It's only the drones (male bees) that do the nasty with the queen, and they only do that at the beginning of her career when she makes a small number of mating flights prior to laying eggs. After that she's kept so full of eggs and food that her formerly trim figure disappears and she's too fat to fly and her mating days are over.
The drones have a modified sting for a penis and when they mate with the queen several hundred feet high, it's ripped from their body along with half their guts and they fall dead to the ground. Some people report having heard an audible 'pop' as the poor/lucky devils consummate their desire.You do wonder why they bother...
When I was at university we used to brew nearly all our own beer (a good friend of mine was an excellent amateur brewer). For a laugh we made a batch of bitter with Guinness yeast grown from a bottle of bottle-conditioned Guinness - you could still get it back in 1973.
The bitter tasted STRONGLY like Guinness.
Though I claim no expertise in the way that yeast flavours beer, that one experiment left a memory that has lasted to this day.
It's absolutely standard practice in the UK for clubs, associations and other similar bodies to be companies limited by guarantee. The risk would be that if they were not, the members would be seen in law as a partnership which is BAD for the members as partnerships by default have unlimited liability and each member is liable for all debts that may be incurred. You wouldn't want to join a trade body, have it sued and then find you lose your house and savings.
This is completely normal. Note that it's not a 'standard' limited company with traded shares etc. It will typically have articles of association which prevent it from distributing profits unless it is wound up. The guarantee bit means that each member is limited in their liability (usually one pound) in the case of any debts or insolvency.
A pound to a penny that is not about terrorism but about taxes. Whenever you see a government doing ANYTHING these days, I strongly recommend that you think 'Hmm, is this revenue related?' before considering anything else.
The UK apparently believes that it's losing around GBP 15 billion per annum in tax to various offshore and other borderline legal tax avoidance schemes.
One such scheme is to claim that you are non-resident for tax purposes. It used to be the case that you could be non-resident and visit for up to 183 days (actually nights, so you could land at 6am one day, depart at 6pm a day later and call it one day) whilst potentially remaining non-resident for taxation. That has recently been tightened so that even one second before midnight now counts as a day for residence purposes. It is highly likely that a substantial number of people claimed non-residence but in fact forgot to count the number of days. Some of those people might well be those Russian squillionaires who own Premiership soccer clubs etc. I've gone non-resident myself once and there are no obvious checks - I reckon I could sit here for a whole year, tell the authorities I'm actually non-resident and have a fighting chance of them simply not noticing.
A database which is easily searchable to find when you left and re-entered the country puts a pretty firm stop to abuses of that.
You betcha they pretend it's about security but I betcha it's at least as much about tax.
As a rule-of-thumb when hiring staff you use a 'fully costed' approach which takes employment taxes, telephone, expenses, office space, heating etc. etc. etc. into account - so employers will take the base salary of the person and then double it to get the fully-costed figure. 50,000 headline figure probably translates into a salary of 25,000 to 35,000 whi
One way of looking at networking (since I'm replying to a post on Slashdot, not writing a f*cking book) is that it lowers social and financial transaction costs.
A key part of networking is doing favours to people. You give away 'stuff' in the natural course of things that cost you nothing. You recover those photos a contact lost because their PC caught a virus. You are funny and amusing company over drinks with your store of anecdotes, building social capital. As your network grows you put A in touch with B when they can solve each other's problems without asking a finder's fee (though you might joke about 'owing you one').
And then when stuff comes up you know nothing about, you have the favours in the bank to call Joe, or Mary or whoever, and have the advice and contacts to call on to fix whatever it is in seconds, not months, and often free or at worst at non-ripoff commercial rates.
Be nice, give away what costs you nothing but don't be the doormat pushover either. People will leech off you - watch for it and find other people. Learn some basic social skills and put in the time. If you are desperately shy and uncomfortable around others, try acting or learning an instrument: it did Tom Lehrer no harm way back!
There's a whole theory of business you can look up about 'internal transaction costs', why big companies exist; because it's just more efficient that way.
Your network, apart from giving you a life in the 'get a life' sense, also gives you dramatically reduced EXTERNAL transaction costs and hugely improves your life efficiency.
If the day comes when you start out in business yourself, then you bless your network. Over, and over, and over again. And when looking for a life partner, a recommendation from a friend who knows you well beats years of hanging around in bars.
In your teens you build technical skills. In your twenties you hone them and start building social skills (if not before). In later life you focus on life skills and social abilities more and more as your undoubted technical ability becomes less important than your ability to just make stuff happen quickly. And that's why you need a network.
It's worth being prepared. Repeat after me "I could never remember the key, that's why I wrote it on the blue post-it note I leave next to my laptop on my desk. What, you mean you don't have it? You mean you lost it when you raided my place? How the hell I am supposed to get my data back you bastards, I'll sue you blah blah blah".
There is, of course, and never was, any post-it note.
But you now have plausible deniability that you possess the key.
I don't think that support is a mirage at all. Many customers will pay for support - I've been in numerous meetings where I say something like "You can have RedHat for xxx per year or Fedora free" and it's the last bit that scares them.
We could have a philosophical debate about how long customers will pay for support on software with a low price tag but my bet is it will be at least until we no longer have to care about it.
If the software is worth having - i.e. has a nonzero benefit to the customer - then it has a negotiable support price. How much would they lose if it stopped working? Between that figure and zero is what they will pay per year to not have it stop. The more it's worth to them the more they will happily pay as an insurance policy let alone to guarantee access to updates.
Until you have been in those meetings negotiating the prices it's hard to get a grasp on how much that means to many customers and how delighted they are to be able to pay someone.
Remember, if the system goes down and they are summoned to talk to higher management who ask "how much were we paying in support for this stuff" - and their answer is "we didn't pay for support" then that's their job on the line. Senior management will not be impressed by that reply.
So for many customers if nothing else it's ensuring that they keep their jobs and it's not coming out of their pockets. There is a budget for support and it has to be spent with someone.
The animosity this caused amongst enough of the UK population brought about a very rare capitulation from the European mandarins who finally threw in the towel and gave up trying to convert the dissenters. This may in part be due to their recognition that imperial units are no longer taught in British schools and that if they wait a generation, nobody will know what an inch/foot/yard ounce/pound/stone are any more.
As far as I know, it's still a criminal offence in the UK to sell food by the pound or soft drinks in a pub by the pint. The exceptions are few and strictly controlled. The 'concession' from the EU is only not to try to convert retail beer measurements to litres rather than a wholesale recognition that affection for alternative units of measure might be a cultural expression of freedom.
It's worth pointing out here that the kind of races (bugs) introduced by faulty locking in general suffer from a very important problem: YOU CANNOT TEST FOR THEM.
Race conditions are mostly eliminated by design, not by testing. Testing will find the most egregious ones but the rest cause bizarre and hard-to-trace symptoms that usually end up with someone fixing them by reasoning about them. "Hmm" you think to yourself "that sounds like a race problem. Wonder where it might be?" and thinking about it, looking at the code, inventing scenarios that might trigger a race; that's how you find them.
Would you care to give an example of such an independent implementation? According to Alex Brown, the person who convened the Ballot Resolution Meeting for ISO/IEC, Microsoft's own current current implementation does not conform to the 'standard'
Ah, NOW I see what you mean. Why, in fact, I've just implemented the standard myself right here: main(){exit(1);}
What do you mean my implementation doesn't conform? Neither does Microsoft's.
But they appear to have battened down the hatches and my guess is that the most likely outcome that you will be ignored.
From what I have seen they are all decent people but institutionally incapable of realising that they have made a big mistake. This whole controversy seems to be something that their systems are incapable of recognising, let alone dealing with.
It looks like a kind of collective denial, but I don't know them well enough to judge better; what I describe as collective denial might conceivably be a well-rehearsed response to dealing with situations like this.
Frankly I'm disgusted with the way that this has been handled. Their systems and processes are, in my view, arcane, out-of-date and unfit. Higher up they seem to be doing a rabbit-in-the-headlights response of just hoping it doesn't matter and it will all go away.
That's a completely understandable viewpoint and it's hard to argue against its pragmatism.
However: as a member until a few weeks ago of the British Standards Institute panel on this topic (I resigned because it's simply impossible to review a 6,000 page document properly and keep a full-time job, the work is unpaid), all that I can do, amid the noise and shouting, is to say that in my opinion a) all the comments about what a pile of crap the draft is are entirely correct and b) I am totally mystified by why national bodies are changing their minds.
I attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, though as a non-delegate was not allowed into the deliberations. Discussions with numerous delegates confirmed my view that the draft remains unfit.
If I had still been a panel member last week my vote would have been no.
It appears that that would have then been 5 for 2 against inside the BSI if the leaks and rumours are to be believed. The BSI procedures are in fact that there is no voting but instead 'consensus' is sought. If that's true, the 5/1 split reported doesn't sound like consensus to me but I wasn't present and can't verify the leaks because the BSI process is closed to outsiders.
Duress codes were widely implemented by the British Special Operations Executive in the Second World War.
Agents dropped behind Axis lines were taught how to use 'security codes' if they were compromised (i.e. captured by the Nazis).
The imbeciles in London who received their messages, especially from the totally infiltrated Dutch circuits, were so stupid as to message them back saying 'why are you omitting your security codes?'
It got so bad that on April 1st 1944 the London operators received a plaintext message from the head of the Nazi operation thanking them for their cooperation (I think his name was Geiske).
Hundreds died. It soured British/Dutch relations for a generation. It was monstrous, inexcusable loss of life.
I hear that amongst the regular criminal fraternity around here it's now common to swipe the cigarette butts that people leave behind when smoking outside our no-longer-smoking bars so they can be dropped at crime scenes. Especially when those bars are where the kind of people already on the database hang out.
So how long before we have to start taking our own glasses and cutlery to restaurants just so we can't end up similarly implicated in something nefarious?
Oh, and guys, if you EVER have casual sex with a stranger, make very, very, very sure that you not only always use a condom but YOU TAKE IT HOME WITH YOU AFTERWARDS. Your semen is gold-dust to the DNA fraudsters.
Give 'em time and they'll be trying to collect fingerprints for train journeys too.
However, in the meantime I've emailed BAA (corporateresponsibility@baa.com) to congratulate them on an initiative that will help to reduce carbon emissions by putting people off traveling by plane. At least it's put me off. And it's suggested a new business for me - the sale of latex fingertips with other people's fingerprints on them. Can you imagine the market for them, with a choice of patterns? Bush, Blair, Paris Hilton... I must contact my suppliers in China and start getting some prices. Who will buy? I feel a website coming on....
A previous poster likened Unix to the wheel and I think it's a useful, though flawed comparison. The wheel is completely obvious and almost impossible to improve upon, being one of the simplest geometric shapes. For me the obviousness makes it the wrong comparison.
If obliged to produce a parallel, the nearest I've found is the internal combustion piston engine. It's complicated enough to be non-obvious, yet in a hundred years very little has been found to be better. Yes of course you get superchargers, fuel injection, overhead cam, rotary valves, petrol/gas/diesel variants.... but they are all essentially the 'same' design.
To me, the core design of Unix is pretty much the software equivalent of that engine. It's just 'the right' way to solve a whole class of problems and it does it well.
Now of course someone will start making tortured comparisons with Wankel engines.
The parent is right. Back when it was exciting and cool and there weren't microprocessors I was excited about radio and got my licence. Then it was a buzz.
My 12-year old son (to humour me) spent 2 days studying this summer and passed his foundation licence with ease. He prefers to chat all around the world on MSN rather than strain his ears to hear SSB signals that don't travel as far. Like building your own steam engines, the peak for Amateur Radio has almost certainly passed. I still enjoy it, but then I use it to chat to friends I made back in the 70s and the occasional new person who get welcomed to the community.
Since it only takes a few days of study and a test to get the licence, it's hardly onerous if you are interested. And the equipment is not expensive. A good 2m/70cm handheld costs around US$200 or less, an all-band HF set around $400 from ebay. Compare that with top range mobile phones and it's not that bad, but unlike the family PC which is probably just there and costs 'nothing' it's still not free.
That (famous) poem was written by Leo Marks who was the codemaster for the British Special Operations Executive. He spent most of the war wishing he was working at Bletchley Park but didn't (although they knew about his coding schemes). His autobiography "Between Silk and Cyanide" is a humorous and very moving account of his time during the war and some of the agents he met who lost their lives. That poem was written for his girlfriend who was killed in an aircraft crash - later he passed it on to Violette Szabo who was executed in a concentration camp after being landed in occupied France (if I remember correctly).
Mandatory reading for anyone with a soul, I would say.
DAB is an open(ish) standard with many implementations (though I'm not sure about whether the codec involves patents). A suitably skilled person can take the spec and build a player.
Your reply doesn't counter my view at all - it supports it.
The BBC should not be in the business of providing players, it should pick standards that allow others to build players. That is the whole point of the argument. It's not about Linux (is there an echo in here?)
The really *scary* thing about this is that the BBC's HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY is still trotting out the bullshit line that this is about Linux users. It is not and never was. It's about a body that is publicly funded from MY F****NG TAXES, with a statutory duty to serve the whole UK population, choosing to use proprietary and encumbered technology. If he's too stupid to understand that he should resign.
It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux.
It's about ensuring that there is a free, open and competitive market in producing players. What annoys me is not that there is no Linux player, but that NOBODY CAN CREATE ONE from the specifications (since there aren't any).
With idiots like this in charge at the Beeb, there's no hope.
Potassium nitrate is the oxidising ingredient in gunpowder and is not used as a fertilizer, the parent post is probably confusing it with ammonium nitrate, both a widely-used fertilizer and a major ingredient in ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil) explosives used in the mining industry and much admired by the IRA in Northern Ireland. ANFO is simple to mix, extremely stable and very effective. Its downside is that it takes a stick of dynamite to set it off.
Calcium chloride is not blackboard chalk, though calcium sulphate is. Calcium chloride has a range of uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_chloride) that don't seem to make it an obvious choice for storing under ones bed.
Possession of potassium nitrate isn't an offence in the UK but when I as a boy, making home-made-gunpowder, asking for it at the local pharmacy meant fibbing and saying it would be used in tanning squirrel skins, since they were wise to its possible uses. Posession of bomb-making equipment is an offence in the UK and I'm not surprised that without a good excuse, the rozzers took a dim view of this lad's home chemistry set.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only the drones (male bees) that do the nasty with the queen, and they only do that at the beginning of her career when she makes a small number of mating flights prior to laying eggs. After that she's kept so full of eggs and food that her formerly trim figure disappears and she's too fat to fly and her mating days are over.
The drones have a modified sting for a penis and when they mate with the queen several hundred feet high, it's ripped from their body along with half their guts and they fall dead to the ground. Some people report having heard an audible 'pop' as the poor/lucky devils consummate their desire.You do wonder why they bother ...
Shome mishtake shurely?
When I was at university we used to brew nearly all our own beer (a good friend of mine was an excellent amateur brewer). For a laugh we made a batch of bitter with Guinness yeast grown from a bottle of bottle-conditioned Guinness - you could still get it back in 1973.
The bitter tasted STRONGLY like Guinness.
Though I claim no expertise in the way that yeast flavours beer, that one experiment left a memory that has lasted to this day.
It's absolutely standard practice in the UK for clubs, associations and other similar bodies to be companies limited by guarantee. The risk would be that if they were not, the members would be seen in law as a partnership which is BAD for the members as partnerships by default have unlimited liability and each member is liable for all debts that may be incurred. You wouldn't want to join a trade body, have it sued and then find you lose your house and savings.
This is completely normal. Note that it's not a 'standard' limited company with traded shares etc.
It will typically have articles of association which prevent it from distributing profits unless it is wound up. The guarantee bit means that each member is limited in their liability (usually one pound) in the case of any debts or insolvency.
A pound to a penny that is not about terrorism but about taxes. Whenever you see a government doing ANYTHING these days, I strongly recommend that you think 'Hmm, is this revenue related?' before considering anything else.
The UK apparently believes that it's losing around GBP 15 billion per annum in tax to various offshore and other borderline legal tax avoidance schemes.
One such scheme is to claim that you are non-resident for tax purposes. It used to be the case that you could be non-resident and visit for up to 183 days (actually nights, so you could land at 6am one day, depart at 6pm a day later and call it one day) whilst potentially remaining non-resident for taxation. That has recently been tightened so that even one second before midnight now counts as a day for residence purposes. It is highly likely that a substantial number of people claimed non-residence but in fact forgot to count the number of days. Some of those people might well be those Russian squillionaires who own Premiership soccer clubs etc. I've gone non-resident myself once and there are no obvious checks - I reckon I could sit here for a whole year, tell the authorities I'm actually non-resident and have a fighting chance of them simply not noticing.
A database which is easily searchable to find when you left and re-entered the country puts a pretty firm stop to abuses of that.
You betcha they pretend it's about security but I betcha it's at least as much about tax.
As a rule-of-thumb when hiring staff you use a 'fully costed' approach which takes employment taxes, telephone, expenses, office space, heating etc. etc. etc. into account - so employers will take the base salary of the person and then double it to get the fully-costed figure. 50,000 headline figure probably translates into a salary of 25,000 to 35,000 whi
One way of looking at networking (since I'm replying to a post on Slashdot, not writing a f*cking book) is that it lowers social and financial transaction costs.
A key part of networking is doing favours to people. You give away 'stuff' in the natural course of things that cost you nothing. You recover those photos a contact lost because their PC caught a virus. You are funny and amusing company over drinks with your store of anecdotes, building social capital. As your network grows you put A in touch with B when they can solve each other's problems without asking a finder's fee (though you might joke about 'owing you one').
And then when stuff comes up you know nothing about, you have the favours in the bank to call Joe, or Mary or whoever, and have the advice and contacts to call on to fix whatever it is in seconds, not months, and often free or at worst at non-ripoff commercial rates.
Be nice, give away what costs you nothing but don't be the doormat pushover either. People will leech off you - watch for it and find other people. Learn some basic social skills and put in the time. If you are desperately shy and uncomfortable around others, try acting or learning an instrument: it did Tom Lehrer no harm way back!
There's a whole theory of business you can look up about 'internal transaction costs', why big companies exist; because it's just more efficient that way.
Your network, apart from giving you a life in the 'get a life' sense, also gives you dramatically reduced EXTERNAL transaction costs and hugely improves your life efficiency.
If the day comes when you start out in business yourself, then you bless your network. Over, and over, and over again. And when looking for a life partner, a recommendation from a friend who knows you well beats years of hanging around in bars.
In your teens you build technical skills. In your twenties you hone them and start building social skills (if not before). In later life you focus on life skills and social abilities more and more as your undoubted technical ability becomes less important than your ability to just make stuff happen quickly. And that's why you need a network.
IMHO YMMV
I think that's Éire in Irish if you want to be extra picky
It's worth being prepared. Repeat after me "I could never remember the key, that's why I wrote it on the blue post-it note I leave next to my laptop on my desk. What, you mean you don't have it? You mean you lost it when you raided my place? How the hell I am supposed to get my data back you bastards, I'll sue you blah blah blah".
There is, of course, and never was, any post-it note.
But you now have plausible deniability that you possess the key.
I don't think that support is a mirage at all. Many customers will pay for support - I've been in numerous meetings where I say something like "You can have RedHat for xxx per year or Fedora free" and it's the last bit that scares them.
We could have a philosophical debate about how long customers will pay for support on software with a low price tag but my bet is it will be at least until we no longer have to care about it.
If the software is worth having - i.e. has a nonzero benefit to the customer - then it has a negotiable support price. How much would they lose if it stopped working? Between that figure and zero is what they will pay per year to not have it stop. The more it's worth to them the more they will happily pay as an insurance policy let alone to guarantee access to updates.
Until you have been in those meetings negotiating the prices it's hard to get a grasp on how much that means to many customers and how delighted they are to be able to pay someone.
Remember, if the system goes down and they are summoned to talk to higher management who ask "how much were we paying in support for this stuff" - and their answer is "we didn't pay for support" then that's their job on the line. Senior management will not be impressed by that reply.
So for many customers if nothing else it's ensuring that they keep their jobs and it's not coming out of their pockets. There is a budget for support and it has to be spent with someone.
In the UK you must submit a GBP 500 deposit to stand for election, a sum which you lose if you poll less than 5%.
The trick of "losing your deposit" is gleefully featured in news reports when one of the major parties achieves it.
This handily prevents a) the poor and b) joke candidates from offering an alternative choice or just some simple amusement.
I've seen Windows people go slack-jawed in astonishment as I ssh to the other side of the world and run X programs over forwarding.
Some refuse to believe it, others shake their heads and walk away.
The British got a lot of crap from the European Union over its pints (interestingly a different measure from the US pint, being 4 fl oz larger).
Plenty of detail can be found on the metric martyrs site.
The animosity this caused amongst enough of the UK population brought about a very rare capitulation from the European mandarins who finally threw in the towel and gave up trying to convert the dissenters. This may in part be due to their recognition that imperial units are no longer taught in British schools and that if they wait a generation, nobody will know what an inch/foot/yard ounce/pound/stone are any more.
As far as I know, it's still a criminal offence in the UK to sell food by the pound or soft drinks in a pub by the pint. The exceptions are few and strictly controlled. The 'concession' from the EU is only not to try to convert retail beer measurements to litres rather than a wholesale recognition that affection for alternative units of measure might be a cultural expression of freedom.
It's worth pointing out here that the kind of races (bugs) introduced by faulty locking in general suffer from a very important problem: YOU CANNOT TEST FOR THEM.
Race conditions are mostly eliminated by design, not by testing. Testing will find the most egregious ones but the rest cause bizarre and hard-to-trace symptoms that usually end up with someone fixing them by reasoning about them. "Hmm" you think to yourself "that sounds like a race problem. Wonder where it might be?" and thinking about it, looking at the code, inventing scenarios that might trigger a race; that's how you find them.
Would you care to give an example of such an independent implementation? According to Alex Brown, the person who convened the Ballot Resolution Meeting for ISO/IEC, Microsoft's own current current implementation does not conform to the 'standard'
Ah, NOW I see what you mean. Why, in fact, I've just implemented the standard myself right here:
main(){exit(1);}
What do you mean my implementation doesn't conform? Neither does Microsoft's.
You can try
BSI British Standards
389 Chiswick High Road
London
W4 4AL
Telephone: +44 (0)20 8996 9001
Fax: +44 (0)20 8996 7001
Email: cservices@bsigroup.com
But they appear to have battened down the hatches and my guess is that the most likely outcome that you will be ignored.
From what I have seen they are all decent people but institutionally incapable of realising that they have made a big mistake. This whole controversy seems to be something that their systems are incapable of recognising, let alone dealing with.
It looks like a kind of collective denial, but I don't know them well enough to judge better; what I describe as collective denial might conceivably be a well-rehearsed response to dealing with situations like this.
Frankly I'm disgusted with the way that this has been handled. Their systems and processes are, in my view, arcane, out-of-date and unfit. Higher up they seem to be doing a rabbit-in-the-headlights response of just hoping it doesn't matter and it will all go away.
That's a completely understandable viewpoint and it's hard to argue against its pragmatism.
However: as a member until a few weeks ago of the British Standards Institute panel on this topic (I resigned because it's simply impossible to review a 6,000 page document properly and keep a full-time job, the work is unpaid), all that I can do, amid the noise and shouting, is to say that in my opinion a) all the comments about what a pile of crap the draft is are entirely correct and b) I am totally mystified by why national bodies are changing their minds.
I attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, though as a non-delegate was not allowed into the deliberations. Discussions with numerous delegates confirmed my view that the draft remains unfit.
If I had still been a panel member last week my vote would have been no.
It appears that that would have then been 5 for 2 against inside the BSI if the leaks and rumours are to be believed. The BSI procedures are in fact that there is no voting but instead 'consensus' is sought. If that's true, the 5/1 split reported doesn't sound like consensus to me but I wasn't present and can't verify the leaks because the BSI process is closed to outsiders.
Duress codes were widely implemented by the British Special Operations Executive in the Second World War.
Agents dropped behind Axis lines were taught how to use 'security codes' if they were compromised (i.e. captured by the Nazis).
The imbeciles in London who received their messages, especially from the totally infiltrated Dutch circuits, were so stupid as to message them back saying 'why are you omitting your security codes?'
It got so bad that on April 1st 1944 the London operators received a plaintext message from the head of the Nazi operation thanking them for their cooperation (I think his name was Geiske).
Hundreds died. It soured British/Dutch relations for a generation. It was monstrous, inexcusable loss of life.
Don't EVER underestimate the power of stupidity.
I hear that amongst the regular criminal fraternity around here it's now common to swipe the cigarette butts that people leave behind when smoking outside our no-longer-smoking bars so they can be dropped at crime scenes. Especially when those bars are where the kind of people already on the database hang out.
So how long before we have to start taking our own glasses and cutlery to restaurants just so we can't end up similarly implicated in something nefarious?
Oh, and guys, if you EVER have casual sex with a stranger, make very, very, very sure that you not only always use a condom but YOU TAKE IT HOME WITH YOU AFTERWARDS. Your semen is gold-dust to the DNA fraudsters.
Give 'em time and they'll be trying to collect fingerprints for train journeys too.
... I must contact my suppliers in China and start getting some prices. Who will buy? I feel a website coming on ....
However, in the meantime I've emailed BAA (corporateresponsibility@baa.com) to congratulate them on an initiative that will help to reduce carbon emissions by putting people off traveling by plane. At least it's put me off. And it's suggested a new business for me - the sale of latex fingertips with other people's fingerprints on them. Can you imagine the market for them, with a choice of patterns? Bush, Blair, Paris Hilton
A previous poster likened Unix to the wheel and I think it's a useful, though flawed comparison. The wheel is completely obvious and almost impossible to improve upon, being one of the simplest geometric shapes. For me the obviousness makes it the wrong comparison.
.... but they are all essentially the 'same' design.
If obliged to produce a parallel, the nearest I've found is the internal combustion piston engine. It's complicated enough to be non-obvious, yet in a hundred years very little has been found to be better. Yes of course you get superchargers, fuel injection, overhead cam, rotary valves, petrol/gas/diesel variants
To me, the core design of Unix is pretty much the software equivalent of that engine. It's just 'the right' way to solve a whole class of problems and it does it well.
Now of course someone will start making tortured comparisons with Wankel engines.
The parent is right. Back when it was exciting and cool and there weren't microprocessors I was excited about radio and got my licence. Then it was a buzz.
My 12-year old son (to humour me) spent 2 days studying this summer and passed his foundation licence with ease. He prefers to chat all around the world on MSN rather than strain his ears to hear SSB signals that don't travel as far. Like building your own steam engines, the peak for Amateur Radio has almost certainly passed. I still enjoy it, but then I use it to chat to friends I made back in the 70s and the occasional new person who get welcomed to the community.
Since it only takes a few days of study and a test to get the licence, it's hardly onerous if you are interested. And the equipment is not expensive. A good 2m/70cm handheld costs around US$200 or less, an all-band HF set around $400 from ebay. Compare that with top range mobile phones and it's not that bad, but unlike the family PC which is probably just there and costs 'nothing' it's still not free.
Times move on. No point in having regrets.
That (famous) poem was written by Leo Marks who was the codemaster for the British Special Operations Executive. He spent most of the war wishing he was working at Bletchley Park but didn't (although they knew about his coding schemes). His autobiography "Between Silk and Cyanide" is a humorous and very moving account of his time during the war and some of the agents he met who lost their lives. That poem was written for his girlfriend who was killed in an aircraft crash - later he passed it on to Violette Szabo who was executed in a concentration camp after being landed in occupied France (if I remember correctly).
Mandatory reading for anyone with a soul, I would say.
DAB is an open(ish) standard with many implementations (though I'm not sure about whether the codec involves patents). A suitably skilled person can take the spec and build a player.
Your reply doesn't counter my view at all - it supports it.
The BBC should not be in the business of providing players, it should pick standards that allow others to build players. That is the whole point of the argument. It's not about Linux (is there an echo in here?)
The really *scary* thing about this is that the BBC's HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY is still trotting out the bullshit line that this is about Linux users. It is not and never was. It's about a body that is publicly funded from MY F****NG TAXES, with a statutory duty to serve the whole UK population, choosing to use proprietary and encumbered technology. If he's too stupid to understand that he should resign.
It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux.
It's about ensuring that there is a free, open and competitive market in producing players. What annoys me is not that there is no Linux player, but that NOBODY CAN CREATE ONE from the specifications (since there aren't any).
With idiots like this in charge at the Beeb, there's no hope.
Potassium nitrate is the oxidising ingredient in gunpowder and is not used as a fertilizer, the parent post is probably confusing it with ammonium nitrate, both a widely-used fertilizer and a major ingredient in ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil) explosives used in the mining industry and much admired by the IRA in Northern Ireland. ANFO is simple to mix, extremely stable and very effective. Its downside is that it takes a stick of dynamite to set it off.
Calcium chloride is not blackboard chalk, though calcium sulphate is. Calcium chloride has a range of uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_chloride) that don't seem to make it an obvious choice for storing under ones bed.
Possession of potassium nitrate isn't an offence in the UK but when I as a boy, making home-made-gunpowder, asking for it at the local pharmacy meant fibbing and saying it would be used in tanning squirrel skins, since they were wise to its possible uses. Posession of bomb-making equipment is an offence in the UK and I'm not surprised that without a good excuse, the rozzers took a dim view of this lad's home chemistry set.