to shield them effectively, and ferrite beads on some of the ports to prevent the emission of radiation, while cheap ones or case mods with windows have large shielding holes and emit all kinds of crap.
Now, do you want to fly in an aircraft with cheap leaky avionics or well designed shielded wiring systems and boxes? I know which I'd prefer.
Your reply shows that you didn't actually read what I was writing or understand the point about the need for standards, or what standards are (they are not the same as rules...). It's nothing to do with using phones on aircraft (which I don't do anyway) and everything to do with the need to ensure that critical systems are properly shielded, suitably frequency selective and degrade gracefully, and that the spectrum is not overused so that the risks of interference become unacceptable.
No, it was British politicians and journalists. British scientists good ( think magnetrons, radar, penicillin ) British politicians useless (think WW1, WW2, dithering on whether closer to US/Europe - hint, guys, 3000 miles versus 20 - crime, vandalism, economic backwardness). British journalists - don't get me started.
There are already compatibility problems between cell phones and cordless phones (at least, I and others I know can't use both simultaneously because of interference)and I'm sure other problems will surface with the flavors of 802.11. But wireless technology just keeps advancing without much assessment of the risks, and the FCC seems more concerned with spectrum selloff and taxing modems than with the actual effects of the technology.
I also wonder, given the apparent senstivity of aircraft to the weak signals from cellphones, how safe are they really when powerful radar systems lock onto them? In the past, I have come across (ground-based) cases where directional radar caused severe interference and the military simply denied the existence of the radar (sorry, guys, panoramic receivers and signal strength meters are more reliable than base spokesmen.)It looks like this whole issue needs a lot more transparency and joint investigation. It isn't good enough just to say "OK, can't take this, switch them off". If there is an EMC problem with current aircraft, it needs to be investigated properly and we need to be told about it.
Just to add to your indecision, look at SuSE Enterprise Server 8. Runs on just about everything, up to 32 processors/64GByte, costs around $750/year per server including maintenance. And SCO may have a hard time with SuSE.
Oh come now...ever since APL and C the geek community has relied on write-only, only-original-author-understands languages. This is just maintaining the great tradition.
I hope the consultants are working on these lines rather than just doing the "can we do everything we do not with a different technology".
The biggest problem is likely to be user retraining - and this is where educational policy needs to be looked at. Schools don't teach Gallimard French or General Motors physics. We expect school subjects to be vendor-neutral. Yet IT is often far from it. Hardware has to be made by somebody, but surely education software should be fully standards compliant and vendor neutral. Potentially, this should level the playing field for students, employers and vendors, and allow companies and local authorities planning long term strategy to make market-independent assessments of needs. I believe that UK local authorities share some responsibility for education with the central government. If so, that's an area of policy they might want to influence.
I built an aerial just like the French one in college, though somewhat larger ( 1GHz band) It was for a transmitter that used a tunnel diode (Esaki diode) as the frequency generator, and the objective was to be able to transmit audio from the tape deck in my room to the Leak amp and Quad speaker array two doors down, at a frequency which would be undetectable on any normal radio equipment. Which I guess proves that technologies come and go, but geeks just go on trying to download music.
But perhaps there is one already, and the output from stuff like this is the ASCII cow art. Or, Heaven forbid, goatse.
I know, I shouldn't reply to my own posts...but I missed out a critical number. It should have been "Liquid helium 3", it's the isotope of mass 3 that does it. See this Finnish site for more than you ever wanted to know on the subject.
Being a little more serious, though, clearly I should have paid a lot more attention in those lectures on abnormal refraction in crystals. Thanks to my lecturers for making crystallography boring all those years ago, when nowadays it's just about the most important set of technologies out.
Liquid helium at close to absolute zero. It doesn't flow uphill, it displays enormous capillary effect which can pull it right out of a container.
You might like to tell the DPA they are well funded. That wasn't what I got told.
You might also like to consider that there is a huge difference between registering the types and reason for data, and the actual data being stored. Also, you do not have access to a database listing every company that holds information about you (and, if you did, its existence would be worrying). It is up to you to identify possible data holders and contact them.
I am not knocking Richard Thomas, but both he and his predecessor have a thankless task.