250ml, 500ml, 1l, 2l and 4l are typical sales units for dairy products in the UK. And before you say "look, they're using powers of two, metric is all a sham", those particular sizes map quite closely to the old sizes, making it easier for uber-conservative (and ardently anti-European) Britons to accept and understand metric.
I'm not conservative or anti-European and I prefer to work in base 10, with consistent ratios, not having to remember the different number of ounces in a pound, vs the number of pounds in a stone, vs the number of fluid ounces in a pint. I like that I can think of a litre of water and have an immediate feel for what a kilogram weighs, or what 100mm looks like.
I'm 43 years old, so I went to school post-initial-metrication, but there are still plenty of hold-outs my age and older who "can't stand metric", including my otherwise-sane wife. But at least we're 30 years further along the metrication process and can report that the world won't end if you do get with the program(me).
The following assumes you were making a serious point - a self-inflicted "whooosh!" if you weren't.
Power, in this context, is relative. The power of the electronic calculator is obviously portability combined with immediacy. The resolution of which you speak so proudly came with a form factor that was inappropriate for putting in your pocket (unless you've got seriously baggy cargo pants on with room for a small CRT, a power supply, and a tape player or perhaps a microdrive).
The Spectrum's handling of maths from complex numbers upwards was also a little challenging (write your own routines from scratch).
Program retention was limited at launch time to saving to audio tape, which again hampered portability and also meant you couldn't just switch it on, factor a polynomial and get on with your life.
Horses for courses etc., and I don't think anyone would advocate using a ZX for maths, any more than you'd use a TI (or an HP) to learn BASIC programming (basic programming maybe, but not BASIC).
Absolutely. I recently treated myself to a brand-new HP50g after a couple of years of using 48 series emulators on my Mac and iOS devices. Makes maths fun again and it's inspired me to re-learn a lot of the calculus that I've forgotten since Uni. Back in the day ('87 was when I stopped learning maths the first time) I had a Casio 7000G. Rambling now, but RPN FTW!
Reading through all the comments here, you (tehcyder) seem to be popping up quite a lot. Do you have a beef with:
humour: whilst it's merely chuckleworthy, rather than laugh-out-loud, it really is funny, both for the individual concerned and for us lot looking at the figures;
the Jedi faith: this would be illogical and suggest that you possibly were mentally ill (see item above - it's a joke);
all faiths other than "the one true faith": I get the feeling, call it a hunch, that you're a believer. Possibly one who's aggrieved that "your" faith has reduced in popularity over the last ten years. Possibly even blaming people who put "Jedi" down as their religion for the drop in adherents to your faith.
all of the above
none of the above
I've been there, done that, in terms of being a believer, and I think I recognise the signs of someone being just a little bit defensive: "how liberal the UK is", rather than "how enlightened, sure of itself and diverse the UK is" is a bit of a giveaway. Sorry if I've misjudged you, etc., but it would have been me posting verbatim what you've been doing, in the dim and distant past.
Absolutely. I gleaned the figures from a variety of sources (particularly the water one, which came from a "green eating" site complaining about the increase in water content) so there'll be some double counting. Wheat flour definitely has some water in it, maybe around 14% at the start of processing.
Most up-to-date figures I could find for the UK suggest that 76% of bread consumed is white, which given the amount of health advice we're exposed to is a little terrifying.
I like wb for toast (something quite comforting to me - I think it harks back to the simpler times of my childhood:) ), wholemeal/granary/wholewheat/malted whatever for use in sandwiches etc.
Starting from the end, I think your "dough conditioner" is out "flour treatment agent". Even some home bakers use Vitamin C in their breadmaking.
So I do some more Googling (try it, you'll like it) and discover that an 800g loaf typically has about 500g of flour and 7g of yeast and may be up to 45% water - we're running out of room for the "chemicals" now.
Onwards:
Vegetable fat - fat extracted from vegetables. Ha. Binding agent, also controls the gluten development to avoid over-rising.
Now, was that so difficult? Use your loaf, as we might say in Britain. Don't be "suspicious" of a product, investigate. You might not like what you find, but at least you'll know and your mind can be put to rest.
And yes, as I mention in another comment, I was being "funny" - I just have a hard time when people have the means to discover information, but instead choose to sit there and develop preconceptions.
See my answer to a similar comment - I'm not commenting on the quality of bagged bread. FWIW I buy fresh-baked daily from the local bakery when possible, but I do occasionally use the bagged stuff.
Please note - I make no comment on the quality of bagged vs home-baked bread - merely that our "suspicious" consumer can quite easily see what goes in to bagged bread to make it last.
Which negates my answer to the AC's question how? I care about man-made global warming since it means that people I care about may have worse time of it in the future than we have. Historically, the trend has generally been that the next generation has it easier in some way (less disease, less violence, etc.).
Saying "we're all doomed" is indeed cold-hearted, short-sighted and defeatist. If you use it as an excuse to do nothing, to change nothing that's in your control to change, then it's selfish as well, FWIW.
Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard. They wanted and needed to provide open access but they couldn't. They don't claim the Pi is open and they're frank about the reasons why they can't make that claim.
It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.
"Because our remit is education in the broadest sense, we wanted â" needed â" to provide completely open access to the hardware."
You provided a one line quote from a broader article in which Pete Lomas explains some of the background to why they couldn't take the fully open route, but did release all that they could. I don't think an article of this sort, written around September of this year, counts as "claiming that the Raspberry is open".
The Foundation seems to have taken a pragmatic line - as open as possible - rather than a religious one. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I for one am glad that I've got a cheap computer to work with, and I'm delighted that today's schoolkids might get to experience the excitement I had when the ZX80 first appeared.
A quick search on the pi forums finds a US user with the following experience:
by skdrowe  Tue Aug 21, 2012 4:39 am Used Newark/ Element 14. Ordered 8/3/2012, Shipped 8/10/2012 Arrived today Calif/USA. (8/20/2012). Merchandise Total : $35.00 Handling Fee : $0.00 Tax : $3.06 Shipping : $7.65 Total : $45.71
In short, you're spending too much time whining and not enough time shopping around. Feel free to buy one of the many competitive products out there. I suspect your entitlement mentality may hit a brick wall when you seek any support from the no-name manufacturers who ship free from China, but YMMV.
So much hate for a cheap computer aimed at opening the horizons of kids.
As I've said in other threads on this subject: cancel your order with RS, go with Farnells. I just received my second, rev 2.0 board. My first (rev 1) Pi is running the home PBX quite happily using IncrediblePBX. The second one was ordered on 2012-11-06 and arrived on 2012-11-20.
Have the patents that pertain to this product expired? Are they in some other way invalid? If not, the company should still enjoy their protection, since that way the benefit to society is maximised. The company innovates and profits, we get new and better (cheaper, bigger, more effective, whatever - better is a broad term) products. After some time, other companies get to make products using the same innovation and prices decrease, or supply improves or whatever. Rinse and repeat.
We can debate the alternatives if you wish, but in this case the patent holder seems to be behaving "constitutionally" (I'm not a citizen of your fine nation). If you really want companies to behave in a way that maximises societal benefits I think you'll need to change more than the patent system.
Not disagreeing about the idiocy of the gutter press and sadly almost every newspaper splashes around in the gutter from time-to-time.
But whether MW was a joke or not (to you and I she was, but my erstwhile evangelical friends thought she had a serious point), she did represent something in our psyche - a puritanical, prudish slant to life.
Somebody brought this to the police's attention - they don't actively "police" facebook, looking for this kind of stuff.
We in the UK have a glorious (sarcasm alert) tradition of being offended and/or taking things personally at the drop of a hat - eg Mary Whitehouse' organisation, or the braying mobs demanding "death to all paediatrics" (sic) whenever a kiddie is murdered (most often by a member of the child's family, it seems, so why aren't they calling for "death to all relatives"?).
I suspect someone, maybe a member of the armed forces or somebody close to them, has seen the poppy burning and rather than thinking "idiot, let's not give them the oxygen of publicity", has instead gone off the deep end and started "shouting the odds", stating that "I'll swing for him, I will", "death's too good for them", "I didn't fight a war for the likes of them" etc. and called the police. Notwithstanding the fact that they would normally the sort of person who decries the wasting of police team and the fact you "never see a bobby on the street these days" and "the streets aren't safe for our kids anymore".
Unsubstantiated hearsay, I know. I'm just blowing off steam.
Thanks, reading the paper now. Issues that occur to me so far:
It's mainly for hospitalized patients - how many of these would have died whatever happened? It's hard to tell from the paper directly, since it cites other estimates from around ten years before, and I haven't been able to read them yet.
How many people's lives have been saved or improved by "big pharma"? Same question for illegal drugs and Aurora-style massacres. Yes, it's silly question, but your equivalence between "big pharma" and illegal drugs is why we're having this little debate.
The number of deaths due to adverse effects forms less than half of the deaths from iatrogenic causes - is the problem really "Big Medical system as a whole"? I know a lot of people are happy to posit a conspiracy by the drug companies but are reluctant to blame medical professionals for whatever reason. Recognition that human errors occur, and learning from those errors, is to my mind more important than belittling the work that everyone involved in humand and animal health is doing.
Yup, I'm in favour of pharmaceutical drugs. I've had cause to take several of them in the past, mostly for mental issues (OCD, anxiety, etc.), but also migraines. In all cases except one (a doctor nearing retirement and seemingly a bit out of touch and too eager to hand out the happy pills), the medical professionals have been very reluctant to prescribe unnecessarily, recommending therapies such as CBT before drugs, waiting to see how those therapies progressed and giving me assistance in eventually terminating treatment when its work was done (ie tapering programs for anti-depressants). YMMV, since I'm a happy customer of the NHS and I suspect you don't have a similar system.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I got this story first from the Daily Show, downloaded yesterday, broadcast the day before, and summarising TV news stories from earlier in the week.
Slashdot Mirror
250ml, 500ml, 1l, 2l and 4l are typical sales units for dairy products in the UK. And before you say "look, they're using powers of two, metric is all a sham", those particular sizes map quite closely to the old sizes, making it easier for uber-conservative (and ardently anti-European) Britons to accept and understand metric.
I'm not conservative or anti-European and I prefer to work in base 10, with consistent ratios, not having to remember the different number of ounces in a pound, vs the number of pounds in a stone, vs the number of fluid ounces in a pint. I like that I can think of a litre of water and have an immediate feel for what a kilogram weighs, or what 100mm looks like.
I'm 43 years old, so I went to school post-initial-metrication, but there are still plenty of hold-outs my age and older who "can't stand metric", including my otherwise-sane wife. But at least we're 30 years further along the metrication process and can report that the world won't end if you do get with the program(me).
The following assumes you were making a serious point - a self-inflicted "whooosh!" if you weren't.
Power, in this context, is relative. The power of the electronic calculator is obviously portability combined with immediacy. The resolution of which you speak so proudly came with a form factor that was inappropriate for putting in your pocket (unless you've got seriously baggy cargo pants on with room for a small CRT, a power supply, and a tape player or perhaps a microdrive).
The Spectrum's handling of maths from complex numbers upwards was also a little challenging (write your own routines from scratch).
Program retention was limited at launch time to saving to audio tape, which again hampered portability and also meant you couldn't just switch it on, factor a polynomial and get on with your life.
Horses for courses etc., and I don't think anyone would advocate using a ZX for maths, any more than you'd use a TI (or an HP) to learn BASIC programming (basic programming maybe, but not BASIC).
Absolutely. I recently treated myself to a brand-new HP50g after a couple of years of using 48 series emulators on my Mac and iOS devices. Makes maths fun again and it's inspired me to re-learn a lot of the calculus that I've forgotten since Uni. Back in the day ('87 was when I stopped learning maths the first time) I had a Casio 7000G. Rambling now, but RPN FTW!
Reading through all the comments here, you (tehcyder) seem to be popping up quite a lot. Do you have a beef with:
I've been there, done that, in terms of being a believer, and I think I recognise the signs of someone being just a little bit defensive: "how liberal the UK is", rather than "how enlightened, sure of itself and diverse the UK is" is a bit of a giveaway. Sorry if I've misjudged you, etc., but it would have been me posting verbatim what you've been doing, in the dim and distant past.
Absolutely. I gleaned the figures from a variety of sources (particularly the water one, which came from a "green eating" site complaining about the increase in water content) so there'll be some double counting. Wheat flour definitely has some water in it, maybe around 14% at the start of processing.
Most up-to-date figures I could find for the UK suggest that 76% of bread consumed is white, which given the amount of health advice we're exposed to is a little terrifying.
I like wb for toast (something quite comforting to me - I think it harks back to the simpler times of my childhood :) ), wholemeal/granary/wholewheat/malted whatever for use in sandwiches etc.
Okay, in the spirit of your comment:
What the freak is Google for?
Here's what you get when you lookup "hovis bread ingredients" (Hovis is the most popular brand in the UK and sadly plain white bread is still the most popular loaf): http://www.hovisbakery.co.uk/our-range/soft-white/soft-white
On that page it lists the ingredients (the same as it does on the bag) as follows:
Wheat Flour (milled from 100% British Wheat), Water, Yeast, Salt, Soya Flour, Fermented Wheat Flour, Vegetable Fat, Emulsifiers: E472e, E471 (made from Vegetable Oils); Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C).
Starting from the end, I think your "dough conditioner" is out "flour treatment agent". Even some home bakers use Vitamin C in their breadmaking.
So I do some more Googling (try it, you'll like it) and discover that an 800g loaf typically has about 500g of flour and 7g of yeast and may be up to 45% water - we're running out of room for the "chemicals" now.
Onwards:
Vegetable fat - fat extracted from vegetables. Ha. Binding agent, also controls the gluten development to avoid over-rising.
Emulsifiers (binding agents, prevent the separation of ingredients, improve the texture). See http://www.laleva.cc/food/enumbers/E471-480.html for the specific ones used by Hovis.
Now, was that so difficult? Use your loaf, as we might say in Britain. Don't be "suspicious" of a product, investigate. You might not like what you find, but at least you'll know and your mind can be put to rest.
And yes, as I mention in another comment, I was being "funny" - I just have a hard time when people have the means to discover information, but instead choose to sit there and develop preconceptions.
Note to mods - I certainly wasn't aiming for Insightful/Interesting/Informative :)
More a sort of "+1 stating the bleeding obvious"
See my answer to a similar comment - I'm not commenting on the quality of bagged bread. FWIW I buy fresh-baked daily from the local bakery when possible, but I do occasionally use the bagged stuff.
Please note - I make no comment on the quality of bagged vs home-baked bread - merely that our "suspicious" consumer can quite easily see what goes in to bagged bread to make it last.
Quick heads up - they put the ingredients on the side of the bag.
Which negates my answer to the AC's question how? I care about man-made global warming since it means that people I care about may have worse time of it in the future than we have. Historically, the trend has generally been that the next generation has it easier in some way (less disease, less violence, etc.).
Saying "we're all doomed" is indeed cold-hearted, short-sighted and defeatist. If you use it as an excuse to do nothing, to change nothing that's in your control to change, then it's selfish as well, FWIW.
I mean, seriously, why do you care if Earth becomes another Venus?
My twin nieces, Ruby and Winnie. My nephews Leo and Max.
Sorry to appeal to emotion, but I find your attitude a little cold, a little remote, a little shitty.
Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard. They wanted and needed to provide open access but they couldn't. They don't claim the Pi is open and they're frank about the reasons why they can't make that claim.
It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.
You provided a one line quote from a broader article in which Pete Lomas explains some of the background to why they couldn't take the fully open route, but did release all that they could. I don't think an article of this sort, written around September of this year, counts as "claiming that the Raspberry is open".
The Foundation seems to have taken a pragmatic line - as open as possible - rather than a religious one. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I for one am glad that I've got a cheap computer to work with, and I'm delighted that today's schoolkids might get to experience the excitement I had when the ZX80 first appeared.
A quick search on the pi forums finds a US user with the following experience:
by skdrowe  /USA. (8/20/2012).
Tue Aug 21, 2012 4:39 am
Used Newark/ Element 14. Ordered 8/3/2012, Shipped 8/10/2012 Arrived today Calif
Merchandise Total : $35.00
Handling Fee : $0.00
Tax : $3.06
Shipping : $7.65
Total : $45.71
In short, you're spending too much time whining and not enough time shopping around. Feel free to buy one of the many competitive products out there. I suspect your entitlement mentality may hit a brick wall when you seek any support from the no-name manufacturers who ship free from China, but YMMV.
So much hate for a cheap computer aimed at opening the horizons of kids.
As I've said in other threads on this subject: cancel your order with RS, go with Farnells. I just received my second, rev 2.0 board. My first (rev 1) Pi is running the home PBX quite happily using IncrediblePBX. The second one was ordered on 2012-11-06 and arrived on 2012-11-20.
Sorry for the assumption I made about your nationality. I've downloaded the PDF and look forward to finding the time to read it :)
Have the patents that pertain to this product expired? Are they in some other way invalid? If not, the company should still enjoy their protection, since that way the benefit to society is maximised. The company innovates and profits, we get new and better (cheaper, bigger, more effective, whatever - better is a broad term) products. After some time, other companies get to make products using the same innovation and prices decrease, or supply improves or whatever. Rinse and repeat.
We can debate the alternatives if you wish, but in this case the patent holder seems to be behaving "constitutionally" (I'm not a citizen of your fine nation). If you really want companies to behave in a way that maximises societal benefits I think you'll need to change more than the patent system.
Because it benefits us,the people.
At the expense of them, the company.
Not disagreeing about the idiocy of the gutter press and sadly almost every newspaper splashes around in the gutter from time-to-time.
But whether MW was a joke or not (to you and I she was, but my erstwhile evangelical friends thought she had a serious point), she did represent something in our psyche - a puritanical, prudish slant to life.
Somebody brought this to the police's attention - they don't actively "police" facebook, looking for this kind of stuff.
We in the UK have a glorious (sarcasm alert) tradition of being offended and/or taking things personally at the drop of a hat - eg Mary Whitehouse' organisation, or the braying mobs demanding "death to all paediatrics" (sic) whenever a kiddie is murdered (most often by a member of the child's family, it seems, so why aren't they calling for "death to all relatives"?).
I suspect someone, maybe a member of the armed forces or somebody close to them, has seen the poppy burning and rather than thinking "idiot, let's not give them the oxygen of publicity", has instead gone off the deep end and started "shouting the odds", stating that "I'll swing for him, I will", "death's too good for them", "I didn't fight a war for the likes of them" etc. and called the police. Notwithstanding the fact that they would normally the sort of person who decries the wasting of police team and the fact you "never see a bobby on the street these days" and "the streets aren't safe for our kids anymore".
Unsubstantiated hearsay, I know. I'm just blowing off steam.
Doh. Sorry - Colbert Report not Daily Show. Wednesday: The Word - Meducation.
Thanks, reading the paper now. Issues that occur to me so far:
It's mainly for hospitalized patients - how many of these would have died whatever happened? It's hard to tell from the paper directly, since it cites other estimates from around ten years before, and I haven't been able to read them yet.
How many people's lives have been saved or improved by "big pharma"? Same question for illegal drugs and Aurora-style massacres. Yes, it's silly question, but your equivalence between "big pharma" and illegal drugs is why we're having this little debate.
The number of deaths due to adverse effects forms less than half of the deaths from iatrogenic causes - is the problem really "Big Medical system as a whole"? I know a lot of people are happy to posit a conspiracy by the drug companies but are reluctant to blame medical professionals for whatever reason. Recognition that human errors occur, and learning from those errors, is to my mind more important than belittling the work that everyone involved in humand and animal health is doing.
Yup, I'm in favour of pharmaceutical drugs. I've had cause to take several of them in the past, mostly for mental issues (OCD, anxiety, etc.), but also migraines. In all cases except one (a doctor nearing retirement and seemingly a bit out of touch and too eager to hand out the happy pills), the medical professionals have been very reluctant to prescribe unnecessarily, recommending therapies such as CBT before drugs, waiting to see how those therapies progressed and giving me assistance in eventually terminating treatment when its work was done (ie tapering programs for anti-depressants). YMMV, since I'm a happy customer of the NHS and I suspect you don't have a similar system.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I got this story first from the Daily Show, downloaded yesterday, broadcast the day before, and summarising TV news stories from earlier in the week.