The ABB-installed high voltage line in Thailand actually had fibre running through a conductor when it was installed in the early 90s. It's the safest place, inside a metal cable. If the electricity industry had really been forward thinking, they might now be in a position to eat the telco's lunches. But too many industries thought the Internet would be a passing geek fad.
I graduated long ago before internships were even thought of. Coming from a poor background but having gotten into a respectable university, I found I was able to talk my way into quite good summer jobs. It was nice to be sitting in the QA department analysing returns and manufacturing defects using a mechanical calculator and a slide rule while the other vacation workers were engaged in manual labor (and it paid better), but I reckon the year of summers I spent in paid work taught me as much as a year of college, and certainly made me more employable. The strange thing was that when I graduated I didn't even apply to the company that had employed me, partly because I wanted to see a bit more of the world, and partly because, I think, I regarded the work I had done there as being part of my education, not part of my career.
Something tells me Tony Hoyle has never worked with real time systems. I have. A number of designers did not apparently know that 2000 was divisible by 400 and so was a Leap Year.
Although some of the things that _could_ and probably would have happened (buildings refusing access, elevators sticking, water systems releasing sewage into tidal rivers at low tide rather than high tide, traffic light patterns out of sync, flow of funds being disrupted) were of themselves non-fatal, the cumulative effects could have been very severe. I only have to look at the effect on my commute if the next day is a public holiday; the disruption caused by the slight change in driving patterns is out of all proportion to the traffic changes. The fact is, we are a lot less adaptable than we like to think.
The tsunami was a relatively small scale event, affecting mainly small islands and long coastlines, but the backup effects (refugees, lack of drinkable water, damage to communication networks, the need to divert resources and the difficulty of doing so) will doubtless result in many more people dying over time. In the same way, I suspect that if we had done nothing about Y2K, the cumulative result of a lot of small disruptions would actually have resulted in major economic loss and many people dying.
Why have you posted as AC? Have you not the courage of your convictions?
As far as I am aware, there was no Roman Empire in 123BCE. There was a Republic. Julius Caesar was assassinated around 44BCE, marking the start of the generally accepted Imperial period.
In fact, however, I was merely trying to make a point about the way the British Honors System is not anhistoric in using the title of "Knight" to recognise commercial success.
Note I'm not accusing you of having a humor bypass because my humor may be too feeble to come over, but the entire piece was intended as a joke.
I have never actually seen an episode of Yes Minister, though I did see a brief clip once. If my views are unoriginal, it is because a substantial number of people (including, I am sure, others who like myself have had direct contact with the British Establishment) share them.
Since the Roman Empire, the order of Knights has really been more about commerce and banking than military activity. (In fact, in the Roman Empire, financially embarrassed senators would occasionally ask to be downgraded to Knights so they could engage in trade.) The British Empire followed the Roman Empire in this regard, awarding knighthoods mainly to entrepeneurs and businessmen. Sir Francis Drake was knighted for his interesting take on maritime commerce - acquiring Spanish ships without paying for them.
The Order of the British Empire is a completely fictitious society invented to satisfy people who want impressive titles, without really giving them anything. The worthy people - the people who have done jobs nobody else wants to do for years - get the lowest ranks (OBE,MBE). The flashy people get the right to be called Dame or Sir, and the lower ranks exist so that the higher titles are not too obviously a complete joke. You can't be a commander if you have nobody to command, though that doesn't stop those terrorist "liberation armies" that seem to have no rank below colonel.
The only parts of the Honors System that are actually worth having are:
Real peerages (e.g. Lord Muck of Bradford): Allow you to spend your time in superior London hotel and get paid for it. Order of the Bath (not what it sounds like) Order of St Michael and St George - what civil servants get for creating the maximum bureaucratic chaos, and divided into 3 levels, viz.
CMG (Call Me God)
KCMG (Kindly Call Me God)
GCMG (God Calls Me God)
Finally, I have to point out that the real pinnacle of English aristocracy is to have a real, ancient and very important title and then NOT USE IT or even give it up. The left-wing parliamentarian Tony Benn, whose family have held the title of Lord Stansgate for many years till he renounced it, is an example of this tendency. The problem is that there is no official register of People Offered an Honor Who Refused It, and letting it be known that this has happened rather defeats the whole "I am above fancy titles" thing.
I do not understand why so many US science fiction writers seem to think that Empires are such a good idea. All they do is go into decline, leaving behind a flotsam of empty titles and people playing games in silly uniforms.
I have often thought that what is needed is a law that requires the installation of _any_ executable on a computer to be subject to the following restraints:
Uninstall information must be provided at the point of installation. This can be on the packaging of boxed software, or there must be a pointer to an uninstall file, giving its name and location, at the point of install. The uninstall information must be retained on the computer after the installation process.
No software whatever may install itself without an installation dialog giving the owner of the computer the option not to carry out the install. This dialog must require a second confirmation of installation. The dialog must specify the implications of not installing, i.e. an ISP might decline to provide service if a particular monitoring program is not installed. The dialog must not use any kind of threat or emotive language but must be strictly factual. Dialogs must consist of clear and legible text and buttons which spell out clearly their function. Check boxes, radio buttons or click through text are not permitted.
Any program which communicates with other resources over a network must declare exactly what network resources it uses, and with what resources it will connect. This declaration can be on packaging, or as part of a file which is clearly labeled and can be read before or during the installation process.
I think all reputable software meets or exceeds this standard nowadays, so let us make it mandatory and make it a criminal offense to create, publish or supply software which does not comply. Although this will not stop the creators of adware, spyware and malware, it would provide a consistent offense with which to charge them.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing surely depends on which aspects of Cuba Chavez wants to imitate. If he wants state repression and political prisoners, it will be an embarrassment for FOSS (but it won't go anywhere because government use of FOSS will not flourish in that climate.) But if he wants to imitate the good bits of Cuba - a society with higher life expectancy and literacy than most of the Caribbean must have some good points - and encourage self reliance and ingenious solutions to the problems of 3rd world countries, it could be a success story.
Personally I suspect Chavez says most of it for effect. He obviously enjoys pissing off the Yanquis. Once upon a time, when the UK had been largely isolated from European in-fighting, the English enjoyed pissing off the Continentals by mocking their political theories and their habits. It was a way of relieving the tension of living next to powerful neighbors who might turn nasty at any moment.
Unfortunately the US has a remarkable degree of paranoia about any country that turns even mildly pink in what it sees as its own backyard. The result has been gross overreaction in places like Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba and, most ludicrously of all, Grenada. It's not surprising that the poor people of the South can easily be made to see the US as the enemy. I hope that the FOSS movement can remain sufficiently politically neutral that it is seen as favoring no particular economic model, but that it will flourish in any economy where independent thought and individual cooperation are valued. The strong German contribution to FOSS, along with the input from the former USSR/Warsaw Pact bloc, suggests that this may well happen. In the meantime, let's not confuse a noisy politician with a country.
Apart from the fact that the article referenced seems to refer to a flash boiler - which is not novel - steam turbines have problems all their own. They do not scale downwards well. It's possible to build very big, efficient steam turbines - that is how nuclear power stations actually drive generators, after all - but the components are smaller than those of reciprocating engines. The result is that as turbines scale downwards, the problems of heat losses, leakage past seals, bearing sizes and reliable construction become more acute than they do with reciprocating engines. People constantly complain that the reciprocating IC engine is inherently a bad idea, but we use reciprocating locomotion rather than rotary and it works well for us. If mother Evolution likes it, who are we to argue?
I realise that people have to try to make these things work, but the problems shouldn't be underestimated. One major practical problem is that steam turbines require a supply of distilled water, and that even small amounts of leakage of steam cause replenishment headaches. (There are stories, with the old steam turbine ships, of ships running out of water because the steam leakage in the engine room prevented staff from entering it to fix problems with the still. )
I'm sure someone will suggest that a hydrogen fueled turbine could use its waste water, but that water will be contaminated and require treatment.
I believe myself that in the end we will have to rethink the whole concept of individual transport, because most of the alternative supplies of energy to oil, like nuclear or solar power, are best suited to electrical distribution system and these favor railways or monorails. Nuclear power also better suits marine transport than aircraft, because it is perfectly possible to design safe nuclear powered ships. All of these attempts to keep the motor car going may just ultimately be dead ends.
The two projects appear to be unconnected except that they are both happening in a part of the world which is not perhaps best known for its research institutes. It looks like a silly season attempt to get some mindshare. Oh well, let's try some more:
Toshiba makes notebook computers
Toshiba researches small fusion reactors
Conclusion: nuclear notebooks could {fill in your own fantasy here.}
Thrust II went supersonic on land
Thrust II was built in England
Soon the British will be driving around in supersonic cars.
Linux was first developed in Finland
The Finns are famous for saunas
The next generation of Linux will require a periodic sauna in order to function with peak efficiency
Michael Faraday was a 19th century experimenter who worked for the Royal Institution in London. Unfortunately many of the members were extremely eccentric and tended to throw rotten fruit at lecturers they did not approve of. Faraday solved this problem by surrounding the lecturer's podium with a cage of fine brass mesh, through which the lecturer could be seen but which repelled the rotten fruit. Glass was no good because the fruit stuck to it, obscuring the view.
Later, of course, Faraday discovered that the cage prevented electromagnetic waves with wavelengths greater than a quarter of the mesh size from escaping, and it is in this form that it has entered technical terminology.
This information brought to you by the Department for the Dissemination of Less than Reliable Data.
This thing needs either a P-M or an AMD64 DTR. It does not need socket 478. Why equip it with the most unsuitable processor for its intended application - a mistake, of course, that Apple would never make.
Yet another environmentally hostile product. Apart from the disposal (I guess the calcium oxide bit is fine for landfill but that the incineration companies wouldn't like it) the conversion efficiency must be awful. Coffee is a simple, low-energy-consuming, long-life stuff that is intended to taste interesting and, depending on your perspective, ruin the lives of lots of people in the 3rd world or provide them with export trade opportunities. It isn't intended to be the bit of brown gunk that provides an excuse for unnecessary technology.
Far more useful, IMHO, would be a little heat exchanger pot linked to a car's coolant circulation and holding a removable mug that you could use to keep a small supply of hot water. People experimented with this sort of thing back in the 20s (one large auto even had a small sink in the trunk so the chauffeur could wash his hands after going repair work) but it never caught on. Works fine in boats, why not cars?
Will have seen it is actually very interesting. HP has if anything gone backwards slightly, whereas Epson's Photo 800 is more or less capable of producing commercial quality print. It has the usual CMYK, pure colors, both matt and gloss black, and machine varnish. Used with Photoshop, it should be capable of giving archival color prints which are dodged, burned and generally improved as much as you could want, and in reality will be cheaper than doing it at home. I for one am very glad that I disposed of all my enlarging kit a few years back, because the cost of high quality scanning and printing is now less than even an entry level color enlarging kit, and with none of those unpleasant chemicals.
The article points out that for serious colour printing, cheap ink is a mistake (and it also lets you know which OEMs are supplying inferior ink.)
I don't have a problem with PcPro looking to recover the cost of some expensive research, and I don't have a problem with paying for OEM ink if it means my great-great-grandchildren will know what their ancestors looked like.
BTW, our lab is currently testing the Kyocera C5016 colour laser printer. If you want A4/letter in reasonable volume, with really rather good color and very cheap consumables, this is the one to go for. Printing black should be as cheap as on an ordinary mono laser, color is a fraction the cost of the HP equivalents. And I'm not even being paid to say this...
Someone made a good point here that perhaps beneits from amplifying.
The biggest short term win in TCO will come when the organisation is of such a size and complexity that it really only needs 1(one) committed open systems evangelist to drive through change. What slows down change in most organisations is the fact that most of the workers (and managers...) are not hugely intelligent - even in IT - and oppose anything that involves change or learning.
If this is right, OSS will only really start to gain momentum where smaller companies which are adopters gain a competitive advantage that enables them to grow faster than the competition. Although IT is only a few percent of the business, a large saving in IT can make a considerable difference to the net profit - but it needs to be a large saving as a percentage of IT costs to make a real impact.
This is good news for call centres and bad news for heavy industry. It would be a pity if OSS is associated in most people's minds with the modern version of cotton picking rather than high tech, but that could be the outcome.
Remember, folks, the technology and science of indigenous peoples isn't real until it has been properly rediscovered by Westerners. In fact, indigenous peoples don't actually exist until the West discovers them and writes coffee-table books about them.
OK this is a cheap jibe, and these houses do look nice, but most cultures have rather good traditional building styles based on local materials, and they are under threat mainly from so-called architects, and the heritage industry which wants to preserve them as they were and not allow them to be adapted to modern conditions. In fact, I have just had my house refaced and new ashlars and lintel on the front door using materials dug up a few miles away, while down the road you can see modern houses being put up with inferior stuff that has probably moved several hundred miles.
This guy may actually be doing a good job, but as others have said, it's not as if he invented doing things this way.
Isn't the whole point that this would not be possible if the house had a completely fair wheel? It could not be beyond the wit of engineering to produce a roulette wheel whose outcome, if not random, had such a small deviation from randomness that it would take a very long time to detect it. In any case, provided the non-randomness is below a quite high level, players will lose in the long run. They will lose faster in the US, land of the double-zero, but they will still lose.
If it is possible to win by detecting non-randomness then the wheel, or the process for using it, is bent.
My main objection to casinos is not that they provide a place for gambling - people will do this, and it is probably better that they do this in a way subject to some sort of regulation - but that reported incidents suggest they do not run fair games, and that the stacking of the odds on e.g. fruit machines is probably intended to fuel gambling addiction. It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry. If the casino gets caught by someone using statistical analysis, the law should not protect them from their own dishonesty.
In being flippant (and I never expected to be moderated up...) I was unintentionally unfair to Plaid Cymru. Perhaps I should make it clear that:
I'm in favor of Welsh Devolution (and I have numerous relatives in South Wales)
I think rich Londoners buying houses and driving out locals is inexcusable. Burning down houses is wrong, but so is destroying communities.
And, now Sinn Fein has almost completed turned into a legitimate political movement, I hope NI gets its independence from the UK and the likes of Ian Paisley are consigned to the dustbin of history.
I wonder if this Paillard is any relation to the Paillard in Paillard-Bolex. For those who aren't as old as me, Paillard used to make the tiny short focus lenses used in 8mm and 16mm cine cameras. Even I can barely remember these, but I had three of them during the 1970s and they were real geek technology of the time.(One was "overclocked" to 100fps to do slow motion shots.) It would be nice if it is the same family and still working on this kind of technology.
Plaid to Paisley? That's worrying. Plaid Cymru just burns down the houses of the English settlers, but the Rev. Ian Paisley shouts stupid things really really loudly.
So where is that on the Fonda-Rumsfeld threat scale?
Load Java. Load actual Star Office rather than OO (OK it's a few $$). Print off the GPL, the Sun Java license, the Star Office license and any others you like. Put them in a neat file binder with the computer asset number on the front (or something.)I know you won't like this bit, but stick a great big Sun logo for a screen background. Make sure the "Grants you a....license" bit is visible in nice big letters on your front page. Stick it by computer.
Don't explain. But if there are any queries, just say "Well, this is a Sun workstation. You'll have heard of them. surely you have licenses like these for all the other PCs?"
The people who go on about military procurement are clearly all desk pilots. If the armed forces had to wait for procurement to solve problems, the war would be long over before anything happened. Remember, defense departments are always fighting the last war.
One senior military analyst, whose job was precisely to find out why equipment did not perform as expected, described it to me as major's logic and sergeant's logic. The Major says, we do it by the book. The patrol goes out and the sergeant says, we'll do it this way, lads, because the official way doesn't fucking work. Then he reports back to the major that the mission was accomplished and everything went by the book. And the major, if he wants to be a colonel, doesn't ask stupid questions. The hard bit is to get through the official chain of command wall to find out what really happens on the ground, investigate the good bits, and turn them into an official solution.
Faced with a choice between certainly getting killed and trying something that might save you, armed forces everywhere become inventive. People bleating on about "No RF near potential booby traps" miss the point. The people on the ground are likely to have a pretty good idea of enemy capability. They might be wrong, occasionally, but that is better than having being dead most of the time. War is not a computer game, and it is not played according to neat rules by any of the sides involved. The hard bit is to strike the right balance between discipline and flexibility, and this must change from conflict to conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
The ABB-installed high voltage line in Thailand actually had fibre running through a conductor when it was installed in the early 90s. It's the safest place, inside a metal cable. If the electricity industry had really been forward thinking, they might now be in a position to eat the telco's lunches. But too many industries thought the Internet would be a passing geek fad.
I graduated long ago before internships were even thought of. Coming from a poor background but having gotten into a respectable university, I found I was able to talk my way into quite good summer jobs. It was nice to be sitting in the QA department analysing returns and manufacturing defects using a mechanical calculator and a slide rule while the other vacation workers were engaged in manual labor (and it paid better), but I reckon the year of summers I spent in paid work taught me as much as a year of college, and certainly made me more employable. The strange thing was that when I graduated I didn't even apply to the company that had employed me, partly because I wanted to see a bit more of the world, and partly because, I think, I regarded the work I had done there as being part of my education, not part of my career.
Something tells me Tony Hoyle has never worked with real time systems. I have. A number of designers did not apparently know that 2000 was divisible by 400 and so was a Leap Year.
The tsunami was a relatively small scale event, affecting mainly small islands and long coastlines, but the backup effects (refugees, lack of drinkable water, damage to communication networks, the need to divert resources and the difficulty of doing so) will doubtless result in many more people dying over time. In the same way, I suspect that if we had done nothing about Y2K, the cumulative result of a lot of small disruptions would actually have resulted in major economic loss and many people dying.
As far as I am aware, there was no Roman Empire in 123BCE. There was a Republic. Julius Caesar was assassinated around 44BCE, marking the start of the generally accepted Imperial period.
In fact, however, I was merely trying to make a point about the way the British Honors System is not anhistoric in using the title of "Knight" to recognise commercial success.
Note I'm not accusing you of having a humor bypass because my humor may be too feeble to come over, but the entire piece was intended as a joke.
I have never actually seen an episode of Yes Minister, though I did see a brief clip once. If my views are unoriginal, it is because a substantial number of people (including, I am sure, others who like myself have had direct contact with the British Establishment) share them.
The Order of the British Empire is a completely fictitious society invented to satisfy people who want impressive titles, without really giving them anything. The worthy people - the people who have done jobs nobody else wants to do for years - get the lowest ranks (OBE,MBE). The flashy people get the right to be called Dame or Sir, and the lower ranks exist so that the higher titles are not too obviously a complete joke. You can't be a commander if you have nobody to command, though that doesn't stop those terrorist "liberation armies" that seem to have no rank below colonel.
The only parts of the Honors System that are actually worth having are:
Real peerages (e.g. Lord Muck of Bradford): Allow you to spend your time in superior London hotel and get paid for it.
Order of the Bath (not what it sounds like)
Order of St Michael and St George - what civil servants get for creating the maximum bureaucratic chaos, and divided into 3 levels, viz.
CMG (Call Me God)
KCMG (Kindly Call Me God)
GCMG (God Calls Me God)
Finally, I have to point out that the real pinnacle of English aristocracy is to have a real, ancient and very important title and then NOT USE IT or even give it up. The left-wing parliamentarian Tony Benn, whose family have held the title of Lord Stansgate for many years till he renounced it, is an example of this tendency. The problem is that there is no official register of People Offered an Honor Who Refused It, and letting it be known that this has happened rather defeats the whole "I am above fancy titles" thing.
I do not understand why so many US science fiction writers seem to think that Empires are such a good idea. All they do is go into decline, leaving behind a flotsam of empty titles and people playing games in silly uniforms.
Uninstall information must be provided at the point of installation. This can be on the packaging of boxed software, or there must be a pointer to an uninstall file, giving its name and location, at the point of install. The uninstall information must be retained on the computer after the installation process.
No software whatever may install itself without an installation dialog giving the owner of the computer the option not to carry out the install. This dialog must require a second confirmation of installation. The dialog must specify the implications of not installing, i.e. an ISP might decline to provide service if a particular monitoring program is not installed. The dialog must not use any kind of threat or emotive language but must be strictly factual. Dialogs must consist of clear and legible text and buttons which spell out clearly their function. Check boxes, radio buttons or click through text are not permitted.
Any program which communicates with other resources over a network must declare exactly what network resources it uses, and with what resources it will connect. This declaration can be on packaging, or as part of a file which is clearly labeled and can be read before or during the installation process.
I think all reputable software meets or exceeds this standard nowadays, so let us make it mandatory and make it a criminal offense to create, publish or supply software which does not comply. Although this will not stop the creators of adware, spyware and malware, it would provide a consistent offense with which to charge them.
Personally I suspect Chavez says most of it for effect. He obviously enjoys pissing off the Yanquis. Once upon a time, when the UK had been largely isolated from European in-fighting, the English enjoyed pissing off the Continentals by mocking their political theories and their habits. It was a way of relieving the tension of living next to powerful neighbors who might turn nasty at any moment.
Unfortunately the US has a remarkable degree of paranoia about any country that turns even mildly pink in what it sees as its own backyard. The result has been gross overreaction in places like Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba and, most ludicrously of all, Grenada. It's not surprising that the poor people of the South can easily be made to see the US as the enemy. I hope that the FOSS movement can remain sufficiently politically neutral that it is seen as favoring no particular economic model, but that it will flourish in any economy where independent thought and individual cooperation are valued. The strong German contribution to FOSS, along with the input from the former USSR/Warsaw Pact bloc, suggests that this may well happen. In the meantime, let's not confuse a noisy politician with a country.
I realise that people have to try to make these things work, but the problems shouldn't be underestimated. One major practical problem is that steam turbines require a supply of distilled water, and that even small amounts of leakage of steam cause replenishment headaches. (There are stories, with the old steam turbine ships, of ships running out of water because the steam leakage in the engine room prevented staff from entering it to fix problems with the still. )
I'm sure someone will suggest that a hydrogen fueled turbine could use its waste water, but that water will be contaminated and require treatment.
I believe myself that in the end we will have to rethink the whole concept of individual transport, because most of the alternative supplies of energy to oil, like nuclear or solar power, are best suited to electrical distribution system and these favor railways or monorails. Nuclear power also better suits marine transport than aircraft, because it is perfectly possible to design safe nuclear powered ships. All of these attempts to keep the motor car going may just ultimately be dead ends.
Toshiba makes notebook computers
Toshiba researches small fusion reactors
Conclusion: nuclear notebooks could {fill in your own fantasy here.}
Thrust II went supersonic on land
Thrust II was built in England
Soon the British will be driving around in supersonic cars.
Linux was first developed in Finland
The Finns are famous for saunas
The next generation of Linux will require a periodic sauna in order to function with peak efficiency
I've lost interest in this now.
Later, of course, Faraday discovered that the cage prevented electromagnetic waves with wavelengths greater than a quarter of the mesh size from escaping, and it is in this form that it has entered technical terminology.
This information brought to you by the Department for the Dissemination of Less than Reliable Data.
This thing needs either a P-M or an AMD64 DTR. It does not need socket 478. Why equip it with the most unsuitable processor for its intended application - a mistake, of course, that Apple would never make.
Far more useful, IMHO, would be a little heat exchanger pot linked to a car's coolant circulation and holding a removable mug that you could use to keep a small supply of hot water. People experimented with this sort of thing back in the 20s (one large auto even had a small sink in the trunk so the chauffeur could wash his hands after going repair work) but it never caught on. Works fine in boats, why not cars?
The article points out that for serious colour printing, cheap ink is a mistake (and it also lets you know which OEMs are supplying inferior ink.)
I don't have a problem with PcPro looking to recover the cost of some expensive research, and I don't have a problem with paying for OEM ink if it means my great-great-grandchildren will know what their ancestors looked like.
BTW, our lab is currently testing the Kyocera C5016 colour laser printer. If you want A4/letter in reasonable volume, with really rather good color and very cheap consumables, this is the one to go for. Printing black should be as cheap as on an ordinary mono laser, color is a fraction the cost of the HP equivalents. And I'm not even being paid to say this...
The biggest short term win in TCO will come when the organisation is of such a size and complexity that it really only needs 1(one) committed open systems evangelist to drive through change. What slows down change in most organisations is the fact that most of the workers (and managers...) are not hugely intelligent - even in IT - and oppose anything that involves change or learning.
If this is right, OSS will only really start to gain momentum where smaller companies which are adopters gain a competitive advantage that enables them to grow faster than the competition. Although IT is only a few percent of the business, a large saving in IT can make a considerable difference to the net profit - but it needs to be a large saving as a percentage of IT costs to make a real impact.
This is good news for call centres and bad news for heavy industry. It would be a pity if OSS is associated in most people's minds with the modern version of cotton picking rather than high tech, but that could be the outcome.
OK this is a cheap jibe, and these houses do look nice, but most cultures have rather good traditional building styles based on local materials, and they are under threat mainly from so-called architects, and the heritage industry which wants to preserve them as they were and not allow them to be adapted to modern conditions. In fact, I have just had my house refaced and new ashlars and lintel on the front door using materials dug up a few miles away, while down the road you can see modern houses being put up with inferior stuff that has probably moved several hundred miles.
This guy may actually be doing a good job, but as others have said, it's not as if he invented doing things this way.
Precisely. I didn't spell this out, but if I remember rightly, in French casinos the croupier would say "Rien ne va plus" BEFORE dropping the ball.
If it is possible to win by detecting non-randomness then the wheel, or the process for using it, is bent.
My main objection to casinos is not that they provide a place for gambling - people will do this, and it is probably better that they do this in a way subject to some sort of regulation - but that reported incidents suggest they do not run fair games, and that the stacking of the odds on e.g. fruit machines is probably intended to fuel gambling addiction. It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry. If the casino gets caught by someone using statistical analysis, the law should not protect them from their own dishonesty.
I wonder if this Paillard is any relation to the Paillard in Paillard-Bolex. For those who aren't as old as me, Paillard used to make the tiny short focus lenses used in 8mm and 16mm cine cameras. Even I can barely remember these, but I had three of them during the 1970s and they were real geek technology of the time.(One was "overclocked" to 100fps to do slow motion shots.) It would be nice if it is the same family and still working on this kind of technology.
So where is that on the Fonda-Rumsfeld threat scale?
Don't explain. But if there are any queries, just say "Well, this is a Sun workstation. You'll have heard of them. surely you have licenses like these for all the other PCs?"
One senior military analyst, whose job was precisely to find out why equipment did not perform as expected, described it to me as major's logic and sergeant's logic. The Major says, we do it by the book. The patrol goes out and the sergeant says, we'll do it this way, lads, because the official way doesn't fucking work. Then he reports back to the major that the mission was accomplished and everything went by the book. And the major, if he wants to be a colonel, doesn't ask stupid questions. The hard bit is to get through the official chain of command wall to find out what really happens on the ground, investigate the good bits, and turn them into an official solution.
Faced with a choice between certainly getting killed and trying something that might save you, armed forces everywhere become inventive. People bleating on about "No RF near potential booby traps" miss the point. The people on the ground are likely to have a pretty good idea of enemy capability. They might be wrong, occasionally, but that is better than having being dead most of the time. War is not a computer game, and it is not played according to neat rules by any of the sides involved. The hard bit is to strike the right balance between discipline and flexibility, and this must change from conflict to conflict.