You would have been entirely within your rights to acquit, if you felt that it was unjust to convict him under the circumstances. You're not forced to follow the directions of the judge, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in having a jury at all. If I was Peter Watts' lawyer, reading your message, I would be filing an appeal on Monday morning, on grounds of misdirection.
Scientists are frequently admonished for publishing ideas which have no scientific basis, or for which there is little or no evidence or where elementary mistakes were made in assumptions or experiments.
We can argue whether God exists or not, but most reasonable people would agree that there is no scientific basis for religion. There is no measurable evidence, there is no coherent hypothesis, and not even a broad consensus of opinion among religious communities.
There may not be a consensus view among US scientists, but the UK is a predominantly atheist/agnostic country. I'd be surprised if there was widespread support for religious equality here in Britain.
There was no 0th century, so 4th century BC to 4th century AD is 700 years. Ok, it could be 800 years at a stretch, if you can accept that there were 200 years between 19th and 20th centuries (01/01/1801-31/12/2000). Pedantry is fun!
Kids in Africa are starving for reasons the Gates Foundation can't fix.
I imagine $38 billion is enough for a small invasion. Take control, run it as a colony for say 25 years, then transfer power back to the people when there's a stable system in place. It's not ideal, but at least nobody starves.
So English is "a language that someone else created"...
I'm not criticising the accessibility, utility or creativity of English, but if someone actually sat down and invented it then they would be almost as crazy as the people who (might have) said "hey, that's a great language, let's use that!"
Coverage of webcams is patchy at best. I've got a Creative Live Motion, pretty much the cheapest PTZ cam you can get, and there's absolutely no support for it. But then Creative are (in)famous for their poor support on non-Windows systems.
Depends entirely on what the processors are doing, just as the equivalent metrics for cars depend on the weight and speed of the car. What I'd like to see is a rating of the load that, for example, an operating system puts on the CPU. Let's say that you want to compare Vista vs Mac OSX or some brand of Linux OS, doing some basic activities (starting up, copying data, etc), and give the results in a way that translates into carbon units.
'some people' evidently doesn't include the UK government, who happily extradited three British citizens to the US in 2006. As the wiki entry says, "the alleged crime was allegedly committed by British citizens living in Britain against a British company based in London". And they were extradited under anti-terrorist legislation. Personally I want people to look at the US as a beacon of liberty, law and democracy, but it has to actually become one before it can expect people to treat it like one.
He will be knighted, just the same as everyone else (visit to Buckingham Palace, sword on the shoulder, medal, etc), but he's not a British national so he couldn't use the full title of 'Sir...'. However, he would be able to use the initials "KBE" (Knight of the British Empire) after his name.
Then again, nobody has any clue who invented rail transit. This may be due in large part to the vague definition of "rail transit", but it still sounds like the name should have survived the last 200 years in the public conciousness.
Most people in the UK are taught from an early age that George Stephenson (UK) invented the Rocket, regarded as the first commercial locomotive engine for railways. But the steam engine already existed (Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, UK), the steam-powered vehicle already existed (Richard Trevithick, UK), and for all we know the Chinese might have invented vehicles on rails centuries before.
Perhaps, as with Joseph Swan's (UK) invention of the electric light bulb, or Sir George Cayley's (UK) invention of the airplane, the fact that Americans didn't always get there first might have lead US schools to downplay the significance of the original inventors.
It's just human nature - everybody wants to believe that their country made the most significant breakthroughs or contributions, but the truth is often that everybody is actually building on everybody else's previous work, and it becomes very difficult to single out one person or group for the credit.
How do you know that "the European powers have no answer to stealth?" The whole point of stealth capabilities is that you're not supposed to know they're there:-)
You're being a bit idealistic! The best thing about having lots of different space programs is that you end up with lots of different approaches to the problem. And the best thing about that is that you maximise the potential that one of them will succeed.
It's like egg fertilisation - why release one big sperm when you can send millions of little ones and increase the odds of one getting through!
Having lots of space programmes is just like making love to a beautiful woman.
There's also the matter of the 4 British Trident submarines armed with hundreds of nuclear warheads, with sealed instructions on what to do with them if they can't tune in to the "Today" programme (BBC Radio 4) for a few days...
As you know, the 14th Amendment was specifically intended to confer citizenship on former slaves, and would not have been necessary at all if the original Constitution had more closely reflected the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence ("all men are created equal").
My personal opinion is that the concept of celebrity is tedious and deeply unfair. Why should a singer or actor earn more in a year than a scientist (who improves our standard of living) or a doctor (who improves our standard of life) can earn in a lifetime?
However we may dislike it, society is structured around the "famous" and the "public" (everybody else), and the famous do draw unnecessarily invasive and prurient interest, especially from mentally unbalanced people. Do you think, for example, that it is acceptable to publish the home addresses of doctors who practise abortion?
I am not for a moment suggesting that famous people deserve or warrant any extra laws especially for them. In the information age it is impossible to prevent publication of anything, and impossible to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
But anybody who does publish private information should be prepared to demonstrate that it is in the "public interest" to do so. And in this particular case, it wasn't. I happen to think that a balanced, and equally applied, concept of an individual's right to privacy would be a Good Thing.
I was responding to your assertion that "It's the truth", therefore there can be no barrier to publication. This is a noble ideal, but too dogmatic to work in the real world. As you have admitted, there is always a line to be drawn between what is acceptable and unacceptable for publication. In Europe we have more mature and pragmatic privacy laws, even if they are not always followed.
I'm not banging a drum for her - I can neither understand why she is loved or hated. But if I lived in a society where gun ownership is not only permitted but positively encouraged, I would be uncomfortable if my location and security arrangements were made public knowledge.
Agreed, within reason. However, the "famous" among us are entitled to a certain amount of privacy, mainly because there are so many crazy people out there. A logical conclusion of your otherwise reasonable point is that it should be OK to publish somebody's credit card details, or their health records, or the government's defence plans.
I am sure that this is a legitimate coastline survey, but the guy has to answer two questions: how does he know who that house belongs to (when it has been said that the house is not named after her or easily linked to her), and why did he choose to use her name on the website? I don't see a problem publishing the picture, so long as it's not identifiable with a person.
The JVM is exactly what it says - the Java Virtual Machine. It loads and executes Java bytecode, handles things like memory management and JIT, and provides a consistent interface between Java programs and the underlying operating system.
The two distributions of Java are the JRE (runtime environment) and the JDK (development kit). There are three sets of JVM/JRE/JDK - the standard edition (J2SE), the enterprise edition (J2EE) for servers, and the micro (J2ME) for embedded solutions.
For most common uses, the J2SE Runtime Env is all that should be required to be installed. But on Java 1.4, this has grown to 44Mb (for the international version - the US only version may be smaller). Of this, only about 8Mb is actually the JVM - the rest is made up of the HUGE library set which, as has already been mentioned, contains many of the extensions and modules that were once kept separate but have since been rolled into the main distribution.
It is almost as if the whole of CPAN was bundled as part of the standard Perl installation.
When it started out, Java billed itself as the first real network programming language, and as such it had a fantastic opportunity to move in the direction that platforms like Flash have since taken, that of small, optimised, download-on-demand components. Fair enough, applets do this to some extent, but I would have liked to see this in the JRE itself. Instead, what we get is an enormous, centralised lump of code that takes far too long to download and therefore isn't really practical for anything but heavyweight server applications.
And as for the memo, whether it is a hoax or not it is right on many points. The java engineers, for whatever reason, simply will not fix many common issues with the language, and it is starting to drive people away.
First of all, AOL have committed themselves to the concept of an open source project to rewrite the browser. There are already over 100 in-house developers working on Mozilla, plus the dozen or so external contributors.
IE5 is *not* a partially implemented piece of software. It's the best (read: fastest, most stable, most standards-compliant) browser available today. I wish it had serious competition, but anyone who knows what you can do in IE5 knows exactly how far away the other browsers are.
You're deluding yourself thinking Mozilla can regain its lost ground; IE5 is far ahead. It's doing everything you might expect Mozilla to do, plus a few more things, and it's already been available for months. There are currently more IE5 users than IE4 users. It would be nice if they ported it to BSD/Linux, but why should they?
All "we" have to do is develop a better (or even remotely comparable) browser and maybe the perceptions will shift. Maybe. Frankly I doubt it. Anyone who has seen and used Office 2000 will understand that, even though it's proprietary, IE5 uses embedded COM objects in an incredibly powerful and interactive way.
Make no mistake, IE5 is already *the* choice for corporate Intranet solutions, and it's only a matter of a short time before it entirely supplants its alternatives on the Internet. The benefits far outweigh the drawback of losing a small percentage of customers through incompatibility.
How big is this single molecule anyway? It could be conceivably any size! A quick search of the Protein Data Bank (yes I was bored, but there's a fairly interesting mail about it) and it turns out that some molecules are 132,000 atoms big (or even bigger). You could probably build a whole cpu out of something that big...
"...rumors run rampant of a new Amiga with a Transmeta CPU and a Linux Kernel to be released in the next couple months."
Anybody else read this as "rumours to be released in the next couple of months" ??? These guys must have a whole roadmap of speculation and hearsay all planned out and ready to "launch" onto the grapevine. Or so I've heard...
Slashdot Mirror
She's still alive!
PyCon really started a trend!
IANAL...
You would have been entirely within your rights to acquit, if you felt that it was unjust to convict him under the circumstances. You're not forced to follow the directions of the judge, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in having a jury at all. If I was Peter Watts' lawyer, reading your message, I would be filing an appeal on Monday morning, on grounds of misdirection.
Scientists are frequently admonished for publishing ideas which have no scientific basis, or for which there is little or no evidence or where elementary mistakes were made in assumptions or experiments.
We can argue whether God exists or not, but most reasonable people would agree that there is no scientific basis for religion. There is no measurable evidence, there is no coherent hypothesis, and not even a broad consensus of opinion among religious communities.
Therefore it has no place in a science classroom.
There may not be a consensus view among US scientists, but the UK is a predominantly atheist/agnostic country. I'd be surprised if there was widespread support for religious equality here in Britain.
There was no 0th century, so 4th century BC to 4th century AD is 700 years. Ok, it could be 800 years at a stretch, if you can accept that there were 200 years between 19th and 20th centuries (01/01/1801-31/12/2000). Pedantry is fun!
I imagine $38 billion is enough for a small invasion. Take control, run it as a colony for say 25 years, then transfer power back to the people when there's a stable system in place. It's not ideal, but at least nobody starves.
So English is "a language that someone else created"...
I'm not criticising the accessibility, utility or creativity of English, but if someone actually sat down and invented it then they would be almost as crazy as the people who (might have) said "hey, that's a great language, let's use that!"
Coverage of webcams is patchy at best. I've got a Creative Live Motion, pretty much the cheapest PTZ cam you can get, and there's absolutely no support for it. But then Creative are (in)famous for their poor support on non-Windows systems.
Depends entirely on what the processors are doing, just as the equivalent metrics for cars depend on the weight and speed of the car. What I'd like to see is a rating of the load that, for example, an operating system puts on the CPU. Let's say that you want to compare Vista vs Mac OSX or some brand of Linux OS, doing some basic activities (starting up, copying data, etc), and give the results in a way that translates into carbon units.
'some people' evidently doesn't include the UK government, who happily extradited three British citizens to the US in 2006. As the wiki entry says, "the alleged crime was allegedly committed by British citizens living in Britain against a British company based in London". And they were extradited under anti-terrorist legislation. Personally I want people to look at the US as a beacon of liberty, law and democracy, but it has to actually become one before it can expect people to treat it like one.
He will be knighted, just the same as everyone else (visit to Buckingham Palace, sword on the shoulder, medal, etc), but he's not a British national so he couldn't use the full title of 'Sir...'. However, he would be able to use the initials "KBE" (Knight of the British Empire) after his name.
There's more information on the history of the award at the Royal Family website.
Then again, nobody has any clue who invented rail transit. This may be due in large part to the vague definition of "rail transit", but it still sounds like the name should have survived the last 200 years in the public conciousness.
Most people in the UK are taught from an early age that George Stephenson (UK) invented the Rocket, regarded as the first commercial locomotive engine for railways. But the steam engine already existed (Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, UK), the steam-powered vehicle already existed (Richard Trevithick, UK), and for all we know the Chinese might have invented vehicles on rails centuries before.
Perhaps, as with Joseph Swan's (UK) invention of the electric light bulb, or Sir George Cayley's (UK) invention of the airplane, the fact that Americans didn't always get there first might have lead US schools to downplay the significance of the original inventors.
It's just human nature - everybody wants to believe that their country made the most significant breakthroughs or contributions, but the truth is often that everybody is actually building on everybody else's previous work, and it becomes very difficult to single out one person or group for the credit.
How do you know that "the European powers have no answer to stealth?" The whole point of stealth capabilities is that you're not supposed to know they're there :-)
You're being a bit idealistic! The best thing about having lots of different space programs is that you end up with lots of different approaches to the problem. And the best thing about that is that you maximise the potential that one of them will succeed.
It's like egg fertilisation - why release one big sperm when you can send millions of little ones and increase the odds of one getting through!
Having lots of space programmes is just like making love to a beautiful woman.
There's also the matter of the 4 British Trident submarines armed with hundreds of nuclear warheads, with sealed instructions on what to do with them if they can't tune in to the "Today" programme (BBC Radio 4) for a few days...
I hope that we can keep this civilised.
As you know, the 14th Amendment was specifically intended to confer citizenship on former slaves, and would not have been necessary at all if the original Constitution had more closely reflected the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence ("all men are created equal").
My personal opinion is that the concept of celebrity is tedious and deeply unfair. Why should a singer or actor earn more in a year than a scientist (who improves our standard of living) or a doctor (who improves our standard of life) can earn in a lifetime?
However we may dislike it, society is structured around the "famous" and the "public" (everybody else), and the famous do draw unnecessarily invasive and prurient interest, especially from mentally unbalanced people. Do you think, for example, that it is acceptable to publish the home addresses of doctors who practise abortion?
I am not for a moment suggesting that famous people deserve or warrant any extra laws especially for them. In the information age it is impossible to prevent publication of anything, and impossible to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
But anybody who does publish private information should be prepared to demonstrate that it is in the "public interest" to do so. And in this particular case, it wasn't. I happen to think that a balanced, and equally applied, concept of an individual's right to privacy would be a Good Thing.
I was responding to your assertion that "It's the truth", therefore there can be no barrier to publication. This is a noble ideal, but too dogmatic to work in the real world. As you have admitted, there is always a line to be drawn between what is acceptable and unacceptable for publication. In Europe we have more mature and pragmatic privacy laws, even if they are not always followed.
I'm not banging a drum for her - I can neither understand why she is loved or hated. But if I lived in a society where gun ownership is not only permitted but positively encouraged, I would be uncomfortable if my location and security arrangements were made public knowledge.
Agreed, within reason. However, the "famous" among us are entitled to a certain amount of privacy, mainly because there are so many crazy people out there. A logical conclusion of your otherwise reasonable point is that it should be OK to publish somebody's credit card details, or their health records, or the government's defence plans.
I am sure that this is a legitimate coastline survey, but the guy has to answer two questions: how does he know who that house belongs to (when it has been said that the house is not named after her or easily linked to her), and why did he choose to use her name on the website? I don't see a problem publishing the picture, so long as it's not identifiable with a person.
The JVM is exactly what it says - the Java Virtual Machine. It loads and executes Java bytecode, handles things like memory management and JIT, and provides a consistent interface between Java programs and the underlying operating system.
The two distributions of Java are the JRE (runtime environment) and the JDK (development kit). There are three sets of JVM/JRE/JDK - the standard edition (J2SE), the enterprise edition (J2EE) for servers, and the micro (J2ME) for embedded solutions.
For most common uses, the J2SE Runtime Env is all that should be required to be installed. But on Java 1.4, this has grown to 44Mb (for the international version - the US only version may be smaller). Of this, only about 8Mb is actually the JVM - the rest is made up of the HUGE library set which, as has already been mentioned, contains many of the extensions and modules that were once kept separate but have since been rolled into the main distribution.
It is almost as if the whole of CPAN was bundled as part of the standard Perl installation.
When it started out, Java billed itself as the first real network programming language, and as such it had a fantastic opportunity to move in the direction that platforms like Flash have since taken, that of small, optimised, download-on-demand components. Fair enough, applets do this to some extent, but I would have liked to see this in the JRE itself. Instead, what we get is an enormous, centralised lump of code that takes far too long to download and therefore isn't really practical for anything but heavyweight server applications.
And as for the memo, whether it is a hoax or not it is right on many points. The java engineers, for whatever reason, simply will not fix many common issues with the language, and it is starting to drive people away.
First of all, AOL have committed themselves to the concept of an open source project to rewrite the browser. There are already over 100 in-house developers working on Mozilla, plus the dozen or so external contributors.
IE5 is *not* a partially implemented piece of software. It's the best (read: fastest, most stable, most standards-compliant) browser available today. I wish it had serious competition, but anyone who knows what you can do in IE5 knows exactly how far away the other browsers are.
You're deluding yourself thinking Mozilla can regain its lost ground; IE5 is far ahead. It's doing everything you might expect Mozilla to do, plus a few more things, and it's already been available for months. There are currently more IE5 users than IE4 users. It would be nice if they ported it to BSD/Linux, but why should they?
All "we" have to do is develop a better (or even remotely comparable) browser and maybe the perceptions will shift. Maybe. Frankly I doubt it. Anyone who has seen and used Office 2000 will understand that, even though it's proprietary, IE5 uses embedded COM objects in an incredibly powerful and interactive way.
Make no mistake, IE5 is already *the* choice for corporate Intranet solutions, and it's only a matter of a short time before it entirely supplants its alternatives on the Internet. The benefits far outweigh the drawback of losing a small percentage of customers through incompatibility.
Convince me otherwise.
How big is this single molecule anyway? It could be conceivably any size! A quick search of the Protein Data Bank (yes I was bored, but there's a fairly interesting mail about it) and it turns out that some molecules are 132,000 atoms big (or even bigger). You could probably build a whole cpu out of something that big...
"...rumors run rampant of a new Amiga with a Transmeta CPU and a Linux Kernel to be released in the next couple months."
Anybody else read this as "rumours to be released in the next couple of months" ??? These guys must have a whole roadmap of speculation and hearsay all planned out and ready to "launch" onto the grapevine. Or so I've heard...