I'm afraid you're not very practiced at reading patents. Each separate claim is an individual protected invention, insofar as it does not rely on the others. Thus just because claim (x+1) refers to "claim x implemented using HTML", that doesn't mean that the patent only applies to HTML. It means that it applies to both x implemented any old way, and to x specifically implemented using HTML.
The reason for this is that if someone can defeat claim x (for being too broad), the patentee can still try and fall back on the more limited claim in (x+1).
Furthermore patent claims are read purposively. Thus for example if a patent for invention specifies a vertical support, then you can't evade the patent by using a support 1 degree off vertical, unless you can establish that the invention patented truly requires absolute verticality. In this situation, a judge would probably rule that a patent covering HTML implementation would extend to XHTML and any other mark-up language that can be read by a standard web browser, since obviosuly the purpose of specifying HTML is to cover such documents.
So let me get this straight: according to the article, women live on average about 81 years, men about 76 years. But when you exclude "preventable" deaths such as smoking, accidents etc, you find that men and women live about 74 years.
So basically, if I smoke, drink, drive fast cars and sleep around I'll probably live to 76 (or 81 if I was a woman). If I live a careful life and die of "unpreventable" causes, I'll only make it to 74. Either that's the best news I've ever heard, or there's something seriously kooky with the research (or more probably the way it's been reported)...
my father (a mathematician) still has a mechanical calculator. It looks like an old store cash register and must weigh at least 10 pounds. You set the input numbers via rotary dials, choose your operation (I think it's limited to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), and then crank the handle until it goes "ping". It has some abacus-like sliders on it as well to help you remember the results of previous calculations...I remember how pissed off he was when I managed to crash the machine as a kid (the handle jammed).
I don't think he still uses it, though. Unless you count as a doorstop.
There is no doubt (zero, not any) that under English consumer law that term would be null and void. Read it literally and it would mean that eMusic could decide it wanted to get out of the online music business and instead start delivering elephants to the moon and, unless you told them not to, they could do so and bill you for it. I'd be amazed if US consumer law would let a term like this pass without serious restrictions on its interpretation.
In the UK, terms permitting unilateral changes to a consumer contract are only permitted if they're reasonable. So increasing prices in line with inflation, OK. Restricting the amount of music you can download because of physical bandwidth restrictions, possibly OK. Reducing your quota from infinity to forty just so they can make money, not OK. If that's what they want to do, they have to contact their customers and explain that they're discontinuing the current service; if they agree to the new terms, can they please sign up again -- i.e. they need positive agreement, not silent acquiesence.
So let me get this straight... if you don't contact them, they will automatically and unilaterally swtich you over to the new "basic" service.
That, my friends, sounds plain illegal. It would be in the UK, at any rate, and UK and US contract law are very similar. If I sign up for one thing, emusic cannot unilaterally decide to give me something else. I have to accept it first. And it's a basic principle of contract law that silence does not amount amount to an acceptance. I can't tell someone "I offer to sell this piece of paper for $500, and if you don't tell me otherwise then I will deem you to have accepted it".
Of course, there's an exception here where there are terms in the original contract allowing one side to unilaterally change the terms. So eg a credit card agreement always allows the card company to change the interest rate. But (at least in the UK), these changes can only be allowed if they are fair and reasonable. If I sign up for an unlimited download service and that's reduced to 40 a month or whatever it was, that's a pretty major change. I don't think any court would regard that as a fair and reasonable change, even if permitted in the original contract.
Having experienced university in the US and UK, I can vouch that there's a simple answer that will be popular with the students too: eliminate the incentive to cheat by grading the entire course properly invigilated exams. This is the standard approach in UK universities: yes, you have tutorials and problem sets, but no-one cares about attendance and marks count for nothing. Everything hinges on the exams.
As a result, the lazy students who would otherwise have cheated simply to pass the class, simply don't bother to do the exercises. They fail, deservedly. The students who care but find the exercises difficult just do their best and come to class with partial answers, but with an understanding of what they need to learn; that's a lot more constructive than copying out someone else's answers. They actually learn something. As for the students who find the class a breeze, they don't need to waste their time completing those poxy problems or attending the class, and can instead work on something worthwhile.
I have to say that coming to the US for grad school from the UK was a real culture shock -- it was like going back to junior high. I would have thought that by the time you've completed a college degree, most people would consider you capable of structuring your own learning but no... warning to any british students thinking about US universities: welcome back to weekly homework assignments.
nope, inherent problem with your powers of imagination. You are extrapolating from your everyday experience, in which every finite body/shape is embedded in another. So you can't imagine a toroidal topology except as being the actual surface of a donut-shaped object. But there is absolutely no mathematical reason to do so. You can define all the essential properties of a toroidal space (for example) without any reference to an "outside" space in which it is embedded. The assumption of embedding is just an extrapolation of our extremely limited experience of living in a 3-d space.
But there are many examples of non-embedded topologies. For example, take the space of all numbers. Real number can be mapped to a line. You might argue that this line is itself embedded in a plane representing all complex numbers. But there;s nothing in which that plane is embedded; there are no numbers that can't be expressed as a sum of real and imaginary part. Or consider the momentum space of waves in a regular lattice. Accoring to both classical and quantum physics, physical space and momentum space are complementary views of reality; neither is more valid than the other. But the momentum space of waves in a regular 3D lattice is indeed a 3D closed space: any wave momentum greater than a certain value in the momentum is remapped to another portion of the space. But there's no 4D momentum space in which these waves are embedded. (OK, you can consider energy as the momentum equivalent of time to build up a 4-d space, but then you hit the buffers -- there's nothing for that 4-d space to be embedded in).
True advances in scientific understanding normally come about when someone realises that "common sense" is wrong, and that an alternative explanation fits the data better. So until Copernicus, it was obvious the world was flat adn the stars went around it. Until Galileo, it was self-evident that the natural state of matter was to be at rest. Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck: each revolutionised science by rejecting "common sense" and instead adopting an (initially) unintuitive approach that actually fits the facts.
Ultimately, your argument is a lot like the argument for the existence of the ether: "in our experience, waves can only move through a substance. therefore there must be a substance through which light waves move". Of course, no-one ever found any evidence for the existence of the ether, and eventually Einstein proposed doing away with the idea altogether.
The authors of the paper claiming the universe is closed claim that this explanation fits better with observations than an infinite universe, so let's assume for now it's true. You say it's self evident that if the universe is finite, it must be embedded in some bigger space. Now, where's your evidence for that? I'm not saying it's not possible that our universe is embedded in a higher-dimensional space. A lot of unification theories assume that our universe contains more dimensions than we see (string theory usually needs 11 dimensions), and some that our universe is indeed embedded in a higher dimensional space (brane theory) -- but that's very different from your assumption. In particular, physical theories involving higher dimensional spaces still allow the possibility that that higher-dimensional space is itself finite and closed, without being embedded in a still-larger space.
wasn't he able to sit around and ponder great mathematical/physical questions because he didn't have to worry about a paycheck?
Hello? He was an academic. Sitting around and pondering great questions is precisely what he was paid to do. In any case, Newton was not wealthy to start with. As a student he was classified as a "sub sizar" -- basically, that meant someone who paid their fees by performing work for the rich students. In his later life he was made Master of the Mint (basically equivalent to Alan Greenspan), and that's when he made his money -- but I don't think he was doing much science at that stage.
And frankly, I'm amazed that anyone could compare Newton (laws of motion, gravity, differential calculus, optics) with Dean Kamen (oversized scooter).
Lamy pens are very nice -- if you like rollerballs, they do one (the Swift) where the retraction mechanism also controls the clip at the top, so when you write with the pen the barrel is completely smooth, then when you retract the nib out pops the clip. Not only is it cool, it also makes it impossible to put the pen in your jacket pocket with the nib still out, saving you $$$ in cleaning bills!
As for fountain pens, I rate wieght and width highly. Skinny pens give my fingers cramp after a while, and the weight means that the ink will flow without you having to press down at all. If you like modern design and are willing to spend $100+, go for the Lamy 2000 -- Apple would have called it the iPen. Despite its name, it was designed in the 1960s when it must have looked incredibly futuristic. It's made from textured black metal and shaped in a continous dart form like one of those early visions of moon rockets (think Tintin on the moon), just the point of the nib is exposed. The barrel also has a translucent section for checking the ink level, and best of all you don't need to open up the pen to refill it -- just stick the nib in an ink bottle and twist the top to suck it up. Of course, it's not cheap, but as good pens go it's not a rip off either.
Unfortunately I lost that pen a while back and can't afford another, but I've found a good substitute made by Tombow. Tombow's a japanese (?) pen maker with a great eye for simple design. My current pen is made from solid brushed steel. Not only is it heavy, it's almost indestructible -- since the upper part of the barrel is a single piece of metal, I use it to stir drinks, even hammer in small nails! It's so finely machined and weighted that one quick flick of the wrist is all that's needed to unscrew or screw back the barrel. Another nice touch is a band of black rubber where you hold the pen, that makes it a joy to hold.
If you do a lot of writing by hand, definitely invest in a good pen. When the ink flows easily, so do the words.
First, I know some employment law and you were clearly badly advised. Assuming you were employed at least one year (minimum required to claim unfair dismissal), you're entitled to a minimum payment of around 300 plus week's pay for each year you were employed. If you're aged over 41, you get 1.5 weeks pay per year, if under 22 0.5 weeks per year. Then you get your salary between the date of dismissal and the date of the hearing. And then you get your "future loss", i.e. your salary for as long into the future as the court thinks it should take you to get a new job. Still, it's probably too late now... you need to claim within 3 months of dismissal.
Secondly, 100 pounds per month for a 64K line? That's ridiculous...even 3 years ago I had a much faster broadband connection at home for less than half that.
You say: Perhaps you should read the article and then think through what they are actually saying. They are not arguing against OSS, they are arguing against the new, inflexible, policy that allows only OSS.
The article says:
While the initial open source software may be "free," most studies conclude that acquisition costs represent only 5 to 10 percent of total cost of ownership. Maintenance, training and support are far more expensive with open source than proprietary software.
Moderators, please check facts before moderating. I can assure you that the London blackout was not a caused by or confined to the London Underground. It covered most of South London, plus the entire Underground system. Moreover the blackout happened at rush hour and on a system carrying nearly 6 million people a day, that results in a lot of people stuck underground in darkness.
No, it wasn't on the same scale as the US and Italy blackouts but the reason for that is largely because the UK's infrastructure was better able to contain the fault to a small area. The US and Italian outages were caused by small incidents that rapidly snowballed as one network failure caused another to overload and fail, and so on. In London, a similar small incident was confined to one area of the network.
>>I find it interesting that the EU uses a two-house legislature patterned after the original US house and senate.
Certainly the similarity is striking -- but don't forget that the US was not the first two-house legislature. The American structure was closely modelled on the British legislature, which since the middle ages consisted of the lower, elected House of Commons, the upper, unelected House of Lords -- made up of the most powerful people in the country, as with the original US senate -- and a head of state (the king) with the power to veto legislation passed by both houses.
Also many European countries have a US-style 2-hosue system where one house is elected & distributed according to the population, and the other house represents each region equally, for example Germany. So it's probable that the founders of the EC system were looking closer to home for their inspiration -- although doubtless they were informed and inspired by the US.
There's one very big difference: buses. You don't swipe your magnetic ticket when boarding a bus in London, just flash it at the driver, so no-one's tracking where I travel by bus. The oystercards need to be scanned for buses and underground.
Also, oystercards will soon be used to replace single-trip tickets on the underground. Yes, I know that registration for oysters used in this way is voluntary, but think about it. First, as a stored-value card people are likely to register them in case of loss or theft -- with London transport prices people are likely to keep quite large sums of money (over 50 pounds). Secondly, it may be wholly voluntary now -- but who can guarantee it will stay that way.
In any case, given that the cheapest tube ticket within central london is going up from 1.15* this year to 1.60 next year**, I I know what I'm going to do: shortly before the prices go up by myself a year's worth of tickets
* prices quoted in pounds. When oh well will/. stop stripping pound signs in posts?
** beware London Transport's false advertising. They claim that by using an oyster you won't have to pay the steep fair rises being brought in next year. But if you use the popular Carnet tickets (a discount rate for buying 10 trips at once), you'll see the price rise from 1.15 per journey to 1.60. True that's still cheaper than the non-carnet or non-oyster price (2 per trip -- ouch), but it's a massive and unavoidable rise. I'm considering writing to the advertising complaints body.
I fully accept that -- but the original post was claiming that this was the first time the "power of the sea" had been harnessed to a national grid in any way, not just via an undersea solution.
But to be really nitpicking, I should point out that it's not the power of the sea being harnessed at all -- it's the power of the moon. Or strictly, the earth-moon gravitational field.
>>the generator is the first in the world to harness the power of the sea and be connected to an electricity grid
That's plain untrue. Tidal barrages -- which use the tidally-driven flow seawater in and out of a river mouth or basin -- have been used to generate electricity for decades. A barrage across the Rance, in northern France, opened in 1967 and has been generating enough power to supply 200 000 homes ever since.
erm, in the last sentence that should be "European commissioner", not "European police chief". The EU is not yet at the stage where the police can dictate what parliamentarians can vote on...Also the French text clearly says that Microsoft was _not_ named but probably implicated, rather than the other way round...ach, that's what you get when you rely on Babelfish.
A quick EU primer. The EU is set up according to the classic tripartite division of power into executive, legislature and judiciary, as is found in most democratic states (including the US).
The Commission is the executive of the EU. It carries out and polices EU law. It also proposes EU legislation, but since it cannot itself pass the legislation this does not make it a legislative body. Indeed, in most democracies the bulk of legislation is proposed by the executive (including the US and UK).
The Council of Ministers and the Parliament together form the legislature. Every piece of new EU legislation proposed by the Commission must be ratified by the Council of Ministers to take effect. In many areas, the approval of the Parliament is also required. Just as in the US and UK, the legislature can amend or throw out proposed legislation.
Finally, the European Court of Justice is (predictably) the judiciary of the EU. It has the power to strike down EU legislation for being incompatible with the Treaties that created the EU, as well as ensuring that the Commission, Council of Ministers, Parliament, Member States and individuals follow EC law.
While the EU is often condemned as being undemocratic, its legislature is in essence much like the US congress. The Parliament, like the House of Representatives, is elected by the people on on a demographic basis (more populous regions get more MEPs). The Council of Ministers, like the US senate, is made up of an equal number of representatives from each member state. While members are not elected directly to the council, they are drawn from the democratically-elected governments of the member states and so are ultimately subject to democratic control.
The big gap in EU democracy is in the unelected nature of the executive, the commission. But it's unfair to blame that on the EU itself -- it was the member states who vetoed the idea of a popularly elected President of the commission at the EU constitutional convention. Why? precidely because an elected President would give the EU Commission democratic legitimacy, and therefore suck power away from individual governments. It's the same story again and again -- national governments deliberately deny the EU proper democratic accountability precisely in order that they can then denounce EU policies they disagree with as being undemocratic and so retain their own grip on power.
I think the American people need to ask themselves a very simple question here. Are elections a reliable way of choosing politicians, or are they a form of prime-time entertainment?
What is the advantage of voting machines -- electronic or mechanical -- over good old paper ballots? One thing and one thing only: they give you the result the minute the polls have closed, which is a great advantage to journalists and folk who don't like waiting up all night, but has no other benefit at all. If something goes wrong, either all hell breaks loose (Florida 00) or, even worse, nobody notices (as possibly happened in Georgia 02, according to the article).
Why is it assumed that the answer to a failed technology (punch card machines) must be a new, untested technology? What was stopping the California federal judges from ruling "these punch card machines are no good, so we're going to run this election using good ol'fashioned pen and paper." No need to delay, since printing out a few million pages of ballot papers and distributing them could be done in days (newspapers manage a similar feat daily). Sure, it would take a few hours longer to count, but that's better than waiting another 6 months.
Paper ballots are by far the most robust system. People can check to make sure they ticked the right box -- if they got it wrong, they might not be able to vote again but they can at least spoil the paper. The counting can be overseen by officials from each party to ensure that it's done fairly. The ballots can be stored and recounted if needed. They can be guarded while being stored, again by representatives from each party, as a safeguard against tampering (not to mention being securely locked up with tamper-proof seals). With electronic methods, especially those that leave no paper trail, you have to take the machine's word for it, and with no certainty that a clever hacker hasn't managed to fiddle the results.
If you want superfast counting of results, there's even a low-tech way to do this. Give each voter a specially-minted token (like a subway token), and have a separate box for each candidate. Drop your token in the slot for candidate you want to vote for. Have an official listen for the "clunk" when they fall so they can hear if someone tried to drop several (counterfeit) tokens in one box. At the end of polling day, weigh the boxes, divide by the weight of each token, and hey presto, total votes.
This goes further than simple marketing confusion -- it could have real-life consequences for less tech-savvy users. Eg suppose I'm backing up some files to a DVD. If my DVD capacity is quoted in the "K=1000" convention but file sizes are qutoed using the "K=1024", then unless I realised the difference I'd be very confused about why my 4.7Gb of files don't come close to fitting on a "4.7Gbyte" DVD=R.
Also, do these industries show consistency further down the line? I.e. do those that use 1GB=1000MB also use 1MB = 1000Kb = 1000000bytes = 8000000 bits?
Wrong wrong wrong. A nut grows in a single season. The carbon in the nut can only come from CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore burning nuts is carbon neutral over a single nut-growing season.
Similarly, I fail to follow your example of a plant in a box. OK, while the seeds are actually aflame CO2 will be produced faster than it's being absorbed. But overall, the amount of carbon in the system is constant: anything which is not in the plant is in the atmosphere. Therefore so long as you burn the plant no more quickly than it grows, you'll never end up with a higher CO2 concentration than when you started.
Your argument only applies if you start burning something which has been growing for decades -- eg old-growth forest -- in which case you're releasing CO2 that took decades to remove from the atmosphere. But so long as you burn material grown only over, say, the last year -- eg fast-growing bamboo -- then the net amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere over that year must be zero.
>>what, if any, impact this would have on your eyes since each one would be seeing a separate image
Erm, that's what happens anyway. It's your brain that puts the two different images together to create a 3-D single image. All 3D imaging systems (including reality) work by presenting each eye with a slightly different image. Except for those wierd stereogram postcards. No idea how they work, but they really give you eyestrain.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you're not very practiced at reading patents. Each separate claim is an individual protected invention, insofar as it does not rely on the others. Thus just because claim (x+1) refers to "claim x implemented using HTML", that doesn't mean that the patent only applies to HTML. It means that it applies to both x implemented any old way, and to x specifically implemented using HTML.
The reason for this is that if someone can defeat claim x (for being too broad), the patentee can still try and fall back on the more limited claim in (x+1).
Furthermore patent claims are read purposively. Thus for example if a patent for invention specifies a vertical support, then you can't evade the patent by using a support 1 degree off vertical, unless you can establish that the invention patented truly requires absolute verticality. In this situation, a judge would probably rule that a patent covering HTML implementation would extend to XHTML and any other mark-up language that can be read by a standard web browser, since obviosuly the purpose of specifying HTML is to cover such documents.
So let me get this straight: according to the article, women live on average about 81 years, men about 76 years. But when you exclude "preventable" deaths such as smoking, accidents etc, you find that men and women live about 74 years.
So basically, if I smoke, drink, drive fast cars and sleep around I'll probably live to 76 (or 81 if I was a woman). If I live a careful life and die of "unpreventable" causes, I'll only make it to 74. Either that's the best news I've ever heard, or there's something seriously kooky with the research (or more probably the way it's been reported)...
my father (a mathematician) still has a mechanical calculator. It looks like an old store cash register and must weigh at least 10 pounds. You set the input numbers via rotary dials, choose your operation (I think it's limited to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), and then crank the handle until it goes "ping". It has some abacus-like sliders on it as well to help you remember the results of previous calculations...I remember how pissed off he was when I managed to crash the machine as a kid (the handle jammed).
I don't think he still uses it, though. Unless you count as a doorstop.
There is no doubt (zero, not any) that under English consumer law that term would be null and void. Read it literally and it would mean that eMusic could decide it wanted to get out of the online music business and instead start delivering elephants to the moon and, unless you told them not to, they could do so and bill you for it. I'd be amazed if US consumer law would let a term like this pass without serious restrictions on its interpretation.
In the UK, terms permitting unilateral changes to a consumer contract are only permitted if they're reasonable. So increasing prices in line with inflation, OK. Restricting the amount of music you can download because of physical bandwidth restrictions, possibly OK. Reducing your quota from infinity to forty just so they can make money, not OK. If that's what they want to do, they have to contact their customers and explain that they're discontinuing the current service; if they agree to the new terms, can they please sign up again -- i.e. they need positive agreement, not silent acquiesence.
So let me get this straight... if you don't contact them, they will automatically and unilaterally swtich you over to the new "basic" service.
That, my friends, sounds plain illegal. It would be in the UK, at any rate, and UK and US contract law are very similar. If I sign up for one thing, emusic cannot unilaterally decide to give me something else. I have to accept it first. And it's a basic principle of contract law that silence does not amount amount to an acceptance. I can't tell someone "I offer to sell this piece of paper for $500, and if you don't tell me otherwise then I will deem you to have accepted it".
Of course, there's an exception here where there are terms in the original contract allowing one side to unilaterally change the terms. So eg a credit card agreement always allows the card company to change the interest rate. But (at least in the UK), these changes can only be allowed if they are fair and reasonable. If I sign up for an unlimited download service and that's reduced to 40 a month or whatever it was, that's a pretty major change. I don't think any court would regard that as a fair and reasonable change, even if permitted in the original contract.
Having experienced university in the US and UK, I can vouch that there's a simple answer that will be popular with the students too: eliminate the incentive to cheat by grading the entire course properly invigilated exams. This is the standard approach in UK universities: yes, you have tutorials and problem sets, but no-one cares about attendance and marks count for nothing. Everything hinges on the exams.
As a result, the lazy students who would otherwise have cheated simply to pass the class, simply don't bother to do the exercises. They fail, deservedly. The students who care but find the exercises difficult just do their best and come to class with partial answers, but with an understanding of what they need to learn; that's a lot more constructive than copying out someone else's answers. They actually learn something. As for the students who find the class a breeze, they don't need to waste their time completing those poxy problems or attending the class, and can instead work on something worthwhile.
I have to say that coming to the US for grad school from the UK was a real culture shock -- it was like going back to junior high. I would have thought that by the time you've completed a college degree, most people would consider you capable of structuring your own learning but no... warning to any british students thinking about US universities: welcome back to weekly homework assignments.
nope, inherent problem with your powers of imagination. You are extrapolating from your everyday experience, in which every finite body/shape is embedded in another. So you can't imagine a toroidal topology except as being the actual surface of a donut-shaped object. But there is absolutely no mathematical reason to do so. You can define all the essential properties of a toroidal space (for example) without any reference to an "outside" space in which it is embedded. The assumption of embedding is just an extrapolation of our extremely limited experience of living in a 3-d space.
But there are many examples of non-embedded topologies. For example, take the space of all numbers. Real number can be mapped to a line. You might argue that this line is itself embedded in a plane representing all complex numbers. But there;s nothing in which that plane is embedded; there are no numbers that can't be expressed as a sum of real and imaginary part. Or consider the momentum space of waves in a regular lattice. Accoring to both classical and quantum physics, physical space and momentum space are complementary views of reality; neither is more valid than the other. But the momentum space of waves in a regular 3D lattice is indeed a 3D closed space: any wave momentum greater than a certain value in the momentum is remapped to another portion of the space. But there's no 4D momentum space in which these waves are embedded. (OK, you can consider energy as the momentum equivalent of time to build up a 4-d space, but then you hit the buffers -- there's nothing for that 4-d space to be embedded in).
True advances in scientific understanding normally come about when someone realises that "common sense" is wrong, and that an alternative explanation fits the data better. So until Copernicus, it was obvious the world was flat adn the stars went around it. Until Galileo, it was self-evident that the natural state of matter was to be at rest. Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck: each revolutionised science by rejecting "common sense" and instead adopting an (initially) unintuitive approach that actually fits the facts.
Ultimately, your argument is a lot like the argument for the existence of the ether: "in our experience, waves can only move through a substance. therefore there must be a substance through which light waves move". Of course, no-one ever found any evidence for the existence of the ether, and eventually Einstein proposed doing away with the idea altogether.
The authors of the paper claiming the universe is closed claim that this explanation fits better with observations than an infinite universe, so let's assume for now it's true. You say it's self evident that if the universe is finite, it must be embedded in some bigger space. Now, where's your evidence for that? I'm not saying it's not possible that our universe is embedded in a higher-dimensional space. A lot of unification theories assume that our universe contains more dimensions than we see (string theory usually needs 11 dimensions), and some that our universe is indeed embedded in a higher dimensional space (brane theory) -- but that's very different from your assumption. In particular, physical theories involving higher dimensional spaces still allow the possibility that that higher-dimensional space is itself finite and closed, without being embedded in a still-larger space.
wasn't he able to sit around and ponder great mathematical/physical questions because he didn't have to worry about a paycheck?
Hello? He was an academic. Sitting around and pondering great questions is precisely what he was paid to do. In any case, Newton was not wealthy to start with. As a student he was classified as a "sub sizar" -- basically, that meant someone who paid their fees by performing work for the rich students. In his later life he was made Master of the Mint (basically equivalent to Alan Greenspan), and that's when he made his money -- but I don't think he was doing much science at that stage.
And frankly, I'm amazed that anyone could compare Newton (laws of motion, gravity, differential calculus, optics) with Dean Kamen (oversized scooter).
Lamy pens are very nice -- if you like rollerballs, they do one (the Swift) where the retraction mechanism also controls the clip at the top, so when you write with the pen the barrel is completely smooth, then when you retract the nib out pops the clip. Not only is it cool, it also makes it impossible to put the pen in your jacket pocket with the nib still out, saving you $$$ in cleaning bills!
As for fountain pens, I rate wieght and width highly. Skinny pens give my fingers cramp after a while, and the weight means that the ink will flow without you having to press down at all.
If you like modern design and are willing to spend $100+, go for the Lamy 2000 -- Apple would have called it the iPen. Despite its name, it was designed in the 1960s when it must have looked incredibly futuristic. It's made from textured black metal and shaped in a continous dart form like one of those early visions of moon rockets (think Tintin on the moon), just the point of the nib is exposed. The barrel also has a translucent section for checking the ink level, and best of all you don't need to open up the pen to refill it -- just stick the nib in an ink bottle and twist the top to suck it up. Of course, it's not cheap, but as good pens go it's not a rip off either.
Unfortunately I lost that pen a while back and can't afford another, but I've found a good substitute made by Tombow. Tombow's a japanese (?) pen maker with a great eye for simple design. My current pen is made from solid brushed steel. Not only is it heavy, it's almost indestructible -- since the upper part of the barrel is a single piece of metal, I use it to stir drinks, even hammer in small nails! It's so finely machined and weighted that one quick flick of the wrist is all that's needed to unscrew or screw back the barrel. Another nice touch is a band of black rubber where you hold the pen, that makes it a joy to hold.
If you do a lot of writing by hand, definitely invest in a good pen. When the ink flows easily, so do the words.
First, I know some employment law and you were clearly badly advised. Assuming you were employed at least one year (minimum required to claim unfair dismissal), you're entitled to a minimum payment of around 300 plus week's pay for each year you were employed. If you're aged over 41, you get 1.5 weeks pay per year, if under 22 0.5 weeks per year. Then you get your salary between the date of dismissal and the date of the hearing. And then you get your "future loss", i.e. your salary for as long into the future as the court thinks it should take you to get a new job. Still, it's probably too late now... you need to claim within 3 months of dismissal.
Secondly, 100 pounds per month for a 64K line? That's ridiculous...even 3 years ago I had a much faster broadband connection at home for less than half that.
You say:
Perhaps you should read the article and then think through what they are actually saying. They are not arguing against OSS, they are arguing against the new, inflexible, policy that allows only OSS.
The article says:
While the initial open source software may be "free," most studies conclude that acquisition costs represent only 5 to 10 percent of total cost of ownership. Maintenance, training and support are far more expensive with open source than proprietary software.
Am I missing something?
Moderators, please check facts before moderating. I can assure you that the London blackout was not a caused by or confined to the London Underground. It covered most of South London, plus the entire Underground system. Moreover the blackout happened at rush hour and on a system carrying nearly 6 million people a day, that results in a lot of people stuck underground in darkness.
No, it wasn't on the same scale as the US and Italy blackouts but the reason for that is largely because the UK's infrastructure was better able to contain the fault to a small area. The US and Italian outages were caused by small incidents that rapidly snowballed as one network failure caused another to overload and fail, and so on. In London, a similar small incident was confined to one area of the network.
>>I find it interesting that the EU uses a two-house legislature patterned after the original US house and senate.
Certainly the similarity is striking -- but don't forget that the US was not the first two-house legislature. The American structure was closely modelled on the British legislature, which since the middle ages consisted of the lower, elected House of Commons, the upper, unelected House of Lords -- made up of the most powerful people in the country, as with the original US senate -- and a head of state (the king) with the power to veto legislation passed by both houses.
Also many European countries have a US-style 2-hosue system where one house is elected & distributed according to the population, and the other house represents each region equally, for example Germany. So it's probable that the founders of the EC system were looking closer to home for their inspiration -- although doubtless they were informed and inspired by the US.
There's one very big difference: buses. You don't swipe your magnetic ticket when boarding a bus in London, just flash it at the driver, so no-one's tracking where I travel by bus. The oystercards need to be scanned for buses and underground.
/. stop stripping pound signs in posts?
Also, oystercards will soon be used to replace single-trip tickets on the underground. Yes, I know that registration for oysters used in this way is voluntary, but think about it. First, as a stored-value card people are likely to register them in case of loss or theft -- with London transport prices people are likely to keep quite large sums of money (over 50 pounds). Secondly, it may be wholly voluntary now -- but who can guarantee it will stay that way.
In any case, given that the cheapest tube ticket within central london is going up from 1.15* this year to 1.60 next year**, I I know what I'm going to do: shortly before the prices go up by myself a year's worth of tickets
* prices quoted in pounds. When oh well will
** beware London Transport's false advertising. They claim that by using an oyster you won't have to pay the steep fair rises being brought in next year. But if you use the popular Carnet tickets (a discount rate for buying 10 trips at once), you'll see the price rise from 1.15 per journey to 1.60. True that's still cheaper than the non-carnet or non-oyster price (2 per trip -- ouch), but it's a massive and unavoidable rise. I'm considering writing to the advertising complaints body.
I fully accept that -- but the original post was claiming that this was the first time the "power of the sea" had been harnessed to a national grid in any way, not just via an undersea solution.
But to be really nitpicking, I should point out that it's not the power of the sea being harnessed at all -- it's the power of the moon. Or strictly, the earth-moon gravitational field.
>>the generator is the first in the world to harness the power of the sea and be connected to an electricity grid
That's plain untrue. Tidal barrages -- which use the tidally-driven flow seawater in and out of a river mouth or basin -- have been used to generate electricity for decades. A barrage across the Rance, in northern France, opened in 1967 and has been generating enough power to supply 200 000 homes ever since.
Yes, and it's called prior art. You can't patent something that has already been invented (even if you didn't know about its invention).
erm, in the last sentence that should be "European commissioner", not "European police chief". The EU is not yet at the stage where the police can dictate what parliamentarians can vote on...Also the French text clearly says that Microsoft was _not_ named but probably implicated, rather than the other way round...ach, that's what you get when you rely on Babelfish.
A quick EU primer. The EU is set up according to the classic tripartite division of power into executive, legislature and judiciary, as is found in most democratic states (including the US).
The Commission is the executive of the EU. It carries out and polices EU law. It also proposes EU legislation, but since it cannot itself pass the legislation this does not make it a legislative body. Indeed, in most democracies the bulk of legislation is proposed by the executive (including the US and UK).
The Council of Ministers and the Parliament together form the legislature. Every piece of new EU legislation proposed by the Commission must be ratified by the Council of Ministers to take effect. In many areas, the approval of the Parliament is also required. Just as in the US and UK, the legislature can amend or throw out proposed legislation.
Finally, the European Court of Justice is (predictably) the judiciary of the EU. It has the power to strike down EU legislation for being incompatible with the Treaties that created the EU, as well as ensuring that the Commission, Council of Ministers, Parliament, Member States and individuals follow EC law.
While the EU is often condemned as being undemocratic, its legislature is in essence much like the US congress. The Parliament, like the House of Representatives, is elected by the people on on a demographic basis (more populous regions get more MEPs). The Council of Ministers, like the US senate, is made up of an equal number of representatives from each member state. While members are not elected directly to the council, they are drawn from the democratically-elected governments of the member states and so are ultimately subject to democratic control.
The big gap in EU democracy is in the unelected nature of the executive, the commission. But it's unfair to blame that on the EU itself -- it was the member states who vetoed the idea of a popularly elected President of the commission at the EU constitutional convention. Why? precidely because an elected President would give the EU Commission democratic legitimacy, and therefore suck power away from individual governments. It's the same story again and again -- national governments deliberately deny the EU proper democratic accountability precisely in order that they can then denounce EU policies they disagree with as being undemocratic and so retain their own grip on power.
I think the American people need to ask themselves a very simple question here. Are elections a reliable way of choosing politicians, or are they a form of prime-time entertainment?
What is the advantage of voting machines -- electronic or mechanical -- over good old paper ballots? One thing and one thing only: they give you the result the minute the polls have closed, which is a great advantage to journalists and folk who don't like waiting up all night, but has no other benefit at all. If something goes wrong, either all hell breaks loose (Florida 00) or, even worse, nobody notices (as possibly happened in Georgia 02, according to the article).
Why is it assumed that the answer to a failed technology (punch card machines) must be a new, untested technology? What was stopping the California federal judges from ruling "these punch card machines are no good, so we're going to run this election using good ol'fashioned pen and paper." No need to delay, since printing out a few million pages of ballot papers and distributing them could be done in days (newspapers manage a similar feat daily). Sure, it would take a few hours longer to count, but that's better than waiting another 6 months.
Paper ballots are by far the most robust system. People can check to make sure they ticked the right box -- if they got it wrong, they might not be able to vote again but they can at least spoil the paper. The counting can be overseen by officials from each party to ensure that it's done fairly. The ballots can be stored and recounted if needed. They can be guarded while being stored, again by representatives from each party, as a safeguard against tampering (not to mention being securely locked up with tamper-proof seals). With electronic methods, especially those that leave no paper trail, you have to take the machine's word for it, and with no certainty that a clever hacker hasn't managed to fiddle the results.
If you want superfast counting of results, there's even a low-tech way to do this. Give each voter a specially-minted token (like a subway token), and have a separate box for each candidate. Drop your token in the slot for candidate you want to vote for. Have an official listen for the "clunk" when they fall so they can hear if someone tried to drop several (counterfeit) tokens in one box. At the end of polling day, weigh the boxes, divide by the weight of each token, and hey presto, total votes.
This goes further than simple marketing confusion -- it could have real-life consequences for less tech-savvy users. Eg suppose I'm backing up some files to a DVD. If my DVD capacity is quoted in the "K=1000" convention but file sizes are qutoed using the "K=1024", then unless I realised the difference I'd be very confused about why my 4.7Gb of files don't come close to fitting on a "4.7Gbyte" DVD=R.
Also, do these industries show consistency further down the line? I.e. do those that use 1GB=1000MB also use 1MB = 1000Kb = 1000000bytes = 8000000 bits?
Actually, adamantium would be a good name for a diamond foam -- "adamant" is the medieval name for diamand.
Wrong wrong wrong. A nut grows in a single season. The carbon in the nut can only come from CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore burning nuts is carbon neutral over a single nut-growing season.
Similarly, I fail to follow your example of a plant in a box. OK, while the seeds are actually aflame CO2 will be produced faster than it's being absorbed. But overall, the amount of carbon in the system is constant: anything which is not in the plant is in the atmosphere. Therefore so long as you burn the plant no more quickly than it grows, you'll never end up with a higher CO2 concentration than when you started.
Your argument only applies if you start burning something which has been growing for decades -- eg old-growth forest -- in which case you're releasing CO2 that took decades to remove from the atmosphere. But so long as you burn material grown only over, say, the last year -- eg fast-growing bamboo -- then the net amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere over that year must be zero.
>>what, if any, impact this would have on your eyes since each one would be seeing a separate image
Erm, that's what happens anyway. It's your brain that puts the two different images together to create a 3-D single image. All 3D imaging systems (including reality) work by presenting each eye with a slightly different image. Except for those wierd stereogram postcards. No idea how they work, but they really give you eyestrain.
I'm afraid that's already been done. I read about it last year somewhere -- might have been a Xerox PARC development.