There's also a few possible violations with cMacTex (a shareware carbonized latex) and MacGhostView (a shareware carbonized GhostView). No GPL licences are obvious in the distributed files and there's no obvious place to download the source.
Some of the tools are piped between the carbonized GUI and the command line program (e.g. dvips), the author cites memory leaks in dvips as a reason for this.
Our government has passed laws making GM crops legal, but fortunately, there has been such a strong anti-GM movement here, that supermarkets don't dare stock GM food. Since BSE, the British public have become slightly more aware of the way that food is produced.
Tesco sells GM food, imported from America. They don't use GM ingredients in their 'own brand' food.
Unfortunately, Slashdot cannot be taken down by the Slashdot effect.
It's a negative feedback system. When the load increases on Slashdot's servers, the number of people who can access the site decreases, decreasing the load on the servers. Eventually, there will be an point where the inflow of new readers equals the outflow of `old' readers.
During this period the throughput will be maximum. Whether throughput==bandwidth depends on the content. The images are hopefully coming from a caching server away from the nonsense that is comment thresholds.
OK, could somebody tell me how to resize my damn browser? The alias.com website resized my window outside of the visible desktop, I have no status bar, toolbar or address bar.
There are two different databases working at search.msn.com. The first at www., and another at techpreview. www. presumably has some forced results for common terms (like Linux/ Orange) and even returns the.co.uk versions from msn.co.uk
techpreview. on the other hand, seems untuned. It returns a wierd advertising blog when you search for 'news'. So their "algorithmic search" isn't quite there yet.
When I referred to either the US or Britain, I referred to the British government - and not the people.
No, you really didn't. You said 'Britain'. Were 6 hours ahead of you over in Blighty, you'll need to get up a lot earlier than you do to trick me.
I never used the word people anywhere - I had meant the government in both the contexts.
You may have meant it, but you didn't say it.
...blah blah democracy blah
The UK and the USA are not democracies. The US is a fully elected republic where the government in power need not represent the majority, you know this, your not stupid.
UK is a consitutional monarchy. The lower house of the government are comprised of locally elected member. The leader of the party in the majority is typically elected as prime minister. The upper house is not elected. But is made of appointed members, selected by the lower house on a proportional basis, and by hereditary peers.
Further, the frequency of elections means that the voters only get to change a government, under all but the most exceptional circumstances, every four years.9/11 occurred 3 years ago, the Iraq war 18 months ago.
Two million is the number of people who turned out to protest, which is far greater than most protests. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington in 1969, he had 250,000 followers, out of a voting population of 100 million.
Just as how despite a lot of people say that Bush is not worthy of being in office and that the war was a sham, the majority of Americans have no problems believing his stories. What more, he will most definitely be re-elected once more, too.
I think you're reading to many left wing papers. Try watching FOX. You might notice an equally vocal group supporting Bush. The election is still undecided, and will be until close of the polls, saying otherwise is foolish.
Vietnam took >7 years to stop, and was fought on the basis of anti-communism. The effects of HUAC were still being felt. Iraq is being fought in the "war against terror" and the DHS still has a lot of power in Washington, and a pro Bush congressman is running the CIA. It may take a while.
The government doesn't always listen to its mandate, nor should it.
The website comment is only condescending if your opinion of PHBs are low. Why are you employing people if you don't think they're useful?
The attitude of the US is sickening, with utter disregard to sovereignity of other nations, and the attitude of the rest of the world in letting the US puppet the UN into submission is sad to see.
And those that shamelessly ass-lick everything that the US does (Britain, for one) no matter how inconsiderate it is to international laws makes it something to think about.
Just so that you understand. It was the British government who were ass-licking the US government and not the British people. 2 million of whom protested against the war, compared to 10 million who voted for the current government.
...The webpage for your startup has a 9.8 on the PHB-meter. Impactful indeed.
Ok, so the firmware update came in the hour between me checking if it was out on the simplyradios forum and posting.
I know MP2 is the native DAB format, I never meant to suggest it was inferior anyway. The O/P said it recorded MP3, the sales pitch says it records MP3. It doesn't record MP3.
The radio has problems reading SD cards sometimes, even the ones that it writes itself. The result is generally garbled filenames or unreadable files.
More seriously, the firmware shipped with the radio is having problems recording more than two thirds of the SD card. After 2/3 of the memory is used up, the recording starts to stutter (as if it's missing packets, which it probably is) or fail altogether.
Times recordings often fail, file deletion is buried in a submenu in a submenu...there's no fast forward or rewind on recordings. The sleep timer is hidden away, the 'joystick' control is unreliable.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it doesn't really record MP3. DAB radio is transmitted as MP2, the radio writes the stream directly to disk. If you want MP3 you have to upload to your computer, then convert. I think it can write mp3
All this will apparently be fixed when the new firmware becomes available. Which will be very soon, imminent in fact, honest.
I would post my sources, but their on PHP message boards, it'll get creamed by the slighest hint of a/.ing. It's easy enough to find if you're thinking of buying The Bug online, in the UK.
If you assume the only reasons for a Corporation (or Government) to not do something is politics or money the answer becomes (IMHO) a bit clearer
Since news of this blocking will spread amongst the Linux websites, it can't be providing good politics for TechWeb (I assume this to be source of the linked article). Advertisers will question why traffic is purposely being blocked and will reduce their custom accordingly.
The only remaining possiblity is that UBM Plc (the parent parent company) thinks that there's money in this scheme.
There are three methods of obtaining revenue from a news website. The first is selling advertisments (and the registration information if any). The referral blocking has effectively ruled this out as a method here.
The remaining methods, subscription and reselling, might be the answer. UBM resells its news stories through B2B channels
PR Newswire provides comprehensive communications services for public relations and investor relations professionals....news and information distribution to global audiences, and communications monitoring and measurement.
(I would link, but it's framed and hidden, it comes from the UBM plc website). They also claim to be the leading US B2B media company.
Taken the path of least intelligence. The reason LinuxToday was blocked is either the CMP wire customers are complaining or some CMP subscription service is suffering because of the ease of getting the information via a 3rd party aggregator. Why 'pay' for access to the NY Times and the Washington Post when Google will aggregate the important stories for you?
It could of course be more complicated, involving low click-through rates or ad-impressions for LT referrals, but the blocking message implies there are 'authorised redistributers' of the content.
The Forbes story has a screenshot of an example conversation....
Guest34725: I'm looking for reliable services with minimal downtime. Can you help? Tony: Absolutely! Zero downtime..guaranteed in our Service Level Agreement
So, either Tony is screwed when the engineers find out, or we can add Rackspace to Cockroaches and Twinkies as the only things that will survive a nuclear war.
Seriously though. This could lead to quite a few problems, given that it's impossible to verify who's taking part in the conversation.
Scenario 1: Sales advisor offers a copy of John Grisham's new book (no, I don't know why either) if the customer buys the two Grisham books he's looking at right now. Customer buys the books but doesn't get his free book. Was it a legal contract?
Sc 2: Female SA asks the customer if he needs any help. Customer asks if she wants to meet up for kinky sex later. SA sues company for sexual harassment (I think 3/. comments like this have +5 already)
Sc 3:SA offers underage customer a deal on Sex tapes because he was looking at some when his mom wasn't in the room and he doesn't have a credit card to buy the good stuff. Paedophile?
Sc 4: Spammers install logging software which detects this popup, redirects to their website. Suddenly all of Amazon's customers are being offered Barnes and Noble special introductory offers. And Penis enlargment.
Sc 5: Tony (in the Rackspace thing) asks the customer for his telephone number, because, there's no way Guest34725 will give out his mates number. (Pizza for I.C. Wiener)
I'm a Fox whore, I apologise. If it appeases you, I don't watch Fox (channel) if such a thing exists, I live in the UK so I watch BBC or C4 (unless they replace it with snooker, hmm.)
Don't worry, they're not any more. Last years' accounts showed a 90% drop in turnover and a 99% drop in profit.
Of course, their turnover went 400, 7000, 9000, 600 ('000s) in the last four years (the only reporting years). ouch, their highest paid director got 400K last year.
English is taught (at least in English speaking countries) as a language for everyday use. In England I guess it would be something like Estuary English. It's a language where words are slurred together (in a general sense, I'm not implying the English are drunk all the time:), 'slow' letter-groups are lost (what==w'ot, what's up==wass'up, hmm...). What is really being said is obtained mostly from the context and slang is used often.
Foreign languages, in your case, German (I'm assuming here that your first language is English),are taught using sentence construction, proper tense usage and correct verb gender. You're taught how to write the sentence before you learn the nouns which are being used.
The only way to correct this (IMHO) would be to have two English subjects, the first is "English as an everyday language"(EEL), the second "English as a foreign language"(EFL). In the EFL class you would English grammer as any non-english speaker would, tense, irregular verbs, pronoun order. The EEL class would be essays, imagination, poetry, discussion, etc.
I doubt it will happen any time soon, nobody wants 3 different English classes (+literature..).
There are also changes that have happened to the English language which didn't happen to the other European languages (German, French, Welsh..). Some of the grammatical constructions are dropped or optional. German has die/der/das/dem, French has le/la/les/l'... to mean 'the'. In English you can often drop the 'the' (e.g. the man's hat='the hat of the man' in [German,French,Welsh,Spanish]). Silly things like not beginning a sentence with 'And' or 'But' and split infinitives also add to the confusion.
Regarding the writing online improving children's English (I just reread the story title, my brain said "the kids have improved, now they are writing online", instead of "...because they are writing"). I think it has something to do with the ability to change sentences as you change your thoughts, on paper you have to form the sentence first, on a computer you can type what you think of first (which is what you see in IRC/IM chat). If you then want to change the structure, you don't have to throw away the entire page. This paragraph has been changed at least 4 times.
How is this different to domain name 'squatters ' (loost term) using a domain name similar to a more popular website. Or advertising free porn to get email addresses in spam...
This is usually done by somebody in a related field, but not always. And is usually to the detriment of the more popular website
On eBay, this is used in the same way as putting random phone models after your Nokia phone so that it comes up in a search. Or the stupid people who want to sell you an ebook on how to get an XBOX for 2 dollars P&P.
It only serves to dilute the usefulness of any search engine when this happens. Trying to search on google for just about any item that Amazon might sell, you'll get leeches for the first few pages trying to earn referral fees. The same is becoming true for just about any commercial item,try "Hotel in Paris" (or any city) and watch the middle men flood the results.
This was on metafilter a few days ago.. The reason Mike Rowe is being sued by M$ is that there "might" be some confusion between the websites because of the design of Mike Rowe's website.
There's also a quote on canada.com" where Mike Rowe says it would be "cool" to have the same phonetic name as the "famous company Microsoft". He had a website (or two) before this, according to the links on his web page.
The Canada.com article does say Copyright, not Trademark, and mentions his mistake of asking for money from Microsoft's lawyers, who are conveniently called "Smart & Biggar". This is just after saying he didn't set up the website to make money (it's $25 a page for his services btw.)
I doubt M$ will be able to win solely on his "sole intention to extract a large settlement", especially when there are only so many ways to organise a 3 section web page in english, i.e. with a top bar, a left bar and a content column. He did step in a big pile of dog poo with his comments though.
The problem with the Mindstorms kit is that it has always relied on a few researchers output from MIT. The researchers used a (AFAICR) Microchip PIC with EEPROM to use as the CPU and an EPROM chip to store the single byte commands. There was also a smaller Mindstorms kit(can't remember the name) based on another MIT project called Crickets, which were smaller, with no LCD screen and only digital I/O. They are referenced on the linked page but the link is dead.
The PIC they used has 13 dual I/O pins and some others, even a basic Brick would take 4 pins for the lcd screen, 3 for the logic inputs. I think there are 2 A/D converters which are both used and a reset switch, oh, and the IR (it has IR, right?)
If they want the kind of things you ask, they need to upgrade the hardware, which they have never done. But with the latest chips they can easily get 4 ports (32 I/O pins) and a couple of A/D aswell. It will also have a new communication protocol allowing (essentially) less I/O lines for the memory and LCD and faster programming.
The radio communications is a bit different, WiFi is out I think, the power needed and the overspec of the transmission (a TCP/IP header would take up a lot of space on the chip).
The Bluetooth might be possible NOW, the communication is either by serial port (RCX 1.0) or USB (RCX 1.5/2.0?), all you should need to do is hack the software to use the port, its already set up to communicate in low-level code.
The language was ripped off from LOGO (perfect for a robot really) and is easy enough to upgrade..even using some of the other interpreters/languages written for the chip.
And yes, I did plan to make a clone, even down to rough schematics and language design. One problem with a clone is the accessories, the brick hardware is possible. The extra sensors are kind of tedious:( LEGO has the LEGO bricks as a common theme to make sensors easy, and they kept them simple (Was it anymore than a switch and a thermistor/resistor?)
Oh for simpler times, when real work didn't interrupt.
The answer is possibly related to the Scientists involved.
The Spirit and Opportunity landers may have been made by experienced scientists in scientifically clean labs and using wind tunnels designed for the military.
Beagle2 (not the Mars Express Orbiter) was cobbled together with pop groups and artists. There's a picture of the project PI (Collin Pillinger) pushing Beagle2 on a shopping trolley. This wasn't a "let's play up the low price tag" PR photograph. He really was transporting the lander on a shopping trolley.
There is then the technical complications. NASA have built two remote controlled sem-autonomous rovers, they have been designed to move about on terrain which has never been seen (from the ground) before. The Sojourner rover from the 90s did very little science because it was mostly wheels and batteries. The only thing I remember from the Sojourner mission is a rock named Yogi.
The thing that separates the two missions is really only the PR. NASA tried to get the fancy rover factor that worked well with Sojourner, and even borrowed a few tricks from Beagle2 in their "were using musical tones to represent spacecraft state".
Beagle2, on the other hand, has a PI who can get people to work for free with the promise of fame (and fortune?). using an artist to paint a spotted calibration plate for the spectrometers/cameras which a scientist would have otherwise done. Using a pop group to play the "mission success" tune on landing (which, I have no doubt, will come through in crystal clear surround sound in the Lander Mission Control).
Going to Mars is expensive, Beagle2 was only cheap because a 300 million Euro orbiter was going that way anyway. Venus Express is recycling the Mars Express engineering models (and will be cheap).
It also has less than 1 in 3 chance of success (3 out of the last 5 failed). Nozomi is dead. 100 million USD doesn't buy what it used to.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also a few possible violations with cMacTex (a shareware carbonized latex) and MacGhostView (a shareware carbonized GhostView). No GPL licences are obvious in the distributed files and there's no obvious place to download the source.
Some of the tools are piped between the carbonized GUI and the command line program (e.g. dvips), the author cites memory leaks in dvips as a reason for this.
BB
Once we're already up there and comfortable, then we can let the galactic treehuggers cry foul. But let's get up there first.
Wow.
You really haven't learned anything, have you?
Care to elaborate? Just what part of the software stack is missing?
The bit that lets Firefox adds new suid root system calls to Linux via .xpi files disguised as links to FREE BOOBIES.
Your link to FREE BOOBIES doesn't work. could you post again using the HTML tags.
Our government has passed laws making GM crops legal, but fortunately, there has been such a strong anti-GM movement here, that supermarkets don't dare stock GM food. Since BSE, the British public have become slightly more aware of the way that food is produced.
Tesco sells GM food, imported from America. They don't use GM ingredients in their 'own brand' food.
Unfortunately, Slashdot cannot be taken down by the Slashdot effect.
It's a negative feedback system. When the load increases on Slashdot's servers, the number of people who can access the site decreases, decreasing the load on the servers. Eventually, there will be an point where the inflow of new readers equals the outflow of `old' readers.
During this period the throughput will be maximum. Whether throughput==bandwidth depends on the content. The images are hopefully coming from a caching server away from the nonsense that is comment thresholds.
BB
OK, could somebody tell me how to resize my damn browser? The alias.com website resized my window outside of the visible desktop, I have no status bar, toolbar or address bar.
No business for you, bad website, bad.
BB
Mine were from the U.K. also.
There are two different databases working at search.msn.com. The first at www., and another at techpreview. www. presumably has some forced results for common terms (like Linux/ Orange) and even returns the .co.uk versions from msn.co.uk
techpreview. on the other hand, seems untuned. It returns a wierd advertising blog when you search for 'news'. So their "algorithmic search" isn't quite there yet.
Maybe they need to sacrifice some pigeons.
BB
Linux. No pointers to linux.org.
Google. Returns the Dutch/Belgian version of the page. Why?
These are no longer true. I know it used to do this but now ...
'Orange' returns Orange.co.uk.'Linux' returns linux.org
'google' returns google.com
'microsoft sucks' returns fuckmicrosoft.com
'abu graib' returns the photographs of inside the prison.
'lindows' returns lindows.com
This is from Firefox 0.8 on Redhat Linux.
BB
When I referred to either the US or Britain, I referred to the British government - and not the people.
No, you really didn't. You said 'Britain'. Were 6 hours ahead of you over in Blighty, you'll need to get up a lot earlier than you do to trick me.
I never used the word people anywhere - I had meant the government in both the contexts.
You may have meant it, but you didn't say it.
The UK and the USA are not democracies. The US is a fully elected republic where the government in power need not represent the majority, you know this, your not stupid.
UK is a consitutional monarchy. The lower house of the government are comprised of locally elected member. The leader of the party in the majority is typically elected as prime minister. The upper house is not elected. But is made of appointed members, selected by the lower house on a proportional basis, and by hereditary peers.
Further, the frequency of elections means that the voters only get to change a government, under all but the most exceptional circumstances, every four years.9/11 occurred 3 years ago, the Iraq war 18 months ago.
Two million is the number of people who turned out to protest, which is far greater than most protests. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington in 1969, he had 250,000 followers, out of a voting population of 100 million.
Just as how despite a lot of people say that Bush is not worthy of being in office and that the war was a sham, the majority of Americans have no problems believing his stories. What more, he will most definitely be re-elected once more, too.
I think you're reading to many left wing papers. Try watching FOX. You might notice an equally vocal group supporting Bush. The election is still undecided, and will be until close of the polls, saying otherwise is foolish.
Vietnam took >7 years to stop, and was fought on the basis of anti-communism. The effects of HUAC were still being felt. Iraq is being fought in the "war against terror" and the DHS still has a lot of power in Washington, and a pro Bush congressman is running the CIA. It may take a while.
The government doesn't always listen to its mandate, nor should it.
The website comment is only condescending if your opinion of PHBs are low. Why are you employing people if you don't think they're useful?
The attitude of the US is sickening, with utter disregard to sovereignity of other nations, and the attitude of the rest of the world in letting the US puppet the UN into submission is sad to see.
And those that shamelessly ass-lick everything that the US does (Britain, for one) no matter how inconsiderate it is to international laws makes it something to think about.
Just so that you understand. It was the British government who were ass-licking the US government and not the British people . 2 million of whom protested against the war, compared to 10 million who voted for the current government.
...The webpage for your startup has a 9.8 on the PHB-meter. Impactful indeed.
There were no 'e's in Scrabble when I was young. You young 'uns have it easy.
You try spelling 'alle were eon gee' without the letter 'e'. It comes out all wrong
mmmmm, Merlot.
Ok, so the firmware update came in the hour between me checking if it was out on the simplyradios forum and posting.
I know MP2 is the native DAB format, I never meant to suggest it was inferior anyway. The O/P said it recorded MP3, the sales pitch says it records MP3. It doesn't record MP3.
Please tell me the update is good?
BB
So far, the Bug is full of them, bugs that is
The radio has problems reading SD cards sometimes, even the ones that it writes itself. The result is generally garbled filenames or unreadable files.
More seriously, the firmware shipped with the radio is having problems recording more than two thirds of the SD card. After 2/3 of the memory is used up, the recording starts to stutter (as if it's missing packets, which it probably is) or fail altogether.
Times recordings often fail, file deletion is buried in a submenu in a submenu...there's no fast forward or rewind on recordings. The sleep timer is hidden away, the 'joystick' control is unreliable.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it doesn't really record MP3. DAB radio is transmitted as MP2, the radio writes the stream directly to disk. If you want MP3 you have to upload to your computer, then convert. I think it can write mp3
All this will apparently be fixed when the new firmware becomes available. Which will be very soon, imminent in fact, honest.
I would post my sources, but their on PHP message boards, it'll get creamed by the slighest hint of a /.ing. It's easy enough to find if you're thinking of buying The Bug online, in the UK.
BB
RTF.
Rich
Text
Format
?
If you assume the only reasons for a Corporation (or Government) to not do something is politics or money the answer becomes (IMHO) a bit clearer
Since news of this blocking will spread amongst the Linux websites, it can't be providing good politics for TechWeb (I assume this to be source of the linked article). Advertisers will question why traffic is purposely being blocked and will reduce their custom accordingly.
The only remaining possiblity is that UBM Plc (the parent parent company) thinks that there's money in this scheme.
There are three methods of obtaining revenue from a news website. The first is selling advertisments (and the registration information if any). The referral blocking has effectively ruled this out as a method here.
The remaining methods, subscription and reselling, might be the answer. UBM resells its news stories through B2B channels
PR Newswire provides comprehensive communications services for public relations and investor relations professionals....news and information distribution to global audiences, and communications monitoring and measurement.
(I would link, but it's framed and hidden, it comes from the UBM plc website). They also claim to be the leading US B2B media company.
Taken the path of least intelligence. The reason LinuxToday was blocked is either the CMP wire customers are complaining or some CMP subscription service is suffering because of the ease of getting the information via a 3rd party aggregator. Why 'pay' for access to the NY Times and the Washington Post when Google will aggregate the important stories for you?
It could of course be more complicated, involving low click-through rates or ad-impressions for LT referrals, but the blocking message implies there are 'authorised redistributers' of the content.
bb
The Forbes story has a screenshot of an example conversation....
Guest34725: I'm looking for reliable services with minimal downtime. Can you help?
Tony: Absolutely! Zero downtime..guaranteed in our Service Level Agreement
So, either Tony is screwed when the engineers find out, or we can add Rackspace to Cockroaches and Twinkies as the only things that will survive a nuclear war.
Seriously though. This could lead to quite a few problems, given that it's impossible to verify who's taking part in the conversation.
Scenario 1: Sales advisor offers a copy of John Grisham's new book (no, I don't know why either) if the customer buys the two Grisham books he's looking at right now. Customer buys the books but doesn't get his free book. Was it a legal contract?
Sc 2: Female SA asks the customer if he needs any help. Customer asks if she wants to meet up for kinky sex later. SA sues company for sexual harassment (I think 3 /. comments like this have +5 already)
Sc 3:SA offers underage customer a deal on Sex tapes because he was looking at some when his mom wasn't in the room and he doesn't have a credit card to buy the good stuff. Paedophile?
Sc 4: Spammers install logging software which detects this popup, redirects to their website. Suddenly all of Amazon's customers are being offered Barnes and Noble special introductory offers. And Penis enlargment.
Sc 5: Tony (in the Rackspace thing) asks the customer for his telephone number, because, there's no way Guest34725 will give out his mates number. (Pizza for I.C. Wiener)
I'm a Fox whore, I apologise. If it appeases you, I don't watch Fox (channel) if such a thing exists, I live in the UK so I watch BBC or C4 (unless they replace it with snooker, hmm.)
Don't worry, they're not any more. Last years' accounts showed a 90% drop in turnover and a 99% drop in profit.
Of course, their turnover went 400, 7000, 9000, 600 ('000s) in the last four years (the only reporting years). ouch, their highest paid director got 400K last year.
bb
The idea isn't a new one. The NSA (and I dare say the KGB and GCHQ) have been using cosmic background radiation to generate their one-time-pads.
You can apparently get software for your email. (Not sure about 2048 bits being stronger than military though, they have bigger guns :)
A simple FM radio, tuned away from a station, would generate suitable data.
BB
That's fine. With the White House devaluing the dollar so quickly the upgrade will cost us the same as a Big Mac.
The end product will taste the same aswell.
There is a simple enough reason for this.
English is taught (at least in English speaking countries) as a language for everyday use. In England I guess it would be something like Estuary English. It's a language where words are slurred together (in a general sense, I'm not implying the English are drunk all the time :), 'slow' letter-groups are lost (what==w'ot, what's up==wass'up, hmm...). What is really being said is obtained mostly from the context and slang is used often.
Foreign languages, in your case, German (I'm assuming here that your first language is English) ,are taught using sentence construction, proper tense usage and correct verb gender. You're taught how to write the sentence before you learn the nouns which are being used.
The only way to correct this (IMHO) would be to have two English subjects, the first is "English as an everyday language"(EEL), the second "English as a foreign language"(EFL). In the EFL class you would English grammer as any non-english speaker would, tense, irregular verbs, pronoun order. The EEL class would be essays, imagination, poetry, discussion, etc.
I doubt it will happen any time soon, nobody wants 3 different English classes (+literature..).
There are also changes that have happened to the English language which didn't happen to the other European languages (German, French, Welsh..). Some of the grammatical constructions are dropped or optional. German has die/der/das/dem, French has le/la/les/l'... to mean 'the'. In English you can often drop the 'the' (e.g. the man's hat='the hat of the man' in [German,French,Welsh,Spanish]). Silly things like not beginning a sentence with 'And' or 'But' and split infinitives also add to the confusion.
Regarding the writing online improving children's English (I just reread the story title, my brain said "the kids have improved, now they are writing online", instead of "...because they are writing"). I think it has something to do with the ability to change sentences as you change your thoughts, on paper you have to form the sentence first, on a computer you can type what you think of first (which is what you see in IRC/IM chat). If you then want to change the structure, you don't have to throw away the entire page. This paragraph has been changed at least 4 times.
BB
I had the page loaded in the browser and blindly reloaded the page (not sure why), something changed!
I'm not sure how much changed but the line you quoted is now
The MyDoom virus has triggered a new wave of attacks on company websites.
Apparently, it was last updated 10 hours ago, which is wrong by about 9 hours.
The attack also raises the possibility of internet blackmail, with companies threatened by individuals or even an individual who might be anywhere.
Say what now?
BB
How is this different to domain name 'squatters ' (loost term) using a domain name similar to a more popular website. Or advertising free porn to get email addresses in spam...
This is usually done by somebody in a related field, but not always. And is usually to the detriment of the more popular website
On eBay, this is used in the same way as putting random phone models after your Nokia phone so that it comes up in a search. Or the stupid people who want to sell you an ebook on how to get an XBOX for 2 dollars P&P.
It only serves to dilute the usefulness of any search engine when this happens. Trying to search on google for just about any item that Amazon might sell, you'll get leeches for the first few pages trying to earn referral fees. The same is becoming true for just about any commercial item ,try "Hotel in Paris" (or any city) and watch the middle men flood the results.
BB
This was on metafilter a few days ago.. The reason Mike Rowe is being sued by M$ is that there "might" be some confusion between the websites because of the design of Mike Rowe's website.
There's also a quote on canada.com" where Mike Rowe says it would be "cool" to have the same phonetic name as the "famous company Microsoft". He had a website (or two) before this, according to the links on his web page.
The Canada.com article does say Copyright, not Trademark, and mentions his mistake of asking for money from Microsoft's lawyers, who are conveniently called "Smart & Biggar". This is just after saying he didn't set up the website to make money (it's $25 a page for his services btw.)
I doubt M$ will be able to win solely on his "sole intention to extract a large settlement", especially when there are only so many ways to organise a 3 section web page in english, i.e. with a top bar, a left bar and a content column. He did step in a big pile of dog poo with his comments though.
BBThe problem with the Mindstorms kit is that it has always relied on a few researchers output from MIT. The researchers used a (AFAICR) Microchip PIC with EEPROM to use as the CPU and an EPROM chip to store the single byte commands. There was also a smaller Mindstorms kit(can't remember the name) based on another MIT project called Crickets, which were smaller, with no LCD screen and only digital I/O. They are referenced on the linked page but the link is dead.
The PIC they used has 13 dual I/O pins and some others, even a basic Brick would take 4 pins for the lcd screen, 3 for the logic inputs. I think there are 2 A/D converters which are both used and a reset switch, oh, and the IR (it has IR, right?)
If they want the kind of things you ask, they need to upgrade the hardware, which they have never done. But with the latest chips they can easily get 4 ports (32 I/O pins) and a couple of A/D aswell. It will also have a new communication protocol allowing (essentially) less I/O lines for the memory and LCD and faster programming.
The radio communications is a bit different, WiFi is out I think, the power needed and the overspec of the transmission (a TCP/IP header would take up a lot of space on the chip).
The Bluetooth might be possible NOW, the communication is either by serial port (RCX 1.0) or USB (RCX 1.5/2.0?), all you should need to do is hack the software to use the port, its already set up to communicate in low-level code.
The language was ripped off from LOGO (perfect for a robot really) and is easy enough to upgrade..even using some of the other interpreters/languages written for the chip.
And yes, I did plan to make a clone, even down to rough schematics and language design. One problem with a clone is the accessories, the brick hardware is possible. The extra sensors are kind of tedious :( LEGO has the LEGO bricks as a common theme to make sensors easy, and they kept them simple (Was it anymore than a switch and a thermistor/resistor?)
Oh for simpler times, when real work didn't interrupt.
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The answer is possibly related to the Scientists involved.
The Spirit and Opportunity landers may have been made by experienced scientists in scientifically clean labs and using wind tunnels designed for the military.
Beagle2 (not the Mars Express Orbiter) was cobbled together with pop groups and artists. There's a picture of the project PI (Collin Pillinger) pushing Beagle2 on a shopping trolley. This wasn't a "let's play up the low price tag" PR photograph. He really was transporting the lander on a shopping trolley.
There is then the technical complications. NASA have built two remote controlled sem-autonomous rovers, they have been designed to move about on terrain which has never been seen (from the ground) before. The Sojourner rover from the 90s did very little science because it was mostly wheels and batteries. The only thing I remember from the Sojourner mission is a rock named Yogi.
The thing that separates the two missions is really only the PR. NASA tried to get the fancy rover factor that worked well with Sojourner, and even borrowed a few tricks from Beagle2 in their "were using musical tones to represent spacecraft state".
Beagle2, on the other hand, has a PI who can get people to work for free with the promise of fame (and fortune?). using an artist to paint a spotted calibration plate for the spectrometers/cameras which a scientist would have otherwise done. Using a pop group to play the "mission success" tune on landing (which, I have no doubt, will come through in crystal clear surround sound in the Lander Mission Control).
Going to Mars is expensive, Beagle2 was only cheap because a 300 million Euro orbiter was going that way anyway. Venus Express is recycling the Mars Express engineering models (and will be cheap).
It also has less than 1 in 3 chance of success (3 out of the last 5 failed). Nozomi is dead. 100 million USD doesn't buy what it used to.
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