You seem to have missed a course in logic. Atheism is simply not believing in a god. It is comparable to you not believing that there is an invisible pink aardvark sitting in the chair next to you. According to your logic, you bear the burden of proof for proving to the rest of us that the chair is indeed empty. We're waiting..
As the aardvark is invisible, it does not reflect light in the correct wavelength in order to appear pink. Thus there is not an invisible pink aardvark. QED. Right, now that's out of the way...
The question of whether the universe has an external creator that can observe and affect the universe (in much the manner that a debugger can observe and affect a running C++ program) is more philosophical in nature, however. Atheists commenting on slashdot generally do not "simply not believe" but make assertions about "the burden of proof", effectively stating not just that you don't believe God exists, but that you believe it is philosophically wrong to believe that God exists (a much bigger statement). That is especially true of atheists on slashdot.
Ironically, the difference is not generally one of evidence at all, but one of the philosophical axioms you should start from in your reasoning, and the question that you start by asking.
Except for the professors who actually listen to the students. In my brief time trying to use Blackboard as an instructor, I pretty much concluded that I would spend more time trying to make it behave than it would take me to write the damn thing from scratch, so I used it as little as humanly possible.
Generally, packaged LMSs are not aimed at the CompSci professors who can do it themselves in their sleep with more freedom and less IT-services hassle, but at the 90% of other faculties for whom HTML reads like ancient Mesopotamian. (Except the history department who apparently quite like ancient Mesopoamian). Our university uses Sakai, and we firmly expect that the last department to take it up will be the computer science department (who are quite happy using custom HTML and Perl scripts).
I know I'd be a lot less upset with "Four robots were blown up by a roadside bomb today. They should be operational again by tomorrow." than to see more soldiers die. Hmm, I worry that this could indirectly make attacks on civilians seem legitimate, and turn every war into an insurgency or terrorist scenario. Think about the case with rockets: the soldier is not the rocket, it is the person that launched the rocket. In the same manner, the enemy will not see the robots as "soldiers" but as "smart bullets" -- they will see the technicians who make, build, and commission the robots as being the soldiers they should target. And the caterers and managers and universities who support the technicians as being the military logistical supply chain. No sane military opponent would restrict themselves to "just going after the robots", and suddenly we may discover that automating our soldiers has not taken people off the front line, but instead put everybody on it.
Exactly the reason why, if that were correct, the translation should have been updated by now, no?
If it really were that important, would such a basic translation error be allowed to stand even for 400 years (assuming the error arrived with the king james version)?
If you pop on over to http://www.biblegateway.com/, you can look it up and notice that every modern translation has it as "murder". The only reason you hear "kill" so often is that people like to quote the KJV when they want to sound dramatic and archaic -- they like the "thee"s and "thou"s and it's the translation that's carved on the front of so many public buildings. I believe the most popular translation in use today is the NIV.
That said, much of the perversion of language today has a lot of blame to lay at the feet of America. But even that is a mixture of linguistic changes brought on by marketing demographics.
Curiously, one piece of "folk wisdom" about this that often gets mentioned in the UK is that American English has remained fairly static over the last two to three centuries, while British English has moved on. In other words, many "Americanisms" are old 18th century "Britishisms". Naturally, as with all folk wisdom, though, nobody's that fussed to check the veracity of the claim!
2 to 3% PER YEAR. We'll use 2.5 since it's the middle.
Something that costs 100 units of money in year 1 will go to 102.5. 102.5 to 105.06 in year 3. etc. So, in year 7, that 100 unit item now costs 118.87 units. Or an increase of 18.87% over 7 years......12.62% for a flat 2%. 19.41% for a flat 3%. 22% wasn't too far off......
Layne
Yes, I'm aware of how compound interest works. However because the original poster (the one behind the one I replied to) had just said "official inflation over the last 7 years has been 22%", it seemed likely his 2 key had stuck: "official inflation" rates are almost always reported per year in the UK, and for the last 7 years they have been around the 2% official target! (As opposed to the 80s and 90s when they were up to 15%p.a)
Anyway, happy to know it wasn't a typo after all, but the point I was making about why he might be "feeling" inflation at a much higher rate remains relevant: inflation is not uniform. For example because house prices and Council Tax have risen faster than inflation generally, the young and the old tend to find their "personal inflation rate" has been much higher than 2% per year.
At the same time the official inflation for these 7 years has been surprise, surprise only 22%.
Are you compounding that increase, hombre, or just adding the rates together? Inflation is compounding and I would be surprised if it's only 22% for the last 7 years.
You guys are all happy your currency is worth 2x US dollars, however that means you have inflation which is 'bad' unless growth is somehow moderated either through currency/trade/investment controls or a recession. The original poster made a typo -- the official UK inflation rate has hovered around 2 to 3% for a long time.
However, the inflation rate is not uniform. House prices and Council Tax (a tax which is not scaled against income) have risen much faster, so for the young (where buying a house is now a near impossibility) and for the elderly (where Council Tax is their biggest single expense), inflation is much much higher than 2%
This is further complicated by the fact that mortgage repayments (and hence house prices) are no longer included in the inflation measure -- the UK was forced to switch to the same inflation measure used by the rest of the EU which doesn't include this.
There's a very big false assumption that everybody seems to be making here. I am, of course, not a lawyer (so this is not legal advice).
MS have not distributed GPL3 code, no matter how much we would like them to have. They have offered a covenant not to sue Novell's customers, and vouchers offering support for Novell's product. This is very different. None of this makes MS a party to the GPL because MS do not need any kind of license or copyright provision just to say "I won't sue Joe Bloggs, and I'll help him with his technical issues". No matter what the FooBarSpecialLicense attached to the product Joe Bloggs happens to own says!
(And if you think otherwise ask yourself this: what part of copyright law would MS have broken by saying "I'm happy to assist with Joe's problem but I don't agree to your license agreement"? On what grounds could you sue them? Or if they say "Mr Novell, if you sell Joe a copy of product X, I'm happy to talk to him about any problems he has with it; but I don't agree to your license agreement" What would you sue them for? If there is no potential copyright breach, there is no license.)
What the Novell-MS deal could have impinged on was Novell's right to distribute SUSE at all. If they were unable to offer the equal patent cover required by the GPL (and clearly they are unable to extend Microsoft's offer of patent protection to non-customers without Microsoft's consent), then they would have been unable to meet the terms of the GPL3 and thus unable to legally distribute the software. Except that Eben Moglen kindly gave them a get-out clause at the end of paragraph 11 of the GPL.
In most countries, as I understand it, even if Novell hadn't been given a get-out clause, the only result would have been the Novell-MS deal being "frustrated". "Frustration" is where an unforseen circumstance prevents a contract from being possible to fulfill. This appears to me to have happened. An unforseen change (the FSF deliberately altering the GPL licensing terms to affect the deal) would have prevented Novell from being able to fulfill its end of the Novell-MS deal. It wouldn't have been able to distribute SUSE under GPL3 because it couldn't extend MS's patent provisions beyond what MS offered in the initial contract without asking MS first. Thus the Novell-MS deal would get terminated, and there might have been a little wrangle about "reasonable recompense for the services provided". (Novell would need to go along to a court to get the contract declared frustrated, however.)
But with the get-out clause in para 11, even that won't happen.
All up, Eben Moglen's grand plan doesn't seem to amount to a hill of beans.
Disclaimer: Once again, this isn't legal advice. It is based on an engineer's shaky memory of engineering law lectures, and has the potential of being utterly wrong.
I think what's really galling people is that the BBC is using DRM at all.
Unfortunately, as I understand it, the BBC has been pushed into using DRM not because providing free unrestricted content might harm the BBC's own commercial interests, but because it might harm their rivals' (eg ITV, Sky). The BBC's most recent charter review, where the government decides whether the BBC can continue to collect TV licence fee revenue, carefully scrutinised whether the BBC's free content offerings would "distort the market" (ie make it too hard for commercial rivals to compete). DRM is the price the BBC is having to pay to release its content over the internet without harming its rivals too much.
Personally, I think it's daft of the government: effectively they are telling the BBC it mustn't offer too good value for licence fee payers' money. As a licence fee payer, I'd like the best value for money possible, thankyou very much, and I don't care two hoots about ITV's or Sky's commercial interests!
Good reason not to cite Wikipedia as your source!
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 5, Informative
From Wikipedia: A mechanical cash dispenser was developed and built by Luther George Simjian and installed 1939 in New York City by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acceptance
A good example of why not to cite Wikipedia as your source -- I followed your link when I read your comment (1830BST 25June2007), and there was no sign of Simjian or the Bank of New York on the page. But the page did list the invention by John Shepherd-Barron, which is the one you are disputing! I suspect many other readers had a similar experience. So either you were making mischief, in which case you've been found out, or it's changed since you cited in, in which case that'll teach you not to cite a publically editable source!
Whilst the BBC report mentions that the police have come forward to say that the game had no impact on the killing, it's sad that they omit the very fact that frees the game from any blame, that as mentioned above, the victim owned the game. To me this suggests that they were clutching at straws to find an example of why the game should indeed be banned, and when unable to find one figured they'd use the next best thing and omit the facts that would negate the use of this example.
Of course, it was only yesterday we were hearing about how the BBC has a serious bias problem in it's reporting, so it really comes as no suprise. It's just a shame that only a day later they insist on proving their fault with the fact they once more publish half truths and bring up an irrelevant murder to try and justify the ban.
Except the BBC was found to have an innate liberal bias -- which doesn't fit with the systematic pro-censorship straw-clutching you suggest after all.
And dare I cheekily alter your own post to make the point against you: "When your post mentions that we've heard the BBC is biased, it's sad you omit the very fact that frees the BBC from suspicion in this case, that as mentioned above it's a liberal bias. This to me suggests that you were clutching at straws to find an example of the BBC nefariously promoting censorship..."
It is not a bad choice. There is nothing wrong with the built-in Intel graphics (GMA950 etc) for 95% of uses. If you plan to play games such as World of Warcraft or Quake then you would want the dedicated ati graphics. It is only clueless whiny mac fanboys who have a hang up with the Intel graphics. I am sure someone can post a long list of benchmarks that show that the Intel graphics are slow, but they won't be able to show a list of how that actually effects the user. Unless you fire up WoW you aren't going to notice.
That's a very backward-looking comment. Going forward, more and more developers may rely on Hardware T&L that the GMA950 doesn't support but most other cards, including Intel's newer integrated graphics, do. 3D will not be "just for games" for much longer. (And a previous poster noted that already a 'casual' game from 2005 -- Civ 4 -- relies on Hardware T&L not for performance but just because the developers relied on its presence; if it's not there, it won't work. Developers are coming to expect its presence.)
A few examples of every-day applications that might expect Hardware T&L in a year or two: Better 3D mapping applications; Mocking up corporate display stands and being able to see what they'd look like assembled; designing your kitchen; 3D cooking animations to explain the method of a recipe, etc.
In fact, the 3D maps is going to be the killer: MS Research and Cambridge Uni have already developed systems that can calculate building geometry from photos taken at different angles; Google Streetview has an awful lot of photos of buldings taken at different angles. Care to guess how quickly a fully-walkable Streetview Map relying on some of the 3D features of your video-card will take? (A 'better' Google Earth or MS VirtualEarth that uses hardware T&L and photo data to give a less 'warped' view...)
So, if you want your laptop to be able to work with interesting non-game software coming out in 1-4 years' time, that GMA950 could be a right pain.
As a side note, it's also interesting that the first two posts in response to this story seemed to advocate the censorship instead of considering whether the "defamed" teachers might in fact be unfit. Are Aussies really that OK with censorship?
Most people are well aware that "the 13-year-old in class who spends the most time on the internet" is not often the best judge of what makes a good teacher. Most people are also aware that teachers have a hard enough time already without the more obnoxious kids in class being able to threaten "if you give me detention, I'll write you a bad review and damage your career".
Do you think your employer would accept you posting defamatory messages about your boss on the internet? If kids have an issue with their teacher, they should see the headteacher.
Those kind of nut cases are the vocal minority of Australians. Family and/or religious groups like the American Family Association but with a much smaller member base per capita (but just as loud and annoying). Most Australians don't care, in fact not giving a crap is our national past time.
Most Australians do care about having recourse to Australian courts, and especially care when it seems US organisations can run roughshod over Australians. So you can expect Australians to care very much that these are American websites and Australians are unable to take them to court in Australia over what they are saying about Australian teachers. Having to mount an expensive lawsuit in America (another continent!) is not seen as proper access to justice for ordinary Australians.
TBH, a firewall run by the courts rather than by the government might well be a good idea -- if foreign websites that effectively do business in Australia (but are not subject to Australian jurisdiction) do not comply with Australian law, then at least a firewall would let ordinary Australians have some recourse to punish them in Australian courts.
I guess it all boils down to the question of whether somebody can just be "born bad".
Frankly, all of science points to the answer being "yes".
Actually, experimental design lectures at Cambridge University's Department of Experimental Psychology use "Are some people born evil?" as an example of an unscientific research question! (It is not possible to determine what the concept of "evil" for a newborn is, nor to examine a newborn's thoughts to see if they are "evil"...) If you were to be more scientific and instead ask something like "can specific brain abnormalities prevent people from learning moral rules" or something more precise, you might have a chance of science saying something (albeit through quasi-experiments rather than experiments). But what it says would be very specific and limited, and couldn't be used to make grand philosophical judgments about the causes of evil and whether people are "born bad".
There's a lesson from MMS that the movie and music industry don't seem to have learned.
Large numbers of phones have had cameras in them for some time, but there hasn't been that much drive to increase the resolution of the camera. Why? Because people haven't tended to use the phone as their primary camera, but have a second (real) camera that they use for anything they really want to keep. Why? Partly because it's often so hard (and expensive) to get the photo off the phone and onto your computer because the operator wants -- in the early days the phone companies wanted to force you to use their revenue earning MMS service rather than a USB connection to move the photo. And even where it is now less restricted, there is still a lingering consumer belief that it is hard to get your photos off the phone.
The upshot of this is that for years phone operators have been moaning that MMS revenues have not taken off as much as they hoped (they're certainly large, in the billions, but historically have not been as large as was hoped). And part of the reason for that is that the "revenue increasing" restrictions caused consumers simply not to use the camera for anything they'd want to keep or trade anyway -- the restrictions hobbled the market.
The movie industry currently has a similar predicament. Most people have the choice between the official distributor and that dodgy guy down the market selling DVDs for a fiver, or even just not buying the DVD. As soon as DRM becomes complex or awkward enough that the user is worried by it, that's a seriously strong incentive for buying from the flea-market instead, or getting your entertainment elsewhere!
Speaking of bad communications skills (or at least editing mistakes), that first line should read "why so few female schools students apply to study computer science" rather than "do not apply"
It's generally thought to be part of the reason why so few female schools students do not apply to study computer science at university ("why would I want to spend my career working in a culture like that?").
More recently I've noticed a worrying trend -- a lack of social skills has become an expected trait for programmers by a few employers (whereas most employers value social and communication skills very highly). I have recently seen job adverts in the UK that have included lines such as "the sort of person we are looking for is a geek. You probably prefer to relate to computers and have very few friends". If even a few employers are actively reinforcing the all-too-common stereotype, then that cannot be healthy for the industry.
Tenagers rejoice -- now whenever your parents ask why you haven't tidied your room, you can give them the formula and tell them to work it out for themselves.
The development of the language had nothing to do with imperial measurements; someone somewhere had to define what a pint/pound/inch actually represents and guess what it was this in the UK.
Actually, you are factually wrong. Those words were used for measures (unstandardised) long before the Weights and Measures Act 1824 and its associated office that you refer to -- by centuries, and in some cases millenia. Pounds date back to Roman times (hence 'lb' still being used as the abbreviation - from the Latin). The inch was (in 1150AD Scotland) "the width of an average man's thumb". A pint is an eighth of a gallon which was not standardised until the 13th century (but that's still five centuries before your citation). In every case, a word has become attached to a measure that is around the size that someone would want to use for something or so it's easy to do something (like divide a gallon into pints -- just halve it three times) -- convenience measures that were later standardised. And even in the metric system convenience measures spring up all around us. A teaspoon is 5ml. A tablespoon is 15ml (20ml in Australia). The French livre is 500g. etc, etc.
Alcohol is still sold in standard amounts in bars in metric countries too and that's what you ask for
Precisely my point. For example even in my home country (supposedly metric Australia -- guaruntee I've travelled more than you by the way), beer is in pints (and pots and midis), cooking uses teaspoons and tablespoons, and many of the everyday measures are largely not metric after all. If you cared to read my post carefully, you would have noted that I was replying to someone's statement that he felt he wasn't metric enough because he still told his friends his height and weight in old units -- and as I point out, there's not much advantage for him to go metric on that one when he's chatting to his friends.
But thanks for making an irrelevant strawcase trying to argue I was wrong about something I didn't say...
Having said that, if somebody asks my weight or height, I'd tell them in stones and feet, so we still have a way to go.
There is a widespread misbelief that everybody needs to go metric in their everyday lives because it is "more scientific" and therefore "better". Frankly this isn't true for most of our everyday lives -- many of the imperial measurements are more fit for purpose because they were designed for particular purposes. To use the old example, ordering "three pints of beer and two shots of vodka please" is much a more usable phrase than "three by five hundred millilitres of beer and two by fifty millilitres of vodka please" -- it is both shorter and harder for a bartender to misunderstand. (assuming they adjust the serving sizes during metricisation; it'd be even worse with the exact metric conversions). And the number of times you need to do a scientific calculation on the size of your beer is vastly outweighed by the number of times you just want a pint of beer!
Similarly apples are sold in pounds because people are likely to want to buy "a pound of apples", whereas a kilogram of apples is a bit much for most families. Frankly, most people even order Coca-cola in "cans" rather than caring that there are 330mls in a can -- it's almost become its own imperial measurement.
In short, every day measures are (rightly) determined by the development of the language, not the development of engineering or science.
Labeling in Europe does NOT work, and it falls short of what would be considered "pro-consumer." The labeling laws are helpful to keep protected producers more protected. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v24/n1/full/nbt0 106-23b.html
I'm NOT saying everyone should call every manufacturer -- instead, by removing labeling requirements and letting the competitive market give the consumers what they want, we'd see a better choice of quality, price and product numbers. If you and I wanted MORE labeling, we'd go to a store that worked with their producers to verify manufacturing and content, and we'd pay more. The market provides. If John and Jane didn't care at all, they could go to a store that bought the cheapest product -- the store would be the risk bearer in providing what the market wants.
You're on a losing argument trying to suggest European consumers don't want more labelling because the trend, especially in the UK, is that actually consumers do want more labelling, so much so that supermarkets are competing with each other to add labelling that is not legislatively required yet, and even take out national TV adverts for their new labelling schemes. Here's one story on it (note the FSA is making encouraging noises, but it has not legislated). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5133786.stm The Trade Descriptions Act ensures that these labels certainly do have to be accurate, on penalty of very large lawsuits.
You might also care to remember the fuss European consumers kicked up when the US wanted to push GM products (labelled only as "sourced from the US", not as GM) onto the European market. Tesco still require all GM foods to be labelled (and ban GM produce from their own-label foods), and I imagine other UK supermarkets are the same. Good luck hoping the European market won't force labelling of cloned foods on your exporters!
We certainly do like our labels, sunshine, and we're well aware that if food is unlabelled everyone ends up eating the salty fatty processed rubbish because our tastebuds can't tell us the salt/fat/GM/clone content and nobody actually has time to phone the company when they're walking down a supermarket aisle trying to keep three screaming kids quiet while doing the weekly shop.
My father by most peoples definition is brilliant. He is a scientist, he speaks several languages, he is a published author of several highly regarded books both fiction and nonfiction.
Despite all this intelligence he refused to take care of himself, got obese, had several heart attacks and then a series of massive strokes. For decades his doctors told him to lose weight, to stop eating junk food, to drink more water, to exersize and he ignored not only his doctors but his family and friends too.
Now he can barely talk, his mobility is severly limited, he has problems reading and all he does is watch tv.
Was my dad smart or dumb? I used to think he was brilliant but now I realize that he was dumb. Too dumb to prioritize, to take care of the important things in life. The time he took to learn that one more language or to write that one more book should have been spent taking walks or something.
Successful scientists can sometimes have a susceptability to obsessive and addictive behaviour -- partly this is what lets them succeed in science academia where the hours are long and the pay on its own isn't encouragement enough for most people to go through the pain -- the work becomes a habit for them. But it also means they can easily fall into other habits they find very hard to break. Pride (academia is a status-driven environment) can also make it hard to accept help. Intelligence probably has very little to do with your father not changing his eating and drinking habits; knowing your habits are unhealthy is easy but changing them is not.
Tell both companies the other has noted in an interest in you working there and ask the question that most job interviewees hate; but not "Why should you work for us?" but "Why should I work for you?" It's the question they will be least expecting and the answer may be somewhat telling.
No, it's the question they are most prepared for because they answer it so often to classfuls of potential grads at top universities. In fact they don't wait to be asked. At presentations they pretty much start with "this is why you should come and work for us" (and tell you about their working culture, the cool things they do, etc...). It's fairly certain the original poster has heard their answer to the question "why should I work for you" about three times already... He's probably more interested in the judgment of impartial bystanders on how his working conditions (and interests) might change over the next few years.
To which my fairly uneducated answer would be this. Google appears to have a very positive culture, and is doing a lot of fun things, and that is likely to continue precisely because of Microsoft targeting them. Google have been trying to get the public attached to more than just their search. There was for a while a business risk that Vista's in-built search features would sap their visitors significantly -- why open a browser and type www.google.com when you can just type your search into the box on your desktop. That risk seems to be abating (it appears many Vista searches might also go via Google), but there is a future business risk in 4 years or so with WPF/E possibly eating into their webapp customers when it becomes more widely installed. If a WPF/E email client can be delivered over HTML, then the fiddliness of HTML/AJAX is no longer a technical advantage and GMail, Maps, etc could face a fresh round of competition. In this sense, "business risk" is good for techies because it drives companies to innovate rather than going into mature maintenance mode. The more MS and Google are going after each other at the Ballmer/Schmidt level, the more fun and freedom you are likely to enjoy as an engineer. So, you'll probably have fun either way but a lot of people perceive being on the "upstart" side of these fights as more fun and less fretful.
Slashdot Mirror
As the aardvark is invisible, it does not reflect light in the correct wavelength in order to appear pink. Thus there is not an invisible pink aardvark. QED. Right, now that's out of the way...
The question of whether the universe has an external creator that can observe and affect the universe (in much the manner that a debugger can observe and affect a running C++ program) is more philosophical in nature, however. Atheists commenting on slashdot generally do not "simply not believe" but make assertions about "the burden of proof", effectively stating not just that you don't believe God exists, but that you believe it is philosophically wrong to believe that God exists (a much bigger statement). That is especially true of atheists on slashdot.
Ironically, the difference is not generally one of evidence at all, but one of the philosophical axioms you should start from in your reasoning, and the question that you start by asking.
Except for the professors who actually listen to the students. In my brief time trying to use Blackboard as an instructor, I pretty much concluded that I would spend more time trying to make it behave than it would take me to write the damn thing from scratch, so I used it as little as humanly possible.
Generally, packaged LMSs are not aimed at the CompSci professors who can do it themselves in their sleep with more freedom and less IT-services hassle, but at the 90% of other faculties for whom HTML reads like ancient Mesopotamian. (Except the history department who apparently quite like ancient Mesopoamian). Our university uses Sakai, and we firmly expect that the last department to take it up will be the computer science department (who are quite happy using custom HTML and Perl scripts).If it really were that important, would such a basic translation error be allowed to stand even for 400 years (assuming the error arrived with the king james version)?
If you pop on over to http://www.biblegateway.com/, you can look it up and notice that every modern translation has it as "murder". The only reason you hear "kill" so often is that people like to quote the KJV when they want to sound dramatic and archaic -- they like the "thee"s and "thou"s and it's the translation that's carved on the front of so many public buildings. I believe the most popular translation in use today is the NIV.
That said, much of the perversion of language today has a lot of blame to lay at the feet of America. But even that is a mixture of linguistic changes brought on by marketing demographics.
Curiously, one piece of "folk wisdom" about this that often gets mentioned in the UK is that American English has remained fairly static over the last two to three centuries, while British English has moved on. In other words, many "Americanisms" are old 18th century "Britishisms". Naturally, as with all folk wisdom, though, nobody's that fussed to check the veracity of the claim!Something that costs 100 units of money in year 1 will go to 102.5. 102.5 to 105.06 in year 3. etc. So, in year 7, that 100 unit item now costs 118.87 units. Or an increase of 18.87% over 7 years......12.62% for a flat 2%. 19.41% for a flat 3%. 22% wasn't too far off......
Layne
Yes, I'm aware of how compound interest works. However because the original poster (the one behind the one I replied to) had just said "official inflation over the last 7 years has been 22%", it seemed likely his 2 key had stuck: "official inflation" rates are almost always reported per year in the UK, and for the last 7 years they have been around the 2% official target! (As opposed to the 80s and 90s when they were up to 15%p.a)
Anyway, happy to know it wasn't a typo after all, but the point I was making about why he might be "feeling" inflation at a much higher rate remains relevant: inflation is not uniform. For example because house prices and Council Tax have risen faster than inflation generally, the young and the old tend to find their "personal inflation rate" has been much higher than 2% per year.
Are you compounding that increase, hombre, or just adding the rates together? Inflation is compounding and I would be surprised if it's only 22% for the last 7 years.
You guys are all happy your currency is worth 2x US dollars, however that means you have inflation which is 'bad' unless growth is somehow moderated either through currency/trade/investment controls or a recession. The original poster made a typo -- the official UK inflation rate has hovered around 2 to 3% for a long time.
However, the inflation rate is not uniform. House prices and Council Tax (a tax which is not scaled against income) have risen much faster, so for the young (where buying a house is now a near impossibility) and for the elderly (where Council Tax is their biggest single expense), inflation is much much higher than 2%
This is further complicated by the fact that mortgage repayments (and hence house prices) are no longer included in the inflation measure -- the UK was forced to switch to the same inflation measure used by the rest of the EU which doesn't include this.
There's a very big false assumption that everybody seems to be making here. I am, of course, not a lawyer (so this is not legal advice).
MS have not distributed GPL3 code, no matter how much we would like them to have. They have offered a covenant not to sue Novell's customers, and vouchers offering support for Novell's product. This is very different. None of this makes MS a party to the GPL because MS do not need any kind of license or copyright provision just to say "I won't sue Joe Bloggs, and I'll help him with his technical issues". No matter what the FooBarSpecialLicense attached to the product Joe Bloggs happens to own says!
(And if you think otherwise ask yourself this: what part of copyright law would MS have broken by saying "I'm happy to assist with Joe's problem but I don't agree to your license agreement"? On what grounds could you sue them? Or if they say "Mr Novell, if you sell Joe a copy of product X, I'm happy to talk to him about any problems he has with it; but I don't agree to your license agreement" What would you sue them for? If there is no potential copyright breach, there is no license.)
What the Novell-MS deal could have impinged on was Novell's right to distribute SUSE at all. If they were unable to offer the equal patent cover required by the GPL (and clearly they are unable to extend Microsoft's offer of patent protection to non-customers without Microsoft's consent), then they would have been unable to meet the terms of the GPL3 and thus unable to legally distribute the software. Except that Eben Moglen kindly gave them a get-out clause at the end of paragraph 11 of the GPL.
In most countries, as I understand it, even if Novell hadn't been given a get-out clause, the only result would have been the Novell-MS deal being "frustrated". "Frustration" is where an unforseen circumstance prevents a contract from being possible to fulfill. This appears to me to have happened. An unforseen change (the FSF deliberately altering the GPL licensing terms to affect the deal) would have prevented Novell from being able to fulfill its end of the Novell-MS deal. It wouldn't have been able to distribute SUSE under GPL3 because it couldn't extend MS's patent provisions beyond what MS offered in the initial contract without asking MS first. Thus the Novell-MS deal would get terminated, and there might have been a little wrangle about "reasonable recompense for the services provided". (Novell would need to go along to a court to get the contract declared frustrated, however.)
But with the get-out clause in para 11, even that won't happen.
All up, Eben Moglen's grand plan doesn't seem to amount to a hill of beans.
Disclaimer: Once again, this isn't legal advice. It is based on an engineer's shaky memory of engineering law lectures, and has the potential of being utterly wrong.
Unfortunately, as I understand it, the BBC has been pushed into using DRM not because providing free unrestricted content might harm the BBC's own commercial interests, but because it might harm their rivals' (eg ITV, Sky). The BBC's most recent charter review, where the government decides whether the BBC can continue to collect TV licence fee revenue, carefully scrutinised whether the BBC's free content offerings would "distort the market" (ie make it too hard for commercial rivals to compete). DRM is the price the BBC is having to pay to release its content over the internet without harming its rivals too much.
Personally, I think it's daft of the government: effectively they are telling the BBC it mustn't offer too good value for licence fee payers' money. As a licence fee payer, I'd like the best value for money possible, thankyou very much, and I don't care two hoots about ITV's or Sky's commercial interests!
A good example of why not to cite Wikipedia as your source -- I followed your link when I read your comment (1830BST 25June2007), and there was no sign of Simjian or the Bank of New York on the page. But the page did list the invention by John Shepherd-Barron, which is the one you are disputing! I suspect many other readers had a similar experience. So either you were making mischief, in which case you've been found out, or it's changed since you cited in, in which case that'll teach you not to cite a publically editable source!
Except the BBC was found to have an innate liberal bias -- which doesn't fit with the systematic pro-censorship straw-clutching you suggest after all.
And dare I cheekily alter your own post to make the point against you:
"When your post mentions that we've heard the BBC is biased, it's sad you omit the very fact that frees the BBC from suspicion in this case, that as mentioned above it's a liberal bias. This to me suggests that you were clutching at straws to find an example of the BBC nefariously promoting censorship..."
That's a very backward-looking comment. Going forward, more and more developers may rely on Hardware T&L that the GMA950 doesn't support but most other cards, including Intel's newer integrated graphics, do. 3D will not be "just for games" for much longer. (And a previous poster noted that already a 'casual' game from 2005 -- Civ 4 -- relies on Hardware T&L not for performance but just because the developers relied on its presence; if it's not there, it won't work. Developers are coming to expect its presence.)
A few examples of every-day applications that might expect Hardware T&L in a year or two: Better 3D mapping applications; Mocking up corporate display stands and being able to see what they'd look like assembled; designing your kitchen; 3D cooking animations to explain the method of a recipe, etc.
In fact, the 3D maps is going to be the killer: MS Research and Cambridge Uni have already developed systems that can calculate building geometry from photos taken at different angles; Google Streetview has an awful lot of photos of buldings taken at different angles. Care to guess how quickly a fully-walkable Streetview Map relying on some of the 3D features of your video-card will take? (A 'better' Google Earth or MS VirtualEarth that uses hardware T&L and photo data to give a less 'warped' view...)
So, if you want your laptop to be able to work with interesting non-game software coming out in 1-4 years' time, that GMA950 could be a right pain.
Most people are well aware that "the 13-year-old in class who spends the most time on the internet" is not often the best judge of what makes a good teacher. Most people are also aware that teachers have a hard enough time already without the more obnoxious kids in class being able to threaten "if you give me detention, I'll write you a bad review and damage your career".
Do you think your employer would accept you posting defamatory messages about your boss on the internet? If kids have an issue with their teacher, they should see the headteacher.
Most Australians do care about having recourse to Australian courts, and especially care when it seems US organisations can run roughshod over Australians. So you can expect Australians to care very much that these are American websites and Australians are unable to take them to court in Australia over what they are saying about Australian teachers. Having to mount an expensive lawsuit in America (another continent!) is not seen as proper access to justice for ordinary Australians.
TBH, a firewall run by the courts rather than by the government might well be a good idea -- if foreign websites that effectively do business in Australia (but are not subject to Australian jurisdiction) do not comply with Australian law, then at least a firewall would let ordinary Australians have some recourse to punish them in Australian courts.
There's a lesson from MMS that the movie and music industry don't seem to have learned.
Large numbers of phones have had cameras in them for some time, but there hasn't been that much drive to increase the resolution of the camera. Why? Because people haven't tended to use the phone as their primary camera, but have a second (real) camera that they use for anything they really want to keep. Why? Partly because it's often so hard (and expensive) to get the photo off the phone and onto your computer because the operator wants -- in the early days the phone companies wanted to force you to use their revenue earning MMS service rather than a USB connection to move the photo. And even where it is now less restricted, there is still a lingering consumer belief that it is hard to get your photos off the phone.
The upshot of this is that for years phone operators have been moaning that MMS revenues have not taken off as much as they hoped (they're certainly large, in the billions, but historically have not been as large as was hoped). And part of the reason for that is that the "revenue increasing" restrictions caused consumers simply not to use the camera for anything they'd want to keep or trade anyway -- the restrictions hobbled the market.
The movie industry currently has a similar predicament. Most people have the choice between the official distributor and that dodgy guy down the market selling DVDs for a fiver, or even just not buying the DVD. As soon as DRM becomes complex or awkward enough that the user is worried by it, that's a seriously strong incentive for buying from the flea-market instead, or getting your entertainment elsewhere!
Speaking of bad communications skills (or at least editing mistakes), that first line should read "why so few female schools students apply to study computer science" rather than "do not apply"
Preview, dammit, preview!
It's generally thought to be part of the reason why so few female schools students do not apply to study computer science at university ("why would I want to spend my career working in a culture like that?").
More recently I've noticed a worrying trend -- a lack of social skills has become an expected trait for programmers by a few employers (whereas most employers value social and communication skills very highly). I have recently seen job adverts in the UK that have included lines such as "the sort of person we are looking for is a geek. You probably prefer to relate to computers and have very few friends". If even a few employers are actively reinforcing the all-too-common stereotype, then that cannot be healthy for the industry.
Tenagers rejoice -- now whenever your parents ask why you haven't tidied your room, you can give them the formula and tell them to work it out for themselves.
Actually, you are factually wrong. Those words were used for measures (unstandardised) long before the Weights and Measures Act 1824 and its associated office that you refer to -- by centuries, and in some cases millenia. Pounds date back to Roman times (hence 'lb' still being used as the abbreviation - from the Latin). The inch was (in 1150AD Scotland) "the width of an average man's thumb". A pint is an eighth of a gallon which was not standardised until the 13th century (but that's still five centuries before your citation). In every case, a word has become attached to a measure that is around the size that someone would want to use for something or so it's easy to do something (like divide a gallon into pints -- just halve it three times) -- convenience measures that were later standardised. And even in the metric system convenience measures spring up all around us. A teaspoon is 5ml. A tablespoon is 15ml (20ml in Australia). The French livre is 500g. etc, etc.
Precisely my point. For example even in my home country (supposedly metric Australia -- guaruntee I've travelled more than you by the way), beer is in pints (and pots and midis), cooking uses teaspoons and tablespoons, and many of the everyday measures are largely not metric after all. If you cared to read my post carefully, you would have noted that I was replying to someone's statement that he felt he wasn't metric enough because he still told his friends his height and weight in old units -- and as I point out, there's not much advantage for him to go metric on that one when he's chatting to his friends.
But thanks for making an irrelevant strawcase trying to argue I was wrong about something I didn't say...
There is a widespread misbelief that everybody needs to go metric in their everyday lives because it is "more scientific" and therefore "better". Frankly this isn't true for most of our everyday lives -- many of the imperial measurements are more fit for purpose because they were designed for particular purposes. To use the old example, ordering "three pints of beer and two shots of vodka please" is much a more usable phrase than "three by five hundred millilitres of beer and two by fifty millilitres of vodka please" -- it is both shorter and harder for a bartender to misunderstand. (assuming they adjust the serving sizes during metricisation; it'd be even worse with the exact metric conversions). And the number of times you need to do a scientific calculation on the size of your beer is vastly outweighed by the number of times you just want a pint of beer!
Similarly apples are sold in pounds because people are likely to want to buy "a pound of apples", whereas a kilogram of apples is a bit much for most families. Frankly, most people even order Coca-cola in "cans" rather than caring that there are 330mls in a can -- it's almost become its own imperial measurement.
In short, every day measures are (rightly) determined by the development of the language, not the development of engineering or science.
You're on a losing argument trying to suggest European consumers don't want more labelling because the trend, especially in the UK, is that actually consumers do want more labelling, so much so that supermarkets are competing with each other to add labelling that is not legislatively required yet, and even take out national TV adverts for their new labelling schemes. Here's one story on it (note the FSA is making encouraging noises, but it has not legislated). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5133786.stm The Trade Descriptions Act ensures that these labels certainly do have to be accurate, on penalty of very large lawsuits.
You might also care to remember the fuss European consumers kicked up when the US wanted to push GM products (labelled only as "sourced from the US", not as GM) onto the European market. Tesco still require all GM foods to be labelled (and ban GM produce from their own-label foods), and I imagine other UK supermarkets are the same. Good luck hoping the European market won't force labelling of cloned foods on your exporters!
We certainly do like our labels, sunshine, and we're well aware that if food is unlabelled everyone ends up eating the salty fatty processed rubbish because our tastebuds can't tell us the salt/fat/GM/clone content and nobody actually has time to phone the company when they're walking down a supermarket aisle trying to keep three screaming kids quiet while doing the weekly shop.
No, it's the question they are most prepared for because they answer it so often to classfuls of potential grads at top universities. In fact they don't wait to be asked. At presentations they pretty much start with "this is why you should come and work for us" (and tell you about their working culture, the cool things they do, etc...). It's fairly certain the original poster has heard their answer to the question "why should I work for you" about three times already... He's probably more interested in the judgment of impartial bystanders on how his working conditions (and interests) might change over the next few years.
To which my fairly uneducated answer would be this. Google appears to have a very positive culture, and is doing a lot of fun things, and that is likely to continue precisely because of Microsoft targeting them. Google have been trying to get the public attached to more than just their search. There was for a while a business risk that Vista's in-built search features would sap their visitors significantly -- why open a browser and type www.google.com when you can just type your search into the box on your desktop. That risk seems to be abating (it appears many Vista searches might also go via Google), but there is a future business risk in 4 years or so with WPF/E possibly eating into their webapp customers when it becomes more widely installed. If a WPF/E email client can be delivered over HTML, then the fiddliness of HTML/AJAX is no longer a technical advantage and GMail, Maps, etc could face a fresh round of competition. In this sense, "business risk" is good for techies because it drives companies to innovate rather than going into mature maintenance mode. The more MS and Google are going after each other at the Ballmer/Schmidt level, the more fun and freedom you are likely to enjoy as an engineer. So, you'll probably have fun either way but a lot of people perceive being on the "upstart" side of these fights as more fun and less fretful.