Lead acid batteries give off a certain amount of hydrogen when they are charged. So modify your big UPS so that it gets fast charged, then collect the hydrogen and use it to power the Ballard box. So long as the UPS is much bigger than the fuel cell, it should work
Yes, I was overtaken by one of those guys having fun a few years back. I was doing a nice safe 130 and he was doing what looked like 220+ (Carrera.) Thirty k down the road I found out what it looks like when a Carrera goes under a Polish truck. The truck had taken itself off the carriageway after the collision and dragged the remains of the car under it, though I doubt the Porsche driver was terribly interested by that time. That and a few other remains I've seen on the autobahns helps me to prefer planes and TGVs when I need to go somewhere quickly. And I think I'd take my chances with terrorists on a maglev ahead of Chinese taxi drivers any day.
The arguments on this thread about the overarching right of corporations to make a profit obviously justify selling arms to Saddam Hussein or, indeed, Osama bin Laden. Supporters of free markets often talk as if there was no need for law to govern the operation of the markets, but of course there is, or before long they will not be free any more.
Now as I understand it, to have a free market transparency of information is needed, i.e. you cannot have a free market if access to market information is selectively denied to people. If the buggy whip makers can prevent the spread of information about Mr. Ford's new toy, that is not a free market. So the one law that must be enforced to protect market economies is the law of freedom of information, and it is this one that the Chinese are breaking.
Amnesty is peeved because the Chinese are preventing the rest of the world from learning that they have a scumbag government, scumbag bureaucracy, and scumbag rural life. A good capitalist might be equally peeved that the Chinese are trying to prevent the rest of the world learning things that might downgrade China's investment worthiness, putting on a face about supporting capitalism while in private allowing corrupt officials to steal from corporations. (You can see Chinese censorship as being equivalent to Enron's trying to keep secret the true nature of its operations and accounting.) One way of doing this is preventing the Chinese from learning about ways of disseminating that information.
To put it another way, the right of one corporation to make a profit by selling censorware has to be balanced against the greater interest of the market economy in not allowing people to use such censorship.
OK, the article is a bit vague, because it is aimed at people who kind of know what an ontology is already, and it is really just an overview of the current state of the art.
However, I found it useful if only for one part, where they talk about ontology construction. If you read it, it looks just like a systems analysis job slightly rephrased. Find out what the entities are, establish the relationships between entities, logicalise, rationalise, and finally populate the resulting structures. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
It looks to my simple and fast ageing mind as if we end up with something like a DFD in which data stores are replaced by sets and data flows are replaced by relationships, and I have no idea at all what happens with processes. Having done a bit of KB work in the late 80s and then failed totally to keep up with the field, I'd like to know more at a practical level, but without having to understand medical applications. Anybody got any good links?
This is so long ago I can't even remember the manufacturer, but there were at least 2 CMOS implementations of a PDP-8 processor. Has anybody observed that the instructions were based around core memory, so the accumulator was cleared when it did a store? If you could get the core again, a home computer with a PDP-8 processor and core memory would really benefit from a modbox with windows and lights.
For some industrial control jobs, something like a PDP-8 or PDP-11 is in many ways ideal because you can see everything that goes on. It is actually possible for one person to understand the hardware, the microcode, and every single bit of the software. For me, that is the great pleasure of small embedded designs. I really think it would be good to have a teaching tool for CS that actually meant that the student could do a project and have a complete overview of the entire thing in this way. I'm far from knocking progress, but there are comments on this thread that are a bit about the kind of alienation we have now between hardware and software - most people have no real idea at all what the hardware does, and use terms like "cache" without even stopping to think about what is going on. So yes, let's have someone build an understandable modern PDP-8. It's less weird than the RCA1802 and easier to get your head around than the 8080.
Ever since thiobacter concretivorans was discovered chewing its way through concrete in nuclear reactors, we've known that life is not necessarily restricted to a temperature range of around 0-40C. (That's 32-104F for people who hate the French.) What with the stuff that grows in hot springs at 95C (work out yourselves), and the stuff that lives at the bottom of oceans, we shouldn't really be surprised if microorganisms can survive in space - after all, comets have plenty of ice and dirt, just like the Earth. And no matter how bad the UV, there is going to be somewhere on a comet or small asteroid that is shaded from direct solar radiation. Maybe I'm just being stupid, but to me the argument goes something like (and I may be repeating myself, if so sorry)
50% of the planets we've actually checked out are inhabited.
The other 50% have been visited by human beings who have left artefacts behind
So why do we expect the rest of the universe, including the non-large rocky bits,to be life-free?
...Did I say our application was Windows-based? For all you know, it's servlet-based Java with MySQL backend and a number of Swing classes. Which in fact it is, and it doesn't care what desktop it runs on.
Decline and Fall presents a world which, I suspect, is just as much a fantasy world as any other. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who likes LOTR. I have a one volume edited version which actually sits next to LOTR on one of my shelves. Gibbon wrote his history in a day when we knew far less about the "Barbarians" than we do now, far less about the economics of the Roman Empire. The result was he had to construct a story, one in which (in fact) Christianity is the villain bringing the Empire into eventual decline. He may be right about this, I suspect it's a gross oversimplification, but whatever, when he actually wrote it, it was a story.
And what about Moby-Dick? Does all the technical stuff about whale-hunting in the mid-nineteenth century make it a solid factual read, or is it in fact an escapist account of adventures in a world alien to almost all its readers, and so a kind of science fiction?
Just because it's a troll, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve a response.
I am currently doing some work for a major services company which is still running NT4 on the desktop and still using Office 97. They really do not want to change and they see no reason (other than being forced to) why they should. The fact is that most users want something familiar to do their jobs on.
A major objection for the average office worker to both Mac OS and Linux is the need to learn new ways of doing things, and the things they do not want to have to learn to do are often amazingly trivial. (Only this morning I had to show a white collar professional how to turn a Mac on, and explain that the reason IE didn't start immediately was because the double click interval on this particular machine was set quite short and a faster double click was needed.)
The constant drive for change on the Windows desktop could, paradoxically, reduce market share if it perceived that each new version of Windows is going to need as big a learning curve as switching. One for Apple and KDE to exploit?
I'd just like to know when the dogs decided that the humans were going to win, so it was worth becoming domesticated...or did they just hang around people thinking "They're bigger, the hyenas will eat them first?" I know that, faced with a giant bone-crunching hyena, our dogs would bravely hide behind me and wait to see what happened next.
No, a libertarian is a very particular kind of US right-wing liberal. Libertarians believe that their personal freedom is more important than things like equality of opportunity, and have a restricted notion of what constitutes harm to other people (basically they tend to have the right-wing extreme insistence on property rights.)
Could we be clear about this? A liberal is someone who wants you to be allowed to do what you want, provided you do not harm other people. Someone who wants you to stop spending money on rockets and solve world problems is perhaps a socialist, perhaps even a Marxist, possibly a Green.
Right wingers try to label these causes "liberal" because they want to force through their agenda - which is to let you send up rockets and keep guns, but to stop you from having:
Extra-marital sex
Non-missionary-position sex
Gay sex
Mood altering substances other than alcohol and tobacco
And from:
Questioning US foreign policy
Questioning the right of people to run the govt. because they have a lot of money
Asking awkward questions, full stop.
Trying to get people to confuse liberalism with left wing social activism is a well tested Republican technique.
With all those Indian coders in the US, I would be surprised that those attitudes persist - exc ept that many middle class Indians do not know much about Indian village life (after all, what does a Bostonian know about small town life in Missouri?)
Information is the most major human resource- even food and shelter are dependent on the ability to know where food can be found and how to build shelters using available materials. Everyone is disempowered by lack of information, whether it is an Indian peasant about to be screwed on harvest prices because he hasn't heard about the shortages, or the employee who doesn't know that the CEO is gambling away the company. A device like the simputer could be used to transport information from a PC in a village with electricity to one without, and transport information and queries back again. The disadvantage of radio is that it supplies generic information and the output is not searchable - villagers cannot spend all their time listening to radio hoping for important information.
I suspect that the key to the success of something like the simputer will the delivery systems that grow up around it, which are likely to be human powered.
When printed books first appeared, they were fabulously expensive (Roger Bacon, in his great buying spree, managed to find 24 books for his college library) but their value was so enormous that before long the idea spread throughout Europe. A book is transportable persistent storage, and a printed book has some guarantee of authenticity (you can see if it has been modified). The simputer is persistent storage and the grain dealer or the government official is unlikely to be able to modify the contents.
Re:UK seems a little better.
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 1
Well, partly I guess someone found it funny.
But if you look, although it is true about 45% of HSBC's assets are in Europe, more of its _profit_ in the last FY came from Hong Kong alone than all of Europe. I couldn't resist making the joke - based on the fact that Li Ka-ching is supposed to have a finger in so many pies that he profits on every financial transaction in Hong Kong, and that this thread is precisely about creaming off.
Re:UK seems a little better.
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 4, Funny
HSBC=Hong Kong and Shanghai banking corporation. As they say in Hong Kong, Ka-ching! That will teach round eyed foreign devil to use Chinese bank.
I completely agree, except I think you mean "accusing Tolkien or Rowling of _not_ being great character writers". And thank you for making the point that stating my opinion is not trolling.
Most of the replies are so anxious to defend Tolkien that they miss my original point, which was that LotR was always going to be the better basius for a Hollywood movie _because_ of its structure.
No, you are being labelled anti-semitic by anyone capable of seeing that you cannot blanket-label a population, whether it be Jewish, German, Vietnamese or American. People who demand the right to attack whole sectors of society or entire nationalities are not supporting freedom of speech, they are promoting falsehoods. I get as angry about the illegal occupation by settlers in Israel as anyone who hasn't actually had to live under it, but I have enough brain to know that this is about a particular set of people in Israel, not about the rest of Israelis or the rest of the worldwide Jewish community. If you do not, that makes you a bigot.
Well, it wasn't meant to be a troll, I just forgot that some people on/. seem to find a lot more depth in Tolkien than I do.
However, I take major issue with you over the suggestion that there are heavy theological issues in LOTR. The view of good and evil there is so simply black and white that even a Southern Baptist hellfire preacher might take pause. All the baddies start bad, proceed badly, and end bad. Everyone else plays a fixed part. This is the nature of epic and tragedy (in Greek tragedies, it is often the character's lack of flexibility or development that brings on the inevitable dreadful events.) Just to make the vestige of a point, consider Terry Pratchett's world which is now if anything as big and complex as LOTR. Compare Aragorn to Captain Carrot. Compare Gandalf and Saruman to the faculty of Unseen University, especially the development of characters like Ponder Stibbons. I am sure that by now Pratchett readers will see what I am on about. Now explain to me why Pratchett can handle characters who develop, interact, and furthermore develop as a result of that interaction (just as with heavyweight novelists like Anthony Powell ) in a complex imagined world, while Tolkien can't. I suspect the answer is because JRRT never really lived in the real world but was an Oxford academic steeped in Nordic myth. This qualified him to write an epic within that tradition, but it was not actually his tradition.
Of course Rowling does caricatures, she is writing books for children and there has to be simplification to get the point over. But they are caricatures of people we recognise, instead of abstract cardboard sheets labelled "Wisdom","Kingliness","Nasty piece of work","Evil bastard no redeeming features". In Rowling's world the good guys turn out to have had badly behaved pasts, the bad guys may not be beyond redemption, and some characters are morally confused.
My point, however, was intended to be serious. LOTR can be made into an epic film because the characters are 2-D. For the same reason, I suggest, you can make a good Old Testament biblical epic but you can't really make an epic out of the New Testament. As soon as characters start to get complex, you cannot have an epic. Books are different, because the timescales on which you read them are such that they can range from epic to up close and personal, whether it be Doctor Zhivago or (still my favorite) Moby-Dick.
Tolkien translates better to film because all his characters are so completely two-dimensional (Except bit parts like Aragorn who barely make one-dimensional). Rowling's main characters have at least some hint of an inner life, and film is too short to show this and the action. But Taco is surely right: the second book is the weakest (and the most childish in the wrong sense) and was always going to be the hardest to rescue in a film.
The point is that alpha particles are helium nuclei. That's a gas, folks. It builds up pressure inside the shield till it ruptures and lets the radioactive source out. Betas are electrons, and if you use a nickel isotope none of the products are gaseous, so no pressure buildup. You cannot use tritium because, even if you use a solid like calcium tritide, the decay product of tritium is helium 3 - which is a gas, and so builds up pressure again. Forget all this range in air stuff, it's good old Boyles Law.
I'd like to make the point that I am not taking an anti-US stand on this, I am making a point about claims to extraterritorial jurisdiction. It is a dangerous argument because, for instance, it can be used to justify the assassination of nationals of a state living abroad but upsetting the government by their criticism (define it as treason and the rest follows.)
However, and I am aware I may be taking this argument beyond the scope fo the usual Slashdot discussions, it is precisely the concept of "reaching into" a foreign server that I take issue with. The actual actions of the alleged cracker took place in the UK, not the US. What actually passed to the US? Nothing physical (the electrons in the wire do not cross the Atlantic). In effect, he asked the server to do something (passed information ) and it responded by doing it.
Now consider an analogous case. Suppose I phone up someone in Chicago and tell them I am their long-lost uncle from Tampa. The person is foolish enough to believe it. I then persuade them to remit me $250 in cash so that I can make it to Chicago, with some hard-luck story. Now, what crime have I committed? Possibly fraud. Where did I commit it? I suggest that most people would say "In Tampa", because that is where I was when I told all those lies, and that is where I actually received the money. What happened in Chicago was that someone behaved in a foolish and gullible manner - which is not itself a crime, though perhaps it should be.
In the same way, although the server was physically located in the US, the action of telling lies to it took place in the UK, and the "stolen" information was received in the UK. The server answered questions and responded to requests to perform certain actions. Had the server ignored the requests, nothing would have happened. The situation is quite different from, say, a terrorist missile launched from one country into another, where a physical destructive agency is passed over which does not rely on the cooperation of an agency in the attacked country.
Of course, IANAL-just someone who has lawyers in the family.
The present US govt. will not allow the extradition of US citizens by the ICC for the most serious crimes, war crimes, mass murder etc. So why should anyone allow extradition to the US for lesser crimes committed outside its jurisdiction? Either the Bush government recognises that all states and citizens have legitimate cross-border security interests, or it doesn't. At the moment, it recognises them in a very one-sided way (You can prosecute Milosevic, but not Kissinger.) It also has a habit of tearing up international treaties. So why should other states recognise treaties with the US? This is a no-brainer. If Bush wants to be isolationist, fine. If he wants to be internationalist, better. But saying "I can be isolationist in my interests but internationalist when I want something from you" - Tony Soprano government.
We all know that the US govt. will not sign up to the International Criminal Court, yet tries to extend US jurisdiction outside its borders. But this is ridiculous. If the actions took place in the EU, on what basis could there be extradition to the US? Extradition is in respect of a crime committed in the country requesting the extradition.
Basically what he did was sit at a keyboard typing and looking at a screen in, presumably, the UK. At what point was the crime committed? When he hit the return key, or when he viewed the resulting data? I would suggest that is the case, and any prosecution should take place in the UK - there is plenty of existing legislation. I am sure that someone will start bleating on about the theft of CPU cycles, or whatever. But this is extremely abstract. If the sites were non-secure, then presumably they had public access. If we are going to pass laws that people can only view websites as the designer intended, it may suit the kind of Government idiots that once threatened someone with prosecution for telling them they had an open SQL port with anonymous login on a military server, but is hardly going to promote good design (or be enforceable).
This is exactly the kind of case that makes the notion of a World Court reasonable. But I can just imagine his lawyers going to the EU Courts to argue that (a) the US is refusing to allow its citizens to be subject to the ICC, thus demonstrating that US law is not even-handed, (b) in the present climate of hysteria he could in any case not get a fair trial, (c) that US law is in conflict with EU human rights legislation.
It seems to me we have more to fear from the kind of idiots that go in for the kneejerk "This guy looked at a Govt. site! He is a terrorist!" reaction. The word for them is Stalinists, and the last thing we want is for the delightful security and political policies of the former Soviet Union to gain a foothold in the Republican Party.
This is embarrassing but true... The first day on site, I was given a pad and told to go find all of the tapes, make a list of the numbers and locations. It was a big department, but even so after 2 hours I still had a lot of gaps. Eventually I went back to my supervisor with the list, and explained that I couldn't find any tapes with an 8 or 9 in the numbers.
"That's because they're numbered in octal" she crowed. I can still remember feeling my ears go red - but I had learnt my way around on the first morning, which was the object of this bit of ritual humiliation of newbies.
The first computer I ever worked with looked like that. And worked like that. I feel even older than I did when I got up this morning.
Ah, the era when the computer operator got paid more than the currency trader. It's all been downhill since. Where did we go wrong? (The answer, obviously, is letting users have Windows.)
Slashdot Mirror
Did I miss something there?
Yes, I was overtaken by one of those guys having fun a few years back. I was doing a nice safe 130 and he was doing what looked like 220+ (Carrera.) Thirty k down the road I found out what it looks like when a Carrera goes under a Polish truck. The truck had taken itself off the carriageway after the collision and dragged the remains of the car under it, though I doubt the Porsche driver was terribly interested by that time. That and a few other remains I've seen on the autobahns helps me to prefer planes and TGVs when I need to go somewhere quickly. And I think I'd take my chances with terrorists on a maglev ahead of Chinese taxi drivers any day.
Now as I understand it, to have a free market transparency of information is needed, i.e. you cannot have a free market if access to market information is selectively denied to people. If the buggy whip makers can prevent the spread of information about Mr. Ford's new toy, that is not a free market. So the one law that must be enforced to protect market economies is the law of freedom of information, and it is this one that the Chinese are breaking.
Amnesty is peeved because the Chinese are preventing the rest of the world from learning that they have a scumbag government, scumbag bureaucracy, and scumbag rural life. A good capitalist might be equally peeved that the Chinese are trying to prevent the rest of the world learning things that might downgrade China's investment worthiness, putting on a face about supporting capitalism while in private allowing corrupt officials to steal from corporations. (You can see Chinese censorship as being equivalent to Enron's trying to keep secret the true nature of its operations and accounting.) One way of doing this is preventing the Chinese from learning about ways of disseminating that information.
To put it another way, the right of one corporation to make a profit by selling censorware has to be balanced against the greater interest of the market economy in not allowing people to use such censorship.
However, I found it useful if only for one part, where they talk about ontology construction. If you read it, it looks just like a systems analysis job slightly rephrased. Find out what the entities are, establish the relationships between entities, logicalise, rationalise, and finally populate the resulting structures. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
It looks to my simple and fast ageing mind as if we end up with something like a DFD in which data stores are replaced by sets and data flows are replaced by relationships, and I have no idea at all what happens with processes. Having done a bit of KB work in the late 80s and then failed totally to keep up with the field, I'd like to know more at a practical level, but without having to understand medical applications. Anybody got any good links?
For some industrial control jobs, something like a PDP-8 or PDP-11 is in many ways ideal because you can see everything that goes on. It is actually possible for one person to understand the hardware, the microcode, and every single bit of the software. For me, that is the great pleasure of small embedded designs. I really think it would be good to have a teaching tool for CS that actually meant that the student could do a project and have a complete overview of the entire thing in this way. I'm far from knocking progress, but there are comments on this thread that are a bit about the kind of alienation we have now between hardware and software - most people have no real idea at all what the hardware does, and use terms like "cache" without even stopping to think about what is going on. So yes, let's have someone build an understandable modern PDP-8. It's less weird than the RCA1802 and easier to get your head around than the 8080.
50% of the planets we've actually checked out are inhabited.
The other 50% have been visited by human beings who have left artefacts behind
So why do we expect the rest of the universe, including the non-large rocky bits,to be life-free?
...Did I say our application was Windows-based? For all you know, it's servlet-based Java with MySQL backend and a number of Swing classes. Which in fact it is, and it doesn't care what desktop it runs on.
Gibbon wrote his history in a day when we knew far less about the "Barbarians" than we do now, far less about the economics of the Roman Empire. The result was he had to construct a story, one in which (in fact) Christianity is the villain bringing the Empire into eventual decline. He may be right about this, I suspect it's a gross oversimplification, but whatever, when he actually wrote it, it was a story.
And what about Moby-Dick? Does all the technical stuff about whale-hunting in the mid-nineteenth century make it a solid factual read, or is it in fact an escapist account of adventures in a world alien to almost all its readers, and so a kind of science fiction?
Just because it's a troll, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve a response.
A major objection for the average office worker to both Mac OS and Linux is the need to learn new ways of doing things, and the things they do not want to have to learn to do are often amazingly trivial. (Only this morning I had to show a white collar professional how to turn a Mac on, and explain that the reason IE didn't start immediately was because the double click interval on this particular machine was set quite short and a faster double click was needed.)
The constant drive for change on the Windows desktop could, paradoxically, reduce market share if it perceived that each new version of Windows is going to need as big a learning curve as switching. One for Apple and KDE to exploit?
I'd just like to know when the dogs decided that the humans were going to win, so it was worth becoming domesticated...or did they just hang around people thinking "They're bigger, the hyenas will eat them first?"
I know that, faced with a giant bone-crunching hyena, our dogs would bravely hide behind me and wait to see what happened next.
No, a libertarian is a very particular kind of US right-wing liberal. Libertarians believe that their personal freedom is more important than things like equality of opportunity, and have a restricted notion of what constitutes harm to other people (basically they tend to have the right-wing extreme insistence on property rights.)
Right wingers try to label these causes "liberal" because they want to force through their agenda - which is to let you send up rockets and keep guns, but to stop you from having:
- Extra-marital sex
- Non-missionary-position sex
- Gay sex
- Mood altering substances other than alcohol and tobacco
And from:- Questioning US foreign policy
- Questioning the right of people to run the govt. because they have a lot of money
- Asking awkward questions, full stop.
Trying to get people to confuse liberalism with left wing social activism is a well tested Republican technique.Information is the most major human resource- even food and shelter are dependent on the ability to know where food can be found and how to build shelters using available materials. Everyone is disempowered by lack of information, whether it is an Indian peasant about to be screwed on harvest prices because he hasn't heard about the shortages, or the employee who doesn't know that the CEO is gambling away the company. A device like the simputer could be used to transport information from a PC in a village with electricity to one without, and transport information and queries back again. The disadvantage of radio is that it supplies generic information and the output is not searchable - villagers cannot spend all their time listening to radio hoping for important information.
I suspect that the key to the success of something like the simputer will the delivery systems that grow up around it, which are likely to be human powered.
When printed books first appeared, they were fabulously expensive (Roger Bacon, in his great buying spree, managed to find 24 books for his college library) but their value was so enormous that before long the idea spread throughout Europe. A book is transportable persistent storage, and a printed book has some guarantee of authenticity (you can see if it has been modified). The simputer is persistent storage and the grain dealer or the government official is unlikely to be able to modify the contents.
But if you look, although it is true about 45% of HSBC's assets are in Europe, more of its _profit_ in the last FY came from Hong Kong alone than all of Europe. I couldn't resist making the joke - based on the fact that Li Ka-ching is supposed to have a finger in so many pies that he profits on every financial transaction in Hong Kong, and that this thread is precisely about creaming off.
HSBC=Hong Kong and Shanghai banking corporation. As they say in Hong Kong, Ka-ching! That will teach round eyed foreign devil to use Chinese bank.
Most of the replies are so anxious to defend Tolkien that they miss my original point, which was that LotR was always going to be the better basius for a Hollywood movie _because_ of its structure.
No, you are being labelled anti-semitic by anyone capable of seeing that you cannot blanket-label a population, whether it be Jewish, German, Vietnamese or American. People who demand the right to attack whole sectors of society or entire nationalities are not supporting freedom of speech, they are promoting falsehoods. I get as angry about the illegal occupation by settlers in Israel as anyone who hasn't actually had to live under it, but I have enough brain to know that this is about a particular set of people in Israel, not about the rest of Israelis or the rest of the worldwide Jewish community. If you do not, that makes you a bigot.
However, I take major issue with you over the suggestion that there are heavy theological issues in LOTR. The view of good and evil there is so simply black and white that even a Southern Baptist hellfire preacher might take pause. All the baddies start bad, proceed badly, and end bad. Everyone else plays a fixed part. This is the nature of epic and tragedy (in Greek tragedies, it is often the character's lack of flexibility or development that brings on the inevitable dreadful events.) Just to make the vestige of a point, consider Terry Pratchett's world which is now if anything as big and complex as LOTR. Compare Aragorn to Captain Carrot. Compare Gandalf and Saruman to the faculty of Unseen University, especially the development of characters like Ponder Stibbons. I am sure that by now Pratchett readers will see what I am on about. Now explain to me why Pratchett can handle characters who develop, interact, and furthermore develop as a result of that interaction (just as with heavyweight novelists like Anthony Powell ) in a complex imagined world, while Tolkien can't. I suspect the answer is because JRRT never really lived in the real world but was an Oxford academic steeped in Nordic myth. This qualified him to write an epic within that tradition, but it was not actually his tradition.
Of course Rowling does caricatures, she is writing books for children and there has to be simplification to get the point over. But they are caricatures of people we recognise, instead of abstract cardboard sheets labelled "Wisdom","Kingliness","Nasty piece of work","Evil bastard no redeeming features". In Rowling's world the good guys turn out to have had badly behaved pasts, the bad guys may not be beyond redemption, and some characters are morally confused.
My point, however, was intended to be serious. LOTR can be made into an epic film because the characters are 2-D. For the same reason, I suggest, you can make a good Old Testament biblical epic but you can't really make an epic out of the New Testament. As soon as characters start to get complex, you cannot have an epic. Books are different, because the timescales on which you read them are such that they can range from epic to up close and personal, whether it be Doctor Zhivago or (still my favorite) Moby-Dick.
Tolkien translates better to film because all his characters are so completely two-dimensional (Except bit parts like Aragorn who barely make one-dimensional). Rowling's main characters have at least some hint of an inner life, and film is too short to show this and the action. But Taco is surely right: the second book is the weakest (and the most childish in the wrong sense) and was always going to be the hardest to rescue in a film.
The point is that alpha particles are helium nuclei. That's a gas, folks. It builds up pressure inside the shield till it ruptures and lets the radioactive source out. Betas are electrons, and if you use a nickel isotope none of the products are gaseous, so no pressure buildup. You cannot use tritium because, even if you use a solid like calcium tritide, the decay product of tritium is helium 3 - which is a gas, and so builds up pressure again. Forget all this range in air stuff, it's good old Boyles Law.
However, and I am aware I may be taking this argument beyond the scope fo the usual Slashdot discussions, it is precisely the concept of "reaching into" a foreign server that I take issue with. The actual actions of the alleged cracker took place in the UK, not the US. What actually passed to the US? Nothing physical (the electrons in the wire do not cross the Atlantic). In effect, he asked the server to do something (passed information ) and it responded by doing it.
Now consider an analogous case. Suppose I phone up someone in Chicago and tell them I am their long-lost uncle from Tampa. The person is foolish enough to believe it. I then persuade them to remit me $250 in cash so that I can make it to Chicago, with some hard-luck story. Now, what crime have I committed? Possibly fraud. Where did I commit it? I suggest that most people would say "In Tampa", because that is where I was when I told all those lies, and that is where I actually received the money. What happened in Chicago was that someone behaved in a foolish and gullible manner - which is not itself a crime, though perhaps it should be.
In the same way, although the server was physically located in the US, the action of telling lies to it took place in the UK, and the "stolen" information was received in the UK. The server answered questions and responded to requests to perform certain actions. Had the server ignored the requests, nothing would have happened. The situation is quite different from, say, a terrorist missile launched from one country into another, where a physical destructive agency is passed over which does not rely on the cooperation of an agency in the attacked country.
Of course, IANAL-just someone who has lawyers in the family.
The present US govt. will not allow the extradition of US citizens by the ICC for the most serious crimes, war crimes, mass murder etc. So why should anyone allow extradition to the US for lesser crimes committed outside its jurisdiction? Either the Bush government recognises that all states and citizens have legitimate cross-border security interests, or it doesn't. At the moment, it recognises them in a very one-sided way (You can prosecute Milosevic, but not Kissinger.) It also has a habit of tearing up international treaties. So why should other states recognise treaties with the US? This is a no-brainer. If Bush wants to be isolationist, fine. If he wants to be internationalist, better. But saying "I can be isolationist in my interests but internationalist when I want something from you" - Tony Soprano government.
Basically what he did was sit at a keyboard typing and looking at a screen in, presumably, the UK. At what point was the crime committed? When he hit the return key, or when he viewed the resulting data? I would suggest that is the case, and any prosecution should take place in the UK - there is plenty of existing legislation.
I am sure that someone will start bleating on about the theft of CPU cycles, or whatever. But this is extremely abstract. If the sites were non-secure, then presumably they had public access. If we are going to pass laws that people can only view websites as the designer intended, it may suit the kind of Government idiots that once threatened someone with prosecution for telling them they had an open SQL port with anonymous login on a military server, but is hardly going to promote good design (or be enforceable).
This is exactly the kind of case that makes the notion of a World Court reasonable. But I can just imagine his lawyers going to the EU Courts to argue that (a) the US is refusing to allow its citizens to be subject to the ICC, thus demonstrating that US law is not even-handed, (b) in the present climate of hysteria he could in any case not get a fair trial, (c) that US law is in conflict with EU human rights legislation.
It seems to me we have more to fear from the kind of idiots that go in for the kneejerk "This guy looked at a Govt. site! He is a terrorist!" reaction. The word for them is Stalinists, and the last thing we want is for the delightful security and political policies of the former Soviet Union to gain a foothold in the Republican Party.
The first day on site, I was given a pad and told to go find all of the tapes, make a list of the numbers and locations. It was a big department, but even so after 2 hours I still had a lot of gaps. Eventually I went back to my supervisor with the list, and explained that I couldn't find any tapes with an 8 or 9 in the numbers.
"That's because they're numbered in octal" she crowed. I can still remember feeling my ears go red - but I had learnt my way around on the first morning, which was the object of this bit of ritual humiliation of newbies.
Ah, the era when the computer operator got paid more than the currency trader. It's all been downhill since. Where did we go wrong? (The answer, obviously, is letting users have Windows.)