In Britain you can (if you'd really want to) go on tours of sewage treatment facilities. One of the highlights is drinking the water that comes out of the end of process (to prove the point that they really do clean the water before they dump it back into the rivers). It's really not that bad at all...Is the idea of pumping this treated water back into the mains really that new an idea?
There was an article about drivers falling asleep in a UK paper a few days back - some of the more (worrying?) ways drivers have tried to not fall asleep included a air hostess who trapped her hair in the sun roof, so when she would fall asleep the sharp pain in her head would wake her up again, and another man who attached pins around an elastic band on his wrist...
"Bags of several dozen cells [...] aren't life"
Of course they're life. There's a good chance we evolved from bags of several dozen cells. Therein lies the tricky issue - at what point in an embryo do you say it's your so called "life"? Clearly since conception the embryo is alive - it fulfills the conditions one would expect a live organism to do. It is life, just not what we might consider "concious" life...
I was working as a lighting technician at a theatre in Edinburgh this year during the annual festival - I was putting on around 8 shows a day for a month, and at every single show someone recieved a text message / phone call...we even had one guy take a call during the show (which did provide the stand up comic at the time with some good material!)
There is a slightly less severe approach to jamming which I know one theatre I work in uses - the cellphone detector, which as the name suggests detects, rather than jams, cellphones. It can be programmed to play a message such as "Please switch off your phones before the show starts", or simply to alert crew backstage. Quite useful when you're recording a performance and what to ensure nothing happens to disturb it...
It should be pointed out, the BBC isn't allowed to run commercials in the UK. It's global stations (BBC America, BBC World) do run ads, because they're not in the UK. It's worth noting only some of their global stations do run ads (BBC World Service Radio doesn't).
There is a commercial arm of the BBC, called "BBC Enterprises". It produces magazines and the like, and is also a record label for BBC artists (mainly kids stuff). There's currently some suggestion that the commercial side might be sold off...
In the UK, professional musicians make an average wage of around 16,000 GBP. That's not just those starting out - that's across the board. Many make this by teaching privately on the side, or gigs during the evening. If you're a classically trained musician, the steadiest job you can get is the army band.
I play the piano. I play it very well. I do jazz gigs, and earn around 20 - 30GBP. My keyboard and amplifier cost around 1000, and my lessons to get me to the stage I am now cost far more than that. I've probably made a massive loss.
So don't knock musicians. I compose (what I consider to be) good songs, and I get paid a pittance. So do some research before making sweeping generalisations, because I make music, and I sure as hell not being "grossly overpaid". I barely have enough to live on.
...the study was more about the addictive properties of caffeine, rather than coffee. This is actually quite useful, because caffeine is often combined with paracetemol in pain killers. People who use these painkillers as "lifestyle drugs" (and they do - just look at the proliferation of "pocket containers" for brand name pills") might want to read this research.
For example, the article states "Griffiths and Juliano assessed the validity of 66 studies on caffeine withdrawal over many decades. Fifty percent of people had headaches, and 13 percent had clinically significant distress or impairment of function.". If you're taking pain killers with caffeine to relieve headaches, the pain could actually start to be caused by your addiction to the caffeine.
Still, at least they're researching something:)
"Given the US's perfect 5 and 0 record against European adversaries (Revolution, War of 1812, Spanish-American War, WWI and WWII)"
I'm sorry? A "perfect record against European adversaries"? How many European countries were on the axis during WWI? How many European countries were on the axis during WWII?
World War I and World War II was not "US vs. Europe", and to say so is just plain insulting, and leads me to doubt your historical knowledge:
World War I: Amongst the allies included Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal. But I guess these weren't European countries, despite the fact they're now members of the EU.
World War II: Amongst the allies included Britain, France, Belgium, Greece, Netherlands. But again, I guess you're right, and these weren't European countries.
So just get your facts right instead of citing the US's "perfect 5 and 0 record against European adversaries". Because for two of those wars, the allies (not the US, the "allies") wouldn't have won without European assistance.
When I vistsed Paris several years ago, you could basically by a laser pointer from anywhere - I must have seen dozens of street vendors selling them (mainly to school children to, you guessed it, shine in other people's eyes...)
To back you up - I have had a single dead pixel on my iBook since I bought it (two years ago), which I rarely notice, if at all. Had it been a powerbook, I could probably have got a replacement (Apple being fairly generous in the "dead pixel support" area).
As it happened, I ended up with £200 cash, calculated by the value of the laptop (£1000) divided by the number of dead pixels before Apple would replace it.
If anyone's interest, the argument I used (and would probably work for other people, certainly in the UK) was that at no point did the retailer I bought it from or Apple state the laptop could have a dead pixel when I bought it.
That said, it did take quite a bit of haggling...
Not that tubes ever went away in audio, but more and more manufacturers are putting them into equipment "because it's a tube / for the sake of it". Take the Korg Triton (one of the more popular music workstations), of which an updated model released around January had a tube built in (to add "warmth")...
...the writers themselves have said on the DVD commentaries that although in the first few seasons a concious effort was made to keep geography accurate, after that they found it easier (and funnier) just to mess about with it, meaning the Simpsons' house is in many places (next to moes, next to the power plant, etc.).
I don't think that's a very insightful comment - by that logic ISPs wouldn't investigate spam activities, phishing, and the like. For the average Joe, it might be a good idea, but in practice it just wouldn't work.
A (probably slightly flawed) analogy would be tracking devices in cars. The vast majority of the public would be heavily oppossed to any form of continous government or police monitoring of their whereabouts whilst driving. People don't want to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (minor speeding and the like).
The same with the internet - the vast majority of people don't want their usage to be tracked, because they don't wan't to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (copyright theft via P2P, those under 18 viewing pornography, etc.)
However, once your car's been stolent, you'd probably really want a vehicle tracking device so you could get your car back. The same with the internet - once you've been hit with a large spam attack / DDoS etc. you'd probably want to find out who carried it out, via logs. Home users with little technical experience would expect their ISP to help, certainly with spam.
That doesn't mean it will be released on Linux - maybe the server software will be Linux based, the graphics tools they used are Linux based etc.
It's pretty meaningless, and I certainly wouldn't read anything into it.
No it wasn't. It was set in Oceania. Great Britain does not exist in the novel. It's set in London, in the country of Oceania. Not Great Britain. Easy, see?
So, yes, when the entire of North and South America, Australia, South Africa, and Great Britain become one massive superpower, the book will become more relevant.
The 20" display in the iMac is likely to be produced in much larger quantities, and have a higher rate of defects (dead pixels, etc). The 20" cinema display is a high quality LCD, designed for those who need total colour reliability, sharpness etc. The iMac display is designed for home / office users, who are unlikely to have such high demands.
...as those in the UK might realise, the newspaper The Guardian also published today a much longer and more detailed article with Sasha Yuvchenko, another engineer working at Chernobyl at the time who survived the disaster. He too comments on the excellent medical care he recieved. Read it here.
Although ID is not strictly required for UK domestic flights, it's generally required by most airlines, because the majority of domestic flights are now run by the budget airlines (EasyJet and the like), who need ID to verify the tickets belong to the ticket holder. In a recent flight with British Airways from Bristol in Edinburgh, I wasn't even issued a ticket, and so ID was required to obtain my booking reference.
By that logic, patents on LCD screens would be invalid because of the same 'prior art' - they too are RGB illumination devices / surfaces and can be controlled by software.
I agree with you about on demand speed paperback publication - I recently ordered a rather obscure US published book on Amazon.co.uk, and was surprised to discover the front cover claimed it was printed in the US, and yet the inside leaf claimed to be printed in the UK.
That's the way on demand paperbacks should work - I shouldn't even know it's been printed on-demand. Certainly, in this particular book I ordered the quality was what I'd expect from a standard print run paperback.
That said, I do know of a friend who worked as a published for Hodder (UK based book publisher), who recently left to take up a degree in electronic publishing - those in the industry seem to think the eBook form has some future, although where and how I don't know...
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think he'll form a splinter group, possible called "Sea Wings" or similar?
In Britain you can (if you'd really want to) go on tours of sewage treatment facilities. One of the highlights is drinking the water that comes out of the end of process (to prove the point that they really do clean the water before they dump it back into the rivers). It's really not that bad at all...Is the idea of pumping this treated water back into the mains really that new an idea?
There was an article about drivers falling asleep in a UK paper a few days back - some of the more (worrying?) ways drivers have tried to not fall asleep included a air hostess who trapped her hair in the sun roof, so when she would fall asleep the sharp pain in her head would wake her up again, and another man who attached pins around an elastic band on his wrist...
"Bags of several dozen cells [...] aren't life" Of course they're life. There's a good chance we evolved from bags of several dozen cells. Therein lies the tricky issue - at what point in an embryo do you say it's your so called "life"? Clearly since conception the embryo is alive - it fulfills the conditions one would expect a live organism to do. It is life, just not what we might consider "concious" life...
I was working as a lighting technician at a theatre in Edinburgh this year during the annual festival - I was putting on around 8 shows a day for a month, and at every single show someone recieved a text message / phone call...we even had one guy take a call during the show (which did provide the stand up comic at the time with some good material!)
There is a slightly less severe approach to jamming which I know one theatre I work in uses - the cellphone detector, which as the name suggests detects, rather than jams, cellphones. It can be programmed to play a message such as "Please switch off your phones before the show starts", or simply to alert crew backstage. Quite useful when you're recording a performance and what to ensure nothing happens to disturb it...
It should be pointed out, the BBC isn't allowed to run commercials in the UK. It's global stations (BBC America, BBC World) do run ads, because they're not in the UK. It's worth noting only some of their global stations do run ads (BBC World Service Radio doesn't). There is a commercial arm of the BBC, called "BBC Enterprises". It produces magazines and the like, and is also a record label for BBC artists (mainly kids stuff). There's currently some suggestion that the commercial side might be sold off...
I completely agree.
In the UK, professional musicians make an average wage of around 16,000 GBP. That's not just those starting out - that's across the board. Many make this by teaching privately on the side, or gigs during the evening. If you're a classically trained musician, the steadiest job you can get is the army band.
I play the piano. I play it very well. I do jazz gigs, and earn around 20 - 30GBP. My keyboard and amplifier cost around 1000, and my lessons to get me to the stage I am now cost far more than that. I've probably made a massive loss.
So don't knock musicians. I compose (what I consider to be) good songs, and I get paid a pittance. So do some research before making sweeping generalisations, because I make music, and I sure as hell not being "grossly overpaid". I barely have enough to live on.
...will these patches be covered on MediCare?
...the study was more about the addictive properties of caffeine, rather than coffee. This is actually quite useful, because caffeine is often combined with paracetemol in pain killers. People who use these painkillers as "lifestyle drugs" (and they do - just look at the proliferation of "pocket containers" for brand name pills") might want to read this research. For example, the article states "Griffiths and Juliano assessed the validity of 66 studies on caffeine withdrawal over many decades. Fifty percent of people had headaches, and 13 percent had clinically significant distress or impairment of function.". If you're taking pain killers with caffeine to relieve headaches, the pain could actually start to be caused by your addiction to the caffeine. Still, at least they're researching something :)
"Given the US's perfect 5 and 0 record against European adversaries (Revolution, War of 1812, Spanish-American War, WWI and WWII)"
I'm sorry? A "perfect record against European adversaries"? How many European countries were on the axis during WWI? How many European countries were on the axis during WWII?
World War I and World War II was not "US vs. Europe", and to say so is just plain insulting, and leads me to doubt your historical knowledge:
World War I: Amongst the allies included Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal. But I guess these weren't European countries, despite the fact they're now members of the EU.
World War II: Amongst the allies included Britain, France, Belgium, Greece, Netherlands. But again, I guess you're right, and these weren't European countries.
So just get your facts right instead of citing the US's "perfect 5 and 0 record against European adversaries". Because for two of those wars, the allies (not the US, the "allies") wouldn't have won without European assistance.
Now go and mod me troll.
When I vistsed Paris several years ago, you could basically by a laser pointer from anywhere - I must have seen dozens of street vendors selling them (mainly to school children to, you guessed it, shine in other people's eyes...)
To back you up - I have had a single dead pixel on my iBook since I bought it (two years ago), which I rarely notice, if at all. Had it been a powerbook, I could probably have got a replacement (Apple being fairly generous in the "dead pixel support" area). As it happened, I ended up with £200 cash, calculated by the value of the laptop (£1000) divided by the number of dead pixels before Apple would replace it. If anyone's interest, the argument I used (and would probably work for other people, certainly in the UK) was that at no point did the retailer I bought it from or Apple state the laptop could have a dead pixel when I bought it. That said, it did take quite a bit of haggling...
Not that tubes ever went away in audio, but more and more manufacturers are putting them into equipment "because it's a tube / for the sake of it". Take the Korg Triton (one of the more popular music workstations), of which an updated model released around January had a tube built in (to add "warmth")...
...the writers themselves have said on the DVD commentaries that although in the first few seasons a concious effort was made to keep geography accurate, after that they found it easier (and funnier) just to mess about with it, meaning the Simpsons' house is in many places (next to moes, next to the power plant, etc.).
I don't think that's a very insightful comment - by that logic ISPs wouldn't investigate spam activities, phishing, and the like. For the average Joe, it might be a good idea, but in practice it just wouldn't work.
A (probably slightly flawed) analogy would be tracking devices in cars. The vast majority of the public would be heavily oppossed to any form of continous government or police monitoring of their whereabouts whilst driving. People don't want to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (minor speeding and the like).
The same with the internet - the vast majority of people don't want their usage to be tracked, because they don't wan't to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (copyright theft via P2P, those under 18 viewing pornography, etc.)
However, once your car's been stolent, you'd probably really want a vehicle tracking device so you could get your car back. The same with the internet - once you've been hit with a large spam attack / DDoS etc. you'd probably want to find out who carried it out, via logs. Home users with little technical experience would expect their ISP to help, certainly with spam.
That doesn't mean it will be released on Linux - maybe the server software will be Linux based, the graphics tools they used are Linux based etc. It's pretty meaningless, and I certainly wouldn't read anything into it.
No it wasn't. It was set in Oceania. Great Britain does not exist in the novel. It's set in London, in the country of Oceania. Not Great Britain. Easy, see? So, yes, when the entire of North and South America, Australia, South Africa, and Great Britain become one massive superpower, the book will become more relevant.
The 20" display in the iMac is likely to be produced in much larger quantities, and have a higher rate of defects (dead pixels, etc). The 20" cinema display is a high quality LCD, designed for those who need total colour reliability, sharpness etc. The iMac display is designed for home / office users, who are unlikely to have such high demands.
...as those in the UK might realise, the newspaper The Guardian also published today a much longer and more detailed article with Sasha Yuvchenko, another engineer working at Chernobyl at the time who survived the disaster. He too comments on the excellent medical care he recieved. Read it here.
...it's a pity that Palm couldn't find a work around to enable the SD card to be used in their other Tungsten handhelds, like my Tungsten E.
Although ID is not strictly required for UK domestic flights, it's generally required by most airlines, because the majority of domestic flights are now run by the budget airlines (EasyJet and the like), who need ID to verify the tickets belong to the ticket holder. In a recent flight with British Airways from Bristol in Edinburgh, I wasn't even issued a ticket, and so ID was required to obtain my booking reference.
By that logic, patents on LCD screens would be invalid because of the same 'prior art' - they too are RGB illumination devices / surfaces and can be controlled by software.
...Microsoft has released a similar product to Apple and crushed them before, is it?
I agree with you about on demand speed paperback publication - I recently ordered a rather obscure US published book on Amazon.co.uk, and was surprised to discover the front cover claimed it was printed in the US, and yet the inside leaf claimed to be printed in the UK.
That's the way on demand paperbacks should work - I shouldn't even know it's been printed on-demand. Certainly, in this particular book I ordered the quality was what I'd expect from a standard print run paperback.
That said, I do know of a friend who worked as a published for Hodder (UK based book publisher), who recently left to take up a degree in electronic publishing - those in the industry seem to think the eBook form has some future, although where and how I don't know...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/14/apple_q3_r esults/