Well the problem with that page is that the only thing the various contributors do agree on is that the plural is not virii. On the other hand, it could equaly well be viruses, viri, vira or virora...My hunch would be to go for vira:
I. From existing Latin written sources, it's clear that virus was a neuter noun in latin. That makes it overwhelmingly likely that the plural ends in -a (almost all neuter plurals in all indo-european languages end in -a. It's still true in modern i.e. languages that retain a neuter case, eg Polish and Russian).
II. Written sources also indicated that the genitive singular of virus is viri. Since the plural forms of latin nouns generally share the stem of the genetive singular, that indicates that the stem of the plural is "vir-"
III. Put them together and you get vira.
And anyone who says it's vires...that's latin for "men". And yes, while we do have an unstoppable drive for reproduction together with a desire to access hidden ports, that's where the similarity ends. Well, OK, we're good at breaking things too.
>>Wikipedia's articles can be (and some are) checked over by hundreds and theoretically an infinite number of people.
Can be, yes. But are they? And do the people checking them over actually have the knowledge to do so properly? At least with Britannica I can be fairly confident that the article was written by an expert in the field. With Wikipedia it may well have been written by some guy with spare time on his hands, enthusiasm, but not much knowledge. Or worse, it may have been written by an expert and then "corrected" by Jo Schmo.
The problem with Wikipedia as a knowledge resource is that by definition it will always gravitate towards reflecting the majority view of what is correct. Popular myths will always win out over unpopular truths.
Compare Wikipedia with open-source software, for example. For a well-run OSS project, anyone can submit changes but they will be properly vetted and reviewd and only put on public release if approved. But with Wikipedia, anyone can make a change and have it reflected immediately. Without a proper system of review, it can never be anything more than a collection of popularly-held views on well-known topics and the opinions of a few nonrepresentative individuals on esoteric ones.
I did this once at the cinema. Friday night, hadn't reserved tickets in advance, long queue. So after a while waiting, I just called up on my phone and bought 4 tickets. Ten seconds later, the announcement comes over that the tannoy that that evening's show is now sold out. The people in front of us in the queue were not too happy, but what could they do?
Reminds me of when I tried to buy a mobile phone in Phones4U (a UK chain). I did my research, told the salesman which phone I wanted and on which priceplan. He tried to upsell me to a different phone; I said no. He tried to upsell me to a different price plan; I said no. He tried to sell me insurance; I said no.
He then started to plead with me that if I didn't buy anything extra or more expensive, he wouldn't make any commission. Eventually he said he'd need the manager's approval to sell me an item that was advertised on the shop floor and that I was trying to buy! At that point I walked out of the store, to his apparent amazement. (Though the amazement was all mine when I saw the same guy working there a year later. If he's as efficient at getting rid of other customers as he was with me, it's amazing the store is still open.)
>>(4) The United States is the BEST and the LAST defense agaisnt tyranny.
Exactly. And the best form of defense, as we all know, is a strong offense. Which is why, in the name of defeating tyranny, the US supported Pinochet and a host of other murderous regimes in South America; why they still support the Saudis - a regime that makes China look free; that nice man Karimov in uzbekistan (what do we care if he boils his political opponents alive in oil? he's on our side!); General Musharraf in Pakistan - so he committed a coup against a democratically elected government, but we like him so that's OK; and of course, let's not forget all the support we gave Saddam and Bin Laden back in the 1980s.
Kinda makes you wonder what the rest of the world has against this peace-loving nation, doesn't it?
"as we obviously were with LPs and cassettes since they had infinite information storage capabilities"
Ah, so that's why everyone still backs up to tape.
Come on, do you seriously believe that an LP or a tape has an infinite information storage capability? Perhaps in a theoretical sense, positing an ideal world free of noise and vibration and with records made out of some perfect continuum substance.
But in the real world your signal is limited by noise, both in recording and playback. You can't record or hear any detail finer than the random jiggling of the needle due to heat, trucks outside, earthquakes in China, not to mention electrical noise in the recording circuit. Even if you could eliminate all that (e.g. do it all at absolute zero in orbit around the earth), you'll come down against the granularity of matter which will dictate the maximum smoothness of the groove. And you'd still need to find a perfectly stable electrical source to drive the turntable at constant speed.
Put against this the impossibiliyu of losslessly compressing an analogue signal and you'll find that a DVD has far more effective storage capacity of an LP. After all, if vinyl is such a high-density storage medium, where are the vinyl videodiscs with 6-track sound?
"The manager authorized payment only if you are doing the work you're supposed to be doing. Reading Slashdot? No pay for that time. On IM, no pay for that time (or reduced pay). The network is working great. No problems in the past week. Hey, you haven't done any recovery work so you don't get that extra $1000 that week. The network crashed and you fixed it. Great, here's $1000 but minus $200 because it crashed."
Hate to break to it to you, but someone might have thought of that already. It's called freelancing, and you're free to try it out any time you like.
>The US is phyiscally to big for this sort of thing to go nation wide.
I don't know about that. Modern high-speed trains top 200 miles per hour, that's a 1000 miles in 5 hours. That's not only about 4 times faster than driving, but it's comparable to flying when you take into account all the dead time that involves: on top of a 2 hour flight, you have to get to the out-of-town airport (say 45min each way, so 1:30hr total), check in (1hr), wait for baggage etc. (say 30min): that's 3 hours of dead time, so 5 hours in all. And if you're a business traveller, 5 hours on the train is 5 hours for working, but 3 hours goofing around airports is 3 hours wasted.
Also note that high speed trains are getting faster - maglevs can do over 300 mph - while no-one is planning faster passenger jets any more. I think a good network of high-speed trains could work well in the midwest and right up and down the coasts - OK, you'd still fly coast-to-coast but that would be the exception.
The real reason the US doesn't have long-distance high-speed trains (an I wouldn't call the Boston-NY Acela high speed by international standards) is that they're capital intensive projects unlikely to make a direct profit - in other words, they need government funding and that's anathema to too many people in the US. (Of course, efficient transportation can massively increase general productivity and boost business over the whole region affected, but unless the railroad itself can turn a quick profit, no private investor will get involved.)
"1) common defense 2) build roads 3) deliver the mail Thats it no more"
That's a weird selection. I mean, defense OK, but deliver the mail? There's no reason why a private company can't do that. What does FedEx do, after all? (And in the UK, they're about to end the govt monopoly on ordinary mail.) And roads? Why can't the private sector handle roads? Toll roads can and do work, and with current technology it's possible to charge people according to where and when they drive.
On the other hand, wouldn't you want the government to have a hand in enforcing the law - not just criminal, but civil. Someone has to make sure all those private sector enterprises aren't engaged in price-fixing, monopolies etc.
Might be nice to have, say, a fire service too. Otherwise when your neighbor's house catches fire, he might not be able to afford the local private firefighting service and then - shucks - look, your house burned down too! (In fact the first fire services were private. They adopted the friendly practice of standing by and doing nothing until you agreed to pay whatever they asked.)
And how about education? Should a kid be condemned to achieve only what his parents can afford? Should the fact that your parents are unemployable druggies necessarily affect YOUR chances? Or should the government try and ensure everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
And healthcare. OK, you can afford medical insurance. But there is perhaps a general public benefit to not having 60% of the population die from plague or flu or SARS.
Of course, one thing I agree with you. Why should the government have control of the money supply? I should be able to print out nice dollar bills on my HP! That way everyone could be a millionaire, and it wouldn't result in hyperinflation or anything.
>>Why ? Why not. I am not a Gym freak, but I do st 45-60 minutes weight training + 40-60 minutes cardio/day (good to rent an office with Gym use included;) )
Well, I've lived in London, Paris and Boston, and didn't notice any shortage of independent bookstores in any of those places. They survive because they specialise in the sort of books you don't find in Barnes & Noble or Borders. E.g. in London there are many thriving bookstores specialising in travel, cookery, art, politics, law, poetry, feminism, foreign literature and many other topics.
It's true that there are not that many independent bookstores surviving on selling popular titles, because they can't compete with the big boys on price. But the only people who lose out from this are independent bookstore owners. The public still has just as wide a selection as before, if not wider.
"big gas engine"? We're talking about mowing the lawns on a British, probably suburban garden, not a Texas ranch. Most British people use electric mowers - the gardens aren't big enough to make a petrol-powered version worthwhile, plus it's much less fun if you don't have to worry about accidentally running over the power cable and electrocuting yourself.
"Hate to say it, but odds are a laptop extended warranty will pay for itself, assuming you keep your gear for long enough."
First think about whether any manufacturer, would sell a warranty at a loss, and then think about your last sentence again. A warranty is no different from an insurance policy: if they're to make a profit, then the overall probability of you needing repairs costing more than the warranty must be less than one.
Then again, laptops are different: not because they are more likely to go wrong, but because they generally can only be repaired with manufacturer-sourced parts. (This goes double for Apple laptops.) So the manufacturer can get away with overcharging on parts for non-warranty repairs, which makes the warranty good value by comparison... That's just a guess, though, since I've never actually had occasion to look into the cost of laptop repairs. In 6 years I've had 4 warranty-free laptops, and all of them are still in daily use without a problem. (The oldest is an IBM - those machines are amazingly durable.)
"Imperial units were an outgrowth of kooky base-12 that was used by Germanic tribes -- it's why English uses eleven and twelve instead of oneteen and twoteen."
Oh dear, when are we going to get a "-1 complete made-up bullshit" modifier? Here are some facts.
1. In the first place, with 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone and 3 feet to the yard, it's perfectly clear that the imperial system is not a pure base-12 system anyway.
2. The "imperial" system was not Germanic in origin. The metric system was invented in the 18th century. Before that, every country in Europe used a variant of the "imperial" system, which is descended from the Roman system of measurements. They're the folk that came up with 12 inches to the foot, 16 ounces to the pound etc.
3. Given that these units are Roman in origin, note that in latin, 11 is "undecim" (i.e. one-ten) and twelve is "duodecim" (two-ten). So clearly, language has nothing to do with it. And incidently, "eleven" comes from the Old English expression for "one left over (from ten)", so even the Germanic tribes counted in decimal.
4. Use of base-12 systems long predates even the Romans. The 12-hour clock and 360-degree system for angles were developed by the Babylonians several thousand years ago.
5. Then again, if you need to convert 5/16 to decimal to figure out that it's more than a quarter and less than a half, you're probably beyond my ability to help.
You're only "onto something" if you ignore the fact that historically dogs were not bred for looks, but for their working ability. It's not coincidence that Rico was a border collie - a breed selected over centuries for their ability to understand human commands and act under their own initiative when herding animals. If a dog can understand the farmer's instructions to round up a flock of sheep, separate the rams from the ewes and drive them into separate paddocks, it's not surprising they can understand a fairly large human vocabulary.
Unfortunately, you're absolutely right. We have CCTV cameras covering most public places, we're about to get compulsory biometric ID cards, and now this.
Political debate on this has become monopolised by the law-and-order brigade. Any attempt to raise a protest about privacy and citizens' rights is met with one or more of the following responses:
1. If you've nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear 2. If you don't support us, you're helping terrorists/criminals/illegal immigrants 3. The "people" have no time for "bleeding heart liberals" like you (the favourite put-down of our beloved Home Secretary)
Funny thing is at the same time the government is taking away the last shreds of our privacy, they're talking about changing the freedom of information laws to prevent citizens from finding out what _they_ are up to.
Why don't the people react? I don't know. Maybe it's the incessant banging on from the press about the crime, immigration and terrorism. I'm starting to think it's because most British people couldn't care less about their rights so long as there's beer in the fridge and football on the telly.
No need to shoot, drop or drive over your hard drive. The simple solution is found by physics, not engineering. All you need to do to erase any magnetic media is heat it above its Curie temperature. This is the temperature at which thermal fluctuations destroy any magnetic order in the material. All magnetic information is completely destroyed.
From nosing around Google, it seems that the Curie temperature for most hard drive platters is around 200C (392F). A domestic oven can manage that easily. So just take out the platters from your hard drive (leave out plastic bits which might melt) and stick them in the oven for an hour.
If someone came up with a HD with heat-resistant, removable platters, you could just bake them to erase, then replace them and have a completely balnk, unformatted drive again.
"The idea that the courts determine whether or not someone ACTUALLY IS GUILTY is a stupid and common American fallacy."
It's not a fallacy, it's a definition. Guilt in this context is a legal concept. If the court finds you guilty, you are guilty. If it finds you not guilty, you are not guilty. Whether or not you did it is an entirely different question. Ideally the two should coincide, but sometimes they don't. In such cases, innocent men are guilty. But they are innocent in fact and guilty in law.
"His guilt is completely separate from those stupid messages."
Well, there have been attempts to divorce the question of guilt from the actual evidence. But from the Salem witch trials to the detention of US citizens as "illegal combatants", they're not generally considered an advance in the notion of justice except by the prosecutors.
>>Similarly, I don't want to buy an extra headphone gizmo to listen to MP3s on my Sony Clie. By the time I've bought the headphones, a large memory stick, and fought through their proprietary software, I'll find that it would have been cheaper and easier just to get an MP3 player in the first place!
Should have just got a new Nokia phone, then. Mine came with headphones, doubles as a radio and MP3 player with removal compactflash memory cards. Oh, and it was free with my (cheap) contract (and is now obsolete, since it's not 3G. Could get a much better one these days).
Well I don't mean to be an RIAA apologist, but prices have gone up in the last twenty years.
Still, you have a point. According to the Economic History Resources "How Much Is That Worth Today" calculator, $6 in 1984 was the equivalent of around $11 today, which is still less than most CDs.
>>Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally?
Perhaps because the record companies have a better grasp of economics than you: what the market does best is _minimise_ profit. Free markets benefit the consumer, not the producer. If someone is making a profit on something, then in a free market someone else can sell the same thing for less (but still making a profit), and gain market share. The result is that in a perfect market, prices will stabilise at a level at which nobody makes any profit.
Of course companies know this and that's why they do everything they do to distort or escape the market. Fundamentally there's only three ways out: either gain a monopoly or join a cartel (microsoft, OPEC), get the government to bankroll you through subsidies (most western agriculture), or stay ahead of the game through innovation and/or strong branding (Apple, BMW).
Once your business gets stuck in the commodity rut, then your margins are so low you can only hope to make money out of massive volumes. That's why you don't find any small companies manufacturing non-specialist consumer electronics (eg TVs,DVDs): margins are too low. The RIAA is scared shitless that if they lose control of the music business, music will head down the commodity path and prices will collapse. Since they're acting to protect the interests of their shareholders, you can't really blame them for doing everything they can to prevent this. You CAN blame your legislators for failing to stand up to them, though.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm getting a second degree in EE right now, and again I find the pattern repeating itself."
Well if you wanted variety, you should have taken a second degree in a different subject from the first...
Well the problem with that page is that the only thing the various contributors do agree on is that the plural is not virii. On the other hand, it could equaly well be viruses, viri, vira or virora...My hunch would be to go for vira:
I. From existing Latin written sources, it's clear that virus was a neuter noun in latin. That makes it overwhelmingly likely that the plural ends in -a (almost all neuter plurals in all indo-european languages end in -a. It's still true in modern i.e. languages that retain a neuter case, eg Polish and Russian).
II. Written sources also indicated that the genitive singular of virus is viri. Since the plural forms of latin nouns generally share the stem of the genetive singular, that indicates that the stem of the plural is "vir-"
III. Put them together and you get vira.
And anyone who says it's vires...that's latin for "men". And yes, while we do have an unstoppable drive for reproduction together with a desire to access hidden ports, that's where the similarity ends. Well, OK, we're good at breaking things too.
>>Wikipedia's articles can be (and some are) checked over by hundreds and theoretically an infinite number of people.
Can be, yes. But are they? And do the people checking them over actually have the knowledge to do so properly? At least with Britannica I can be fairly confident that the article was written by an expert in the field. With Wikipedia it may well have been written by some guy with spare time on his hands, enthusiasm, but not much knowledge. Or worse, it may have been written by an expert and then "corrected" by Jo Schmo.
The problem with Wikipedia as a knowledge resource is that by definition it will always gravitate towards reflecting the majority view of what is correct. Popular myths will always win out over unpopular truths.
Compare Wikipedia with open-source software, for example. For a well-run OSS project, anyone can submit changes but they will be properly vetted and reviewd and only put on public release if approved. But with Wikipedia, anyone can make a change and have it reflected immediately. Without a proper system of review, it can never be anything more than a collection of popularly-held views on well-known topics and the opinions of a few nonrepresentative individuals on esoteric ones.
>>By contrast, the most realistic night sky was from Lawrence of Arabia, with no recognizable constellations, but still very realistic.
Maybe David Lean used the high-tech expedient of filming the sky?
I did this once at the cinema. Friday night, hadn't reserved tickets in advance, long queue. So after a while waiting, I just called up on my phone and bought 4 tickets. Ten seconds later, the announcement comes over that the tannoy that that evening's show is now sold out. The people in front of us in the queue were not too happy, but what could they do?
Reminds me of when I tried to buy a mobile phone in Phones4U (a UK chain). I did my research, told the salesman which phone I wanted and on which priceplan. He tried to upsell me to a different phone; I said no. He tried to upsell me to a different price plan; I said no. He tried to sell me insurance; I said no.
He then started to plead with me that if I didn't buy anything extra or more expensive, he wouldn't make any commission. Eventually he said he'd need the manager's approval to sell me an item that was advertised on the shop floor and that I was trying to buy! At that point I walked out of the store, to his apparent amazement. (Though the amazement was all mine when I saw the same guy working there a year later. If he's as efficient at getting rid of other customers as he was with me, it's amazing the store is still open.)
>>(4) The United States is the BEST and the LAST defense agaisnt tyranny.
Exactly. And the best form of defense, as we all know, is a strong offense. Which is why, in the name of defeating tyranny, the US supported Pinochet and a host of other murderous regimes in South America; why they still support the Saudis - a regime that makes China look free; that nice man Karimov in uzbekistan (what do we care if he boils his political opponents alive in oil? he's on our side!); General Musharraf in Pakistan - so he committed a coup against a democratically elected government, but we like him so that's OK; and of course, let's not forget all the support we gave Saddam and Bin Laden back in the 1980s.
Kinda makes you wonder what the rest of the world has against this peace-loving nation, doesn't it?
"as we obviously were with LPs and cassettes since they had infinite information storage capabilities" Ah, so that's why everyone still backs up to tape. Come on, do you seriously believe that an LP or a tape has an infinite information storage capability? Perhaps in a theoretical sense, positing an ideal world free of noise and vibration and with records made out of some perfect continuum substance. But in the real world your signal is limited by noise, both in recording and playback. You can't record or hear any detail finer than the random jiggling of the needle due to heat, trucks outside, earthquakes in China, not to mention electrical noise in the recording circuit. Even if you could eliminate all that (e.g. do it all at absolute zero in orbit around the earth), you'll come down against the granularity of matter which will dictate the maximum smoothness of the groove. And you'd still need to find a perfectly stable electrical source to drive the turntable at constant speed. Put against this the impossibiliyu of losslessly compressing an analogue signal and you'll find that a DVD has far more effective storage capacity of an LP. After all, if vinyl is such a high-density storage medium, where are the vinyl videodiscs with 6-track sound?
"The manager authorized payment only if you are doing the work you're supposed to be doing. Reading Slashdot? No pay for that time. On IM, no pay for that time (or reduced pay). The network is working great. No problems in the past week. Hey, you haven't done any recovery work so you don't get that extra $1000 that week. The network crashed and you fixed it. Great, here's $1000 but minus $200 because it crashed."
Hate to break to it to you, but someone might have thought of that already. It's called freelancing, and you're free to try it out any time you like.
>The US is phyiscally to big for this sort of thing to go nation wide.
I don't know about that. Modern high-speed trains top 200 miles per hour, that's a 1000 miles in 5 hours. That's not only about 4 times faster than driving, but it's comparable to flying when you take into account all the dead time that involves: on top of a 2 hour flight, you have to get to the out-of-town airport (say 45min each way, so 1:30hr total), check in (1hr), wait for baggage etc. (say 30min): that's 3 hours of dead time, so 5 hours in all. And if you're a business traveller, 5 hours on the train is 5 hours for working, but 3 hours goofing around airports is 3 hours wasted.
Also note that high speed trains are getting faster - maglevs can do over 300 mph - while no-one is planning faster passenger jets any more. I think a good network of high-speed trains could work well in the midwest and right up and down the coasts - OK, you'd still fly coast-to-coast but that would be the exception.
The real reason the US doesn't have long-distance high-speed trains (an I wouldn't call the Boston-NY Acela high speed by international standards) is that they're capital intensive projects unlikely to make a direct profit - in other words, they need government funding and that's anathema to too many people in the US. (Of course, efficient transportation can massively increase general productivity and boost business over the whole region affected, but unless the railroad itself can turn a quick profit, no private investor will get involved.)
Well, given that the US Navy uses Windows NT to run (nuclear capable) warships, I wouldn't be so sure.
"1) common defense 2) build roads 3) deliver the mail Thats it no more"
That's a weird selection. I mean, defense OK, but deliver the mail? There's no reason why a private company can't do that. What does FedEx do, after all? (And in the UK, they're about to end the govt monopoly on ordinary mail.) And roads? Why can't the private sector handle roads? Toll roads can and do work, and with current technology it's possible to charge people according to where and when they drive.
On the other hand, wouldn't you want the government to have a hand in enforcing the law - not just criminal, but civil. Someone has to make sure all those private sector enterprises aren't engaged in price-fixing, monopolies etc.
Might be nice to have, say, a fire service too. Otherwise when your neighbor's house catches fire, he might not be able to afford the local private firefighting service and then - shucks - look, your house burned down too! (In fact the first fire services were private. They adopted the friendly practice of standing by and doing nothing until you agreed to pay whatever they asked.)
And how about education? Should a kid be condemned to achieve only what his parents can afford? Should the fact that your parents are unemployable druggies necessarily affect YOUR chances? Or should the government try and ensure everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
And healthcare. OK, you can afford medical insurance. But there is perhaps a general public benefit to not having 60% of the population die from plague or flu or SARS.
Of course, one thing I agree with you. Why should the government have control of the money supply? I should be able to print out nice dollar bills on my HP! That way everyone could be a millionaire, and it wouldn't result in hyperinflation or anything.
Whaddaya mean? Bemer invented the caps lock too. That's why he came up with ASCII and not ascii. To give it a purpose.
>>Why ? Why not. I am not a Gym freak, but I do st 45-60 minutes weight training +
40-60 minutes cardio
Correction. You are a gym freak.
Well, I've lived in London, Paris and Boston, and didn't notice any shortage of independent bookstores in any of those places. They survive because they specialise in the sort of books you don't find in Barnes & Noble or Borders. E.g. in London there are many thriving bookstores specialising in travel, cookery, art, politics, law, poetry, feminism, foreign literature and many other topics.
It's true that there are not that many independent bookstores surviving on selling popular titles, because they can't compete with the big boys on price. But the only people who lose out from this are independent bookstore owners. The public still has just as wide a selection as before, if not wider.
"big gas engine"? We're talking about mowing the lawns on a British, probably suburban garden, not a Texas ranch. Most British people use electric mowers - the gardens aren't big enough to make a petrol-powered version worthwhile, plus it's much less fun if you don't have to worry about accidentally running over the power cable and electrocuting yourself.
"Hate to say it, but odds are a laptop extended warranty will pay for itself, assuming you keep your gear for long enough."
First think about whether any manufacturer, would sell a warranty at a loss, and then think about your last sentence again. A warranty is no different from an insurance policy: if they're to make a profit, then the overall probability of you needing repairs costing more than the warranty must be less than one.
Then again, laptops are different: not because they are more likely to go wrong, but because they generally can only be repaired with manufacturer-sourced parts. (This goes double for Apple laptops.) So the manufacturer can get away with overcharging on parts for non-warranty repairs, which makes the warranty good value by comparison... That's just a guess, though, since I've never actually had occasion to look into the cost of laptop repairs. In 6 years I've had 4 warranty-free laptops, and all of them are still in daily use without a problem. (The oldest is an IBM - those machines are amazingly durable.)
"Imperial units were an outgrowth of kooky base-12 that was used by Germanic tribes -- it's why English uses eleven and twelve instead of oneteen and twoteen."
Oh dear, when are we going to get a "-1 complete made-up bullshit" modifier? Here are some facts.
1. In the first place, with 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone and 3 feet to the yard, it's perfectly clear that the imperial system is not a pure base-12 system anyway.
2. The "imperial" system was not Germanic in origin. The metric system was invented in the 18th century. Before that, every country in Europe used a variant of the "imperial" system, which is descended from the Roman system of measurements. They're the folk that came up with 12 inches to the foot, 16 ounces to the pound etc.
3. Given that these units are Roman in origin, note that in latin, 11 is "undecim" (i.e. one-ten) and twelve is "duodecim" (two-ten). So clearly, language has nothing to do with it. And incidently, "eleven" comes from the Old English expression for "one left over (from ten)", so even the Germanic tribes counted in decimal.
4. Use of base-12 systems long predates even the Romans. The 12-hour clock and 360-degree system for angles were developed by the Babylonians several thousand years ago.
5. Then again, if you need to convert 5/16 to decimal to figure out that it's more than a quarter and less than a half, you're probably beyond my ability to help.
You're only "onto something" if you ignore the fact that historically dogs were not bred for looks, but for their working ability. It's not coincidence that Rico was a border collie - a breed selected over centuries for their ability to understand human commands and act under their own initiative when herding animals. If a dog can understand the farmer's instructions to round up a flock of sheep, separate the rams from the ewes and drive them into separate paddocks, it's not surprising they can understand a fairly large human vocabulary.
Unfortunately, you're absolutely right. We have CCTV cameras covering most public places, we're about to get compulsory biometric ID cards, and now this.
Political debate on this has become monopolised by the law-and-order brigade. Any attempt to raise a protest about privacy and citizens' rights is met with one or more of the following responses:
1. If you've nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear
2. If you don't support us, you're helping terrorists/criminals/illegal immigrants
3. The "people" have no time for "bleeding heart liberals" like you (the favourite put-down of our beloved Home Secretary)
Funny thing is at the same time the government is taking away the last shreds of our privacy, they're talking about changing the freedom of information laws to prevent citizens from finding out what _they_ are up to.
Why don't the people react? I don't know. Maybe it's the incessant banging on from the press about the crime, immigration and terrorism. I'm starting to think it's because most British people couldn't care less about their rights so long as there's beer in the fridge and football on the telly.
No need to shoot, drop or drive over your hard drive. The simple solution is found by physics, not engineering. All you need to do to erase any magnetic media is heat it above its Curie temperature. This is the temperature at which thermal fluctuations destroy any magnetic order in the material. All magnetic information is completely destroyed.
From nosing around Google, it seems that the Curie temperature for most hard drive platters is around 200C (392F). A domestic oven can manage that easily. So just take out the platters from your hard drive (leave out plastic bits which might melt) and stick them in the oven for an hour.
If someone came up with a HD with heat-resistant, removable platters, you could just bake them to erase, then replace them and have a completely balnk, unformatted drive again.
"The idea that the courts determine whether or not someone ACTUALLY IS GUILTY is a stupid and common American fallacy."
It's not a fallacy, it's a definition. Guilt in this context is a legal concept. If the court finds you guilty, you are guilty. If it finds you not guilty, you are not guilty. Whether or not you did it is an entirely different question. Ideally the two should coincide, but sometimes they don't. In such cases, innocent men are guilty. But they are innocent in fact and guilty in law.
"His guilt is completely separate from those stupid messages."
Well, there have been attempts to divorce the question of guilt from the actual evidence. But from the Salem witch trials to the detention of US citizens as "illegal combatants", they're not generally considered an advance in the notion of justice except by the prosecutors.
>>Similarly, I don't want to buy an extra headphone gizmo to listen to MP3s on my Sony Clie. By the time I've bought the headphones, a large memory stick, and fought through their proprietary software, I'll find that it would have been cheaper and easier just to get an MP3 player in the first place!
Should have just got a new Nokia phone, then. Mine came with headphones, doubles as a radio and MP3 player with removal compactflash memory cards. Oh, and it was free with my (cheap) contract (and is now obsolete, since it's not 3G. Could get a much better one these days).
Well I don't mean to be an RIAA apologist, but prices have gone up in the last twenty years.
Still, you have a point. According to the Economic History Resources "How Much Is That Worth Today" calculator, $6 in 1984 was the equivalent of around $11 today, which is still less than most CDs.
>>Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally?
Perhaps because the record companies have a better grasp of economics than you: what the market does best is _minimise_ profit. Free markets benefit the consumer, not the producer. If someone is making a profit on something, then in a free market someone else can sell the same thing for less (but still making a profit), and gain market share. The result is that in a perfect market, prices will stabilise at a level at which nobody makes any profit.
Of course companies know this and that's why they do everything they do to distort or escape the market. Fundamentally there's only three ways out: either gain a monopoly or join a cartel (microsoft, OPEC), get the government to bankroll you through subsidies (most western agriculture), or stay ahead of the game through innovation and/or strong branding (Apple, BMW).
Once your business gets stuck in the commodity rut, then your margins are so low you can only hope to make money out of massive volumes. That's why you don't find any small companies manufacturing non-specialist consumer electronics (eg TVs,DVDs): margins are too low. The RIAA is scared shitless that if they lose control of the music business, music will head down the commodity path and prices will collapse. Since they're acting to protect the interests of their shareholders, you can't really blame them for doing everything they can to prevent this. You CAN blame your legislators for failing to stand up to them, though.