actually, Jesus was frequently taunted as a bastard, it's just that only one of the gospels doesn't spell that out. Only in the last
back then, people could be officially a bastard - if there were witnesses to the illegitimate conception - and you could only marry someone else who was also officially so; Jesus was not officially so, but since it was well known no respectable man would let his daughter marry a bastard.
calling someone or their illegitimate in the middle east is still a great insult and was used to taunt the Iraqi soldiers during the invasion to "smoke them out" so they would come out fighting!
the British Library is a copyright repository and they turned down quite a few now famous authors and books as they felt they were too populist. Now, I think, they don't turn down anything - just in case.
so, archiving things isn't just a problem for niche market things - quiet a lot of art is lost because it's not thought to be worthwhile at the time. Consider famous cave paintings - a few primitive daubs, now of immense value and interest.
many university lecturers get sent free books and gifts by publishers, the publishers hope that the lecturer will use it as the basis of their course, in theory if the lecturer has good ethics s/he will choose the best book for the job. However, they might curry favour with a particular publisher to get their own book into print, or might use a book written by a friend as a favour.
When I was at university (too many years ago) some lecturers pushed very hard to get you to buy their book, making it clear that the notes from their lectures would be insufficient - those lecturers were usually a bit crap, coasting through the lessons and so meaning you just didn't have sufficient material to get through their exams - i.e they were able to avoid the hard work of preparing good lessons. Most lecturers were quite good, the books were supplemental, but if you took good notes and borrowed a book from the library you'd have fairly comprehensive coverage.
steam? in the 2nd world war when magnesium was used for fire bombs it was quickly discovered steam would in fact allow magnesium to burn - worse still, the Mg "stole" the O2 when burning, leaving free H2 to then burn separately. Moral: don't try to put out a magnesium fire with water!
very crudely, firewire was specifically designed to be for high speed streaming data - like video - it's ideal for a hard drive moving large chunks of data, and would be no use for mice and keyboards. USB was originally designed for low bandwidth low latency peripherals; it allocates data bandwidth in inverse proportion to demand, so e.g. mass storage gets whatever's left after mice/keyboards and tablets have had their share.
this seems clearly aimed at providing a long reach version of sata at 3Gb/s (Gigabits not GigaBytes per second). Incidentally, too many people call the higher speed sata "SataII" which is somewhat incorrect - sataII means a whole slew of features over and above the first version say Sata IO Org. Note that 3Gbps means 3 x 10^9, not 3 x 1024^3.
I have a clock that I know is absolutely accurate twice a day. Snag is, if I don't put a new battery in it I don't actually know even approximately what the time is!
> "opposition from the Bush Administration"
maybe Bush is worried that all the scientific research will discover he's the missing link in the fossil records?
implied contract? yes you can, your bank and credit card company do it all the time - send you notice of change of t's and c's, you could write and refuse, but then essentially you're giving notice of intent to terminate the contract. In my example, what you are doing is turning the verbal contract into a written one by putting it in writing, your supplier (bank etc) then has to refute your written version of their contract.
oh dear, I should have put a smiley in there. Read the articles about Bitterly's flywheel powered vehicles and you'll see they're using magnetic levitation bearings, and multiple wheels to provide sufficient storage and also balance out the gyro forces.
there have been schemes to use flywheels to provide short term energy storage for vehicles:
google for it.
for slow urban vehicles like buses I can see this would be OK, but I would hate to hate a high speed turn in my flywheel-storage sports car and have it start to flip over!
hey, great, my car is now a mobile uninterruptable power supply, so if there's a threat of a power outage taking out my home computers, I have to make sure I rush home and plug the car in!
In a previous job I was a s/w developer, and I had a particularly troublesome boss. The sort who would say "let me know if any problems at all arise" and then at reviews would say "you kept telling me all the problems that came up", or "I want to hear solutions not problems". Anyway, he had a habit of telling people by phone to do things which were against procedures if it would help up meet deadlines, saying that we didn't have to be so rigid; if things went wrong he'd immediately blame the developers.
One day he told me to go ahead with a software upgrade which hadn't been approved by the approved chain of managemen and told me he would give business approval. So I went out the standard system upgrade notification stating that X had given his approval on behalf of the business. He rang me to say why had I quoted him thus, I responded that's what he'd said, and he told me that I shouldn't quote him like that!
Anyway, my point is that if someone asks you, off the record, to do something that will only come to be your problem, put it on the record. Something as simple as an email to confirm that they have requested so and so. This is also good practise if, say, you have to ring the bank with some issue of policy or a dispute and they tell you something which you think might be rescinded later - write and say "in according with telephone conversation on Xth of $Month you told me blah blah and this means I shall...." - and ensure you keep signed and dated copies... months later if they change their mind you can point to the letter and say that since they didn't countermand it, the contract as offered in the letter stands.
if you farted (break wind) at work, your employer would own the chemical formula. You can bet that if farts had useful chemical properties, you'd be plumbed in the moment you arrived at work!
not only that, if you don't use the BBC product but simply own a computer you have to by law sign up to it and pay the £135 license fee, but then you get to proclaim proudly to the rest of the world we have the best gov't controlled BBCPL-licensed products.
you are right in your statement that "sharing" is not the right term for p2p file sharing since you don't actually loan or give a part of a physical item to someone else and thus deprive yourself of it temporarily or permanently.
however, in the same vein, you're not stealing music from the creators because they still have their copy!
piracy is also a bad term since historically pirates were ruthless & violent thieves.
Some people say that "sharing" can make people buy more music, however, I also agree that some people will copy music with no intention of buying it. There are, as I see it, three classes of such copyright violators:
those who would be unable to pay for a copy anyway (when I was a kid I used to copy records and cds rented from my local public library, I had no money to buy them)
those who could pay for a copy but are too cheapskate or too lazy to do so
those who profit by illegal mass copying and selling
A fair system would enure the first group is educated so that when they can afford to pay their way, they do so (any copied music I liked as a kid was gradually bought on record or cd as I grew up), the second group made to understand the law, and the third group should definitely be charged with serious crimes.
friends lists of bands that I like on Myspace.
I find the "musicwall" facebook thing quite interesting for finding stuff, or even discovering what your apparently normal friends and colleague actually listen to!
there's a system whereby the cellular/mobile operator can pass some part of your identity on; in the UK it's called whitelisting - they simply put a URL into their whitelist of websites which are allowed to receive additional headers allowing them to uniquely identify the cellphone/mobile phone (GSM in UK/Europe).
GPRS data is a finicky beast, given that the mobile phone lives behind multiple levels of nat, special gateways to fragment IP to go over the GSM air protocol etc, so it's very hard for a website to be able to give a persistent session to a mobile phone - especially as some (historically) have poor cookie handling.
Used sensibly, it's a reasonable thing to do.
Oh, and it was admitted on a mailing list by an employee of O2, the UK operator who won the contract from Apple to gouge their customers for lots of money, that they record and track the handset data to make sure that people don't take their iPhone "unlimited data" sim and put it into a different phone for use with their computer!
I'd love to try this out with video from a formula1, nascar or superbike race - it'd be *really* amazing if it could be done live - you could actually simulate being in the driving seat live during a race!
I can predict that if the tech becomes cheap enough, it will lead to a slew of re-runs of the famous Rendezvoos video (cross-Paris maniac run in a Ferrari) or Gumball rally.
ok, so, ignoring the ethics of how Microsoft weaselled^Wassisted the change from linux to Windows, there are some possible good outcomes:
MS actually manage to produce a new OS which is actually less bloated than their predecessors
That the new MS OS proves to be so slow and bloated an insecure, it is dumped in a very public manner bringing shame to MS, and the OLPCs are reloaded with linux, the cost of which has to be born by MS
I just thought of another...
that the whole exercise proves costly enough to MS to visibly dent their balance sheet, upsetting share holders (many/most? of whom are employees) causing their share to start falling, and the evil empire to come crumbling down supported as it is only by rickety chairs
actually, base 12 can be enormously useful provided you adopt the correct processes for handling the numbers.. why do we still have 360 degrees in a circle? 24 hours in a day. Where did base 12 arithmetic come from? I'll let google and wikipedia give the answers. Hint: using your thumb to point at the joints on your four fingers, you can count to 12 on one hand.
for a while I had a macbookpro and the bluetooth worked really well, allowing me to use my mobile phone's headset as a sound device; linux won't do this "out of the box" - but the wiki does mention it. However, my new toshiba tecra m9 needs some special toshiba acpi driver installed (the standard one which came with suse 10.3 doesn't seem to be compatible), so I can't turn on bluetooth at all.
the kde bluetooth apps aren't bad, but it'd be great to make things simpler, so that it has an auto-discovery mode and when it finds headsets, gps, cellphone etc starts a configuration wizard to set up connections.
for all the things you *have* to have working to make a computer useable, linux often beats windows in terms of setting up especially in a secure manner, but coping with the massive variety of obscure peripherals windows wins, no doubt due to its monopoly on being the default OS on retail machines.
I found with suse 10.3 it detected my toshiba tecra m9 laptop's nvidia video card and resolution perfectly, it even managed twin-head mode but did need a small amount of operator intervention.
minimo has been working fine for me on Angstrom distro for Zaurus - just as well, 'cos it's the only useful browser in the Angstrom distribution - they chose not to include any old libraries so the old opera 7 from the Sharp original distro is not compatible, nor is netfront, and konqueror sucks, and firefox segfaults!
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actually, Jesus was frequently taunted as a bastard, it's just that only one of the gospels doesn't spell that out. Only in the last back then, people could be officially a bastard - if there were witnesses to the illegitimate conception - and you could only marry someone else who was also officially so; Jesus was not officially so, but since it was well known no respectable man would let his daughter marry a bastard.
calling someone or their illegitimate in the middle east is still a great insult and was used to taunt the Iraqi soldiers during the invasion to "smoke them out" so they would come out fighting!
the British Library is a copyright repository and they turned down quite a few now famous authors and books as they felt they were too populist. Now, I think, they don't turn down anything - just in case.
so, archiving things isn't just a problem for niche market things - quiet a lot of art is lost because it's not thought to be worthwhile at the time. Consider famous cave paintings - a few primitive daubs, now of immense value and interest.
many university lecturers get sent free books and gifts by publishers, the publishers hope that the lecturer will use it as the basis of their course, in theory if the lecturer has good ethics s/he will choose the best book for the job. However, they might curry favour with a particular publisher to get their own book into print, or might use a book written by a friend as a favour.
When I was at university (too many years ago) some lecturers pushed very hard to get you to buy their book, making it clear that the notes from their lectures would be insufficient - those lecturers were usually a bit crap, coasting through the lessons and so meaning you just didn't have sufficient material to get through their exams - i.e they were able to avoid the hard work of preparing good lessons. Most lecturers were quite good, the books were supplemental, but if you took good notes and borrowed a book from the library you'd have fairly comprehensive coverage.
steam? in the 2nd world war when magnesium was used for fire bombs it was quickly discovered steam would in fact allow magnesium to burn - worse still, the Mg "stole" the O2 when burning, leaving free H2 to then burn separately. Moral: don't try to put out a magnesium fire with water!
very crudely, firewire was specifically designed to be for high speed streaming data - like video - it's ideal for a hard drive moving large chunks of data, and would be no use for mice and keyboards. USB was originally designed for low bandwidth low latency peripherals; it allocates data bandwidth in inverse proportion to demand, so e.g. mass storage gets whatever's left after mice/keyboards and tablets have had their share.
this seems clearly aimed at providing a long reach version of sata at 3Gb/s (Gigabits not GigaBytes per second). Incidentally, too many people call the higher speed sata "SataII" which is somewhat incorrect - sataII means a whole slew of features over and above the first version say Sata IO Org. Note that 3Gbps means 3 x 10^9, not 3 x 1024^3.
wouldn't it be cheaper for them to put you into cryogenic storage and hope one day they can cure you cheaply?
:-)
I have a clock that I know is absolutely accurate twice a day. Snag is, if I don't put a new battery in it I don't actually know even approximately what the time is!
> "opposition from the Bush Administration"
maybe Bush is worried that all the scientific research will discover he's the missing link in the fossil records?
implied contract? yes you can, your bank and credit card company do it all the time - send you notice of change of t's and c's, you could write and refuse, but then essentially you're giving notice of intent to terminate the contract. In my example, what you are doing is turning the verbal contract into a written one by putting it in writing, your supplier (bank etc) then has to refute your written version of their contract.
oh dear, I should have put a smiley in there. Read the articles about Bitterly's flywheel powered vehicles and you'll see they're using magnetic levitation bearings, and multiple wheels to provide sufficient storage and also balance out the gyro forces.
there have been schemes to use flywheels to provide short term energy storage for vehicles: google for it.
for slow urban vehicles like buses I can see this would be OK, but I would hate to hate a high speed turn in my flywheel-storage sports car and have it start to flip over!
hey, great, my car is now a mobile uninterruptable power supply, so if there's a threat of a power outage taking out my home computers, I have to make sure I rush home and plug the car in!
One day he told me to go ahead with a software upgrade which hadn't been approved by the approved chain of managemen and told me he would give business approval. So I went out the standard system upgrade notification stating that X had given his approval on behalf of the business. He rang me to say why had I quoted him thus, I responded that's what he'd said, and he told me that I shouldn't quote him like that!
Anyway, my point is that if someone asks you, off the record, to do something that will only come to be your problem, put it on the record. Something as simple as an email to confirm that they have requested so and so. This is also good practise if, say, you have to ring the bank with some issue of policy or a dispute and they tell you something which you think might be rescinded later - write and say "in according with telephone conversation on Xth of $Month you told me blah blah and this means I shall ...." - and ensure you keep signed and dated copies... months later if they change their mind you can point to the letter and say that since they didn't countermand it, the contract as offered in the letter stands.
if you farted (break wind) at work, your employer would own the chemical formula. You can bet that if farts had useful chemical properties, you'd be plumbed in the moment you arrived at work!
not only that, if you don't use the BBC product but simply own a computer you have to by law sign up to it and pay the £135 license fee, but then you get to proclaim proudly to the rest of the world we have the best gov't controlled BBCPL-licensed products.
however, in the same vein, you're not stealing music from the creators because they still have their copy!
piracy is also a bad term since historically pirates were ruthless & violent thieves.
Some people say that "sharing" can make people buy more music, however, I also agree that some people will copy music with no intention of buying it. There are, as I see it, three classes of such copyright violators:
A fair system would enure the first group is educated so that when they can afford to pay their way, they do so (any copied music I liked as a kid was gradually bought on record or cd as I grew up), the second group made to understand the law, and the third group should definitely be charged with serious crimes.
friends lists of bands that I like on Myspace.
I find the "musicwall" facebook thing quite interesting for finding stuff, or even discovering what your apparently normal friends and colleague actually listen to!
there's a system whereby the cellular/mobile operator can pass some part of your identity on; in the UK it's called whitelisting - they simply put a URL into their whitelist of websites which are allowed to receive additional headers allowing them to uniquely identify the cellphone/mobile phone (GSM in UK/Europe). GPRS data is a finicky beast, given that the mobile phone lives behind multiple levels of nat, special gateways to fragment IP to go over the GSM air protocol etc, so it's very hard for a website to be able to give a persistent session to a mobile phone - especially as some (historically) have poor cookie handling. Used sensibly, it's a reasonable thing to do. Oh, and it was admitted on a mailing list by an employee of O2, the UK operator who won the contract from Apple to gouge their customers for lots of money, that they record and track the handset data to make sure that people don't take their iPhone "unlimited data" sim and put it into a different phone for use with their computer!
I'd love to try this out with video from a formula1, nascar or superbike race - it'd be *really* amazing if it could be done live - you could actually simulate being in the driving seat live during a race!
I can predict that if the tech becomes cheap enough, it will lead to a slew of re-runs of the famous Rendezvoos video (cross-Paris maniac run in a Ferrari) or Gumball rally.
- MS actually manage to produce a new OS which is actually less bloated than their predecessors
- That the new MS OS proves to be so slow and bloated an insecure, it is dumped in a very public manner bringing shame to MS, and the OLPCs are reloaded with linux, the cost of which has to be born by MS
I just thought of another...Sorry, got carried away.
actually, base 12 can be enormously useful provided you adopt the correct processes for handling the numbers.. why do we still have 360 degrees in a circle? 24 hours in a day. Where did base 12 arithmetic come from? I'll let google and wikipedia give the answers. Hint: using your thumb to point at the joints on your four fingers, you can count to 12 on one hand.
for a while I had a macbookpro and the bluetooth worked really well, allowing me to use my mobile phone's headset as a sound device; linux won't do this "out of the box" - but the wiki does mention it. However, my new toshiba tecra m9 needs some special toshiba acpi driver installed (the standard one which came with suse 10.3 doesn't seem to be compatible), so I can't turn on bluetooth at all. the kde bluetooth apps aren't bad, but it'd be great to make things simpler, so that it has an auto-discovery mode and when it finds headsets, gps, cellphone etc starts a configuration wizard to set up connections.
for all the things you *have* to have working to make a computer useable, linux often beats windows in terms of setting up especially in a secure manner, but coping with the massive variety of obscure peripherals windows wins, no doubt due to its monopoly on being the default OS on retail machines.
I found with suse 10.3 it detected my toshiba tecra m9 laptop's nvidia video card and resolution perfectly, it even managed twin-head mode but did need a small amount of operator intervention.
minimo has been working fine for me on Angstrom distro for Zaurus - just as well, 'cos it's the only useful browser in the Angstrom distribution - they chose not to include any old libraries so the old opera 7 from the Sharp original distro is not compatible, nor is netfront, and konqueror sucks, and firefox segfaults!