However, in some cases children are fighting back in rather funny ways. In one school (I'd find the link if I wasn't late for work!) a group of children started buying snacks, cans of fizzy drink and chocolate from a local wholesaler, and then sold them on to children during break time and lunch.
In 1980, my family moved out to the west of the UK from the Home Counties - parents jacked in their jobs (civil engineer & teacher respectively) and we ran the village shop and local bakery.
Now money was scarce, so we didn't get much in the way of pocket money, 50p I think. My brother and I put our heads together and clubbed together to buy an outer (case) of Cadburys Cream Eggs for £2.50. Sold at 18p each * 50 == a nice healthy profit. Before long we were running a small dealing operation, carrying bulging sports bags out to the bus every morning and returning to count the pennies and calculate the profits. Before long we discovered a few more interesting business lessons. For starters, certain Big'Uns put the squeeze on us for a cut (free chocolate, generally); so we had to get us some protection. Then we had stock that spoiled, melting during a long day in a hot classroom. And certain kids started to get stuff on tick, running up long slates which they'd never quite pay back. Ah me, miserable days but what a lot we learned of life that way.
This response reminds me of recent comments about Israel's "disproportionate response" to Hezbollah. The whole point of war is to destroy the enemy. War is not an Olympic event!
if war is war and Israel is justified in their current actions, then Al Qaeda were justified flying aircraft into the WTC. (To spell it out for the irony-challenged, I do not think AQ were or are justified, any more than Hamas suicide bombers of Hezbollah or the IRA or Tim McVeigh or anyone else who deliberately kills civilians.)
A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist, regardless of whether they wear a nation's uniform or not.
Did no-one pick up on the obvious feed line in the writeup about other possibilities? This is basically what the airpwn guys did at Defcon a couple of years back. Except that they rewrote every img tag to point to goatse. I swear, I nearly shat myself looking at their pics of stupefied lardass l337 types staring blankly at their laptops and clearly without a clue how they were being had.
Google it, you won't regret it:)
There was a very interesting piece on BBC Radio's "From Our Own Correspondent", by a journalist who lived in Beijing for four years, then found himself in Delhi for six months. At the end of the six months he's on a flight back to Beijing. The flight leaves at 3am, the ticket agent tells him "Yes, it really is 3am - the airport's too small, so many flights leave at night." Sure enough he arrives to find Delhi airport a heaving mass of people, with that implies in Indian cities. After takeoff he fell into conversation with the Indian passenger sitting next to him. "Have you been to Beijing before?" "Yes, I lived there for four years." "Great! So tell me, what can I expect?" "I think you can expect to be surprised."
Sure enough, they arrive at the brand new, huge, ultramodern airport (OK, it may have been Shanghai...) and his Indian travelling companion's jaw hits the tarmac. No heaving crowds... no beggars,... picks up a car straightfowardly and soon finds himself on the zooming along 8 lane motorway back to town...
It should still be up on bbc.co.uk/FOOC, let's look for a link.,..
Well wouldn't you know it, the full text is here and will expose my summary above as hopelessly inaccurate, but do check it out anyway, it's great:)
Completely agree with you, although that has nothing to do with this nonsense story at all. (Perhaps ASBOs are a Bad Thing; I'm not sure, personally, and have changed my mind several times on the issue. However that all fades into insignificance next to Iraq, ID cards, ANPR cameras (google up "UK national ANPR", but be ready to change your trousers), the NHS, the cronies,.. and all the rest of it. Basically, I'm with Steve Bell:)
What's this 'would'? ASBOs have been law for years ( 4 t 7 ). They've been very popular for local getting rid of antisocial neighbours, vandals, etc etc. Apparently.
The write-up missed the important angle that if they decide to power down the possibly leaky APU, they'll have to use explosive bolts to lower the undercarriage. That's never been used in flight before. That doesn't mean it won't work, of course, but it will make the re-entry and landing a little more interesting than usual.
God and I are good friends. He communicates with me on a daily basis, using events in my own life around me as his vocal chords.
people who say things like this clearly need treatment for their mental illness. The things that scares me is that so many millions of people in the US seem to be infected. I cleave to Dawkins' take on religion, it's a maladaptive coping strategy that we should have grown out of four or five hundred years ago.
Seeing it for real although miles away is more awe inspiring... Even for a who cares 14 year old girl that still thinks emo is cool and that adults are stupid.
Well emo IS cool, the vast majority of adults are stupid. Perhaps when she spends 40 years of working life toiling in grinding poverty trying to repay the grossly swollen US national debt she'll find it bit less cool. (Disclaimer, yes I know the Iraq war is costing the annual NASA budget every two weeks, but then that's another damn fool idea to file under "bread and circuses".)
(PS don't bother mod'ing me down, I already know I'm in a minority of one around here in thinking manned spaceflight is a dumb idea.)
The ONLY way that we're going into space permanently is if we forget about government taking the lead, and focus on capitalism.
Doesn't the fact that this hasn't happened, despite capitalism being for all essential purposes unfettered on Earth, suggest something to you?
(Note that it's gradually emerging that the major US aerospace corps were running a secret private SSO operation in the 80s on behalf of the US Government, and that apart from the Chinese, *all* space-capable hardware is designed and built (and, increasingly, flown) by private corps.) If there was money to be made from it, you can bet your arse they'd have tried it by now.
It's going to take a few eccentric billionaires frittering away their fortunes (and probably a few brave but foolish pilots and passengers their lives) before this whole Star Trek nonsense is finally put to bed, of course. I do find it ironic that the most vociferous advocates of aggressive manned colonisation of space are generally fans of science fiction. I wonder how many of these understand anything of real-world science & engineering. (John Carmack excepted, of course - he knows not very much, but is going about learning in an admirably hard-headed and diligent way.)
I'd love it if Armadillo could reach orbit, just because it'd be cool, but let's not kid ourselves it means anything. You can build an aeroplane in your garage, but no-one's built an amateur heavy passenger jet or supersonic fighter, ie functionally useful implementations of the idea of powered flight.)
We in the EFF don't hold the copyright to the Linux kernel, or indeed any other GPL'd software apart from Tor (AFAIK?).
However, we in the FSF do hold the copyright to a huge collection of Free software, and will enforce that copyright with legal action where appropriate. (So far, it hasn't been appropriate; infringers tend to drop their pants and bend over once the FSF lawyers have had a little chat with their lawyers.)
(Yes, I'm a member of both the EFF and FSF, aren't you?)
I was just reading Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynmann's excellent anecdotes book "Surely you're joking Mr Feynmann" - he describes being co-opted onto various charitable boards and stuff after he became famous - he mentions some advice from an old hand: "I always ask myself which particular type of crookery the crooks are trying to absolve their conscience of by giving away their money."
...to shove it up his arse, and fuck off whilst he's about it.
Note: this is not mere crude abuse, but a clever reference to a popular British film of the 1980s, as well as a rational response to a god-botherer trying to give advise to a scientist. Honestly... is it just me, or should religion be classed as a mental illness? If not, why not? I mean, how delusional can you get? "There's a guy with a big beard floating on a cloud in the sky who created the world in seven days", I mean, really!! I honestly believe our species and planet is going nowhere until this perfidious nonsense is stamped out, wherever it's found.
Perhaps we could buy an island somewhere, like the geek-friendly Libertarian county some people were trying to establish in New England a few years ago... we could call it Dawkinsia.
or do other Viz readers out ther find that the words "squeeze out three more launches this year" more appropriate? I mean by this that the project's (to put it politely) a white elephant. One lesson that has to be learnt from the Shuttle is: make sure you have solid plans for a new generation of vehicles. Actually, scrub that: the lesson is, make sure you don't need a next generation. We should have learned that from the Russian experience, at least!
Someone will sell 'em Oracle Reports or Cognos or some other bloated "Enterprise scale solution" and they'll cane billions of taxpayer dollars over 5-10 years with little to show for it except happy BMW dealers in the areas where the middleware agile on-demand service bus oriented architecture consultants live. Bad news if you're an American taxpayer, but not as bad as it'd be if the US Govt actually capable of developing functional large-scale systems. You don't have to look far to see that it ain't necessarily so... and that if the intelligence generated by the system can be systematically ignored, marginalised and worked-around by the executive branc anyway, what difference would it make? (hint: it makes none...)
Careful what you say. I got bitchslapped for questioning whether a story belonged on Slashdot. (At this point I've pretty much given up on/. too, after 8 years [my other account has a 5 figure UID] I can't say I'm happy about it but... sometimes you just have to accept that the world's moved on, there are new alternatives that don't come with Slashdot's little "quirks". Hello Digg, BoingBoing, delicio.us and google news.
Wow, intriguing! I haven't bothered to read the article because even the write-up says it's light on details. Unhampered by preconceptions, the possibilities are endless!
infrared solar cells lining cabinets absorb all heat passively - saving money on fans and the power to drive them - one rack per row contains a small steam (or hot water) powered generator.
Arrays of pigeons
batteries! They're self contained, after all
256-port power-over-ethernet switch bonds multiple ports into one 240v supply
convection-powered 'wind' turbines. Ajax-heavy Web2.0 content will obviously be more eco-friendly due to the warm gusts of hype
Helldesk phone receivers connected to flywheel. List the phone, add some revs to the flywheel
...my imagination fails. Well, it is nearly 2am... note to self: must stop posting to slashdot in bed.
Yeah, Carl Icahn's fairly well known. In other news, the faeces of the species Ursus Ursus is often discovered in arboreal settings, and it is believed that a German chap in a house in Rome is titular head of the organisation known as the "Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church".
Will our DNA be a lot tighter in 30,000,000 AD (assuming we survive at all)?
I've heard it said that the average lifetime of a species is one million years, but I've never found a good source for it - I'd love to know if it's true. Of course, this figure is only a starting point for humans - we have a major factor that might be expected to increase our species' lifespan (intelligence and culture) but also several factors that might be expected to reduce it (er... intelligence and culture;)
Slashdot Mirror
In 1980, my family moved out to the west of the UK from the Home Counties - parents jacked in their jobs (civil engineer & teacher respectively) and we ran the village shop and local bakery. Now money was scarce, so we didn't get much in the way of pocket money, 50p I think. My brother and I put our heads together and clubbed together to buy an outer (case) of Cadburys Cream Eggs for £2.50. Sold at 18p each * 50 == a nice healthy profit. Before long we were running a small dealing operation, carrying bulging sports bags out to the bus every morning and returning to count the pennies and calculate the profits. Before long we discovered a few more interesting business lessons. For starters, certain Big'Uns put the squeeze on us for a cut (free chocolate, generally); so we had to get us some protection. Then we had stock that spoiled, melting during a long day in a hot classroom. And certain kids started to get stuff on tick, running up long slates which they'd never quite pay back. Ah me, miserable days but what a lot we learned of life that way.
A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist, regardless of whether they wear a nation's uniform or not.
Did no-one pick up on the obvious feed line in the writeup about other possibilities? This is basically what the airpwn guys did at Defcon a couple of years back. Except that they rewrote every img tag to point to goatse. I swear, I nearly shat myself looking at their pics of stupefied lardass l337 types staring blankly at their laptops and clearly without a clue how they were being had. Google it, you won't regret it :)
There was a very interesting piece on BBC Radio's "From Our Own Correspondent", by a journalist who lived in Beijing for four years, then found himself in Delhi for six months. At the end of the six months he's on a flight back to Beijing. The flight leaves at 3am, the ticket agent tells him "Yes, it really is 3am - the airport's too small, so many flights leave at night." Sure enough he arrives to find Delhi airport a heaving mass of people, with that implies in Indian cities. After takeoff he fell into conversation with the Indian passenger sitting next to him. "Have you been to Beijing before?" "Yes, I lived there for four years." "Great! So tell me, what can I expect?" "I think you can expect to be surprised."
Sure enough, they arrive at the brand new, huge, ultramodern airport (OK, it may have been Shanghai...) and his Indian travelling companion's jaw hits the tarmac. No heaving crowds... no beggars,... picks up a car straightfowardly and soon finds himself on the zooming along 8 lane motorway back to town...
It should still be up on bbc.co.uk/FOOC, let's look for a link.,.. Well wouldn't you know it, the full text is here and will expose my summary above as hopelessly inaccurate, but do check it out anyway, it's great :)
That is NOT a memory leak in Firefox. It is a RAM cache. IT DOES THIS BY DESIGN.
Completely agree with you, although that has nothing to do with this nonsense story at all. (Perhaps ASBOs are a Bad Thing; I'm not sure, personally, and have changed my mind several times on the issue. However that all fades into insignificance next to Iraq, ID cards, ANPR cameras (google up "UK national ANPR", but be ready to change your trousers), the NHS, the cronies,.. and all the rest of it. Basically, I'm with Steve Bell :)
You mean magistrates, not judges; but other than that, you're basically right :)
(What is the US equivalent of a magistrate, incidentally?)
What's this 'would'? ASBOs have been law for years ( 4 t 7 ). They've been very popular for local getting rid of antisocial neighbours, vandals, etc etc. Apparently.
The write-up missed the important angle that if they decide to power down the possibly leaky APU, they'll have to use explosive bolts to lower the undercarriage. That's never been used in flight before. That doesn't mean it won't work, of course, but it will make the re-entry and landing a little more interesting than usual.
people who say things like this clearly need treatment for their mental illness. The things that scares me is that so many millions of people in the US seem to be infected. I cleave to Dawkins' take on religion, it's a maladaptive coping strategy that we should have grown out of four or five hundred years ago.
(PS don't bother mod'ing me down, I already know I'm in a minority of one around here in thinking manned spaceflight is a dumb idea.)
Why in heaven's name would anyone want to go back to the moon? Because it's there? Get real.
Doesn't the fact that this hasn't happened, despite capitalism being for all essential purposes unfettered on Earth, suggest something to you?
(Note that it's gradually emerging that the major US aerospace corps were running a secret private SSO operation in the 80s on behalf of the US Government, and that apart from the Chinese, *all* space-capable hardware is designed and built (and, increasingly, flown) by private corps.) If there was money to be made from it, you can bet your arse they'd have tried it by now.
It's going to take a few eccentric billionaires frittering away their fortunes (and probably a few brave but foolish pilots and passengers their lives) before this whole Star Trek nonsense is finally put to bed, of course. I do find it ironic that the most vociferous advocates of aggressive manned colonisation of space are generally fans of science fiction. I wonder how many of these understand anything of real-world science & engineering. (John Carmack excepted, of course - he knows not very much, but is going about learning in an admirably hard-headed and diligent way.)
I'd love it if Armadillo could reach orbit, just because it'd be cool, but let's not kid ourselves it means anything. You can build an aeroplane in your garage, but no-one's built an amateur heavy passenger jet or supersonic fighter, ie functionally useful implementations of the idea of powered flight.)
However, we in the FSF do hold the copyright to a huge collection of Free software, and will enforce that copyright with legal action where appropriate. (So far, it hasn't been appropriate; infringers tend to drop their pants and bend over once the FSF lawyers have had a little chat with their lawyers.)
(Yes, I'm a member of both the EFF and FSF, aren't you?)
Oh Zarquon, haven't they collapsed yet?
I was just reading Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynmann's excellent anecdotes book "Surely you're joking Mr Feynmann" - he describes being co-opted onto various charitable boards and stuff after he became famous - he mentions some advice from an old hand: "I always ask myself which particular type of crookery the crooks are trying to absolve their conscience of by giving away their money."
Note: this is not mere crude abuse, but a clever reference to a popular British film of the 1980s, as well as a rational response to a god-botherer trying to give advise to a scientist. Honestly... is it just me, or should religion be classed as a mental illness? If not, why not? I mean, how delusional can you get? "There's a guy with a big beard floating on a cloud in the sky who created the world in seven days", I mean, really!! I honestly believe our species and planet is going nowhere until this perfidious nonsense is stamped out, wherever it's found.
Perhaps we could buy an island somewhere, like the geek-friendly Libertarian county some people were trying to establish in New England a few years ago... we could call it Dawkinsia.
or do other Viz readers out ther find that the words "squeeze out three more launches this year" more appropriate? I mean by this that the project's (to put it politely) a white elephant. One lesson that has to be learnt from the Shuttle is: make sure you have solid plans for a new generation of vehicles. Actually, scrub that: the lesson is, make sure you don't need a next generation. We should have learned that from the Russian experience, at least!
We're all in it together.
Someone will sell 'em Oracle Reports or Cognos or some other bloated "Enterprise scale solution" and they'll cane billions of taxpayer dollars over 5-10 years with little to show for it except happy BMW dealers in the areas where the middleware agile on-demand service bus oriented architecture consultants live. Bad news if you're an American taxpayer, but not as bad as it'd be if the US Govt actually capable of developing functional large-scale systems. You don't have to look far to see that it ain't necessarily so... and that if the intelligence generated by the system can be systematically ignored, marginalised and worked-around by the executive branc anyway, what difference would it make? (hint: it makes none...)
Careful what you say. I got bitchslapped for questioning whether a story belonged on Slashdot. (At this point I've pretty much given up on /. too, after 8 years [my other account has a 5 figure UID] I can't say I'm happy about it but... sometimes you just have to accept that the world's moved on, there are new alternatives that don't come with Slashdot's little "quirks". Hello Digg, BoingBoing, delicio.us and google news.
Yeah, Carl Icahn's fairly well known. In other news, the faeces of the species Ursus Ursus is often discovered in arboreal settings, and it is believed that a German chap in a house in Rome is titular head of the organisation known as the "Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church".
Try setting your threshold to +5. It cuts out a lot of the more offensive crap.
I've heard it said that the average lifetime of a species is one million years, but I've never found a good source for it - I'd love to know if it's true. Of course, this figure is only a starting point for humans - we have a major factor that might be expected to increase our species' lifespan (intelligence and culture) but also several factors that might be expected to reduce it (er... intelligence and culture ;)