The things is, nobody seems to have reported on this investigation and trial until its conclusion, which suggests non-standard reporting restrictions were imposed.
...or it just didn't make the "news agenda" at the time of the trial. Not every criminal trial makes headline news...
Just because they really are out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid:-)
I'm sure that there are subtleties here that I'm missing by being an American
Not very subtle - its simply not "trial in secret" by any stretch of the imagination. Journalists can and do report factually on trials in progress. Here's a random example. Just strict rules on what can be reported while the trial is in progress (e.g. no interviews with witnesses, speculating on the outcome, no photography in the courtroom etc.). The facts of the trial are a matter of public record.
...this one just hasn't really made the news in the UK yet.
Guy comes out of the bar because it closes at 2 AM, [snip] he's lit up big-time [snip] it's International Falls, Mn with a current temp of -35 degrees, there's no one around and he passes out and dies of hypothermia.
Fixed that for you. I'm sure it happens all the time. Whether the car doesn't start because it was snowed-in, the battery has frozen or if he was just too rat-arsed to find the right car and get the key in the ignition - get too bladdered to save yourself in a region where it gets that cold at night and you can pick up your Darwin award on your way to the afterlife. As for the breath-test system - worked as intended and stopped an idiot driving while pissed. I'd hope that the population of Int Falls Mn. are smart enough to wrap up warm and carry emergency kits and cellphones. Hell, where I live it rarely gets more than a few degrees below and even then I chuck a sleeping bag into the back of my car in the winter.
That said, I'd rather not have a car that refused to start because I'd eaten the wrong sort of breath mint, used the wrong sort of screenwash fluid or my passenger had just enjoyed a liquid lunch so colour me skeptical as to whether such a system would be sufficiently sensitive to be useful without throwing endless false positives. Even so, I'd bet that the most fatalities would be from drivers who thought they were good to drive because the system didn't trigger...
For some reasons time travel is thought of as difficult but faster than light travel is thought of as easy and always settings allow high speed travel but leave time as a mysterious thing yet to be cracked.
Its called dramatic necessity - a space show needs FTL to get to the planet of the week, whereas too-easy time travel would mean that every week you'd have to contrive a new reason why you couldn't use time travel to resolve the plot.
Wrong. Faster than light travel is a huge problem. Time travel maybe not so.
Or, possibly, the two things are logically equivalent - one can always be used to achieve the effect of the other. But maybe your FTL drive won't work (or you may risk existence failure) if you try to use it to violate causality... or perhaps you just hate the paperwork caused if you violate the Prime Temporal Directive, not to mention the crippling tax implications becoming your own grandparent.
Again, scifi assumed all disease is cured. Nobody has heart disease in scifi but nobody has figured out how to tell the changeling from the captain.
Both unfair in a thread mentioning B5 which included (a) the doctor finding the cure to a plague just after the last member of the affected race had died, (b) a major (alien) character very nearly dying from a heart attack (wrong heart - the other one could have been fixed) and at least one occasion where the changeling was found out via a combination of a brain scan and common sense (but Our Hero knowingly went along with the ruse because the alternatives were bad).
Another example: why does the enterprise always without exception meet another ship, the helmsman says their hailing us, the captain says this is so and so from the enterprise, and only then does the screen show the alien replying. It's all nonsense.
You mean they missed out the bit where they have to wait while the latest Skype update installs, then the captain asks the helmsman to send the other ship a text telling them that their audio is muted and to press the little speaker icon with a cross through it, and there's a massive feedback howl before they finally start speaking only for the captain to grawdlually looooose th th the ababababiiiiility to spk because there's a delayed echo of his own voice coming over the speakers...
Seriously - videoconferencing has been a thing for a decade or two now and it's still a crapshoot for techies and totally beyond the wot of management. Also, we now know that the Enterprise only had viewscreens because the former captain couldn't abide holograms.
gnuplot : user-friendly as a cornered rat, but powerful.
Also Geogebra which is designed for education and thus is more of a fluffy guinea-pig in a nice spacious cage, but watch your fingers, because it also does interactive geometry and can be used to set up nice geometric models.
My test is always, will it draw a circle if you type Y^2+y^2=1
I half agree. US audiences are famous for hating subtitles. [snip] However, plenty of stuff has made it onto US TV from the earliest days, e.g. Monty Python, Dr. Who, etc.
I really hope that US TV didn't show Python and Dr Who with subtitles...:-) Even their tendency to re-make British shows for the US is probably because they can't conceive of a show being successful if it has less than 100 episodes. (Life on Mars makes me laugh - ISTR the flop US version ran to more episodes before it was cancelled than the jewel-in-the-BBCs-crown original version... although the original probably would have needed US subtitles... "Its teatime - I'm 'avin 'oops!")
But, you kinda miss the point: at least part of the "US viewers are stupid" meme is down to the big US TV networks assuming that viewers were stupid (or maybe just targeting the ones more susceptible to advertising) and not showing anything that might cause excessive cogitation. Once the networks had decided that Joe Sixpack didn't like subtitles they simply wouldn't show anything with subtitles.
On Netflix, you sometimes only find out that a show is in French with English subtitles when you sit down to watch it. They don't decide for you that you don't like foreign TV.
Because no one ever watched movies and TV shows from other countries before Netflix./sarc
Yes, there have always been some. Maybe moreso here in the UK than in the USA. Often dubbed or completely shredded for international audiences. However, you'd have had to subscribe to several specialist cable channels or install a multi-band satellite dish to get anything like the range of international programs currently offered by Netflix as part of their standard service... and Netflix largely serves them up shoulder-to-shoulder with the US/UK programs rather than filing them by nationality. (Not sure if that's a plus or a minus, however, the godawful navigation and discovery features on Netflix are another topic entirely...)
Not that I've indulged yet, but there are a few subtitled shows on my shortlist...
Meanwhile, I'm hoping that now that Disney has cancelled all the Marvel contracts we'll see less wall-to-wall fucking superhero shows...
Is there a German or Argentinian version of 'Game of Thrones'
No, but there is a British one on Netflix called "The Crown".
There's also this show called Game of Thrones which is mainly made in Northern Ireland plus location shoots in Spain, Malta and Croatia and half the cast is British or European...
Look guys. If the big bad gov'ment is going to fake evidence to pin a murder on you for some reason, then they are just going to fake evidence to pin a murder on you whether you take a commercial DNA test or not.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence... Normally, that's the conspiracy theorist's fallacy, but you've found a reverse application: the real concern here is not that The Man is out to get you personally, but the authorities' capacity for incompetence and misunderstanding of statistical significance, and their disinclination to question anything that seems to offer an easy solution.
Actually falsifying evidence involves people in power taking a real risk. Buying the snake oil because we don't yet require politicians, lawyers or police to have any scientific education doesn't seem to have any consequences.
Compare two random samples of DNA and maybe the chances of an accidental match are 1:100,000,000 - but search for a DNA match in a database of 100,000,000 people and its a near certainty that you'll find an accidental match (but still quote the 100,000,000 figure to the jury)... Then fail to ask whether that 1:100,000,000 is just the theoretical chance of two "fingerprints" matching, or if it factors in experimental error, cross contamination etc. and crowd-source your database from "low stakes" ancestry tests that might not work to forensic standards, and present it all to a jury that have watched way too much CSI:New York... and even if justice does prevail and the falsely accused walks free, by the time the wheels of justice have ground to a conclusion, you've already destroyed their family and career (oh, and probably re-traumatised the victims, into the bargain). BTW: can you remember where you were and what you were doing this day in 1993?
Its like the use of face-recognition and crime-prediction technology by the police - they probably have great potential value when used properly for screening and prioritising, but the potential for abuse is immense - whether its treating a match as "proof" because tfalse positives are politically inconvenient when he force paid $1.5m for the technology, or walking into one of the huge, gaping "confirmation bias" traps that these technologies present and getting a false proof of their efficiency.
NB: are statistics and the scientific method on the compulsory curriculum at law school yet?
the Raspberry Pi still feels a little niche to merit its own dedicated retail store.
Its in Cambridge.
To translate that for viewers in the USA its like saying... well, come to think about it, its like saying "Its in Cambridge" (copycats!).
It will have access to a slightly different customer demographic than your typical Radio Shack on a strip mall somewhere that doesn't have the students and professors from a top-tier university, the employees and families of ARM inc. and a dozen other tech companies passing by on their way back from the bookshop - is what I'm saying.
People can add it to the tourist trail between the alma mater of Newton and Hawking and the pub where Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry had a punch-up.
And much like the USB design of the Raspberry PI, there will be multiple entrances to the building which will then funnel all traffic through a single door.
Yes, they should have bought the former department store next door with 50 times the floor space and 8 independent doors. Except that would have cost a lot more and rendered the whole project financially impossible.
The Pi has a USB bottleneck (and falls short to being totally open source) because they used a dirt-cheap, off-the-shelf system-on-a-chip in order to meet their prime requirement: its so cheap that you can happily mod it, let the kids play with it etc. without any drama if/when somebody lets the magic smoke out. Or just buy a new one for your next project rather than have to tear apart your last project to retrieve the expensive computer.
It would be great if there were some ARM equivalent of generic x86 PC hardware - with proper USB, Ethernet, PCIe, M.2. SATA etc. and standardised firmware/drivers - but that's not what the Pi was intended to be, and is unlikely to cost $35 or less...
Ok, so the work was done using illegal, questionable sources, etc. But the work is done, is the science bad?
There's a Pratchett quote along the lines of "The thing about criminals is that they don't obey the law - its part of the job description."
If someone thinks (or was coerced into thinking) that it is OK to torture people, harvest organs without consent etc. then they're not going to blink about falsifying data, especially in an environment where failing to get the result that your superior expects is tantamount to volunteering to be the next experimental subject.
Haven't looked at the organ transplant study in detail (hey, this is an internet forum!) but - for example - if the organs came from a dubious source, how sure can you be that the kidneys supposedly from a healthy 18 year-old woman who was hit by a bus didn't actually come from a 55 year old male prisoner who died after snorting cocaine cut with rat poison?
So, these sorts of data sources are fundamentally untrustworthy - without looking very, very carefully at how the data was gathered (in which case you'll probably end up giving your research students PTSD).
There'd be no lawsuit if this was being done in the newspaper classified ads, or on a bulletin board.
Completely agree in principle... but in practice what the internet changes is the speed and scale of the potential harm that can be done via a high-profile App where a malicious post can be created for free, in seconds, and can instantly reaches a global audience without any sort of human sanity checking. The perpetrator doesn't even need to get up off their bar stool or even interact with another human (which may not be infallible, but would put a severe damper on abuse and allow the publisher to impose their own rules and guidelines). You probably wouldn't get a dozen responses a day - continuing for weeks.
Regardless of the law, if a company is going to create - for profit - a new service, they should take some responsibility for the consequences. "Its only a dating App where people can post their photos and contact details with a strong implication that they're interested in more than just coffee - what could possibly go wrong?" is no longer a safe or realistic attitude. For a dating site not to have precautions in place (such as a compulsory "escrow" service for contacting partners and a credible mechanism for stopping people posting their locations) is grossly irresponsible. I have no idea if this applies to Grindr, but if they do make it easy to create a fake profile then they deserve what they get. Ultimately, you need a human in the loop to prevent abuse - and one of the reason some internet services are so wildly successful is that they're entirely automated.
Even on Slashdot, If I posted an obviously abusive message inviting people to someone's address for sex, it would quickly get modded to oblivion - and on several occasions I've told people who ask whether they can have a comments section on their website I've replied "sure, but who is going to volunteer to monitor it and deal with any problems?"
Going after the perpetrator is, of course, perfectly proper and important, but can only happen after the damage is done, and the world has an infinite supply of perpetrators to take the place of the ones you punish.
, yes, they do want you to download it into the Amazon Music app, but they also give you the option to download (DRM-free,) MP3s.
And even if you do use the App, that still saves it as a DRM-free MP3 with sensible names in your "Amazon Music" folder (as well as letting you stream it).
Then there are more "indy" sites like Bandcamp (that lets you stream the whole album in the browser, and buy a download if you like it) although you won't find the mainstream stuff there...
JScript probably was all about tying people in to Internet Explorer by implementing an almost-but-not-quite Javascript.
Typescript, on the other hand, really is just a pre-processor for Javascript that gives you 'compile-time' type checking and a bunch of new/proposed ECMAScript features - and then spits out standard Javascript code targeted at whatever version of JS/ECMAScript you want to support. Rather than locking you in to particular browsers, it levels the playing field between browsers, since you can start using bleeding-edge ECMAScript features in your source code now without requiring users to have the latest version of your favourite browser.
What you won't appreciate unless you've tried it is that the output from Typescript is not just standard JavaScript (of the version you specify) but legible Javascript - not some hyper-optimised, minified mess. They've actually avoided including a minifier/optimiser/obfuscater at the TypeScript stage - you can use one of those on the JS output if you want. If you start worrying about that MS scorpion on your back, you really can just ditch Typescript and start working directly with the JavaScript output.
Of course, if you wouldn't touch Javascript with a bargepole you probably won't want anything to do with Typescript. I'm sure that there are platform-independent zero-install options for delivering Haskell, Rust and Python apps to non-tech users out there somewhere.
...but isn't pretty much everything else already defined in terms of physical phenomena? E.g. 1 second is defined to be exactly 9 192 631 770 cycles of a Caesium atomic clock, 1 metre is equal to 1 650 763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum (disclosure: copypasta from Wikipedia!)
Sounds like the Kilogram is the missing link that's still based on an artefact (maybe they'll change the base to "gram" at the same time).
As for the QWERTY layout per se - since its so established and hard-to-change why don't we just re-define "alphabetic order" from A,B,C,D... to Q,W,E,R,T,Y.... - then the QWERTY layout would make perfect sense.
OK, so re-defining alphabetic order is going to be a little bit tricky and have a few unintended consequences but, frankly, the QWERTY layout has been technically obsolete since at least the 1960s (golfball typewriters didn't have type bars to collide) and has resisted all attempts to improve/replace it - even the numeric phone keypad (that had its day when SMS texting went viral) suffered death-by-iPhone - so alphabetical order is pretty much the soft target here. Most kids these days will see a QWERTY keyboard before they get taught to read, so that shouldn't be a problem, and if you ever forget what the new order is - just look down! With lots of semi-skilled workers about to be made redundant by AI, just think how many valuable jobs would be created re-sorting the books in the great libraries of the world...
Chord keyboards and other "clever" solutions have the problem that you have to learn to use them - and they failed to take off even back in the days when people expected to need training before they could type. The chord-based stenograph has been around as long as the typewriter, but has never broken out of specialised niches in courts etc.
The great thing about the QWERTY keyboard is that the instructions for basic use are printed on the bloody keys. Only a minority of keyboard users today have actually been taught to touch-type - so the failure of all alternatives can't be about the level of training on QWERTY, its that you don't need training to use QWERTY. Maybe, just maybe, QWERTY is still around because it gets the job done?
These days, we've got pretty good speech and handwriting recognition, too - but the inconvenient truth is that many people prefer typing to writing, and feel like a twit talking to their computer or phone (and we're talking here about people who don't feel a twit meandering along with their head hunched over their phone). The other problem with speech/handwriting is that they grind to a halt as soon as you want to go back and edit your work, undo a typo or fix an autocorrupt error.
As for "thought control" - we (sex!) know (manager walking past - hide slashdot) how (sex!!) that will (what a wanker!) work out (talking of wanking...) in practical (need a piss) day-to-day (sex!!!) office (coffee!!!) use (my ass itches).
Right... you should have used lovingly hand-crafted C with CGI, because that would have solved all of your security problems./s
Or spent months hacking through the jargon thicket that is Java server-side programming (OK, maybe not rocket science but massive overkill for simple stuff).
Anyway, before the days of $5/month virtual servers and free Amazon cloud, PHP was probably the only thing that your shared web host offered...
This article is exclusively talking about Apple, isn't it?
Apple are actually one of the lesser offenders here - sure, they have proprietary sockets on their iDevices but the other end of the cable has always been USB-A that plugged into a socket on the charger - and even the proprietary connectors are standard across the iPod/iPad/iPhone range and have only changed once unless you count the early before-they-were-famous iPods.
I've traveled for years with a mixture of iPad/iPod, android, kindle, 3rd party wireless headphones etc. and only needed to take one charger (plus the appropriate cables).
Plus, there's already rumors that Apple - like every other manufacturer - are going to switch to USB-C (they already have for Macs).
iPhone and Android users have long complained about using different chargers for their phones.
I think they meant "Long ago, Sony/Erickson, Nokia and Motorola users used to complain about using different chargers for their phones."
Seriously - how is this still a problem? I don't think I've encountered a modern (i.e. post-iPhone) smartphone or tablet - Apple or android - that doesn't come with a charge/sync cable terminating in a standard USB-A plug (worst case - if you use a different adapter it might no charge so quickly)... and now everybody will probably be switching to USB-C anyway which should sort out the fast charging incompatibilities.
OK, if you use different types of devices you might need different cables but I doubt that they're making up those 51000 tons of electrical waste and, at worst, there's only 3 common options (micro-USB, USB-C and Lightning) and since Apple is using USB-C on their laptops already they'll probably switch at some stage.
Except one of the much vaunted benefits of self-driving cars is they're going to be safer than human drivers...
Anyway, this wasn't a freak accident - the safety driver was watching their phone and not the road and, if you believe the video they released, then the car was driving too fast for the visibility conditions (the alternative is not to believe the video...)
Even in the good ol' 60s, if Apollo 11 had landed on a civilian's head because the Heroic Astronauts were busy Tweeting then Questions Would Have Been Asked (like, "what the hell is Tweeting?")
As TFS suggests - the game-changer is likely neither DAB nor DAB+ but internet radio available on pretty much every smartphone, smart TV, computer, phone, creepy digital household spy/assistant etc. the only drawback of which is the need for an internet connection and the need for a "smart device" to receive it.
The problem is, of course, areas with poor internet service (which I bet is strongly correlated with poor DAB reception), people for whom £25/month for broadband is a problem and, of course, car drivers who don't want their radio to cut out every time they drive through a 3G/DAB dark spot. Plus, its another incentive for drivers to be fucking around with their phones while driving.
It would help if every car sold in the last 20 years still had a standard slot for a radio rather than an irrevocably integrated "entertainment system".
If only the USA had, at its disposal, some sort of efficient, economical and widely available way of killing people... I don't know, guns for example?
Seems pretty simple to me: either (a) decide that the death penalty is morally wrong and don't do it or (b) if you must have a death penalty, just stick the victims up against the wall and shoot them - which will be by far the most effective way of satisfying the lust for "retribution" that is the real motive behind the death penalty.
Sure, don't go out of your way to torture people slowly to death but if you're trying too hard to make it less painful than a trip to the dentist that's probably because you're in denial over why you are killing people (clue: the voters want retribution!) - and the more elaborate your execution method, the more there is to go horribly wrong. A couple of well-placed bullets is probably a better end than most law-abiding people can look forward to when their number comes up. "Medical" methods of execution founder because good doctors tend to have views about deliberately killing people - but you have thousands of troops trained to shoot-to-kill... and killing evil criminals who threaten society from within is just as important and good for the country as shooting foreign bad guys (= probably just kids who've been indoctrinated by their leaders)....right?
Anyway, the victim is going to be pretty comprehensively traumatised by the rigmarole leading up to a ritual execution anyway - the coup de grace is a fairly small part of it. Now, what would be really "cruel and unusual" would be to condemn someone to death, then keep them alive in a hell-hole prison for decades while lawyers re-enact the death penalty debate just for them (probably at their families' expense) - finally executing them after years of raising and lowering hopes of a reprieve... but then, no country would be that ridiculous.
TLDNR: there's no 'nice' way of killing people that can't potentially go wrong and turn into torture - don't pretend there is. Plus, justice is fallible so accept that you're going to kill a few innocent people (they'd have rotted in prison for years anyway, they might prefer a swift conclusion). Don't like them apples? Simple: don't have a death penalty (lots of countries manage without).
Its perfectly fine to say that the ritual of pulling out a record, enjoying the sleeve art, getting an record out of its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, placing the pickup, the characteristic sounds at the start and end... all add to the entertainment value of listening to music. Its also OK to like the "sound" of vinyl - i.e. the way the music has been mangled to fit the limitations of the medium (especially for studio-produced music that was designed to be heard that way). I wouldn't be surprised if vinyl outlasts the CD for that reason...
The only problem is people who feel the need to justify their subjective enjoyment of vinyl by making pseudo-sceintific arguments as to why it is better quality than digital.
...and if we're talking about pop/rock then its always worth remembering that one of the design goals of guitar amps, effects and synths is not to create mathematically perfect sounds, but, rather, to make them imperfect in interesting-sounding ways. If a guitar amp distorts, or a synth oscillator produces a slightly flakey wave form, that's called "character". Huge efforts have been made to produce digital virtual instruments that faithfully simulate the analog quirks of the originals.
Slashdot Mirror
The things is, nobody seems to have reported on this investigation and trial until its conclusion, which suggests non-standard reporting restrictions were imposed.
...or it just didn't make the "news agenda" at the time of the trial. Not every criminal trial makes headline news...
Just because they really are out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid :-)
I'm sure that there are subtleties here that I'm missing by being an American
Not very subtle - its simply not "trial in secret" by any stretch of the imagination. Journalists can and do report factually on trials in progress. Here's a random example. Just strict rules on what can be reported while the trial is in progress (e.g. no interviews with witnesses, speculating on the outcome, no photography in the courtroom etc.). The facts of the trial are a matter of public record.
...this one just hasn't really made the news in the UK yet.
Guy comes out of the bar because it closes at 2 AM, [snip] he's lit up big-time [snip] it's International Falls, Mn with a current temp of -35 degrees, there's no one around and he passes out and dies of hypothermia.
Fixed that for you. I'm sure it happens all the time. Whether the car doesn't start because it was snowed-in, the battery has frozen or if he was just too rat-arsed to find the right car and get the key in the ignition - get too bladdered to save yourself in a region where it gets that cold at night and you can pick up your Darwin award on your way to the afterlife. As for the breath-test system - worked as intended and stopped an idiot driving while pissed. I'd hope that the population of Int Falls Mn. are smart enough to wrap up warm and carry emergency kits and cellphones. Hell, where I live it rarely gets more than a few degrees below and even then I chuck a sleeping bag into the back of my car in the winter.
That said, I'd rather not have a car that refused to start because I'd eaten the wrong sort of breath mint, used the wrong sort of screenwash fluid or my passenger had just enjoyed a liquid lunch so colour me skeptical as to whether such a system would be sufficiently sensitive to be useful without throwing endless false positives. Even so, I'd bet that the most fatalities would be from drivers who thought they were good to drive because the system didn't trigger...
For some reasons time travel is thought of as difficult but faster than light travel is thought of as easy and always settings allow high speed travel but leave time as a mysterious thing yet to be cracked.
Its called dramatic necessity - a space show needs FTL to get to the planet of the week, whereas too-easy time travel would mean that every week you'd have to contrive a new reason why you couldn't use time travel to resolve the plot.
Wrong. Faster than light travel is a huge problem. Time travel maybe not so.
Or, possibly, the two things are logically equivalent - one can always be used to achieve the effect of the other. But maybe your FTL drive won't work (or you may risk existence failure) if you try to use it to violate causality... or perhaps you just hate the paperwork caused if you violate the Prime Temporal Directive, not to mention the crippling tax implications becoming your own grandparent.
Again, scifi assumed all disease is cured. Nobody has heart disease in scifi but nobody has figured out how to tell the changeling from the captain.
Both unfair in a thread mentioning B5 which included (a) the doctor finding the cure to a plague just after the last member of the affected race had died, (b) a major (alien) character very nearly dying from a heart attack (wrong heart - the other one could have been fixed) and at least one occasion where the changeling was found out via a combination of a brain scan and common sense (but Our Hero knowingly went along with the ruse because the alternatives were bad).
Another example: why does the enterprise always without exception meet another ship, the helmsman says their hailing us, the captain says this is so and so from the enterprise, and only then does the screen show the alien replying. It's all nonsense.
You mean they missed out the bit where they have to wait while the latest Skype update installs, then the captain asks the helmsman to send the other ship a text telling them that their audio is muted and to press the little speaker icon with a cross through it, and there's a massive feedback howl before they finally start speaking only for the captain to grawdlually looooose th th the ababababiiiiility to spk because there's a delayed echo of his own voice coming over the speakers...
Seriously - videoconferencing has been a thing for a decade or two now and it's still a crapshoot for techies and totally beyond the wot of management. Also, we now know that the Enterprise only had viewscreens because the former captain couldn't abide holograms.
gnuplot : user-friendly as a cornered rat, but powerful.
Also Geogebra which is designed for education and thus is more of a fluffy guinea-pig in a nice spacious cage, but watch your fingers, because it also does interactive geometry and can be used to set up nice geometric models. My test is always, will it draw a circle if you type Y^2+y^2=1
I half agree. US audiences are famous for hating subtitles. [snip] However, plenty of stuff has made it onto US TV from the earliest days, e.g. Monty Python, Dr. Who, etc.
I really hope that US TV didn't show Python and Dr Who with subtitles... :-) Even their tendency to re-make British shows for the US is probably because they can't conceive of a show being successful if it has less than 100 episodes. (Life on Mars makes me laugh - ISTR the flop US version ran to more episodes before it was cancelled than the jewel-in-the-BBCs-crown original version... although the original probably would have needed US subtitles... "Its teatime - I'm 'avin 'oops!")
But, you kinda miss the point: at least part of the "US viewers are stupid" meme is down to the big US TV networks assuming that viewers were stupid (or maybe just targeting the ones more susceptible to advertising) and not showing anything that might cause excessive cogitation. Once the networks had decided that Joe Sixpack didn't like subtitles they simply wouldn't show anything with subtitles.
On Netflix, you sometimes only find out that a show is in French with English subtitles when you sit down to watch it. They don't decide for you that you don't like foreign TV.
Because no one ever watched movies and TV shows from other countries before Netflix. /sarc
Yes, there have always been some. Maybe moreso here in the UK than in the USA. Often dubbed or completely shredded for international audiences. However, you'd have had to subscribe to several specialist cable channels or install a multi-band satellite dish to get anything like the range of international programs currently offered by Netflix as part of their standard service... and Netflix largely serves them up shoulder-to-shoulder with the US/UK programs rather than filing them by nationality. (Not sure if that's a plus or a minus, however, the godawful navigation and discovery features on Netflix are another topic entirely...)
Not that I've indulged yet, but there are a few subtitled shows on my shortlist...
Meanwhile, I'm hoping that now that Disney has cancelled all the Marvel contracts we'll see less wall-to-wall fucking superhero shows...
Is there a German or Argentinian version of 'Game of Thrones'
No, but there is a British one on Netflix called "The Crown".
There's also this show called Game of Thrones which is mainly made in Northern Ireland plus location shoots in Spain, Malta and Croatia and half the cast is British or European...
Look guys. If the big bad gov'ment is going to fake evidence to pin a murder on you for some reason, then they are just going to fake evidence to pin a murder on you whether you take a commercial DNA test or not.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence... Normally, that's the conspiracy theorist's fallacy, but you've found a reverse application: the real concern here is not that The Man is out to get you personally, but the authorities' capacity for incompetence and misunderstanding of statistical significance, and their disinclination to question anything that seems to offer an easy solution.
Actually falsifying evidence involves people in power taking a real risk. Buying the snake oil because we don't yet require politicians, lawyers or police to have any scientific education doesn't seem to have any consequences.
Compare two random samples of DNA and maybe the chances of an accidental match are 1:100,000,000 - but search for a DNA match in a database of 100,000,000 people and its a near certainty that you'll find an accidental match (but still quote the 100,000,000 figure to the jury)... Then fail to ask whether that 1:100,000,000 is just the theoretical chance of two "fingerprints" matching, or if it factors in experimental error, cross contamination etc. and crowd-source your database from "low stakes" ancestry tests that might not work to forensic standards, and present it all to a jury that have watched way too much CSI:New York... and even if justice does prevail and the falsely accused walks free, by the time the wheels of justice have ground to a conclusion, you've already destroyed their family and career (oh, and probably re-traumatised the victims, into the bargain). BTW: can you remember where you were and what you were doing this day in 1993?
Its like the use of face-recognition and crime-prediction technology by the police - they probably have great potential value when used properly for screening and prioritising, but the potential for abuse is immense - whether its treating a match as "proof" because tfalse positives are politically inconvenient when he force paid $1.5m for the technology, or walking into one of the huge, gaping "confirmation bias" traps that these technologies present and getting a false proof of their efficiency.
NB: are statistics and the scientific method on the compulsory curriculum at law school yet?
the Raspberry Pi still feels a little niche to merit its own dedicated retail store.
Its in Cambridge.
To translate that for viewers in the USA its like saying... well, come to think about it, its like saying "Its in Cambridge" (copycats!).
It will have access to a slightly different customer demographic than your typical Radio Shack on a strip mall somewhere that doesn't have the students and professors from a top-tier university, the employees and families of ARM inc. and a dozen other tech companies passing by on their way back from the bookshop - is what I'm saying.
People can add it to the tourist trail between the alma mater of Newton and Hawking and the pub where Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry had a punch-up.
And much like the USB design of the Raspberry PI, there will be multiple entrances to the building which will then funnel all traffic through a single door.
Yes, they should have bought the former department store next door with 50 times the floor space and 8 independent doors. Except that would have cost a lot more and rendered the whole project financially impossible.
The Pi has a USB bottleneck (and falls short to being totally open source) because they used a dirt-cheap, off-the-shelf system-on-a-chip in order to meet their prime requirement: its so cheap that you can happily mod it, let the kids play with it etc. without any drama if/when somebody lets the magic smoke out. Or just buy a new one for your next project rather than have to tear apart your last project to retrieve the expensive computer.
It would be great if there were some ARM equivalent of generic x86 PC hardware - with proper USB, Ethernet, PCIe, M.2. SATA etc. and standardised firmware/drivers - but that's not what the Pi was intended to be, and is unlikely to cost $35 or less...
Ok, so the work was done using illegal, questionable sources, etc. But the work is done, is the science bad?
There's a Pratchett quote along the lines of "The thing about criminals is that they don't obey the law - its part of the job description."
If someone thinks (or was coerced into thinking) that it is OK to torture people, harvest organs without consent etc. then they're not going to blink about falsifying data, especially in an environment where failing to get the result that your superior expects is tantamount to volunteering to be the next experimental subject.
Haven't looked at the organ transplant study in detail (hey, this is an internet forum!) but - for example - if the organs came from a dubious source, how sure can you be that the kidneys supposedly from a healthy 18 year-old woman who was hit by a bus didn't actually come from a 55 year old male prisoner who died after snorting cocaine cut with rat poison?
So, these sorts of data sources are fundamentally untrustworthy - without looking very, very carefully at how the data was gathered (in which case you'll probably end up giving your research students PTSD).
There'd be no lawsuit if this was being done in the newspaper classified ads, or on a bulletin board.
Completely agree in principle... but in practice what the internet changes is the speed and scale of the potential harm that can be done via a high-profile App where a malicious post can be created for free, in seconds, and can instantly reaches a global audience without any sort of human sanity checking. The perpetrator doesn't even need to get up off their bar stool or even interact with another human (which may not be infallible, but would put a severe damper on abuse and allow the publisher to impose their own rules and guidelines). You probably wouldn't get a dozen responses a day - continuing for weeks.
Regardless of the law, if a company is going to create - for profit - a new service, they should take some responsibility for the consequences. "Its only a dating App where people can post their photos and contact details with a strong implication that they're interested in more than just coffee - what could possibly go wrong?" is no longer a safe or realistic attitude. For a dating site not to have precautions in place (such as a compulsory "escrow" service for contacting partners and a credible mechanism for stopping people posting their locations) is grossly irresponsible. I have no idea if this applies to Grindr, but if they do make it easy to create a fake profile then they deserve what they get. Ultimately, you need a human in the loop to prevent abuse - and one of the reason some internet services are so wildly successful is that they're entirely automated.
Even on Slashdot, If I posted an obviously abusive message inviting people to someone's address for sex, it would quickly get modded to oblivion - and on several occasions I've told people who ask whether they can have a comments section on their website I've replied "sure, but who is going to volunteer to monitor it and deal with any problems?"
Going after the perpetrator is, of course, perfectly proper and important, but can only happen after the damage is done, and the world has an infinite supply of perpetrators to take the place of the ones you punish.
, yes, they do want you to download it into the Amazon Music app, but they also give you the option to download (DRM-free,) MP3s.
And even if you do use the App, that still saves it as a DRM-free MP3 with sensible names in your "Amazon Music" folder (as well as letting you stream it).
Then there are more "indy" sites like Bandcamp (that lets you stream the whole album in the browser, and buy a download if you like it) although you won't find the mainstream stuff there...
JScript probably was all about tying people in to Internet Explorer by implementing an almost-but-not-quite Javascript.
Typescript, on the other hand, really is just a pre-processor for Javascript that gives you 'compile-time' type checking and a bunch of new/proposed ECMAScript features - and then spits out standard Javascript code targeted at whatever version of JS/ECMAScript you want to support. Rather than locking you in to particular browsers, it levels the playing field between browsers, since you can start using bleeding-edge ECMAScript features in your source code now without requiring users to have the latest version of your favourite browser.
What you won't appreciate unless you've tried it is that the output from Typescript is not just standard JavaScript (of the version you specify) but legible Javascript - not some hyper-optimised, minified mess. They've actually avoided including a minifier/optimiser/obfuscater at the TypeScript stage - you can use one of those on the JS output if you want. If you start worrying about that MS scorpion on your back, you really can just ditch Typescript and start working directly with the JavaScript output.
Of course, if you wouldn't touch Javascript with a bargepole you probably won't want anything to do with Typescript. I'm sure that there are platform-independent zero-install options for delivering Haskell, Rust and Python apps to non-tech users out there somewhere.
...but think of all the jobs that will be created re-printing all the textbooks (Seriously, though, Duh! you're right, of course.)
...but isn't pretty much everything else already defined in terms of physical phenomena? E.g. 1 second is defined to be exactly 9 192 631 770 cycles of a Caesium atomic clock, 1 metre is equal to 1 650 763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum (disclosure: copypasta from Wikipedia!) Sounds like the Kilogram is the missing link that's still based on an artefact (maybe they'll change the base to "gram" at the same time).
As for the QWERTY layout per se - since its so established and hard-to-change why don't we just re-define "alphabetic order" from A,B,C,D... to Q,W,E,R,T,Y.... - then the QWERTY layout would make perfect sense.
OK, so re-defining alphabetic order is going to be a little bit tricky and have a few unintended consequences but, frankly, the QWERTY layout has been technically obsolete since at least the 1960s (golfball typewriters didn't have type bars to collide) and has resisted all attempts to improve/replace it - even the numeric phone keypad (that had its day when SMS texting went viral) suffered death-by-iPhone - so alphabetical order is pretty much the soft target here. Most kids these days will see a QWERTY keyboard before they get taught to read, so that shouldn't be a problem, and if you ever forget what the new order is - just look down! With lots of semi-skilled workers about to be made redundant by AI, just think how many valuable jobs would be created re-sorting the books in the great libraries of the world...
Chord keyboards and other "clever" solutions have the problem that you have to learn to use them - and they failed to take off even back in the days when people expected to need training before they could type. The chord-based stenograph has been around as long as the typewriter, but has never broken out of specialised niches in courts etc.
The great thing about the QWERTY keyboard is that the instructions for basic use are printed on the bloody keys. Only a minority of keyboard users today have actually been taught to touch-type - so the failure of all alternatives can't be about the level of training on QWERTY, its that you don't need training to use QWERTY. Maybe, just maybe, QWERTY is still around because it gets the job done?
These days, we've got pretty good speech and handwriting recognition, too - but the inconvenient truth is that many people prefer typing to writing, and feel like a twit talking to their computer or phone (and we're talking here about people who don't feel a twit meandering along with their head hunched over their phone). The other problem with speech/handwriting is that they grind to a halt as soon as you want to go back and edit your work, undo a typo or fix an autocorrupt error.
As for "thought control" - we (sex!) know (manager walking past - hide slashdot) how (sex!!) that will (what a wanker!) work out (talking of wanking...) in practical (need a piss) day-to-day (sex!!!) office (coffee!!!) use (my ass itches).
... when you opted to use PHP in the first place.
Right... you should have used lovingly hand-crafted C with CGI, because that would have solved all of your security problems. /s
Or spent months hacking through the jargon thicket that is Java server-side programming (OK, maybe not rocket science but massive overkill for simple stuff).
Anyway, before the days of $5/month virtual servers and free Amazon cloud, PHP was probably the only thing that your shared web host offered...
This article is exclusively talking about Apple, isn't it?
Apple are actually one of the lesser offenders here - sure, they have proprietary sockets on their iDevices but the other end of the cable has always been USB-A that plugged into a socket on the charger - and even the proprietary connectors are standard across the iPod/iPad/iPhone range and have only changed once unless you count the early before-they-were-famous iPods.
I've traveled for years with a mixture of iPad/iPod, android, kindle, 3rd party wireless headphones etc. and only needed to take one charger (plus the appropriate cables).
Plus, there's already rumors that Apple - like every other manufacturer - are going to switch to USB-C (they already have for Macs).
iPhone and Android users have long complained about using different chargers for their phones.
I think they meant "Long ago, Sony/Erickson, Nokia and Motorola users used to complain about using different chargers for their phones."
Seriously - how is this still a problem? I don't think I've encountered a modern (i.e. post-iPhone) smartphone or tablet - Apple or android - that doesn't come with a charge/sync cable terminating in a standard USB-A plug (worst case - if you use a different adapter it might no charge so quickly)... and now everybody will probably be switching to USB-C anyway which should sort out the fast charging incompatibilities.
OK, if you use different types of devices you might need different cables but I doubt that they're making up those 51000 tons of electrical waste and, at worst, there's only 3 common options (micro-USB, USB-C and Lightning) and since Apple is using USB-C on their laptops already they'll probably switch at some stage.
Except one of the much vaunted benefits of self-driving cars is they're going to be safer than human drivers...
Anyway, this wasn't a freak accident - the safety driver was watching their phone and not the road and, if you believe the video they released, then the car was driving too fast for the visibility conditions (the alternative is not to believe the video...)
Even in the good ol' 60s, if Apollo 11 had landed on a civilian's head because the Heroic Astronauts were busy Tweeting then Questions Would Have Been Asked (like, "what the hell is Tweeting?")
As TFS suggests - the game-changer is likely neither DAB nor DAB+ but internet radio available on pretty much every smartphone, smart TV, computer, phone, creepy digital household spy/assistant etc. the only drawback of which is the need for an internet connection and the need for a "smart device" to receive it.
The problem is, of course, areas with poor internet service (which I bet is strongly correlated with poor DAB reception), people for whom £25/month for broadband is a problem and, of course, car drivers who don't want their radio to cut out every time they drive through a 3G/DAB dark spot. Plus, its another incentive for drivers to be fucking around with their phones while driving.
It would help if every car sold in the last 20 years still had a standard slot for a radio rather than an irrevocably integrated "entertainment system".
If only the USA had, at its disposal, some sort of efficient, economical and widely available way of killing people... I don't know, guns for example?
Seems pretty simple to me: either (a) decide that the death penalty is morally wrong and don't do it or (b) if you must have a death penalty, just stick the victims up against the wall and shoot them - which will be by far the most effective way of satisfying the lust for "retribution" that is the real motive behind the death penalty.
Sure, don't go out of your way to torture people slowly to death but if you're trying too hard to make it less painful than a trip to the dentist that's probably because you're in denial over why you are killing people (clue: the voters want retribution!) - and the more elaborate your execution method, the more there is to go horribly wrong. A couple of well-placed bullets is probably a better end than most law-abiding people can look forward to when their number comes up. "Medical" methods of execution founder because good doctors tend to have views about deliberately killing people - but you have thousands of troops trained to shoot-to-kill... and killing evil criminals who threaten society from within is just as important and good for the country as shooting foreign bad guys (= probably just kids who've been indoctrinated by their leaders) ....right?
Anyway, the victim is going to be pretty comprehensively traumatised by the rigmarole leading up to a ritual execution anyway - the coup de grace is a fairly small part of it. Now, what would be really "cruel and unusual" would be to condemn someone to death, then keep them alive in a hell-hole prison for decades while lawyers re-enact the death penalty debate just for them (probably at their families' expense) - finally executing them after years of raising and lowering hopes of a reprieve... but then, no country would be that ridiculous.
TLDNR: there's no 'nice' way of killing people that can't potentially go wrong and turn into torture - don't pretend there is. Plus, justice is fallible so accept that you're going to kill a few innocent people (they'd have rotted in prison for years anyway, they might prefer a swift conclusion). Don't like them apples? Simple: don't have a death penalty (lots of countries manage without).
Its perfectly fine to say that the ritual of pulling out a record, enjoying the sleeve art, getting an record out of its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, placing the pickup, the characteristic sounds at the start and end... all add to the entertainment value of listening to music. Its also OK to like the "sound" of vinyl - i.e. the way the music has been mangled to fit the limitations of the medium (especially for studio-produced music that was designed to be heard that way). I wouldn't be surprised if vinyl outlasts the CD for that reason...
The only problem is people who feel the need to justify their subjective enjoyment of vinyl by making pseudo-sceintific arguments as to why it is better quality than digital.
...and if we're talking about pop/rock then its always worth remembering that one of the design goals of guitar amps, effects and synths is not to create mathematically perfect sounds, but, rather, to make them imperfect in interesting-sounding ways. If a guitar amp distorts, or a synth oscillator produces a slightly flakey wave form, that's called "character". Huge efforts have been made to produce digital virtual instruments that faithfully simulate the analog quirks of the originals.