Police arrested a 20-year-old gamekeeper for wearing a "Bollocks to Blair" T-shirt at a game fair last weekend
But hang on - the word "bollocks" is legally not obscene - this was tested in the English courts in 1977, after a record shop was prosecuted for displaying the Sex Pistols' album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols in its window.
From the Wikipedia article:
"an attempt was made to prosecute a record shop in Manchester for displaying the 'obscene' cover in their window. However the case was overturned when defending QC Sir John Mortimer produced expert witnesses who were able to prove that the word "bollocks" was a legitimate Old English term originally used to refer to a priest, and that in this context it meant 'nonsense'."
Ah, sometimes you have to admit, there are advantages to having been invaded and overrun by just about every major civilisation for the last X thousand years - and one of them is a rich language that lets you get away with just about any phrase so long as you can prove that people have been swearing that way for centuries - now, anyone for Chaucer?
In other news, more than a year before the final peak and subsequent crash will hit the markets, an article on Slashdot is revealing radically retro buzzwords and use of tell-tale phrases such as "user paradigm shifts" that recall the overly ambitious marketing departments in the Dotcom Heyday of the past.
Hmmm... interesting points, especially if you consider the following timeline:
Iraq switched to Euros back in 2001
In October 2002 US Congress passes "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq".
US invades Iraq in March 2003.
Iran recently began valueing a good portion of its' oil reserves in Euros.
Also recently, US policy towards Iran has hardened leading many to post the question Is Iran Next After Iraq?
Coincidence? Synchronicity? The unseen finger of fate plucking the boogers of destiny from the nostril of time and flicking them out of the car window of the age? You decide....
I thought my code organization was bad... at least i don't take historians and anthropologists to decipher it
You know, I used to think exactly the same, until I had to fix a bug on a system that had been untouched for years - so i'm trawling through the code, saying out loud stuff like "oh my god, this is awful, what muppet wrote this?", until after a couple of hours, I finally checked the logs, and found out who originally wrote it - me. D'oh....
The usual way that people approach this is to dive in, code away feverishly through several iterations until they've got something that seems to work, THEN go back through it and add comments - if they have the time...
One trick I picked up early on in my coding career that radically changed the way I approach the coding process is to write your comments FIRST.
It's a very handy way of planning out your structure, algorithms, and data flow on complex chunks of code before anything is set in stone.
Otherwise, if you dive right in there and start coding away, you often realise halfway through that your first approach is not going to work, and you have to go back and change THIS structure, change THOSE parameters, add THIS call, take THIS chunk out into a separate function, etc etc...
Try writing your comments first - you should be able to walk through your process and catch some of the most common gotchas before you even write a single line of code. Of course, you're always going to have to do the occasional rushed hack job, but I've found this approach tends to actually save me time in the long run.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes taking a time out to stare out the window at the horizon helps me feel a lot better about sitting in front of the computer.
Its not just the fact that it makes you feel better - often someone who appears to be just staring blankly and unproductively into space, may actually be deep in thought about the complex system they're working on.
I often have to think through logic paths, forks, and possible consequences of the tinest changes to such an extent that it takes me nearly fifteen minutes of quiet to get down through my abstract mental models to the required level of detail. Any interruption can completely derail your mental thought processes and waste up to an hour while you deal with the minor interruption, maybe go get a coffee, settle back down again, and start thinking it through from the top again.
In a nutshell - just because someone looks like they're zoning out, doesn't mean they're not being productive.
Yeah, you know what movie scared me the most when I was little? It wasn't one with violence -- it was Beetlejuice
You know what scares me more than any movie? The fact that one of my "peers" just said that they were little when they watched Beetlejuice!
Crap, I'm getting old...
new plan:
-sell gold
- imform buyer he has suspicious gold amount
-warn player about buying gold being bad
The scary thing is, if you replace 'Gold' with 'Weapons', and 'Player' with 'Third World / Middle East Regime', then you have American foreign policy for the last forty years in a nutshell.
Very true - eventually an empire grows large enough for outlying regions to become dissociated from the central "core" of the empire. Meanwhile, the administrative bureaucracy required to oversee a large empire becomes more and more of an overhead itself. The administrative centres tend to be focussed on the central regions, and as they become more and more focussed on administration, they produce less and less. Hence they become more and more dependent on imports from the outer regions.
If the regime focusses on maintaining these outer regions, they have to send more and more troops and resources in order to keep control. This means less attention focussed on the central regions - which means the central regions feel neglected and get restless.
End result - the empire decays from within, and the central regime falls.
If the empire focusses its efforts on maintaining the central regions, it is focussing less on the outlying regions, who begin to resent the fact that they are supporting a remote and distant regime at the centre with their exports, and become discontented. If the regimes efforts are focussed on maintaining the centre, the outer discontent becomes outright rebellion.
End result - the regime decays from the outside, and the regime eventually falls.
( Disclaimer : this argument is mostly paraphrased from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which I think is one of the all-time greatest sci-fi achievements - the dialogue is a bit dated, but the ideas behind it are timeless. )
Bottom line - every empire eventually outgrows itself or stagnates and decays until it falls. Enjoy your time as world leaders while it lasts guys - another few decades and you'll be tomorrows Britain.
By the same analogy, can we not now make gun companies legally liable for gun related deaths? Can we not make cigarette companies legally liable for smoking related deaths? I mean, really, it's the same thing isn't it?
That, my friend, would truly be a glorious day... but unfortunately you will never EVER get Donald Rumsfeld to take responsibility for the actions of the US Military. It's the same thing, surely - he supplied them, so he's responsible for them... but good ol' Teflon Don will always survive to deny another day..
Reminds me very much of the dolphins/humans superiority debate from Hitchikers Guide:
Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. Conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man, for precisely the same reason.
Does this mean that as an advertising company, Google could be in danger of falling prey to the advertising pressures that rule the traditional US news media? Draw your own conclusions, I guess....
The U.S. Supreme Court defines pornogaphy as anything which has no artistic merit, and causes sexual though. That's their definition.
Well, let's see.... no artistic merit, causes sexual thought.... well that sounds like.... EVERY COMMERCIAL ON TELEVISION to me...!
I have a confession to make - when I see those two twins in that Doublemint commercial.... I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but.... I'm not thinking about gum....sorry....
"Double your pleasure, double your fun..." Yeah, baby, where's the Wrigleys! I feel like chewing !
American:
So where are you from?
me:
England
American:
What - the actual city of England?
me:
England is a country
American:
Whatever.... so how far is England from London?
American:
London is in England
American:
Right, right...but it's pretty near to the UK, right?
me:
(nothing - i'm completely stuck for how to answer that one)
But then I guess, in a country where the capital city of Washington, but the state of Washington is actually thousands of miles away in the north-west, I guess I can forgive a little geographic confusion....
When I was in the first year at University way back in 1993, I had a friend, Dan, on the "Computer Committee" (the guys who controlled the roomfull of PCs in our college) who had a sense of humour just as warped and geeky as mine.
One late night after several snakebite-and-blacks-with-double-shot-of-pernod (hey...we were first year students!) a plan was hatched...
We waited until about 3am, when no-one was around, went round every single PC and loaded up a ZX Spectrum emulator, running full screen, and left them all showing the (c)1982 Sinclair Research prompt.
Then we printed out a notice and stuck it on the door:
IMPORTANT NOTICE
Due to a virus infection, all PCs in the computer workroom have been reverted to an 1982 Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Unfortunately this means normal faclities such as word processing, spreadsheets and email are temporarily unavailable.
However, you can get copies of Horace Goes Skiing and JetPac from Alexis in room 42C
Dan got into a bit of trouble about that, but nothing serious - and besides, he'd managed to get his best mate Alexis woken up extremely early by several confused-and-slightly-irate students, so everyone was happy.
"I am not sure how it is figured that the mass of the escaping particle must be debited from the the mass of the black hole"
Ok, you can think about it this way - another gross over-simplification, admittedly, but I can't even *follow* Hawkings calculations these days, let alone explain them to anyone else.
You can imagine the antiparticle annihilating with a corresponding particle inside the event horizon, thus decreasing the mass of the black hole. ( What's not clear to my fuzzy memory is what happens to the emitted energy that results from this - it obviously doesn't escape the event horizon!)
If you imagine this was NOT the case, an observer at a distance would detect high-energy particles appearing (the Hawking radiation) without any corresponding opposite effect, as by definition we cannot observe past the Event Horizon. This would imply that Conservation of Energy had been violated - a black hole would in effect be a perpetual motion machine.
why does the antiparticle have to fall into the hole? Why not the particle? It would seem to me that they would fall in in equal amounts, thus negating any "decay" of the hole.
IIRC, Hawking explained this by saying that the antiparticle was more likely, on average, to fall into the black hole, as black holes were made of "ordinary" matter*, so the antiparticle is more attracted to the black hole than the normal particle.
Always seemed a bit of a kludge to me too, but who am I to argue with him?
There is far more matter than antimatter in the observed universe, and black holes are *mostly* a result of the collapse of matter, ergo black holes are mostly matter rather than antimatter.
Photons at the event horizon of a black hole are allowed, by a tiny quantity, some Scotty Factor in their speed because their position is certain.
I actually did my dissertation in Hawking Radiation, but it's been ten years since I studied this, so I'm going to be a bit fuzzy...
I don't recall anything about the position at the event horizon being certain. I remember it more in these terms:
Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle doesn't just apply to position and momentum. It also applies to the combination of Energy and Time.
This means that the energy of a vacuum can never be exactly zero - if it *is* exactly zero, (or any exact value) then it's zero for an infinitesimal time
As energy is equivalent to matter (I'm sure I don't have to quote *THAT* equation, at least!) this fluctuation in energy levels can be interpreted as particle-antiparticle pairs being constantly produced, and then annihilating again within a certain small time (the time for annihilation is related to the energy of the particles by Heisenberg's uncertainty priniciple). These pairs are known as "virtual" particles, as they can't be directly detected.
This goes on all the time, everywhere - but where it leads to the most interesting effects is right on the edge of the event horizon of a black hole.
If a pair is created right on the edge of the event horizon, then as the particles will be created with opposite momentum, it's possible for the antiparticle to cross the event horizon and fall into the black hole, while the (non-anti-) particle has just enough energy to escape.
The escaping "non-anti" particle thus does not annihilate with it's partner, and becomes a "real" particle that can be directly detected as radiation. This is what is called Hawking Radiation.
Its antiparticle partner falls into the black hole, and as it is an *anti*particle, it decreases the mass of the black hole by an amount equal to its (negative) mass.
So, to a distant observer, it appears that the black hole has itself emitted a particle by losing a small amount of its mass - thus energy has been conserved.
As I said, it's been a while, research has moved on since I studied it and Hawking himself may well have changed his mind about some aspects of this in the last ten years - but that's how i remember it anyway.
(obligatory oracle reference:) What's *REALLY* going to bake your noodle later, is if you start looking at it in terms of information theory, and start considering a black hole, and even the entire universe, not as a black box, but as a giant computer....
...That discussion is left as an exercise for the reader!
Lots of people gave me lots of advice, lots of people told me things that "you'll wish you'd known this later".....and I listened to virtually none of it.
I wish I'd known that a lot of it actually *was* worth paying attention to.
Slashdot Mirror
But hang on - the word "bollocks" is legally not obscene - this was tested in the English courts in 1977, after a record shop was prosecuted for displaying the Sex Pistols' album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols in its window.
From the Wikipedia article:
Ah, sometimes you have to admit, there are advantages to having been invaded and overrun by just about every major civilisation for the last X thousand years - and one of them is a rich language that lets you get away with just about any phrase so long as you can prove that people have been swearing that way for centuries - now, anyone for Chaucer?
In other news, more than a year before the final peak and subsequent crash will hit the markets, an article on Slashdot is revealing radically retro buzzwords and use of tell-tale phrases such as "user paradigm shifts" that recall the overly ambitious marketing departments in the Dotcom Heyday of the past.
In October 2002 US Congress passes "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq".
US invades Iraq in March 2003.
Also recently, US policy towards Iran has hardened leading many to post the question Is Iran Next After Iraq?
...and as if by magic : U.S. evangelist calls for assassination of [Venezuelan President] Chavez
Coincidence? Synchronicity? The unseen finger of fate plucking the boogers of destiny from the nostril of time and flicking them out of the car window of the age? You decide....
You know, I used to think exactly the same, until I had to fix a bug on a system that had been untouched for years - so i'm trawling through the code, saying out loud stuff like "oh my god, this is awful, what muppet wrote this?", until after a couple of hours, I finally checked the logs, and found out who originally wrote it - me. D'oh....
The usual way that people approach this is to dive in, code away feverishly through several iterations until they've got something that seems to work, THEN go back through it and add comments - if they have the time...
One trick I picked up early on in my coding career that radically changed the way I approach the coding process is to write your comments FIRST.
It's a very handy way of planning out your structure, algorithms, and data flow on complex chunks of code before anything is set in stone.
Otherwise, if you dive right in there and start coding away, you often realise halfway through that your first approach is not going to work, and you have to go back and change THIS structure, change THOSE parameters, add THIS call, take THIS chunk out into a separate function, etc etc...
Try writing your comments first - you should be able to walk through your process and catch some of the most common gotchas before you even write a single line of code. Of course, you're always going to have to do the occasional rushed hack job, but I've found this approach tends to actually save me time in the long run.
I was born in Hull. I assure you, you are not far wrong.
Its not just the fact that it makes you feel better - often someone who appears to be just staring blankly and unproductively into space, may actually be deep in thought about the complex system they're working on.
I often have to think through logic paths, forks, and possible consequences of the tinest changes to such an extent that it takes me nearly fifteen minutes of quiet to get down through my abstract mental models to the required level of detail. Any interruption can completely derail your mental thought processes and waste up to an hour while you deal with the minor interruption, maybe go get a coffee, settle back down again, and start thinking it through from the top again.
In a nutshell - just because someone looks like they're zoning out, doesn't mean they're not being productive.
Two is enough. Any more is a bonus...
"It's also used in physical simulation to solve the static friction conditions that arise when many objects are in mutual contact."
(sigh) Only on Slashdot would this sentence refer to a mathematical method rather than KY Jelly... ( ducks )
The scary thing is, if you replace 'Gold' with 'Weapons', and 'Player' with 'Third World / Middle East Regime', then you have American foreign policy for the last forty years in a nutshell.
*cough**cough*no, never....&*cough**cough*
Very true - eventually an empire grows large enough for outlying regions to become dissociated from the central "core" of the empire. Meanwhile, the administrative bureaucracy required to oversee a large empire becomes more and more of an overhead itself. The administrative centres tend to be focussed on the central regions, and as they become more and more focussed on administration, they produce less and less. Hence they become more and more dependent on imports from the outer regions.
If the regime focusses on maintaining these outer regions, they have to send more and more troops and resources in order to keep control. This means less attention focussed on the central regions - which means the central regions feel neglected and get restless.
End result - the empire decays from within, and the central regime falls.
If the empire focusses its efforts on maintaining the central regions, it is focussing less on the outlying regions, who begin to resent the fact that they are supporting a remote and distant regime at the centre with their exports, and become discontented. If the regimes efforts are focussed on maintaining the centre, the outer discontent becomes outright rebellion.
End result - the regime decays from the outside, and the regime eventually falls.
( Disclaimer : this argument is mostly paraphrased from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which I think is one of the all-time greatest sci-fi achievements - the dialogue is a bit dated, but the ideas behind it are timeless. )
Bottom line - every empire eventually outgrows itself or stagnates and decays until it falls. Enjoy your time as world leaders while it lasts guys - another few decades and you'll be tomorrows Britain.
That, my friend, would truly be a glorious day... but unfortunately you will never EVER get Donald Rumsfeld to take responsibility for the actions of the US Military. It's the same thing, surely - he supplied them, so he's responsible for them... but good ol' Teflon Don will always survive to deny another day..
Reminds me very much of the dolphins/humans superiority debate from Hitchikers Guide:
"French movies suck. Seriously. No explosions or Ben Affleck or anything."
Conversely, we over here in Europe believe that American movies "suck", FOR PRECISELY THE SAME REASON!
The first thing I did was think "yeah, this could be a really cool way to compare news bias..."
So I added two sections side by side: one from the UK "World News" section, and the other from the US "World News" section.
Top stories in the UK World News were
and yet neither story was mentioned on the US side. The top story in the US world news was:
Does this mean that as an advertising company, Google could be in danger of falling prey to the advertising pressures that rule the traditional US news media? Draw your own conclusions, I guess....
Obligatory Bill Hicks quote:
Reminds me of a conversation I had in Seattle:
American: So where are you from? me: England American: What - the actual city of England? me: England is a country American: Whatever.... so how far is England from London? American: London is in England American: Right, right...but it's pretty near to the UK, right? me: (nothing - i'm completely stuck for how to answer that one)But then I guess, in a country where the capital city of Washington, but the state of Washington is actually thousands of miles away in the north-west, I guess I can forgive a little geographic confusion....
When I was in the first year at University way back in 1993, I had a friend, Dan, on the "Computer Committee" (the guys who controlled the roomfull of PCs in our college) who had a sense of humour just as warped and geeky as mine.
One late night after several snakebite-and-blacks-with-double-shot-of-pernod (hey...we were first year students!) a plan was hatched...
We waited until about 3am, when no-one was around, went round every single PC and loaded up a ZX Spectrum emulator, running full screen, and left them all showing the (c)1982 Sinclair Research prompt.
Then we printed out a notice and stuck it on the door:
Dan got into a bit of trouble about that, but nothing serious - and besides, he'd managed to get his best mate Alexis woken up extremely early by several confused-and-slightly-irate students, so everyone was happy.
Ah....happy days, happy days....
I don't care HOW close we get, aluminium has TWO I's, dammit!
Ok, you can think about it this way - another gross over-simplification, admittedly, but I can't even *follow* Hawkings calculations these days, let alone explain them to anyone else.
You can imagine the antiparticle annihilating with a corresponding particle inside the event horizon, thus decreasing the mass of the black hole. ( What's not clear to my fuzzy memory is what happens to the emitted energy that results from this - it obviously doesn't escape the event horizon!)
If you imagine this was NOT the case, an observer at a distance would detect high-energy particles appearing (the Hawking radiation) without any corresponding opposite effect, as by definition we cannot observe past the Event Horizon. This would imply that Conservation of Energy had been violated - a black hole would in effect be a perpetual motion machine.
IIRC, Hawking explained this by saying that the antiparticle was more likely, on average, to fall into the black hole, as black holes were made of "ordinary" matter*, so the antiparticle is more attracted to the black hole than the normal particle.
Always seemed a bit of a kludge to me too, but who am I to argue with him?
There is far more matter than antimatter in the observed universe, and black holes are *mostly* a result of the collapse of matter, ergo black holes are mostly matter rather than antimatter.
I actually did my dissertation in Hawking Radiation, but it's been ten years since I studied this, so I'm going to be a bit fuzzy...
I don't recall anything about the position at the event horizon being certain. I remember it more in these terms:
As I said, it's been a while, research has moved on since I studied it and Hawking himself may well have changed his mind about some aspects of this in the last ten years - but that's how i remember it anyway.
(obligatory oracle reference:) What's *REALLY* going to bake your noodle later, is if you start looking at it in terms of information theory, and start considering a black hole, and even the entire universe, not as a black box, but as a giant computer....
Lots of people gave me lots of advice, lots of people told me things that "you'll wish you'd known this later".....and I listened to virtually none of it.
I wish I'd known that a lot of it actually *was* worth paying attention to.