I stand by this as a factual account of what happened. Of course there may be other factors which I'm unware; I could speculate that they'd somehow got the mistaken impression that Japanese was supposed to be spoken in this particular shop, although I can't imagine how.
I know it sounds bizarre; I can still hardly believe it 25 years later...
I had a bad time in my first Saturday job with some Japanese customers 'high expectations'. I was 15 and working in an ordinary shoe shop in Reading, UK (small town, 250,000 people). A group of about five middle-aged Japanese business types came in and started talking to me in Japanese and clearly expecting me to understand. After several minutes incomprehension they got angry and left. My boss nearly sacked me for 'not dealing with the situation better' (and yes, I did try pointing and smiling, and showing them various shoes...).
AFAIK in the UK it's illegal to charge more than the posted price under just about any circumstances. I read somewhere that the big stores are *very* careful to price correctly because of this.
"Err. Milk (unless its in glass bottles) is sold by the (half) litre in the UK."
Not true as a rule. We have two local shops - the Spar shop sells milk in half litre units, but the Co-op sells it in pints (labelled as 568ml). The co-op is in the majority - I also buy milk from Sainsbury's, Tesco, and Marks & spencer and all of them sell in pint units (labelled as 568ml etc.). In all cases these are in plastic screw-top bottles. Aparently it's quite legal to sell these in pints as long as they are labelled in metric.
I guess all the main supermarkets don't want to look mean by reducing to half-litre units. Spar don't seem to care.
"Recycling, anything but cans, is actually more harmful to the environment than just throwing it away."
I think that's too simplistic.
Recycling has sometimes been given a bad name by poorly thought-out schemes which don't include all energy/pollution costs at all parts of the product lifecycle.
There are so many factors to consider, like: 1/ Environmental transport costs to disposal facility vs equivalent costs to recycling facility.
2/ What you are going to recycle into - recycling paper waste into pristine new white paper may be environmentally stupid due to the purification/bleaching necessary. Recycling high grade waste to lower-grade waste like newsprint and toilet paper makes much more sense.
3/ Recycling a given product may initially be environmentally negative but once the amount reaches a threshhold level you get economies of scale, and it makes commercial sense to develop more energy efficient processes.
4/ More complex items often make no sense to recycle because there are too many different materials mixed together in a way which is too difficult to seperate them. If the products are designed for dismantling followed by a combination of re-use and recycle the equation changes drastically. This requirement is being phased in for example for all new cars in the EU. It has the additional advantage of making it easier to repair such products by replacing smaller components rather than larger assemblies.
5/ Combined facilities can overcome the inefficiencies of standalone processes. E.g. mixed household waste can be partly burnt to generate energy onsite (no transmission losses etc.) for recycling its glass/metal content.
I'd agree that not all recycling that's done at present makes sense but for example glass recycling has been going on for many years on a commercial basis, before recycling was 'fashionable', so presumably the claims that it can be more energy efficient than manufacturing from scratch are true.
My only experience of WinXP is trying to recover a friend's system after he hosed it by pulling the plug out the wall socket while it was writing to disk. System crashes on boot trying to load WinXP. 1/ Try XP recovery console. Unable to get in because admin password required (due to disc corruption - password is actually blank). 2/ Try Win2K boot discs (bypasses XP password). Get into recovery console. CHKDSK won't run due to missing files. 3/ Try Knoppix. Boots OK, can read NTFS partition, run NTFSFIX to force CHKDSK. Reboot, CHKDSK runs. WinXP still fails on boot. 4/ Try various other things with no success. 5/ Try winXP 'repair' reinstall. Now I can boot WinXP but all additional programs are in a 'half installed' state. Spend several hours uninstalling/reinstalling and eventually get the system back pretty much how it should be.
Now, I'm not an XP expert so maybe there's something I could have done different. But my take on this it that a basic problem is that NTFS is a 'closed' file system which has to be reverse engineered. Non-windows NTFS read support seems fine, but write support is either partial/unstable or if you use the 'captive' version needs bits of WinXP which may be corrupt in this sort of case. By the time NTFS has been fully reverse engineered with stable write support, MS will have moved on to the new Longhorn WinFS 'closed' filesystem and we're back to square one.
I wouldn't object to a closed O/S like WinXP nearly as much if it used a fully openly documented filesystem like ext3 or something so you've got a full set of tools to work on it and repair it even when Windows won't boot and the recovery console won't work.
BTW, I've convinced my friend that next time he gets some 'dodgy images' downloading that he doesn't want he should disconnect the cable modem connector, NOT the power...
"Rather than giving someone your timecard, you just make a mould of your finger and they press that against the fingerprint reader."
This is why high-security systems also check blood flow and/or temperature. So you don't just need a mould of a finger (or a chopped -off dead finger) - you need something closer to a real live working model. Maybe not impossible. But very very difficult.
Laser hair removal is very effective and these days targeted at men as well as women. If I remember right it's about $40 per session (but varies quite a lot), one 30 min session per week for about 6 months (typical male growth) giving a total of about $1000. It would probably pay for itself in saved shavers etc. in 5-20yrs depending on the expense/longevity of your shaving method but in s(h)aved time it would start paying immediately...
OK, I'll bite. 1/ You equate a democratically elected Social Democratic government (not even Socialist - they ditched Nationalisation years ago) with a murderous Communist dictatorship. That would be about the same as equating a mildly rightist democratic government with a murderous facist dictatorship.
2/ I'm neither embarassed nor proud to be a Socialist or a Communist since I'm not either of these things. I agree with certain policies of various moderate parties of the left, right and center. I'm strongly in favour of greater personal freedom.
3/ My main criterion for polcies is practicality. I believe that the National Health Service in the UK provides excellent value for money and a practical solution for universal healthcare. I also think that having a healthy workforce benefits our economy. The vast majority of voters and all three main parties (left, centre and right) in this country are strongly committed to the National Health Service, so in the UK the NHS is not a Socialist/Left Wing policy at all.
So basically all your assumptions and conclusions are fundamentally flawed. I suppose now I can expect some further unfounded abuse?
What socialist government are you referring to? I don't think we've *ever* really had one of those in the UK apart from just after WWII. In fact, when the British Labour party dropped 'clause 4' (nationalization of key industries) in about 1995 it ceased to be socialist by most people's definition and became a 'Social Democratic' party. Which is a noticably different beast.
Yes, the government is *so* greedy to provide all those shiny new schools and hospitals, and extra doctors and nurses and teachers that everyone always says they want.
Or do you think that Gordon Brown just converts it into a big pile of gold at the treasury that he sits on at night while he cackles "All mine, all mine" repeatedly?
That quote is just sooooo last millennium my dear. Everyone's at it like kinky rattlesnakes in GB these days, even the over 80's. They sell vibrators *that actually work* in respectable department stores now.
If you need real player and version 8 is good enough, you can get this easily enough on the real website via 'services and support', 'downloads', 'legacy software archive'.
I don't think this treaty will stand legal scrutiny. I think European human rights legislation will trump any attempt to extradite without due process, particularly for a 'crime' alleged which does not involve physical presence in the US. Various arguements could be employed, such as: 1/ Personal safety endangered in US prison awaiting trial (think 'big Bubba in same cell', cite assault/death rates in US prisons). 2/ Unable to get a fair trial due to lack of money for a 'proper' lawyer and poor quality of publicly appointed defenders (cite well known precedents from various capital cases). 3/ Illness (prospect of extradition to US prison would certainly induce clinical depression in many people). 4/ Disproportionality (process and likely outcome far too extreme for extradition without evidence) etc. etc. 5/ Identity theft - no hard evidence that you were this 'online person' who is accused.
I think if you appealed against the treaty all the way to the European court of human rights you would almost certainly win on at least one of these grounds for a 'no physical presence in US' case.
So yes, it's a nasty one-sided treaty. But I think David Blunkett probably knew when he signed it that it will be overturned/moderated by the courts. That way he can say to the US 'I did my best, but my hands are tied'.
As a relative beginner in this area, what I would like is a specialised conf file editor which 'knows' the format of all common conf files and can validate/prompt/assist/auto comment/etc. your editing of such a file (while not preventing you entering things which it 'thinks' are wrong if you want). It would make the learning curve much less steep and the whole process much less error prone without taking away the flexibility and transparency that text conf files bring. Maybe editors like this already exist? Guess I'll have a trawl around later...
I assume he means 'embedded as an object within an email' which is a non-standard MS way of messing up non-MS email clients, as opposed to 'attached to an email' which is the standard way supported by everyone, MS or non-MS.
Quote from zdnet story at http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39149841,00 .htm "Microsoft can also apply for interim measures, effectively requesting suspension of the measure on the grounds that it will cause irreparable damage. This process would take a few weeks."
I.e. If they fail in their application for 'interim measures' they have to comply within the original timescales (almost immediately) regardless of the appeal. At least that's how I read it.
They can drag the appeals process out, but they still have to pay and comply in the meantime unless they can get the judgement suspended within 3 months pending this appeal. The court may take the view that suspending the judgement for this length of time would have the effect of totally neutralising it and refuse to do so.
So 3 months is the key time, not 5 years.
Even if they do get it suspended, the appeals process may be expedited because the commission can again argue that 5 year timescales would effectively neutralise it, in which case I've read it would be a maximum 1-2 years.
Klite (not some earlier versions however) has a couple of options which should help. The main one is "don't return list of all files for this user" so if they find you're sharing one particular file, they can't just "list files for this user" in order to determine that you are a "substantial infringer" (which is who they are going after). It would be interesting to know if anyone using Klite with this option has been "got" yet...
"Memo to the EU: fuck with us, and we'll fuck with you. And you'll lose." Yes. And so will the US. Both sides tend to lose in an escalating trade war, and both sides know this. That's why they pull back from the brink and compromise when it's in danger of getting out of control. That's why both sides (eventually, relutantly and to the minimum possible extent) tend to comply with WTO rulings.
One of the earlier posts stated MS worldwide turnover at $32 billion. That means that if MS does not comply with the required remedies, the EU can continue stepping up the fines until they reach $3.2 billion per year every year. Surely *that's* going to hurt?
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If there's any leg-slapping to be done we should call in some Lederhosen-clad Germans. They have a lot of experience in this matter.
I stand by this as a factual account of what happened. Of course there may be other factors which I'm unware; I could speculate that they'd somehow got the mistaken impression that Japanese was supposed to be spoken in this particular shop, although I can't imagine how. I know it sounds bizarre; I can still hardly believe it 25 years later...
I had a bad time in my first Saturday job with some Japanese customers 'high expectations'. I was 15 and working in an ordinary shoe shop in Reading, UK (small town, 250,000 people). A group of about five middle-aged Japanese business types came in and started talking to me in Japanese and clearly expecting me to understand. After several minutes incomprehension they got angry and left. My boss nearly sacked me for 'not dealing with the situation better' (and yes, I did try pointing and smiling, and showing them various shoes...).
AFAIK in the UK it's illegal to charge more than the posted price under just about any circumstances. I read somewhere that the big stores are *very* careful to price correctly because of this.
We do *not* have 'fall' in the UK. We have the much more dignified 'autumn'. Though my favourite season name is the French 'printemps'...
"Err. Milk (unless its in glass bottles) is sold by the (half) litre in the UK."
Not true as a rule. We have two local shops - the Spar shop sells milk in half litre units, but the Co-op sells it in pints (labelled as 568ml).
The co-op is in the majority - I also buy milk from Sainsbury's, Tesco, and Marks & spencer and all of them sell in pint units (labelled as 568ml etc.). In all cases these are in plastic screw-top bottles. Aparently it's quite legal to sell these in pints as long as they are labelled in metric.
I guess all the main supermarkets don't want to look mean by reducing to half-litre units. Spar don't seem to care.
"Recycling, anything but cans, is actually more harmful to the environment than just throwing it away."
I think that's too simplistic.
Recycling has sometimes been given a bad name by poorly thought-out schemes which don't include all energy/pollution costs at all parts of the product lifecycle.
There are so many factors to consider, like:
1/ Environmental transport costs to disposal facility vs equivalent costs to recycling facility.
2/ What you are going to recycle into - recycling paper waste into pristine new white paper may be environmentally stupid due to the purification/bleaching necessary. Recycling high grade waste to lower-grade waste like newsprint and toilet paper makes much more sense.
3/ Recycling a given product may initially be environmentally negative but once the amount reaches a threshhold level you get economies of scale, and it makes commercial sense to develop more energy efficient processes.
4/ More complex items often make no sense to recycle because there are too many different materials mixed together in a way which is too difficult to seperate them. If the products are designed for dismantling followed by a combination of re-use and recycle the equation changes drastically. This requirement is being phased in for example for all new cars in the EU.
It has the additional advantage of making it easier to repair such products by replacing smaller components rather than larger assemblies.
5/ Combined facilities can overcome the inefficiencies of standalone processes. E.g. mixed household waste can be partly burnt to generate energy onsite (no transmission losses etc.) for recycling its glass/metal content.
I'd agree that not all recycling that's done at present makes sense but for example glass recycling has been going on for many years on a commercial basis, before recycling was 'fashionable', so presumably the claims that it can be more energy efficient than manufacturing from scratch are true.
My only experience of WinXP is trying to recover a friend's system after he hosed it by pulling the plug out the wall socket while it was writing to disk. System crashes on boot trying to load WinXP.
1/ Try XP recovery console. Unable to get in because admin password required (due to disc corruption - password is actually blank).
2/ Try Win2K boot discs (bypasses XP password). Get into recovery console. CHKDSK won't run due to missing files.
3/ Try Knoppix. Boots OK, can read NTFS partition, run NTFSFIX to force CHKDSK. Reboot, CHKDSK runs. WinXP still fails on boot.
4/ Try various other things with no success.
5/ Try winXP 'repair' reinstall. Now I can boot WinXP but all additional programs are in a 'half installed' state. Spend several hours uninstalling/reinstalling and eventually get the system back pretty much how it should be.
Now, I'm not an XP expert so maybe there's something I could have done different. But my take on this it that a basic problem is that NTFS is a 'closed' file system which has to be reverse engineered. Non-windows NTFS read support seems fine, but write support is either partial/unstable or if you use the 'captive' version needs bits of WinXP which may be corrupt in this sort of case.
By the time NTFS has been fully reverse engineered with stable write support, MS will have moved on to the new Longhorn WinFS 'closed' filesystem and we're back to square one.
I wouldn't object to a closed O/S like WinXP nearly as much if it used a fully openly documented filesystem like ext3 or something so you've got a full set of tools to work on it and repair it even when Windows won't boot and the recovery console won't work.
BTW, I've convinced my friend that next time he gets some 'dodgy images' downloading that he doesn't want he should disconnect the cable modem connector, NOT the power...
"Rather than giving someone your timecard, you just make a mould of your finger and they press that against the fingerprint reader."
This is why high-security systems also check blood flow and/or temperature. So you don't just need a mould of a finger (or a chopped -off dead finger) - you need something closer to a real live working model. Maybe not impossible. But very very difficult.
Laser hair removal is very effective and these days targeted at men as well as women. If I remember right it's about $40 per session (but varies quite a lot), one 30 min session per week for about 6 months (typical male growth) giving a total of about $1000. It would probably pay for itself in saved shavers etc. in 5-20yrs depending on the expense/longevity of your shaving method but in s(h)aved time it would start paying immediately...
OK, I'll bite.
1/ You equate a democratically elected Social Democratic government (not even Socialist - they ditched Nationalisation years ago) with a murderous Communist dictatorship. That would be about the same as equating a mildly rightist democratic government with a murderous facist dictatorship.
2/ I'm neither embarassed nor proud to be a Socialist or a Communist since I'm not either of these things. I agree with certain policies of various moderate parties of the left, right and center. I'm strongly in favour of greater personal freedom.
3/ My main criterion for polcies is practicality. I believe that the National Health Service in the UK provides excellent value for money and a practical solution for universal healthcare. I also think that having a healthy workforce benefits our economy. The vast majority of voters and all three main parties (left, centre and right) in this country are strongly committed to the National Health Service, so in the UK the NHS is not a Socialist/Left Wing policy at all.
So basically all your assumptions and conclusions are fundamentally flawed.
I suppose now I can expect some further unfounded abuse?
What socialist government are you referring to? I don't think we've *ever* really had one of those in the UK apart from just after WWII. In fact, when the British Labour party dropped 'clause 4' (nationalization of key industries) in about 1995 it ceased to be socialist by most people's definition and became a 'Social Democratic' party. Which is a noticably different beast.
Yes, the government is *so* greedy to provide all those shiny new schools and hospitals, and extra doctors and nurses and teachers that everyone always says they want. Or do you think that Gordon Brown just converts it into a big pile of gold at the treasury that he sits on at night while he cackles "All mine, all mine" repeatedly?
That quote is just sooooo last millennium my dear. Everyone's at it like kinky rattlesnakes in GB these days, even the over 80's. They sell vibrators *that actually work* in respectable department stores now.
If you need real player and version 8 is good enough, you can get this easily enough on the real website via 'services and support', 'downloads', 'legacy software archive'.
I don't think this treaty will stand legal scrutiny. I think European human rights legislation will trump any attempt to extradite without due process, particularly for a 'crime' alleged which does not involve physical presence in the US. Various arguements could be employed, such as:
1/ Personal safety endangered in US prison awaiting trial (think 'big Bubba in same cell', cite assault/death rates in US prisons).
2/ Unable to get a fair trial due to lack of money for a 'proper' lawyer and poor quality of publicly appointed defenders (cite well known precedents from various capital cases).
3/ Illness (prospect of extradition to US prison would certainly induce clinical depression in many people).
4/ Disproportionality (process and likely outcome far too extreme for extradition without evidence)
etc. etc.
5/ Identity theft - no hard evidence that you were this 'online person' who is accused.
I think if you appealed against the treaty all the way to the European court of human rights you would almost certainly win on at least one of these grounds for a 'no physical presence in US' case.
So yes, it's a nasty one-sided treaty. But I think David Blunkett probably knew when he signed it that it will be overturned/moderated by the courts. That way he can say to the US 'I did my best, but my hands are tied'.
As a relative beginner in this area, what I would like is a specialised conf file editor which 'knows' the format of all common conf files and can validate/prompt/assist/auto comment/etc. your editing of such a file (while not preventing you entering things which it 'thinks' are wrong if you want).
It would make the learning curve much less steep and the whole process much less error prone without taking away the flexibility and transparency that text conf files bring.
Maybe editors like this already exist?
Guess I'll have a trawl around later...
I assume he means 'embedded as an object within an email' which is a non-standard MS way of messing up non-MS email clients, as opposed to 'attached to an email' which is the standard way supported by everyone, MS or non-MS.
Quote from zdnet story at0 .htm
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39149841,0
"Microsoft can also apply for interim measures, effectively requesting suspension of the measure on the grounds that it will cause irreparable damage. This process would take a few weeks."
I.e. If they fail in their application for 'interim measures' they have to comply within the original timescales (almost immediately) regardless of the appeal. At least that's how I read it.
Governments sometimes restrict or break up Monopolies. Fucking get over it.
They can drag the appeals process out, but they still have to pay and comply in the meantime unless they can get the judgement suspended within 3 months pending this appeal. The court may take the view that suspending the judgement for this length of time would have the effect of totally neutralising it and refuse to do so. So 3 months is the key time, not 5 years. Even if they do get it suspended, the appeals process may be expedited because the commission can again argue that 5 year timescales would effectively neutralise it, in which case I've read it would be a maximum 1-2 years.
And if they don't comply, fines can be up to $3bn per violation per year. That *would* start to hurt.
Klite (not some earlier versions however) has a couple of options which should help. The main one is "don't return list of all files for this user" so if they find you're sharing one particular file, they can't just "list files for this user" in order to determine that you are a "substantial infringer" (which is who they are going after). It would be interesting to know if anyone using Klite with this option has been "got" yet...
"Memo to the EU: fuck with us, and we'll fuck with you. And you'll lose."
Yes. And so will the US. Both sides tend to lose in an escalating trade war, and both sides know this. That's why they pull back from the brink and compromise when it's in danger of getting out of control. That's why both sides (eventually, relutantly and to the minimum possible extent) tend to comply with WTO rulings.
One of the earlier posts stated MS worldwide turnover at $32 billion. That means that if MS does not comply with the required remedies, the EU can continue stepping up the fines until they reach $3.2 billion per year every year. Surely *that's* going to hurt?