Since there's nothing whatsoever to prevent you doing this of course its going to be widespread.
At the last office I was contracting in the whole lot of them would bid on each others auctions to push the price up, they were even having a competition amongst themselves to see who could push the price the most above the actual price of the item and still have someone buy it.
I've only ever sold one item on E-Bay and it's a very tempting course of action, the only reason I didn't bid myself is because the price was twice what I had expected anyway.
I was a webmaster. The first thing I did was build a Content Management System so the people who were actually going to use the website could update it themselves. Once I'd added all the initial content, trained up the users and fixed some bugs there was nothing for me to do any longer so I went and did something else.
How easy is it get your hands on these coins ? For example could I go to the currency exchanges in the UK and specify they convert my recent huge bank loan to US to be paid in pennies which I can then melt down and sell.
"It seems to be very stable, and I have had few problems with the final release copy. I am sure the general public will enjoy its user friendly features. I recommend the Business or Ultimate versions, since they have the Complete PC. Backup feature, which I have found to be about the most useful feature of Vista since if one has a good backup to a secondary hard drive, DVD or External Hard Drive, it can save a lot of time in system reconstruction in case of hackers or system failures. I think the general and business community will save many millions if not billions of hours by using Vista. Mike Scott"
For some reason reminds me the cosmetic and grooming regime and genesis vs phil collins bits in American Psycho which obviously opens the debate as to whether all Windows users are closet psychopaths.
I submitted something to this yesterday but I think they've stopped taking submissions now.
I repeat what I wrote here for the benefit of you all and the good of society in general:
"Vista is best computer. it plays all my games just with putting in the disk and cliking on the mouse, i like the internets also and just with clicking the OKs it works really good in Vista.
My frend works in IT and he says that linux is rubbish and you cant even put in the dvds and theirs no games and he says no proper business would use it because it wont let microsoft run their programs on it so it is useless for all serious things. That is another reason why i use Vista because its good and i can use it for business too if i wanting to.
Mac is too expensive and will get too dirty cos its white"
They had this on the BBC yesterday too, I think in the morning they had suggested everyone microwave their sponges and then in the evening news they had a man with a ginger mustache from ROSPA who said that he wouldn't advise microwaving sponges because there is no setting on microwaves for sponges and that he for one didn't have the faintest idea what would happen if you did microwave a sponge except that whatever it was which happened would probably be unsafe and might cause an accident.
I found it very reassuring that ROSPA ( Royal Society For The Prevention Of Accidents ) does its research so thoroughly before making announcements.
Plus we don't have to listen to that highly irritating whiney American accent. Bang on, I don't understand how peoples voices can be so grating but Americans seem to manage it effortlessly.
There is nothing worse when you're on holiday somewhere and perhaps you've booked a trip up a Jungle river with some camping but when you meet up with everyone the first thing you hear ( usually half a mile before you get there is ) "GEE ! WOW THIS IS LIKE THE JUNGLE. HEY EVERYONE ARE WE GONNA HAVE A COOL TIME IN THE JUNGLE" - Shut the fuck up you irritating little fuck, we are not all even remotely interested in you and your inane tittle tattle and we can be sure that since you are American, female and travelling outside of the US that you will have no sense of humour whatsoever and talk only about yourself at the top of your irritating great voice.
That's nothing, in fact thats just weak you should really push yourself and not just settle with what you think you're comfortable with.
I like to do 2 hours hard physical work in the garden tending my produce ( you can't beat real organic homegrown veggies ! ) before I jog to work which normally takes around an hour. It's a long 10 hour day so I have quick break to jump in the pool and bang out a couple K's before I munch a couple of carrots for lunch.
Cycling home ( I alternate between jogging there and cycling back and vice a versa ) means I can get back in time to work on my paintings ( I have no TV or Radio and I rarely read cheap paperbacks or mass market magazines ) before I a couple of hours rowing practice and then a further couple of hours socialising with either the rowing crowd, arts crowd or the young professionals. I usually get to bed around 1AM and by that time thanks to all the effort I put into my life and my healthly routine I'm out like a light and fresh as a daisy when I get up around 5 to work in the garden.
I earn an excellent wage so I could 'enjoy' much of what I consider to be uneccessary luxuries but I don't because I realise I am an incrediably lucky and successful guy and wouldn't like to waste my advantages and go back to being an 'ordinary joe' again.
Everyone can, in time, achieve a roughly comparable standard of living to the one I enjoy, they just have to be willing to put in a *lot* of effort and have at least some genetic aptitude which would allow them to keep up. It's not for everyone and not everyone can hack it but thats just because they are lazy and not up to it. Everyone can try though and they may manage to improve themselves a little.
When I say "at will" I mean "without effort".. which is pretty much the standard definition of "at will". I take "at will" to mean that if you have the will do something then it is achievable, nothing to do with the amount of effort it may require. If you have the will to excerise and eat healthily then you can with the result that you will be less obese and have a better quality of life.
Surely time lasts forever so all you have to do is encode fluctuations in the time wave which can be re-read from now until the very end of time its self.
Good question and I think it depends on the number of generations they are removed from me, the information I'd like my parents to store is much different to the information I'd like a Great Great Great Great Granparent to store for me. This is assuming there is a limit to the amount of data they can preserve into the future.
With the more ancient relatives I'd be more interested in the day to day trivia of their lives since their lives would quite likely be very different from the life I'm used to but the more recent relatives I'd like to know more about their relationships between other branches of my family. For everyone I'd like some insight into any large decisions they have made, e.g. going to war or whatever.
I often wander to what extent my perception of the past is influenced by black and white photographs or grainy footage, it's strange that when I see some of the very rare pioneering colour film from the Edwardian period it seems a lot easier to relate to as the past being a real place than it does in black and white and I wonder what effect this will have on our ancestors as they view our lives today in full colour.
I'm surprised the US hasn't been doing this before, I think we've been able to do this for years in the UK and it's a pretty obvious development really.
I'm not sure how well Solar Power works here though;-)
There are quite a lot of things which amuse me about this whole episode:
1) It's a Labour government being accused of selling Peerages when it is really only them who have ever been opposed to this idea.
2) Various members of the Labour party moaning that Ruth Turner is a lovely lady and that its in extremely bad taste to go around to arrest her at 6AM in the morning with 4 police officers. This is a bit like saying to the police who are arresting you for a blatant crime "Don't you have any real criminals to catch ?"
3)Trying to hide evidence and then being undone by your own laws to retrieve it.
4) Just the general stupidity of the Labour party in general, I really hope this Ruth woman is charged, convicted and sent down for life as a lesson to all the others that blindly follow the party line and are willing to say or do anything provided it's "on-message" regardless of the obvious facts.
Are non genuine facts still facts or are they lies ?
It seems Microsofts understanding of the word fact is something which optionally may or not be true which leads me to believe that they are not someone I'm going to be trusting as far as I can throw them.
Is the fact that these is a genuine facts they are presenting us with a genuine fact or its self or is it one of those other not genuine, or partially genuine facts ? Who can tell.
I agree, I was once in the curious postion of working for a major IT outsourcing company in the outsourcing division which meant I was working as part of the IT department for a couple of hundred businesses.
The internal IT department for our company was a different entity altogether and spent its entire time and effort in endless in fighting amongst its various departments and was absolutely totally useless. For example the company policy was for every team to have a website and share their knowledge to replace old fashioned paper based procedures. The only problem being that the only official websites they would let anyone set up their intranet were totally static where you just sent them the pages and 6 months or so later they may get around to publishing it for you. The result of this was that everyone developed their own autonomous intranet based on spare computers which had slipped below their radar that was totally dynamic and allowed everyone to share information exactly how they needed to.
Ideally though these things should be handled by the IT department but they should be handled intelligently and in partnership with the users. Where this isn't happening then that in my opinion is a the sign of a failing IT department.
I once saw an Excel spreadsheet some guy had created to track assets in a newly built hospital. A very large hospital with hundreds of different assets in each room; door handles, taps, tables, light bulbs, curtains etc etc etc etc.
As well as having separate sheets for each of the hundreds of rooms containing the hundreds of individual assets in each he also had sheets for every type of asset with the purchase order details, further sheets for when the assets were delivered and yet more to track when they were invoiced.
He told me that it was beginning to run a bit too slowly and was taking too long to copy around because it was an enourmous number of megabytes. In addition to these problems for some inexplicable reason it had become far too complicated to actualy use and he wanted me to simplify it for him whilst keeping all of it current functionality. I told him he should use a database for all of this and I wasn't going near it with a barge pole.
If I were an insurgent I'd be thinking about the best way to wire up rifles to fire remotely and in which of my enemies neighbourhoods I would be hiding my new device.
Why kill my rivals myself when I can get the US to drop a great big bomb on their heads.
I agree in a perfect world all countries should take action to curb carbon emissions. Unfortunately this isn't an easy or cheap process to undertake and the world isn't perfect so at the moment countries are more concerned about the costs and problems involved in tackling climate change than they are about fixing it.
The fact is that the US and other 1st world countries have benefitted from using coal and other fossil fuels to power their industrial revolutions for the last 150 years or so and its this industry which has made them into the powerful 1st world nations they are today. India and China are only now harnessing and building their industrial power bases.
One way of looking at this is that 1st world countries should be taking the lead in reducing carbon emissions because they have contributed far more to its causes than China or India have over the last 150 years. If 1st world countries began to take serious action in this matter then its much more likely that China and India will come on board seriously too and the problem can begin to be actually fixed.
The US might point to China and India having easier targets under Kyoto and complain that it is unfair to their interests but this is a short sighted and selfish point of view . Yes China and India will benefit more than the US off the bat but to moan about that is to ignore the vast benefits the US has already reaped whilst contributing to the problem.
This is a global problem which needs serious US involvement to get the rest of the world on board and get something done to sort out the problem.
Since you're the one pushing this theory why don't you explain first of all how you have determined that these planets and moons have been experiencing climactic warming events and secondly what your explanation for this is ?
It's obviously wrong to stop anyone contributing to any side on the Global Climate Change debate but just because Weatherfolk aren't allowed to do forecasts on TV doesn't mean they can't contribute papers on the subject and join in the debate.
The aim here seems to be to stop Weather presenters pretending that Global Climate Change isn't happening, the consequence weather presenters putting forward this point of view is that the viewing public will most likely believe them rather than all the "boffins predicting climate chaos" with the result that the public may have a very skewed view of what the current real scientific thinking on the matter is.
If weather presenters claimed that rain was in fact Gods tears and this had been scientifically proven then you'd expect him or her to lose their job or at least be removed to doing something where they are not in contact with the public and this is similar to what seems to be going on here.
This is almost entirely off-topic but nevertheless...
A friend of mine was working in IT Support for a major company and recieved a call from a lady who said the space bar on her keyboard was broken, it seemed like it was constantly depressed even when she wasn't pressing it.
He went to see her and checked out the keyboard and couldn't see anything wrong so he assured her that everything should be fine from now on. The next day she phones back reporting the same problem so he goes to see her again and again can find no problem with the keyboard. In order to look like he is doing something he replaces the keyboard anyway and assures the lady everything is OK now.
The next day she phones back again and says she is still experiencing the same problem and she wants it fixed properly this time so he goes down to see her again but this time he wants to see the problem for himself. He asks the lady to do what she normally does and he will wait so he can see the problem himself when it happens. As he was sitting there he noticed that the lady had a large bosom and it seemed to be resting on the keyboard and as he looked closer he saw that at times it did actually bounce on to the space bar. This was clearly the cause of the problem but he couldn't bring himself to explain this to the lady and basically ran off.
Maybe a female IT worker would have had more success here !
Libertarian crap ? This is the first time anyone has ever accused me of being a libertarian, congratulations !
There is so obviously such a huge gap between helping your friend drink drive and you choosing an appropriate licence under which to licence your software that I'm amazed you haven't spotted it already. If you really are this blind then I hope your friends are on hand to stop you trying to drive.
If you don't want DRM to interfere with your medical records then don't you think it might be more effective to write to whoever it is in your country who is in charge of medical records rather than write posts on/. about how you have trouble choosing software licences ?
If you don't want people to use your software with DRM then you may choose a licence which prohibits this but you should extend this right to choose to Linus as well.
If DRM is an effective tool and acceptable to the majority of the public then it will become widespread regardless of how you choose to licence your software whereas if its restrictive and used to lever cash out customers by media conglomerates and doesn't gain any widespread support then it will wither and die, again regardless of your licencing choices.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article it is illegal in the UK under the Fraud Act 2006.
Since there's nothing whatsoever to prevent you doing this of course its going to be widespread.
At the last office I was contracting in the whole lot of them would bid on each others auctions to push the price up, they were even having a competition amongst themselves to see who could push the price the most above the actual price of the item and still have someone buy it.
I've only ever sold one item on E-Bay and it's a very tempting course of action, the only reason I didn't bid myself is because the price was twice what I had expected anyway.
I was a webmaster. The first thing I did was build a Content Management System so the people who were actually going to use the website could update it themselves. Once I'd added all the initial content, trained up the users and fixed some bugs there was nothing for me to do any longer so I went and did something else.
I'm sure this is a typical experience.
Ahhh, Whispering Bob. Nice.
Not neccessarily but it can turn it's users into zombies.
How easy is it get your hands on these coins ? For example could I go to the currency exchanges in the UK and specify they convert my recent huge bank loan to US to be paid in pennies which I can then melt down and sell.
Reading this submission from the BBC site
"It seems to be very stable, and I have had few problems with the final release copy. I am sure the general public will enjoy its user friendly features. I recommend the Business or Ultimate versions, since they have the Complete PC. Backup feature, which I have found to be about the most useful feature of Vista since if one has a good backup to a secondary hard drive, DVD or External Hard Drive, it can save a lot of time in system reconstruction in case of hackers or system failures. I think the general and business community will save many millions if not billions of hours by using Vista. Mike Scott"
For some reason reminds me the cosmetic and grooming regime and genesis vs phil collins bits in American Psycho which obviously opens the debate as to whether all Windows users are closet psychopaths.
I submitted something to this yesterday but I think they've stopped taking submissions now.
I repeat what I wrote here for the benefit of you all and the good of society in general:
"Vista is best computer. it plays all my games just with putting in the disk and cliking on the mouse, i like the internets also and just with clicking the OKs it works really good in Vista.
My frend works in IT and he says that linux is rubbish and you cant even put in the dvds and theirs no games and he says no proper business would use it because it wont let microsoft run their programs on it so it is useless for all serious things. That is another reason why i use Vista because its good and i can use it for business too if i wanting to.
Mac is too expensive and will get too dirty cos its white"
They had this on the BBC yesterday too, I think in the morning they had suggested everyone microwave their sponges and then in the evening news they had a man with a ginger mustache from ROSPA who said that he wouldn't advise microwaving sponges because there is no setting on microwaves for sponges and that he for one didn't have the faintest idea what would happen if you did microwave a sponge except that whatever it was which happened would probably be unsafe and might cause an accident.
I found it very reassuring that ROSPA ( Royal Society For The Prevention Of Accidents ) does its research so thoroughly before making announcements.
There is nothing worse when you're on holiday somewhere and perhaps you've booked a trip up a Jungle river with some camping but when you meet up with everyone the first thing you hear ( usually half a mile before you get there is ) "GEE ! WOW THIS IS LIKE THE JUNGLE. HEY EVERYONE ARE WE GONNA HAVE A COOL TIME IN THE JUNGLE" - Shut the fuck up you irritating little fuck, we are not all even remotely interested in you and your inane tittle tattle and we can be sure that since you are American, female and travelling outside of the US that you will have no sense of humour whatsoever and talk only about yourself at the top of your irritating great voice.
That's nothing, in fact thats just weak you should really push yourself and not just settle with what you think you're comfortable with.
I like to do 2 hours hard physical work in the garden tending my produce ( you can't beat real organic homegrown veggies ! ) before I jog to work which normally takes around an hour. It's a long 10 hour day so I have quick break to jump in the pool and bang out a couple K's before I munch a couple of carrots for lunch.
Cycling home ( I alternate between jogging there and cycling back and vice a versa ) means I can get back in time to work on my paintings ( I have no TV or Radio and I rarely read cheap paperbacks or mass market magazines ) before I a couple of hours rowing practice and then a further couple of hours socialising with either the rowing crowd, arts crowd or the young professionals. I usually get to bed around 1AM and by that time thanks to all the effort I put into my life and my healthly routine I'm out like a light and fresh as a daisy when I get up around 5 to work in the garden.
I earn an excellent wage so I could 'enjoy' much of what I consider to be uneccessary luxuries but I don't because I realise I am an incrediably lucky and successful guy and wouldn't like to waste my advantages and go back to being an 'ordinary joe' again.
Everyone can, in time, achieve a roughly comparable standard of living to the one I enjoy, they just have to be willing to put in a *lot* of effort and have at least some genetic aptitude which would allow them to keep up. It's not for everyone and not everyone can hack it but thats just because they are lazy and not up to it. Everyone can try though and they may manage to improve themselves a little.
Surely time lasts forever so all you have to do is encode fluctuations in the time wave which can be re-read from now until the very end of time its self.
Good question and I think it depends on the number of generations they are removed from me, the information I'd like my parents to store is much different to the information I'd like a Great Great Great Great Granparent to store for me. This is assuming there is a limit to the amount of data they can preserve into the future.
With the more ancient relatives I'd be more interested in the day to day trivia of their lives since their lives would quite likely be very different from the life I'm used to but the more recent relatives I'd like to know more about their relationships between other branches of my family. For everyone I'd like some insight into any large decisions they have made, e.g. going to war or whatever.
I often wander to what extent my perception of the past is influenced by black and white photographs or grainy footage, it's strange that when I see some of the very rare pioneering colour film from the Edwardian period it seems a lot easier to relate to as the past being a real place than it does in black and white and I wonder what effect this will have on our ancestors as they view our lives today in full colour.
I'm surprised the US hasn't been doing this before, I think we've been able to do this for years in the UK and it's a pretty obvious development really.
;-)
I'm not sure how well Solar Power works here though
There are quite a lot of things which amuse me about this whole episode:
1) It's a Labour government being accused of selling Peerages when it is really only them who have ever been opposed to this idea.
2) Various members of the Labour party moaning that Ruth Turner is a lovely lady and that its in extremely bad taste to go around to arrest her at 6AM in the morning with 4 police officers. This is a bit like saying to the police who are arresting you for a blatant crime "Don't you have any real criminals to catch ?"
3)Trying to hide evidence and then being undone by your own laws to retrieve it.
4) Just the general stupidity of the Labour party in general, I really hope this Ruth woman is charged, convicted and sent down for life as a lesson to all the others that blindly follow the party line and are willing to say or do anything provided it's "on-message" regardless of the obvious facts.
"Get the genuine facts campaign"
Are non genuine facts still facts or are they lies ?
It seems Microsofts understanding of the word fact is something which optionally may or not be true which leads me to believe that they are not someone I'm going to be trusting as far as I can throw them.
Is the fact that these is a genuine facts they are presenting us with a genuine fact or its self or is it one of those other not genuine, or partially genuine facts ? Who can tell.
I agree, I was once in the curious postion of working for a major IT outsourcing company in the outsourcing division which meant I was working as part of the IT department for a couple of hundred businesses.
The internal IT department for our company was a different entity altogether and spent its entire time and effort in endless in fighting amongst its various departments and was absolutely totally useless. For example the company policy was for every team to have a website and share their knowledge to replace old fashioned paper based procedures. The only problem being that the only official websites they would let anyone set up their intranet were totally static where you just sent them the pages and 6 months or so later they may get around to publishing it for you. The result of this was that everyone developed their own autonomous intranet based on spare computers which had slipped below their radar that was totally dynamic and allowed everyone to share information exactly how they needed to.
Ideally though these things should be handled by the IT department but they should be handled intelligently and in partnership with the users. Where this isn't happening then that in my opinion is a the sign of a failing IT department.
I once saw an Excel spreadsheet some guy had created to track assets in a newly built hospital. A very large hospital with hundreds of different assets in each room; door handles, taps, tables, light bulbs, curtains etc etc etc etc.
As well as having separate sheets for each of the hundreds of rooms containing the hundreds of individual assets in each he also had sheets for every type of asset with the purchase order details, further sheets for when the assets were delivered and yet more to track when they were invoiced.
He told me that it was beginning to run a bit too slowly and was taking too long to copy around because it was an enourmous number of megabytes. In addition to these problems for some inexplicable reason it had become far too complicated to actualy use and he wanted me to simplify it for him whilst keeping all of it current functionality. I told him he should use a database for all of this and I wasn't going near it with a barge pole.
If I were an insurgent I'd be thinking about the best way to wire up rifles to fire remotely and in which of my enemies neighbourhoods I would be hiding my new device.
Why kill my rivals myself when I can get the US to drop a great big bomb on their heads.
I agree in a perfect world all countries should take action to curb carbon emissions. Unfortunately this isn't an easy or cheap process to undertake and the world isn't perfect so at the moment countries are more concerned about the costs and problems involved in tackling climate change than they are about fixing it.
The fact is that the US and other 1st world countries have benefitted from using coal and other fossil fuels to power their industrial revolutions for the last 150 years or so and its this industry which has made them into the powerful 1st world nations they are today. India and China are only now harnessing and building their industrial power bases.
One way of looking at this is that 1st world countries should be taking the lead in reducing carbon emissions because they have contributed far more to its causes than China or India have over the last 150 years. If 1st world countries began to take serious action in this matter then its much more likely that China and India will come on board seriously too and the problem can begin to be actually fixed.
The US might point to China and India having easier targets under Kyoto and complain that it is unfair to their interests but this is a short sighted and selfish point of view . Yes China and India will benefit more than the US off the bat but to moan about that is to ignore the vast benefits the US has already reaped whilst contributing to the problem.
This is a global problem which needs serious US involvement to get the rest of the world on board and get something done to sort out the problem.
Since you're the one pushing this theory why don't you explain first of all how you have determined that these planets and moons have been experiencing climactic warming events and secondly what your explanation for this is ?
It's obviously wrong to stop anyone contributing to any side on the Global Climate Change debate but just because Weatherfolk aren't allowed to do forecasts on TV doesn't mean they can't contribute papers on the subject and join in the debate.
The aim here seems to be to stop Weather presenters pretending that Global Climate Change isn't happening, the consequence weather presenters putting forward this point of view is that the viewing public will most likely believe them rather than all the "boffins predicting climate chaos" with the result that the public may have a very skewed view of what the current real scientific thinking on the matter is.
If weather presenters claimed that rain was in fact Gods tears and this had been scientifically proven then you'd expect him or her to lose their job or at least be removed to doing something where they are not in contact with the public and this is similar to what seems to be going on here.
This is almost entirely off-topic but nevertheless...
A friend of mine was working in IT Support for a major company and recieved a call from a lady who said the space bar on her keyboard was broken, it seemed like it was constantly depressed even when she wasn't pressing it.
He went to see her and checked out the keyboard and couldn't see anything wrong so he assured her that everything should be fine from now on. The next day she phones back reporting the same problem so he goes to see her again and again can find no problem with the keyboard. In order to look like he is doing something he replaces the keyboard anyway and assures the lady everything is OK now.
The next day she phones back again and says she is still experiencing the same problem and she wants it fixed properly this time so he goes down to see her again but this time he wants to see the problem for himself. He asks the lady to do what she normally does and he will wait so he can see the problem himself when it happens. As he was sitting there he noticed that the lady had a large bosom and it seemed to be resting on the keyboard and as he looked closer he saw that at times it did actually bounce on to the space bar. This was clearly the cause of the problem but he couldn't bring himself to explain this to the lady and basically ran off.
Maybe a female IT worker would have had more success here !
Libertarian crap ? This is the first time anyone has ever accused me of being a libertarian, congratulations !
/. about how you have trouble choosing software licences ?
There is so obviously such a huge gap between helping your friend drink drive and you choosing an appropriate licence under which to licence your software that I'm amazed you haven't spotted it already. If you really are this blind then I hope your friends are on hand to stop you trying to drive.
If you don't want DRM to interfere with your medical records then don't you think it might be more effective to write to whoever it is in your country who is in charge of medical records rather than write posts on
If you don't want people to use your software with DRM then you may choose a licence which prohibits this but you should extend this right to choose to Linus as well.
If DRM is an effective tool and acceptable to the majority of the public then it will become widespread regardless of how you choose to licence your software whereas if its restrictive and used to lever cash out customers by media conglomerates and doesn't gain any widespread support then it will wither and die, again regardless of your licencing choices.