I don't accept this excuse from Google, because they have effectively destroyed the concept of a beta version. Even gmail is still in beta, and it's probably among the world's top three email providers now.
Google, please do official releases of your products. Or, if you really need to childishly continue to call them development versions, invent a new category. Maybe, call them "gamma" versions. You are spoiling a useful metaphor for everyone else.
Exclamation marks suck.
on
Google Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh god, they too used to have an exclamation mark in their brand name!
It looks weird. It sounds weird in your head. And it totally! messes up the readability of texts. Just imagine you have to write an article about Google! considering Yahoo! might be a good acquisition target!
So why on earth did everyone do that in the nineties? And why has no one told the marketing departments of this world that the nineties are over?
Re:Well, it is beta ...
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Google chrome hasn't even been released yet, and you're trying to compare resource usage to Microsoft IE?
Chrome has been released. Google has ruined the concept of beta. Gmail has been in beta for three years now. It's a wonder that the search page is apparently considered an actual product.
People don't understand beta any more. They will just be pissed every time "this new google thing crashed." Google ruined the idea of a beta, now they'll have to live with the repercussions.
Hey China, Europe here!
Nice to have you around. Wehope you will be enjoying your trains. We originally developed them for our own pleasure, but we don't mind you too much using our ideas.:-)
First off, nice how el Reg mistakes German Customs officers for private security guards, although they are wearing federal seals on their shoulders, have the word "Zoll" ("Customs") written in nice big friendly letters all over their backs, and are wearing anti-person handguns (which are illegal for almnost anyone except the police in Germany)
Second, as TFA happily drops somewhere between the lines, we don't actually know yet whether the hardware was seized due to alleged patent infringement or allegations of plain old plagiarism, as happens regularly at such trade fairs. In the latter case, I would be hard pressed to find anything bad about this. While copyright law is debatable, trademarks generally are a good thing.
Actually, we have slightly more nuanced picture over here (Europe). The proverb is that America has the world's five best universities, but also 500 of the worst ones.
It's true that the Ivy League Schools and MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech are amazing places to do research. I wouldn't want to leave my beautiful old and very good university in the old world for a random place in the States, though. I find it funny how more or less every American I come across maintains a belief that his particular alma mater is "a very good school" and "everybody is trying to get a place there".
There is no greener and safer energy than nuclear (I would note that solar energy is a kind of nuclear energy).
I liked the rest of your comment. But this part is rubbish. Apart from "releasing energy by changing the state of atomic nuclei", solar energy and contemporary nuclear power generation have nothing to do with each other. Their similarities are limited to the realms of undergrad physics text books.
Solar Power is produced by fusion while every contemporary terrestic nuclear plant still relies on fission. The sun fuses Hydrogen and Helium. Nuclear plants split Uranium, Thorium and Plutonium.
More importantly, the sun is 8 light-minutes away. My nearest nuclear power plant is more like 8 sound-minutes away, and I wouldn't want to hear that one sound that makes it all this way. While nuclear fission has, in my opinion, a lower overall risk than fossil fules, you sound biased for totally ignoring the real problems associated with contemporary nuclear power generation (mostly the waste).
If we want to have a fruitful discussion about a way out of fossil fules, it is counter-productive to lump everything from photovoltaics to nuclear fission, to possible future nuclear fusion plants in one big pot and call it "nuclear". It will only make people stop listening to you.
[...] 1080p will have merit when your TV dies and you need to replace it [...]
Serious question: Has anyone here ever seen a TV die? I mean, not from being dropped during a move, but actually just stopping to work. I might be mistaken, but I have the impression these things just don't break.
Which might be a hint to why the producers of such technology are trying hard to impress the consumers with ever newer technology.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe
on
Is Hushmail Still Safe?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Quantum computing is the cold fusion of our industry.
I assume you are implying that Quantum Computing does not have any sound physical validity, will never work, and is only backed by scientists with questionable track records.
I disagree. Quantum Computing is the hot Fusion Energy of your industry: It is much more complex than most people understand, it takes much longer to pull off than most people think, and it will take much longer to arrive than most people expect. But it has a sound theoretical foundation and is, at this point, purely a (very hard) engineering challenge, rather than pure conjecture, mixed with a few highly questionable experimental results.
This is not about privacy. It is also not, as the submitter wants us to think, about "Freedom of Speech".
Freedom of speech is the right to say what you think if you don't thereby infringe on other people's higher valued rights (by committing libel). It's not the right to hide behind a false identity and make libelous claims.
It is also not "privacy" to go out in public, use a fake name and yell something, independent of whether it's true or not.
Privacy is the right to decide for yourself how much of the "things you don't do in public" becomes public (that's a vague definition, given).
There is no reason to protect the identity of trolls. There is a reason to protect their right to say their honest opinion, however stupid it may be -- but not their wish to make libelous claims and go unpunished.
Surely glass is a really bad idea for laptops? It's heavier than plastic, and less durable in terms of scratch resistance and shattering. Worse still it has more friction than some plastics, so not ideal for moving your finger over.
Actually, glass is more scratch resistant than most plastics (try dropping your plastic sunglasses on the beach, once. Then try again with a pair of proper glasses, made from glass).
Glass can also be made less sticky by roughening up the surface. Now, I agree that it's indeed heavier than most plastics. The only reason to have a glass trackpad instead of a plastic one would be if one wanted to protect what's underneath...
We have seen Apple using Glass as a cover for the iMac displays, and for the iPhones. So I would conjecture that they would go for a display under the trackpad. That, however, strikes me as odd from an ergonomics point of view: You'd have to move your head back and forth between the display and the pad, which sounds stupid.
How was this modded "Troll"? It's a very reflective answer to the GP's statements that
statistically, men are better at science than women. There are enough objectively identifiable differences between the sexes to justify such a statement. (The same could be said for races, too.)
That's a codified way of saying "most women are idiots" and "most blacks are idiots". The parent post simply re-worded his statement to apply to his own social group. I hope it stung, because, just as the GP's statement, it's utter nonsense.
Icahn is only interested in his back pocket, not the interest of shareholders, or the employees of Yahoo.
Well, Icahn is a shareholder in yahoo. And I would be surprised to find out the other shareholders are not interested in "their backpockets".
Now, I agree that the whole thing sucks for yahoo's employees. But that's the way the system works. It's called capitalism because the capital controls the system, not employeeism. Within the bounds of this system, Icahn has a perfectly valid point: He thinks Microsoft is offering a great deal to Yahoo's shareholders, and since Yahoo's board has to answer to the shareholders (and only the shareholders), he thinks they are not doing their job well.
Honestly: Jerry Wang is as rich as he is because he sold his company to outside investors (by going public). He can't cry foul now that they want to act out their control over the company he sold them.
It has more than 100 million native speakers, at least twice as many people who can speak it fluently. In northern and eastern Europe, it's among the most widely spoken foreign languages, together with English and Russian.
It has a very logical structure. Learning German might actually help you with maths.
If you are planning to work in the car industry or in renewable energy at some point, going to work in Germany for a while might be a very interesting option. They have a lot of good technical universities, research institutes and engineering companies, some of them among the world's best.
Ever wanted to read Einstein's, Schroedinger's, Bohrs, Heisenberg's,... original papers, in the language they were thought out in?
In contrast to the French, Germans are actually welcoming, friendly and understanding towards people you don't speak their language fluently. Most people there speak English as a second language, so if you ever go there, you will be able to settle in gracefully.
Am I the only person who prefers to read pdfs on a screen rather than a printed sheet of paper, let alone an e-reader?
For me, it's all about the size of displayed text. The larger the better. I've got good eyesight, but it's simply easier on the eyes to have text in a large font that I can read from a distance. I also like to be able to zoom into images (think academic papers, with complex plots that are often printed way to small to save space).
Now, I can see the advantage of having a mobile device. But while I'm at my desk, I'll take the display over a printed sheet any time.
...if this will be a free upgrade similarly to the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1. It would seem hard to justify a purchase price of anything more than $20 that adds only additional stability and developer tools.
While reflections on the desktop and a new way to flip through folders would be worth $120 to you?
You see, this attitude of consumers is exactly why companies like Apple and Windows have so far focussed more on building OSes that look good, rather than work well. People want a shiny new thing, not a really efficient, rock solid operating system, because they have got used to crashes, useless error-messages, viruses and spam.
For me, this is the most enthralling idea in the End-User computer market in years. Finally, a company decides it's time to stop adding new eye-candy. Instead, Apple is taking a step back and taking their time to iron out the bugs and add actual innovation.
OpenCL sounds amazing. If it works as advertised, it will give developers who really care about performance the option to tap into the hugely parallel architecture available on the GPU that was inacessible to most of us so far (unless we wanted to learn the obscure proprietary semi-languages of ATI, IBM and nVidia).
Grand Central seems to be just the opposite of this: It will make sure those eight cores we'll soon all have in our machines will actually get used, even if the developers who wrote the programs we run didn't care to think about parallelization.
I'm bying Apple stocks. At a time when Microsoft's developers are once again falling victim to the marketing department (remember when Windows 7 was supposed to be a clean new start?), Apple is taking a bold step in what I think is the right direction.
Let's face it, if the law is laid out in such a ridiculous manner, we are all pedophiles.
I, for example, am the proud owner of Nirvana's "nevermind" album. And so are 26 million other people. (Don't click that link, it contains child pornography!)
I also own pictures of myself in the nude, when I was about one and a half years old. Some of those pictures have other nude babies in them, alongside myself.
I don't understand what has happened to this society. At which point did we all just stop thinking and handed in our brains to the mainstream media? It's not hard to avoid this whole bullshit. Just don't call it "child pornography" if no child was harmed in its creation! Oh, yes, there will be some people who get off on pictures of naked babies at the beach. You know what, I don't care! Just as I don't care if people get off on watching a 25 year-old woman walk down main street in a short skirt from 50 yards away. Do what you want, as long as you don't infringe on other people's rights. If someone is so keen on watching a picture of my naked self from a time I can't remember any more, maybe, just maybe, he's not actually causing any harm to me, or anyone else.
Okay, we have all heard ten times now, that "Wikia is not affiliated with Wikipedia". Then, why on Earth does it use this name?
I know, I know, they do wiki-stuff and so on. But I can't help thinking that if anyone else besides Jimmy Wales had come up with that name, he would have a counterfeiting lawsuit at his neck right now.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea either. Forever, it will be "The-firm-that's-not-affiliated-with-wikipedia". I can already see the crowds of wikeeks (wiki-geeks. clever, I know) who'll slowly get horribly annoyed by having to explain this over and over again, once wikia does anything remotely bad (like loosing data, censoring, or some privacy cock-up), throwing a dark shadow on wikipedia.
My university is in the US, but how is this handled in other parts of the world?"
I studied physics in Heidelberg, Germany. During the first half of my first year (about 6 years ago), we had introductory courses in C (they liked to call it C++, but it really was glorified C). In the second half of the first year, there was a "technical informatics" (read: Hardware design) course, which involved every student designing a little 16bit chip which could decipher the DCF long-wave time signal. That part used mostly C, but had some bits were we had to gnaw through Assembler.
That was my formal introduction to computing. Later on in my course, I mostly used MatLab, and occasionally C. Sometimes I had to reverse-engineer old Fortran code. I wrote my Master's thesis in MatLab (even though it was a rather computationally expensive application. In scientific applications, the time saved during design time often easily makes up for the loss in computational efficiency).
Since I started my PhD, I've tried a lot of different languages, from MatLab to Java, C# Python and, recently, F#. Even though I was brought up with OSS (my laptop runs Debian next to Windows), I have come to value the rapid development capabilities of.NET (I know, it sounds crazy. Please try it out before you flame. Visual Studio is certainly the best (maybe the only good) piece of software Microsoft ever made). But I'm a theoretician, so my focus is on being able to rapidly change my code to incorporate new ideas. Experimentalists, who mostly just want to control their machinery, need to know more about Fortran, C, and on the high-level side, LabView and MatLab
I think my point is: It's probably a good idea to start with powerful low-level languages like C first, but don't overdo it. It's good if your students know about the existence of Assembler and Fortran, but the important point is that they lose their fear of computers. Nowadays, teenagers grow up with computers, but they never get to see behind the web 2.0 surface. Our generation grew up with text editors and batch files. They grow up with facebook. So it's important to give them a look behind the curtains. Let them feel the power of being able to control memory adresses. Once they have lost their fear of pointers, they can move on to use high-level languages that safe loads of design time, while being able to descend down into the architecture when it really counts.
Depends on what you mean by "it worked very well".
Direct democracries have a tendency for extreme slowness and a dictatorship of the majority. It took until 1971 for Swiss women to gain the right to vote (as it was the men who had to vote for it to happen).
Also, Switzerland is a comparatively small country in the centre of Europe. This causes several advantages for the economy which don't have much to do with their form of government (the BeNeLux countries and to a certain degree Denmark are in a similar situation, though their locations are less ideal), so your argument that "the Swiss are prosperous because they are a direct democracy" does not hold.
Greek city states, on the other hand, were oligarchies, not democracies. Even in Athens, there was always a class of slaves that was not allowed to vote. In Sparta, only a small elite of "Warriors" had a say in politics. Platon famously argued that a country where "a carpenter thinks he can do the business of a politician" was doomed.
If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here and here. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then, except for a very vague patent application to be found here.
It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...
What the hell is everyone talking about? BBS,/b/, 2chan, 2channel, 4chan, futaba... This is the first time ever that I don't understand a single comment in a whole slashdot-story.
Man, the internet is weird. Could it be that I lost my 1337 5k11z about the time I started to do earn money?
And, no, I didn't RTFA. Given I don't even understand what the summary is about, I don't think it'll help me much.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only in beta.
I don't accept this excuse from Google, because they have effectively destroyed the concept of a beta version. Even gmail is still in beta, and it's probably among the world's top three email providers now.
Google, please do official releases of your products. Or, if you really need to childishly continue to call them development versions, invent a new category. Maybe, call them "gamma" versions. You are spoiling a useful metaphor for everyone else.
Oh god, they too used to have an exclamation mark in their brand name!
It looks weird. It sounds weird in your head. And it totally! messes up the readability of texts. Just imagine you have to write an article about Google! considering Yahoo! might be a good acquisition target!
So why on earth did everyone do that in the nineties? And why has no one told the marketing departments of this world that the nineties are over?
Google chrome hasn't even been released yet, and you're trying to compare resource usage to Microsoft IE?
Chrome has been released. Google has ruined the concept of beta. Gmail has been in beta for three years now. It's a wonder that the search page is apparently considered an actual product.
People don't understand beta any more. They will just be pissed every time "this new google thing crashed." Google ruined the idea of a beta, now they'll have to live with the repercussions.
Hey China, Europe here! Nice to have you around. We hope you will be enjoying your trains. We originally developed them for our own pleasure, but we don't mind you too much using our ideas. :-)
First off, nice how el Reg mistakes German Customs officers for private security guards, although they are wearing federal seals on their shoulders, have the word "Zoll" ("Customs") written in nice big friendly letters all over their backs, and are wearing anti-person handguns (which are illegal for almnost anyone except the police in Germany)
Second, as TFA happily drops somewhere between the lines, we don't actually know yet whether the hardware was seized due to alleged patent infringement or allegations of plain old plagiarism, as happens regularly at such trade fairs. In the latter case, I would be hard pressed to find anything bad about this. While copyright law is debatable, trademarks generally are a good thing.
Actually, we have slightly more nuanced picture over here (Europe). The proverb is that America has the world's five best universities, but also 500 of the worst ones.
It's true that the Ivy League Schools and MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech are amazing places to do research. I wouldn't want to leave my beautiful old and very good university in the old world for a random place in the States, though. I find it funny how more or less every American I come across maintains a belief that his particular alma mater is "a very good school" and "everybody is trying to get a place there".
I liked the rest of your comment. But this part is rubbish. Apart from "releasing energy by changing the state of atomic nuclei", solar energy and contemporary nuclear power generation have nothing to do with each other. Their similarities are limited to the realms of undergrad physics text books.
Solar Power is produced by fusion while every contemporary terrestic nuclear plant still relies on fission. The sun fuses Hydrogen and Helium. Nuclear plants split Uranium, Thorium and Plutonium.
More importantly, the sun is 8 light-minutes away. My nearest nuclear power plant is more like 8 sound-minutes away, and I wouldn't want to hear that one sound that makes it all this way. While nuclear fission has, in my opinion, a lower overall risk than fossil fules, you sound biased for totally ignoring the real problems associated with contemporary nuclear power generation (mostly the waste).
If we want to have a fruitful discussion about a way out of fossil fules, it is counter-productive to lump everything from photovoltaics to nuclear fission, to possible future nuclear fusion plants in one big pot and call it "nuclear". It will only make people stop listening to you.
Serious question: Has anyone here ever seen a TV die? I mean, not from being dropped during a move, but actually just stopping to work. I might be mistaken, but I have the impression these things just don't break.
Which might be a hint to why the producers of such technology are trying hard to impress the consumers with ever newer technology.
I assume you are implying that Quantum Computing does not have any sound physical validity, will never work, and is only backed by scientists with questionable track records.
I disagree. Quantum Computing is the hot Fusion Energy of your industry: It is much more complex than most people understand, it takes much longer to pull off than most people think, and it will take much longer to arrive than most people expect. But it has a sound theoretical foundation and is, at this point, purely a (very hard) engineering challenge, rather than pure conjecture, mixed with a few highly questionable experimental results.
This is not about privacy. It is also not, as the submitter wants us to think, about "Freedom of Speech".
Freedom of speech is the right to say what you think if you don't thereby infringe on other people's higher valued rights (by committing libel). It's not the right to hide behind a false identity and make libelous claims.
It is also not "privacy" to go out in public, use a fake name and yell something, independent of whether it's true or not.
Privacy is the right to decide for yourself how much of the "things you don't do in public" becomes public (that's a vague definition, given).
There is no reason to protect the identity of trolls. There is a reason to protect their right to say their honest opinion, however stupid it may be -- but not their wish to make libelous claims and go unpunished.
Actually, glass is more scratch resistant than most plastics (try dropping your plastic sunglasses on the beach, once. Then try again with a pair of proper glasses, made from glass).
Glass can also be made less sticky by roughening up the surface. Now, I agree that it's indeed heavier than most plastics. The only reason to have a glass trackpad instead of a plastic one would be if one wanted to protect what's underneath...
We have seen Apple using Glass as a cover for the iMac displays, and for the iPhones. So I would conjecture that they would go for a display under the trackpad. That, however, strikes me as odd from an ergonomics point of view: You'd have to move your head back and forth between the display and the pad, which sounds stupid.
Well, it is a rumour.
Why on Silver Street? I always thought Hawking lived on Trinity Street. You know, in Caius...
That's a codified way of saying "most women are idiots" and "most blacks are idiots". The parent post simply re-worded his statement to apply to his own social group. I hope it stung, because, just as the GP's statement, it's utter nonsense.
Well, Icahn is a shareholder in yahoo. And I would be surprised to find out the other shareholders are not interested in "their backpockets".
Now, I agree that the whole thing sucks for yahoo's employees. But that's the way the system works. It's called capitalism because the capital controls the system, not employeeism. Within the bounds of this system, Icahn has a perfectly valid point: He thinks Microsoft is offering a great deal to Yahoo's shareholders, and since Yahoo's board has to answer to the shareholders (and only the shareholders), he thinks they are not doing their job well.
Honestly: Jerry Wang is as rich as he is because he sold his company to outside investors (by going public). He can't cry foul now that they want to act out their control over the company he sold them.
Am I the only person who prefers to read pdfs on a screen rather than a printed sheet of paper, let alone an e-reader?
For me, it's all about the size of displayed text. The larger the better. I've got good eyesight, but it's simply easier on the eyes to have text in a large font that I can read from a distance. I also like to be able to zoom into images (think academic papers, with complex plots that are often printed way to small to save space).
Now, I can see the advantage of having a mobile device. But while I'm at my desk, I'll take the display over a printed sheet any time.
No. Photons do not carry a charge. Which is why accelerated charges can emit photons, without losing their charge.
You see, this attitude of consumers is exactly why companies like Apple and Windows have so far focussed more on building OSes that look good, rather than work well. People want a shiny new thing, not a really efficient, rock solid operating system, because they have got used to crashes, useless error-messages, viruses and spam.
For me, this is the most enthralling idea in the End-User computer market in years. Finally, a company decides it's time to stop adding new eye-candy. Instead, Apple is taking a step back and taking their time to iron out the bugs and add actual innovation.
OpenCL sounds amazing. If it works as advertised, it will give developers who really care about performance the option to tap into the hugely parallel architecture available on the GPU that was inacessible to most of us so far (unless we wanted to learn the obscure proprietary semi-languages of ATI, IBM and nVidia).
Grand Central seems to be just the opposite of this: It will make sure those eight cores we'll soon all have in our machines will actually get used, even if the developers who wrote the programs we run didn't care to think about parallelization.
I'm bying Apple stocks. At a time when Microsoft's developers are once again falling victim to the marketing department (remember when Windows 7 was supposed to be a clean new start?), Apple is taking a bold step in what I think is the right direction.
Let's face it, if the law is laid out in such a ridiculous manner, we are all pedophiles.
I, for example, am the proud owner of Nirvana's "nevermind" album. And so are 26 million other people. (Don't click that link, it contains child pornography!)
I also own pictures of myself in the nude, when I was about one and a half years old. Some of those pictures have other nude babies in them, alongside myself.
I don't understand what has happened to this society. At which point did we all just stop thinking and handed in our brains to the mainstream media? It's not hard to avoid this whole bullshit. Just don't call it "child pornography" if no child was harmed in its creation! Oh, yes, there will be some people who get off on pictures of naked babies at the beach. You know what, I don't care! Just as I don't care if people get off on watching a 25 year-old woman walk down main street in a short skirt from 50 yards away. Do what you want, as long as you don't infringe on other people's rights. If someone is so keen on watching a picture of my naked self from a time I can't remember any more, maybe, just maybe, he's not actually causing any harm to me, or anyone else.
Okay, we have all heard ten times now, that "Wikia is not affiliated with Wikipedia". Then, why on Earth does it use this name?
I know, I know, they do wiki-stuff and so on. But I can't help thinking that if anyone else besides Jimmy Wales had come up with that name, he would have a counterfeiting lawsuit at his neck right now.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea either. Forever, it will be "The-firm-that's-not-affiliated-with-wikipedia". I can already see the crowds of wikeeks (wiki-geeks. clever, I know) who'll slowly get horribly annoyed by having to explain this over and over again, once wikia does anything remotely bad (like loosing data, censoring, or some privacy cock-up), throwing a dark shadow on wikipedia.
That was my formal introduction to computing. Later on in my course, I mostly used MatLab, and occasionally C. Sometimes I had to reverse-engineer old Fortran code. I wrote my Master's thesis in MatLab (even though it was a rather computationally expensive application. In scientific applications, the time saved during design time often easily makes up for the loss in computational efficiency).
Since I started my PhD, I've tried a lot of different languages, from MatLab to Java, C# Python and, recently, F#. Even though I was brought up with OSS (my laptop runs Debian next to Windows), I have come to value the rapid development capabilities of
I think my point is: It's probably a good idea to start with powerful low-level languages like C first, but don't overdo it. It's good if your students know about the existence of Assembler and Fortran, but the important point is that they lose their fear of computers. Nowadays, teenagers grow up with computers, but they never get to see behind the web 2.0 surface. Our generation grew up with text editors and batch files. They grow up with facebook. So it's important to give them a look behind the curtains. Let them feel the power of being able to control memory adresses. Once they have lost their fear of pointers, they can move on to use high-level languages that safe loads of design time, while being able to descend down into the architecture when it really counts.
Depends on what you mean by "it worked very well".
Direct democracries have a tendency for extreme slowness and a dictatorship of the majority. It took until 1971 for Swiss women to gain the right to vote (as it was the men who had to vote for it to happen).
Also, Switzerland is a comparatively small country in the centre of Europe. This causes several advantages for the economy which don't have much to do with their form of government (the BeNeLux countries and to a certain degree Denmark are in a similar situation, though their locations are less ideal), so your argument that "the Swiss are prosperous because they are a direct democracy" does not hold.
Greek city states, on the other hand, were oligarchies, not democracies. Even in Athens, there was always a class of slaves that was not allowed to vote. In Sparta, only a small elite of "Warriors" had a say in politics. Platon famously argued that a country where "a carpenter thinks he can do the business of a politician" was doomed.
If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here and here. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then, except for a very vague patent application to be found here.
It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...
My head just exploded.
/b/, 2chan, 2channel, 4chan, futaba... This is the first time ever that I don't understand a single comment in a whole slashdot-story.
What the hell is everyone talking about? BBS,
Man, the internet is weird. Could it be that I lost my 1337 5k11z about the time I started to do earn money?
And, no, I didn't RTFA. Given I don't even understand what the summary is about, I don't think it'll help me much.
I'm looking forward for Yahoo! to answer by joining this idea to get Gaming! ready! for the Internet! with Yahoo! Game!
Heavens, people, whoever thought it'd be a great idea to trademark punctuation needs to be slapped!(tm)