BT is the monopoly provider in the rest of the country.
False. Apart from the local loop unbundling which still sort of involves BT, a large part of the country can use Virgin Media's cable network for phone/TV/Internet with no BT involvement at all.
Does anyone else think the whole affair sounds a lot like Communism?
No, it's just you living in the 1950's. The EU is trying to create the conditions for a free market, the fundamental basis of capitalism, by punishing abusive monopolies.
Yet, I doubt that giving a choice to the users in question will make any difference. If they didn't care until now, they won't care when given the choice now.
From a free market point of view, it seems like a good thing to me that at least they will know that there *is* a choice.
Very strange... why would someone become transgendered and then turn lesbian?
You don't 'become' trans-gendered. Current medical opinion is that it's a brain structure thing you're born with. And you wouldn't 'turn' lesbian either, typically you would be born with the tendency to be oriented towards men/women/both. Gender identity (whether you 'feel' that you are male or female) and sexual orientation (whether you are attracted to men or women or both) are separate issues. It's not a question of 'what is easier', it's a fundamental identity issue.
How many Linux kernel developers are filthy rich from the millions of people they have helped? None. RHAT just uses their code for free to make $$$$.
1/ How many low-level MS 'kernel' developers are filthy rich? 2/ Red Hat actually employs (and pays damn good salaries to) some kernel developers, as do various other companies like IBM.
That's the evilness and stupidity of communism...
Can't say I see where communism comes into it when everyone involved is either employed by a capitalist company or freely and voluntarily coding because they want to (and probably gaining kudos which translates into employability and money). But if you want to live in the 1950's and see reds under the bed everywhere that's up to you. Sad though.
This is the strategy of the far left in most of the world.
We are talking specifically about the UK Labour government here. They have become more authoritarian as they have moved to the right. On some issues they are more right-wing than the 'right-wing' opposition. When they were actually a left-wing party, they were much more supportive of civil liberties.
but with Leftists in control in America, there is little to stop it.
I don't suppose you realize that by world standards the Obama administartion is actually classed as centre-right.
But then I don't suppose you want reality to challenge your preconceptions about left and right.
Why is it again, that I need to pay to educate other people's ankle-biters?
If they are educated and become useful members of society capable of earning a living, they are less likely to burgle your house, mug you or murder you, or cost you a lot of money to lock them up.
Batteries suck. There have been many times when batteries would be "10 times" more better than some previous generation. But they never are.
My eeePC 1000 (SSD model) gets about 5hrs battery life and is much more powerful in nearly every respect** than my work-provided 5 year old laptop, which gets about 1hr battery life (and probably got less than 2hrs when it was new). Seems like pretty reasonable progress to me (although I realize this is only partly due to battery improvements).
** Twice as much RAM and disc space, about 3x faster, weighs about 1/3rd as much but smaller screen
I'll tell you why: because the programmers are incompetent jackasses.
You know there was a time not so long ago when computers did not support lower case *at all* and it was not even defined as part of the character set (e.g. IBM's 6 bit alphanumeric BCD, the predecessor of EBCDIC); then there was a long period when terminals (and later some personal computers) didn't support it for input or display. It's quite possible the MediTech code originates from before lower case was even a consideration rather than the programmers being 'incompetent jackasses'.
Do you really believe that a company would hire a Wikipedia admin to wedge an article about said company onto Wikipedia because said company was looking for a NEUTRAL point of view?
Some companies are reasonably ethical and well regarded. They might be quite happy to have a neutral POV article on wikipedia rather than no article at all, given that no-one has much that is bad to say about them.
Just to clarify, I was taking the rankings from the two 2008 surveys shown in wikipedia; the third (2007) survey shows China fractionally behind Germany, but given the year's gap I don't think this contradicts the later surveys.
Nevertheless, it is in the bottom end of the range of (much smaller) western European countries.
No, you should have looked at the figures - you're still not in the right area. China's GDP is third in the world, well ahead of France, Germany and the UK, and only just behind Japan in second. Given China's growth rate and population, it is inevitable it will overtake Japan in the next few years.
I can understand how you could make this mistake though; China's GDP has been increasing at a ridiculously high rate in the last decade and it has come up the GDP rankings very fast.
However, look at their GDP - slightly less than that of Spain
That figure looked grossly wrong to me - so I checked and you'll find that China's GDP is about three times that of Spain (this is the sort of thing where I think wikipedia is pretty trustworthy). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
When CDs came out, they were fifty to a hundred percent more expensive than vinyl, but we were all told that the prices would come down because CDs are cheaper to make than vinyl or cassettes. Guess what - that didn't happen.
In the UK I would say it pretty much did happen - eventually.
Allowing for inflation, CDs are probably a little cheaper now than vinyl LPs were 30 years ago.
The phone book, as far as I am aware, is only provided as a hard copy.
Assuming it was true that you couldn't get a copy of the phone book in a database: Get a fancy scanner with a suitable feeder, cut the spine off the directory, scan and ocr - should be reliable given the fixed format/fonts.
It would be a lot more than 2m wide. Four tracks plus the space between them and beside them comes out at about 14m wide for the whole formation (tracks 4 x 4'8.5" wide, gaps between tracks 3 x 6' approx, 4' each side = 45' approx = 13.5m approx)
This gives a much more reasonable 84MW - easily in the same ballpark as 110 MW
At least with Virgin Media, they claim not to (and in my experience don't) throttle on a protocol basis. They throttle everything during peak hours once you've downloaded a certain amount, but not aggressively (i.e. the 'throttled' speed is still quite usable). If you're going to have any limits at all, the Virgin service seems to be one of the least offensive of the large ISPs.
If they don't clearly state that certain books have been removed from the rankings, and thus that the rankings of other books have been artificially inflated, they could be liable under some consumer law involving misrepresentation. Saying that a book ranks number 3 in your sales when it is actually at number 7 (say) seems a pretty clear case of fraudulent advertising.
After all, if you can put it under test you could combinatorically determine the function of the software by slamming every combination of input at the thing and cataloging the output... but such an approach would be very expensive and time consuming
Slight understatement - such an approach would typically be totally impossible for a non-trivial program (some sort of exponential type function describing the number of inputs as a function of amount of input). Crudely, a program accepting just one 80 char record consisting only of upper case letters and display numerics has 36**80 possible inputs.
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In populated areas, you can often get services from NTL,
Wake Up! It *was* a NTL and Telewest (near) cable duopoly, but more than five years ago it was merged into one company known as Virgin Media.
BT is the monopoly provider in the rest of the country.
False. Apart from the local loop unbundling which still sort of involves BT, a large part of the country can use Virgin Media's cable network for phone/TV/Internet with no BT involvement at all.
Does anyone else think the whole affair sounds a lot like Communism?
No, it's just you living in the 1950's. The EU is trying to create the conditions for a free market, the fundamental basis of capitalism, by punishing abusive monopolies.
Yet, I doubt that giving a choice to the users in question will make any difference. If they didn't care until now, they won't care when given the choice now.
From a free market point of view, it seems like a good thing to me that at least they will know that there *is* a choice.
Very strange... why would someone become transgendered and then turn lesbian?
You don't 'become' trans-gendered. Current medical opinion is that it's a brain structure thing you're born with.
And you wouldn't 'turn' lesbian either, typically you would be born with the tendency to be oriented towards men/women/both.
Gender identity (whether you 'feel' that you are male or female) and sexual orientation (whether you are attracted to men or women or both) are separate issues. It's not a question of 'what is easier', it's a fundamental identity issue.
How many Linux kernel developers are filthy rich from the millions of people they have helped? None. RHAT just uses their code for free to make $$$$.
1/ How many low-level MS 'kernel' developers are filthy rich?
2/ Red Hat actually employs (and pays damn good salaries to) some kernel developers, as do various other companies like IBM.
That's the evilness and stupidity of communism...
Can't say I see where communism comes into it when everyone involved is either employed by a capitalist company or freely and voluntarily coding because they want to (and probably gaining kudos which translates into employability and money). But if you want to live in the 1950's and see reds under the bed everywhere that's up to you. Sad though.
This is the strategy of the far left in most of the world.
We are talking specifically about the UK Labour government here. They have become more authoritarian as they have moved to the right. On some issues they are more right-wing than the 'right-wing' opposition. When they were actually a left-wing party, they were much more supportive of civil liberties.
but with Leftists in control in America, there is little to stop it.
I don't suppose you realize that by world standards the Obama administartion is actually classed as centre-right.
But then I don't suppose you want reality to challenge your preconceptions about left and right.
How can you call something who's pealing is not edible a fruit?
It'd hope it's 'pealing' would be audible rather than edible.
It's funny how anything not pro global warming is instantly modded troll and here
Funny, I see posts which boil down to 'global warming is a bunch of lies cos I say so' modded up to +5 insightful.
Why is it again, that I need to pay to educate other people's ankle-biters?
If they are educated and become useful members of society capable of earning a living, they are less likely to burgle your house, mug you or murder you, or cost you a lot of money to lock them up.
Batteries suck. There have been many times when batteries would be "10 times" more better than some previous generation. But they never are.
My eeePC 1000 (SSD model) gets about 5hrs battery life and is much more powerful in nearly every respect** than my work-provided 5 year old laptop, which gets about 1hr battery life (and probably got less than 2hrs when it was new). Seems like pretty reasonable progress to me (although I realize this is only partly due to battery improvements).
** Twice as much RAM and disc space, about 3x faster, weighs about 1/3rd as much but smaller screen
It is illegal to ask about this stuff when being considered for a job.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, it is illegal to discriminate based on the answers, so it is very imprudent to ask, but not illegal.
I'll tell you why: because the programmers are incompetent jackasses.
You know there was a time not so long ago when computers did not support lower case *at all* and it was not even defined as part of the character set (e.g. IBM's 6 bit alphanumeric BCD, the predecessor of EBCDIC); then there was a long period when terminals (and later some personal computers) didn't support it for input or display. It's quite possible the MediTech code originates from before lower case was even a consideration rather than the programmers being 'incompetent jackasses'.
Do you really believe that a company would hire a Wikipedia admin to wedge an article about said company onto Wikipedia because said company was looking for a NEUTRAL point of view?
Some companies are reasonably ethical and well regarded. They might be quite happy to have a neutral POV article on wikipedia rather than no article at all, given that no-one has much that is bad to say about them.
Just to clarify, I was taking the rankings from the two 2008 surveys shown in wikipedia; the third (2007) survey shows China fractionally behind Germany, but given the year's gap I don't think this contradicts the later surveys.
Nevertheless, it is in the bottom end of the range of (much smaller) western European countries.
No, you should have looked at the figures - you're still not in the right area. China's GDP is third in the world, well ahead of France, Germany and the UK, and only just behind Japan in second. Given China's growth rate and population, it is inevitable it will overtake Japan in the next few years.
I can understand how you could make this mistake though; China's GDP has been increasing at a ridiculously high rate in the last decade and it has come up the GDP rankings very fast.
However, look at their GDP - slightly less than that of Spain
That figure looked grossly wrong to me - so I checked and you'll find that China's GDP is about three times that of Spain (this is the sort of thing where I think wikipedia is pretty trustworthy).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
When CDs came out, they were fifty to a hundred percent more expensive than vinyl, but we were all told that the prices would come down because CDs are cheaper to make than vinyl or cassettes. Guess what - that didn't happen.
In the UK I would say it pretty much did happen - eventually.
Allowing for inflation, CDs are probably a little cheaper now than vinyl LPs were 30 years ago.
Come on, no Ubuntu LTS uses ext4 by default,...
No current Ubuntu release of any sort (LTS or not) uses ext4 by default. The next release (9.10, Karmic Koala) *may* default to ext4.
The phone book, as far as I am aware, is only provided as a hard copy.
Assuming it was true that you couldn't get a copy of the phone book in a database:
Get a fancy scanner with a suitable feeder, cut the spine off the directory, scan and ocr - should be reliable given the fixed format/fonts.
As per my previous commment, a four track rail formation is about 14m wide, not 2m so you can potentially multiply your power output by seven.
See http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1230751&cid=27928367
It would be a lot more than 2m wide. Four tracks plus the space between them and beside them comes out at about 14m wide for the whole formation (tracks 4 x 4'8.5" wide, gaps between tracks 3 x 6' approx, 4' each side = 45' approx = 13.5m approx)
This gives a much more reasonable 84MW - easily in the same ballpark as 110 MW
At least with Virgin Media, they claim not to (and in my experience don't) throttle on a protocol basis. They throttle everything during peak hours once you've downloaded a certain amount, but not aggressively (i.e. the 'throttled' speed is still quite usable). If you're going to have any limits at all, the Virgin service seems to be one of the least offensive of the large ISPs.
If they don't clearly state that certain books have been removed from the rankings, and thus that the rankings of other books have been artificially inflated, they could be liable under some consumer law involving misrepresentation. Saying that a book ranks number 3 in your sales when it is actually at number 7 (say) seems a pretty clear case of fraudulent advertising.
After all, if you can put it under test you could combinatorically determine the function of the software by slamming every combination of input at the thing and cataloging the output... but such an approach would be very expensive and time consuming
Slight understatement - such an approach would typically be totally impossible for a non-trivial program (some sort of exponential type function describing the number of inputs as a function of amount of input). Crudely, a program accepting just one 80 char record consisting only of upper case letters and display numerics has 36**80 possible inputs.