>>Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.
Maybe in the US. Here in the UK, a generation of kids grew up with Morph - he was a shape-shifting plasticine stop-motion animated character created in 1980. In fact, Morph was the very first creation of Aardman Animations, who went on to produce Wallace & Grommit and Chicken Run. Learn (slightly) more at http://www.aardman.com/showcase/amazing.html.
The difference between using a calculator and a spell/grammar check is that if you use it correctly, a calculator will give you the correct answer. MS Word, on the other hand, will take a perfectly well-written sentence and destroy it. I use many words that aren't covered by the spellcheck; I use many constructions that Word considers ungrammatical. Fortunately I know enough to know when I'm right and Word is wrong, but most kids will be scared by those wiggly green lines. They will end up being stylistic pygmies, scared to ever use a passive or write a sentence containing more than three clauses. Microsoft-approved style may be fine for helping semiliterate employees write reports, but it's woefully inadequate for students learning to write creatively.
>> do the Welsh, Scots, and Irish all have a commond bond because of their oppression at the hands of the English?
I think most Scots would take exception to that remark. After all, England and Scotland were united by a Scottish king (James VI, known to the English as James I) and Scots have made a disproportionate contribution to British history since. Even today the Prime Minister (Blair) and Chancellor (Brown) are both Scottish. (And the leader of the opposition party is Welsh, as it happens.)
Also the Scots and the Irish have never got on well (not since the reformation, anyway). The "troubles" in northern ireland is basically an irish-scottish conflict - the pro-British unionists are almost all of scots descent. (And frankly, most English people are now sick to death of Northern Ireland and would be delighted to get rid of it. It's only the inconvenient fact that the majority of the population there still wants to be British that's getting in the way.)
>>I had always assumed that they would but the cultures seem pretty divergent from a distance.
It would be an odd response to someone else threatening your culture, to give it up to merge with another threatened culture.
I too doubt there's anything audibly different with directional cables, but I wouldn't discount the possibility. The point that the current is AC (so electrons move in both directions) is irrelevant. The electrons are just carriers of the signal, and nobody can deny that the SIGNAL moves in one direction - from amp to speaker. (If you doubt it, consider the net energy flux: the amp powers the speaker, so energy is being carried down the wire.) It's like a sound wave: the individual carriers of the wave move both ways, but the wave itself moves forward.
Now clearly there are components that transmit an electrical SIGNAL better in one direction than another (a diode is an extreme example). Given that, it's not impossible that a cable could be engineered to transmit a signal better in one direction than another. For example, IIRC AC signals get reflected at discontinuities in impedance (resistance), which tends to occur when one component (a cable) meets another (a speaker or amp terminal). Gradual changes in impedance will rather tend to attenuate/accentuate a signal. So maybe by a careful arrangement of the impedance structure, they can come up with a cable that minimises reflection of the forward carrying signal while absorbing any back-reflection that might interfere with the signal.
I can tell you're a medical student and not a doctor, because most doctors are much more realistic about the limits of their knowledge. "Scientific" limits on the capabilities of biological systems are often wrong because of some overlooked or unknown factor.
A famous example of this is that for many years scientists could not work out how bees could fly. Their wings were too small, muscles too weak and bodies too heavy. It turned out that bees were able to use previously unknown aerodynamic effects to generate more lift than our previous "knowledge" allowed. Another example is that many birds of prey have visual acuity better than the laws of optics, applied to their eyes, would seem to permit. It turned out that the visual signal processing in their brains is so advanced that birds can actually 'see' features that are below the resolution limit of their eyes.
Similarly, we shouldn't be too dogmatic about what humans can and cannot hear. MP3s (and presumably AACs) compress music by suppressing parts you "can't" hear, not because they're outside your range of hearing but because the brain, assuming those parts should be there, fills in for them even when they're absent.
But it may be that you can't hear something consciously but still tell that it's not there. For example, there was a news story a week or so back showing that people could somehow tell when a picture had changed by the removal of an item in it, even though consciously they could not explain what the difference was - it just 'felt different'.
So, if someone claims to be able to tell the difference between 1 128Kb AAC and a CD, test that claim in a double-blind experiment. Only when he fails the test can you say he was imagining things.
" Rearrange your work schedule so you start at 7am and get off at 3pm or 4pm. By hitting the streets at semi- off hours you will cut your commute time by possibly half (less traffic.)"
Better solution: find a place to live within 5 minute's walk of work or subway ride. Then you will save on your commute time and not have to get up early. If there is no subway and no residential neighborhoods near work, dump suburbia and move to a proper city. What's the point of freeing up all that time if you're stuck in Boonsville?
"By hitting your seat at 7am when the office is empty and quiet you can get more productive sooner, and get more done between 7am and 9am than most people have done by noon."
This only makes sense if you don't work closely with other people. If you do, you'll spend 2 hours from 7 to 9 waiting for the others to get in. If you can work for hours without needing to ask anyone else for anything, then ask your boss if you can work from home part-time.
"Let a woman take you clothes shopping, throw out everything in your closet and replace it with whatever she suggests. Make sure everything matches everything else. Time saved : none, but nobody will know you got dressed in the dark before you had caffeine in your system."
Wear a suit to work. You can wear the same suit everyday, with the same tie and a range of identical shirts, and no-one will think it odd.
"Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day."
That may be true, but what's the point? Surely a big reason for saving time where it's not needed is to give you more relaxation time, not less.
"Get your news from FARK (www.fark.com) In the hour it takes to watch the news on TV you could have a synopsis of the important events around the globe from a hundred different news sources. If it is newsworthy, it's on FARK."
Listen to the radio news while doing other things. Try NPR and you might even learn something. Alternatively, admit that for 99.99% of what's reported, there's no reason why you need to know it straight away. So just catch up with the news weekly instead of daily.
"Cancel your MMORPG accounts (stop playing Everquest). This will give you back 1000 hours per year. Maybe more."
And stop reading slashdot. That will save even more.
>>I already use Audible.com to squeeze in more books in my life, by listening, rather than reading.
Here's a hint: if you learn to read without moving your lips, you'll find that you can get through a book in a fraction of the time it would take to listen to it.
>>I've completed 8 unabridged books in two months
I'm starting to wonder if the poster's age is in double digits. Apart from the puerile boasting (you know, it's not how much you read that counts, it's what you read), what's this 'unabridged' thing? Call me a metropolitan intellectual snob if you like, but the last time I saw an abridged book was in kindergarten. In the age of Harry Potter, even 8 year olds read 600-page books.
*sigh*. Yes I know scotland has a separate legal system. So does Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. (You might also note that all the systems are joined at the top, since they share the same highest court, namely the House of Lords.) But this minor mistake on my part is rendered inconsequential compared to the nonsense you write. I'll just respond to the more egregious errors:
"Scotland has a (superior) legal system that is derived from Roman Law (even today proceedings are in Latin)."
Are you smoking crack? Whether Scots law is superior is a matter of taste, though you should note that it's very much a hybrid common-law/Roman-law system. But thinking that they still argue in Latin? All lawyers are fond of the occasional Latin turn-of-phrase, but it's been several hundred years since proceedings were conducted in latin any court in Britain.
"Scotland has fully adopted the EU Human Rights Act whilst England is lagging behind. "
There is no such thing as the 'EU Human Rights Act'. The Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (commonly known as the European Convention on Human Rights, or ECHR) was promulgated in (I believe) 1947 by an organisation called the Council of Europe, which is unrelated to the E.U., which did not exist in even embryonic form until the Treaty of Rome in 1956. The ECHR is enforced by the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, while EU law is under the aegis of the European Court of Justice, in Luxembourg. There are no organisational links between the two.
The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the ECHR into both English and Scottish law simultaneously. As far as I know there is no difference between the two nations regarding the applicability of the ECHR. Please point me to the provisions of the relevant legislation showing this is not the case.
"English law DOES NOT HAVE the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise thanks to the Criminal Justice Act in the early nineties."
This is truly complete, total, utter bollocks. If that were the case, why was there such uproar when the Home Secretary suggested changing the standard of proof in terrorism cases (a position from which he backtracked today.) There is not one single criminal offence in English law where the presumption of innocence does not apply.
"Also, your example about the box of matches does not hold true in England. The 1996 offensive weapons act makes it illegal to carry any offensive object in a public place. this would include a pocket penknife (of any size). You *will* be charged for carrying a pocket penknife in London - even if you had no intention whatsoever of using it to garot someone. If you had a box of matches in one pocket and lighter fluid in the other then you could well be charged, or at least, receive a caution."
You are labouring under various misapprehensions here. Firstly, if you care to read the act (all Acts of Parliament can be found on government websites) you'll see that the offence is actually "carrying an offensive weapon without lawful excuse". Thus clearly carrying a lighter and lighter fluid is not an offence is you were using it to light your cigarette. Further, as regards knives the offence of 'carrying a bladed or pointed article in a public place' specifically excludes folding pocket-knives with blades under 3 inches long, and excludes knives carried for use at work. So you should be safe with your penknife.
Secondly, of course you could be arrested, charged and cautioned for carrying a lighter or box of matches. You can be arrested for walking down the street if the police feel like it. But that doesn't mean you'll be convicted.
"Also the Anti-Terrorism act allows citizens to be held without charge for an indefinite time. This came about to combat the irish threat in the 80's, long before bush and his oddball war for oil/power."
The power to detain UK citizens without trial was introduced by the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991. It was repealed in
Did I not say that there were exceptions? (All thought up by legislators, I might add, not judges.) Almost all (note the qualification, please) of which relate to pretty minor offences. The vast bulk of the criminal law requires intent as well as action. Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, as Coke put it in the 1600s.
No, you don't understand the difference between being charged and being convicted. The police can charge you with whatever they like. But they won't have much chance of convicting without evidence, if you insist on a trial.
you didn't read my post. Who said foot traffic dropping off for an afternoon. I was talking about the roads being closed (to vehicles as well as pedestrians) for days or even weeks. A lot of businesses would have trouble in that situation.
OK as a lawyer please let me put an end to all the crap on this thread.
The British and American legal systems are extremely similar to each other. Not surprising since the US legal system was inherited from the British, and the British hasn't changed much in 300 years (that's why we wear the same gowns and wigs we wore back in 1700).
BOTH are common law systems, meaning that while the legislature makes the laws, the judges interpret them and the judge's interpretation of the law is the law (until it's appealed). As a result both have a legislative tradition of writing very detailed laws. By contrast, the continental 'Roman law' system depends upon broad legal principles, with judges filling in the gaps according to circumstance.
BOTH have the presumption of innocence until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. (Both ignore this presumption if you're a foreign muslim.)
BOTH require, for guilty verdict in criminal law (and with very few exceptions), the accused to have the intention to commit a crime as well as actually performing the action. For example, if I took your new iPod, but in the honest belief that it was my new iPod, it would not be theft. The idea that it's an offence to carry a box of matches is ridiculous. It's an offence to carry a box of matches if it can be proved that you were on the way to burn down a house. A big difference.
The only real difference is that the US has a written constitution, while the UK relies upon evolved constitutional norms. Both these systems have their strengths and their failings. Up until a couple of years ago I'd have said the UK was doing better but now the current British government appears to have decided to flush our constitution down the toilet I'm not so sure. Then again Bush, Ashcroft et al. seem to get away with ignoring large chunks of the US constitution, so maybe it makes no difference anyway.
>>I have no doubt a 1Ghz G4 iBook would satisfy the computing needs of a liberal arts college student.
The computing _needs_ of a liberal arts student could be satisfied by a typewriter. The only reason a student needs a powerbook is as a babe magnet, which means they're really only necessary for geeks.
>>You think they should compensate all the businesses that were affected?
Suppose it was your business. You're not doing too well, but you've just had a big order that will keep you afloat. But the police close down the area and you can't fulfill. Maybe you sell perishable goods, so your stock is now worthless. You didn't fulfill the order, so you don't have the money to pay your supplier for the now-worthless stock. You have no option but to declare yourself bankrupt. You lose your business, your house and your car. All because of the police closing the road.
Still so sure you shouldn't get any compensation?
Re:I don't get it
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Something else I find very rude is the way a phone call gets priority over anything else competing for the recipient's attention. Such as a conversation with me, for instance.
Say you're talking to a friend. Wouldn't you think it was incredibly rude if someone else, who you don't even know, came along, butted in and started his own new conversation, expecting you to wait? Wouldn't you think your friend pretty rude for cutting you out, too? But that's how it always is with phone calls. I think that if you're talking to someone and the phone rings, you shouldn't answer it (unless you're expecting a call). Everyone now has caller id and/or voicemail so there's no worry about missing the message.
Of course this is a gripe about the way we use phones in general, not just cellphones, but the problem is made much worse. Now you can't even go for a walk/drive with someone without an invisible intruder turning up - you can even have a guest at your own home cut you out!
Somehow though I have difficulty getting other people to sympathise with me. Last month,when I was with a group of 5 friends on a train, I tried to explain my point of view after one person made the rest of us shut up for 10 minutes so he could hear what is phone-friend was saying. Somehow no-one else thought it was rude (and I was only suggesting that maybe he should go and stand further from us while on the phone so we could get on with what we were talking about before).
Until most folk improve their manners a lot, I can see why people might want a jammer, though I wouldn't buy one myself.
Firstly, there are large swathes of the US where fertile land is neither urbanised nor farmed, but simply left to grow back into forest. I'm thinking of New England. Outside the main cities (and often surprisingly close to them) there are acres and acres of new-growth forest that used to be farmland. What happened was local farmers were priced out of business by big midwestern producers, and the land was just left fallow. (if you've ever been to Walden Pond -- where Thoreau went off to retreat from the world -- you'll notice it's surrounded by dense forest. But when Thoreau lived there it was all farmland.)
Secondly, it may be a no-brainer that cities tend to grow around fertile land, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea. (Indeed it's the sort of idea only someone with no brain would consider good.) Especially since once that fertile land is concreted over, it's gone for good.
if you want to throw money around, the best 35mm film can provide the equivalent of 20 megapixels and will cost you far less than an EOS 1D. Though you'll need a good camera since at that level flaws in the lens are more important than the film grain.
An everyday SLR with decent film will give you around 12 MPx. Even a $5 throwaway gives you 4MPx. Good film also holds more colour information, equivalent to 36bit.
Digital cameras have many advantages, but resolution is not yet one.
Well that's a very social contract view of the constitution. But as you state it, it suffers from a major internal inconsistency. As you write:
'The citizens say, "We will give up our right to make laws directly, and in return the two governments give up the right to hold office longer than we want them to." The state government says, "I will give up my right to have my own army, and in return, the federal government will give up its right to not defend me.'
Where did the government acquire any rights for it to be able to bargain with the citizens? This assumes that the government exists and exercises power independently of the constitution, rather than being defined by the constitution. If that's the case, then the previous poster was correct and 'government' is more than an agreement. On the other hand, if government is merely an agreement between citizens, then the government does not exist independently of the constitution and so cannot be a party to it.
I prefer the former view. After all, plenty of countries have managed without constitutions throughout history. The UK, New Zealand and Israel manage pretty well to this day.
And what makes you think "would" is any more grammatical (as opposed to more polite) than "can"? What is "would" in this context? It's the future conditional of "to be". so to be a grammar nazi, it doesn't make sense without an 'if' clause. for example,
Q: "Would you pass the salt" A: "In what circumstances? I would if you said please"
As for "please", that's a contraction of "if you please", i.e. if it would please you. So again you're not asking FOR anything:
Q: "Please pass the salt" A: "Yes, it would be very pleasing"
If you want to be totally 'accurate', you'd better construct your requests explicitly and preferably not as a question. How about "I would like some salt, please, John". But of course it doesn't sound very natural, because language is not mathematics. There is no objectively correct and incorrect way of saying something. There is merely what the majority of speakers, at any given time, regard as normal. Grammar nazis telling people that a practice used by 99% of people is "wrong" have got their heads screwed on backwards.
"dark side" of the moon means the one that is always turned away from the earth and so impossible to see from earth-bound telescopes (the moon rotates such that the same side always faces the earth as it orbits). But it's not dark in the literal sense - if you think about what happens at new moon, it's that that side facing the earth is in shadow, i.e. the 'dark' side is facing the sun. So send a satellite to orbit the moon and you'll get full daylight pics of the dark side.
"It's set by the resistance, which is determined by the current. Yah. The current is determined by the current. Sounds screwy, but it's right. Once the current through the air hits a threshold, the air undergoes dielectric breakdown, forms a conductive path, and the current goes to hell. Again, you could either say the current causes it, or the voltage gradient causes it, because the resistance per unit length is fixed. "
I think you're failing to get the basic point. Our electric supply is 220V or 110V or whatever. High tension cables are 10kV or whatever. Batteries are 1.5V or 3V, not 5A. In almost all electrical circuits, we control the voltage first, and then vary the current by adjusting load. If I'm living under a high-voltage cable, I wouldn't write to the electricity company and say "please reduce your current", because that depends on what consumers are using. But I could say "please reduce your voltage" [and step it up/down nearer the point of use]; this would of course affect the amount of current used proportionately, but would not directly control it. That's why it's relevant to do an experiment where you measure the amount of ozone generated as a function of voltage and not current.
On a more general level, current is of course caused by the movement of electrons or ions. Electrons/ions move because of an electric field which is another way of saying because of a voltage difference. A current does not create an electric field, it's the field that creates the current. In a very real, physical sense, voltage determines current and not the other way round.
"Next example. Take that 10kV balloon floating in the air. Move it into the stratosphere. How long is it going to stay at that potential? A very, very long time. There's no easy path to ground, and so how exactly would it dissipate?"
It would dissipate in exactly the same way. Air molecules bumping into it and picking up (or dropping) excess charge. How and when (and if) the resulting ion makes its way to the ground is irrelevant. The charge moves off the balloon and into the atmosphere. If it took longer in the stratosphere than at sea level, it would be because of the difference in air pressure.
'Ground' is an irrelevant concept here. It's useful in electrical engineering because it's so big that moving a few electrons one way or the other doesn't noticeably affect its voltage, so we use it to set the (arbitrary) zero level of our voltage measurement. Here, we can consider the atmosphere as "ground"; it's also a big sink whose voltage doesn't vary much if you add or remove a few electrons. True, air doesn't conduct well but neither does much of what covers the earth (e.g. sand, stone, dry earth)
It doesn't require a spark to create ozone. Never smelt the ozone coming off a CRT monitor or a laser printer when you turn it on? That arises from the charge on the screen or printer drum. How do you think air ionisers work? Not by shooting sparks, I can tell you.
Take your balloon at 10kV, floating in the air. How long does it stay charged? forever? of course not. The charge (and voltage) dissipates within a few minutes, generating ions and ozone as a result. Sure you're not going to get much ozone from a balloon, because the charge involved is tiny. Attach the balloon to a generator for keeping its charge constant and it will produce plenty of ozone for you.
True, such a device consumes current to generate ozone. But as someone who understands Ohm's law, you surely realise that - since the relevant 'resistance' is a property of the atmosphere - current is entirely determined by the voltage. In the context of HV power lines, we set the voltage, not the current. So it makes far more sense in an experimental context to measure the effect of exposure to high voltage than to fiddle around trying to set the current.
Of course, because like all movies until pretty recently it was recorded on good ol' photographic film, which offers a resolution far higher than any existing digitised video format. Same goes for digital cameras - even the best still don't match the resolution of a decent 35mm film.
That's not true if you get a bright enough machine. I've got a 1500 lumens projector and the picture's perfectly visible in daylight (it's better in a dark room, but then so's any video medium). I get a picture twice as big as any plasma or back-projection unit for about 1/3 the price, plus it takes up a tiny amount of space. And another bonus is I can make shadow puppets during boring shows.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.
Maybe in the US. Here in the UK, a generation of kids grew up with Morph - he was a shape-shifting plasticine stop-motion animated character created in 1980. In fact, Morph was the very first creation of Aardman Animations, who went on to produce Wallace & Grommit and Chicken Run. Learn (slightly) more at http://www.aardman.com/showcase/amazing.html.
The difference between using a calculator and a spell/grammar check is that if you use it correctly, a calculator will give you the correct answer. MS Word, on the other hand, will take a perfectly well-written sentence and destroy it. I use many words that aren't covered by the spellcheck; I use many constructions that Word considers ungrammatical. Fortunately I know enough to know when I'm right and Word is wrong, but most kids will be scared by those wiggly green lines. They will end up being stylistic pygmies, scared to ever use a passive or write a sentence containing more than three clauses. Microsoft-approved style may be fine for helping semiliterate employees write reports, but it's woefully inadequate for students learning to write creatively.
>> do the Welsh, Scots, and Irish all have a commond bond because of their oppression at the hands of the English?
I think most Scots would take exception to that remark. After all, England and Scotland were united by a Scottish king (James VI, known to the English as James I) and Scots have made a disproportionate contribution to British history since. Even today the Prime Minister (Blair) and Chancellor (Brown) are both Scottish. (And the leader of the opposition party is Welsh, as it happens.)
Also the Scots and the Irish have never got on well (not since the reformation, anyway). The "troubles" in northern ireland is basically an irish-scottish conflict - the pro-British unionists are almost all of scots descent. (And frankly, most English people are now sick to death of Northern Ireland and would be delighted to get rid of it. It's only the inconvenient fact that the majority of the population there still wants to be British that's getting in the way.)
>>I had always assumed that they would but the cultures seem pretty divergent from a distance.
It would be an odd response to someone else threatening your culture, to give it up to merge with another threatened culture.
I too doubt there's anything audibly different with directional cables, but I wouldn't discount the possibility. The point that the current is AC (so electrons move in both directions) is irrelevant. The electrons are just carriers of the signal, and nobody can deny that the SIGNAL moves in one direction - from amp to speaker. (If you doubt it, consider the net energy flux: the amp powers the speaker, so energy is being carried down the wire.) It's like a sound wave: the individual carriers of the wave move both ways, but the wave itself moves forward.
Now clearly there are components that transmit an electrical SIGNAL better in one direction than another (a diode is an extreme example). Given that, it's not impossible that a cable could be engineered to transmit a signal better in one direction than another. For example, IIRC AC signals get reflected at discontinuities in impedance (resistance), which tends to occur when one component (a cable) meets another (a speaker or amp terminal). Gradual changes in impedance will rather tend to attenuate/accentuate a signal. So maybe by a careful arrangement of the impedance structure, they can come up with a cable that minimises reflection of the forward carrying signal while absorbing any back-reflection that might interfere with the signal.
I can tell you're a medical student and not a doctor, because most doctors are much more realistic about the limits of their knowledge. "Scientific" limits on the capabilities of biological systems are often wrong because of some overlooked or unknown factor.
A famous example of this is that for many years scientists could not work out how bees could fly. Their wings were too small, muscles too weak and bodies too heavy. It turned out that bees were able to use previously unknown aerodynamic effects to generate more lift than our previous "knowledge" allowed. Another example is that many birds of prey have visual acuity better than the laws of optics, applied to their eyes, would seem to permit. It turned out that the visual signal processing in their brains is so advanced that birds can actually 'see' features that are below the resolution limit of their eyes.
Similarly, we shouldn't be too dogmatic about what humans can and cannot hear. MP3s (and presumably AACs) compress music by suppressing parts you "can't" hear, not because they're outside your range of hearing but because the brain, assuming those parts should be there, fills in for them even when they're absent.
But it may be that you can't hear something consciously but still tell that it's not there.
For example, there was a news story a week or so back showing that people could somehow tell when a picture had changed by the removal of an item in it, even though consciously they could not explain what the difference was - it just 'felt different'.
So, if someone claims to be able to tell the difference between 1 128Kb AAC and a CD, test that claim in a double-blind experiment. Only when he fails the test can you say he was imagining things.
>>speed up the audio.. up to about 1.5x
As an added bonus, everyone will sound like they're breathing helium.
These suggestions are totally half baked. Viz:
" Rearrange your work schedule so you start at 7am and get off at 3pm or 4pm. By hitting the streets at semi- off hours you will cut your commute time by possibly half (less traffic.)"
Better solution: find a place to live within 5 minute's walk of work or subway ride. Then you will save on your commute time and not have to get up early. If there is no subway and no residential neighborhoods near work, dump suburbia and move to a proper city. What's the point of freeing up all that time if you're stuck in Boonsville?
"By hitting your seat at 7am when the office is empty and quiet you can get more productive sooner, and get more done between 7am and 9am than most people have done by noon."
This only makes sense if you don't work closely with other people. If you do, you'll spend 2 hours from 7 to 9 waiting for the others to get in. If you can work for hours without needing to ask anyone else for anything, then ask your boss if you can work from home part-time.
"Let a woman take you clothes shopping, throw out everything in your closet and replace it with whatever she suggests. Make sure everything matches everything else. Time saved : none, but nobody will know you got dressed in the dark before you had caffeine in your system."
Wear a suit to work. You can wear the same suit everyday, with the same tie and a range of identical shirts, and no-one will think it odd.
"Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day."
That may be true, but what's the point? Surely a big reason for saving time where it's not needed is to give you more relaxation time, not less.
"Get your news from FARK (www.fark.com) In the hour it takes to watch the news on TV you could have a synopsis of the important events around the globe from a hundred different news sources. If it is newsworthy, it's on FARK."
Listen to the radio news while doing other things. Try NPR and you might even learn something. Alternatively, admit that for 99.99% of what's reported, there's no reason why you need to know it straight away. So just catch up with the news weekly instead of daily.
"Cancel your MMORPG accounts (stop playing Everquest). This will give you back 1000 hours per year. Maybe more."
And stop reading slashdot. That will save even more.
>>I already use Audible.com to squeeze in more books in my life, by listening, rather than reading.
Here's a hint: if you learn to read without moving your lips, you'll find that you can get through a book in a fraction of the time it would take to listen to it.
>>I've completed 8 unabridged books in two months
I'm starting to wonder if the poster's age is in double digits. Apart from the puerile boasting (you know, it's not how much you read that counts, it's what you read), what's this 'unabridged' thing? Call me a metropolitan intellectual snob if you like, but the last time I saw an abridged book was in kindergarten. In the age of Harry Potter, even 8 year olds read 600-page books.
*sigh*. Yes I know scotland has a separate legal system. So does Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. (You might also note that all the systems are joined at the top, since they share the same highest court, namely the House of Lords.) But this minor mistake on my part is rendered inconsequential compared to the nonsense you write. I'll just respond to the more egregious errors:
"Scotland has a (superior) legal system that is derived from Roman Law (even today proceedings are in Latin)."
Are you smoking crack? Whether Scots law is superior is a matter of taste, though you should note that it's very much a hybrid common-law/Roman-law system. But thinking that they still argue in Latin? All lawyers are fond of the occasional Latin turn-of-phrase, but it's been several hundred years since proceedings were conducted in latin any court in Britain.
"Scotland has fully adopted the EU Human Rights Act whilst England is lagging behind. "
There is no such thing as the 'EU Human Rights Act'. The Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (commonly known as the European Convention on Human Rights, or ECHR) was promulgated in (I believe) 1947 by an organisation called the Council of Europe, which is unrelated to the E.U., which did not exist in even embryonic form until the Treaty of Rome in 1956. The ECHR is enforced by the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, while EU law is under the aegis of the European Court of Justice, in Luxembourg. There are no organisational links between the two.
The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the ECHR into both English and Scottish law simultaneously. As far as I know there is no difference between the two nations regarding the applicability of the ECHR. Please point me to the provisions of the relevant legislation showing this is not the case.
"English law DOES NOT HAVE the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise thanks to the Criminal Justice Act in the early nineties."
This is truly complete, total, utter bollocks. If that were the case, why was there such uproar when the Home Secretary suggested changing the standard of proof in terrorism cases (a position from which he backtracked today.) There is not one single criminal offence in English law where the presumption of innocence does not apply.
"Also, your example about the box of matches does not hold true in England. The 1996 offensive weapons act makes it illegal to carry any offensive object in a public place. this would include a pocket penknife (of any size). You *will* be charged for carrying a pocket penknife in London - even if you had no intention whatsoever of using it to garot someone. If you had a box of matches in one pocket and lighter fluid in the other then you could well be charged, or at least, receive a caution."
You are labouring under various misapprehensions here. Firstly, if you care to read the act (all Acts of Parliament can be found on government websites) you'll see that the offence is actually "carrying an offensive weapon without lawful excuse". Thus clearly carrying a lighter and lighter fluid is not an offence is you were using it to light your cigarette. Further, as regards knives the offence of 'carrying a bladed or pointed article in a public place' specifically excludes folding pocket-knives with blades under 3 inches long, and excludes knives carried for use at work. So you should be safe with your penknife.
Secondly, of course you could be arrested, charged and cautioned for carrying a lighter or box of matches. You can be arrested for walking down the street if the police feel like it. But that doesn't mean you'll be convicted.
"Also the Anti-Terrorism act allows citizens to be held without charge for an indefinite time. This came about to combat the irish threat in the 80's, long before bush and his oddball war for oil/power."
The power to detain UK citizens without trial was introduced by the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991. It was repealed in
Did I not say that there were exceptions? (All thought up by legislators, I might add, not judges.) Almost all (note the qualification, please) of which relate to pretty minor offences. The vast bulk of the criminal law requires intent as well as action. Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, as Coke put it in the 1600s.
No, you don't understand the difference between being charged and being convicted. The police can charge you with whatever they like. But they won't have much chance of convicting without evidence, if you insist on a trial.
you didn't read my post. Who said foot traffic dropping off for an afternoon. I was talking about the roads being closed (to vehicles as well as pedestrians) for days or even weeks. A lot of businesses would have trouble in that situation.
OK as a lawyer please let me put an end to all the crap on this thread.
The British and American legal systems are extremely similar to each other. Not surprising since the US legal system was inherited from the British, and the British hasn't changed much in 300 years (that's why we wear the same gowns and wigs we wore back in 1700).
BOTH are common law systems, meaning that while the legislature makes the laws, the judges interpret them and the judge's interpretation of the law is the law (until it's appealed). As a result both have a legislative tradition of writing very detailed laws. By contrast, the continental 'Roman law' system depends upon broad legal principles, with judges filling in the gaps according to circumstance.
BOTH have the presumption of innocence until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. (Both ignore this presumption if you're a foreign muslim.)
BOTH require, for guilty verdict in criminal law (and with very few exceptions), the accused to have the intention to commit a crime as well as actually performing the action. For example, if I took your new iPod, but in the honest belief that it was my new iPod, it would not be theft. The idea that it's an offence to carry a box of matches is ridiculous. It's an offence to carry a box of matches if it can be proved that you were on the way to burn down a house. A big difference.
The only real difference is that the US has a written constitution, while the UK relies upon evolved constitutional norms. Both these systems have their strengths and their failings. Up until a couple of years ago I'd have said the UK was doing better but now the current British government appears to have decided to flush our constitution down the toilet I'm not so sure. Then again Bush, Ashcroft et al. seem to get away with ignoring large chunks of the US constitution, so maybe it makes no difference anyway.
>>I have no doubt a 1Ghz G4 iBook would satisfy the computing needs of a liberal arts college student.
The computing _needs_ of a liberal arts student could be satisfied by a typewriter. The only reason a student needs a powerbook is as a babe magnet, which means they're really only necessary for geeks.
>>You think they should compensate all the businesses that were affected?
Suppose it was your business. You're not doing too well, but you've just had a big order that will keep you afloat. But the police close down the area and you can't fulfill. Maybe you sell perishable goods, so your stock is now worthless. You didn't fulfill the order, so you don't have the money to pay your supplier for the now-worthless stock. You have no option but to declare yourself bankrupt. You lose your business, your house and your car. All because of the police closing the road.
Still so sure you shouldn't get any compensation?
Something else I find very rude is the way a phone call gets priority over anything else competing for the recipient's attention. Such as a conversation with me, for instance.
Say you're talking to a friend. Wouldn't you think it was incredibly rude if someone else, who you don't even know, came along, butted in and started his own new conversation, expecting you to wait? Wouldn't you think your friend pretty rude for cutting you out, too? But that's how it always is with phone calls. I think that if you're talking to someone and the phone rings, you shouldn't answer it (unless you're expecting a call). Everyone now has caller id and/or voicemail so there's no worry about missing the message.
Of course this is a gripe about the way we use phones in general, not just cellphones, but the problem is made much worse. Now you can't even go for a walk/drive with someone without an invisible intruder turning up - you can even have a guest at your own home cut you out!
Somehow though I have difficulty getting other people to sympathise with me. Last month,when I was with a group of 5 friends on a train, I tried to explain my point of view after one person made the rest of us shut up for 10 minutes so he could hear what is phone-friend was saying. Somehow no-one else thought it was rude (and I was only suggesting that maybe he should go and stand further from us while on the phone so we could get on with what we were talking about before).
Until most folk improve their manners a lot, I can see why people might want a jammer, though I wouldn't buy one myself.
Two comments:
Firstly, there are large swathes of the US where fertile land is neither urbanised nor farmed, but simply left to grow back into forest. I'm thinking of New England. Outside the main cities (and often surprisingly close to them) there are acres and acres of new-growth forest that used to be farmland. What happened was local farmers were priced out of business by big midwestern producers, and the land was just left fallow. (if you've ever been to Walden Pond -- where Thoreau went off to retreat from the world -- you'll notice it's surrounded by dense forest. But when Thoreau lived there it was all farmland.)
Secondly, it may be a no-brainer that cities tend to grow around fertile land, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea. (Indeed it's the sort of idea only someone with no brain would consider good.) Especially since once that fertile land is concreted over, it's gone for good.
if you want to throw money around, the best 35mm film can provide the equivalent of 20 megapixels and will cost you far less than an EOS 1D. Though you'll need a good camera since at that level flaws in the lens are more important than the film grain.
An everyday SLR with decent film will give you around 12 MPx. Even a $5 throwaway gives you 4MPx. Good film also holds more colour information, equivalent to 36bit.
Digital cameras have many advantages, but resolution is not yet one.
Well that's a very social contract view of the constitution. But as you state it, it suffers from a major internal inconsistency. As you write:
'The citizens say, "We will give up our right to make laws directly, and in return the two governments give up the right to hold office longer than we want them to." The state government says, "I will give up my right to have my own army, and in return, the federal government will give up its right to not defend me.'
Where did the government acquire any rights for it to be able to bargain with the citizens? This assumes that the government exists and exercises power independently of the constitution, rather than being defined by the constitution. If that's the case, then the previous poster was correct and 'government' is more than an agreement. On the other hand, if government is merely an agreement between citizens, then the government does not exist independently of the constitution and so cannot be a party to it.
I prefer the former view. After all, plenty of countries have managed without constitutions throughout history. The UK, New Zealand and Israel manage pretty well to this day.
And what makes you think "would" is any more grammatical (as opposed to more polite) than "can"? What is "would" in this context? It's the future conditional of "to be". so to be a grammar nazi, it doesn't make sense without an 'if' clause. for example,
Q: "Would you pass the salt"
A: "In what circumstances? I would if you said please"
As for "please", that's a contraction of "if you please", i.e. if it would please you. So again you're not asking FOR anything:
Q: "Please pass the salt"
A: "Yes, it would be very pleasing"
If you want to be totally 'accurate', you'd better construct your requests explicitly and preferably not as a question. How about "I would like some salt, please, John". But of course it doesn't sound very natural, because language is not mathematics. There is no objectively correct and incorrect way of saying something. There is merely what the majority of speakers, at any given time, regard as normal. Grammar nazis telling people that a practice used by 99% of people is "wrong" have got their heads screwed on backwards.
"dark side" of the moon means the one that is always turned away from the earth and so impossible to see from earth-bound telescopes (the moon rotates such that the same side always faces the earth as it orbits). But it's not dark in the literal sense - if you think about what happens at new moon, it's that that side facing the earth is in shadow, i.e. the 'dark' side is facing the sun. So send a satellite to orbit the moon and you'll get full daylight pics of the dark side.
"It's set by the resistance, which is determined by the current. Yah. The current is determined by the current. Sounds screwy, but it's right. Once the current through the air hits a threshold, the air undergoes dielectric breakdown, forms a conductive path, and the current goes to hell. Again, you could either say the current causes it, or the voltage gradient causes it, because the resistance per unit length is fixed. "
I think you're failing to get the basic point. Our electric supply is 220V or 110V or whatever. High tension cables are 10kV or whatever. Batteries are 1.5V or 3V, not 5A. In almost all electrical circuits, we control the voltage first, and then vary the current by adjusting load. If I'm living under a high-voltage cable, I wouldn't write to the electricity company and say "please reduce your current", because that depends on what consumers are using. But I could say "please reduce your voltage" [and step it up/down nearer the point of use]; this would of course affect the amount of current used proportionately, but would not directly control it. That's why it's relevant to do an experiment where you measure the amount of ozone generated as a function of voltage and not current.
On a more general level, current is of course caused by the movement of electrons or ions. Electrons/ions move because of an electric field which is another way of saying because of a voltage difference. A current does not create an electric field, it's the field that creates the current. In a very real, physical sense, voltage determines current and not the other way round.
"Next example. Take that 10kV balloon floating in the air. Move it into the stratosphere. How long is it going to stay at that potential? A very, very long time. There's no easy path to ground, and so how exactly would it dissipate?"
It would dissipate in exactly the same way. Air molecules bumping into it and picking up (or dropping) excess charge. How and when (and if) the resulting ion makes its way to the ground is irrelevant. The charge moves off the balloon and into the atmosphere. If it took longer in the stratosphere than at sea level, it would be because of the difference in air pressure.
'Ground' is an irrelevant concept here. It's useful in electrical engineering because it's so big that moving a few electrons one way or the other doesn't noticeably affect its voltage, so we use it to set the (arbitrary) zero level of our voltage measurement. Here, we can consider the atmosphere as "ground"; it's also a big sink whose voltage doesn't vary much if you add or remove a few electrons. True, air doesn't conduct well but neither does much of what covers the earth (e.g. sand, stone, dry earth)
It doesn't require a spark to create ozone. Never smelt the ozone coming off a CRT monitor or a laser printer when you turn it on? That arises from the charge on the screen or printer drum. How do you think air ionisers work? Not by shooting sparks, I can tell you.
Take your balloon at 10kV, floating in the air. How long does it stay charged? forever? of course not. The charge (and voltage) dissipates within a few minutes, generating ions and ozone as a result. Sure you're not going to get much ozone from a balloon, because the charge involved is tiny. Attach the balloon to a generator for keeping its charge constant and it will produce plenty of ozone for you.
True, such a device consumes current to generate ozone. But as someone who understands Ohm's law, you surely realise that - since the relevant 'resistance' is a property of the atmosphere - current is entirely determined by the voltage. In the context of HV power lines, we set the voltage, not the current. So it makes far more sense in an experimental context to measure the effect of exposure to high voltage than to fiddle around trying to set the current.
Of course, because like all movies until pretty recently it was recorded on good ol' photographic film, which offers a resolution far higher than any existing digitised video format. Same goes for digital cameras - even the best still don't match the resolution of a decent 35mm film.
That's not true if you get a bright enough machine. I've got a 1500 lumens projector and the picture's perfectly visible in daylight (it's better in a dark room, but then so's any video medium). I get a picture twice as big as any plasma or back-projection unit for about 1/3 the price, plus it takes up a tiny amount of space. And another bonus is I can make shadow puppets during boring shows.